The tormented dance of the colonizer: Peter Beinart, liberal Zionism and the battle for Palestine

Earlier this year Jerusalem-based journalist and analyst Nathan Thrall called out the Zionist left for promoting the fiction that as long as Israel refrains from annexing occupied Palestinian land, it does not cross the line into apartheid. The essay, “The Separate Regimes Delusion: Nathan Thrall on Israel’s Apartheid,” was published by the London Review of Books on January 21, 2021. “The premise that Israel is a democracy,” he wrote, “rests on the belief that one can separate the pre-1967 state from the rest of the territory under its control.” The “separate regimes delusion” has been a key component of the almost five-decades long political theater of the peace process to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. As Israel has continued to take land and impose a system of control and fragmentation that has made the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state impossible, liberal Zionists have clung desperately to the fiction of the two-state solution as all that stands in the way of the now undeniable reality that Israel and its occupied territories comprise a single apartheid state. Accordingly, a storm of protest erupted in response to the government’s espoused intent to annex 30% of the West Bank in early summer 2020. It was in the midst of this controversy that Peter Beinart’s “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” appeared on July 7, 2020 in Jewish Currents. Cutting the Gordian knot of a Jewish and democratic Israel, Beinart endorsed the idea of a single state for Jews and Palestinians. 

A fervent Zionist, which he reaffirms in the Jewish Currents article, Beinart has struggled to reconcile his commitment to humanitarianism with Israel’s trampling of Palestinians’ rights and its increasing alignment with the most conservative elements in U.S.society. In the process of threading this needle, Beinart has not hesitated to break ranks with the liberal Zionist establishment. In a 2010 piece in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” he called out his fellow Jews in the U.S. for their reluctance to publicly oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. A New York Times opinion piece followed in 2012, advocating a boycott of goods produced in the illegal settlements. When, in June 2020, in his own words crossing the “red line” of allegiance to the two-state solution, Beinart embraced the notion of one multinational state or federation, it seemed he was ready to go even farther. “It is time,” he wrote, “for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality. …to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.” Appearing to many to be a radical shift for Beinart, the piece was celebrated by many on the Left as a victory for human rights. Surely, Beinart’s argument for a single shared state was another sign that the liberal defense of the Zionist project was crumbling.

Not so.

Beinart assures us that his argument for unification “doesn’t require abandoning Zionism.”  The modern state of Israel, he argues, with its systematic abrogation of Palestinian rights and its relentless taking of land, is a form that Zionism has taken, not its essence. The real Zionism, maintains Beinart, the project that must be saved and is worth saving, can be realized in an Israel shared by Jews and Palestinians. 

Except for this shift away from two states, this is the same position taken by Beinart in his 2012 “The Crisis of Zionism,” where he argued that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was poisoning Israel’s democracy. It was still possible, contended Beinart, to redeem this Israel, in which, free of the unjust occupation, Jews and Arabs would coexist as equals. This stance was in line with what has been the position of mainstream liberal Zionism since the 1993 Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority and laid out the purported roadmap to Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. In his LRB article Thrall lays out the rationale underlying the so-called peace process:  “A conceptual wall must be maintained between two regimes: (good) democratic Israel and its (bad) provisional occupation. This way of thinking is of a piece with the general liberal Zionist belief…that the occupation is occurring somewhere outside the state and that it is temporary, a 53-year-long departure from what liberal Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund call Israel’s ‘liberal democratic founding values.’” 

Beinart’s pivot from two states today does not depart from his fundamental objective, set out in the 2010 article: “Saving liberal Zionism in the United States,” he wrote then, “so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age.”  Today, with the possibility of a Palestinian state foreclosed by successive waves of colonization and annexation, Beinart has turned to unification as the answer. 

Peter Beinart speaking at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress on February 3, 2009. (Photo: The Center for American Progress/Flickr)

Whose problem?

Shortly after the appearance of the Jewish Currents piece, Beinart and Palestinian-American Yousef Munayyer of the Washington DC-based Arab Center were interviewed by the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Lara Friedman. Following Beinart’s explanation of why he had lost faith in the two-state solution, Friedman invited Munayyer to talk about his long-held opposition to the idea that had for decades been the goal of the peace process. Munayyer responded in this way:

“A solution is a tool that you apply to a particular problem, and whether or not a solution is adequate for resolving the problem depends on what the problem is. The way that I see it — and I know that not everybody sees it this way — but the way that I see it and I think a lot of Palestinians see it, is that the problem, certainly for us, is not this identity crisis, this sort of mid-life crisis the Israeli state is going through trying to figure out can I be a democracy and can I be Jewish at the same time and how can I resolve it? That’s not the problem for Palestinians. The problem for Palestinians is what Zionism has done to Palestinians for over a century.” 

