Wednesday, July 21, 2010

One-State Debate Explodes Myth About Zionist Left


NOTE: An interesting article dealing with the same topic Ali Abunimah dealt with in his piece Israeli right embracing one-state? posted yesterday.

by Jonathan Cook

"A fascinating debate is entering Israel’s political mainstream on a once-taboo subject: the establishment of a single state as a resolution of the conflict, one in which Jews and Palestinians might potentially live as equal citizens. Surprisingly, those advocating such a solution are to be found chiefly on Israel’s political Right.

The debate, which challenges the current orthodoxy of a two-state future, is rapidly exploding traditional conceptions about the Zionist Right and Left.....

We should not romanticize these Likud converts. They are not speaking of the “state of all its citizens” demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians accept life in a state dominated by Jews. Arens, for example, wants to exclude the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza from citizenship to gerrymander his Jewish-majority state for a few more decades. None seems to be considering including a right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees. And almost all of them would expect citizenship to be conditional on loyalty, recreating for new Palestinian citizens the same problematic relationship to a Jewish state endured by the current Palestinian minority inside Israel.

Nonetheless, the Right is showing that it may be more willing to redefine its paradigms than the Zionist Left. And in the end it may confound Washington by proving more capable of peace-making than the architects of Oslo."

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