I attended most of this very good conference—organized by the CERI and New York Review of Books—yesterday and the day before, commemorating the life and work of Tony Judt a year after his death. Though it was in Paris there appeared to be more New Yorkers than Parisians in the audience, a number of whom looked to be NYRB authors. The collective brain power in the room was exceptional. The discussion on the future of social democracy was most interesting, notably Pierre Rosanvallon’s excellent talk on the subject. This prompted me to reread Tony Judt’s brilliant lecture—lots of superlatives here—from October 2009, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” It’s a must, if one missed it back then.
The panel on “Palestine beyond reach?” I was most looking forward to, particularly to hear Zeev Sternhell and Sari Nusseibeh. The interventions on this one were of course driven by Judt’s 2003 essay, “Israel: The Alternative,” where he in effect argued that the two-state solution was dead and that the only real alternative was the creation of a single binational state in Israel-Palestine. It was the most controversial piece Judt ever wrote—and he wrote quite a few—and provoked the inevitable firestorm. While I was and remain an admirer of Judt’s work I thought he was way off base on this one, so much so that I wrote a letter to the editor with my critique. After I sent it off a New York friend, who is an occasional NYRB author and knows it from the inside, informed me that the review had already received several thousand letters on Judt’s essay—more than on any in its history—and that mine therefore had a near zero chance of being published. It wasn’t, needless to say. Only four letters were, by persons rather more renowned than I. As I still have the letter, here it is, eight years later
October 17, 2003
To the editors:
Tony Judt’s essay, “Israel: The Alternative” [NYR, Oct. 23], is provocative and brave – one can imagine the hate mail and death threats he’s sure to receive – and will hopefully provoke considered responses from American supporters of Israel. I entirely agree with Judt on everything, except on three points. First, he exaggerates in labeling Israel an anachronism. The Zionist conception of the nation is clearly exclusionary in a way that, e.g., French and American conceptions are not (though French universality was incapable of integrating Algeria – and has ongoing troubles with Corsica – and it is not certain that the US would remain one nation, indivisible, were Puerto Rico to become the 51st state). But I don’t see how the notion of a Jewish nation is fundamentally different from, say, that of a German, Greek, or Japanese nation – such as the Germans, Greeks, and Japanese define it – or of a Palestinian nation for that matter. If anything, Zionism is more open and inclusionary than Palestinian nationalism, as anyone can become a Jew if he or she really wants to and thereby automatically obtain Israeli nationality, whereas to be Palestinian is to be Arab and born of Palestinian parents (and specifically a Palestinian father). Ethnic, jus sanguinis-based nationalisms unfortunately predominate in today’s world and will be with us for a while to come.
Secondly, Judt is way off the mark in seeing some kind of inevitability, not to mention desirability, in a binational state. Such a state, where Jews and Palestinians live together in harmony, is certainly a beautiful idea but the problem is that practically no one in Israel-Palestine wants this, has ever wanted it, or will likely want it in the future. And least of all the Palestinians, who are absolutely fed up with being ruled by Jews and want them out of their lives. Palestinians want their own state, not one where Jews will continue to run the show (which would almost certainly be the case – economically at least – in a binational setup even if Jews were only a third of the population). Israelis who invoke the specter of a binational state (Avraham Burg, Meron Benvinisti, etc) do so out of despair, not conviction that this is at all a desirable solution. Those who advocate a binational state also never hint at how such a thing could possibly be made to work, what its institutions would be, or how it would even come into being in view of the mutual antipathy of the two nations destined to coexist in the new entity. Does anyone seriously imagine that the Israeli and Palestinian electorates – whose mutual loathing will only increase in the foreseeable future – would ever endorse such an arrangement in a referendum? With all due respect to Judt it’s a half-baked idea and which bears no relationship to the reality on the ground in Israel-Palestine.
Which gets to my third disagreement, which is Judt’s assertion that the two-state solution is probably dead. Israel can settle as many Jews as it likes beyond the Green Line and build walls as high as the sky but the rest of the world will never accord this legitimacy. And, needless to say, no legitimate Palestinian leadership will ever accept it. If the present situation continues to fester – and there is no reason to believe it won’t – it will sooner or later destabilize the region and negatively impact on US interests, constraining the US to seriously reengage in the peace process and recover its status as an honest broker. As the Israelis and Palestinians seem incapable of arriving at a solution on their own, the only way out of the impasse, so far as I can see, is the one laid out recently by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, which is for the US, EU, Russia, and ‘moderate’ Arab states to agree among themselves on a two-state final settlement – most certainly along the lines of the Clinton parameters of December 2000 – and oblige the Israeli government and Palestinian authority to submit it directly to their electorates in a referendum, where it would most certainly be ratified.
