At The American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg states that the Sheikh Jarrah protests have stopped the evictions for now, and thereby revivified "the Israeli left." Good news. (h/t Richard Witty)
Now the quibbles.
I bet that Gorenberg is attached to that leftwing label out of some Vietnam-era pride, but let’s look at the values. Gorenberg states that part of the motivation of this left protest against the evictions is sectarian/protective: the Jewish fear that if Jewish settlers succeed in claiming pre-1948 title in East Jerusalem, Palestinians will turn around and gain title in West Jerusalem on property that was taken from them by Jews in 1948– and so Jews in nice neighborhoods will lose their homes.
I somehow doubt that Jews would lose their homes in such a process; there would be compensation. But readers should ask, is this a left position? I say it is not. Gorenberg is a religious Zionist, still he is deemed most reliable narrator on this question by the liberal media.
Gorenberg’s point is that the right of return will create a "new class of displaced Jews" in a binational state. Now Gorenberg may be right, and this is a fair question, whether a binational state will create endless turmoil, but it is only fair to describe the "old class of displaced," the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been displaced, and are still being displaced, in the Negev and the West Bank, by Israeli policy. A lefty should make that point, beyond Gorenberg’s acknowledgment of the Palestinian "tragedy."
Finally, the prospect Gorenberg holds out of a Jerusalem ringed by Jewish "bridgeheads" is not a prospect. It is a reality that has caused many realistic people to conclude that the two-state solution is over. Americans should be informed of this reality, not forever gaslighted along the path of partition, which Gorenberg is obviously committed to out of some degree of religious devotion. (Do you want religious people informing you about stem-cell research?)
Gorenberg:
by claiming former Jewish property in Sheikh Jarrah, the settlers are also asserting the right of 1948 refugees or their heirs to reclaim their homes. In this case, the refugees are Jews. Yet the Palestinian insistence on the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees is the demand that Israelis generally see as the most significant Palestinian roadblock to a peace agreement. Implemented without restriction, it would make a two-state solution meaningless, since Palestinians would reclaim property in West Jerusalem and throughout Israel, creating a new class of displaced Jews in a binational state. (When peace negotiators on either side are realistic, they dicker about what limited number of Palestinians would return to Israel, in a symbolic acknowledgment of the Palestinian tragedy.) For Israeli rightists to assert the unrestricted right of return in Jerusalem is strategically suicidal — but they do not even imagine that a right granted to their side would apply to the other.
The settlers also have a more immediate goal of creating Jewish bridgeheads in a ring of Arab areas around the Old City. Those footholds are intended to ensure that the entirety of the Old City remains under Israeli rule. More ambitiously, they are aimed at preventing a political division of Jerusalem. In other words, the goal is to remove the basic conditions for a two-state solution.
The mix of blatant injustice and the right’s rash disregard for Israel’s own future has fueled the protests…
if a vibrant Israeli left is reborn, history will mark that it regained life facing the blocked entrance of Sheikh Jarrah.
