This is the second review of three books on the One State Solution.
My previous review was of Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In this post I will look at Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and in the final installment I will look at Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution.
Why One State? It’s time to say kaddish for the dead and move on. “Two States” was an idea that had its genesis over a century ago and might have had its day for the briefest moment in time, but it was almost universally declared dead by 1983. To continue promoting two states is dishonest and as creepy as pretending to talk to the dead.
It is also high time that American “Liberals” and “liberal” American Zionists stopped supporting a violent ethnocratic supremacist state. We don’t want one here and we shouldn’t be paying for the one in Israel. Americans pretend that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” but it’s no such thing. It’s an Apartheid state with a brutal occupation over millions of stateless people, and over five dozen laws that discriminate against its own non-Jewish citizens. With the massive amount of money American taxpayers shell out to preserve the Zionist state, why on earth are we not calling for a genuine democracy?
Moreover, the notion that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation is hogwash. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? A state for practitioners of Santeria? Rastafari? If liberals really believe in such a “right” then why are they not pushing just as hard for theocratic states all over the Western hemisphere?
It should go without saying: a repressive state does not have a right to exist as a repressive state. It cannot claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms constitute hate-speech or antisemitism. If there are calls to dismantle Israel’s Zionist state, for all the shrill Cassandras, this in no way implies the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself must cease doing business as usual. Portugal, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to name a few examples of former dictatorships or repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. The ADL and a myriad of Zionist attack organizations can infer whatever delusional meanings they like from it, but this is is what I mean when I utter that unambiguous phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic
While Ian Lustick proposes recognizing the reality of Israeli domination “from the river to the sea” and building a single secular democracy (however slowly) out of a repressive ethnostate, Omri Boehm’s vision is of redefining Zionism to promote a confederation that allows two peoples to share one land. Boehm’s vision is similar to an early (pre-state) thread of Zionism that advocated a Jewish homeland but not necessarily a state.
Boehm begins by recounting the angry reception that Tony Judt’s essay in the New York Review of Books (“Israel: The Alternative”) received from Zionists in 2003 when he proposed that Israel abandon Zionism and embrace liberal democracy. Zionists huffed that Judt had crossed a line from legitimate criticism of Israel to “illegitimate criticism of Israel’s existence.”
But then Thomas Friedman — hardly a kefiyah-sporting radical — declared in a February 2016 New York Times column that “they all killed the Two State Solution. Let the one-state era begin.” But he wasn’t finished. Friedman went on, “It’s over folks, so please stop sending the New York Times your proposals for a two-state solution […] The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.” And Friedman was not wrong. Even an unlikely Henry Kissinger threw shade on the Two State solution shortly before his death.
Haifa Republic recounts the history of the Yishuv — pre-Israel — and the varieties of Zionism that existed before Revisionist Zionism prevailed and from then on Zionism meant (1) a state not just a homeland; (2) exclusive control over all of Palestine; and (3) ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) to ensure a Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion implemented these goals and told the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937:
“In many parts of the land Jewish settlement would not be possible without transferring the Arab peasants. […] We’re lucky that the Arab people has immense and empty territories. The growing Jewish power in the land will increase more and more our ability to execute the transfer in large numbers.”
Boehm agrees with Lustick that a one-state reality now defines Israel:
The future is here: one-state politics now defines Israel’s reality, and the consequences are monumental — to Israelis, to Palestinians, and to world Jewry. But we’re still lacking a language for liberal Zionist thinking in a post-two-state, post-ethnic era.
But he believes that the beginnings of Zionism might hold the key to refashioning a new, shared democratic state:
The basic vocabulary of this language existed in the past — in Zionism’s beginnings. Whereas Zionist politics today is synonymous with the view that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state in Eretz Israel, the movement’s founding fathers held a more nuanced view. Intense ideological disagreements divided Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, but they could all agree on the distinction, all too often forgotten, between national self-determination and national sovereignty: up until very late in Zionist history, they all viewed the project as committed to the former but not the latter. In fact, they were for the most part committed to the latter’s denial.) That is, they believed that the Jews had the right to exercise political self-rule, administrate autonomously their own lives, and revive Jewish culture and education. But they did not believe that this should have been done in a sovereign Jewish state: the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty. Jabotinsky, for example, who is commonly regarded today as a raving right-wing Jewish nationalist, explicitly agreed with Brit Shalom, Martin Buber’s Zionist faction, that “the future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a binational state.” Even Hannah Arendt, who is often considered an anti-Zionist, could subscribe to this concept of Zionism. Until late in his career, Ben-Gurion actually did subscribe to it. When Wieseltier or Dershowitz condemn binationalism as a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, they overlook the distinction between self-determination and sovereignty: both as a crucial political distinction and as one that, historically, stood at the heart of Zionism’s origins. Israel’s political survival as a democracy depends on the recovery of this distinction.
