In recent days the idea of a two-state solution has been dealt yet another fatal blow in Israel. Netanyahu’s biggest rival, Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party, said he would move forward on a plan to annex the Jordan Valley if he becomes prime minister.
That puts a strong majority of the Israeli political establishment in favor of some annexation of the occupied West Bank that was supposed to become the Palestinian state. And it shows that a centrist Jewish leader believes there is No political hay to be made in appeals to the left. He has to appeal right to gain seats.
Tammy Zandberg is frankly “terrified” by Gantz’s collapse. The leader of the leftwing party Meretz warns American progressive Zionists that the “crumbling” of the two-state solution threatens Israel’s relationships to Arab neighbors, and could bring more violence to Israel and Palestine.
“We warned Blue and White not to play with this card,” she says. “I’m terrified by the option, and the fact that it is being thrown so easily by a center candidate is very worrying.”
Gantz’s shift puts the entire burden of maintaining a two-state solution on the Jewish left, she says: the new political slate of four liberal Zionist parties, Meretz/Labor/Gesher/Democratic Party.
But how broad are the shoulders of that slate? It is polling at a mere 8 to 10 seats out of 120. No wonder Gantz isn’t appealing to the left wing. The Israeli left has been smashed.
“Meretz running by itself for the first time in 1992, got 12 seats,” observes Evan Gottesman of Israel Policy Forum. The former proponents of the peace process in Israeli politics don’t even talk peace. “Labor has completely stopped talking about the diplomatic arena, security, the conflict with the Palestinians,” says Eli Kowaz of IPF. “And that is something that they were really leading for many, many years. They’ve become… a really niche social economic focused party.”
Zandberg agrees: “What used to be called the peace process is totally stuck.”
Trump has accelerated the crumbling of the two-state solution, Zandberg explains. Liberal Zionists always counted on the White House to do lip service to a Palestinian state somewhere in the future. Now Trump’s alignment with rightwingers and settlers in Israeli politics has facilitated the destruction of the liberal Zionist camp. And Gantz goes along with it — shifting right in an anticipation of Donald Trump’s long-awaited deal of the century.
Yossi Alpher tells Americans for Peace Now that the worst development in Israel is the “ongoing legitimization of Kahanist-fascist political actors on the far right.”
The only hope for the two-state solution is support from the Palestinian Joint List, the political bloc that polls far stronger than the Jewish liberal parties. Alpher:
[T]he only hope for a viable Israeli left wing advocating a two-state solution could well become some sort of Jewish-Arab alliance based on Meretz and the less extreme members of the Joint Arab List. This would reflect at one and the same time the shrinking of the Zionist left and the persistence of the Joint Arab List in hanging together and gaining votes (projected at between 13 and 15 mandates in the coming election).
This helps explain the hero’s welcome that Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian legislator in the Joint List, has gotten from liberal Zionists in America recently. Palestinian votes are all that is keeping the two-state solution alive.
But bear in mind: Touma-Sliman is not a Zionist and wants Israel to be a state of its citizens, not the “nation state of the Jewish people,” and she regards the West Bank as “apartheid.”
Touma-Sliman’s importance to liberal Zionists is a healthy reminder of… liberalism.
In the United States these Jewish organizations are all for refugee and minority rights, but they abandon those principles when it comes to the Jewish state.
Those liberals make excuses for rightwing Israeli policies by saying that Israel is afflicted by Netanyahu the same way the United States is afflicted by Trumpism.
But Gantz’s collapse strips away that excuse, as does the continuing rightward shift in Israeli politics.
This ought to be a wakeup call to liberal Zionists (or yet another one). How many of them will accept that their natural alliance with the likes of Aida Touma-Sliman means that they should abandon Zionism as an ideology? I am hopeful that some will see the light.
Henry Siegman made that shift from being a Zionist leader, and his latest column on Israel’s shifting culture avoids excuses. The two-state solution ended under Barack Obama, who caved to the rightwing Israel lobby, AIPAC, which had a strong following inside the Democratic Party.
The root of the problem is Zionism itself, Siegman writes:
Yet deeper and more troubling questions are raised by the choices that now face Israel, including whether the original idea of the Zionist movement of a state that is both Jewish and democratic is not deeply oxymoronic, a question that not only Israelis but Jews outside of Israel must address.
