Peter Beinart says that leftwing advocates for a single state in Israel and Palestine are utopians; and to make his point, he asks what the army of “Israstine” will look like. I’ve seen him do it three times: here, here, and in yesterday’s Times.
[Y]ou have to believe that the “Israstine” army, composed of joint Jewish-Palestinian brigades, would hold together under enormous stress because its members are more loyal to “Israstine” than they are to being Jewish or Palestinian. That’s even more delusional than the two-state solution. More likely, “Israstine” would be civil war under a common flag.
I agree with Beinart: It’s hard to imagine. But before we do that thought experiment, let’s look at reality. What does the army of Israel look like right now? It is almost all Jewish and Druze. It does not represent 15 percent so of the Israeli population, Palestinian Muslims and Christians (beyond a handful from those communities).
The army of Israel looks a lot like the American army before it was desegregated 67 years ago. Actually worse than the Jim Crow American army; black men served in our army, in segregated units. The Tuskegee Airmen. But Palestinians don’t serve. Because they don’t have to and because they are not wanted: they are not thought likely to be loyal warriors for a Jewish state that is in conflict with other Palestinians.
And why would they want to? If the U.S. was constituted as a white Christian state, blacks and Jews surely wouldn’t want to serve in the US army.
Israel’s army shows that right now the country enforces Jim Crow laws worse than the American version that we buried 50 years ago.
As for Beinart’s critique of the one-state future as utopian, I agree that’s a real question. As Yousef Munayyer said in a debate with Beinart a few weeks back, none of the short term answers for Israel and Palestine look hopeful at all, and there are bound to be terrible problems on any road we go down. And don’t raise “bogeymen,” Munayyer said.
The future looks so scary because the conditions in Israel Palestine are reminiscent of revolutionary conditions in Algeria and the antebellum south, injustices so pronounced they produced enormous violence. (That’s why I support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, it is a nonviolent means of putting pressure on Israel so its Jewish nationalist regime will see the light and begin dismantling a system of discrimination against Palestinians.)
As for the army of Israstine, it is something of a debating trick. Do fears of an unknown future justify keeping people of color in worse-than-Jim-Crow conditions? Of course not. Imagine telling American blacks in the 60s we have to put the civil rights movement on ice because we don’t think blacks and whites will be able to live alongside one another as equals. They wouldn’t have accepted the argument. Americans who believe in equal rights here– and who supported desegregating our armed forces 7 decades ago– should stop enabling a system that makes Jews first class citizens and Arabs second class ones.
Is Beinart really saying that the inability to imagine an army composed of Palestinian and Jewish soldiers is a sufficient reason to reject one state with equal rights for both?
Let’s imagine then? First, assume that Israstine in fact does uphold full citizenship with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in what is now Israel + the West bank + Gaza. Assume too that Palestinians have been justly compensated for what has been taken from them. Why would such an army be problematic even if within the army the Palestinians would rather eat with Palestinians and Jews with Jews. Armies are supposed to protect against external threats. What true threats to Israstine would Palestinians not fight against under these assumed conditions? Beinart’s worry about the army’s unity seems to stem from an assumption that the army will still be repressing Palestinians within Israstine. Finally, someone must have made this same argument in support of maintaining apartheid in South Africa.
First, a huge thanks to the crew who probably put in a long arduous weekend improving our experience with MW. Kudos to all.
Now to the subject at hand.
If any positive outcome is to be realised in the P/I conflict, then Zionism must be defeated and assigned to the bin of history.As long as this curse persists , nothing will be achieved .Beinart,s claim that Arabs and Israeli Jews will never live in peace with each other is misguided and ignores the many examples where former enemies have successively buried their differences.Northern Ireland and South Africa are two examples.While the level of success is not perfect , at least the conditions for further improvement are there and future generations will find common cause and respect each other,s humanity.
The 2SS is dead and the only possible outcome is a 1SS . The Zionits can continue on their self defeating goal of a Greater Israel but that will end in disaster.Zionits need to start realising that electing leaders who ( survive on fear mongering) are in turn more right wing than those before them and will see the end of Israel in any form.Zionits need to accept that they must admit that the Nakba happened and apologise for their part in that.A long honest look in the mirror is required to change the zionist mindset.Hopefully the international community and BDS can assist them in this endeavour.
Beinart and co are only serving to keep the conflict going , that is to say , keep the Zionists in the business of occupation and oppression.
Beinart says he cannot imagine the army, but what he really cannot imagine is a state, successor to today’s Israel, in which Jews have no overwhelming predominance and privilege over all others. He cannot imagine all or some of the macho (or religious fundameltalist) Jewish Israelis agreeing (or being forced) to act equally under the laws and customs.
As to the army, he cannot imagine a State that no longer gets its jollies by going to war because of the pure pleasure of trashing a neighbor — that neighbor being an Arab state and no longer for that reason alone a natural enemy, what with Israel being >50% Arab at that point.
Many people are coming to the realization — slowly of course — that the goal of Zionism, a predominantly Jewish State in all of Palestine — could never, not then and not now, be achieved without both theft and expulsion (ethnic cleansing). And the realization that that theft and expulsion were evils then and evils now– and are broadly seen that way.
Beinart is having trouble making this transition. He is not there yet. He still wants the judenstaat and for him, I suppose, the end still justifies the means that were chosen and put into operation from 1945 til 2015. And counting.
But I bet he is not liking it as much as he once did.
“Do fears of an unknown future justify keeping people of color in worse-than-Jim-Crow conditions? ”
Palestinians living within Israel’s 1967 lines are not living in anything like Jim Crow conditions. Those in the West Bank and Gaza face more serious oppression, and arguing for the type of solution that has led to bloodbaths almost everywhere else it has been attempted, not to mention a solution that is rejected by both peoples and a solution that would greatly injustice everyone in the region, is wrong politically and morally.
And talking about the army in such a state in not a dodge. How would any of the state institutions function? How do they function in Syria? In Iraq? In Lebanon? In the former Yugoslavia? In Nigeria in the 1960’s? In Congo?
You must answer why it’s a good idea for the international community to create a state inhabited by two peoples who neither trust nor like one another in a region where peoples who dislike and do not trust each other in way Palestinians and Israelis dislike and mistrust one another tend to kill each other.
Western ideas imposed on Middle Eastern peoples are no better just because their progenitors are radical leftists.
He should read MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, to help him imagine that state, and to help him understand why his outlook is so similar to that of Southern segregationists, who themselves had difficulty imagining the US as it exists today, 50 years after the Civil Right movement.
It all boils down to how you define your community, and he’s defining his in an exclusionary way, inconsistently with American values.