In the summer of 2004 in Milwaukee, the U.S. Green Party at its national convention included in its platform a call for “a U.S. foreign policy which promotes serious reconsideration of the creation of one, secular, democratic state, for Palestinians and Israelis, on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, as the national home of both peoples …”
The Green Party is a fringe group on the U.S. political scene. Therefore, one feels tempted to dismiss its platform generally as utopian fantasizing.
Yet as Boaz Wachtel of Israel’s Green Leaf Party said to me at the convention, “political creativity and social change come from the fringe, not the center.” Indeed, in history, ideas once considered on the fringe — as Zionism was in the Jewish community before World War II — have become mainstream, accepted, and even triumphant.
The “one-state solution” to the Israel-Arab conflict looks increasingly like an idea on the move from the fringe, at least in academia and among leftists. Now two books advocating this idea have been published and are available in local bookstores and libraries.
While I do not want to encourage anyone to purchase them and thereby support their authors, I do recommend that pro-Israel community members read them for their revelations of the thinking behind the “one-state solution,” and because of the troubling issues they raise.
The most recent is “The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock” (University of Michigan Press) by Virginia Tilley, associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. (The colleges’ Web site says that she earned her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
The other is “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle” (published last year by Pluto Press and distributed by University of Michigan Press) by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian Christian who is associate professor of genetics at Yale University.
Set against them is famed attorney Alan Dershowitz’s new book, “The Case for Peace” (John Wiley & Sons), in which he argues for the two-state solution. But just as his earlier book “The Case for Israel” was readable but ultimately inadequate, so this one also doesn’t really do the required job.
Jews are expendable
Of the one-state solution authors, Qumsiyeh appears to be the more energetic advocate. He spoke about the topic in Milwaukee twice last year, at the Green Party convention and at UW-Milwaukee.
That difference is audible in the tone of the two books. Tilley strives to be scholarly and reasoned; and she has more thorough documentation for her statements. She even makes a few attempts (though woefully inadequate) to try to present some of the Jewish/Zionist point of view, if only to dismiss it.
Qumsiyeh writes in an impassioned style and is more careless about his facts and documentation. He also allows his interest in genetics to lead him to claim that the Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews who created modern Zionism are actually descended from the medieval Khazars rather than from the original ancient Canaanites, and therefore can have no legitimate claim to the land of Israel. (Qumsiyeh, who uses “racist” to describe Israel and Zionism throughout his book, doesn’t seem to realize how truly racist is any appeal to such genetic fantasies.)
Yet their minds work in congruent ways that most Jewish readers will find disturbing or disgusting.
Both make elementary mistakes in referring to Jewish history or institutions. Tilley calls AIPAC “the American Israel Political Action Committee” instead of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its true name and an important legal as well as factual distinction.
Qumsiyeh has the notion that the Maccabees led the first Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire around 70 C.E. (page 59). The Maccabees actually rebelled against the Seleucid empire beginning in 167 B.C.E.
But these mistakes are less significant for themselves than they are symptomatic of these authors’ common carelessness toward, disdain for, refusal to take seriously — in short, almost complete denial of — Jewish history, Jewish experience and Judaism.
Neither mentions the long-standing importance of the land of Israel in Judaism nor accords that the respect due to any religion and its teachings – a respect that Judaism has been denied too often for the last 2,000 years.
Neither understands, nor even appears to try to understand, how tiny the Jewish population of the world is (roughly 14 million in a total human population of six billion, or about 1 out of every 430 people on the planet); and how we are still vulnerable to non-Jews’ active anti-Semitism and passive indifference to our fate, no matter how good Israel’s army is or how many atom bombs Israel might have, or how wonderful Jewish life is in the United States at present.
Both denounce as racist Israel’s Law of Return, which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who comes to Israel to claim it. Neither sets this law into the historical context of the Jewish experience of Nazi Germany, when, out of hostility or indifference,
countries the world over closed their borders to endangered Jews.
Neither apparently knows or cares that Israel exists because of the persecution, discrimination and contempt for Jews and Judaism that have existed in the Arab/Muslim world for centuries, as much as because of the horrors in Christian Europe. You will look in vain in both books for even one occurrence of the word dhimmi, the Arabic name for Jewish and Christian second class citizens under Muslim rule.
Neither takes seriously modern Arab and Muslim expressions of hatred for Jews and Judaism as well as of Israel. Both claim that Israel provoked the 1967 Six Day War, dismissing or not referring to the Arab world’s fevered genocidal rhetoric at the time.
