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August 20, 2009
It’s rare, a little thrilling, and even scary when the Right and the Left reach the same conclusion, like watching a snake eat its own tail or Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann give each other a bear hug.
There is some surprising agreement from both sides of the ideological spectrum that the two-state solution is beyond saving and was never viable in the first place.
Last week it was a piece by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in The New York Times. Malley, a former Bill Clinton aide, and Agha, who shares Malley’s thesis that Israel and Arafat were both to blame for the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit, suggest that both sides still appear unable to make the essential compromises for solving the conflict. Israel is unwilling to relinquish sovereignty over Jerusalem and insists that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The right of Palestinian “refugees” to return to Israel proper is also a nonstarter.
As for the Palestinians, they won’t recognize a “Jewish” state, while they cling to the “right of return.”
For Malley and Agha, these are unbridgeable historical divides — a slightly patronizing conclusion, if you ask me, since it presumes that neither Jews nor Arabs have the capacity to change. And the two end on the following odd note, which annoyed more than a few Jewish leaders, who read it as an endorsement of a single, binational state of Jews and Arabs:
“For years, virtually all attention has been focused on the question of a future Palestinian state, its borders and powers. As Israelis make plain by talking about the imperative of a Jewish state, and as Palestinians highlight when they evoke the refugees’ rights, the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, as in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel.”
Is that a call for a one-state solution? I can’t tell. But I do wonder this: Why does a two-state solution depend completely on what compromises Israel is willing to make? Malley and Agha seem to say that if Israel doesn’t stop with this Jewish nonsense and doesn’t welcome the Palestinians back to their old homes, we’ll know whom to blame for the failure of a peace process.
On the right side of the spectrum, Mike Huckabee was in Israel this week, telling reporters that a two-state solution is “unrealistic.” The presumed 2012 Republican presidential candidate isn’t opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state, mind you — the problem is location. “The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that,” he said. “Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”
Where it should be is an open question, apparently. Uganda? Detroit? Sitka, Alaska?
Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher as well as former governor of Arkansas, traveled to Israel as the guest of Ateret Cohanim, a group committed to increasing the Jewish presence in predominately Arab east Jerusalem (and restoring the Temple, when God deems the timing propitious). Huckabee’s judgment on a Palestinian state seems based less on realpolitik than on theology. In this case, Ateret’s religious Zionism and Huckabee’s Christian Zionism leave no room for Palestinian nationalism in the Jews’ biblical homeland.
In truth, most American Jews — and an ever-shifting consensus of Israelis — reject both Huckabee’s restorationism and Malley and Agha’s one-sided determinism. Jewish support for a two-state solution is based on pragmatism — the idea that if two large populations can’t and don’t want to live with each other, the solution is separation. Both the Right and the Left are opposed to separation — the Right because separation means giving up on theological or historical claims, the Left because they disdain Zionism and believe binational “democracy” will cure Israel of its retrograde nationalism.
The big middle rejects these messianist impulses, with a capital and lower-case M. The two-state pessimist who speaks for them is an analyst like Efraim Inbar, of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. In his recent report, “The Rise and Demise of the Two-State Solution,” Inbar recognizes, a la Malley and Agha, that the two sides are far apart on the core issues of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders. But he also lists the ways the Palestinians have failed to seize the opportunities offered them, from the miserable aftermath of the pullout from Gaza, to the anarchic governing style of the Palestinian Authority, to an educational system that continues to incite the population against Jews.
Inbar surveys this landscape and despairs — his recommendation is for short-term conflict management and a longer-term regional approach that “re-links” the Palestinian areas to some sort of Egyptian and Jordanian control.
But there’s something oddly optimistic about Inbar’s pessimism. He demonstrates the willingness of Middle Israel to embrace the two-state solution if Palestinians are able to regain the confidence of the average Israeli. Unlike Huckabee, he doesn’t see a divine plan standing in the way. And unlike Malley and Agha, he doesn’t see two sides trapped by history.
That doesn’t bring us any closer to peace, but it suggests that the future of the region is in the hands of the people who live there, not forces beyond their control.
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