Step toward apartheid

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The announcement of President Donald Trump’s Middle East “Deal of the Century” this week basically cedes the West Bank to Israel, allowing the country to seize land that otherwise would have constituted a Palestinian state.

Since Palestinian representatives were not invited to the announcement (Trump told reporters that the details had been discussed with Palestinian leadership only “briefly”), the policy’s significance seems to lie in how Israel, backed by the United States, will respond once the Palestinians reject the offer.

The response will include massive one-sided annexations, empowered by the claim that the Palestinians had refused to “compromise.” It’s a step toward apartheid. As these monumental developments take place, liberal Zionists have watched with alarm. For some time, they have begun to see that the “two-state solution” is passé.

It is clear that Israel never will evacuate hundreds of thousands of settlers, that a town like Ariel (with 20,000 inhabitants and a research university) will not be removed. The two-state idyll flies in the face of fact. But Israeli progressives have not offered a politically viable counterpoint.

Partly, that’s because today Zionists of every political stripe believe that Jews need sovereignty, their own state. And partly it’s because, for that state to be democratic, it must have a Jewish majority.

Since Palestinians account for about 50% of the combined population of Israel and the occupied territories, a Jewish and democratic state is impossible without a two-state solution. Also, Israeli nationalists, who support annexations, want to protect Israel’s Jewish majority. So a politics of “transfer” — code for ethnic cleansing — is emerging.

Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly advocates expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Avigdor Liberman, former defense minister, even supports removing Arab Israelis from the towns where they live. For these reasons, a two-state solution seemed like the only hope for progressives who don’t want to trample another people’s rights.

They now despair. This anguish is based on a false premise. Zionism is based on the idea that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state, but the movement’s founders held a more nuanced view.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “The Times Tribune”.

Context added by this archive

Closing line as printed: ‘And for the first time in Israel’s history, a binational Zionism has become necessary.’ Note the caption spells the settlement ‘Ari’el’ while the text spells it ‘Ariel’; both as printed. Also printed: in the 1977 Knesset vote on Begin’s program, ‘64 voted in favor and eight against; 40 abstained.

(It was rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which insisted on sovereignty, and Israel turned away to pursue a peace accord only with Egypt.)’ No Palestinian is quoted in the column either — it is an argument addressed to liberal Zionists about what they should do — but it is the only item in the batch that names expulsion policy as expulsion policy.

Cite this clipping

"Step toward apartheid," Times Tribune, 30 January 2020. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2020-014. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2020-014