Arnon Soffer, a former adviser to Sharon, offers the Zionist answer to rightwinger Moshe Arens’s call for a binational state, in Haaretz. Note that his entire argument for the two state solution is based on various notions of ethnic supremacy, including at one point imagining the possibility of “erase”-ing 1.5 million Palestinians. You’re an American with liberal ideals. Are you down with this? Shouldn’t liberal Zionists be condemning this kind of talk? And if they are condemning it, what sort of vision are they offering in response? I am not a slam-dunk one-stater (no I’m a waffler; I think there are a lot of ethnocratic places in the world that thankfully I have nothing to do with) but those who hope to redeem Israel have to come up with better ideas than this filthy demographic talk, and ethnic ferocity. Seems very 19th century. From Haaretz:
within Israel, Jews constitute 75.5 percent of the population, but… the proportion in 1998 was 79.2 percent, and 81.7 percent in 1988. In other words, the percentage of Jews in the Israeli population is constantly declining, in spite of the influx of about 1 million immigrants over the past two decades.
According to the forecasts, in 2015 the percentage of Jews will decline to 73.5 percent, and will drop to 70.6 percent by 2025. Only in 2030 will there be, for the first time, a minuscule increase in the proportion of Jews, bringing us to 72 percent. What is there here to make Arens happy?
If to this harsh data we add foreign workers, immigrants from Africa, tourists who did not return to their homeland and Palestinians who enter the country and don’t return home, then the percentage of Jews drops to 70 percent of the inhabitants of Israel. What’s so wonderful here? It’s an unpleasant picture….
The demographic bogey, then, is alive and threatening after all, and we still haven’t discussed the density of the population or the issues of internal security that we can expect from a hostile population of millions of people.
There is no choice but to tell Arens that the right-wing Betar ideology on which he was raised went bankrupt a long time ago and it won’t help if he virtually erases 1.5 million Arabs from the territories. They are here. The conclusion is frighteningly simple: Whoever brings about the establishment of a single binational state in the Land of Israel will doom the Jews of Israel to destruction. We, the sane majority who still live here, will not allow anyone to do that.
