Yes that's a provocative headline. The latest New York Review of Books includes a wonderful interview from Yedioth Ahronoth in which Ehud Olmert says it's time to give up the land now, and stop these idiotic generals from running our foreign policy anymore. Every prime minister has known this for 20 years, the occupation is destroying Israel, he says. All true, all wise.
This statement is included in Olmert's stirring interview:
Whoever wants to maintain control over the entire city will have to absorb 270,000 Arabs into the borders of Israel proper. This won't do. We need to make a decision. This decision is difficult, awful, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our deepest yearnings, our collective memories, and the prayers of the nation of Israel for the past two thousand years.
Think about this. This won't do. This is a good thing? We're supposed to applaud the designation of political boundaries based on the exclusion of minorities? But Israeli policy has always been focused on this question: Draw boundaries to keep Arab numbers down, and force 'em out when you can't draw the lines.
Maybe you noticed. In this country, we are getting a black president whose middle name is Hussein, the son of a Muslim, in part because of the small black vote, which went 90 percent for Obama. The Republican Party is being forced to change right now, before our eyes, because they cannot reach a certain 10 percent of the population, blacks. Both parties are reaching out to non-whites as never before. Because it is just demographically true: and demographics in a democracy mean votes. As I have pointed out repeatedly lately, EVEN ISRAELI ARABS ARE DEALT OUT OF THE ISRAELI POLITICAL SYSTEM, because they're never included in the governing coalitions. Even the liberal Jewish parties don't want them. So their voices are never really considered in governance. Maybe that's the problem, not just the borders.
Zionism made that. Collective memories and prayers built that political system. In Brooklyn the other night, at the anti-apartheid event, there was a poster with a picture of South African patriarch H.F. Verwoerd, the prime minister in the 60s, saying that Both South Africa and Israel practice apartheid. I have to believe he was right.
I do think it a great thing the NYRB publishes that piece. The Olmert piece is being published prominently in the NY Review of Books, translated from Hebrew, for one very good reason: Because NYRB is read by many older liberal Jews, who include in their families and even in their own minds, very conservative Zionist ideas about Israel and Arabs. The NYRB is honorably trying to educate the American Jewish intellectual community toward a greater understanding. And so this man Olmert, a former Likudnik, is put forward as an intellectual leader. And God bless 'em, this is their function; and this is the reality of Jewish life.
But once again: the intellectual tail is wagging the intellectual dog. We are brave Americans who have our own wisdom about minority rights. (And NYRB ought to review Walt and Mearsheimer, it's a gross dereliction not to, and reflects the marginalization of non-Jewish voices, licensed by the elites themselves.). I just discovered Italics!!!!
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I don't remember who posted the comment to mine about Arab parties non-participation in Israeli politics. I think it was Eurosabra.
That was that my assertion was untrue in that there is fairly high Arab vote for labor, and that there are Arab labor ministers in the knesset, and I believe now an Arab cabinet member.
And, that the two Arab parties are anti-Zionist.
If dual loyalty is a concern, then they would not be able to take the Israeli oath of office honestly.
Phil's invocation is an irony for him, in that he urges unification, assimilation of Jews and Arabs, but then where it happens, he condemns it.
Richard, the important point is that no Arab party has ever been allowed into any ruling coalition. That means that 25% of the population has no say (NONE, ZERO, ZILCH) in their governance. The parties may as well not exist. (And of course any party that wanted to campaign for one-man-one-vote is banned by law any way.)
You'll always be able to find figureheads. Israel is engaged in a public relations war, after all.
Olmert is a LAME DUCK, Phil, so he can say what he likes. Meanwhile, Barak and Ashkenazi can try to prove they're tougher than Bibi.
Israel has one-man-one-vote. So does Palestine, through the PA. You may argue that the PA is a figurehead, but even supposing belligerent occupation, Israel does not have to include the West Bank in Israel. Theoretically, it could withdraw everyone tomorrow and seal the border, returning to the "no occupation, no peace" of 1949-1967. You don't get One State just because you want to destroy Israel that way.
I'm trying to figure out how long West Bank Jews lasted in 1948. I think the last prisoners were expelled to Israel one year after the war. After a year's captivity.
No Arab party has ever run on a platform that would enable them to sit in a "Jewish"-majority government. All–except Hadash, which is mixed anyway–call for the establishment of a "state of all its citizens" which both Labor and Likud regard as a disavowal of their role in preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Surely, a joint Meretz-Hadash platform would not feel compelled to hew to the "Jewish and Democratic oxymoron" – but of course Meretz without Labor is completely irrelevant, at least at the national level.
I don't think Meretz is willing to go as even as far as Hadash, which calls for "full equality of all citizens and recognition of Israeli-Arabs as a national minority". And for a "state of all its citizens" you need NDA. And Ta'al is Islamist anyway. Meretz is still a Zionist party, and if they want to govern, it'll be as a party in a Jewish and democratic state. And that assumes some kind of ZA-style re-alignment of an Israeli public moving away from Zionism.
There seems to be a split going on in Meretz.
Even in the UK, the Meretz supporters are pretty strange. During one of my forays into finding ways to become a Jew of some stream or other, more or less any stream that is recognised by the Israel govt (some chance) I found myself at one point at a ceremony held by a Meretz-oriented yeshiva drop-out, who wanted everyone to practice a version of the Jewish prayers that he had re-written entirely in Heraclitean or possibly Democritean terms, since these philosophers were Marx's early love.
It reminds me of the strange ideologies developed by the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim, in which they replaced the traditional Jewish seasonal festivals with marxo-zionist ones, glorifying labor and the building of the state.
There is an alrticle about 'secular conversion' in today's Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1037556.html
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