The Two State Illusion

Dear Friend,

You should know of my high regard for my friend Mark Braverman ()

He has written another piece that I am passing on to you.

Here is what I wrote in the "comment" section of his blog: It is consistent with your long-held conviction and stated position, relentlessly exposing the fatal flaw at the heart of the Zionist vision of 1897 and beyond. It must be recanted, rescinded, thus opening the door to a truly pluralist, democratic (One) State.

As I found on my two week study tour to I/P last June, there is virulent opposition to this position. It is considered treason of the highest order. One State dominated by “Jews” is by far, the preferred model.

The Two – State is a fig leaf to mask the commitment to a “Jews Only” State. One pluralist, democratic State is nowhere even on the horizon. Yet, there are SO MANY still trumpeting the Two-State "solution" (now being pursued by Sec. Kerry, Pres. Obama and Martin Indyk; among them, The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), Peter Beinart, Peace Now (Amy-Jill Levine), Gershon Baskin, Uri Avnery, J Street (Jeremy Ben Ami), Hussein Ibish, and probably even Bishop Shori, are on the other side–wanting to “preserve the Zionist dream” by giving a few crumbs to their Palestinian neighbors.

Yet, there you are Mark. And Miko Peled and a hand-full of others, wanting to dismantle it from the ground up, and start over. All the best. And what a task (through KUSA) to get American ecumenical and evangelical congregations on board with this view. Whew. JRK


The Two State Illusion, Racism in Israel, and Jewish Hubris

October 30, 2013 at 11:08 am

On October 16 The Christian Century published my review of Rashid Khalidi’s Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. The fact that the Century reviewed Khalidi’s book is an indication of the media’s increasing willingness to present viewpoints that challenge the very basis of Israel as a Jewish ethnic nationalist entity. This shift reflects the reality that once you address present-day violations of Palestinian rights, you see that the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was the continuation of the program of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and continues to this day with the annexation and carving up of the West Bank and the inhuman siege of Gaza. You begin to understand that the dispossession of the Palestinians was the inevitable outcome of the project to set up a state for the benefit of one people. It is also becoming frighteningly clear that oppression and frankly racist policies on the part of Israel are not limited to occupied areas, but to the territory within the de facto borders of the State of Israel prior to the 1967 war.

Israel’s new racism

A recently released documentary demonstrates this with horrifying vividness. Ali Abunimah, Palestinian writer and activist and publisher of the Electronic Intifada, has reported on a video entitled “Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land,” produced by Max Blumenthal and David Sheen, a piece solicited — and then rejected — by the New York Times. According to Blumenthal, it has since gone viral on YouTube, with close to one million views. The ten minute piece documents vicious, racist attacks on African residents of Israel incited by prominent demagogues and several members of the Israeli Parliament. The piece presents voices, not only shrieking in public demonstrations but speaking calmly in office interviews, proclaiming that Israel is the land of the Jews and that non-Jews (especially those with black skin) are not welcome. The video is shocking — but it is not surprising. From our twentieth-century perspective, we understand all too well that ethnic nationalism breeds racism – that it is racism – and that oppression and violence – the bloody as well as the structural, state-sponsored kind – is the inevitable result. In his recently published Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Blumenthal documents Israel’s escalating move to the political right, into what many would described as fascism. The problem, as I pointed out in my 2011 blog post about Peter Beinart and his brand of “progressive Zionism,” (a piece accepted and then rejected by The Nation), is not the occupation, nor is it the religiously-based racism of fundamentalist Jewish settler-colonists — the problem is a state founded on an ethnic nationalist ideology. “The late and deeply mourned Tony Judt,” I wrote then, “got it exactly right in his NYRB piece back in 2003: ‘The problem with Israel [is that]…it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place.’”

For over half a century, much of the world, with the U.S. in the lead, has accepted and supported this anachronistic and, by Judt’s definition, illegitimate political entity. A central point of Khalidi’s book is how language has been used to deny the reality of a State of Israel that, by virtue of its founding principle of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine has never been willing to share the territory. Khalidi describes the history of U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “a carefully constructed realm of obscurity, a realm in which the misuse of language has thoroughly corrupted both political thought and action.” He documents how U.S. policy since the 1970s has embraced that denial by sponsoring a “peace process” that has advanced Israel’s expansionism, demonstrating how, I wrote, “language functions to obscure the reality of a colonial settler project that has resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians…language used to maintain the destructive illusion of a process of negotiation between equal parties, rather than the reality of a powerless, stateless, occupied people at the mercy of a highly militarized state supported by the world’s only superpower.” Despite the futility of this approach to peacemaking, Khalidi points out, our government has pursued it doggedly, bowing to domestic political pressures and to Israeli stubbornness and persistence.

