Ian Lustick’s bombshell piece in the New York Times last Sunday describing the two-state negotiations as a charade with tremendous human cost has catalyzed the American discussion of the death of the two-state solution as no writer before Lustick was able to do. I can only imagine what J Street’s conference is going to be like next week– a lot of rouge and embalming fluid.
Here are three responses to Lustick. To his great credit, David Remnick at the New Yorker has seized the Lustick moment and published a very sharp and calm piece by Yousef Munayyer explaining why partition failed– because of the ideology of Zionism, and its need for a Jewish majority in Palestinian lands. Munayyer thanks Lustick:
Ian Lustick had no problem putting the two-state solution in its final resting place this past week, in a lengthy Op-Ed in the Times. If this can open the door to new thinking on a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian question, the timing could not be better. Identifying the flaws and faults of a two-state solution has been done many times before. What we need now is new thinking on a policy level that grapples both with the failures of the two-state approach and the realities on the ground.
…[T]e two-state solution, which has dominated mainstream discourse on policy toward this issue, is primarily a solution to a problem: Israel’s problem.
Israel’s problem is one of identity and territory. It claims it is both Jewish and Democratic, and yet, under the control of the Israeli state today, between the river and the sea, there are an equal number of Jews and non-Jews. Those non-Jews, the Palestinians, are either treated as second-class citizens or have no citizenship rights at all.
The reason for this problem is the implementation of Zionism. The ideology sought to establish a Jewish state, which envisioned and required a Jewish majority. It did so, problematically, in a geographic space where the majority of the native inhabitants were Palestinians Arabs. Every attempt to resolve this conflict between Zionist ideology and demographic reality for the past hundred years has included some form of gerrymandering—drawing oddly shaped, impractical, winding borders around often sparse Jewish populations to encompass them in a single geographic entity.
At last the American public is being brought to understand that the problem did not begin in 1967, and that Palestinian rejection of a Jewish state, surely one of the strongest forces shaping the political geography of Israel/Palestine, has a legitimate basis in their own experience.
From 1947 to 1949, Palestine was emptied of sixty-seven per cent of its native Arab inhabitants. A conventional two-state solution would do little to address the grievances of these refugees or their descendants, many of whom were launched into a lifetime of dispossession.
Munayyer explains that it is one state right now in Israel and Palestine. His grim description of the reality is unvarnished. Remarkable that Remnick, so long a believer in the Jewish state, is offering a Palestinian’s political commentary without Zionist lipgloss:
Why would the Israelis ever accept a single state—one in which they’d be equal to Palestinians before the law? No party in power willfully cedes it unless the costs of monopolizing become overbearing. Israelis face a choice today between affording equal rights to the Palestinians in one geographic space or managing conflict through an apartheid system. Neither alternative may be particularly attractive to Israelis, but continuing the apartheid route will only get uglier and costlier over time, as well as being constantly at odds with the state’s claim of democracy.
What I most savored about Munayyer’s piece is that he mentions Zionism seven times. That is essential intellectual/political business–especially when addressing a largely-Jewish audience. No ideology can be taken on until it is correctly defined and labeled. And when the belief in the need for a Jewish state–Zionism–is separated from the Jewish historical experience, in Europe and the U.S., then American Jews and American friends of Jews can say, Why do you folks need such an exclusionary politics? Munayyer’s conclusion:
It’s time to start thinking outside the Zionist box and look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved, and not simply the political demands of the stronger party.
At Open Zion, Jerry Haber is also advancing and amplifying Lustick’s argument. The best thing about this piece is Haber’s complete impatience with the Israel lobby’s bogus claim to have supported a two-state solution. I have to believe this is the new consensus.
From my reading of Lustick I infer that he would not be adverse to a two-state solution if it addressed satisfactorily the core issues, provided peace and security to both sides, and achieved the overwhelming support of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples (including, of course, the Israeli and Palestinian diasporas). That sort of two-state solution has never been anywhere near the negotiating table, as I explained here, primarily because of the power disparities between the two sides to the negotiation.
