Jew World Order

We have fully entered the era of the one-state reality. While even progressive Democrats endorse the two-state solution as some sanctified goal, policymakers have moved on. They know a Palestinian state will never be established, there are simply too many Israeli Jews living on Palestinian land, and the ethnic cleansing continues up to the minute, today in Jerusalem. And people have different scenarios of how things will work out. Conflict management — doing nothing substantive in the way of Palestinian rights but trying to ease the situation a bit and hoping the Palestinians accept that as progress — is the preferred answer for even liberal American Zionists.

Here are two interesting recent responses to the current stasis from leftleaning American Jews. One, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, says Jews need to pray for the two-state solution– or anyway, continue to believe in a two-state solution as a “moral and spiritual imperative” and in biblical terms. The second, Ian Lustick, says that the new Israeli government with its reliance on a Palestinian party is taking the country a step closer toward enfranchisement of all Palestinians in one state.

At the J Street conference in March, Jacobs likened the path to the two-state solution to the “long” biblical journey from Egypt to the promised land, and said Jews have to stay the course. Jacobs heads T’ruah, an organization for “rabbis and cantors at the vanguard of the Jewish human rights movement.” Here’s much of her speech:

The journey to the promised land is not an easy one. In the Jewish calendar we’re in the period of the Omer, counting day after day and week after week from Pesach to Shavuout. But Shavuot is not the end of the story either. As we celebrate receiving the Torah, we acknowledge that freedom and self determination come with responsibility.

In the Jewish world today we hear too many people complain that they are giving up on Israel or on the two state solution because it’s just too hard to imagine actually getting there. But giving up is an abdication of our moral and spiritual imperative. It’s an attempt to jump from mitzrayim [Egypt] to the promised land without accepting the obligations that come with freedom and all the starting and the stopping along the journey. Indeed it’s getting stuck in mizrayim, the narrow place, the place of impossibility.

When those of us who are committed to human rights give up on Israel or on the possibility of two states, whether with a hard border or in a confederation model, we cede the space to the right wing, who have spend decades and billions of dollars to build settlements, to push a racist and anti-human rights agenda and to insure that occupation is here to stay.

During the 40 years of the Israelites’ walk through the wilderness, there were thousands of naysayers demanding to give up and go back to Egypt. But there were other voices as well: the scouts Caleb and Joshua who were realistic about the struggles ahead and yet urged the people to have faith and move forward, the generous Israelities who donated their most precious possessions and their talents to building the mishkan [tabernacle] which would summon God into the wilderness, the priests and Levites who faithfully packed up and rebuilt the mishkan at every stage. And of course the young people, the new generation born in the desert, who rejected their parents’ despair and who led us to the promised land.

Every year the vast majority of the American rabbinical and cantorial students spending their required academic year in Israel take part in T’ruah’s year long program that brings them into the West Bank and that introduces them to Israeli and Palestinian human rights leaders.

One student told me that this experience was the the only thing that gave her hope during her year in Israel. Instead of falling into the trap of believing that nothing can change, she met the people who were working to change their own reality. And as a rabbi… she will be a voice, saying, there is a destination and we are going to get there.

Instead of sinking into despair let’s reconnect with the moral and spiritual imperative before us. This community has power, the progressive Israel network has power. Together and in partnership with Israeli and Palestinian leaders we can end the stain of occupation.

We can create an Israel in which all citizens are equal both on paper and in reality. We are not walking away. We are moving forward with faith, with courage and with leadership. The journey may be long, there will be many obstacles along the way. We will need to invest our money, our time, and our passion, but there is a destination, and we are going to get there together.

It’s interesting that Jacobs says abandoning the two-state solution is a submission to the right wing– when many on the left are calling for that abandonment in the name of Palestinian human rights.

One of those voices is Ian Lustick, the professor and author of “Paradigm Lost, (2019)” on the end of the two-state solution. In an article out today (at Smerconish site), Lustick argues that the new Israeli government under Naftali Bennett represents hope: All eight parties right and left in the coalition recognize that there will never be a Palestinian state, and it was this acceptance of the one-state reality that led the Jewish parties to include a Palestinian party in the coalition, for the first time ever (with three Ra’am Party votes for the Bennett government). Lustick envisions that this inclusion will lead to more.

The Israeli leadership no longer argues about the outcome for the occupied territories, he says, and that’s why Ra’am got in:

The reality that there is one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and that there will not be two, explains why a government could form in Israel totally reliant on an Arab political party – an Arab party with indirect ties to the Muslim Brotherhood movement as well as substantive political and material demands. Only now, because its support cannot enable withdrawal from “Judea and Samaria” (Israel’s official term for the West Bank) as part of a two-state solution could a ruling coalition form that relies upon an Arab party as a more-or-less equal partner. Thus does the complexion of this coalition reflect an end to five decades of an Israeli political system dominated by competition over what to do with territory occupied more than half a century ago…

The West Bank, with its 3 million Palestinian inhabitants, and the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip, with its 2 million Palestinian inmates, are as fully part of the Israeli state system as the 2 million Arab citizens of Israel “proper.” No matter if they are Israeli citizens or not, Palestinians are all living within different zones of control within a state of Israel that subjects them to different rules depending on the geographical, national, bureaucratic, residency, and citizenship categories to which they belong.

Lustick extracts hope from this. He says the new Israeli government will stop embarrassing the American government, “its only real ally with outrages against Palestinians.” And more good will follow.

[E]ven very partial democracies, if they feature intense partisan competition, can make progress toward building a more inclusive and reasonable society.  Now that Jews have shown they can rule the country with Arab political support, they may find they can no longer do so without it.  In other words, the long road is now open to a future consistent with President Biden’s important vision for all those living in Israel/Palestine. 

Maybe that’s magical thinking. But it seems more idealistic than Jacobs’s plan.

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