Seven years after the New York Review stunned the Upper West Side by running Tony Judt’s argument for one-state in Israel/Palestine (and 43 years after I.F. Stone notioned binationalism in Ramparts; further proof that this whole issue is a hamster wheel), the New York Review is allowing these ideas to reach its readers. It runs a good piece by Israeli David Shulman, blasting the flotilla raid, and pointing out that the right wing in Israel is more receptive to one-state talk than all the great liberals. Shulman is a two-stater, but what is noble in this excerpt is that he seems aware that liberal Zionists are also enmeshed in an ideology that has destroyed imagination.
Time is running out, possibly has already run out, for a solution based on partition. Still, there are occasional flashes of something slightly new. On June 2, Moshe Arens, former minister of defense in three Likud governments and a prominent spokesman for the right (in my view, the extreme right), published a column in Haaretz arguing that an Israeli retreat from the West Bank and the evacuation of settlements are inconceivable; along with various figures on the left, such as Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, he thinks the so-called two-state solution is long dead, a chimera kept alive artificially by the leadership on both sides in order to paste over the disastrous reality on the ground. But Arens’s surprising conclusion is that because the occupation is irreversible, the Palestinian population on the West Bank—some 1.5 million by his count, probably a little low—should be granted Israeli citizenship and integrated into the Israeli state. Note that Arens has intentionally left out the 1.5 million Palestinians languishing in Gaza.
There have also been recent reports of small groups of Israeli settlers in the territories who have come to the conclusion that the current situation cannot endure, and that new modes of coexistence are called for. There are, it appears, points where the far right and the far left of the Israeli spectrum might coincide; perhaps these are the points where change will begin.
P.S. The Shulman is one of two pieces by Israelis opposing the occupation in my latest issue (the other is fiction by David Grossman). I continue to fail to understand this, why others are not given a voice here. This is a mental reservation, on the part of the editors.