“The two-state solution,” he continued, “as it has been discussed and as it has been put forward in every conventional form, is not a resolution to that problem.” 

“For Palestinians, a two-state solution does not adequately resolve, in any conventional understanding, the plight of Palestinian refugees does not approximate justice for them in any realistic way. It leaves huge questions open as to the future of Palestinian citizens of Israel and what becomes of them. The best case scenario does not even result in real sovereignty for Palestinians in a new would-be state in the West Bank and Gaza. It may be a solution to somebody’s problem, it’s not a solution to ours and never has been.” 

Munayyer’s words resonate beyond the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. The voices that demand our attention are those of the oppressed, not those of the oppressors trying to make peace with what they see when they look in the mirror. From Beinart’s opening question, “What makes someone a Jew—not just a Jew in name, but a Jew in good standing—today?” It is clear that his subject is not the liberation of Palestine from colonization and ethnic cleansing. Rather, he is raising a Jewish question, directed to Jews: how, in the face of Israel’s appalling human rights record, can the Jewish state be preserved as the centerpiece of Jewish life and identity? 

Beinart recognizes that the current reality is unacceptable and unsustainable. His outrage over the historic and continuing crimes against the Palestinian people is well-known and longstanding, unalloyed by excuses or justifications for Israel’s human rights crimes. But as long as Beinart clings to Zionism as the answer to antisemitism, the peaceful and just resolution he desires will remain out of reach. Zionism emerged over a century ago to solve a problem, but its success has created a new problem. Since the British government’s endorsement in 1917 of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, the Palestinians have been rendered virtually invisible—their peoplehood denied, their nature misrepresented to suit the interests of the powerful, and their claim to nation status and human rights spurned in favor of Zionist aims. The one state-two state debate, which translates to “how can we make Zionism work?” is a red herring dragged across the path to a solution.

Rewriting history

In drawing a distinction in “The Crisis of Zionism” between the “democratic Israel” inside the pre-1967 borders and the oppressor Israel of the occupation, Beinart demonstrated a striking blindness to what was becoming apparent to more and more observers: that the “occupation” of the West Bank was not a temporary condition, the unintended consequence of a defensive war, inimical to the “essence” of Zionism. It was, rather, the inevitable result of the project to possess all of historic Palestine. In now proposing a “Jewish home” in which the power asymmetry between Jews and Palestinians would be overcome, Beinart is similarly blinkered in eliding Israel’s colonial history and the way it continues to shape the character of the state. In his call for a shared Israel, Beinart is rewriting history —reverting to a Jewish conversation that ended in the early years of the Zionist movement. Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi writes in his recent and indispensable “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine that Zionism “was understood from its beginnings clearly as a colonial settler project…carried out as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population.” 

It is true that from its earliest days, Zionism cherished a vision of a flourishing Jewish culture, unfettered by persecution and marginalization. Very few of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the 20th century were aware that this dream was being pursued through what has now been documented by Jewish Israeli historians as a carefully planned and mercilessly carried out program of colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing. This is the inconvenient truth of the Zionist project—its original sin—stubbornly denied by its adherents and staunchly justified by its apologists. It has doomed Israel to endless conflict, political unsustainability, the stain of illegitimacy and rogue-state status, and a tragic betrayal of Jewish values. Israel’s Jewish citizens, living under increasingly reactionary and militaristic regimes, have been sickened by a culture of fear, isolationism and racism, schooled from childhood that not only their Arab neighbors, but the entire world seeks their destruction.

