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September
/ october 2006:
Peace
in an Unpeaceful world
Below is an exclusive excerpt from Alan Dershowitz's new book, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved. In this, the entire second chapter, he discusses whether the one-state solution is a barrier to peace.
by Alan Dershowitz
Because the two-state solution requires the recognition of Israel’s right to continue to exist as a Jewish democracy, those who oppose Israel’s existence have been trying to sell the “one-state” or “binational” solution. I first challenged this ploy — and that’s all it is—in a debate with Noam Chomsky back in 1973. Chomsky’s proposal at that time was consistent with the PLO party line. He wanted to abolish the state of Israel and to substitute a “secular, binational state,” based on the model of binational “brotherhood” that then prevailed in Lebanon. Chomsky repeatedly pointed to Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims “lived side by side,” sharing power in peace and harmony. This was just two years before Lebanon imploded in fratricidal disaster. He also used to point to the former Yugoslavia as a model of a one-state solution.4 This was before it too blew up into five separate nation-states.
This is what I said about this harebrained scheme in our 1973 debate:
Putting aside the motivations behind such a proposal when it is made by the Palestinian organizations, why do not considerations of self determination and community control favor two separate states: one Jewish and one Arab? Isn’t it better for people of common background to control their own life, culture, and destiny (if they so choose), than to bring together in an artificial way people who have shown no ability to live united in peace? I confess to not understanding the logic of the proposal, even assuming its good will.
My counterproposal was that “Israel should declare, in principle, its willingness to give up the captured territories in return for a firm assurance of lasting peace. By doing so, it would make clear what I think the vast majority of Israelis believe: it has no interest in retaining the territories for any reason other than protection from attack.”
Chomsky rejected my proposal out of hand. He characterized it as a mere return to the “colonialist status quo.” Only the dismantling of the colonialist Jewish state would satisfy the PLO, and only the creation of a secular, binational Palestine in “all of Palestine” would satisfy Chomsky.
The violence in Lebanon and Yugoslavia relegated the Chomsky proposal to the dustbin of history until the PLO removed it from the trash and tried to dust it off and resell it in 2004. The lawyer for the PLO, Michael Tarazi, wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times in which he argued that Israel is both unwilling to disengage and incapable of disengaging from the West Bank, so that a de facto binational state already exists and only awaits international recognition. Tony Judt, a New York University history professor, tried to give this nonstarter some academic credibility by publishing an article in the New York Review of Books that characterized Israel as “an anachronism” and called for “a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”
It is rare for events to prove a historian completely wrong within a decade of his asserting historical truths. In Judt’s case, it took less than a year. He published his anti-Israel screed in October 2003. In it he declared that “the Middle East peace process is finished” — not delayed or postponed, but forever “finished.” He also believed that “the two state solution — the core of the Oslo process and the present ‘road map’ — is probably already doomed.” Not endangered but “doomed”! And he criticized those who, in the spirit of “a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully recite . . . the Israeli cabinet line: It’s all Arafat’s fault.” These “dummies” included, of course, President Bill Clinton, U.S. chief negotiator Dennis Ross, and President George W. Bush, as well as Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who represented Saudi Arabia at the negotiations. Dennis Ross put it this way:
Did we come close? Yes. Were the Palestinian negotiators ready to do the deal that was available? Yes. Did we ultimately fail because of the mistakes that Barak made and the mistakes that Clinton made? No, each, regardless of his tactical mistakes, was ready to confront history and mythology. Only one leader was unable or unwilling to confront history and mythology: Yasir Arafat.
Well, it turned out the dummies were right and the professor was wrong. The peace process was not finished. All it needed to start up again was the death of Arafat, because its rejection was in fact “all Arafat’s fault.” Arafat’s untimely death (untimely, because if it had come a few years earlier the Camp David negotiations would almost certainly have produced peace and a Palestinian state) immediately changed the dynamics and restarted the peace process. Rarely has history provided such a natural experiment: while Arafat was alive the peace process remained stymied; as soon as Arafat died the peace process continued. This alone should be more than enough to disqualify Judt from ever again being taken seriously about how to achieve peace in the Middle East.
