Media Analysis

‘NYT’ columnist says struggle for equal rights in one state is upon us

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran an article titled, “The Jerusalem Issue, Explained,” which was forthright about the fact that Israel faces an apartheid-style struggle for equal rights.

Max Fisher, a columnist for the paper, concluded realistically that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has in all likelihood ended the peace process. And that means that Israel must decide whether it wants to be a democracy.

All of that points toward a future in which peace is less likely, a Palestinian state is less likely and Israel is one day forced to choose between the two core components of its national identity: Jewish and democratic. Either it asserts permanent control over Palestinians without granting them full rights — a sort of state that critics sometimes compare to apartheid South Africa — or it grants Palestinians full rights, establishing a pluralistic democracy that is no longer officially Jewish.

I like the lack of sentimentalism over the end of a Jewish state. After all, most liberals endorse the principle of separation of church and state.

Fisher’s last line is blunt:

Mr. Trump’s move likely edges Israelis and Palestinians closer to that future. But things were probably moving in that direction already.

This is a very good intervention by the Times because a good number of Zionists are seeking to maintain that the two-state solution is alive and well, precisely so that no one can accuse Israel of practicing apartheid. This is the approach taken by Ehud Barak, Gilead SherNatan Sharansky, Alon Ben-Meir and others. They know that if the two-state solution is declared over, Israel loses its legitimacy/figleaf, it’s just a permanent occupier. So they need to insist that the two-state solution is alive.

Journalism like Fisher’s makes this juggling act more difficult for Israel’s defenders to pull off.

I must register my irritation with Fisher’s analysis of the problem though. Like everyone else, he blames America’s loss of neutrality in the Israel/Palestine conflict on evangelical Christians, with rightwing Jews riding in the sidecar.

the policy of neutrality has grown contentious in American politics since the 1980s and the rise of the evangelical Christian right as a political force.

Evangelical Christians have been joined by a subset of American Jews and others on the political right in arguing that the United States should overtly back Israel in the conflict. This position hardened during the second intifada, a period of vicious Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s.

12 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

PW: “Israel must decide…”

Hasn’t Israel done decided? Long, long ago?

—-
Just as a perception quibble, but isn’t Fisher’s non-specific and pretty ethereal longing for a sometime-in-the-future, collective, Jewish-Israeli decision to maybe, incrementally, do the right thing a definition of sentimentalism? Seems like he’s explicitly longing for an Israel that might have been. Leaving the door open, he is.

Still, for the NYT this article is as close as it may come to declaring an end to all the theater supporting chimeric outcomes. It’ll be interesting to see just how deep this epiphany runs at the NYT as the next wave of opinions and reporting rolls out.

Max Fisher, a columnist for the paper, concluded realistically that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has in all likelihood ended the peace process. And that means that Israel must decide whether it wants to be a democracy

The above is not a quote from Fischer but from Weiss –compounding the gross deception practiced by the NYT whores.

How is it “Trump’s recognition”?

How fast we forget that the US dictatorship of the Two Parties in its Congress did very officially do just that, already in 1995, by voting 93-5 + 374-37 the Jerusalem Embassy Act under a Democrat administration!

Not to forget the Democrat convention of 2012, Obama reigning, at which the same recognition was officially registered also by the party of worldwide imperialism –still voted by many here.

Not to forget the 90-0 unanimous Senate vote in June 2017 –so far away nobody remembers it, I suppose.

Trump is the usual Trump, the con artist.
Without doing anything at all that hadn’t already been perpetrated by the Dim and Puke criminals, without even skipping the ritual Presidential waiver, he presents this old crime as if it were new and his own. And all the Dims, all of them without a single exception accessories to the crime of US participation in Zionism, try to use this nonsense to make us believe it’s new and it’s by Trump.

And that means that Israel must decide whether it wants to be a democracy

Still pretending you believe it was not decided long ago?
Not pretending?

“Subset” is a term borrowed from mathematical set theory. 0.01% is a subset and so is 99.99% So use of this term handily evades the questions of “how many” or “what proportion” that arise when trying to choose among non-specialized words like some, few, many, most, etc.

PHIL- “Like everyone else, he blames America’s loss of neutrality in the Israel/Palestine conflict on evangelical Christians, with rightwing Jews riding in the sidecar.”

Isn’t it just like the Gentiles to blame the Jews for the creation of the Jewish state! Everyone knows it was a Christian Zionist named Herzl the Baptist who conned the Jews into going along with his cockamamie scheme!

I can speak a little bit about evangelical Christians because many people I know as well as most of my relatives are such folks. It’s my impression that they care about Israel a good deal from a religious perspective and want to visit there and defend it, but it’s not about specifics. Palestinians, settlements, human rights never come up. So as long as politicians mention Israel and say they “love it”, that is good enough. They care about from their theological point of view, but they do not get into specifics. Afterall, Jews do not accept Jesus as their savior, so the cannot go to heaven according to people i know. (This is not my point of view.)

I feel like this issue is driven by political donations from rich donors, just like all of the other big and little political causes in our country. Politicians can get the evangelicals on board easily with the shiny biblical object talk about Israel and throw in some terrorist attack talk for good measure.

In a way, i hope what trump did by calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel is push the US to the margins of negotiations because the world can no longer pretend the US is a neutral intermediary. Hopefully the Europeans will step in with a more clear eyed view and step up sanction pressure. I also think it will be easier to point out the apatheid that exists in Israel and that it is no where close to being a democracy.

In some perverse way, maybe trump has moved things along, just not in the direction his donors intended.