Palestinians inspect the remains of the offices of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City, following an Israeli airstrike on March 26, 2019. Israel launched airstrikes in Gaza on Monday after a rocket landed near Tel Aviv wounding seven people. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

The persistent legacy of colonialism

As a Jew raised in the Zionism-infused Judaism of the post-Holocaust twentieth century, I agree with Beinart that we must overcome the preoccupation with our historic suffering—that a dignified future for Israel depends on overcoming the victim mentality that has driven our nationalist project. But despite his assertion in the Jewish Currents article that we Jews must free ourselves “from the fear of annihilation [that] has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew” and that “turns Palestinians into Nazis,” Beinart has brought these time-honored justifications for Zionism into his argument for a shared state. He assures readers that working for equality will lessen the risk of violence from Palestinians. He warns of the risk of a “violent Palestinian response” as hope for self-determination fades. Repeated references to “Palestinian violence” are made without nuance, qualification, or context. That context is the history of systematic and violent dispossession and the massive asymmetry between the resistance of the oppressed and the overwhelming power of a national security state. We cannot ignore the resonance of colonialism in this aspect of Beinart’s argument for a shared state. Indigenous peoples marked for dispossession and exploitation are inevitably portrayed by their colonizers as not only backward but dangerous. I know that Beinart does not hold these views. He and I share a passionate commitment to human rights for Palestinians. But in allowing these tropes to infiltrate his argument, Beinart has undercut his plea for a renewed and healthier Jewish identity and his bid for an Israel that can take its place as a legitimate member of the community of nations.

Political Zionism emerged in the political and cultural context of late 19th century Europe, where taking and settling land inhabited by non-Europeans was considered neither immoral nor cruel. Swedish writer and historian Sven Lindqvist, author of “Exterminate All the Brutes,” describes how notions of white supremacy provided the rationale and the roadmap for European colonialism. He quotes a German newspaper in 1894 asserting that only “people of higher culture have the right to a nationality of their own” and an early 20th century German colonialist who claimed, in view of the great contribution to be made by the “great European nations,” that the “primitive native” has no “moral right to exist.” These prevailing assumptions helped the founders of the Zionist movement sidestep considerations about the impact of their project on the indigenous population of Palestine. In his 2003 New York Review of Books article, “Israel: The Alternative,” British-American historian Tony Judt called Zionism an anachronism. “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’” he wrote, “is rooted in another time and place.” Judt was right, but what is most disturbing about Israel today is how it embodies the legacy of colonialism playing out in the economic and political realities of our time.  

Scholar of Black critical and political theory Charisse Burden-Stelly defines “racial capitalism” as “a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, labor superexploitation, and property by dispossession.” Burden-Stelly’s description of how the powerful justify their depredations against dehumanized, dispossessed populations chillingly evokes the case of Israel: “War and militarism perpetuate the endless construction of ‘threats,’” she writes, “against which to defend progress, prosperity, freedom, and security.” The West’s willingness to disregard or excuse Israel’s human rights crimes exemplifies the blindness of the “developed world” to the effects of the globalized economy in a rapidly expanding underclass and the dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples. 

“It is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine,” writes Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappé in his 2007 “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” “Half the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only a very few among them ever managed to return,” Pappé documents. “It is hard to understand,” he continues,  withholding neither his horror nor his incredulity, “why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present should have been so totally ignored.” Rashid Khalidi, discussing the toothless 1967 United Nations resolution demanding the return of territory captured by Israel in June of that year, a resolution that barely references the Palestinians as a people, indicts the international community for “a whole new layer of forgetting, of erasure and myth-making…added to the induced amnesia that obscured the colonial origins of the conflict between Palestinians and the Zionist settlers.”

Beinart holds out the hope that ultimately, power will be shared in a political arrangement committed to equality. But as long as the search for a political solution is shaped by a mindset reinforced over the 100 years of denying Palestinian nationhood, until the perceptions—explicit as well as unspoken—about Palestinians as a threat to the established order have been held up to the light and declared inimical to justice, efforts to overturn the current reality of de facto colonization will fail. We return to Munayyer’s plea: that the answer be sought, not in how to salvage the Zionist project now that the two-state solution is a dead letter, but in the recognition, as he went on to state later in the interview, of the “century-long settler-colonial process that has worked to not only erase Palestinians and their voices on the ground but also silence their voices in the debate about it here in the United States as well.”