I am not interested in Lustick’s pro-Israel critics, who continue to delude themselves into thinking that they support a two-state solution, when what they really support is a strong state of Israel controlling a collection of emasculated Palestinian bantustans that they wish to call a state. Their clinging to the two-state illusion is the chief impediment to a viable two-state solution, even more than those who, like cabinet minister Naftali Bennett, have declared the Palestinian state dead.
Haber devotes a lot of energy to the view expressed by Hussein Ibish and Saliba Sarsar at Open Zion that the two-state solution is essential for Palestinian self-determination.
Ibish and Sarsar claim that the Israel-Palestinian negotiations represent “the only practical of means achieving the minimum goals of each party” without giving a single argument and without countering the historical record and the current circumstances, where one party—Israel—is simply not interested. Nor can the hardening of positions in Israel can be attributed to Israeli insecurity. On the contrary, history indicates that when Israelis feel most secure, their negotiating positions harden (cf. post 48 and post 67), and that is perfectly understandable. Until Ibish and Sarsar articulate how Israel can be effectively weakened so that the prospects of successful negotiations are enhanced, they are not serving their cause well.
What Ibish, Sarsar and Lustick share is a genuine desire to end the daily horrors of occupation and exile that have been the fate of the Palestinians since 1948. On the historical level Prof. Lustick is correct; there is no reason to believe that this round of negotiations will do anything besides hurting the Palestinians—unless the Palestinians can parlay them into advancing the idea of a genuine Palestinian state, and not the desert mirage offered them by the Israelis. It is not the fact that there is an international consensus for a two-state solution that should be emphasized, but rather that there is an international consensus for a Palestinian state. According to a recent poll, most Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would prefer living in an independent state than in one state in which Jews and Arabs are considered equal. Can you blame them? After all, how many Zionist displaced persons would have preferred living in post-war Germany with guaranteed equality for Jews and Germans to living in their own state as a free people? That number appears to be dropping, though, as Palestinians realize what they are likely to get at the end of a negotiated process.
The two-state solution is dead. Everyone knows that. The Israeli right does not want it. The left is furious about it.
But a one-state solution will not work, either. Israeli Jews will never allow themselves to become a minority in Israel. Forgetting what is right or wrong, they just will not allow it.
The term Apartheid is wrong; and unproductive. The Israelis can counter that by showing you the rare Israeli-Arab who has done well, and has the vote.
Israel is not a strict Apartheid state, since some Israeli-Arabs inside the Green Line do have the vote.
What best describes Israel is a Kafkaesque police state. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria are riddled with informers. You cannot get a permit to travel unless you divulge some info.
They get Arabs to reveal things like the color of their friends bedroom. Where the windows are.
They have compiled computerized profiles of everyone, used to intimidate the whole population.
A Kafkaesque police state is the proper critique, not Apartheid. Israel has been careful enough to enfranchise just enough Arabs to deny the charge of Apartheid, something South Africa never did with blacks.
Administrative dentention where you are convicted of crimes that you are not told of is the very essesence of a Kafkaesque police state. This is what the Jews were subjected to in Eastern Europe and Austria-Hungary. This is what they know. They tyranny applied to them, they apply to others, now.
But it is not classic Apartheid; and if you persist in that term, you will lose the debate.
What it is is a Kafkaesque nightmare.
However, ask yourself this:
Imagine a Jew coming from a history of thousands of years of persecution: a mixture of real, imagined, and exaggerated persecutions. Some of the persecution was horrific. I hope no one here would deny the Holocaust. Some was nasty: The Inquisition. Some was exaggerated: The English did not have a very strong history of anti-Semitism, but it is brought up – though af far as Europe goes, the English were not really too anti-semitic.
Imagine a Jew living in Tel Aviv, or in a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria.
Do you think the Jews are going to willingly surrender the Jewish state to a one-man, one-vote state of all its citizens. The Jews see the horrors of Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Bahrain, etc; and all they see is that Arabs are completely unstable – with many being Islamic supremacists.
