Yesterday's Jerusalem Post ran an important piece by Samuel Freedman on the likely end of the two-state solution and calls for democracy in Israel/Palestine. Last week at the 92d Street Y, another American Jewish journalist, Michelle Goldberg, said the same thing: now's our last chance to save the Jewish state, because Zionism isn't looking democratic.
Last year Bernard Avishai published a book, The Hebrew Republic, in which he quoted Israeli P.M. Ehud Olmert saying the same thing, more than two years ago (history gets impatient), at a breakfast at his house. Avishai then takes up the great realistic/democratic chore that follows from this understanding: how to lead Israeli Jews and American Jews toward imagining acceptance of a democratic basis for coexistence in Israel/Palestine.
Isn’t the real issue whether one sees the identity of the nation as a blood tie, something a Jew can claim the moment the plane touches down, or whether one has to go through a process of acculturation, the acquisition of the language, the way every other European country does it, the way Canada does it?… After her husband left, I confessed to Aliza Olmert that I feared we might not have fifty years. In any case, I said, Yehuda Amichai’s poetry, not the law of Return, embodies the Zionist project for me. She looked at me softly. “Hebrew is my homeland,” she said.
Olmert's comments were accurate.
They are exacerbated by Netanyahu's likely government (not yet formed), in that Netanyahu does not consider accepting any peer Palestinian state. (Maybe he'll change. Hopefully.)
The problem with Netanyahu is that he is aware of the issue and an adept at avoiding it, and in ways that look to a biased supporter to be prospectively legal.
There are MANY assertions that the left makes about international law, assuming them to be already concluded and definitive, that aren't in fact.
Consider the legal ambiguity about former Jordanian state land in the West Bank, that they renounced sovereignty over. Israel presumed (maybe even accompanied by compensation), that those lands were then Israeli state lands.
But, that conflicts with much of the human rights community, and certainly has not afforded individual Palestinians their day in court, in either the West Bank or in Israel.
Olmert is absolutely right of course and I've used these quotes (and similar ones) a lot when discussing Israel's future with Israeli Zionists. Usually I don't get an answer. Either they just don't get it or they just don't care.
I suspect it's the latter. Finkelstein posits that Israel lives from one day to the next and relies on the occasional 'miracle' for its survival as a settler state. I agree and I see the momentum of ever increased settlement activity, combined with ever increased disdain, hatred even, for the Palestinian 'partners' as the main reasons to view the whole situation as a 'massive-train-crash-in-slow-motion', with Israel unknowingly, uncaringly and possibly unstoppably choochooing into full blown Apartheid and with no choice but to absorb the Palestinians which they've not been able to expel, perhaps as little as ten years into the future. The incoming Israeli government would seem to indicate that any freeze/reversal of settler activity has now been postponed by at least one parliamentary term.
Perhaps on this too they're waiting for a 'miracle' or trying to engineer one: if ten years down the line the world doesn't give a rats arse about the Palestinians any more, Greater Israel will be acceptable and possible. But going by the current momentum the world's public opinion is gaining this doesn't seem likely.
The Little Engine That Could–right-wing Jewish version. Sucha golden book! Get it at your nearest library for your kids. Or, you could give them, say Mark Rudd's new book. And tune them into Chas Freeman. There's also a Jewish version of Little Black Sambo–or the Arab version if you prefer. Maybe Dick & Jane wasn't so bad after all?
Or, how about The Saggy Baggy Elephant, by W & M?
Zionism versus democracy – they don't appear to have much in common, do they?
Or, how about The Saggy Baggy Elephant, by W & M? Posted by: Alice | March 23, 2009 at 12:09 PM
I dunno, Alice, but maybe if you hum it, we'll recognise the tune.
They are oxygen and hydrogen in water.
Zionism versus democracy – they don't appear to have much in common, do they?
They have absolutely nothing in common, in fact are diametrically opposed.
Richard Witty: your take on the legal status of the West Bank, is absurd. The West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights are territories captured in war. Were they part of the lands given to Israel in the UN Partition Plan (itself a complete violation of the rights of the people actually living in Mandate Palestine)? NO, they were not. Were they part of the Israel that emerged after the armistice of 1949? NO, they were not. How did they come to be under Israeli rule? They were seized in war, in 1967. International law is clear: it is illegal to acquire territory through war. Even clearer: the Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel signed, and to which the US is a High Contracting Party) states in black and white that it is illegal to move civilians into territories captured in war. EVERY "settlement", and every "settler" are illegal. Israel persistently conflates residency with sovereignty. 'Taint so.
Just because the Jordanian regime joined in screwing the Palestinians, the occupied territories are not some blank canvas, lands to be tossed to the Israelis as soon as the Jordanians renounced rights they didn't have in the first place.
So here's the question for you, Richard: where are the borders of Israel?