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November 25, 2004
I came across a reference to this article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books whilst reading Herzl's Nightmare by Peter Rogers, the former Australian Ambassador to Israel.
In the article Judt says that, as a result of its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices:
"It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens."
Or alternatively, Israel can:
"...continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both."
And lastly, Israel
"Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah."
Judt says that the situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless.
Judt adds that suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society.
That puts the cards squarely on the table, does it not? It indicates that the Palestinian/Israeli crisis in the Middle East won't go away. It also suggests that the two-state solution—( the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map")—is probably already doomed. Israel is acting to ensure that the whole package called the Palestinian state is off the agenda. Sharon's plan is to bury the Palestinian national cause by conferring legitimacy on Israel's settlements in the West Bank.
So is the integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians ie., a pluralist states that is multiethnic and multicultural. For though Israel, is a democratic state, it uses ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is a Jewish state that is walking down the pathway to becoming an intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state, and away from the pathway of a Jewish state becoming a binational state.
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