Published: 30 September 2024
Last updated: 8 October 2024
American Jews no longer have a consensus in favour of Zionism, commentator Peter Beinart told a Jewish Council of Australia event on Sunday.
"Instead of a Zionist consensus in America, what we have is a kind of a very fierce internal civil war, often within families along generational lines," he said. While the older generation, which controls institutions, and some young Jews are firmly pro-Israel, an increasing number of young Jews were integrated in a multi-religious, multi-racial movement that is sympathetic with Palestinians and opposed a Jewish state, he said.
Beinart was for many years a leading voice of the Zionist left in the US, arguing strongly in favour of a two-state solution. But over the past few years he has come to believe the two-state solution is dead and that a bi-national single state is both a more just and a more practical solution.
Comments6
Iván G. Somlai4 January at 04:15 am
With all the persistent focus on a one or two state solution, I do believe that there need be opportunities to discuss realities. There are too many disagreements, debates and ad infinitum inconclusions about the right answer.
Personally, I believe that the oft proclaimed solution of two states is unrealistic. But so is the one state alternative.
Hong Kong had been under British rule for 156 years. Pakistan became an independent state in 1947 or 78 years ago. Taiwan, in our recent history, has been independent since 1949, only 76 years. These states had, after a change in governance and in the number of years under very different governance, along with scores of other new nations, developed cultures different from their prior culture, especially as it pertains to governance. The culture of Hong Kong, for example, had evolved to be different from the Chinese mainland, to the point of considerable incompatibility. Pakistan has also developed unique features from the former greater India. And Taiwan, too, using just our three examples, has noteworthy differences from the mainland.
My point is that any society divorced from its former governance changes in many aspects, for better or worse, including governance, culture, geo-politics etc.
What has all this got to do with the issues surrounding Israel? The West Bank and Gaza, despite the 1993 Oslo Accord and its claim to respect those two areas as a single territorial unit, have had to evolve separately. Granted, that recently the prolonged war has brought many on the Gaza side to presently support Hamas.
The Indian subcontinent had a similar era during which the newly created states of East and West Pakistan could not be sustained for three reasons:
• India could not countenance being hemmed in by two Islamic states under one overarching government;
• travel, transport and other communication –regardless of the mode– between the two extremities of East and West Pakistan could be at any time disrupted by India; and…
• the two east/west entities, by virtue of their locations, had been naturally forced to develop different geo-political and societal cultures that ended in a formal split (Bangladesh and Pakistan).
West Bank and Gaza have been in a similar evolutionary mode. To now expect that the two distinctly developing cultures, bordering on different countries could be effectively united with an Israel permanently inbetween is a pipe dream.
It is therefore time to seriously weigh the possible advantages of a three-state solution.
I do think that the present treaty with UAE is not stable, as its rationale and timing are suspect (after US blunders with DPRK, Afghanistan, China and multiple international covenants, to have this particular agreement come true begs credibility).
I remain incredulous as to how there could be any theorization or planning for the realization of one state being permanently divided from its other half. It cannot work. And a federated Israel/Palestine state remains unrealistic, in my mind, as neither side would contemplate a democratic governance that may at some point result in some ‘unlikely’ majority or inequitable civil society.