Is there anyone who watched last night’s Presidential debate who really thinks Joe Biden can survive?
It’s not just Biden’s chances of winning an election I’m talking about. I’m referring to his extremely fragile physical and mental state. Voters have every reason to question whether the walking corpse we saw on CNN’s debate stage last night can see the end of a second term or function any better than what we saw last night. The man is not well, and it’s shocking that the DNC allowed Biden to take the stage in Atlanta — especially after images surfaced of him “frozen” at a Juneteenth celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.
The man most of us saw last night shuffled onto stage and squinted into the cameras, appearing slack-jawed and confused. Speaking in a barely perceptible whisper, Biden often lost the thread of what he was saying, misquoted facts and figures, or mumbled incomprehensible jibberish. Almost as troubling, a clueless and self-unaware Biden insisted his poor performance was due to a head cold, adding “I think we did well.”
In comparison, a practiced Donald Trump spoke in the convincing manner of the sleazy, racist real estate salesman he is. And to those who judge debate performance primarily on appearances, Trump’s incessant lying miraculously did not diminish a pretense of presidential command and competence.
But Biden’s abysmal performance finally grabbed the attention of the liberal pundocracy, long in denial and now terrified. A surprising number of one-time Biden cheerleaders are now calling for candidate Biden to step down, including panicking donors. By and large, however, a timid and unimaginative Democratic establishment is doubling down on support for their guy.
Among the liberal columnists now calling for Biden to voluntarily drop out of the race are: New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman, Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Nicholas Kristof; Current Affairs’s executive editor Nathan Robinson; Harold Myerson of the American Prospect; The Slate’s David Faris; and Mehdi Hassan, who jumped from MSNBC to the Zeteo platform. Sacramento Bee opinion writer Robin Epley warned readers that “for the Democrats, only a fresh injection of visible vitality and something more than a minimally-acceptable level of intelligence will save Americans from a second Trump administration.” Presciently, last month Alex Shepherd wrote in the New Republic (“Democrats have a Joe Biden Problem”), warning Democrats to replace Biden on the basis of his consistently awful polling.
But such warnings are nothing new.
A year go The Atlantic acknowledged that “Democrats would like a new presidential candidate. The problem is that the current president is plugging along fine.” But this morning things were not so fine. Franklin Foer’s article in the Atlantic is titled “Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys.” Another by Jerusalem Demsas counsels the same: “Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option.” In February 2023 Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times, “Biden’s a Great President. He Should Not Run Again,” warned against precisely what debate viewers saw last night.
Despite last night’s fiasco, the Democratic establishment is still not ready to throw in the towel on Biden.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an obvious dog in the fight, conceded that Biden had a “slow start” but warned that the election should be decided on the basis of “substance.” California governor Gavin Newsom, a rumored replacement for Biden who was in Atlanta for the debate as a Biden surrogate, dismissed Biden’s replacement: “With all due respect, the more times we start having these conversations, going down these rabbit holes, it’s unhelpful to our democracy, the fate and future of this country, the world. They need us right now to step up and that’s exactly what I intend to do.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, another whispered replacement, tried to cast the debate in the best light for Biden: “Tonight, voters were presented with a clear choice — a president working hard every day to improve the lives of all Americans or a convicted felon, a selfish blowhard looking out only for himself. The contrast between these two men was clear before the debate — it is even clearer now.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called rumors of Biden dropping out “bizarre” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) dismissed the idea as well. “I’ve heard no credible plan B, and I’m not counting on a plan B.” Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro pooh-poohed replacing Biden, calling only for Democrats to “stop worring and start working.”
But much of the media cheering section is still with Biden.
MSNBC, the Fox News for centrist Democrats, denied that Biden was unfit and said only that Biden had had a bad night, counseling optimism: “Biden still has months to right the ship.” But no one can fault MSNBC for inconsistency: a year ago the network ran a segment denying problems with Biden’s candidacy, letting 2016 runner-up Hillary Clinton tell listeners why he was a great a candidate as she was. The Slate’s Jill Filipovic still supports Biden — but by the thinnest of threads: “That Biden bungled even his party’s strongest issue should be a moment of reckoning –not just for his supporters, of which I am one, but for the man himself.” Robert Reich wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, only leaving panicking readers with a panicky lecture on how Trump is exactly like Hitler. Heather Cox Richardson also wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, but dissected each of Trump’s lies. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Israel hawk Bret Stephens is still betting on Biden but sounds like he’d prefer Republican Elise Stefanik to the Vice President.
And this is only the “morning after.”
We’re going to have to wait a few days or weeks to see if Democrats are capable of moving past their shock and denial to a rational — actually the only possible — response to last night’s disaster. In any rational universe the DNC would replace Biden.
Despite the fact that it’s never been done before so late in the game, a new candidate could soften the rift between centrists and progressives, allay concerns over Biden’s age, address his terrible polling and also his choice of VP, offer a stronger challenge to the many third party candidates in the race, and (providing the replacement is not another zealous Christian Zionist) pacify somewhat the 10-15% of Democrats who voted “undecided” in the primaries because of Biden’s collaboration in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
But this is a party that doesn’t care, never learns, and never takes responsibility. Blaming voters for Biden’s almost certain defeat in 2024 will be the the DNC’s response to their own irresponsibility. It’s going to be a repeat of 2016 unless the party grownups wake the hell up.
On Sunday, June 23, 2024 an Israeli real estate firm called My Home in Israel (“housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel”) staged a real estate event inside a synagogue, Congregation Adas Torah, in Los Angeles together with another Israeli company called International Marketing & Promotions (“We sell things to Jews. We sell Israel to the world.”). This unseemly event not only dragged a synagogue into the muck but broke U.S. civil rights and international human rights laws in the process. Yet protests against the event were quickly spun as quite literally a “pogrom” against Jews — and by some of America’s most recognizable “liberal” Democrats.
The protest was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and was joined by a number of pro-Palestinian groups on the Left, including CODEPink. As an article in the Forward reported, “Hundreds of counter-protesters — toting their own flags and megaphones — were present when it began at 12 p.m. […] The scene recalled a fracas at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA the night of April 30 which began when a pro-Israel mob arriving after the conclusion of Passover lobbed fireworks, poles and other items at the encampment and tried to tear down its makeshift walls.”
The vehemence of the counter-protest betrays an ugly truth about Zionism. It has always used land theft and land sales to accomplish the displacement of Palestinians. Such property is illegal; international law recognizes the West Bank as Palestinian and settlements as illegal. Real estate sales like Adas Torah’s are no different from selling stereos off the back of a truck under some overpass.
The usual shrill accusations of antisemitism have been turned up a notch and the propagandists’ keyboards are on fire — because these real estate sales, more than anything else we see right out in the open, demonstrate exactly how Zionism works and its absolute depravity.
In March a similar event took place at Keter Torah synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey. This followed almost identical events — all at synagogues — in Montreal and Toronto and was to be followed in Lawrence and Flatbush. According to New York Magazine, “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is an annual exhibition produced by Gideon Katz, a self-described ‘expert in marketing Israeli real estate to the global Jewish community.’ […] At most of the events was a company called My Home in Israel, brought along to showcase available properties in both Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies: multiple units in a building near Givat HaMatos in East Jerusalem, townhouses in near Ariel University in the heart of the West Bank, and a five-bedroom villa with a pool in the luxury enclave of Efrat south of Bethlehem.”
