Today I read Isabel Kershner’s very good report in the New York Times saying there are serious reasons to doubt the Israeli government’s commitment to investigate and prosecute Jewish terrorists — including “price tag” criminals who murder Palestinian villagers as a message to the government against even trying to restrict Jewish colonization of the West Bank. The article underlines the view that:
Israeli law-enforcement authorities have for years acted with laxness and leniency toward Israeli citizens.
And while Kershner does not adequately consider the backing for these radicals inside the Israeli political structure, she unwittingly raises a burning question that liberal Zionists and other advocates of the two-state solution must answer:
Two-state advocates have to convince us that an Israeli government that has proven ineffective to do anything to stop a pattern of terroristic activities by Jews far away from the settlements can project the physical force necessary to move hundreds of thousands of settlers back into Israel.
Reflect that liberal Zionists tell us that a two-state solution is still possible, that most Palestinians and Israeli Jews support it. But to create a viable Palestinian state, large number of settlers will have to move — or be moved — back across the Green Line into pre-67 Israel.
There are well over half a million settlers across the Green Line, and whole communities would have to be uprooted. Large numbers of often-religious nationalists would have to leave the territory of the new Palestinian state.
I think the answer is that Israel can’t pull that off — not even to move the 100,000 settlers that supporters of a bare-minimum Palestinian “entity” envision — without provoking a civil war among Jews.
Who’s going to force the Jewish settlers to move back into Israel? Hard-core Jewish nationalists, long supported by the Israeli government, have already proven that they’re going to kill, bomb and burn to hold on to what they call biblical lands, and they don’t mind murdering Jews to do so. Anyone who’s serious about this should study the history of the French in Algeria; when calls for Algerian independence gained traction in the 1950s, the French nationalist OAS, or Organisation de l’armee secrete, tried to hold the line against any French concessions on Algeria by committing terrorist acts across Algeria and inside France too, by trying to overturn the French government, and by attempting to kill French President, Charles de Gaulle. Jewish nationalist radicals are capable of the same violence. In fact they already did murder Israel’s leader. Twenty years ago, one of them, Yigal Amir, killed the Israeli Prime Minister for talking about giving up West Bank lands, and he is a hero in right-wing circles. Today there are many rightwing leaders inside the Israeli political establishment who are one degree of separation from these fanatics — and quietly respect them for helping to shatter the idea of a Palestinian state.
Israel will not be able to move even 10,000 settlers, let alone 100,000, without creating a bloodbath.
Advocates of two states sometimes say those who call for one state are utopians. But isn’t the belief that Israel will force hundreds of thousands of settlers to leave the occupied West Bank just as utopian?
See, there is such a thing as bride that is too beautiful.
I think it would have been good to bring up why moving West Bank settlers wouldn’t be like moving Gaza settlers. I suppose it’s a moot point though. Letting go of the West Bank was never on the table in the first place.
Every new illegal settlement built across the Green line was built to achieve this very outcome.Every successive Israeli Gov has contributed to Ben Gurion,s plan to take over the whole of the so called “Greater Israel”.,
If there is to be a bloodbath , then so be it.No one but those perpetrating and supporting this 60 year crime of ethnic cleansing is to blame.One thing is sure , the status quo cannot continue and as BDS bites harder and Israel becomes more and more isolated , nothing can stop the inevitable mayhem that will ensue.Maybe all those 2SSer,s/ Israel apologists in the US with dual citizenship will don their olive uniform and go and put their bodies where their mouths have been.
It is not as if they have not been warned.
My thoughts would be with those Jews who had the courage to act and speak out against this criminal enterprise.
The value of the two state solution is that it is well delineated: if one accepts the Geneva Accord of 2003. It is also backed by the US, Russia, China, France, Germany and Japan among others.
The question regarding the two state solution is how? and it is a good question.
The value of the one state solution is it aims at perfect justice. The question regarding the one state solution is how? and it is a good question. (When I offered the first step as an annexation of the west bank by Israel, which someone admitted later is the obvious first step towards a one state solution, i was roundly excoriated for being a colonialist and a right winger.)
How do you envision your one state solution coming about, James North? Or is this merely: you call us utopian, well you’re no closer to reality than we are? Is that the only takeaway here.
No, because Israel has done this before, in 1982, when it removed settlers from Sinai, and during Disengagement in 2006. Neither event resulted in bloodshed.
When you make silly assumptions, you end up with silly arguments. Though settler violence is a serious problem, it remains the province of a tiny fringe of the settler community, most of which is not ideological. Most settlers live in the blocs, not in far-flung places, and they will move as long as the government takes care of paying them for their trouble. The rest are not going to take up arms against the IDF. Mostly, it would be like Disengagement multiplied by a factor of 10. Lots of civil disobedience, lots of crying, but not civil war.
The much more important question is whether the Palestinians themselves can function as a state in a polity where the Palestinian government may not have a monopoly on the use of force, since Palestinian society suffers from its own profound divisions.
The one state solution, which would repeat, yet again, the mistake of placing two peoples who don’t like each other in the same political entity, continues to be a bad idea (utopian is a misnomer; it’s better described as offensively stupid) that not only has little support among the people in the region, but a track record of abject failure there and everywhere else; it led to civil war in Lebanon, civil war in Iraq, dictatorship by minority and now civil war in Syria, civil war in the former Yugoslavia, civil war in Yemen, and civil wars throughout Africa. The one state solution is not utopian in nature, actually. It is the most colonial of colonial ideas.
And perhaps the reason offensively stupid ideas like these come from the West is that Westerners don’t ever have to practice what they preach; Europeans live largely in homogeneous states where the population is 80 to 95% Christian and White, and the moment there is any chance of those numbers changing, they fall into political disarray and can’t handle it. An entire political party in the United States wants to stop immigrants from coming over the border; it’s a baldly racist campaign against Brown people. Right-wing, anti-immigrant (read anti-Muslim) parties are surging in Europe, and will only continue to do so as the number of Muslim immigrants rises.