One-State Debate Explodes Myth About Zionist Left

A fascinating debate is entering Israel’s political mainstream on a once-taboo subject: the establishment of a single state as a resolution of the conflict, one in which Jews and Palestinians might potentially live as equal citizens. Surprisingly, those advocating such a solution are to be found chiefly on Israel’s political Right.

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Most observers – including a series of U.S. administrations – have supposed that Israel’s peace-makers are to be found exclusively on the Zionist Left, with the Right dismissed as incorrigible opponents of Palestinian rights.

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What the new one-state debate reveals is that, while some on the Right – and even among the settlers – are showing that they are now open to the idea of sharing a state with the Palestinians, the Left continues to adamantly oppose such an outcome.

In a supplement of Israel’s liberal Ha’aretz newspaper last weekend largely dedicated to the issue, Yossi Beilin, ......... spoke for the Zionist Left in calling a one-state solution “nonsense.” He added dismissively: “I’m not interested in living in a state that isn’t Jewish.”

The Israeli Left still hangs on resolutely to the goal .......: the annexation to Israel of most of the settlements in the West Bank and all of those in East Jerusalem. The consensus on the Left is that the separation wall, Barak’s brainchild, will ensure that almost all the half million settlers stay put while an embittered Palestinian population is corralled into a series of ghettoes misleadingly called a Palestinian state. .................

The problem with the Left’s solution has been summed up by Tzipi Hotoveley, a senior Likud legislator who recently declared her support for a single state. “There is a moral failure here [by the Left]. … The result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of massacres, to put it bluntly. It’s the Left that made us a crueler nation and also put our security at risk.”

The Right is beginning to understand that separation requires not just abandoning dreams of Greater Israel but making Gaza the template [example, presumably] for the West Bank. Excluded and besieged, the Palestinians will have to be “pacified” through regular military assaults like the one on Gaza in winter 2008 that brought international opprobrium on Israel’s head. Some on the Right believe Israel will not survive long causing such outrages.

But if the Right is rethinking its historic positions, the Left is still wedded to its traditional advocacy of ethnic separation and wall-building.

It was the pre-state ideologues of Labor Zionism who first argued for segregation under the slogans “Hebrew labor” and “redemption of the land” and then adopted the policy of transfer. It was the Labor founders of the Jewish state who carried out the almost wholesale expulsion of the Palestinians under cover of the 1948 war.

..........The much-misunderstood “iron wall” doctrine of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Likud’s intellectual father,.....................

Jabotinsky’s successors are grappling with the same dilemmas. Most, like Netanyahu, still believe Israel has time to expand Israeli control by buying the Palestinians off with such scraps as fewer checkpoints and minor economic incentives. But a growing number of Likud leaders are admitting that the Palestinians will not accept this model of apartheid forever.

Foremost among them is Moshe Arens, a former defense minister and Likud guru, who wrote recently that the idea of giving citizenship to many Palestinians under occupation “merits serious consideration.” Reuven Rivlin, the parliament’s speaker, has conceded that “the lesser evil is a single state in which there are equal rights for all citizens.”

We should not romanticize these Likud converts. They are not speaking of the “state of all its citizens” demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians accept life in a state dominated by Jews. Arens, for example, wants to exclude the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza from citizenship to gerrymander his Jewish-majority state for a few more decades. None seems to be considering including a right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees. And almost all of them would expect citizenship to be conditional on loyalty, recreating for new Palestinian citizens the same problematic relationship to a Jewish state endured by the current Palestinian minority inside Israel.

Nonetheless, the Right is showing that it may be more willing to redefine its paradigms than the Zionist Left. And in the end it may confound Washington by proving more capable of peace-making than the architects of Oslo.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Reject the Diaspora, Threatening to Split World Jewry

Last week, a committee in the Israeli Knesset passed a measure that would effectively undermine all branches of Judaism other than the most militantly Orthodox. If the bill, proposed by the ultra-right wing party Yisrael Beitanu (Israel Our House) becomes law, conversion, marriages, identities will all be tightly controlled by a tiny, ultra-Orthodox group of rabbis who don’t even recognize other Orthodox branches of Judaism. Jeff Goldberg, at the Atlantic, blogged that the bill, “if passed, [would] disenfranchise Reform and Conservative Jews, and help Israel transform itself into Ayatollahstan.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come out forcefully against the proposal, saying it would “tear apart the Jewish people.”

