Jonathan Chait at New Republic says that Helen Thomas’s formula for Israel/Palestine is the same as Tony Judt’s:
Judt advocates dissolving the state of Israel and replacing it with a a bi-national democratic state where Jews can live happily and peacefully as minority citizens of Palestine. It’s an utterly fantastical proposition. Thomas’s anti-Zionism entails a no more preposterous alternative fantasy (Israel’s Jews will immigrate to Germany, Poland, and perhaps the United States.) The main difference is that Thomas is a little more forthright about the fact that her preferred solution is to turn a large chunk of the world’s Jews into refugees.
This is really absurd. Begin with one Orwellian aspect of this comment. One reason there is unending conflict in Israel/Palestine is that Israel, Chait’s preferred solution, actually created 750,000 some refugees 60-some years ago and has refused to acknowledge their rights, let alone repatriate them, despite Harry Truman’s and the world’s insistence. This injustice inflames the Palestinian Diaspora to this day, and extends obviously to Arab-Americans like Helen Thomas.
Judt 7 years ago dared to suggest a democracy in all of Israel and Palestine. I share some of Chait’s apprehension about whether this can come to pass, but the existing arrangement is oppressive–which is why Judt was using his imagination to describe what he called the multicultural "alternative." He was explicitly opposed to any expulsion:
[Binational state] would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history… A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force…
Finally, consider this: Israel is now such a bleak place in terms of its inability to chart any hopeful future beside the "conflict," that 700,000-1,000,000 Israelis are said to be living outside the country, trying to build futures in other places. The "reverse aliyah," as John Mearsheimer puts it. It’s why you hear Israeli accents on the Upper West Side. Chait surely knows some of these people. Why are they leaving? Because of the horrifying lack of vision for 21st century life that Zionism has produced, and that Judt was seeking to replace.