Boehm wants to redefine Zionism — if such a thing is now possible. Redefinition seems like a face-saving device to soften the blow to liberal Zionists of abandoning the ideology. So Boehm doesn’t require them to abandon it; he just calls it something different. This seems like the perfect solution for people given to self-delusion. Maybe it could even work.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are thus the main pillars of Zionist thinking as we have come to know it– of the axiom that Zionism is essentially about Jewish sovereignty, and that Jewish demographic superiority, therefore, must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to see that this alleged Zionist axiom is not a Zionist axiom at all, and that adhering to it is leading to the destruction of Israel and expulsions of Palestinians.
It is time to restore a binational Zionism – with a strong notion of equal citizenship in a one-state solution. One way we can do this is by developing an art of forgetting, a politics of remembering to forget the Holocaust and the Nakba in order to undo rather than perpetuate them as the pillars of future politics. Ernest Renan advanced the idea of such an art of forgetting in his great lecture of 1882, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s account of modern citizenship can help us rethink Israel’s future relation to its past. What is true of the Holocaust is true of the Nakba: for the sake of a future binational politics, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the country would have to be, in a similar sense, forgotten. But it can be forgotten only if we commemorate it first–and do justice to the past by committing ourselves as citizens to the Palestinians right of national self-determination. This includes a meaningful commitment to the right of return.
Perhaps realizing he’s out on a limb, Boehm addresses his skeptics:
How practical a binational political program would be, one may however wonder. Thoroughly practical. None other than Menachem Begin, Israel’s first right-wing prime minister and a vehement opponent of territorial compromise, offers a viable model with the “autonomy plan” he devised in the late 1970s. Begin’s program could just as well be called the “one-state plan.” It included not only the institution of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, but also an option for all Palestinians to become full Israeli citizens, as well as complete freedom of movement and economic rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and a department within the Palestinian Autonomy’s Council for the Rehabilitation of Refugees. The Knesset voted on this proposal and passed it by a large majority in December 1977.
That Begin had some such plan is familiar to some, but its details, coming so close to a binational constellation, have received little attention. Historians, deferring to the two-state orthodoxy, tend to see the plan as Begin’s plot to prevent Palestinian statehood, not as a program that originates in Jabotinsky’s binational thinking and could test and open up the ethnic political boundaries and taboos of contemporary Israel.
It is worth pointing out that the Likud and Netanyahu are political descendants of Jabotinsky and Begin. Netanyahu’s father Benzion was even Jabotinsky’s secretary. Philosophically, then, resurrecting and adapting Begin’s plan is something the current (37th) government of Israel could conceivably do. Boehm calls this “new Zionist” proposal the “Haifa Republic” in honor of a city that has played a key role in the history of Jews and Palestinians:
It is time to explore a program reconstructed from Begin’s proposal — I call it the Haifa Republic — recognizing the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination, even sovereignty, in their own states, separated along the ’67 border, and yet regulating their separate sovereignty by a joint constitution ensuring basic human rights, freedom of movement, and economic liberties throughout the territory. Such a plan could allow many settlers to remain in their homes. And it would enable Palestinians to exercise rights commonly associated with the right of return-the aspiration to return to the territories from which they were expelled in 1948. Plans of this sort have been raised in the past, and are still promoted, but they are too often regarded as Post-Zionist. The attempt here is to rehabilitate such politics as a Zionist program, consistent with the core aspirations of Zionism’s founding fathers.
In essence the Haifa Republic is a Zionist two-state fiction that permits settlers to remain in the West Bank and opens up present-day Israel to currently-expelled Palestinians. It is also somewhat of an ideological fiction because the nature of Zionism has been redefined.
The final chapter of Boehm’s small book fleshes out a few details of the “Republic.” The Palestinian state Begin proposed was to be demilitarized, overseen by an elected Palestinian council, and included a provision for vetting the return of some “reasonable number” of Palestinian exiles. But it unequivocally asserted the Jewish right to “Samaria” and “Judea” (the West Bank).
The Haifa Republic is based on Begin’s idea, but instead of making Palestinians citizens of Israel (as in Lustick and Begin’s plans) Boehm would conjure Palestinian nationhood without a physical nation. In the Haifa Republic Palestinians would have their own military which co-operated with the IDF in a mutual defense treaty. Complete freedom of movement and the ability to buy and own land anywhere in Palestine would be extended to all within the borders. Arabic and Hebrew would both be official languages. East and West Jerusalem would be capitals of each nation, respectively, and a legal entity structurally similar to the EU would apply to both nations. There would be a shared supreme court that adjudicated disputes without international involvement.
The big question is how to get from today’s one state reality to Boehm’s.
The devil, as always, is in the details.
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