At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the
continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming
"nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs,
Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When
the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their
leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the
first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic"
majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all
three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were
consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in
their own home.
But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its
ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in
the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat
of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a
second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish
nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the
founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts
and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or
Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious
self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners,"
has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg
Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes
suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather
that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically
late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved
on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international
law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the
Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish
citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place.
Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite
different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of
imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks
to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces
three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in
the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews
constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a
democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of
second-class Arab citizens.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and
Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will
become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which
case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority
of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it
cannot be both.
Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get
rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by
forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood,
leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could
indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the
cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale
ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn
Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international
pariah.
Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all
for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of
settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past
quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the
Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground
of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component
is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to
Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose
uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once
attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one
hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that
his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected
president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits
better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.
The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may
be close to hopeless. Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli
state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed
Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the
Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and
the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more
than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab
majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the
political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent
Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years
of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state,
run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.
This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been
a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support,
Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions
requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel
is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal
weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has
effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent
such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially
belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even
in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest
of the world no longer credits our good faith.
It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that
America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those
advertised at the time.[2]
For many in the current US administration, a major strategic
consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the
Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story
continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because
Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved
there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any
other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes
of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat.
However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data
on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath
whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States
as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?
On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council
resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser
Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record,
that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the
increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by
restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment
to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further
undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region.
America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised
at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same.
Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own
difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in
their mistakes? The US has tentatively sought in the past to pressure
Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of
the money that goes to subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last
time this was attempted, during the Clinton administration, Jerusalem
got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure." Washington
went along with the subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over
four years, between 1993 and 1997, less than $775 million was kept
back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we don't even
try to stop it.
This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also
corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the
Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European
allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent
anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any
public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.
But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away.
President Bush will probably be conspicuous by his absence from the
fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the "road map"
in June to placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American
statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime
minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and
moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting
that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the
settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab
recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian
state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international
agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a
just and possible solution.
But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too
many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians,
and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass
laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the
ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over
a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers
would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it
will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than
move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state
policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal
Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense
Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]
The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution—
the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"—is probably
already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an
inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so
far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing
the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed
Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and
Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in
Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the
removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a
Jewish state.
But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish
state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly
likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd
thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states
which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian
Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter;
Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and
languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many
others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.[4]
Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it
remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to
ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens.
It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid
supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.
For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the
Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless
survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition
would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews
needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's
identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to
exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is
drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that
Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find
fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an
alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral
equivalent of genocide.
In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did
not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether
they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent
anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and
would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in
Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep
a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years,
the situation has tragically reversed.
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 a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and
intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to
communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have
multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we
had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an
anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In
today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and
belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually
risks falling into the wrong camp.
To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not
be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has
already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most
Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In
any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely
supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will
resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The
"fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt
roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet
tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will
destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish
community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring
nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin
Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime
it is intended to protect.
A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and
relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and
Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a
legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier
policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are
free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry,
excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5]
A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence,
among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is
an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to
begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.
—September 25, 2003
Notes
[1] See Burg's essay, "La révolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde,
September 11, 2003. A former head of the Jewish Agency, the writer was
speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, between 1999 and 2003 and
is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first
appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward (August 29, 2003) and the London Guardian (September 15, 2003).
[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair.
[3]
In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister
Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close
down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry
resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no
one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists,
not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai
Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."
[4]
Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in
England all continue to encounter hostility. A minority of voters in
France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and Norway, support political
parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only
platform. But compared with thirty years ago, Europe is a multicolored
patchwork of equal citizens, and that, without question, is the shape
of its future.
[5]
As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best
recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to the fate of Palestinian
children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we surprised when they blow
us up in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it
would change nothing." See Burg, "La révolution sioniste est morte."