Rich Segal, a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey and himself Jewish, testified at a public hearing in March that he believes restrictive sales of Palestinian land to Jews-only buyers (American Muslims can’t buy any of the houses) violate both domestic and international law, including the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “We don’t allow real estate events to be for whites only, or for Jews only. Now, as Jews, we don’t get to fly under the radar and break the law and hide it in the synagogue. Segal went on to say that such sales also violate international law because, at the Teaneck sale, homes from three different [illegal] West Bank settlements were being offered.
At these events much of the violence has come from counter-protesters. In Toronto, Ilan-Reuben Abramov, a supporter of the Israeli real estate event, attacked protesters with a nail gun. In Los Angeles pro-Palestinian protesters were punched, shoved, pelted with raw eggs, and soaked with bear and pepper spray. Well-organized counter-protesters and members of nearby synagogues, many with Israeli flags, were there expressly to confront the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Predictably, a Jewish Chronicle headline screamed “Keffiyeh-clad mob launches bloody assault on Los Angeles synagogue.” CNN commentator Van Jones actually called the protest a “pogrom.” And Democratic Party leaders at all levels — President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — all endorsed stomping on the First Amendment by barring protests in front of houses of worship. Bass promised to meet with the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas, and “other law enforcement and faith leaders” to prevent a repeat of the protests.
President Biden, who after October 7th claimed to have seen videos of nonexistent beheaded babies on kibbutzim in the Negev, sputtered that the protests were “antisemitic and un-American.” But what of those American and international laws being broken by the Israeli real estate organizers? Isn’t violating the 1965 federal Civil Rights Act un-American? The Fair Housing Act? Apparently not to the great enabler of a genocide — who as Senator undermined civil rights provisions, lobbying his colleagues as a Delaware Dixiecrat against school busing, calling it a “liberal train wreck.”
Because pro-Israel spin has transmuted the protest into an attack on Jewish worshippers, it is necessary to point out that the protest took place on a Sunday — not the Jewish sabbath. It was also not, as echoed throughout the mainstream media, a random racist attack on a synagogue but a protest at an offensive and illegal sale.
Religious institutions, including synagogues, often open their facilities to community groups and for public meetings or voting. Churches hold medical screening clinics. Synagogues hold on-site blood drives. A New Bedford synagogue rents out part of its facility to a girls school. These are all commendable public uses of religious property, but none has anything to do with Judaism. And neither did the Zionist real estate event in a meeting room at Adas Torah.
In 2009 Stoughton (MA) synagogue Ahavath Torah hosted a series of far right speakers, including Dutch fascist Geerd Wilders. When it repeated the stunt in 2016 over a hundred clergy, including rabbis from other congregations, protested. And quite justifiably.
So, again, it is unfortunate to have to point out the obvious — but like any organization, houses of worship are capable of staging questionable (even illegal) events, and the public has every right to protest them.
Adas Torah Congregation is situated in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles in an area known as the “kosher corridor.” According to an Aish magazine profile, “In a 20-minute stroll down Pico […] I encounter 30 shuls, kollels and outreach programs: Persian, Modern Orthodox, kiruv, yeshivish, Chabad, Carlebach, Yemenite, Chassidic, Israeli. There are boutique shuls for musicians and artists; one for Moroccans and another French-Moroccan. Plus 30 kosher restaurants!”
With all these opportunities to conduct a so-called “pogrom” why was only Adas Torah chosen for protest? The answer is staring you right in the face – because of the illegal sale of Palestinian land and the violation of domestic and international laws shamefully taking place inside the building.
“In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” — Phil Ochs, intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)
* * *
The New Republic recently ran a series of articles about Liberalism, one of which was authored by Jamie Raskin. The article is accompanied by a photo of “liberals” protesting Trump immigration policies (“no ban, no wall”) — but this was not a picture of liberals illustrating liberal immigration values but of progressives protesting Trumpian policies the party of liberals has now chosen to follow.
This is just one example of an easily-observed phenomenon: that liberals often voice approval for progressive policies while doing the complete opposite. Don’t believe me? Read the Democratic Party Platform, national or Massachusetts versions. It doesn’t matter. Both are filled with voter candy that Democratic legislators then turn around and vote against.
Right out of the gate Raskin admits that “American liberals exist for the most part implicitly — in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification.” What Raskin acknowledges here is that liberals have certain sentiments but absolutely no coherent political positions — which is much the same thing comedian Lewis Black was getting at when he observed that “Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.”
Liberals want to have it both ways. They want to be progressives and conservatives, both at the same time. Let’s hear more of what else Raskin has to say:
“We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence — everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.”
I concede that some liberals are inclined to many of these things, but few are inclined to defend, say, the “individual liberty” of Palestinians — or to even criticize their leaders for colluding in a genocide. And the political party that represents liberals has done little to defend any of it. Wasn’t it Biden, for example, who ushered Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court? Has the Constitution ever been any more than an aspirational document for people who can be satisfied with mere verbiage? Doesn’t this same Wonder Document enshrine gravely undemocratic institutions (the electoral college, the Senate) into law? Have Democrats really defended these institutions that Raskin enumerates with anything nearing the same zeal that the GOP shows in trying to destroy them?
But Raskin was right about the conservatism. While Republicans have become a party of radicals who “violate norms” and would tear our institutions apart if they could, liberal Democrats have become the champions of these decrepit, dysfunctional institutions, including our relatively unchanging American foreign policy. While MAGA Republicans question everything from NATO to provoking Russia and China while focusing on domestic issues, liberal Democrats (according to a Pew Research Center study) are only too happy to expand NATO right up to Russia’s door and spend taxpayer money freely at the arms bazaar.
Tellingly, nowhere in Raskin’s essay does he mention foreign policy, the great Achilles heel of Liberalism — because liberal values exist only in an extremely limited geographical bubble. Move outside the borders of the United States and liberals become the most ardent defenders of empire, war, conquest, and colonialism.
Raskin goes on to assign progressive fights to the liberal scorecard. While the ACLU and the NAACP are no bastions of Bolshevism, to be sure, both struggle with “liberal” Democratic Party policies and inaction. Yet they appear on his “liberal wins” column. But liberals can’t undermine the Ilhan Omars and Rashida Tlaibs in their own party while simultaneously taking credit for their progressive activism.
Quoting John Dewey, Raskin writes that the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; among the ills that sicken our democracy are gerrymandering (still used by Democrats, as I can personally attest since my own Congressional district is still gerrymandered) and voter suppression (Democrats are currently using an entire catalog of dirty tricks to keep third parties off the ballot in numerous states). The real problem with our democracy is that the rules of the game in the Constitution are flawed and undemocratic. And liberals aren’t interested in changing them.
Raskin goes on to slam autocrats like Putin and Orban who shut down papers and use state powers to crush political opposition. Fair enough. But the hypocrisy of his observation — at a time when Democrats have colluded with Republicans in shutting down protests over Gaza and punishing academics and college presidents for permitting critiques of Zionism and colonialism on their campuses — is sickening.
And speaking of Zionism, liberals are apparently great defenders of this 19th Century relic of ethnonationalism that is so popular with the Orbans and Bolsonaros. Our liberal President, on innumerable occasions, has called himself a Zionist. The party of the liberals unhesitatingly gives Israel whatever it needs to keep its supremacist state in place. This in turn undermines liberal claims to defend liberty and fight authoritarianism. The Israeli government that American liberals enthusiastically support is the most far-right in history and includes outright fascists who every week advocate genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no individual freedom when an entire people is being carpet-bombed and ethnically cleansed. And there is no individual freedom when the liberal state uses its power to crush dissent over unpopular wars and foreign policy. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when liberals were slaughtering VietNamese and beating protesters.