Reading this eight years later I would modify the third point and drop the bit about Judt being brave—in writing the essay he wasn’t risking a thing apart from the eternal opprobrium of people like Martin Peretz—, but reinforce the arguments in the first two. Israel has its particularities as a society—notably in the size of its religious population—but as a nation it is not an outlier even in the Western world. There is no contradiction between Israel defining itself as the state of a particular national group—the Jewish people, and with those in the diaspora having the right to claim citizenship—and of such being displayed in the symbols of the state (flag, national anthem, etc), while at the same time respecting the rights of national minorities, in this case the Arab citizens of Israel. On this, I am entirely persuaded by the arguments of Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein on the issue. A number of Western democracies have situations analogous to that of Israel—of cross-border diasporas in the country and enjoying the status of national minorities—, e.g. Hungarians in Romania (and also in Serbia and Slovakia), Turks and Albanians in Greece, Swedes in Finland, South Tyroleans in Italy… Israeli Arabs may be second-class citizens and suffer various forms of discrimination—which are not fatalities etched in the stone of the Israeli state, to mix my metaphors—but their cultural, religious, and linguistic rights have always been respected. And, it may be added, they are not discriminated against when it comes to political representation, i.e. given the way the Israeli electoral system works there are no institutional impediments to Israeli Arabs being represented in the Knesset in exact proportion to their demographic weight in the country.
In general I don’t get into arguments or debates over the binational/one-state idea, as I think it is so cockamamie and off-the-wall that it is not worth discussing. There are, in fact, only two groups who advocate one state. The first is mainly comprised of Arabs, hard leftists, and sundry tiersmondistes, for whom the one-state idea is simply a euphemism for the elimination of the state of Israel. They reject the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, period. (For Arab perceptions on this, see my post on mental maps). And for some odd reason they seem to think that what the Palestinians failed to achieve by armed struggle can somehow be realized by boycotts and sanctions, court cases, letting demography do its handiwork, or whatever.
The second group—and to which Judt belonged—is made up of dreamers and naifs, who have a faulty knowledge of the conflict and its history. When confronted with members of either group, I simply ask them to provide a credible scenario as to how the one-state could come about in the foreseeable future, i.e. before we’re all dead. If they can do this, then we can discuss the successes and failures of other binational states (e.g. Cyprus, Belgium, Canada/Quebec). If they can’t do this—and they in fact never do—, then I’m simply not going to get into the issue. I’m not going to waste time talking about pie-in-the-sky.
There are a couple of points that need to be added. Those who advocate binationalism overlook one immutable fact. Binationalism means two nations—Jews and Palestinians—and the mutual recognition of such. Golda Meir may have denied the existence of a Palestinian people forty years ago but hardly anyone in Israel does today. The acknowledgment that Palestinians constitute a national group—or have a vocation to be one—is largely admitted even on the Israeli right. But such is decidedly not the case on the other side. For Palestinians, Palestine is Arab and Palestinians are Arabs. Case closed. The Palestinian consensus on this is total. As for the Palestinian/Arab view of Jews, the latter is considered a religious community tout court. The notion that Jews may also constitute a national group—that Jews are a nation and with a vocation to have their own state—is vehemently rejected. It always has been and is to this day. Jews-as-a-nation is Zionism. And Palestinians will sooner go to Jonestown and drink Kool-Aid en masse than formally recognize Zionism and accord it legitimacy. In this respect, it is to be noted that when Palestinians talk about one state, they never refer to it as binational. (Sure, Edward Said may have done so, but he was more of a deracinated American than a Palestinian).
The second point—and which was mentioned yesterday by Alain Dieckhoff—is that if the one state were willed into existence and Palestinians were to constitute the numerical majority, they would have no reason to play a binational game. They would simply invoke the principle of majority rule and define the nation-state’s identity as Palestinian and Arab (and with Islam as the official religion), with the usual formal guarantees for religious minorities. Well, we know how religious minorities have fared in that part of the world over the past century…
As for the third point—which needs modifying—, I do think a two-state solution based on the June 4th 1967 borders is still theoretically possible. More or less. Palestinians do have a right to be free and not live under occupation. There are, in fact, creative alternatives to the standard two-state scenarios that have been laid out ad infinitum (Clinton parameters etc etc). I’ll get into this in detail at the opportune moment.
Impressed (which means I agree) by your analysis especially since I have been browsing Caroline Glick’s “The Israeli Solution.”
Now, I am looking for a nuanced comparison of the Tony Judt/Electronic Intifada version and Caroline’s.
As you are, I am extremely skeptical of both versions and since Glick was an aide to Netanyahu, it makes me wonder what is afoot.
Caroline Glick is not exactly a reference for me. I have discussed her once on this blog, here (scroll down), and hope not to have to a second time.
I can’t be sure whether Caroline Glick is stupid or lying or “in denial of reality”.
Probably not #1. And probably not #2 either.
I think she is sincere, which of course may be even worse.