The Jews are not going to surrender the Jewish state.
I am not even saying this is a wrong attitude. I am just saying this is the attitude, right or wrong.
The Jews will never surrender what they see as their patrimony.
This is just historical analysis, not criticism of the Jews, nor criticism of the Arabs.
The Jews will not surrender their Jewish state apart from nuclear war.
I am not saying this is right to the Palestinians. I am just saying this is fact.
So much of what you suggest will never happen.
All your suggestions should start with this incontrovertible fact in mind: The Jews will not abandon Israel no matter what the rest of the world says.
When I came to that realization, I suggested paying the Palestinians to leave.
Is it right? (Who cares?!)
It is the only solution which may work.
There is perhaps another, more viable two state solution. The way things develop now there is no dobt that the Palestinains will get a very poor deal even if in its best version – the Almert’s offer. For though who dont know – see below the reference and short account of it and its faith.
Here is the link to Almert’s offer
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/ehud-olmert-still-dreams-of-peace/story-e6frg76f-1225804745744
From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008 I think I met with Abu Mazen more often than any Israeli leader has ever met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations.
On the 16th of September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. It was based on the following principles.
One, there would be a territorial solution to the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes over the last 40 years…
And four, there were security issues. [Olmert says he showed Abbas a map, which embodied all these plans. Abbas wanted to take the map away. Olmert agreed, so long as they both signed the map. It was, from Olmert’s point of view, a final offer, not a basis for future negotiation. But Abbas could not commit. Instead, he said he would come with experts the next day.]
He (Abbas) promised me the next day his adviser would come. But the next day Saeb Erekat rang my adviser and said we forgot we are going to Amman today, let’s make it next week. I never saw him again. (Nov. 28, 2009)
”What I most savored about Munayyer’s piece is that he mentions Zionism seven times. That is essential intellectual/political business–especially when addressing a largely-Jewish audience. No ideology can be taken on until it is correctly defined and labeled. ”>>>
Defined, labeled…and ….vilified and destroyed completely.
If the ‘separation’ and eternal victim beliefs arent throughly wiped out it will keep creeping back like a reoccuring infection.
Realistically, I doubt it can be totally eradicated except over a long period of time.
But there has to be a campaign to expose it as the dangerous destructive cult ideology it is, the sooner the better.
Zionism is the default view among Jews due to their realization that being at the mercy of others was – and is no way – for Jews to live.
There was the Philip Weiss Of Iraq – a wealthy, well-connected non-Zionist Jew, with Arab friends and connections in high places in Iraq. His name was Shafik Ades. In September 1948, he was arrested by the Iraqi authorities, tried in a show trial and executed for arms smuggling and treason, with his property and wealth confiscated. His body was hung on the gallows in front of his own home as Arab mobs cheered. This development had a jolting effect on Iraq’s Jews:
“The execution of Ades sent shivers of fear down the spines of Iraq’s Jews. If it could happen to Ades, a friend of the Regent, a man whose sympathies could not be further from Zionism if he tried, it could happen to them, they reasoned. Shafik Ades’s execution was one of the main reasons why Iraq’s Jews streamed out when they were given the chance – the vast majority to Israel. ”
Jewish safety and well being must never be dependent on others. Jews can be truly safe only if they have their own country and their own army to protect them. Zionism is a powerful argument against Jewish persecution and genocide. Yosef Munayyer does not understand this is precisely why the vast majority of Jews will never let go of Israel. And there is nowhere else for them to go. Ades could have saved his own life. Iraq’s Jews took note of his grisly fate – and nearly all of them understandably chose to move to Israel.
Some Zionist claim that the Palestinians already have a state: Jordan. They ignore how the Palestinians are treated (lots of discrimination) in Jordan, while arguing the Palestinians are more than a majority there. They also ignore that the Jordan regime denies it’s a Palestine state and says Israel’s just trying to ethnically cleanse Israel at Jordan’s expense, and that the diaspora Palestinians’ homes were located in land Israel sits on and the land it occupies, and is settling illegally.