I just heard Brooke Gladstone of On the Media, NPR, grill Wadah Khanfar, an Al Jazeera executive, about how the network is hurting the peace process by running stories suggesting that Mahmoud Abbas was wrong to attempt to cashier the Goldstone Report. O hallowed peace process. Does she have any idea what the unending peace process has produced for Palestinians? Or what it has produced for Israelis? In a word, Jim Crow. But Gladstone’s is an establishmentarian shibboleth. You will be barred from the mainstream if you say you don’t believe in the peace process. Here is Gideon Levy in Haaretz on the Zionist insistence that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state. Why isn’t this in the American discourse?
Defining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state…
There is also no argument about the justice of the Law of Return: Israel is the place of the Jews who want to live there. The real argument is over the law’s exclusivity, over the fact that it applies only to Jews. That’s where it all begins. One could understand the need after the Holocaust, the necessity in the first years of the state, but 62 years after the founding of the state the time has come to reexamine the long-obsolete concepts. Does anyone actually know the meaning of the term "Jewish state" that we bandy about so much? Does it mean a state for Jews only? Is it not a new kind of "racial purity"? Is the "demographic threat" greater than the danger of the state’s becoming a religious enthnocracy or an apartheid state? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a just democracy? And how is it even possible to speak about a state being both Jewish and democratic?
