In the comments to my earlier post on Israel/Palestine, North and Michael Drew got into a very intelligent (and spirited) back and forth.

Michael eventually wrote the following (way down in the thread of comment #9):

The question is why or whether they [The Palestinians] would be interested in a state for themselves, knowing at this point what it would consist of (not what it might have done). You are eliding the question by saying that they should want it if they have interest in a state on that territory. That is the question. Palestinian nationalism is largely a thing of the 1980s and to some extent 90s. Since then, it has largely been a crutch for the U.S. and Israel’s efforts at peace. Whatever reason Palestinians once had to desire the state on offer has been long since spoilt by war and economic siege. I honestly don’t see what reason they would have to accept what they can now get. It would not even come with any guarantee of security from Israeli interference pursuant to “security interests’ — no Israeli government could ever take that off the table. Given the history, and given that the Palestinian “state” would be effectively demilitarized, the “state” would amount to nothing more than a voluntarily promise of nonintervention from Israel. The cumulative effects of economic isolation and sense that historical wrongs had only been institutionalized would guarantee eventual violence directed at Israel from the new “state,” and the cycle of intervention and retaliation would begin anew.

This is a very important and well articulated point of view.  As a quick review, my own sense of how crippled the Two State Framework is, led me to argue (in the comments) for the out-there idea that the US should take over the West Bank to create a kind of state-tutelage for the Palestinians, cover security for the Israelis, and separate the two populations.  An admittedly somewhat insane idea*, only surpassed in its insanity (I think) by the current state of affairs and its seemingly unstoppable trajectory towards Israel ruling over a stateless ethnic majority disenfranchised politically.  The consequences of an increasingly unstoppable Accidental Empire.

Michael’s argument gains support from Juan Cole, who in the conclusion to a classic takedown of Jeffrey Goldberg (always in good order), says the following:

Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.  (boldface in original)

For those interested, the best argument I’ve ever read towards a a one state solution is that of Ali Abu Nimah (titled One Country).  The book makes some strong arguments and is definitely worth reading and considering, but I still admit to thinking there are serious potential flaws in the idea.  Flaws that push (as discussed in this interview with Abu Nimah) even people like Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky to favor a two state solution.  In that same interview Abu Nimah counters:

What I argue in the book [One Country], of course this isn’t about destroying Israel. It isn’t about turning things over from one day to the next. Palestine-Israel is not the only country that faces this sort of power struggle along ethnic, religious, and other lines. We have to look for structures, and I talk about this in some detail in the book. How they did it in South Africa, where by the way, the same sorts of arguments were made against ending Apartheid and against one person, one vote. We have to look at countries like Belgium, we have to look at Northern Ireland.

There are many models out there for dealing with those sort of things. So that you have one person, one vote, full democracy, full equality, while at same time, ethnic communities, the Israeli-Jewish community, the Palestinian community, will have mechanisms for expressing their national identity, for decision making over issues that concern them. We have to stop thinking this very simplistic, binary way. And this is where I’m trying to take the discussion with this book.

While I generally think the idea of Two States is much more workable in theory, I’m leaning more towards the notion that it is has become unfeasible in practice, however preferred it might be at the hypothetical/policy level.  I think these kinds of discussions need to take place–what do we do if the Two State Solution fails?  What do we do if the Two State Solution is not workable, if there is no realistic path from here to there?

If the Two State Solution is dead (or at least becoming incapacitated with little to no hope of legitimate recovery), then we are left only with the choice of Israeli domination of a (soon to be) ethnic majority without political rights, which would call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and continue the horrible, right-less existence of the Palestinian people.  Or one state.  Again that binary choice occurs IF the Two State Solution is dead.  My own view is that The Two State Solution is increasingly on the precipice–while for others we’ve already fallen off that edge.

I think much more work needs to be done on thinking about what safeguards there would be in a One State framework.  Abu Nimah begins that discussion, but I think it needs to go much further.

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* I didn’t know these previous to TEH GOOGLE telling me, but apparently this fellow has argued that the united Israeli-Palestinian state become the 51st State in the US.

Stephen Walt thinks that the latest spat between Israel and the US is grounds for bringing back up a topic that very few want to discuss:  what plans/solutions/options remain if (and when) the two state solution fails?

His ideas on that subject (which are worth the read) are here.

Obligatory preface on Stephen Walt–I didn’t find his Israel Lobby book persuasive.  I do find his questions about the future of the two state solution very important and worth consideration.  (i.e. The second link above).