Are Jews to take pride in a Jewish state that adopts citizenship requirements that mirror those advocated by white Christian supremacists?
Gantz’s collapse ought to be prompting reflection. And reflection’s natural result: action.
The Henry Seigman article that Phil mentions at the end is well worth reading –
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/01/22/is-apartheid-the-inevitable-outcome-of-zionism/
That new [Palestinian] leadership would have to shut down the Palestinian Authority, which its present leaders allowed Israel to portray as an arrangement that places Palestinians on the path to statehood, of course in some undefined future. Israel has deliberately perpetuated that myth to conceal its real intention to keep the current occupation unchanged. The new Palestinian leadership would have to declare that since Israel has denied them their own state and established a one-state reality, Palestinians will no longer deny that reality. Consequently, the national struggle will now be for full citizenship in the one state that Israel has forced them into.
The truth regarding the relationship between America and the entity referred to as “Israel.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/israel-is-not-americas-ally/
“Israel Is Not America’s Ally” The American Conservative, March 8, 2019, by Daniel Larison
“Andrew Sullivan comments on the U.S.-Israel relationship and the role of ‘pro-Israel’ lobbying groups in our politics in a new essay. There are several things that I think Sullivan gets wrong, but perhaps the most significant and pervasive error in the piece is his repeated description of the relationship an ‘alliance.’ He notes that the U.S. gets nothing in return for the extensive military and diplomatic support that it provides, he acknowledges that the U.S. ‘suffers internationally’ on account of its close relationship with Israel, and he marvels at how badly its government under Netanyahu has behaved towards the U.S. Nonetheless, he writes, ‘I would defend the alliance despite this, because of my core belief in a Jewish state.’ The trouble with all this is that there is no alliance and Israel is not our ally. Its government does not behave as an ally does, it has never fought alongside U.S. forces in any of our foreign wars, and its interests are not aligned with ours as an ally’s should be. There is no formal treaty and no binding obligations that require our governments to do anything for the other.
“There are few words in U.S. foreign policy debates used more frequently and with less precision than ally and alliance. Our politicians and pundits use these terms to refer to almost every state with which the U.S. has some kind of security relationship, and it always grossly exaggerates the nature and extent of the ties between our governments. The exaggeration in Israel’s case is greatest of all because it is routinely called our ‘most important ally’ in the region, or even our ‘most cherished ally’ in all the world. These are ideological assertions that are not grounded in any observable reality. Dozens of other states all over the world are better allies to the United States than the ‘most cherished ally’ is, and they don’t preside over an illegal occupation that implicates the U.S. in decades of abuses and crimes against the Palestinian people living under that occupation, but none of them enjoys the lockstep, uncritical backing that this one state does. The effect of this constant repetition is to make the U.S.-Israel relationship seem extremely important to U.S. interests when it is not, and that serves to promote the ‘illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.’ It is this illusion as much as anything else that prevents a serious reassessment of the relationship.
“Israel is one of America’s regional clients, and it is the one that the U.S. indulges more than any other, but that is all that it is. As such, it receives far more support than it needs to and far more than makes sense for the U.S. to give, and the overwhelming political support that the relationship has is out of all proportion to the value of the relationship to the United States. In fact, like several other regional clients Israel has increasingly become a liability for the U.S., and the relationship should be changed accordingly.”
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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago.
Liberal Zionists remind me of that orchestra in the movie “Titanic” that keeps playing music even as the ship is sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. Zionism is a sinking ship and the Liberal Zionists need to get on the lifeboats that are Anti-Zionism and BDS.
Enough with the lukewarm acceptance of Palestinians. Enough of the bombastic pro-Israel apologies, Zionism has made it’s ugly presence even more manifest and if liberal Zionists don’t abandon it, things will become grotesque beyond human imagination.
An organized campaign for free and equal rights under the law by Palestinian citizens of Israel, modeled on precepts detailed by MLK, with marches, placards and civil disobedience, would bring Israel’s left and American Jews alive and change everything.
Israel has no legal right to “annex” any portion of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and there appears to be no reason whatever to expect Israel to be willing to annex the entire West Bank.