The tormented dance of the colonizer

Denial of the racist and colonial nature of Zionism by the world at large not only frustrates efforts to bring peace to the region—it has poisoned Israeli society. In his classic “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” Tunisian-born writer Albert Memmi describes how the role of colonizer affects the character of those who hold power over the dispossessed. According to Memmi, no matter how earnest the desire to improve the situation of the colonized, whether from commitment to human rights or as realpolitik, the experience of living in a colonial framework distorts the perspective and warps the identity of the colonizer. “While he happens to dream of tomorrow, a brand-new social state in which the colonized cease to be colonized,” writes Memmi, the colonizer “does not conceive, on the other hand, of a deep transformation of his own situation and his own personality. In that new, more harmonious state, he will go on being what he is, with his language intact and his cultural traditions dominating.” 

All attempts to change the colonial reality absent a recognition of the colonial mindset will fail, writes Memmi. Borrowing Sartre’s term mauvaise foi, he charges that these efforts constitute “bad faith”— lying to oneself about the nature of one’s own history and current actions. It is an existential dilemma: “He invokes the end of colonization, but refuses to conceive that this revolution can result in the overthrow of the situation and himself. For it is too much to ask ones’ imagination to visualize one’s own end even if it be to be reborn another.” [emphasis in the original.] This leaves him in what Memmi describes as “the tormented dance of the colonizer… .who lives on in the context of colonization in a constant state of contradiction and uneasiness.” 

Relinquishing the idea of a Jewish state is indeed a kind of death – the death of a dream. But when one dream dies, another can be born. Memmi’s context was the liberation of Tunisia from French rule. There the choice for the French was to continue to rule as colonizers or to leave. In the case of Israel, however, there is no parent or colonizer country for the colonizers to return to — the Jews of Israel are home. But in order for that home to be legitimate and sustainable, Israeli Jews must let go of the conviction that Jewish hegemony in Palestine is essential for Jewish survival, self-respect and dignity. To speak of “equality” between Jews and Palestinians without acknowledging the history of separation, domination, and attempted erasure that has shaped the Israeli government’s policies and the worldview of its Jewish citizens is to doom to failure the creation of something new. 

Memmi’s caution against denying the dark truths of one’s history is echoed by African-American journalist Isabel Wilkerson in “Caste: the Origins of our Discontents.” Writing about race in the United States, Wilkerson analyzes “the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.” A persistent and powerful reality, caste is “the infrastructure of our divisions” that has “held each actor in that scene in its grip.” “Whatever you are wishing away” warns Wilkerson, “will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”

Memmi’s depiction of the colonizer’s dilemma matches the situation of Jewish Israelis. In a recent piece in +972 Magazine, “For a new political imagination, Israeli Jews must unlearn Zionism” Israeli sociologist and human rights activist Norma Musih describes her confrontation with the truth of her country’s history. Six depopulated Palestinian villages lie buried beneath the modern city of Tel Aviv. “I knew them as national parks, as ruins along the road, as picnic sites,” she recounts. “Yet when I saw their remains, entangled with the streets, galleries, and coffee shops of Tel Aviv, I could not imagine these villages or their inhabitants becoming part of the city again. …The ethos of Zionism has redrawn the land by means of partition, segregation, and discrimination, leaving no space to envision anything other than what exists today.” Musih’s difficulty picturing a shared future brought her face to face with “the overwhelming power that the Zionist national imaginary has had on my thinking.”  She laments that “[v]ery few Israeli Jews have the political imagination to see themselves as equals to the Palestinians.” Musih submits that Israelis must unlearn Zionism. This means “understanding the ideology not only as a national movement but as a colonial one—in other words, understanding it through the lens of the Nakba” (Nakba—the Arabic for catastrophe—is the Palestinians’ word for the dispossession and expulsions of 1947-1949).

Quoted in a 2012 article in New York Jewish Week, Beinart worried that his children might have to choose between “blind support” for Israel and the commitment to justice and universalism he hoped to pass on to them. But we do have to choose. Accepting Zionism as a workable, sustainable political program is a kind of blindness. It requires a striking lapse in critical thinking and has led to the moral crisis and political dead end in which we find ourselves. Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) expresses the Zionist dream: “to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” This yearning is understandable and it is powerful. Zionism presented a kind of desperate logic for the Jews of 19th century Europe—but it is wrong and unsustainable today. Only when the Jewish community and Israel’s supporters around the world come to understand Zionism as a catastrophically flawed answer to Jewish suffering will Israel be able to turn to the task of re-envisioning itself as a political entity committed to democratic principles. The end of Zionism will not be the disaster that so many Jews—and Christians—fear. Rather, it will open Israel to a future where the Other is embraced, liberated from the present reality, in which armies are mustered, walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined, are vilified and attacked. “Saving” Zionism by trying to make it into something it is not, takes us in the wrong direction.