The Two State Solution, which as Walt correctly notes was only official policy at the extreme terminus of the Clinton administration, was officially endorsed (from the beginning) by George W. Bush (but never really followed up on) and is now the de facto position across the board, reflected by the Obama administration’s outrage over the recent Israeli decision to start construction on 1600 (1600!!!) houses in East Jerusalem.  East Jerusalem being of course at the center of the Two State Solution as the planned capital of the (hypothetical) Palestinian state.

The Two State Solution I believe is an extension of the earlier successes of US, Arab, and Israeli diplomacy–the so-called Land for Peace paradigm.  Israel gave back land captured in the Six Day War to various Arab states who in turn recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel and end the state of war between the two countries.

This basic format worked in the case of The Camp David Accords with Egypt and formed the template for the later Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, which President Clinton helped negotiate.  It’s also the deal that President George H. W. Bush offered (via Sec. of State Baker) to the Syrians (and by extension at the time their proxies Lebanon) and continues to this day to be on the table–which the Syrians have yet to take the Israelis up on.

This framework, however, worked because the states in question already existed as states.  Applying this model to the Palestinian process appears to have put the cart before the horse.  The failure of the Oslo Accords looms large in this scenario.  If you take a more pro-Israeli position, the failure occurred because the PLO/Fatah never really led in the fashion of true statesmen.  If you take the side of the Palestinians, Oslo failed because the deal offered was not a viable one that any group (including Fatah) could have claimed domestically as a win and thereby cemented their legitimacy.

In other words, the PLO wasn’t a state and therefore couldn’t negotiate under a paradigm presuming its existence existence as a state.  [Even PM Rabin more or less unilaterally declared the PLO the rightful spokespersons for the Palestinian Authority.]

Here is Walt on the options remaining if (as I believe looks increasingly likely) the Two State Solution dies: [Read more →]

Roger Cohen is on board with ending the Peace Process and moving to a de facto ceasefire (though admittedly still pretty awful ) in Israel-Palestine.  Money quote: [Read more →]

Rob Malley and Hussein Agha have a very thought-provoking piece in the New York Review of Books (h/t Marc Lynch) concerning the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.  In effect, they argue that the peace process is a flawed, failed construct.  I agree. Do read the whole thing.

But here it is in a nutshell:

The problem with the two-state idea as it has been construed is that it does not truly address what it purports to resolve. It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state’s legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel’s responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state’s birth.

This logic is devastating:

If the objective is to end the conflict and settle all claims, these matters will need to be dealt with. They reach back to the two peoples’ most visceral and deep-seated emotions, their longings and anger. For years, the focus has been on fine-tuning percentages of territorial withdrawals, ratios of territorial swaps, and definitions of Jerusalem’s borders. The devil, it turns out, is not in the details. It is in the broader picture.

The problem was built into the structure of the negotiations. It is only a slight exaggeration to describe them as a confidence game, a tacit understanding by all sides to elude the historic core of the matter through disingenuous ambiguity. Palestinians hoped they could achieve their goals even as they persisted in denying the Jewish people’s entitlement to even part of the land; Israelis trusted that if they granted Palestinians some kind of state the whole problem would fade away. The US assumed the role of a willing participant. Others, Europeans included, lazily followed.

A kind of “bipartisan consensus” exists among the leadership of both sides:

Establishing two states would resolve the occupation, but that is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of a problem that arose decades before the occupation began. An Israeli leader will be loath to relinquish territory and permit the emergence of an indisputably sovereign Palestinian state at least as long as suspicion lingers that Palestinians have not genuinely made their peace with the new reality, that they are biding their time, and that a future of renewed strife lies in store.

In turn, a Palestinian leader cannot credibly proclaim that the conflict has come to a close if the solution ignores the genesis of the Palestinian plight and the historic core of its national cause. To adopt such a stand would be tantamount to conceding that the refugees—who make up a majority of the Palestinian population, were once its political vanguard, and could well regain that position—had waged six decades of struggle by mistake and endured six decades of suffering in vain. Internal challenges to such an arrangement might not be immediate. But they would be certain and severe, laying bare the fragility of a supposedly historic accord.

It seems to me the Peace Process has been built (at least since the 80s) on the foundation of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords.  In that case, you had two already existing states working diplomatically with each other.  One state (Egypt) found a modicum of a victory in the Yom Kippur War.  The Israelis had something to offer in exchange for peace, a deal that was preferable to both sides.  That precedent guided the Clinton-era Jordan-Israel peace deal.

