J Street is asking the right question: Does John McCain believe in the two-state solution? J Street says it can't get an answer despite its many efforts, and is leery given the fact that Sheldon Adelson has promised $250,000 to support the campaign (and that Rudy Giuliani used the Republican convention to replight his vows to an undivided Jerusalem). As I have reported here, Adelson's similar munificence on behalf of George Bush in 2000 reflected rightwing Zionist anxiety about the Camp David process. And Adelson got his wish: Bush hired more brains out of the American Enterprise Institute than anywhere, and the "peace process" went nowhere for eight years. Because neoconservatives by and large don't want to divide the biblical land of Israel, whatever that is.
J Street asks: "If enough of us
demand an answer from McCain, he'll either show his true colors as an
opponent of the two-state solution, or he'll help us put the
far-right's anti-two state views where they really belong – out of the
mainstream of American politics."
That last statement is absolutely true: that rightwing opposition to a two-state solution remains in the mainstream of American politics. Myself, I'm for a two-state solution in the near term not because I care about a Jewish state–guess what, I'm fine here–but because I'm an American who's sick of this issue blowing up the world. And it's about time the media began to focus on this issue. Joe Klein has written of the nest of neocons McCain has lain down with. So has the London Telegraph. So has Stephen Walt in this piece in the National Interest:
advising GOP candidate John McCain, and they remain a ubiquitous
presence on op-ed pages and TV talk shows and in journals of opinion
(along with their close cousins, the liberal interventionists).
It is in the neocons' interest for this issue to remain unspoken, it is in McCain's interest, it is in Netanyahu's interest. There is one obvious cure for this. The New York Times should commission Jeffrey Goldberg and John Mearsheimer to co-author a piece on the urgency of the two-state solution. Alternatively, David Remnick at the New Yorker could co-author a lead Comment with Mearsheimer or Walt. This would, in an instant, transform the debate. Gentlemen?