* * *
Presidential candidate Cornel West weighed in on liberalism last year and, like Raskin, has a complicated relationship with it. On the one hand, he easily sees its weaknesses, but he also has a classical liberal orientation toward it:
“The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it’s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we’re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and foibles.”
Like Raskin, West identifies human dignity as Liberalism’s most important feature. But instead of massive structural change, including change initiated by conflict and the system’s inherent contradictions, West ultimately believes that civics and morality will straighten it all out:
“In Democracy Matters, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it’s their voice. That’s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that’s it. Let’s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?”
* * *
Writing in the same issue of TNR as Raskin, Sam Adler-Bell observes that:
“Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.” […]
“I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class.” […]
“The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.”
There’s that conservatism again. And — completely in conflict with justice, fairness, rights, and dignity — the liberal penchant for warmongering and repression has repeatedly surfaced even in relatively enlightened times.
Adler-Bell points out that it was Truman who signed Executive Order 9835, kicking off the [second] McCarthyite era. Likewise LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to repress the American Left, the Black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement. And —
“As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands — when they’re not ringing the police–over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.”
And Adler-Bell sure puts his finger on the patient’s pulse when he writes:
“American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se — a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency–but not like that.”
This explains, in part, how even a Protestant “radical” like Cornel West can share many of these values.
* * *
Next up to defend liberalism in the New Republic is Robert Kagan. Those who remember this Machiavellian liar and warmonger who pushed the US to invade Iraq also know that neoconservatives like Kagan and Elliot Abrams hold an esteemed place at the Democratic Party’s actual (not professed) foreign policy table. As a well-known neoconservative Zionist apologist who advocates for American domination of the “White Man’s Burden” variety, and for Jewish supremacy in Palestine, Kagan writes that he is appalled that the Supreme Court would defend white Christian supremacy. To some ears this nonsense is not as glaringly inconsistent as it sounds to mine.
* * *
Finally, rounding out the discussion in the New Republic, Jefferson Cowie wonders if Liberalism has any meaning at all:
“First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.” […]
“We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.”
This 1955 view of Liberalism brings us directly to the 1950’s America both Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden represent. Whether by beefing up NATO or imposing tariffs, or kicking out the immigrants (which both geezers now appear to be in favor of), it’s the bad old America that was. Not the America of the future.
Cowie rattles off several competing views of liberalism, but each falls back on the old, comfortable “more democracy” argument. In naming many of American democracy’s most glaring defects, even Cowie shrinks from pointing out the obvious — that only radical medicine can treat this habitually sick patient. In the end it is liberalism’s “respect for the individual” that each of Liberalism’s advocates presented here falls back upon.
That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. This is what Robert Paul Wolff was getting at when he wrote his brilliant 1968 autopsy report, The Poverty of Liberalism.
The solution, as old math books used to say, “is left as an exercise to the reader.”
The Two State Solution is a fundamentally dishonest proposition. When Western colonial powers first conceived carving up the Middle East, starting with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1919 League of Nations mandate system — and by way of dozens of partition schemes to take one people’s land and give it to another — the whole notion of partitioning Palestine became nothing less than an organized system of land theft persisting until the present day.
Naturally, Palestinians have reacted with understandable anger at the imposition of a Jewish state literally built on the rubble of their homes and communities — some 500 cities and towns — and the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians accomplished through massacre and state terror. Today Israel continues to extend Jewish domination on the rubble of newly bulldozed and cratered Palestinian homes and cities. And state terror continues to be an important arrow in its quiver of control and repression techniques.
Operating out of desperation, with much of the Western world arrayed against them, Palestinians have at varying times acquiesced to partition schemes — just as one might have no choice but to allow an armed home invader to move into his house while he flees to the basement. These are essentially the terms that American “peace” brokers from various, mainly Democratic, administrations have dictated to the Palestinians. Americans who live in communities that long ago overran Native American lands — I’ll wager this is most of White America — somehow find this arrangement completely normal and reasonable.
So, while incapable of condemning the home invader, the fictive Two State Solution has become the default position of Centrist Democrats who promote this “solution” at every opportunity while offering neither description nor outline of how such an impossibility could ever be conjured into existence. Lately, these Two-Staters’ biggest problem is that One State is official Zionist policy and the entity our politicians are working in behalf of — Israel, not the US — won’t consider any sort of Palestinian state — even the “basement” option. And, of course, Palestinians are none too eager to accept a third-rate rump state on a fraction of their homeland while leaving the heavily-armed home invader still in charge.
As much as a Two State solution has become a deservedly lampooned article of faith among American Liberals and liberal Zionists, it is no longer even a remote possibility. 10% of Israel’s population — 15% of them Americans, many of them non-Jewish Russians — now occupy the West Bank. The scale of Israeli settlement is so vast, especially with Israeli laws that “legalize” ongoing pretextual land grabs and encourage Judaization of even Arab communities within Israel proper, that there is no longer enough contiguous land in the West Bank — forget about the isolated Gazan enclave — from which any sort of Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together. To speak of Two States, then, is to promote a damnable blatant lie.
A few years ago I read about an 11-foot python that swallowed a baby deer. It was a meal that cost both the deer and the python their lives. Israel has exactly the same problem as the snake — in a land where Zionism has long struggled to attain and maintain a Jewish majority, Palestinians have always been an indigestible mass that a Zionist ethno-state can never control, repress, or eliminate without massive assistance from the same colonial powers that created it. Zionism, which now openly expresses itself in the most vile, racist, separatist jingoism and violence, will never be able to contend with Palestinians in their midst or make peace with the Arab neighbors who sympathize with them. And it’s just a matter of time — repeated attempts to eat the deer will eventually kill the snake.
Historically, Zionism is an aberration and an anachronism, as historian Tony Judt and innumerable Jewish writers have observed in recent years. While earlier proto-Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes may have envisioned a bi-national homeland, by the 1942 Biltmore Conference it was clear that Zionism now meant an exclusionary Jewish state. In 1945 the last European concentration camps were liberated but that did not alter the trajectory of Revisionist Zionism’s plan — initiated in the late Thirties — to completely rid Palestine of Arabs. As Israel’s New Historians have shown, the massacres, atrocities, and mass expulsions of Arabs of the Nakba had been long planned.
Ethnic cleansing was arguably built into Zionism by its best-known advocate, Theodor Herzl, who wrote in Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State) that the indigenous people would be “spirited across” the border. Though the Nakba had been planned for almost a decade, Plan Dalet was finally implemented on March 10th, 1948 — months before the fabled “massing Arab armies” supposedly instigated the 1948 war. Any discussion of the present conflict should begin not with October 7th but with March 10th, 1948, the day that the Nakba was launched from David Ben Gurion’s offices in Tel Aviv. It has been 76 years since then, and the snake is still trying to eat the deer.
