I
No Longer Believe in a Jewish State
For decades I argued for separation
between Israelis and Palestinians.
Now, I can imagine a Jewish home in
an equal state.
By Peter Beinart
July
11, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - I
was 22 in 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin
and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the
White House lawn to officially begin
the peace process that many hoped
would create a Palestinian state
alongside Israel. I’ve been arguing
for a two-state solution — first in
late-night bull sessions, then in
articles and speeches — ever since.
I
believed in Israel as a Jewish state
because I grew up in a family that
had hopscotched from continent to
continent as diaspora Jewish
communities crumbled. I saw Israel’s
impact on my grandfather and father,
who were never as happy or secure as
when enveloped in a society of Jews.
And I knew that Israel was a source
of comfort and pride to millions of
other Jews, some of whose families
had experienced traumas greater than
my own.
One
day in early adulthood, I walked
through Jerusalem, reading street
names that catalog Jewish history,
and felt that comfort and pride
myself. I knew Israel was wrong to
deny Palestinians in the West Bank
citizenship, due process, free
movement and the right to vote in
the country in which they lived. But
the dream of a two-state solution
that would give Palestinians a
country of their own let me hope
that I could remain a liberal and a
supporter of Jewish statehood at the
same time.
Events have now extinguished that
hope.
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About 640,000 Jewish settlers now
live in East Jerusalem and the West
Bank, and the Israeli and American
governments have divested
Palestinian statehood of any real
meaning. The Trump administration’s
peace plan envisions an archipelago
of Palestinian towns, scattered
across as little as 70 percent of
the West Bank, under Israeli
control. Even the leaders of
Israel’s supposedly center-left
parties don’t support a viable,
sovereign Palestinian state. The
West Bank hosts Israel’s newest
medical school.
If
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
fulfills his pledge to impose
Israeli sovereignty in parts of the
West Bank, he will just formalize a
decades-old reality: In practice,
Israel annexed the West Bank long
ago.
Israel has all but made its
decision: one country that includes
millions of Palestinians who lack
basic rights. Now liberal Zionists
must make our decision, too. It’s
time to abandon the traditional
two-state solution and embrace the
goal of equal rights for Jews and
Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a
Jewish home that is not a Jewish
state.
Equality could come in the form of
one state that includes Israel, the
West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East
Jerusalem, as writers such as Yousef
Munayyer and Edward Said have
proposed; or it could be a
confederation that allows free
movement between two deeply
integrated countries. (I discuss
these options at greater length in
an essay in
Jewish Currents). The
process of achieving equality would
be long and difficult, and would
most likely meet resistance from
both Palestinian and Jewish
hard-liners.
But
it’s not fanciful. The goal of
equality is now more realistic than
the goal of separation. The reason
is that changing the status quo
requires a vision powerful enough to
create a mass movement. A fragmented
Palestinian state under Israeli
control does not offer that vision.
Equality can. Increasingly, one
equal state is not only the
preference of young Palestinians. It
is the preference of young
Americans, too.
Critics will
say binational states don’t work. But Israel
is already a binational state. Two peoples,
roughly equal in number, live under the
ultimate control of one government. (Even in
Gaza, Palestinians can’t import milk, export
tomatoes or travel abroad without Israel’s
permission.) And the political science
literature is clear: Divided societies are
most stable and most peaceful when
governments represent all their people.
That’s the
lesson of Northern Ireland. When Protestants
and the British government excluded
Catholics, the Irish Republican Army killed
an estimated
1,750 people between 1969 and 1994.
When Catholics became equal political
partners, the violence largely stopped. It’s
the lesson of South Africa, where Nelson
Mandela endorsed armed struggle until Blacks
won the right to vote.
That lesson
applies to Israel-Palestine, too. Yes, there
are Palestinians who have committed acts of
terrorism. But so have the members of many
oppressed groups. History shows that when
people gain their freedom, violence
declines. In the words of Michael Melchior,
an Orthodox rabbi and former Israeli cabinet
member who has spent
more than a decade forging
relationships with leaders of Hamas, “I have
yet to meet with somebody who is not willing
to make peace.”
Rabbi
Melchior
recently told me that he still
supports a two-state solution, but his point
transcends any particular political
arrangement: It is that Palestinians will
live peacefully alongside Jews when they are
granted basic rights.
What makes
that hard for many Jews to grasp is the
memory of the Holocaust. As the Israeli
scholar Yehuda Elkana, a Holocaust survivor,
wrote in 1988, what “motivates much of
Israeli society in its relations with the
Palestinians is not personal frustration,
but rather a profound existential ‘Angst’
fed by a particular interpretation of the
lessons of the Holocaust.” This Holocaust
lens leads many Jews to assume that anything
short of Jewish statehood would mean Jewish
suicide.
But before
the Holocaust, many leading Zionists did not
believe that. “The aspiration for a
nation-state was not central in the Zionist
movement before the 1940s,” writes the
Hebrew University historian Dmitry Shumsky
in his book, “Beyond the Nation-State.” A
Jewish state has become the dominant form of
Zionism. But it is not the essence of
Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish
home in the land of Israel, a thriving
Jewish society that can provide refuge and
rejuvenation for Jews across the world.
That’s what my
grandfather and father loved — not a Jewish
state but a Jewish society, a Jewish home.
Israel-Palestine
can be a Jewish home that is also, equally, a
Palestinian home. And building that home can
bring liberation not just for Palestinians but
for us, too.
Peter Beinart
(@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and
political science at the Newmark School of
Journalism at CUNY and editor at large of Jewish
Currents. - - "Source"
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The views expressed in this article are
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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