Years ago at The Nation magazine I asked Henry Siegman about a one-state democracy and he said it was impossible to imagine, dismissed the possibility. Now Siegman, the former head of the World Jewish Congress, grasps that the business of imagining a democratic outcome is far more important than a business to which he dedicated much of his life, Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. He is a great leader.
This is a piece at the National Interest about the urgency of stripping away the “disguise” that Greater Israel has maintained in the West. That is media work, of course, work we do here. Notice Siegman’s use of “Jews-only” highways, eschewing the usual prevarication about the fact that even Palestinian Israelis may use those roads.
(By the way, Siegman tries to resuscitate the two-state solution near the end of the piece. I think this is a common response. Because folks imagine a one-state paradigm will require decades to materialize and they want an exit ramp sooner.)
The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead…
The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government’s policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways…
Israeli decision-making elites long ago made a cold cost-benefit calculation that the benefits of establishing permanent Israeli control over the entire West Bank exceed the cost..
It is unlikely that even those Western democracies accustomed to pandering to their Israeli lobbies would be prepared to shield Israel from condemnations and sanctions when its apartheid can no longer be disguised. One must assume that no American president wouldagain declare at a UN General Assembly that Palestinian victims of such a system should seek relief not from the UN or international courts but from their occupiers….
Paradoxically, only Palestinians can make that happen. By abandoning the Palestinian Authority, ending the ugly Fatah-Hamas rivalry and mounting a struggle for full citizenship rights in the Greater Israel they now live in, Palestinians will challenge not only Israel’s public but also the United States and the international community to finally stand up to the most reactionary government in Israel’s history.
The Palestinians are obviously losers in the current system but at the rate discipline is breaking down in Israel, ordinary Israeli Jews are going to be the biggest losers. The sociopaths will destroy everything to hold onto YESHA. That is why aliyah is dead.
I wouldn’t like to be a mid 30s professional with 2 kids in Tel Aviv. Not when the settlers are painting slogans on churches and firebombing migrants and that’s just in 2012.
Or when the settlers in Hebron get to enact their Kristallnacht repeatedly, with impunity. Apologies for the reference, but it had to be said.
quote:…There is also no longer any question whether this government’s policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. …
All I read from this nonsense is that they might be politicians of undefined score (good, mediocre, or bad -I don’t mind) but as political scientists or Historians they’re zeroes.
The main force of the black emanzipation movement in ZA never tried to abrogate the State, not even the system. They simply wanted to reform the point in its constitution that stigmatised Blacks only because of their birth.
Gill Scott Heron always called “ANCANIA” when he spoke about ZA, but Mandela never jumped on, because he was clever enough that the ANC will be only one party within ZA and not ZA the land belonging to his party.
In difference to Palestine, the PLO rejected any ethnical identity of Jews until 1992. They accepted only a future Arabic state, where only Jews having settled before the start of the British Mandate would get the citizenship.
Moreover it was even FORBIDDEN (!!!) to settle any other compromise.
But even today there are no trustworthy signs that the PLO really -against their promisses- have modified their Charta meanwhile. But it’s peanuts so or so, because even showing some pragmatism against Israel brought them their worst decline in popularity, so much that even here some out themselves as Hamas admirers.
Before you all proceed with words you obviously don’t know their meanings, simply think about the magic of “Selffullfilling Prophecy”. If you open express that you had somebody only because he exists, what you expect from him then?
That he treats you like a brother or sister or what?
I don’t think the issue is “haTE”? If your squatting in my house at gunpoint, I’m going to have a problem with it. Understandable. If I’m armed, your going to have a big problem.
Your just 10 years too late. Hasn’t your PM’s recent juvenile behavior informed you? How about the overwhelming “Boos” at the DNC Convention. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, the last train is pulling out.
Hej! Tumta
Speaking of being a young professional in Tel Aviv, here are some of them on Al Jazeera in a coffee shop trying to talk about the wonderful Jewish Democratic state with Haneen Zoabi sitting next to them. Oh, yes and Schlomo Sand too. http://youtu.be/RXmpN0QavUA