At the close of his essay, Beinart asks us to imagine the Jewish and Palestinian co-presidents of a shared state gathering at a future “Museum of the Nakba” as a rabbi recites the Jewish prayer of mourning. But it is not enough to mourn our victims. The Jewish preoccupation with debating one versus two states is a continuation of the self-absorption and blindness that has afflicted us for too long. The challenge is not to find a way to keep the state through accommodation with the Palestinians. It is rather about seeing the unvarnished truth of our history and allowing ourselves to experience horror over what has become of the Zionist dream. We must acknowledge that Zionism was a mistake—an understandable but catastrophic wrong turn in our quest for safety and dignity. Until then, we will continue to build a state on top of a lie and a crime. Until then, the Palestinians will continue to resist by steadfastly refusing to relinquish their identity, their way of life, and their connection to their homeland—occupied, harassed, imprisoned, blockaded, bombarded, starved, and betrayed by their political leaders, but proud, unbowed, and refusing to disappear. Jews must recognize that our story today is not what was done to us, but what we are now doing to others. This is our tragedy, our catastrophe. This is what we must mourn. 

Battles joined

Beinart’s question “What makes someone a Jew” may help advance the Jewish conversation about Israel. But it is not the central question for a world confronting the reality of a nation state practicing apartheid with the diplomatic and financial backing of the world’s remaining superpower and the theological support of most of the world’s churches. How much longer will Zionism be kept on life support before it is allowed to expire, so that Israel, in concert with the rest of the world, can get on with the decisions that will determine the future of our planet? Unpacking the reality of Palestine today offers an opportunity to wake up to the global system of privilege, power and greed that is responsible for so much suffering and that can only be expected to increase. It is no longer possible to ignore the calamity that is bearing down on us in the form of extreme weather, shortages of food and water, critical inequalities in healthcare and housing, mass migration, civil war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. 

Conversations about what political arrangements can best serve the interests of Palestinians and Jews may prove valuable when conditions permit the parties to sit at the table as equals. Until then, we should direct our attention to the network of liberation movements linking the Palestinian cause with other struggles against structural violence, economic injustice and looming environmental catastrophe. Citing W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., who both placed the African American struggle for equality “in a broad international context,” Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, author of “Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire” admonishes those who have “provincialized their aspirations for a just society.” He continues: “In remaining bounded by their particular contexts of oppression, they have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that…routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens.” The question that must open the conversation about Israel and Palestine today is not what does it mean to be a Jew, but what does it mean to be Black in the United States, subject to economic disparity, police brutality and mass incarceration, a farmer in Central America or the Sahel driven to desperate flight by crop failure and violence, or a member of a dispossessed indigenous people living in the heart of the colonial entity built on the ruins of her civilization. 

Slowly but inevitably, politicians are being challenged to confront the disconnect between their avowed positions on racial justice, human rights, and self-determination and their political and economic alignment with the State of Israel. Beinart’s insistence on the democratic “essence” of Zionism is dangerously out of step with reality. “By embracing its illiberal and discriminatory essence,” notes Khalidi, “modern Zionism is increasingly at odds with the ideals, particularly that of equality, on which Western democracies are based.” These ideals, he maintains, “are threatened by illiberal and populist authoritarian trends in the world today.” 

Palestinian-American legal scholar, human rights attorney and author of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine Noura Erakat lays bare the “racialized structure” of Israeli civil law, designed to protect the state from what she terms the “Palestinian native presence.” In this, she points out, Israel is abetted by the international community, which regards Palestinians as “refugees necessitating humanitarian concern, but not a dispossessed people in need of a political solution.” Khalidi agrees: “The Palestinians,” he points out, “could be treated as no more than a nuisance, or at best as a humanitarian issue.  Indeed, after 1967, their existence was acknowledged mostly under the rubric of terrorism purveyed by Israel and eventually adopted by the United States.” Israel’s ability to pursue its project of dispossession, he observes, “rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans.” 

