Lord knows I feel for President Biden’s desire to avoid getting dragged into mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas made something crystal clear to me: Unless we preserve a minimum of the potential of a two-state solution, the one-state reality that might emerge in its place won’t just magnify Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; it could alright magnify the Democratic Party and each Jewish organization and synagogue in America.
Yes, that’s what I learned last week.
I don’t expect Biden to summon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Camp David. As long as both are in power, no serious compromise is feasible. But it's vital that Biden urgently take steps to re-energize the likelihood of a two-state solution and provides it a minimum of some concrete diplomatic manifestation on the bottom.
Because without that horizon — with no viable hope of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two states for 2 peoples — the sole outcome left are going to be one state during which the Israeli majority dominates and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and therefore the West Bank is going to be systematically bereft of equal rights in order that Israel can preserve its Jewish character.
If that happens, the charge that Israel has become an apartheid-like entity will resonate and gain traction far and wide. The Democratic Party is going to be fractured. A rising chorus of progressives — who increasingly portray the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians as like the Minneapolis Police Department’s treatment of Black people or to the treatment by colonial powers of Indigenous peoples — will enforce distancing us from Israel and, maybe, even cause bans on arms sales.
Meanwhile, centrist Democrats will keep off that these progressives are incredibly naïve, that they need no clue what percentage of two-state peace plans the Palestinians have already rejected — which decimated the Israeli peace camp — which none of their causes, from women’s rights to L.G.B.T.Q. rights to spiritual pluralism would last a moment on the Hamas-run campus of the Islamic University of Gaza.
As the past fortnight demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America are going to be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that's not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders like better to believe the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?
Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also are going to be forced to wrestle with this question or run as distant as possible from the talk. More and more will abandon Israel. you'll already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.
It will get very ugly. All nuance is going to be lost. Twitter and Facebook will become battlefields between Israel’s critics and defenders, and Donald Trump and therefore the Republicans will fan the flames, telling American Jews that they need no future within the Democratic Party and beckoning them to return over to the G.O.P. — which, with its evangelical base, does indeed unquestioningly support the Jewish state … for now.
“People got to understand that this issue has been transformed within the past fortnight,’’ said Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Group, a number one Israeli think factory. “The place of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inside American society and politics — and inside the Jewish community — has morphed from a bipartisan issue to a wedge issue.’’
And it's a wedge issue not only between Democrats and Republicans, he added, “but also between Democrats and Democrats. this is often very bad news for Israel and for the Jewish people. Israel and Biden must urgently collaborate to defuse it.’’
Therefore, I hope that when the secretary of state, Tony Blinken, meets with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the week, he conveys a really clear message: “From today forward, we'll be treating the Palestinian Authority within the West Bank as a Palestinian state within the making and that we are going to be taking a series of diplomatic steps to concretize Palestinian statehood so as to preserve the viability of a two-state solution. We respect both of your concerns, but we are determined to maneuver forward because the preservation of a two-state solution now's not only about your national security interests; it's about our national security interests within the Middle East. And it's about the political way forward for the centrist faction of the Democratic Party. So we all got to get this right.’’
.jpg)
