Bird’s-Eye: It doesn’t seem that long ago, does it, that one would be accused of being anti-Israeli (or anti-Semitic) for suggesting a one-state solution in the Middle East. Now the Israeli Right is supporting such a move. We look in more detail at why the sea-change has happened, but here’s a first hint: it’s not to help the Palestinians.
* Israeli right embracing one-state? Al Jazeera (Thanks, Gabe!)
One might expect that any support for a single state among Israeli Jews would come from the far left, and in fact this is where the most prominent Israeli Jewish champions of the idea are found, although in small numbers.
Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, including the right to vote for the knesset, have emerged from a surprising direction: Right-wing stalwarts such as knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin, and former defence minister Moshe Arens, both from the Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. Even more surprisingly, the idea has been pushed by prominent activists among Israel’s West Bank settler movement….
* Rosemary’s Baby Uri Avnery Gush Shalom – Israeli Peace Bloc
SINCE I witnessed the rise of the Nazis during my childhood in Germany, my nose always tickles when it smells something fascist, even when the odor is still faint. When the debate about the “one-state solution” began, my nose tickled.
Have you gone mad, I told my nose, this time you are dead wrong. This is a plan of the Left. It is being put forward by leftists of undoubted credentials, the greatest idealists in Israel and abroad, even certified Marxists. But my nose insisted. It continued to tickle.
Now it appears that the nose was right, after all.
* The Closing of the Zionist Mind Juan Cole Informed Comment
Failing Nationalism Syndrome (FNS)—Not all national projects succeed. There are by some counts 5000 ethnic groups in the world of a sort that could be the basis for a nation-state, but there are only about 190 countries. Some political projects, such as French Algeria (dominated by colons or colonists as a privileged group) or a Christian-dominated Lebanon, get going but just don’t have staying power. Algeria is now an almost wholly Muslim country, and Christians in Lebanon, while still powerful and numerous, are probably down to less than a third of the total population. But if we went back in time to 1935, we could sit at cafes in Algiers or Beirut and talk with these two about the future of their countries, and the ones in Algiers would have said that Algeria’s fate was to always be a part of France, and the Lebanese Maronites would talk have talked about their majority being strengthened and about the Phoenician identity of their country in the future.
Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the strangest things.
