After Donald Trump’s historic comments at the White House Wednesday about his indifference to a one- or two-state outcome, The New York Times ran an editorial rating the president’s comments as “nonsensical.” The editorial conceded that there may never be a Palestinian state before describing Israel’s “miserable choice.”
The likeliest outcome, given the growth rate of the Arab population, is that Israel would be confronted with a miserable choice: to give up being a Jewish state — or to give up being a democratic state by denying full voting rights to Palestinians.
Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books landed on the Times’s framing:
Notice here that the ‘choice’ belongs exclusively to Israel. Palestinians, as always, are the objects of a decision, and never the decision-makers. That these options – ceasing to be a Jewish state or allowing non-Jews full citizenship rights – are considered equally lamentable is a gift to historians. One day this kind of commentary will be read in much the same way as we now read Times editorials from the 1950s on the ‘Negro Problem’.
Israel made its choice long ago, without much hand-wringing. It is impossible to imagine the Jewish state without bulldozers and settlements, even in the unlikely event of the US government withdrawing its annual $3.8 billion dollars of aid. The real question isn’t the choice that faces Israel, but the choice that faces Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the diaspora, as they confront an apartheid regime, and an impending single-state reality, which appears, this week, to have the backing of the White House, and the complicity of America’s Arab allies.
Happily, Shatz’s understanding is now widely shared among Times readers. The newspaper’s initial story on Trump’s comments has 1016 comments. The Times editors (to their credit) chose this one from D. Hall of Canada near the top.
The two state solution has been dead for years – killed by Israel’s policy of massive settlement building in the heart of what could have been a Palestinian state. Much as I detest Trump, the previous policy of ‘let’s pretend’ was a thily veiled policy of allowing Israel to use its military power to do whatever it liked. Nothing Trump can do is going to make that worse.
Israel, and its supporters, will just have to face the alternatives they have created. They can have a single, secular state with equal rights for all people regardless of ethnicity or religion. Or they can have an apartheid state with Palestinian bantulands, until they lack the political and military power to maintain it.
everything else is just spin, smoke and mirrors. And if, as seems likely, Israel and its suporters go with the Apartheid approach, they had best pray for someone of Nelson Mandela to be in charge when that corrupt option dissolves – as it inevitably will.
Many other Times commenters are just as sensible.
But let’s get back to the Times‘s Negro Problem. On Wednesday, Tom Friedman published a column titled, “President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?” which is written from the standpoint of “Jewish history.” If Donald Trump doesn’t curb the Israeli settlement project, Friedman warns, American Jews are going to be at each others’ throats:
As long as the two-state solution was on the table, the debate among Jews on Israel was “right versus left” and “more security versus less security.” Some thought the border should be here; others thought it should be there. But we could mostly all agree that for Israel to remain a Jewish democratic state, it had to securely separate from most of the 2.7 million West Bank Palestinians. That debate could and did go on in every synagogue, Jewish institution and Jewish country club, without tearing them apart.
But if Netanyahu’s weak leadership and the overreach of the settlers in his party end up erasing the two-state solution, the debate within the Jewish community will move from “left versus right” to “right versus wrong.” That debate will not be about which are the best borders to defend the state of Israel, said the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, “but whether the state is worth defending in moral terms.”..
That debate will tear apart virtually every synagogue, Jewish organization and Jewish group on every campus in America, and around the world. Israel will divide world Jewry.
It is hard to imagine a more hermetic attitude to the fate of millions of Palestinians living under apartheid than Tom Friedman’s pieties about Jewish consensus in the United States.
As if the debate about two states among communal American Jews did ANYTHING to help the Palestinians. People who cared about human rights should have torn those communal institutions apart! That might have ended the occupation! It might have disgraced the neoconservatives before they helped start a war. But, no, in order to maintain Friedman’s blessed cohesion, Wolf Blitzer taking leaks from the Israeli embassy helped to destroy Breira as pro-Palestinian back in the 70s, B’nai Jeshurun endlessly hosts neoconservatives at its progressive synagogue; and Peace Now stayed on the board of the rightwing Conference of Presidents; and the big Jewish organizations did their utmost, using the most coercive measures, to make sure our government never put any pressure on Israel to adhere to U.S. policy. The occupation is an American Jewish achievement; it is 50 years old now; thanks to Friedman’s generation not fighting outright. The great thing about the next generation of Jews is that they are actually resisting these communal forces. Some day they may save the Times from the Negro Problem…
Zionists:
– do not care about justice and morality in I-P;
– do care about how much “Jewish State” injustice and immorality they can get away with.
The day before the Trump/Netanyahu lovefest, I was thinking, “By the end of tomorrow, Trump will have either ruined America’s relations with Israel, or its relations with every other country between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.”
I underestimated him: he’s done both. Israeli politicians to the right of Netanyahu (i.e. completely crazy) will see the green light and jump out of the plane, without first checking whether they’ve strapped their parachutes on. They will proclaim a single state from the sea to the Jordan. Then, they will be faced with the dilemma all we Mondoweiss folks know so well – will it be a Jewish apartheid state, which will become a pariah; or will it be a democratic state with a Jewish minority sharing power with a non-Jewish majority?
Meanwhile, the rulers of several Arab states, which Trump seems to think will form some sort of grand alliance against Shia Islam, will see the threat to their own interests from the US’s new position, and act accordingly.
If Trump had suggested turning the Al Aqsa Mosque/Wailing Wall into a crazy golf course, he could have hardly f%$*ed things up further.
It’s wonderful! Just enshrine equal rights and full freedom of speech and religion into the new Constitution. Everything will be fine I promise. :-)
Tom Friedman “President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?”
Huh? I know Friedman’s an idiot (despite his Pulitzer Prizes), but really. Why should the Goyim have to step in (again)?
TRUMPISTA CLIVEN OWEN SPEAKS HIS MIND ON “THE NEGRO PROBLEM”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd6X8bkv8E8
Published on Apr 25, 2014
Transcript –
…” and so what I’ve testified to ya’, I was in the WATTS riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen the last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people is thinking they did not have their freedom; they didn’t have these things, and they didn’t have them.
We’ve progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and sure don’t want to go back; we sure don’t want the colored people to go back to that point; we sure don’t want the Mexican people to go back to that point; and we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.
Let me tell.. talk to you about the Mexicans, and these are just things I know about the negroes. I want to tell you one more thing I know about the negro.
When I go, went, go to Las Vegas, North Las Vegas; and I would see these little government houses, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids…. and there was always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch. They didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for the kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for the young girls to do.
And because they were basically on government subsidy — so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered are they were better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things? Or are they better off under government subsidy?
You know they didn’t get more freedom, uh they got less freedom — they got less family life, and their happiness -you could see it in their faces- they were not happy sitting on that concrete sidewalk. Down there they was probably growing their turnips — so that’s all government, that’s not freedom.
Now, let me talk about the Spanish people. You know I understand that they come over here against our constitution and cross our borders. But they’re here and they’re people — and I’ve worked side-by-side a lot of them.
Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structure than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, they’re together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together, and I’ll tell you in my way of thinking they’re awful nice people.
And we need to have those people join us and be with us…. not, not come to our party.