Given that top Democratic leaders supported Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, there’s a limit to how much protesting sane Americans can make. But when the world settles back down in the next decade or two after whatever conflagrations and wars erupt on account of this miscalculation, Israel itself will have been transformed. Whether Trump, or his Israeli friends realize it or not, he has just ditched the Israel-Palestine Two State Solution. But it is not in favor of the Greater Israel sought by the fanatics, whose Jewish settlements have already stripped the Palestinians of any possible homeland. It will rather be the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that will bring a mature peace to that troubled land. Jerusalem will have become the capital of a single state, shared in some politically defined fashion by the Palestinian and Jewish people. The era of the Jewish state will have ended. The western world was so (?!) sympathetic to the Jews after the Holocaust that they were given Arab Palestine. Of course, true justice would have been giving these traumatized people a piece of Germany Be that as it may, the Jews proved no more humane than any other group in history. Their time is up in having been given so privileged a moral status. So now the world is ready for a stable peace, a nation where both ethnicities will simply have to learn to live together as one nation.
I hadn’t gotten up this morning intending to plug a book I wrote in 2009. But I hadn’t then realized how the lunacy of an American president could tap into bipartisan zealotry and/or cowardice with such finesse. Noam Chomsky’s back cover blurb for my book, Does Israel Have a Future? The Case for a Post-Zionist State encouraged me to persist even though many found the mere notion of one state for both peoples preposterious:
“Constance Hilliard raises very critical issues, and whether one agrees with her conclusions or not, there is much to ponder in her analysis. Her leading theme seems to me very persuasive.”
Envisioning One State (from the book’s last chapter)
“The term “one-state solution” encompasses a range of democratic structures: federal, confederal, binational, unitary dedentralized, consociational, or multi-confessional. In 2003 in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Meron Benvenisti suggested a system ‘that recognizes collective ethnic-national rights and maintains power sharing on the national-central level, with defined political rights for the minority and sometimes territorial-cantonal divisions. . . .Ali bunimah prefers the Belgian model. . .”
“It would be premature to lay out in detail the form a binational state would take. This is because the process of debating and negotiating is a creative rather than linear one. But the first and possibly the most difficult, step in the process will be acknowledging that the time has come to set aside the exhausting diplomatic fiction that twenty-first century Palestinians and Jews will eventually live in separate but equal states. This is as unworkable in Israel as it was in the southern United States.”
“Israel should mean more to the world than the fact, however important, that it is the guardian of the most sacred heritage of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It should mean more to the diplomatic community than its current perception as an incurable migraine of rival nationalisms, religious and ethnic hatreds. A piece of Israel should exist in the hearts and minds of all thoughtful men and women. It should be the voice that shouts ‘never again’ not only for Jews, but for all who face injustice. This is the real Israel, the one now struggling to be born.”
