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two-state solution

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Logo for the American Jewish Committee survey of millennial American Jews.

Younger American and Israeli Jews have starkly different attitudes from each other in a new survey by the American Jewish Committee– 45 percent of US Jews say that it’s appropriate for them to influence Israeli policy while 70 percent of Israeli Jews say, Stay out of our business. Nearly half of the Americans don’t feel very connected to Israel and 22.5 percent believe that there should be one “bi-national” state in Israel and Palestine.

“The first Intifada was a struggle to end Israeli occupation by establishing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories,” political scientist Ian Lustick writes. “I supported that struggle. Tragically, it failed. Three decades and half a million settlers later, that objective is no longer attainable. The BDS movement has effectively taken its place as a grassroots popular movement, based on an absolute commitment to nonviolence, a long-term strategy, a fundamental commitment to equality, and insistence on the realization of Palestinian rights, rather than calling for a specific kind of institutional arrangement.”

Har Bracha is a Jewish settlement outpost that regularly terrorizes the Palestinian village of Burin, whose lands it stole. President Isaac Herzog, who is routinely celebrated by liberals in the U.S., toured the settlement Tuesday and declared that the Jewish people’s connection to that land cannot be “denied or diminished.” So much for all the liberal Zionist talk of a two-state solution that would yield land to Palestinians.

The two state solution has been killed by Israeli expansion, and Jonathan Kuttab argues for the development of a program for one hybrid state that would be a truly unified democracy by allowing both Jews and Palestinians to “validate the essential elements of both Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism,” while rejecting those elements in each “which degrade or deny the Other.”