* * *
Today we live in a vastly different world than our mothers and grandfathers did in 1948. Colonialism has fallen into disrepute, South Africa’s Apartheid regime has collapsed. America’s foreign adventures in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been recognized by a significant percentage of voters as bloody disasters that not only killed millions but tore our own country apart. Here in the US we are making uneven progress with our long-festering race problems, but a significant part of America remains committed to racial justice (even as a significant number is not). All this is to say that the climate for accepting a racist ethno-state like Israel’s has changed. What was normal at the end of Jim Crow America in 1948 is now seen as obviously racist. Yet, fighting to keep JIm Crow alive in Israel, Zionists are pulling out all the stops to demonize young protesters, pass laws that criminalize criticism of Israel, and assure that Israel-friendly candidates have a leg up in the Democratic primaries.
Peter Beinart, who one could consider a “recovering Zionist,” offers one of the best explanations of why young people today, including Jewish students, are turning their backs on Zionism. One of the reasons is “intersectionality.” This generation of students has been involved in racial justice and police accountability struggles following George Floyd’s murder, gun control, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ justice, and in climate and environmental justice campaigns. Some of these issues intersect with justice for Palestinians, but mainly their activism represents the fact that young people are simply paying more attention to the greater world we live in.
And this goes for Jews too. As the list of Israeli human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and charges of genocide grows, many Jews have become soured on Zionism, particularly the Revisionist strain that became official policy after 1942. Following the 1967 war, especially, Zionism began hijacking Judaism and threatens to destroy the religion by compromising Judaism’s values as it insists that there is no difference between an ethno-nationalist movement and a religion. This, of course, is exactly what is happening to Christianity in the United States and Eastern Europe. And in fact many Zionists are politically in bed with the autocratic Far Right and Christian Nationalists. Consider Israel’s cozy relationships with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Spain’s Vox party, and Christian Zionists like John Hagee, to cite just a few examples. Zionism is literally Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin. Jews who fear our domestic turn to the right also fear Israel’s now shamelessly open expression of the same.
It’s fair to say that Europe-facing Israel would love to be part of an illiberal autocratic ethno-nationalist global Far Right, even as it courts the economically powerful neoliberal Western nations (US, Germany, France, Great Britain). While these nations admittedly have emerging autocratic, illiberal, and ethnocratic tendencies of their own, they also have significant numbers of people pushing back against these tendencies. This is what makes the unprecedented opposition to American and European policy on Gaza so remarkable — it is not antisemitsm, as the Zionists would have it, but a growing awareness of how our domestic turn to the right is connected with the illiberalism at Israel’s core.
Ultimately both MAGA revanchism and Israel’s attempts to preserve its antique ethno-nationalism are doomed to fail. In 2003 historian Tony Judt wrote in “Israel: the Alternative” that
“In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s”clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.”
* * *
All this has led to the idea of a single, secular bi-national state for both Palestinians and those who made their homes out of Palestinian homes.
In 2010 Merav Michali asked Tony Judt what his idea of a bi-national state looked like:
“I don’t know. What I do know is that since I wrote that in 2003, everyone from Moshe Arens through Barak to Olmert has admitted that Israel is on the way to a single state with a potential Arab majority in Bantustans unless something happens fast. That’s all that I said in my essay.
But ok, since it looks as though Israel is determined to give itself this future, what will it look like? [It will look like] Hell. But what could it look like? Well, there could be a federal state of two autonomous communities – on the Swiss or Belgian model (don’t tell me the latter doesn’t work – it works very well but is opposed by Flemings led by people very much like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman). This could have crossover privileges and rights for both communities, but each would be autonomous. I think this would work better than a mixed single-state, and it would allow each community to set certain sorts of religious and other regulations according to its taste.”
Why “Hell?”
Because it would start from a very bad place. It would begin with Jews running the place in the name of a Jewish state, defined by Orthodox Rabbis and controlled by an army whose officer core is increasingly permeated by religious and settler communities. No Arab would feel remotely safe, much less equal or a citizen in such a “single state”. The Arabs’ lack of property, rights, status and prospects would either make them a sullen and potentially violent underclass or else the best of them would try to leave. This is no good basis for integration, though it is of course what some of Israel’s present leaders privately desire. And then there would be Gaza…
… Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also recognize that Israel is on its way to a single state. […] In such a state, Jews would soon be a minority. Doesn’t that frighten you?
Not as much as it seems to frighten others. Why is it ok for a Jewish minority to dominate an Arab majority, its leaders to call for expulsions of majority members, etc., but not ok for a democracy to have a majority and minority both protected under law? At least Israel could then call itself a democracy with a clear conscience.
What you are really asking is whether I think the Palestinians would immediately set out to rape, pillage and murder the Jews? I don’t see why they would want to — there is no historical record suggesting that this is what Palestinians do for fun, whereas we have all too much evidence that Israelis persecute Palestinians for no good reason. If I were an Arab, I would be more afraid of living in a state with Jews just now.
Can you see or understand why Israelis are afraid?
Yes, but only in the sense that someone who has been brought up to fear and hate his neighbors will have good reason to be frightened at the thought of living in the same house with them. Israelis have created a generation of young Palestinians who hate them and will never forgive them and that does make a real problem for any future agreement, single- or two-state.
But Israel should be much, much more afraid of the Israel it’s creating for itself: a semi-democratic, demagogic, far-right warrior state dominated by racist Russians and crazed rabbis. In this perspective, an internationally policed and guaranteed federal state of Israel, with the same rights and resources for Jews and Arabs, looks a lot less frightening to me.
Can you see why American Jews are fearful as well of that?
No. This is the fear of the paranoid hysteric – like the man at the dinner table in the story I wrote in the New York Review who had never been to Israel but thought I should stop criticizing it because “We Jews might need it sometime.” American Jews — most of whom know nothing of Jewish history, Jewish languages or Jewish religion — feel “Jewish” by identifying unthinkingly with Auschwitz as the source of their special victim status and “Israel” as their insurance policy and macho other. I find this contemptible — they are quite happy to see Arabs killed in their name, so long as other Jews do it. That’s not fear, that is something between surrogate nationalism and moral indifference.
Judt was certainly not the first or last to speak of a one-state land-sharing solution, but he certainly roiled the waters when he suggested it. Zionists accused him of antisemitism and of denying the Jewish people both their “historic home” and “Jewish self-determination.” Aside from the fact that all the religious states we are familiar with are nightmares (Saudi Arabia comes to mind), Germany of early 1945 was the last European nation with laws privileging or demonizing specific ethnic groups. That Israel would essentially preserve Nuremberg-style laws in a Jewish state has always seemed aberrant. Especially to many Jews.
In the last two decades there have been dozens of proposals, all with slightly different wrinkles, offering plans to end the ongoing nightmare in Palestine. Contrary to the shrill voices of Zionists telling the rest of us what we mean when we say “from the river to the sea…” Palestine will be free someday. For everyone. There will be something closer to a democracy, and it will offer the world a hopeful example.
An overview of One State proposals — good and bad — will be the subject of my next essay.
This is the last of three book reviews on the One State Solution I started a few weeks ago. I previously reviewed Ian S. Lustick’sParadigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, and Omri Boehm’sHaifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. From time to time I will add additional One State reviews.
Jonathan Kuttab has dedicated much of his life to human rights, first as one of the founders of Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group established in 1979, and also as a co-founder of Nonviolence International in 1989. Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian lawyer who has practiced in Israel, Palestine, and the US and was the head of a legal team that negotiated the 1994 Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. In 1980 Kuttab co-authored a study of Israeli military laws governing the West Bank that had been modified from British Mandate and Jordanian law to apply more draconian control over Palestinians and to “legalize” land theft.
Kuttab, then, is as qualifed as anyone to present a non-violent program for a One State solution in his book “Beyond the Two-State Solution,” available in English, Hebrew, and Arabic print editions and also in electronic format.