But there is more, much more. The idea of a one-state solution comes as close to a crackpot idea as anything ever published in a serious intellectual journal, especially by a writer who claims to be interested in what’s good “for the Jews.” You see, Judt’s basic point, as he wrote in a New York Review of Books article, is that “the depressing truth is that Israel is bad for the Jews.” I’ve heard all that before. When Joseph Lieberman was nominated to be the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, some frightened Jews worried that a Jewish vice president — or, God forbid, a Jewish president — would be “bad for the Jews,” because all the Jews would be blamed for his mistakes. I recall once during a question-and-answer period following a speech in Los Angeles being asked by a woman whether having “so many Jewish professors and students at Harvard was bad for the Jews.” (This was before Harvard had a Jewish president.) Jewish success, Jewish influence in the media, Jewish Nobel Prize winners — all bad for the Jews! Now comes Tony Judt:
Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.
In other words, the real cause of anti-Semitism is Israel, because non-Jews hold all Jews accountable for the actions of the Jewish state. This is no more than a modern-day variation on a very old theme: rich and powerful Jews, like the Rothschilds, caused anti-Semitism; communist Jews, like Marx and Trotsky, caused anti-Semitism; media-owning Jews, like Pulitzer and Sulzberger, caused anti-Semitism; poor Orthodox Jews caused anti-Semitism. It’s all the fault of the Jews themselves, not the anti-Semites.
Leon Wieseltier answered Judt as follows:
I detect the scars of dinners and conferences. He does not wish to be held accountable for things that he has not himself done, or to be regarded as the representative of anyone but himself. It is disagreeable to be falsely represented by others. These are old anxieties. ... Why doesn’t he simply delete his Zionism or his support for Israel from his inventory of multiple elective identities? Why must Israel pay for his uneasiness with its life? ...
For the notion that all Jews are responsible for whatever any Jews do, that every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion. It is an anti-Semitic notion. ... But if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews, and racism as a response to blacks, and misogyny as a response to women, then you have not understood it. You have reproduced it.
And bad for which Jews? Surely Israel is not bad for the Jews of Russia, who may need a haven; or for the Jews of Argentina, who may need a haven; or for the Jews of Iran, who may need a haven; or for any Jews who may need a haven.
There is an even better answer: let “the Jews” decide what is good or bad for them. For too many years, others have determined the destiny of the Jewish people. It was an important part of the theory of Zionism to establish self-determination for the Jewish people, rather than elitist decision making by a handful of Jews who are embarrassed by Ariel Sharon or other elected leaders of the Jewish state.
It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews believe that Israel is not bad for the Jews.11 The same, I suspect, is true of American Jews and even of European Jews who are the particular object of Judt’s misguided and patronizing solicitude.
And they are right. Notwithstanding the anti-Semitic attacks on some Jews in some countries that may be attributable to hatred of Israel, the Jewish state has been good for the Jews. It has also been good for the world. And, difficult as Judt and his ilk may find it to accept, Israel will prove to be good for the Palestinians and the Arab world in general, because of the model of democracy and free-market economy it provides. King Hussein of Jordan told me as much during a conversation in 1996, and other moderate Arabs have also implicitly acknowledged beneficial effects stemming from the Israeli model. Many Palestinians also acknowledge this reality, as evidenced by polls showing that they favor the Israeli model of democracy, and especially its independent judiciary, over all other models, including the United States.12 And the fact that most Israeli Arabs want to remain Israeli, rather than become Palestinian, citizens provides some confirmation as well.
It would be a tragedy if the first modern democratic state to be abolished in the name of some abstract principle of “multiculturalism” were to be the world’s only Jewish state, rather than one or more of the numerous Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox states. This is especially so because Israel, unlike many of these other ethnoreligious states, does not have a single “established” religion or any religious barriers to office holding, citizenship, or other rights. As Edward Rothstein put it in the New York Times:
Perhaps then, despite Mr. Judt’s embarrassment, the binational experiment might first be tried elsewhere? Say between Iran and Iraq? Or Pakistan and India? Or France and Germany? Until then attention might return to the real world and to the details that inspire such proposals of despair.
In fact, Israel already is a secular binational nation, even while retaining its identity as a Jewish state, in much the same way as France retains its identity as French and Germany as German. “Jewish” is more than merely a religious identification. Judaism is a civilization and culture that began as a religion and has become, especially since the Enlightenment and the establishment of Israel by secular socialists, a largely secular civilization. Israel is more secular than any other Middle Eastern state or any Muslim state. It is far more secular, in practice, than the United States. Its 1.25 million Arabs are full citizens with representation in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court. Arabic is an official Israeli language and Israeli Arabs enjoy more rights in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East. Israeli Arabs are better off — as measured by longevity, health care, legal rights, even religious liberty — than other Arabs in the Middle East.
Forcibly integrating Israel proper and the occupied territories into one political entity would be the surest way to destroy Israel’s secular, democratic character. There would be an immediate struggle for demographic superiority. Every death would be seen as a victory by the other side and every birth as a defeat. Within decades, the different birth rates would ensure that Palestinians will outnumber Jews, and the binational state would become another Islamic state — Greater Palestine.
An Arab majority would bode ominously for a Jewish minority. Jewish life within Arab nations, as well as within the British Mandate of Palestine, has been marked by discriminatory laws against dhimmi (Jews and Christians), expulsions, and pogroms. Considering the close proximity and history of hostilities between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, it is more than likely that Jews would fare even worse in a Greater Palestine than they have elsewhere in the Arab world. There would be, as Benny Morris puts it, “old scores” to settle. And the wide economic gap between Jews and Palestinians would certainly not “make for peaceful co-existence.”
This binational state would be truly devastating to Israeli Jews, left defenseless once they had lost their sovereignty and military deterrent. It is for good reason that I have likened the proposed one-state solution in the Middle East to Hitler’s one-state solution for Europe. Only this time, the Jews would be geographically concentrated and easier to identify. David Frum makes this point powerfully:
If the day were ever to come when the Jews of Israel lost the power to defend themselves and had to submit to the rule of their neighbors, the outcome would not be “pluralism” but slaughter. ... One must hate Israel very much indeed to prefer such an outcome to the reality of the liberal democracy that exists in Israel today.
Five hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims died in the process of partitioning the Indian subcontinent. No one today recommends that those two ethnicities be reintegrated into a binational state in order to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Likewise, Israelis and Palestinians are already, for the most part, geographically distinct. It would be absurd to suggest that they both forgo their separate aspirations to self-determination as a testing ground for Tony Judt’s failed multicultural fantasies.
What is certain, though, is that neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinians want to be subsumed in a Greater Palestine. A binational state would not only imperil its Jewish population, but would eradicate the one state in the Middle East that affords its Muslim citizens more expansive civil liberties and political prerogative than any other. As Michael Walzer observed:
Every opinion poll shows that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want the two-state solution. The US government is formally committed to it; so are the Europeans. There is still time to enforce it. And afterward, when the French, Germans, Swedes, Bulgarians, and Japanese begin to worry about their anachronistic politics, Jews and Palestinians will be able to join them.
The binational Greater Palestine solution is the far left’s equivalent of the Israeli far right’s Greater Israel. The late Rabbi Meir Kahane was rightfully denounced, his party even outlawed in Israel, for advocating the transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank. Tony Judt’s binational state would do the same to the Jews, only, we can reasonably assume, far more violently.
The one-state solution is an argument made in bad faith. It is an attempt to accomplish by law and demography what Hamas seeks to achieve by terrorism: the extinction of Israel. The practical consequences of such a state would be to leave millions of Jews geographically isolated, politically powerless, and physically defenseless. The one-state solution is rejectionism, pure and simple. But its proponents do not merely reject peace; they reject Israel’s right to exist altogether.
In a world with numerous Muslim states, there is surely room for one Jewish state. The one-state solution will surely fail, but it is also important that it be taken off the table immediately, because its very advocacy poses a serious barrier to the only peace that has any realistic chance for success: peace based on the two-state solution.
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