Protest against the Israeli atack on the Palestinians held at the State Library 4 January 2009.
Photo: Takver / Wikimedia Commons
There are indications that a new reality in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is in the making. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be losing out to President Obama. Under a re-elected Obama opportunities for Palestinians could return.
“For
the last forty years I have specialized, both in my writing and teaching, in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, and as a consequence I now regard Israel as a moral
disaster--a betrayer of what we have long believed to be Jewish rationalism,
enlightenment, and commitment to the highest values of civilization. It is a disgraceful state, and an increasingly ignorant and in many ways
disgraceful society, a pariah state that fully deserves its pariah status.
Aside from its moral evil, it is also insanely self-destructive, and it will be
something of a miracle if it survives. I am no longer in a tiny minority in holding
these views; they have become increasingly common among American Jewish
intellectuals, and indeed among the best Israelis.”
That is what Jerome Slater said in an
email exchange with New York Times' chief Israeli correspondent Jodi Rudoren. A retired political science
professor, Slater is a seasoned observer. He has taught and written about U.S.
foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for nearly 50 years. In his
correspondence with Rudoren he criticizes her for biased and too rosy reporting
about Israel. The fact that Israel has turned so far away from Herzl's vision is
a nightmare to him. Don’t simply discard my observations as mere ideology, he says, “the facts about
Israel's behaviour towards the Palestinians are overwhelming. There is no prospect of serious change in Israeli policies in the
absence of serious U.S. pressures, and there is no prospect of such pressures
in the absence of change in the views of the American Jewish community”. Such disaster
could also take the form of the collapse of liberal democracy, says
Slater. His message is: come to grips with
the reality and rouse
your readers from their ignorance.
Haaretz
editor Tal Niv joins Slater in his concern over the fate of the Zionist project.
She sees the bankruptcy of a country where children are subject to an upbringing
that preaches violence and hatred against the indigenous population, hatred
that takes the form of lethal violence. It is clear to her that something has become twisted in a country that witnesses
a surge of violence among its future citizens. Violence that seeks to expunge anyone who is not a Jew, that
is continually occupied with educating children to feel superior because of
their nationality instead of instilling pluralistic ideals. Violence that puts
the Zionist project itself in doubt, a project that is turning its back on
human rights. Israel may survive as an armed state of Jewish law in which Jews
and the children of Jews do as they please to Arabs by divine right, but this
is no longer the kind of Zionist state that Herzl envisioned, a state in which
a decent person could live, says Niv.
If the Zionist project
is a failure, then what is on the horizon for Israel and the
Palestinian population in Israel,
the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Diaspora? That is the big
question for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For
decades, Israel has campaigned for recognition in the Arab world. But when in
early 2002 the Arab League adopted the Saudi initiative that provided for recognition
of Israel within the 1967 borders, peace seemed suddenly not so attractive. In
that scenario, the prime minister would be faced with the uncomfortable choice between
a unitary state with equal rights for settlers and Palestinians in the West
Bank, or a binational state for Jews and Palestinians, but with different political
institutions. The first option would challenge the Jewish character of Israel, the
second constitutional democracy. With the Israeli political landscape shifting
to the right and more than 600,000 hyper assertive settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has
colonised the two-state solution into oblivion.
A version in Dutch of this article first appeared on De Wereld Morgen and Geopolitiek in perspectief
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