Yesterday's Jerusalem Post ran an important piece by Samuel Freedman on the likely end of the two-state solution and calls for democracy in Israel/Palestine. Last week at the 92d Street Y, another American Jewish journalist, Michelle Goldberg, said the same thing: now's our last chance to save the Jewish state, because Zionism isn't looking democratic.
Last year Bernard Avishai published a book, The Hebrew Republic, in which he quoted Israeli P.M. Ehud Olmert saying the same thing, more than two years ago (history gets impatient), at a breakfast at his house. Avishai then takes up the great realistic/democratic chore that follows from this understanding: how to lead Israeli Jews and American Jews toward imagining acceptance of a democratic basis for coexistence in Israel/Palestine.
Isn’t the real issue whether one sees the identity of the nation as a blood tie, something a Jew can claim the moment the plane touches down, or whether one has to go through a process of acculturation, the acquisition of the language, the way every other European country does it, the way Canada does it?… After her husband left, I confessed to Aliza Olmert that I feared we might not have fifty years. In any case, I said, Yehuda Amichai’s poetry, not the law of Return, embodies the Zionist project for me. She looked at me softly. “Hebrew is my homeland,” she said.