Acknowledgement of this reality is missing from the political discourse. It is missing from Beinart’s essay. It is missing in the reactions to his latest proposal, both for and against. The colonization and attempted erasure of the Palestinians has been recognized and vigorously debated for decades. The debate has intensified in response to the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and the 2009 Kairos document of the Palestinian Christians. Human rights organizations, labor unions, community-based coalitions and campus groups in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas have responded to the BDS call. The Kairos document, “A Word Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering,” has roused the church, reminding it of the history-changing movements for racial and economic justice that emerged in the grassroots of the churches in Germany, Latin America, the United States and South Africa in the 20th century. Clergy, theologians, educators and human rights workers on local, national and global levels of the churches are speaking out for Palestine, challenging the unspoken norms that prohibit censure of Israel and that equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Prompted by the theology emerging from Palestine, the church is examining its key role in the history of Eurocentric white supremacy and the horrors of colonialism as well as casting a critical eye on Christian Zionism, past and present. A parallel process is unfolding in the Jewish community, where voices, young and old, are calling their denominations and advocacy organizations to account for the acceptance, either tacit or direct, of Israel’s ongoing crimes. Claiming that Zionism does not represent their values, they are questioning whether the Jewish state can be part of the Jewish future.

The debate has crossed over into the wider global community. The Palestinian cause has emerged as an expression and powerful symbol of the struggle for economic and political justice that is shaping up between the formerly-colonized nations (the “Global South”) and their past colonizers. Erakat observes that international law, established after World War I by the victorious European powers, purportedly to regulate relations between nations and to safeguard human rights, was actually designed to preserve the colonial order in a world reconfigured by war. She describes how the former colonial powers, eventually joined by the United States, have manipulated international law to block the Palestinians’ 100 year-long pursuit of nationhood and self-determination. If, reflecting its colonial origins, international law serves the interests of the powerful, what can we call upon in the work to put an end to apartheid in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan? We have a movement: churches, campuses, labor unions, and the solidarity of those who continue the struggle for racial and economic justice on every continent. What does it mean to be a Jew today? asks Peter Beinart. If it means anything, it means to be part of this.

The two-state solution has died, not because of Palestinian rejectionism or because the political muscle of the settler movement has overpowered successive Israeli governments. It died because Zionism could never allow it to be, could never countenance nationhood and self-determination for Palestinians, rights that from the beginning of the Zionist movement have stood in the way of the Jewish homeland project. The alternative of one democratic state for all its citizens has been advocated by analysts and political activists—Jewish, Christian and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian—for years. Why does the idea reach the level of public debate and grab media attention only when a Jew embraces it? Beinart has been called “the darling of the Left” because of his willingness to criticize Israel. But why does the Left need a Jew’s permission to challenge the sacred cow of Zionism?  Change will come, not by pivoting from “two states living side by side in peace and security” to “one democratic state,” but through a shift in how the Palestinian people are perceived in relation to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Erakat writes: “A discriminatory race-based system is the outcome of a territorial project that seeks to usurp that land and remove the markers of native Palestinian attachment. Any effort to resolve the denial of rights and inequality requires contending with a history of dispossession. It requires committing to a future that affirms the centrality of native people.” [emphasis added.] 

Beinart has made the discourse about Jewish identity and survival, about reforming and preserving Israel as a Jewish project. But it is folly to focus on the Jewish conversation when the issues are so much broader and urgent than the comfort of one privileged and now empowered group. The work to be done, by Jews and by the privileged worldwide, is not to exercise that privilege in opining about the form of a political solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Rather, the work we are facing is on the order of U.S. citizens acknowledging the genocidal history of our republic as a settler colonial project, a project pursued relentlessly until there were no more lands to be stolen and the indigenous peoples transferred to reservations. It is on the order of the United States compensating African Americans for their kidnapping and enslavement and the systematic denial of equality that has been the story of Black people in this country since the undoing of Reconstruction. It is on the order of the South African process of Truth and Reconciliation following the dismantling of apartheid. For Israel, when there is a commitment to fundamentally change the present political order and to unequivocally repudiate the system of racial supremacy, privilege, and inequality upon which it has been built, then, and only then, can Israel begin the work of creating a decent future for its citizens. Until then, new forms of erasure will emerge, new methods of subjugation and dispossession cloaked as reform, and more fruitless attempts to rescue a tragically flawed project. 

A version of this article was published, with a response by Yehezkel Landau, by Tikkun Magazine, on March 18, 2021, under the headline “The Tormented Dance of the Colonizer,” and is reprinted with permission.  For more, see www.tikkun.org.

Source

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes