The best thing about Michelle Goldberg’s column in the New York Times on the death of the two-state solution is its tone. She’s not that upset about it. Yes, she says the end of a Jewish state would be “disastrous,” in passing, but she knows that what Israel is practicing is apartheid and she insists that American Jews won’t prop it up in the long run. (However long that is! Stay warm in jail, Ahed.)
Supporters of Israel hate it when people use the word “apartheid” to describe the country, but we don’t have another term for a political system in which one ethnic group rules over another, confining it to small islands of territory and denying it full political representation.
Goldberg repeatedly detaches herself from Israel’s supporters; and the only expert she quotes is a Palestinian! Nobody from J Street gets to tell you how to think.
“If the Israelis insist now on finishing the process of killing the two-state solution, the only alternative we have as Palestinians is one fully democratic, one-state solution,” [Mustafa] Barghouti says, in which everyone has “totally equal rights.”
And though Israel will not accept democracy, Goldberg concludes, “most of the world– including most of the Jewish diaspora” will have to support a “Palestinian campaign for equal rights.”
Israel’s apologists will be left mimicking the argument that William F. Buckley once made about the Jim Crow South. In 1957, he asked rhetorically whether the white South was entitled to prevail “politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” The “sobering answer,” he concluded, was yes, given the white community’s superior civilization.
It’s impossible to say how long Israel could sustain such a system. But the dream of liberal Zionism would be dead. Maybe, with the far right in power both here and there, it already is.
Goldberg’s apostasy is a reminder that the most disputed space in the conflict is the space between American Jews’ ears: Are we allowed to come out for equal rights instead of Jewish nationalism? Notice the immediate pushback from a liberal Zionist, Daniel Seidemann:
Maybe you’re right Michelle. We are under attack from Netanyahu’s government, viewed with contempt by the ideological left, and the facts are the facts. But there is no alternative to 2 states. Destroying it doesn’t create an alternative out of the ashes. There is no giving up.
The reason that Israeli liberals are viewed with contempt by the left is that they have more pity for themselves than for the people under the Israeli boot. They cannot offer anyone a credible program for how Palestinians will get rights, and when. Instead, they passively endorse an idea of managed conflict, as Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now does when he rejects even Ahed Tamimi’s form of resistance, slapping an occupying soldier.
And they reject the only thing Israel seems to fear, international pressure in the form of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). Goldberg (a friend of mine) ought to take the obvious next step here and endorse BDS. That would be a real slap at the occupation, and the least an American can do to support nonviolent resistance.
H/t Scott Roth.
“The reason that Israeli liberals are viewed with contempt by the left is that they have more pity for themselves than they do for those under the Israeli boot.”
I sure do like the sound of that, but the left in the usa act more like Israeli liberals. The Dem Party certainly doesn’t voice contempt for Israeli liberals. When was the last time (in years) that NPR had an anti-zionist guest on? Besides Bernies one tiny sympathetic mention…where are the usa Jewish law makers comments?
“And they reject the only thing Israel seems to fear, international pressure in the form of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).”
Indeed they do and they are quivering in their jackboots.
“The Strategic Affairs Ministry has set up a public-benefit corporation to engage in what it calls “mass awareness activities” as part of “the struggle against the delegitimization campaign” against Israel internationally.
Haaretz has obtained a list of the shareholders and directors of the company, Kella Shlomo, who include former Israeli ambassadors to the United Nations.
The government recently allocated 128 million shekels ($37 million) to the initiative, in addition to the 128 million shekels it will raise from private donors around the world.
The new initiative will not be subject to the Freedom of Information Law, in accordance with the secrecy policy of the ministry, which refuses to release detailed information about its activities.
read more: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.833817
I thought Nuttyahu assured his audience that BDS was defeated.
Just cannot believe a word the leader of the Apartheid Regime in Tel Aviv says.
IOW, Jewish supremacism is too big to fail, even if it means doing more “necessary evil” to secure its future.
Liberal Zionism: “Kinder, gentler” injustice and immorality.
“… we don’t have another term for a political system in which one ethnic group rules over another …”
Apartheid (Dutch/Afrikaans) is the mot juste (French) and attempts to call it something else may induce Schadenfreude (German) on account of the chutzpah (Yiddish/Hebrew) of those trying to find a euphemism (from the Greek) for it.
Isn’t English great?
This was a very significant column, especially coming on the heels of the Halbfinger article from a few days ago that Phil wrote about here – https://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/kristof-zionist-rubicon/ . The Times is oh so mainstream on Israel and Palestine (“can’t we all just get along”?), as has been diligently reported here by Phil, James North, Donald Johnson, and many others on innumerable occasions. Now there are two prominent presentations of the one-state equal-rights solution appearing within days of each other. Neither is a full-throated endorsement, of course, but both address the issue with reasonable fairness and barely a raised eyebrow. Israel and its supporters have been successfully suppressing this reasonable and fair resolution, both by disparaging it as a secret plan to “destroy” the world’s only Jewish State and by proffering the supposedly more feasible and reasonable two-state solution as the only conceivable outcome. In fact, their efforts have been so successful that people like Norman Finkelstein and even Noam Chomsky have at least partially voiced agreement. Now that many are seeing the 2ss solution for what it always was – a chimera cynically used as a delaying tactic – the only truly fair solution is coming into focus.
In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, the two-state solution was always much less fair and even less feasible (its only conceivable virtue) than one state of equals. It is very gratifying to see two non-hysterical presentations in the Times this week, even if it may turn out to be only the umpteenth dam-bursting tipping-point event. The relentless rightward drift of Israel may ultimately shoot itself in the foot after all.
Goldberg deserves kudos for her courage, even though I would have written something significantly different if the Times had only invited me to be an op-ed columnist. I am much closer to Richard Falk’s brilliant analysis in mondoweiss yesterday – https://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/state-solution-natural/ – but was more pleasantly surprised by the Goldberg column today.