Inside Israel there is a growing war against Netanyahu. Here is Zeev Sternhell in Haaretz trying to save the two-state solution. I think he is too late, but there is an important theme here, which the American press has failed to reflect: that the ideology of the settlers, having devoured Israeli politics, has thereby exposed the foundational ideas of Zionism as racist and expansionist; and Sternhell and other liberal Zionists mean to rescue the founders from that shadow. (As a Jew, I do see some of the idealism that propelled the early Zionists, the messianic response to conditions in Europe, but anyone who has seen the occupation can’t read these sorts of arguments without having the feeling that they evade the essential issue, human-rights atrocities.) Sternhell:
[I]f we see the establishment of the state as a watershed event in Jewish national history – both because it engendered a new political and legal concept in the history of Zionism, that of citizenship, and because geopolitical borders were assigned to the new entity for the first time – then the enterprise of conquering the land has ended. And that, in the eyes of the right wing, is the real existential danger.
Indeed, the right wing considers recognition of the reality created in 1949 to be the chief enemy of Zionism…
[T]he question of borders is only one aspect of the failure to recognize the War of Independence as a fundamental turning point; it also has a civic angle. The anti-democratic legislation that the Knesset has enacted over the past year, which targets basic civic equality and which borders on racism even if it is not actually racist, is a way of declaring that the essence of the state is that it belongs to Jews alone. At bottom, this view stems from seeing Jews as the sole owners of the Land of Israel. This means the state doesn’t exist to guarantee democracy, equality, human rights or even a decent life to all; it exists to guarantee Jewish rule over the Land of Israel and to make sure no additional political entity is established here. Everything is deemed permissible to reach that end, and no price is considered too high.
