Jimmy Carter said he’d ‘commit suicide’ before he abandoned Israel, but American Jewish leaders did not trust him because of his parallel commitment to a “Palestinian homeland” and opposition to Israeli settlements, Stuart Eizenstat writes in a detailed memoir. Carter always underestimated the power of the Israel lobby. He came to believe that it helped cost him a second term, a lesson politicians have heeded ever since.
Israeli historian Benny Morris tells Gideon Levy that one state means a future of genocide and ethnic cleansing for Israeli Jews, thereby dehumanizing Palestinians as murderous, wild animals, when history tells us Palestinians are angry over ethnic cleansing and discrimination and when those conditions end, we can struggle toward one state with equality.
Israel had its worst week in a long time in the US discourse. The two-state consensus is now in a complete shambles, with many Americans on both right and left beginning to advocate for one democratic state in Israel and Palestine, which of course would mean the end of what Benjamin Netanyahu calls “the one and only Jewish state.”
A new poll conducted by Shibley Telhami at the University of Maryland shows unprecedented support among Americans for the one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, stronger sanctions against Israel, as well as growing criticism of the Israeli role in U.S. politics.
Had the Palestinians only accepted the UN partition plan in 1947, they could be celebrating their independence alongside Israel– is a common argument by those who fear the demise of the two-state solution. But partition was always an unjust and unworkable answer to the colonialist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
J Street denounces Tom Friedman’s announcement that there’s one state in Israel and Palestine, but it won’t take its own members over to the West Bank. Doing so would make it clear as day that the two-state solution is past; and J Street’s stance is delusory. The organization wants Jews to sing HaTikvah (The Hope) for Zionism, when that hope has plainly curdled.
Now that the Two State Solution has finally received belated, more-or-less official autopsy results, what will liberal…