Despite his conciliatory tone, Kuttab doesn’t pull any punches. Zionism is a land grab and, following each war and Oslo, Israel always grabbed as much land as it could — finally rendering impossible a Two State solution. Kuttab analyzes the many failed brokered peace agreements and tries to isolate the unresolved sticking points.
Kuttab acknowledges Israel’s extreme preoccupation with security, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian right of return, and a difficult-to-imagine reversal of illegal settlements. After looking at all the proposals that bowed to Zionist domination, he eliminates Two States as a workable solution because “the language of the Two State Solution leaves the battling ideologies intact, and only requires a geographic division and spatial limitation on the exercise of each ideology. Chauvinism, racism, discrimination, and inherent problems are all swept under the rug. No real critique of Zionism or Palestinian Nationalism is required, if we accept the language of the Two State Solution.” Kuttab’s rejection of Palestinian nationalism may grate on those who want to discard one nationalism for another.
Kuttab begins by enumerating the “minimum requirements” for Jewish Israelis when entering into a bi-national state: (1) the Jewish Right of Return; (2) Security; (3) a Jewish rhythm of life; (4) Hebrew; (5) the right to live anywhere in Palestine. For Palestinians the list is virtually identical: (1) the right of return for refugees; (2) Democracy; (3) respect for and protection of Arab Identity; (4) Arabic; (5) the right to move about and live anywhere in Palestine. Kuttab sees no pragmatic impediment to a bi-national state and sets about describing how one could be realized, how national and meta-national laws and even a bi-national Supreme Court could protect both peoples with binding judgments instead of hollow actions in toothless international courts.
Kuttab throws out any number of concrete suggestions for structuring a new bi-national state, but these are only useful to illustrate the point that any serious party could come up with plenty of workable ideas. For this reason it’s not worth dissecting Kuttab’s specifics because specifics must be proposed by both parties and negotiated only after both come to terms with the reality that a bi-national state is the only possible option.
Kuttab writes that “Jewish fears need to be addressed forthrightly” (but of course Palestinians have their own well-justified fears). Kuttab demonstrates enormous (disproportionate?) sensitivity to the fears of Jewish Israelis who, even with the most powerful and only nuclear military in the Middle East, habitually reject Palestinian rights because they are perceived to limit Jewish security. So Kuttab suggests writing Jewish supremacy into the new state’s legal system with a Lebanese-style requirement that the head of the new bi-national military always be Jewish, while the head of the national police always be an Arab. As much as I respect what Kuttab is attempting here, it is an odd and lopsided provision that cannot fail to be a show-stopper.
in remaining chapters Kuttab addresses other objections and challenges to his proposals. One is that a bi-national state has never succeeded before. But is that true? Kuttab writes that Lebanon and Yugoslavia may have foundered because of ethnic strife, but Switzerland and Canada are examples of successes of confederation models.
Even if a successful model did not exist, Kuttab writes that the Holy Land is a special case that deserves special effort, and that a resolution of this particular conflict could play an outsized role in resolving other regional and global conflicts.
Kuttab asks rhetorically why Zionists — having “won” — would ever agree to anything limiting their power or supremacy. The quick answer is that Israel’s victory has never been a stable “win” and, in any case, is not sustainable without bottomless aid and diplomatic cover from Western colonial enablers who will eventually tire of subsidizing human rights abuses. And in the long run the injustices perpetrated on Palestinians cannot be ignored forever.
Another objection Kuttab addresses is the argument that the degree of enmity is so great that it can never be surmounted. If this were true then contemporary national alliances of the 21st Century would be impossible — consider Britain and France, the US and Germany, the US and Japan, Germany and Israel. Many of these former bitter enemies became friends within a generation following the end of conflict.
A final argument for pursuing a single state — and against doing nothing — is that, under Zionism, there is no place for minorities. The logic of Zionism requires that minorities (Muslim, Arab, Bedouin, Christian) can never be allowed to become a majority, and which requires that they must either be repressed or eliminated. But this is logic of the 18th and 19th centuries. A multicultural democracy is manifestly superior to endless occupation, war, racist law, and the perversion of democracy.
Kuttab never says so explicitly, but ultimately Israelis will recognize that Zionism is incompatible with democracy. As fantastical as such a prediction sounds in the middle of Israel’s most genocidal war to-date, Israelis will eventually admit that Zionism did its job of saving millions of Jews but it is now time to abandon it, just as Palestinians will have to abandon their own nationalist aspirations — that is, if a bi-national state is ever to take root.
Kuttab’s final chapter is a discussion of what one might call the “attitude adjustments” necessary to make a bi-national state possible. Kuttab, as a proponent of non-violence, rejects armed resistance for both pragmatic and moral reasons (to give you a sense of where he comes from, he’s on the board of a Christian Bible college). Before the two peoples can ever start to build a shared state, settlement will have to stop. Israeli’s aren’t going away, and not all settlers are extremists, Kuttab writes. Likewise, Hamas isn’t going away and (contrary to the propaganda) many of their members are moderates. In any case, Hamas will have to be part of any One State solution.
Palestinians have rights and agency. Thus, truly democratic elections in Palestine — not a US-Israeli-appointed regime – would have to precede any sort of political realignment in order to obtain Palestinian agreement. Collective punishment has to stop immediately. Gratuitous repression and domination for domination’s sake would have to end. “Administrative detentions” and many other Israeli excesses and daily insults would have to cease before Palestinians could enter into a new state with Israelis. Terror attacks (from both sides) and Israeli military incursions would need to stop immediately.
Jonathan Kuttab joins many other One-Staters who have reached the same conclusion — that Two States are now an impossibility and, even if feasible, would only defer and compound the conflict. As unimaginable as One State is now, it is the best and only hope for two peoples sharing one land.
Shortly after the 2016 election, Democrats started telling voters — particularly racial and sexual minorities – that they were idiots for dabbling in “identity politics.” By this they meant that the values these voters held were too controversial, and too “divisive.” Instead, Democrats rolled out an election strategy based on economics, launching it from the one Virginia county where HIllary Clinton had won a majority of votes. Fast forward to 2024 and the Dems are again flogging “Bidenomics, Bidenomics, Bidenomics” – as if it were the only issue over which American voters ought to worry their pretty pointy little heads.
Even though Biden’s numbers have long been stuck at levels absolutely guaranteed to sink his campaign, a vast gaslighting project has emerged to explain why voters aren’t buying the whole economics shtik and to tell voters that they’re idiots for not buying it.
Everybody from James Carville to Robert Reich has offered a contribution to the oevre. The Washington Post thinks that, while personal finances are generally OK, voters are actually more worried about the national economy. Bloomberg takes the completely opposite view. Zachary D. Carter’s recent article in Slate offers the online lede, “I think I can explain Joe Biden’s Bad Approval Ratings” and then proceeds to roll out his own incoherent theory of “new beginnings.”
In other words, Democrats have completely written off what Richard Hofstadter called “interest politics” – or what today we would call the concerns of “value voters” – in his groundbreaking book on the American Far Right, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
So, having read Hofstadter and in contrast to Zachary Carter, I think I can actually explain why Biden’s approval ratings are in the toilet. And it has nothing to do with the economy.
