Published: 15 October 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DAN COLEMAN: US Democrat Andy Levin tackles some thorny questions with the bill he has drafted to reinvigorate the US commitment to a two-state solution
“AS A JEWISH AMERICAN, I was raised with a strong attachment to Israel.” With these words, Democrat Congressman Andy Levin last month introduced his Two-State Solution Act, a bill aimed at putting the two-state solution at the heart of US policy toward Israel and Palestine.
For Levin, 61, the third member of Congress from his Detroit Jewish family, his feelings about Middle East peace grow out of personal experience. He describes how, in his twenties, he organised an interfaith trip to Israel and Palestine. The experience brought the “urgency, pain and injustice of the status quo into stark relief.” Returning years later as a member of Congress, he found that “the injustices on the ground and obstacles to peace had only grown worse”.
As a result, Levin now aspires to reinvigorate the United States’ commitment to “a two-state solution that secures Israel’s future as a democratic state and a national home for the Jewish people, a viable, democratic Palestinian state, an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and peaceful relations between the two states”.
Levin laments “in recent years, saying one supports a two-state solution has become like authoring ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the wake of a mass shooting. People say they support the two states, but words are not connected to any deeds.” The Two-State Solution Act is “designed to reverse that trend.”
The bill (HR 5344) currently has 29 co-sponsors, all Democrats, seven of them Jewish. Among its findings are an array of precedents, going back to the Eisenhower Administration, that placed conditions on US aid, supported two states, and decried the settlements.
In the 1980s, President Reagan declared that “further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated”.
