Eric Alterman has an excellent piece of reporting on Israel at 60 in the latest Nation.
Though it has a Zionist backbeat–Alterman describes his own intense
relationship with Israel; I wish other Jewish
journalists would be half so honest about their attachment–it can be
read as a companion to Ian Lustick's forthcoming piece in Middle East Policy about an Israel that has lost its way of conceiving its relations to the outside world (now linked at Lustick's site).
Alterman describes many of the same currents Lustick has also put
his finger on: the feeling that it is "five minutes to midnight," as
political scientist Naomi Chazan says; that Israel is on the verge of
"semi-sanctioned" apartheid or a one-state solution; that it can't
leave the occupation and it can't justify it either. Also, Alterman
picks up the end-times feelings throughout Israel about the Muslim
world. Even at the liberal Jewish magazine he's associated with,
Moment, Alterman reports, many contributors subscribe to the idea that
you can't deter Iran, they only want to destroy Israel, so let's hope
the U.S. takes Iran out. Sounds like Dissent, 20 years on.
Alterman is a Zionist, and I fault the piece for being immured in
the Israeli narrative, for not having more imagination. Lustick sees
the same desperate situation in a more detached manner and sees the crisis as a failure of both Zionism and anti-Zionism, says that creative leaders must help
the Israelis and their neighbors to imagine a pathway out of the
desperately mistrustful situation that they have come to, whatever the
terms of that resolution are, in order to end the existential
nightmares that now proliferate in the region. Alterman places faith in his Israeli informants. He dismisses the idea of a
one-state solution as satisfying only a tiny minority of Israelis (none
of whom he speaks to, as he also eschews the occupied territories, and
the Israeli right wing). And he offers the following ideas about
peace:
interviewed think it will be necessary to work out a way for the
hard-core settlers to remain where they are but be located inside
Palestine. After all, if they are so attached to the land–rather than
the state–let them stay on the land in another state. [Novelist A.B.] Yehoshua was
particularly animated on this point. "If you will give the Palestinians
the maximum amount of the territories but say to them, 'You will have to
take 60,000 to 70,000 Israeli Jews as Palestinian citizens, and you can
have your secular Palestinian state,' that would be a great outcome and
could facilitate the transition. The American Jews will pour money on
them, and this will benefit their economy." His hopes go so far as to
plan for platoons of Israeli Arabs to protect the settlements inside
Palestine to provide a "bridge" between the two nations, "knowing, as
they do, the intimate codes of the two people." Yehoshua shares Chazan's
view that if you strip the conflict of ideology and religion, it is
solvable.
Well O.K. But if you strip the problem of
religion and ideology, then why not let Zionism go out the window, too, and it's two
people learning to live together? If you strip the problem of religion
and ideology, you actually do find your way to a one-state solution. If
you insist that the Palestinian state is secular, well, can the U.S. even make that insistence in Iraq? Did the U.N. make that insistence when it partitioned India and Pakistan? Notice also Yehoshua's assumption that the U.S. will
lavish money on the new Palestinian state. And I guess we will do that. But
this has been the assumption all the time, that we must sanctify with cash the arrangments that brutalized people halfway across the word come up
with. If we have to pay, then we get to play. Americans must try to
help these people reconceive their future, and that includes Americans
who are not Zionists.