And even during the first Bush administration, then Sec. of State James Baker wanted to make a deal first with Syria along these lines.  The thinking was that if they could get Syria on board, Lebanon would be brought in (via Syria’s de facto control), Jordan would join (which they later did anyway), and Saudi Arabia would at least not stand in the way, if not declare its acceptance of the Israeli state.  The theory was that if all of the Arab states were in that would then push Arafat  to accept the deal–that latter point is a hypothetical one now so it’s impossible to really know.

Whatever the case, that moment is long gone and these faux attempts to revive it are nothing but a case of going through the motions politically, further engendering corrosive cynicism on both sides.

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Via Spencer Ackerman is George Gilder’s pretty reprehensible argument in favor of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories:

[KATHRYN JEAN] LOPEZ: What do you mean these wretched refugees benefited from Israel?

GILDER: The key period was between 1967 and 1987 when the Israelis administered the territories after Arabs refused all negotiations with their famous three “nos.” The Arabs were adamant against trading “land for peace” following their defeat in the ’67 war, so Israel inherited the territories.

During this 20-year period under Israeli rule, some 250,000 Israelis settled in the Territories. These were the supposedly predatory settlers. They supplied the infrastructure of power, water, education, and medical care that attracted nearly ten Arab settlers for every one Israeli. During this period, the economy in the territories grew some 25 percent per year, nearly the fastest in the world, and far faster than that of Israel itself, which was still bogged down in socialism. Arab life expectancy rose from 40 to around 70. Their incomes tripled while their population soared. Seven universities and 2,500 factories were established. It was the golden age for Palestinian Arabs.

Ackerman is right to compare this to the contention – occasionally made by retrograde conservatives/modern-day confederate-sympathizers – that American slavery wasn’t so bad, as it brought Africans to America, which is so much more awesome than Africa, or something.  In fact, you can extend this argument to almost any instance of oppression; British domination of India wasn’t a complete wash, after all, Indians benefited from British education, British industry and British culture.  Yes, a few million Indians had to die for “civilization,” but really, higher prices have been paid for less.

That said, I wonder if George Gilder – or any other American neo-colonialist – would make the same argument in support of Britain’s control over the American colonies.  Again, the United States owes much of its early prosperity to British industry and British markets.  Indeed, it goes far deeper than that; the entire American tradition of self-governance grows out of British conceptions of representative government.  It’s always worth remembering that before the American revolutionaries were revolutionaries, they were Englishmen qua Englishmen fighting for their God-given rights as British citizens.  The logic that Gilder uses to justify Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories almost certainly applies to British occupation of the American territories, and I’m honestly curious as to whether he would have opposed revolutionary efforts to sever America from the crown (for what its worth, I probably would have, if I were a land-owning white dude).

Well, not exactly, but if you want to set down that cynicism for a moment, this could be the beginning of something perhaps sort of resembling a peace… [Read more →]

by max socol

In the bowels of ED Kain’s most recent Israel prophecy, there’s a (pleasantly civil) debate swirling around the security implications of a West Bank withdrawal. As I mentioned there, it reminded me of speaking to Akiva Eldar, the Ha’aretz reporter and author whose anti-settlement politicking has made him a national star, of a sort.

I very much like Eldar and enjoyed his talk. He delivers a persuasive and excellent presentation on just how destructive settlements are — so good, in fact, that I dug out my old docket pad, where I scribbled the notes I took (just below, appropriately, notes from my interview with the party leader of National Union, the radical right-wing settlers’ party that wants to force Palestinians out of the West Bank.) Here they are, for those who are interested: [Read more →]

Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish physician and theologian of Medieval Cordoba, had a tendency to refer to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad as “the madman.”  Maimonides had reasons abundant to use this term.  The Jews of Cordoba lived for a long time as dhimis before being forcefully expelled by their Islamic rulers.  Granted, had he lived a few centuries later on the Christian conquerors would have given him much the same choice as the Almohades: conversion, exile, or death.  He traveled across Africa, to the Holy Land, and eventually ended up under the protection of the remarkably tolerant Kurdish Sultan of Egypt, Saladin.

I think Maimonides may have given a similar nickname to the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Jeffrey Goldberg has a good round-up of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements on Israel.  The “Madman of Tehran” has a nice ring to it, and Maimonides would be quite correct in leveling at him were he with us today.

October, 2005: “Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine… I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.”

