Novelist couple Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have written a letter for Peace Now urging American Jews to get behind the two-state solution. It begins with language I find offputting:
Where I was thinking it's the Jarmulovsky Bank Building on the Lower East Side… The letter reflects the usual non-progressiveness of liberal American Jews on Israel/Palestine: it nowhere refers to human-rights violations by the Israel Defense Forces, only by the settlers. And it prominently raises the demographic threat:
Israel with an untenable choice: If it retains permanent control of the
Palestinians and their lands, Jews will become a minority between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The result of this one-state
"solution" is that Israel will no longer be a functional democracy, nor
will it long remain a Jewish state.
Last night at the Israel Policy Forum I heard several references to this demographic threat. Naomi Chazan of Meretz talked about the importance of creating a Palestinian state so as to maintain a "Jewish majority" in Israel.
The obvious question to all these people is: If it's so damned important that Jews stay a majority in Israel/Palestine, why don't you move there? (Even as you keep tens of thousands who were born there and want to live there from doing so…) Congressman Gary Ackerman made that point last night. "There are very few people in this room who can't change citizenship and move to Israel tomorrow. But we're not doing it."
No: Jews like living in America as a minority. As Michael Chabon wrote in the New York Review of Books earlier this year at the Democratic convention:
I have written elsewhere about how my having grown up during its
utopian heyday in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland—in an
integrated neighborhood, taught by black teachers to revere Dr. King,
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Benjamin
Banneker—might help explain the appeal of Barack Obama to me.
I knew, listening to [Obama] in Denver, that there had been a lot of
speeches about equality and justice given since August 28, 1963 [MLK's dream speech] …. When Obama concluded his speech, we looked at each other, and then
at him, and all stood up, wild with applause… Now it was
time to go save the world.
It's hard for me to see how these views are consistent with saying that we must do everything to maintain a religious/ethnic majority in a country halfway around the world you don't want to live in. Ali Abunimah has said that the two-state solution is essentially apartheid for Palestine: you on your side, me on mine. I'm for the two-state solution, for the time being anyway, because I seek an end to the conflict, and because Israelis I trust are for it, and as Norm Finkelstein points out, there's broad international consensus. But as I say continually here, It's time that Israelis start looking at the U.S. so as to reimagine their own ideas of minority freedom. This is actually what Avraham Burg's book is all about.
Adam Horowitz had a similar response to mine:
An ethnic ghetto obsessed with demography? We need to
expand the Jewish imagination to include Palestinians and to include a
future not based in tribalism.
There's a great line in Chabon's book The Yiddish
Policeman's Union, near the end, when the main character says "My
homeland's in my hat." I loved it, the perfect diasporic anthem and
totally at odds with "Israel is a flower — perhaps the greatest — of
the Jewish imagination."