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…In Joel Chasnoff’s marvelous memoir, “The 188th Crybaby Brigade,” which came out earlier this year (think “Catch-22″ for the post-modern generation), the author narrates his decision, at age 24, to leave America and join the Israeli army. It’s partly for love – he’s fallen for an Israeli girl and wants them to be able to live in Israel, should they choose (and if they do, he feels an army experience is essential). It’s partly because he was raised in a certain kind of Jewish Zionist home – he was sent to Jewish day schools, raised with the idea that Israel needed defending. And so he goes, and becomes the best soldier in his unit –only to discover, having served in Lebanon, having patrolled the borders, the state does not consider him to be a Jew. To marry in Israel, he must convert. And though he hates himself for doing it, he goes through with it.

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“To make aliyah [emigrate to Israel] and join the IDF [Israeli Defense Force], the Israeli consulate requested a copy of my bar mitzvah certificate; or, if I couldn’t provide that, I could supply a letter from my rabbi (who happened to be Conservative), on synagogue letterhead, stating that I was Jewish,” Chasnoff wrote me by e-mail.

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“A year later, during a furlough from a tour of duty in Lebanon, Dorit (my then-girlfriend, now wife) and I applied for a marriage license. On application, I stated that my mother had converted to Judaism in 1968 — five years before I was born. Suddenly, a letter from my rabbi was no longer enough to prove I was a Jew. The Rabbinical Authority investigated my mother’s conversion and declared that, because she had studied with a Conservative rabbi, neither she nor I were Jewish. The army then sent me back to Lebanon to wage its war against Hezbollah. So I went back to Lebanon knowing that if I died in battle, I would not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. As Dorit put it: Israel didn’t mind if I died for the country, so long as I didn’t get married there.”….At a moment when Israel-U.S. state relations have barely begun to thaw, one might think that the two largest world Jewish communities – one in Israel, one in the United States – would be rejoicing. Instead it’s a time of tension, anger, suspicion and dread.

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ΩΩWhy  are diaspora Jews shocked by all of this?  The entire concept of Israel is totally racist from top to bottom.  It is not a religion, it is a race issue.  The young guy in this story is stunned to learn that his non-Jewish mother means he isn’t a Jew!  Well, duh!  This has been always true.  I was Mrs. Levy for years and years and had children and was a  non-human within my own family.  The rest of the clan, upon my divorce, considered me even less human than before, namely, I am dead.

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ΩΩThe founding of Israel was based on the notion that only genetic tribal Jews were allowed to live in Palestine.  Even though the Bible makes it totally clear in nearly every chapter that Palestine had many tribes and many peoples, the Jews laid claim to it all even though they, themselves, admitted they had to exterminate other tribes…but FAILED even back in the heyday of Jewish military power.

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ΩΩToday, this odious doctrine is the fundamental basis for Israel and leads the Jews down the same road trod by the Nazis.  And denial that this is happening won’t stop it from happening.  India is on this road, too.  Darker skinned, lower caste members are in a life and death struggle with the top castes who are ‘whiter’.  And racism in India has to be confronted.  As does racism in the US or Europe.  Anti-white racism is also a problem.  The solution for all nations is to be a nation and to confer citizenship to all people who live there and to have them be part of a civil system not run by religious lunatics and to separate religion from the state and to have civil rights!!!  Sheesh.  What we used to have and threw away.

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ΩΩNote also, in this story, an AMERICAN decided to fight for Israel, not his nation.  He had zero interest in real patriotism here but cleaved to this racist, odious society because he wanted to be one of the racist supermen suppressing barely armed natives.  His only shock is, even more racist gangsters hate him.  Well, duh!  He should have stayed here in the US where we all have the same rights and Jewish racists can’t dictate to us…except they are....................

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