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March 2015

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Israeli PM Netanyahu’s dismissal of the two-state solution in the last days of the election campaign in Israel is having a huge and beneficial effect on the discussion of the conflict inside the United States. President Obama has taken Netanyahu at his word and says there will be no two-state solution for “several years.” He seems to be doing what many on the US left are doing: preparing Americans to think about what one state looks like.

“We’re not going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem this morning,” WNYC public radio host Brian Lehrer told listeners Monday at the close of his all-Jewish discussion with NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren and Time columnist Joe Klein about the Netanyahu victory aftermath. They might have come a little closer if his guests had included a Palestinian instead of two Zionists. Klein called Netanyahu’s race-baiting Election Day speech “beyond tragic. It is shameful and embarrassing.” Unknowingly, he nails it. For liberal Zionists, it’s not the tragedy of generations of Palestinians exiled, slaughtered or marginalized because powerful outsiders claim their land—­it’s the shame and embarrassment of those who have to reconcile their support for all of that with their liberal self-image.

In 1967, American Jews fell in love with Israel and made a solemn promise to protect the country through thick and thin. Nearly fifty years later the same community is reconsidering that vow. What we are seeing is a transfer of power from the Israeli Jewish community to the Diaspora Jewish community that Benjamin Netanyahu failed to anticipate even as he precipitated it.

Jodi Rudoren’s recent piece from Jerusalem titled “Rebukes From White House Risk Buoying Netanyahu” is a full-on assault on President Obama for taking on Netanyahu over his repudiation of the two-state solution and his election day racism, and it is disingenuous from start to finish, beginning with the headline. The aim of the piece is to buoy Netanyahu and submarine Obama. Phil Weiss writes he has never seen anything like this before: the top space of the newspaper turned over to a war- and fear-mongering foreign leader to undermine the US president.