Do liberal zionists think that international law should be ignored because Israel will never adhere to it?

During his opening remarks, Kulick, who dramatically rolled his eyes whenever Vilkomerson or Mermelstein mentioned the importance and necessity of justice and human rights during their own presentations, revealed a surprising contempt for well-established international law because the implementation of such goals would implicitly negate the ethno-religious nature of Israel and the institutionalized superiority of its Jewish citizens.  Kulick stated that the true goal of the BDS movement is not to simply end the occupation but rather to, in his own words, “perniciously…bring about the collapse of the Zionist enterprise.”

Kulick made his position abundantly clear early on, declaring, “The reality is that anything other than a two-state solution means the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state, which to me is totally unacceptable,” and proceeded to dismissively call a “secular democratic state” the “objective of those Palestinians who would like to see the state of Israel disappear.”

The fear of losing Jewish power and privilege in Israel, in deference to full human rights as argued by Vilkomerson and Mermelstein, was an unfathomable suggestion for Kulick.  The reason, however, Kulick gave for why this “idealistic” solution (as Buchanan described it) is unattainable and unrealistic was instructive.

“If we don’t bring an end to the occupation, through a negotiated two-state solution in the near future, we will end up with one state,” Kulick said, “but it won’t be the state that many of you envision, because I am certain that Israeli Jews and most American Jews will never give up Israel’s Jewish identity in favor of a phantom secular democratic state, an imaginary one with an Arab majority and with perfect equality for all of its citizens.”

Possibly the most revealing statement made all evening, Kulick here perfectly summarizes the deepest deficiencies of the so-called “progressive Zionist” community.  According to his statement, the real reason why coexistence and equality are unachievable in Israel is because the Jewish communities both there and here won’t freely or peacefully relinquish their own political and religious dominance in Israel.  In essence, Kulick is arguing that secular democracy is unappealing to Jews, in general, when they cannot be guaranteed authority over their fellow citizens and cannot systematically discriminate against them.

What seemed to be missing from this analysis – and was never addressed that evening by the panelists or anyone else – is the fact that human rights and international law should not be (and are not) left up to the discretion of a ruling ethnosupremacist class, no matter how much military aid or diplomatic cover they receive from the United States or how many nuclear weapons they have stockpiled.  Left up to their own devices and racist whim, white South Africans would have never dismantled apartheid and voluntarily accepted blacks as their equals.  This is clear from numerous public research polls from the 1980s and early 90s, which found that, even as the sun was setting on the barely four-decade-old apartheid enterprise (legally established in 1948, the same year Israel unilaterally declared statehood), whites diligently clung to their devotion to racial, cultural, and political superiority.

Ali Abunimah tells us that a March 1986 poll found that 83% of whites said they would opt for continued white domination of the government if they had the choice, while a 1990 nationwide survey of Afrikaner whites found just 2.2% were willing to accept a “universal franchise with majority rule.”  Furthermore,