Though he studied American politics in the first part of the 20th Century, in Part I of “The Paranoid Style” Hofstadter offers us a solid clue about much of what is happening today. In fact, Hofstadter’s formulation below explains voter disinterest in Bidenomics, the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, the phenomenon of people “voting against their own interests,” and also explains why the moral furor over Gaza has taken Democrats by surprise and will likely tank Biden’s Presidency:
The wealth of the country and the absence of sharp class-consciousness have released much political energy for expression on issues not directly connected with economic conflict; and our unusually complex ethnic and religious mixture has introduced a number of complicating factors of great emotional urgency.
Significantly, the periods in which status politics has been most strikingly apparent have been the relatively prosperous 1920’s and the 1960’s. In periods of prosperity, when economic conflicts are blunted or subordinated, the other issues become particularly acute. We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their prejudices. In good times, with their most severe economic difficulties behind them, many people feel that they can afford the luxury of addressing themselves to larger moral questions, and they are easily convinced that the kind of politics that results is much superior to the crass materialism of interest politics. They have fewer inhibitions about pressing hard for their moral concerns, no matter how demanding and ill-formulated, as an object of public policy, than they have in pressing for their interests, no matter how reasonable and realistically conceived.
In the following essay, I will try to show that Barry Goldwater was one campaigner who saw with considerable clarity the distinction between interest politics and status politics, and went out of his way in his campaign to condemn the immorality of the first and to call for an intensification of the second.
Today, Americans from both political extremes feel America is morally on the wrong track and the two ethically-compromised antediluvian candidates for President are no answer to their concerns. The only question is: given this focus, which candidate will have the edge in November?
Well, that’s easy. Trump, with his coterie of “prophets” and preachers and a side-line as a bonafide Bible-thumping Bible salesman – as transparently fraudulent as this vaudeville act is – still comes closest to what Hofstader recognized in Barry Goldwater and the successful Far Right revolution he launched sixty years ago.
Biden, though he hasn’t been convicted of any felonies or bribed a porn star lately, has a crackhead son and has enthusiastically coupled his fate to that of an accused war criminal (who like Biden can’t survive politically) in carrying out a well-documented genocide.
Bidenomics isn’t going to save Joe any more than it can save America.
This is the second review of three books on the One State Solution.
My previous review was of Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In this post I will look at Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and in the final installment I will look at Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution.
Why One State? It’s time to say kaddish for the dead and move on. “Two States” was an idea that had its genesis over a century ago and might have had its day for the briefest moment in time, but it was almost universally declared dead by 1983. To continue promoting two states is dishonest and as creepy as pretending to talk to the dead.
It is also high time that American “Liberals” and “liberal” American Zionists stopped supporting a violent ethnocratic supremacist state. We don’t want one here and we shouldn’t be paying for the one in Israel. Americans pretend that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” but it’s no such thing. It’s an Apartheid state with a brutal occupation over millions of stateless people, and over five dozen laws that discriminate against its own non-Jewish citizens. With the massive amount of money American taxpayers shell out to preserve the Zionist state, why on earth are we not calling for a genuine democracy?
Moreover, the notion that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation is hogwash. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? A state for practitioners of Santeria? Rastafari? If liberals really believe in such a “right” then why are they not pushing just as hard for theocratic states all over the Western hemisphere?
It should go without saying: a repressive state does not have a right to exist as a repressive state. It cannot claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms constitute hate-speech or antisemitism. If there are calls to dismantle Israel’s Zionist state, for all the shrill Cassandras, this in no way implies the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself must cease doing business as usual. Portugal, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to name a few examples of former dictatorships or repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. The ADL and a myriad of Zionist attack organizations can infer whatever delusional meanings they like from it, but this is is what I mean when I utter that unambiguous phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic
While Ian Lustick proposes recognizing the reality of Israeli domination “from the river to the sea” and building a single secular democracy (however slowly) out of a repressive ethnostate, Omri Boehm’s vision is of redefining Zionism to promote a confederation that allows two peoples to share one land. Boehm’s vision is similar to an early (pre-state) thread of Zionism that advocated a Jewish homeland but not necessarily a state.
Boehm begins by recounting the angry reception that Tony Judt’s essay in the New York Review of Books (“Israel: The Alternative”) received from Zionists in 2003 when he proposed that Israel abandon Zionism and embrace liberal democracy. Zionists huffed that Judt had crossed a line from legitimate criticism of Israel to “illegitimate criticism of Israel’s existence.”
But then Thomas Friedman — hardly a kefiyah-sporting radical — declared in a February 2016 New York Times column that “they all killed the Two State Solution. Let the one-state era begin.” But he wasn’t finished. Friedman went on, “It’s over folks, so please stop sending the New York Times your proposals for a two-state solution […] The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.” And Friedman was not wrong. Even an unlikely Henry Kissinger threw shade on the Two State solution shortly before his death.
Haifa Republic recounts the history of the Yishuv — pre-Israel — and the varieties of Zionism that existed before Revisionist Zionism prevailed and from then on Zionism meant (1) a state not just a homeland; (2) exclusive control over all of Palestine; and (3) ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) to ensure a Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion implemented these goals and told the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937:
“In many parts of the land Jewish settlement would not be possible without transferring the Arab peasants. […] We’re lucky that the Arab people has immense and empty territories. The growing Jewish power in the land will increase more and more our ability to execute the transfer in large numbers.”
Boehm agrees with Lustick that a one-state reality now defines Israel:
The future is here: one-state politics now defines Israel’s reality, and the consequences are monumental — to Israelis, to Palestinians, and to world Jewry. But we’re still lacking a language for liberal Zionist thinking in a post-two-state, post-ethnic era.
But he believes that the beginnings of Zionism might hold the key to refashioning a new, shared democratic state:
The basic vocabulary of this language existed in the past — in Zionism’s beginnings. Whereas Zionist politics today is synonymous with the view that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state in Eretz Israel, the movement’s founding fathers held a more nuanced view. Intense ideological disagreements divided Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, but they could all agree on the distinction, all too often forgotten, between national self-determination and national sovereignty: up until very late in Zionist history, they all viewed the project as committed to the former but not the latter. In fact, they were for the most part committed to the latter’s denial.) That is, they believed that the Jews had the right to exercise political self-rule, administrate autonomously their own lives, and revive Jewish culture and education. But they did not believe that this should have been done in a sovereign Jewish state: the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty. Jabotinsky, for example, who is commonly regarded today as a raving right-wing Jewish nationalist, explicitly agreed with Brit Shalom, Martin Buber’s Zionist faction, that “the future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a binational state.” Even Hannah Arendt, who is often considered an anti-Zionist, could subscribe to this concept of Zionism. Until late in his career, Ben-Gurion actually did subscribe to it. When Wieseltier or Dershowitz condemn binationalism as a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, they overlook the distinction between self-determination and sovereignty: both as a crucial political distinction and as one that, historically, stood at the heart of Zionism’s origins. Israel’s political survival as a democracy depends on the recovery of this distinction.
Boehm wants to redefine Zionism — if such a thing is now possible. Redefinition seems like a face-saving device to soften the blow to liberal Zionists of abandoning the ideology. So Boehm doesn’t require them to abandon it; he just calls it something different. This seems like the perfect solution for people given to self-delusion. Maybe it could even work.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are thus the main pillars of Zionist thinking as we have come to know it– of the axiom that Zionism is essentially about Jewish sovereignty, and that Jewish demographic superiority, therefore, must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to see that this alleged Zionist axiom is not a Zionist axiom at all, and that adhering to it is leading to the destruction of Israel and expulsions of Palestinians.
