The Washington Times ran an amazing op-ed yesterday on the need for Israel to become a democratic state of its citizens, “The Tragedy of a two-state solution,” by Palestinian member of the Knesset Ahmad Tibi. I am excerpting a lot of it below. Basically it’s a call to America, let Israel become a true democracy, and stop parking your mind in a two-state-solution that’s not going anywhere. And Tibi uses the term “Israeli apartheid,” which you won’t see in many mainstream venues.
Now consider this.
The Washington Times also ran Ahmad Tibi last March, a piece on Israeli extremism. I am told that the LA Times ran a piece by him (can’t find it), and the IHT ran one in October. But you won’t find Tibi in the Washington Post or the New York Times. The major East Coast papers are sitting it out. Where are the Tibis, Zahalkas, and Zoabis to decry the expanding racism within Israel for the elite audience of major East Coast newspapers? These are the John Lewis’s and Ralph Abernathy’s of this civil rights movement! And they’re all over the internet; but the establishment papers are acting like these voices are radioactive.
What does it say about the state of the limited liberalism operating at the New York Times that it falls to the paleo-conservative Washington Times to run a Palestinian member of the Knesset on issues pertaining to equal rights and discrimination within Israel? Ahmad Tibi:
The two-state solution is the optimal solution proposed by the international community for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet each passing day of occupation and deepening settlement activity on the land intended for a Palestinian state makes it more difficult to implement the two-state vision. Instead, another possibility is emerging: one state adhering to the democratic principle of one person, one vote for all citizens between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel should decide either to end the occupation and accept an independent Palestinian state on the land it occupied in 1967 or face a movement backing one democratic state for all…Democratically elected by half the population and led by politicians, many of whom are immigrants whose leading credential for office is that they are Jewish, the Israeli government does not represent a huge segment of the state. The 20 percent of Israelis who are Palestinians increasingly face racist legislation, while the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation do so without equal rights, citizenship or the ability to choose those who make the decisions that ultimately control their lives.
For Palestinians and Israelis alike, it is time to change direction and stop focusing on extending a moribund and mislabeled 19-year-old “peace process” while Israel is relentlessly colonizing the land of the second state. …
Instead, American leaders must exert concerted pressure on Israel to embrace equality and be prepared to call out Israeli political leaders who thwart such sensible ideals.
This new path forward is one that shifts the dialogue away from unachievable negotiated solutions and focuses on reforming civil society – the revolutionary change of legalizing equality and civil rights. Nonviolent revolutions transformed the American South and apartheid South Africa and can do the same for Israelis and Palestinians…
Israel should be defined as a state of all its nationalities instead of as a “Jewish state.”
The Obama administration could help by changing its role from enabler and funder of Israeli segregation within the 1948 borders and Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories of 1967 to one of helping strengthen civil society by clearly backing a non-racial society based on equality and freedom. If not, our situation could still be transformed if European governments suddenly were seized by concern for the oppressed Palestinian minority in Israel and insisted on basic rights for Palestinians that have been suppressed for decades by Israel.
…Only by providing equal rights and freedom to all of its citizens and to all those under its rule will Israelis find long-sought security, peace and strength. When we invest in all our people – and not segregationist settlement housing and ever more arms – we will be on the right path forward rather than the current dangerous one that overlooks basic investments such as firefighting and thereby imperils Jews and Palestinians alike.
