Two-state doyen Leonard Fein takes stock of the situation in his latest column for the Forward. Fein outlines how he has moved from the liberal edge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to becoming a "hard liner:"
But by now, after two messy and inconclusive wars, one with Hezbollah
in the north and the other with Hamas in the south, in the thick of
growing impatience with a conflict that seems permanently stuck,
there’s more and more talk of a “one-state solution,” a state that
would reach from the Mediterranean to the Jordan and would (somehow)
guarantee the rights and perhaps even a degree of autonomy for its
component minorities (i.e., the Jews). Those who cling to the two-state
idea — that is, those who believe that a Jewish state is both desirable
and possible alongside a new Palestinian state — increasingly resemble,
and feel like, a balloon with a slow but accelerating leak. They have
become today’s hard-liners, hewing to Zionist axioms that once felt
bold, evoked fervor, but now seem increasingly quaint, forlorn.
Clearly, Fein is not just talking about the two-state solution. He is lamenting the difficulty of reconciling liberal beliefs with the demand for a Jewish state. In his words Zionism used to be "bold" but now seems "quaint" and "forlorn." The air is out of the balloon, and Fein senses that the air is going somewhere else. This article shows where the discussion is going. Increasingl, people who support the two-state solution in order to save a Jewish state will find they are arguing against democracy and equality in favor of ethnic exclusion and division. This is a losing argument.
Fein's initial argument against a one-state solution makes little sense. He tries to discount the idea by saying it "would (somehow)
guarantee the rights and perhaps even a degree of autonomy for its
component minorities" as if that's a laughable idea. How about with a constitution which outlines and protects citizens' rights? Perhaps Fein has a hard time imagining it because Israel still doesn't have a constitution that does this. Later he is a bit more honest when he says, "A one-state solution with the Palestinian majority in control means an end to the Zionist enterprise, to the Jewish state." To which I would say – you're right, and if you want peace, that's a good thing.