But things are changing. For an increasing number of Americans, the realization is dawning that the story they have been told is a distortion and that our government’s policies are bad, not only for the Palestinians, but for the citizens of Israel. Mainstream journalism, which, like politics, responds to the wind of public opinion, is reflecting this shift. Ian Lustick’s September 14 New York Times opinion piece “Two State Illusion” represents a sea change in NYT editorial policy with respect to Israel. Lustick’s piece was followed closely by Yousef Munayyer’s “Thinking outside the two state box” in the New Yorker’s online edition. “The reality now,” wrote Munayyer, “is that there is a single state. The problem is that it takes an apartheid form.” Rather than solving the problem that it was intended to solve, which is security and freedom from fear for Jews, Israeli policy has condemned the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel to continuing conflict. “It’s time” Munayyer writes, “to start thinking outside the Zionist box and look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved, not just the political demands of the stronger party.”

On a recent panel, which they shared with Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street (watch it or you access unedited transcripts of the entire panel presentation) Lustick and Munayyer spell out the political danger of clinging to the possibility that negotiations can bring about a fair and sustainable two state solution. The addresses by Lustick and Munayyer are riveting — and an excellent adjunct to Khalidi’s book. A key point made by both of them is that the implausibility of a fair partition at this point not only makes the negotiations pointless, but worse, perpetuates the conditions that make two states impossible, playing into Israel’s hands even more effectively than handing them the entire territory on a silver platter. In contrast, Ben Ami’s words give us a good look at the arguments that must be mustered to hold on to the “two-state illusion.” It is pretty much the brand of “progressive Zionism” that Peter Beinart has been offering up to preserve the Zionist dream: nothing is impossible if we wish for it hard enough and believe in it deeply enough. Commitment to the idea of Jewish nationalist homeland trumps reality, and certainly any commitment to equality for Palestinians, despite the language to the contrary — duly served up by those committed to saving Zionism — about full commitment to a state of their own for Palestinians.

Sad Zionists

Recently, Beinart, in his blog Open Zion, has adopted a strategy similar to that demonstrated by J Street in its recent annual conferences: broaden the tent to competing points of view, in particular to those advocating some version of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). In her recent piece in Open Zion, “If you want two states, support BDS,” Kathleen Peratis freely admits that her commitment to two states has her standing “on very narrow ground…that the current peace process is at best a Hail Mary.” “Sad Zionists,” is how she describes herself and those who cling to “our liberal Zionist dreams.” My question to Peratis is this: how sad are you willing to be? Are you willing to tolerate the sadness of letting go of the concept that an ethnic nationalist entity, a concept carried over from the late nineteenth century, is the answer to anti-Semitism? Are you willing to mourn the understandable mistake of political Zionism as the solution to our historic suffering, a forgivable (if and when we acknowledge the mistake) but all the same catastrophic wrong turn? Are we willing to be sad enough? And having tolerated that sadness, are we then able to contemplate, as I wrote in my critique of Beinart, that “[t]he end of Zionism will not be the disaster that so many Jews – and some Christians — fear. Rather, it will open the Jewish people to a future where the Other is embraced, rather than back to a past in which armies are mustered, walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined, are vilified and attacked. “Saving” Zionism by trying to make it into something it is not takes us in precisely the wrong direction.”

Like other progressive Zionists, Peratis sees commitment to political Zionism as integral to Jewish identity. What I find most unsettling, however, is not Peratis’ sentimental clinging to the “liberal Zionist dream” or the even more dangerous notion that “Fortress Israel,” as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has characterized the state, keeps Jews safe (indeed, it makes not only Jews, but the entire world less safe). As the title of her piece makes very clear, Peratis wants to say yes to (what she calls) BDS because it will help the two state solution. Here is what Peratis does not get: BDS is a Palestinian project. It is a call from Palestinian civil society, endorsed at the time of its inauguration in 2005 by 108 Palestinian political parties, unions, associations, coalitions and organizations representing Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The goal of BDS is Palestinian human rights, not the preservation of the Zionist project. If we, as Jews, choose to support BDS, it has to be as world citizens (and if we are Americans, then in particular U.S. citizens) joining a global, universal human rights movement, a movement to say “No” to apartheid in our time. What hubris — what chutzpah — to attempt to co-opt the Palestinian call for BDS into supporting the failing, fundamentally flawed and, in the present scenario — it must be said — racist and anti-human rights cause that is the two state solution today. Holding on to two states is holding on to the Jewish state. And holding on to the Jewish state means suffering the consequences of such a project, consequences on such horrific display in the Sheen-Blumenthal video.

Is that sad enough for you?