Bernard Avishai’s piece in yesterday’s Times Magazine reflects the consensus in the center-left of American politics that now is the time to push for the two state solution; and we can do it if we try. Hendrik Hertzberg says so in the New Yorker. Daniel Levy says it at Haaretz. Henry Siegman in LRB says it too. I believe Thomas Friedman and J Street are also saying it. (I don’t think it’s possible or even a good deal but that’s just me, I’m going to shut up for now.) Here is Hertzberg:
Yesterday, Avishai [pleaded]
“that if columnists, bloggers, pundits, foreign policy experts, etc., broadly understood how doable a deal was, they would encourage a change of course from the administration and cover Obama’s back. I still believe that there is a very narrow window here; that if Obama does not act on Palestine—formulating a plan based on the Olmert-Abbas gaps, and rallying the Quartet and the countries of the OECD to it—not only will young Arabs turn decisively on America, but Abbas will soon be gone, and Jerusalem will blow.”
If the President were to follow this advice, the so-called Israel lobby would of course raise holy hell; AIPAC would make FNC sound like NPR. But, I believe, most American Jews, especially younger ones, would support him. America might be able to save Israel from itself and its misguided “friends.” And Obama could finally earn that Nobel prize.
And here is Henry Siegman:
The administration’s best chance of restoring some of its lost credibility may lie here: in the attempt to rescue a functioning and sovereign state from an unyielding Israeli occupation now on the verge of swallowing Palestine whole. If the US were to succeed and a viable Palestinian state emerge, not only would America’s influence in the region grow and Iran’s be weakened, but the major cause of Arab and wider international hostility to Israel – and of popular Arab support for Iran – would be greatly diminished.
Given the record of failed US peace initiatives, is such a rescue operation even conceivable? Can an American president finally abandon the peace process for the fraud it has been, present the parties with a detailed framework for a permanent status solution and obtain Israeli and Palestinian acceptance? The answer is yes, for two important reasons.
First, the recent upheavals have dramatically increased the cost to American interests of the country’s current policies in the Middle East. Not only does it exceed by far the cost to any administration of admitting the truth about Israel’s culpability for the deadlocked peace talks: it’s a cost to America’s interests that even congressmen in thrall to the Israel lobby may now find excessive. No one has suggested the US punish Israel in order to get its way. It need only cease to reward it – with unprecedented military, diplomatic and economic gifts – for its indifference to the damage its sabotaging of a two-state solution has done not just to the Palestinians but to America’s national interests and its own.
Second, Israel’s own cost-benefit calculations have changed. Now that it is on the verge of reverting to an earlier isolation – its peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan are at risk, international assaults on its legitimacy are newly underway – a government that rejects the urgent demands of its only remaining friend will not survive for long.
