On Monday Hussein Agha and Robert Malley published an op-ed in the Times, "The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything," that many people have sent along. The piece was both elliptical and elusive. Its argument was that the essential battle lines in Israel-Palestine are 1948: non-recognition by both sides. It spoke of a "Jewish state" as representing the profound aspirations of most Israelis, but didn’t offer a solution. Steve Walt called the piece "frustratingly ambiguous", and in harping on the question, What kind of Israel do you want, reminds me that Lyndon Johnson asked Levi Eshkol this question more than 40 years ago,as Gershom Gorenberg has reported in his book. Walt:
the most significant lines in the entire essay were the last two, where they write "the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel." Again, they didn’t explain what they meant by this, so it’s hard to know what they were trying to say. The implication, however, is that Israel still has to decide what kind of state it is going to be. Will it be a modern secular democracy with a certain Jewish character, but where non-Jews are fully equal citizens both de jure and de facto? If so, then two states will work, and the two conflicting narratives about the past could gradually cease to matter very much. In the most optimistic scenario, the whole sorry history of the Zionist-Arab conflict might eventually be regarded as a painful historical episode but not part of anyone’s future agenda, much as Alsace-Lorraine eventually ceased to be an issue between France and Germany. Or will Israel continue to pursue the dream of Greater Israel, increasingly fueled by ethno-religious claims and the growing political power of religious extremists? If so, then it will become an apartheid state and will eventually face a Palestinian struggle for democratic rights. Again: what sort of state will it become? Needless to say, these different visions will have far-reaching implications for relations between Israel and its neighbors, the rest of the world, and between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Again, I wish Agha and Malley had been less coy in raising this important set of issues.