October, 2006: “This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely…”You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people…The wrath of the region’s people is boiling… You should not complain that we did not give a warning. We are saying this explicitly now…”

October 5, 2007: “Canada and Alaska have vast lands, why don’t you relocate them over there and keep helping them over there with (aid of) 30 to 40 billion dollars per year for building a new existence over there?”

And there’s much, much more.  Diplomat he is not.  Orator and propagandist, certainly.  His demagoguery, however, is of the blatant and – quite frankly – laughable variety.  Madman, perhaps, but also national buffoon.  He is one of those men who can stir the embers of national discontent but is otherwise generally harmless.  The blustering and bloviating are fit more for conservative talk radio than any substantive national platform.  Like many of his contemporary demagogues, he is mostly boring. [Read more →]

Via Andrew, Chris Hitchens has some harsh words for Israeli settlers in the West Bank:

Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it’s fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein’s rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

It’s wonderful to hear this sort of thing from Hitchens because few people could question whether or not he’s a friend to Israel, though quite honestly this sort of essay could blacklist him fairly quickly, especially if he were to follow up with repeated criticisms of the far-right Israeli setters and the crazy religious leaders who are quite single-handedly making an Israeli push for a two-state solution look less and less likely daily.  The same is true, of course, of the crazy religious and nationalist Palestinians, though there is quite a bit more press on that front, and a rather more widespread agreement that their tactics are wrong.  People have less knowledge and thus less opinion or investment in the subject of radical Israeli settlers.

It’s time Americans began to learn about the settlements and how very un-American they are.  After all, the thing that unites us most closely with Israel is our affinity with that country.  But settlements and apartheid are not things Americans generally approve of – or at least not since the days of Indian killing out West.

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Noah Pollock is in rare form in this Commentary Post – utilizing all the tired, typical old strawmen and red herrings against “paleos” and the unabashedly critical conservative voices at the American Conservative magazine who dare to come out against the boiler plate pro-Israel inanities of the Commentary crowd.   Writes Pollack:

In my opinion, a magazine that attempts to undermine the democratic legitimacy of the contribution of Jews to the public debate by repeatedly referring to them as a “fifth column” is indeed an un-American publication. TAC also publishes the embarrassing conspiracy-theorizing of Philip Giraldi, a man whose writing is almost entirely dedicated to exposing what he believes are the Israeli or Jewish plots manipulating U.S. policy. The attempt to write one religious or ethnic group out of the debate by assigning them membership in conspiracies and imputing to them dual loyalties is indeed un-American, and there should be nothing controversial about saying so. [emphasis added]

Is that what the writers at the American Conservative are doing?  I’ve read a lot of columns by a wide variety of writers at TAC, from Daniel Larison to Pat Buchanan, and I am having a very, very difficult time recalling when a single one of them referred to the “contribution of Jews to the public debate” as a “fifth column.”  I have heard the Israel Lobby referenced as a “fifth column” but I certainly haven’t heard TAC’s writers calling out all Jewish contributions to the public debate as such.  Of course, I’m looking for evidence and reason, two things Pollack is wholly lacking.

And that’s the point of Pollack’s rhetoric.  Just insert “Jew” wherever the word “Israel” pops up and you can basically call out your opponents and critics as anti-Semites without actually having to overtly state it – and sometimes insinuations are simply more powerful than outright statements. This is what the Commentary crowd does whenever pressed with legitimate criticism of Israel.  This is the neoconservative playbook on dissent management.  This tactic is tragic and foolish because it really is important to have a wide variety of voices and opinions on the Israel/Palestine debate.  Dissent from the status quo is necessary.  If we only have the gung-ho pro-Israel hawks debating with other gung-ho pro-Israel hawks then we don’t have a debate, we have an echo chamber.  If we only have the neocon talking points to reference when debating whether or not to bomb Iran – it should be telling that we’ve even gotten to that point – then we’re rarely given an opportunity to dig into the deeper historical truths of that nation.  And without history we have the Iraq invasion all over again.

Now to get to the meat of this post, it seems that Pollack considers Buchanan’s critique of the Israel lobby as “un-American” to be rather “un-American” itself.  Would the proper response be for me to call out Pollack as un-American in turn?  Then perhaps someone could level a similarly vapid retort against me.  As Andrew points out, this becomes “a slightly comic and self-defeating cycle in which those who call others un-American are thereby called un-Americans in turn.”