Both use the most inflammatory terms to describe Israel and Zionism — “racist,” “settler-colonial,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” — and never consider how those concepts actually apply more justly and accurately to the Arab/Muslim world.
Ultimately, both are people who, consciously or otherwise, find Jewish faith, apprehensions, fears, well-being, safety and ultimately lives to be expendable or, at best, worth putting at risk in the name of human rights and democracy in the abstract.
Small wonder, then, that a two-state solution advocate like Dershowitz can, in “The Case for Peace,” dismiss the one-state solution as “an argument made in bad faith. It is an attempt to accomplish by law and demography what Hamas seeks to achieve by terrorism: the extinction of Israel. The practical consequences of such a state would be to leave millions of Jews geographically isolated, politically powerless, and physically defenseless.”
Two states impossible?
And yet, even after one concludes that the one-state solution would be a solution of spilled Jewish blood, there is something else these books contend that needs to be considered in all justice.
Both claim that the two-state solution — i.e., a separate Jewish state of Israel and a separate Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is no longer possible or workable. Since Tilley makes the better argued and documented case for this, I will quote her reasons why:
“Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian territory [i.e., the West Bank] into a vestige too small to sustain a viable national society…. By the end of the 1990s, [Jewish settlements] were major urban complexes [with] 230,000 settlers … embedded in the region, with jobs, children, social networks and full cultural lives … [T]his massive grid’s economic, political, and demographic weight [have] rendered it a politically immovable object.”
“Any Palestinian state created in the twisted scraps of land remaining is certain to fail Palestinian national hopes and needs…. Even if a Palestinian ‘state’ were declared in this dismembered enclave, it can bring only continuing instability.
“The resulting Palestinian statelet would be blocked off physically from the Israeli economy, its major cities would be cut off from each other, and its government would be unable to control the territory’s water resources, or manage its trade with neighboring states. It would comprise little more than a sealed vessel of growing poverty and demoralization.”
Tilley further contends that Israel, under both Labor and Likud administrations, deliberately created such conditions, because of the need to control the vitally important water resources there and in order to encourage “soft transfer,” which she defines as “mass emigration of Palestinians to wherever in the world they can find kin or jobs.”
But realities are increasingly against Israel maintaining its identity as a Jewish state, Tilley argues. “Ultimately, Israel-Palestine itself was always far too small and sensitive a region to sustain two states. The Jewish state now faces the last act of its own Greek tragedy – the Zionist project to reconstitute a Jewish nation-state in an ancient land already holding an indigenous national society.
“Still too democratic in character to tolerate expelling the Palestinians en masse a third time, yet too ethnocentric to absorb them, Israel wavers on the knife-edge of its own self-identity, as a putatively civil democracy formally premised on ethnic hierarchy, a ‘light unto the nations’ that relied for its formation – and still relies for its preservation – on ethnic cleansing.
“For the Jewish state is inherently unstable as long as non-Jews live within it; only by ethnic cleansing in each succeeding generation can it ensure continuing Jewish dominion. Neither the Wall nor a crippled Palestinian state will permit that formula to endure. Israel will only suffer needlessly, politically and physically, from the apartheid formula it has invented in its own unenlightened self-interest – until, inevitably, someday Jews cease to be a majority.”
In other words, within the Israel-Palestinian/Arab conflict — alongside prejudice and disregard for Jews and Judaism — there exist some real issues involving the well-being of the Palestinian and Israeli Arabs and real Israeli encroachments upon them. And these are matters that many two-state solution advocates like Dershowitz refuse to acknowledge.
“The Case for Peace” has some problems in common with his earlier “The Case for Israel” — repetition of arguments and quotations, a sizable amount of pages devoted to Dershowitz himself and those who have attacked him. But what really makes it an inadequate brief to counter Tilley and Qumsiyeh is his failure to grapple with those concrete issues.
It is telling that while both Tilley and Qumsiyeh devote pages to the issue of water in the West Bank and how Israel and Jewish settlements have been wresting control of it away from Palestinian Arabs there, Dershowitz’s book doesn’t discuss this topic at all.
So if both of these solutions are inadequate, based as they are on different denials of reality and different inflictions of unacceptable suffering – what is left?
Must we endure a status quo of periods of fighting and terrorism alternating with periods of truce and half-hearted negotiations, a grim muddling through to see which side ultimately can outlast the other? Or can only one more big Arab-Israel war settle things once and for all?
I do not have the wisdom or insight enough to know. But I do understand enough to know that nobody else has them either, certainly not the authors of any of these books. Perhaps we can only hope that they are all wrong; that some yet undreamed solution is out there, if it can only be discovered and accepted.