It is time to restore a binational Zionism – with a strong notion of equal citizenship in a one-state solution. One way we can do this is by developing an art of forgetting, a politics of remembering to forget the Holocaust and the Nakba in order to undo rather than perpetuate them as the pillars of future politics. Ernest Renan advanced the idea of such an art of forgetting in his great lecture of 1882, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s account of modern citizenship can help us rethink Israel’s future relation to its past. What is true of the Holocaust is true of the Nakba: for the sake of a future binational politics, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the country would have to be, in a similar sense, forgotten. But it can be forgotten only if we commemorate it first–and do justice to the past by committing ourselves as citizens to the Palestinians right of national self-determination. This includes a meaningful commitment to the right of return.
Perhaps realizing he’s out on a limb, Boehm addresses his skeptics:
How practical a binational political program would be, one may however wonder. Thoroughly practical. None other than Menachem Begin, Israel’s first right-wing prime minister and a vehement opponent of territorial compromise, offers a viable model with the “autonomy plan” he devised in the late 1970s. Begin’s program could just as well be called the “one-state plan.” It included not only the institution of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, but also an option for all Palestinians to become full Israeli citizens, as well as complete freedom of movement and economic rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and a department within the Palestinian Autonomy’s Council for the Rehabilitation of Refugees. The Knesset voted on this proposal and passed it by a large majority in December 1977.
That Begin had some such plan is familiar to some, but its details, coming so close to a binational constellation, have received little attention. Historians, deferring to the two-state orthodoxy, tend to see the plan as Begin’s plot to prevent Palestinian statehood, not as a program that originates in Jabotinsky’s binational thinking and could test and open up the ethnic political boundaries and taboos of contemporary Israel.
It is worth pointing out that the Likud and Netanyahu are political descendants of Jabotinsky and Begin. Netanyahu’s father Benzion was even Jabotinsky’s secretary. Philosophically, then, resurrecting and adapting Begin’s plan is something the current (37th) government of Israel could conceivably do. Boehm calls this “new Zionist” proposal the “Haifa Republic” in honor of a city that has played a key role in the history of Jews and Palestinians:
It is time to explore a program reconstructed from Begin’s proposal — I call it the Haifa Republic — recognizing the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination, even sovereignty, in their own states, separated along the ’67 border, and yet regulating their separate sovereignty by a joint constitution ensuring basic human rights, freedom of movement, and economic liberties throughout the territory. Such a plan could allow many settlers to remain in their homes. And it would enable Palestinians to exercise rights commonly associated with the right of return-the aspiration to return to the territories from which they were expelled in 1948. Plans of this sort have been raised in the past, and are still promoted, but they are too often regarded as Post-Zionist. The attempt here is to rehabilitate such politics as a Zionist program, consistent with the core aspirations of Zionism’s founding fathers.
In essence the Haifa Republic is a Zionist two-state fiction that permits settlers to remain in the West Bank and opens up present-day Israel to currently-expelled Palestinians. It is also somewhat of an ideological fiction because the nature of Zionism has been redefined.
The final chapter of Boehm’s small book fleshes out a few details of the “Republic.” The Palestinian state Begin proposed was to be demilitarized, overseen by an elected Palestinian council, and included a provision for vetting the return of some “reasonable number” of Palestinian exiles. But it unequivocally asserted the Jewish right to “Samaria” and “Judea” (the West Bank).
The Haifa Republic is based on Begin’s idea, but instead of making Palestinians citizens of Israel (as in Lustick and Begin’s plans) Boehm would conjure Palestinian nationhood without a physical nation. In the Haifa Republic Palestinians would have their own military which co-operated with the IDF in a mutual defense treaty. Complete freedom of movement and the ability to buy and own land anywhere in Palestine would be extended to all within the borders. Arabic and Hebrew would both be official languages. East and West Jerusalem would be capitals of each nation, respectively, and a legal entity structurally similar to the EU would apply to both nations. There would be a shared supreme court that adjudicated disputes without international involvement.
The big question is how to get from today’s one state reality to Boehm’s.
According to defenders of Israel’s Apartheid state — which today maintains a brutal supremacist regime across all of Palestine — the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” supposedly implies the genocide of the Jewish people. The ADL, which cites the Hamas and PFLP charters, calls it an “antisemitic slogan” that “means the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.” — Or so they say.
Hamas, of course, is not the only group to have used this phrase. Israel’s Likud party used a similar phrase (“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) in its platform. Perhaps it’s just simple projection, but Zionism has actually denied the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially through the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The perpetuation of a system of Jewish supremacy maintained by a genocidal occupation is both unsustainable and unimaginable.
The purpose of this and two essays to follow is to review three books that propose — instead of a Zionist supremacist state– a shared democratic, secular state in Palestine.
It is fair to say that the so-called Two State Solution (TSS) may have once had its day, but that day is long gone following massive settlement by now more than 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. Until or unless they are withdrawn there will never be any land for a contiguous Palestinian state. In terms of a Palestinian “rump” state, the conditions imposed on Palestinians in each of the American “peace” negotiations would have been unacceptable to Israel if imposed on Jews; thus each foundered because Palestinians too would reasonably not accept colonialism, even a “Lite” version that denied them a genuine state with full self-determination.
This leaves a One State Solution, or some variant, as the most reasonable solution — a single land for two peoples. Each of the solutions in these three books have a slightly different wrinkle, as we will see.
Today’s review is Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In following posts I will review Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Each of the authors has proposed a solution “from the river to the sea” that is more than a maligned slogan — a solution in which everyone in Palestine is free.
But before we get into the books, the Hamas Charter frequently cited by Israel-defenders actually reads like a mirror of Zionist policies. You could almost do a global search and replace of “Judaism” with “Islam” or “Jewish” with “Palestinian.” Or replace “the Jewish people” with the “Ummah” — and you get the idea. Palestine is still contested land and its original inhabitants have rightly never given up their claim.
Here is the context in the Hamas charter in which the contentious phrase is used:
“20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”
This doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Elsewhere the charter makes it even clearer:
“16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
While it is presumptuous of the ADL and other Zionist attack organizations to tell us what our own words mean, their interpretations are quite a stretch. The authors of each of the three books I review could well be smeared as “antisemites” by Zionists for their proposals of secular democracies that do away with Jewish supremacy, but each of these proposals must be read to see how Jewish — and Palestinian — life and culture can not only survive but flourish in a shared state. This is anything but antisemitic.
And what of a Zionist state? Is dismantling a racist, Apartheid regime such a tragedy? The question answers itself.
To me the premise that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation seems strange. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? The state for practitioners of Santeria? Writing as a secular American, the whole notion of Christian Nationalism offends me, and the reality of today’s Christian nationalists (and their kissing cousins, the Zionists and Saudi Wahabbists) ought to be a cautionary tale about the dangers and excesses of theocratic states. So, yes, for Zionists to claim that Israel is the home of all the world’s Jews, including me, is both offensive and insane.
Furthermore, a repressive state does not have a right to claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms of it constitutes hate-speech or antisemitism. If people call for dismantling Israel’s repressive state — as it is — this does not mean the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself cannot conduct business as usual under its toxic ideology. Portugual, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to list only a few examples of former dictatorships and repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. This is what I mean when I say:
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Paradigm Lost
Ian Lustick is a former intelligence analyst with the State Department, and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Lustick grew up Jewish in upstate New York. His dissertation was on Arabs in the Jewish state, and he has written extensively about the Israeli settler movement. He has clearly thought deeply about how two peoples might live in this one land.