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There is something remarkable and frightening about the fact that Avigdor Lieberman’s Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, came in third in Israel’s recent parliamentary elections, gaining 15 seats in the Knesset, only 13 fewer than Tipi Livni’s moderate Kadima Party and only 12 fewer than the Conservative Likud Party.  Yisrael Beiteinu, which translates to Israel is Our Home, campaigned on an anti-Arab ticket–denouncing Israeli Arabs as unpatriotic, and calling for their expulsion.  The Party could very well decide whether Likud or Kadima is the head of the next government, unless the two should choose to form a unity Government.

Now, every Democratic nation should be able to choose who they please to run their Government, even racially driven, extremist Parties like Yisrael Beiteinu, but the fact of that Party’s success does call to question how long Israel’s current course will be sustainable.  I am a great admirer of Israel, which I view as a a nation at odds with itself, a land of hope and tragedy, a strange mixture of redemption and defeat, startling oppression and the promise of freedom.

The birth of the State of Israel signaled the last chapter in the long Diaspora, but has led to sixty years of Palestinian existence as a homeless population–a sort of new Diaspora spread out across refugee camps, occupied territories, and Arab cities across the region; lead by terrorists, nationalists, and religious leaders; second class citizens in whatever place they have the bad luck of ending up in.  Israel, once lively with the dream of the original idealistis who founded it, has over the years become increasingly militarized, entrenched, and anti-Democratic.

I do sympathize with the plight of Israel.  It took a number of wars to drive them to this place.  Those misguided socialists whose ideas founded the Zionist movement have all been replaced by more realistic leaders.  Unfortunately, the reality that many of these new visionaries live by – be they Avigdor Lieberman or Tipi Livni -  is one of stubborn refusal to make the hard choices necessary to bring about a lasting peace, and in some cases a stubborn resolve to see these compromises aborted.

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, ostensibly a move toward peace with the Palestinians, was coupled with increased settlement of the West Bank, a region fast becoming a mini-apartheid state with an state; a three-year blockade that has severely damaged the living conditions of Gazans (who had already become a captive market for Israeli exports, and have now been made dramatically more dependent on Israeli mercy and goods through the blockade and recent war); and despite all of this, continued rocket fire out of Gaza, continued violence between IDF forces and Palestinians, assassinations, arrests, and kidnappings–essentially, for all the increased militarism on Israel’s part, it has been met only with violent reprisal and the collective suffering of Israelis and Palestinians.

And now, Israelis have voted into the Knesset fifteen seats for a Party dedicated to the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, and the continued expansion of Israeli settlers into the West Bank–a policy whose logical outcome is the total expulsion of Palestinians and Arabs from Israel altogether, or into smaller Gaza-like enclaves within the West Bank, surrounded by Israeli security forces, and utterly dependent on Israel for their continued survival. [Read more →]

Reading over this article from Jewcy while I was looking for updates on the recent Israeli elections about the proported rise in anti-semitism in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Chavez’s support for groups like Hamas, I was struck by a question: is it intellectually and morally acceptable to attempt to understand where groups like Hamas are coming from and cultivate a certain degree of sympathy/empathy for the circumstances that have given rise to them?

This question is distinct from the notion of supporting a group like Hamas, which, by my lights, is a pretty difficult move given that one of its core principles is the complete annihilation of another state and its people. I believe pretty firmly that I would feel the same if that state weren’t Israel, so let us jettison both the “blind love of Israel” and “ignorant romanticizing of Hamas” arguments alike. I should also clarify that I am talking about finding sympathy and empathy in one’s heart for Hamas, as distinct from doing the same for Palestinians in Gaza generally — I don’t want to overstate my suggestion here, but neither do I want to falsey sugar-coat it.

The more I’ve thought about the question, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that finding such sympathy/empathy is a key component in understanding and successfully seeking a resolution to the generations long conflict in the region. For all my recent talk about cultivating a better interventionism, I continue to believe that there is no real military solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is only a human solution (call it a political solution if you like, but what I’m pointing to is human beings figuring out a way and cultivating an openness to living together). That there will by necessity, given the players in this conflict, be a military component to the lead up to such a resolution, as has already been abundantly demonstrated, is a sad fact, but I don’t think it detracts from the reality that at the end of the day the military elements of this conflict will eventually have to become exhausted and some kind of human solution will have to emerge if there is ever going to be a “just and lasting peace”. To perhaps assuage some of my interlocutors on interventionism, I don’t take that to be an isolated incident in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think it is true broadly that there are no real military solutions to what generally in geo and regional politics boil down to human conflicts, but I’m also aware that there are times when use of force becomes sadly necessary (so my whole track on interventionism is trying to formulate a better version thereof). [Read more →]