The talks are surely a farce, but this is an amazing moment that we must celebrate: independent Palestinian voices are at last being heard in major American newspapers as a counter to the endless pro-Israel arguments. And they are speaking plainly to Americans about an American idea: equal rights.
The other day the New York Times ran Ali Abunimah on the centrality of Hamas to any discussion of the Palestinian future.
Today the LATimes features an Op-Ed piece by Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, more prominently than Yossi Klein Halevi’s counterweight hasbara. And Tibi tells Americans of the right of return to stolen farms and houses.
no Palestinian negotiator I know of will bow before the Israeli demand — put forward only recently, but increasingly adamantly — that Israel be recognized as an exclusively Jewish state.
This is an unreasonable demand, as it requires Palestinian negotiators to relegate more than 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to an inferior standing. Already, there are more than 30 Israeli laws that serve to discriminate against Palestinians. Abbas cannot be expected to sign off on such an injustice. Not only would he be consigning Palestinian citizens of Israel to second-class citizenship, he would be stripping away the right of return from Palestinian refugees who long to return to homes and farms stolen from them 62 years ago.
The only way out of the impasse is for Jews to recognize Palestinians as their equals and negotiate with them on that basis. A fair two-state solution requires the abrogation of all laws, both in Israel and the occupied territories, that raise Jews above Palestinians.
Yesterday the Washington Post Op-Ed page– managed by my old friend Fred Hiatt, a true liberal notwithstanding the neocons garrisoning Washington for two decades– ran an important piece on the talks by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. The piece all but predicted the talks’ failure, because the power differential between the Israelis and the P.A. is so crushing, and lamented that in the fallout, Palestinians were likely to be blamed for "obstinacy," and the atmosphere "poisoned."
And today? The Washington Post has printed a thrilling one-state argument by George Bisharat that includes the revolutionary-in-D.C. statement that the two-state solution has become "unrealistic":
Israeli perspectives are already beginning to shift, most intriguingly among right-wing leaders. Former defense minister Moshe Arens recently proposed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel annex the West Bank and offer its residents citizenship. Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin and Likud parliamentarian Tzipi Hotovely have also supported citizenship for West Bank Palestinians, according to the Haaretz. In July, Hotovely said of the Israeli government’s policies of separation: "The result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of massacres, to put it bluntly."
Is one of these politicians the Israeli de Klerk? That remains to be seen. Gaza is pointedly excluded from the Israeli right’s annexation debate. They still envision a Jewish state, simply one with a larger Palestinian minority. But their challenge to the two-state orthodoxy, which empirical experience has proven unrealistic, is healthy.
If Americans aspire to more than managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via perpetual and inconclusive negotiations, we should applaud this emerging discussion. Having overcome our own institutionalized racial discrimination, we can model the virtues of a vibrant, multicultural society based on equal rights. President Obama, moreover, would be a fitting emissary for this vital message.
Our world is rocking. If this is not a one-off, if it keeps up for the next year, Americans’ views could change dramatically, and the evening news would start to play up the brutal Palestinian conditions and show Americans what it means to get 1/26th of the water that illegal colonists get. I should also praise Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for her humanizing reports from Gaza on NPR (even her get-the-other-side piece from Israel managed to include the horrifying dystopian description of remote-controlled machine guns on the border of the Strip, controlled by Israelis at computers).
Certainly the left will start to shift if Americans get this sort of fare on a regular basis. And maybe Chuck Schumer will be paid back for urging the "strangulation" of the Gazans. Tell me this is not a real sign that a compelling Palestinian argument, all people are created equal, is starting to break through to Americans.
And believe me, if Palestinians see that at long last their simple argument for self-determination is at last heard in the American capital, that they finally have a partner for gaining rights that Americans have taken for granted for years, this will transform their political culture.