Lustick’s One State Solution is essentially the democratization and transformation of Israel into a nation for all of its people from the river to the sea. He builds his case, beginning with an uncomfortable truth: “A Palestinian state could have been established and could have coexisted peacefully alongside Israel, but the opportunity to establish it was historically perishable and is no longer available.” The question then becomes: what kind of Single State does Lustick envision?
Lustick recounts the history of Zionism, from the Yeshuv to early Israel, through 1948, 1967, Oslo, the PLO, and Arab League peace initiatives. A Palestinian state was no longer an option by the 1980’s because it was official policy of almost every government that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could never exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” was the operational philosophy that decreed that Palestinians must experience unrelenting, uncompromising force until their nationalist aspirations have been extinguished. While it guided successive Israeli governments and parties like the Likud, it has never succeeded. A variety of Palestinian liberation movements have fought Israel tooth and nail since its founding. The unintended consequences of the “Iron Wall” were, according to Lustick, that “Zionism’s strategic logic unintentionally institutionalized a political incapacity to discern or exploit Arab willingness to compromise.” Zionist state builders like David Ben-Gurion convinced themselves that the Arabs would eventually give up. But they never did.
Another self-inflicted Israeli delusion is what Lustick calls “Holocaustia.” This is the abuse of the Holocaust by turning it into a justification for the demonization and nazification of Palestinians and the Arab world. In 2006 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed American Zionists in Los Angeles, telling them “it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2016 Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told a group of soldiers, “Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise: All of us, each and every one of us, has a number tattooed on his arm.” While the Holocaust was certainly a defining traumatic event for many Israeli and Jewish families, in Israel it became weaponized as the justification for Zionism. Without an imagined second Holocaust just on the horizon, and without a new Nazi to fear — or as of October 7th the biblical enemy Amalek — Zionism is little more than a 19th century nationalist ideology in search of a contemporary raison d’etre.
Outside Israel, AIPAC and dozens of “lobbying” groups that fly high above FARA registration requirements hold American foreign policy captive and provide Israel with all the armaments and diplomatic cover it needs to continue operating its 76 year-old occupation. Lustick presents little new information here, but this mention is necessary because the United States is the only — as of yet unrealized — hope for applying leverage on Israel. Owing to the shared colonial (and genocidal) history of both the US and Israel, any solution would have distinct American fingerprints on it. Lustick believes that there is hope yet that Americans may yet decide to “save Israel from itself” and show some tough love leading to a breakthrough. This is going to require a paradigm shift.
Lustick regards the Two State Solution (TSS) as a dead paradigm, albeit one that politicians and liberal Zionists cling to desperately. Amusingly, Lustick compares the TSS to the old theory of phlogiston, a non-existent element related to combustion. Only after trial after trial after experiment after experiment was phlogiston debunked. Similarly, there is now enough proof of the impossibility of the TSS so that policy makers ought to stop talking about it.
In fact, over one hundred years of schemes and negotiations have demonstrated that, given Israel’s refusal to permit a Palestinian state, the idea of two states is a dead letter. Lustick systematically shows how each of the assumptions underlying Two States were undermined by different facts or contrasting assumptions. For example, Israelis wanted “two states” to mean no territorial concessions, but for Jordan to provide land for a Palestinian homeland. It wasn’t until the Oslo process that both sides saw TSS as a real possibility. Right after Oslo Israel slowed down settlements and there was discussion of land swaps. But by 1983 it was clear that annexation of “Judea” and “Samaria” had progressed too far to ever support two states. The window had been closed. Hope had become fantasy.
Lustick has tried to formulate a solution given his understanding of the facts on the ground. And the facts are that there is already a One State Reality (OSR) “from river to the sea.” Sorely lacking, however, are evenly-applied freedoms within that space. Lustick writes:
Though there is no “solution” in sight, there is a reality. There is today one state, the State of Israel, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is an apparatus of power, recognized by the international community, whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. It collects taxes from West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and determines who enters and leaves those areas, who enjoys rights to property, and who can live, build, or even visit where. In its current form, the state is no group’s pretty picture. It was achieved by no one’s carefully implemented plan. It is not a solution but an outcome — a one-state reality (OSR).
Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are citizens of no other recognized state. As measured by the State of Israel’s impact on the intimate details of their lives and indeed on whether they live at all, they are as much its inhabitants as black slaves were of the United States and as Africans in the Bantustans were of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the twelve-year blockade of Gaza, combined with the exposure to state violence that these populations regularly endure, do not mark their exclusion from the Israeli state. Rather, they simply register the fact that Israel rules different populations in different regions in different ways. Though the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip came within the ambit of the Israeli polity fifty-two rather than seventy-one years ago, the palpable fact is that they live within it.
Officially, the Israeli government views lands west of the Jordan River but across the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from territories occupied in 1967 — as “disputed,” which implies that from their perspective they are part of the country, Thus, when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the number of Israelis in the country, it counts every Israeli living west of the Jordan River, not just those living in the part of the country surrounded by the Green Line.
Most official Israeli maps feature no divisions between the sea and the river other than administrative boundaries of districts and regions. Textbooks show lines surrounding the Gaza Strip and around Area A clusters and a slightly different shading for Area B clusters. But the only lines indicating a border between Israel and another sovereign country are those along its borders with Arab states — and these separate both Gaza and the West Bank from the Arab states. A map accessed in December 2018 on Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was titled “Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines.” The map labels the Gaza Strip as “under Palestinian jurisdiction” and the Oslo demarcated areas of “A” and “B” in the West Bank as characterized by Palestinian responsibility for “civil affairs.” The country’s international boundary includes both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within the state. All mail that enters or leaves the West Bank or the Gaza Strip does so via Israel. The undeclared OSR is also revealed in the ordinary language of public communications: images of the country used by Israeli ministries, weather maps, maps of annual average temperature and rainfall, maps of the topography of the “State of Israel,” road maps, and iconic depictions of the country’s borders used for tourism and other purposes.
In 2009 I visited Palestine and Israel. I spoke to Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American I met in Ramallah, who expressed the view that the Palestinian demand for a separate nation, if frustrated, would lead to a Civil Rights movement in which Palestinians demanded equal treatment within the Israeli state. In this scenario, would American decision-makers take Palestinian demands for equal rights and civil liberties seriously, or pretend that two states are still possible, deciding that Palestinians need another 75 years of martial law and repression? Most of today’s Congress would opt for the latter, I’m sure of it.
To democratize Israel would require abolishing Zionism’s discriminatory laws and injustices. Zionism itself would finally have to be discarded. The “Basic Law: Israel as a Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which assigns rights of citizenship only to Jews, would have to be repealed in an expanded democracy. As it is, the law discriminates against 20% of Israeli citizens of Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Muslim heritage for whom Israel resembles the Jim Crow South.
Finally, Israelis and Americans have to come to terms with the fact that Israel cannot be — and never really has been — a “democratic AND Jewish” state. Just as a “democratic and Christian” state is a similar impossibility in the US, American liberals and liberal Zionists will have to be among the first to recognize and reject this incongruity. In a land where Jews are actually a slight numerical minority, Zionism has no moral right to crush the hopes and lives of the majority. But for many Israelis and Jews who cannot see where Judaism ends and Zionism begins, this is going to be enormously challenging.
