An excellent column by Peter Beinart in Haaretz says this is the year the two-state solution ends. He puts the blame squarely on the Israel lobby for its inflexibility and says what few say openly in the U.S., organized Jewish influence on the matter is losing traction for global and sociological reasons.
2014 will be the year that America’s Israel debate begins to pass the organized American Jewish community by. The first reason is the end of the American-dominated peace process. Despite John Kerry’s best efforts, the most likely scenario is that 2014 will be the year he fails….
Kerry himself has said that if “we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance.” He’s right. If he fails, the United States won’t take another shot until it inaugurates a new president in 2017, and maybe not then. In the meantime, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle will move outside Washington as Palestinians take their case to international organizations, college campuses, religious and labor groups and European consumers. And for the organized American Jewish community, that’s a disaster because universities, international organizations and liberal religious groups are exactly the places the American Jewish establishment is weak.
Notice Beinart’s stress on the lynchpin of Zionism, establishment Jewish influence in the U.S.
It’s sadly ironic. The organized American Jewish community has spent decades building influence in Washington. But it’s succeeded too well. By making it too politically painful for Obama to push Netanyahu toward a two-state deal, the American Jewish establishment (along with its Christian right allies) is making Washington irrelevant…
But the decline of the American-led peace process is only one reason 2014 may spell the decline of organized American Jewish influence. The other is Iran. For two decades, AIPAC and its allies have successfully pushed a harder and harder American line against Iran’s nuclear program. In Congress, where a bipartisan group of senators has just introduced new sanctions legislation over White House objections, that hard-line agenda remains popular. But in the country at large, it risks alienating the Americans who will dominate politics in the decades to come.
It’s no secret that young Americans are less unwaveringly “pro-Israel” than their elders…
The American Jewish establishment won’t become irrelevant anytime soon. But 2014 may be the year when the downward trajectory of its power becomes clear. Wiser American Jewish leaders, aware of the BDS movement’s efforts to move the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside of Washington, might have pushed Netanyahu to embrace the core tenets of a two-state agreement, and thus given skeptics more reason to believe Washington can still deliver.
When Peter Beinart closed Open Zion, I said that it was because the end of the two-state solution and unending Israeli intransigence left him as an impresario/intellectual/community-organizer with nowhere else to go but left, toward one person, one vote– and he was determined not to go there. Jeffrey Goldberg saw the trend nearly three years ago: “The left… believes that settlements are a manifestation of Zionism’s true nature. I disagree with that argument strenuously. But I will say this, though: The left position on this question has the wind at its back.”
Thanks to Annie Robbins, in 2014.
”An excellent column by Peter Beinart in Haaretz says this is the year the two-state solution ends. ”
Hasn’t the two-state solution been ‘ending’ for almost as long as the ‘Iranian bomb’ has been imminent?
peter is right with this assessment. but i think it’s pointless, too little too late. bottom line is that the zionists will NEVER relinquish any land. they still dream of greater israel, from the nile to the euphrates. isn’t that what the two blue lines in the flag of the zionists entity really mean? isn’t that what nutnyahoo and his ilk want?
so where does this leave us in the dawn of 2014? 1S1P1V. that’s it. and here ‘s why.
99.9% of the world supports a palestinian state based on 2SS. that includes over 65% of world Jews. still the zionists are not accepting that fact. they believe their weapons will dictate their terms. so 2014 will be the year where things will get worse due to zionists unchecked absolute arrogance, paranoia psyche, ostrichian occupation mindset, and massada mentality. what a lethal combination for the zionists. unfortunately, we palestinians will feel the brunt of the pain until the palestinians/pa/plo start focring things to happen through continues and intensified efforts at the un/bds/icc/icj/eu/arab spring. this is OUR struggle and no one will do it for us. not particularly the usa since the us government is 100% pro-zionists, don’t count on the usa to make it happen. we will make it happen ourselves in the context of 1S1P1V. it will creep uo on the zionists as we no longer need to call for “withdrawal”, “giving up land”, “end of settlements”, etc. but rather push for equality, justice, liberty, freedom, and respect in one system.
It’s been amusing to watch Phil’s position on Beinart over the past few years. Swinging wildly, almost like a romance. First he was a genius, then an egotistical sell-out and now he’s awesome again.
I agree that Beinart’s column is well-written but ultimately, he will never embrace the one vote for everyone, regardless of race, because that’s the end of his ethnocratic dream.
There are a lot of people like Beinart on Haaretz. Like Carlo Strenger or Bradley Burston whose Op-Eds on Haaretz since 2010 have all but embraced the 1SS in the abstract, damned Israel as an incurable Apartheid state etc etc but they keep crawling back to the cross(pardon the pun).
Beinart’s going to be a younger update on them. He will be a much more eloquent and intellectual version of them, but morally there is little to no difference.
The two state solution died 12 years ago. Most Israelis understood that very quickly. The non-skeptics became skeptics there.
Gradually, people everywhere are doing the math and realizing the two state solution is not something worth investing their own time or resources in. What makes Beinart et al so glaringly irrelevant is that they seem to be only piecing this together now and still trying to figure out what it means, which makes you wonder why they were paid to opine in the first place.
What he sees as ‘American Jewry losing control of the narrative for the first time’ is simply people realizing that the Oslo era two state solution is a pie in the sky dream in the Middle East of the 2010s. But of course, Beinart has proven himself to be such a genius in recent years, that he’s gotta be correct this time, right? Right?
If current trends continue, and as a result of the US’ Mideast debacle since the Iraq invasion, Americans choose to extricate themselves from the area rather than get more involved, this is not going to affect Israel the way you think it is.
Americans won’t cool their interest in Israel and extricate themselves from the Middle East in general only to focus more energy on creating a Palestinian state. We saw how far from the mark the rhetoric about nation-building in Iraq was. Other than a few fringe people, nobody wants to invest real American time and money into manufacturing a Palestinian state, or into the preposterous notion of forcing Israelis to become one nation with the West Bank and Gaza.
I realize at this site you live and die by which way the gas from Ariel Sharon’s tuchus blows, and can manufacture a month’s worth of posts about each such emittance and how it changes everything, but the big picture is this:
People are losing interest in the high ideals of the 1990s regarding the Middle East. America overextended itself in the region in the 2000s, and we’re eager to draw back. In a region known for glacial pace of change, the events of the so-called Arab Spring are changing everything. The idea that the IP conflict is still somehow the lynchpin onto which the entire M.E. geopolitics hinges is preposterous at this point. At this pace, Beinart might actually figure that out by 2016.
Israel is doing fine. I’m surprised no one seems to be stating this more explicitly, but the net result of the last 10 years is that Israel has extricated itself from Gaza, and delineated a separation between itself and most of the West Bank. If anyone remembers the 80s (I realize that was 20 years before Phil Weiss became aware of Israel), the rightwing Israeli position was that Israel would never cede any claim to any territory, including Gaza. Part of that ideology meant no walls, fences, or borders between the West Bank and Israel.
Israel has effectively tightened its position, given itself more defendable borders, and set itself up well to weather the next round of change in the Middle East. When we come out the other end, there might not even be a Kingdom of Jordan anymore, and yet the two-state solution fools are still talking about Gaza and the West Bank as one viable entity. No wonder even dunces like Beinart are finally figuring it out.
With regime change occurring all over the Middle East, a volatile situation in Egypt, and a sectarian bloodbath in Syria that makes Lebanon look like a beacon of safety and stability, the people on this website will still be fixating on sniffing intently to see which way Ariel Sharon’s wind blows, and geniuses like Peter Beinart will keep publishing their irrelevancies as long as someone will publish them.
Is the seemingly unending maximalist-Zionist quest for a Greater Israel equal (in size) to Mandatory Palestine an intrinsic part of (all) Zionism(s)? Wrong question. Is it an intrinsic part of today’s Israeli “democratically”-determined consensus, national interest, manifest destiny? It is so at least for now. Is it an intrinsic part of tomorrow’s Zionist consensus? When tomorrow comes, we will know the answer to that.
BDS and all anti-occupation and pro-PRoR movements have a single purpose: to change the Zionist consensus (or at least Israel’s behavior). The Israeli frog has sat in cold water for 65 years, but now the water (although not yet boiling) is heating up. Frogs sometimes stay inside the soon-to-boil water too long, but this one might jump (toward a more-or-less fair and just one-state or two-states) if enough heat is applied to it.
Zionism is not a permanent philosophy but a constantly re-evaluating consensus. Let us bend our efforts to making it re-evaluate toward justice and away from racism and oppression.