7 thoughts on “Foreign Policy Elite Abandons Two-States, but Refuses to Envision One – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. What happened to Czechoslavkia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq and Yugoslavia?
    These countries were all artificial constructs were different ethnic groups, languages and cultures, were forced to mix and make nice.
    Things didn’t work as planned.

    Richard. If you and your next door neighbor were forced to live together under one roof, how long would that last?

    Please.

    1. @ Ed: Once again, you missed my point. I was not talking of countries in which ethnic groups already existed and in which no attempt was made to protect or guarantee minority rights. The problem with the countries you mention is that they were essentially colonial constructs in which various ethnic/religious groups or tribes were thrown together with little thought about what would make for homogeneity. In fact they may’ve been thrown together deliberately to create such tension & conflict.

      I was talking about countries which attempted to negotiate a new paradigm in which the groups within the state recognized the these differences and respected or affirmed them.

      Your hypothetical doesn’t work. A better version would be if I decided my house was too small and found a book which told me (in my interpretation) that my neighbor’s house and my entire block were mine and I commandeered all those houses and moved all my relatives in and threw the existing owners out.

      Then if all the dispossessed organized themselves and demanded the return of their property and threatened me if I didn’t do that and told me to move back into my own house. For good measure–and if they were generous–they might demand I build them new homes to replace the ones that you stole from them. That would be a more comparable hypothetical.

      1. Your hypothetical is even worse as you can’t compare private property to national sovereignty.

        Without colonialism there would have been large Arab nation in the Lavant so then Israel would have consisted 3% of the region. It is the multiple European powers that were here that made this artificial separation. Imagine India where cultural/linguistical differences are much greater that those of countries in the lavant but India is one country, not 21

        1. @ Ginger: Regarding India…would you like to compare the 1,100 Indian Muslims slaughtered under Narendra Modi’s Gujarat reign to Israel? Perhaps slaughter 1,100 Israeli Muslims inside Israel? Not to mention its illegal occupation of Muslim Kashmir. India doesn’t do that much better than Israel I’m afraid.

          1. Why won’t you answer to the point of the artificial split of the Arab world into nations?
            And Kashmir is a complex story. Simply writing illegal occupation is shallow.

  2. Thanks, Richard, for this excellent analysis. I must admit I’m enjoying watching Bibi desperately scrambling to hold onto the support of younger American Jews. Seems with the latest decision to ban JVP and other groups from entering Israel due to their support of BDS, he’s turning to Evangelical Christian Zionist zealots. I guess that will help for a while, but the writing is on the wall.

  3. Richard, I like your 10-point list, but it misses (I think) one matter important to me, namely, that Israel must rescind and guarantee not to have subsequently any laws on the books which limit political opinion (e.g., no party must be disallowed unless it agrees Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state”, or any party disallowed because it demands right of return for non-Jews, etc. One might also add a free-speech-is-free-speech item if it’s not on your list (as against the present anti-BDS law).

    BTW, I take seriously the comments above by people who doubt that apples and oranges (Zionist-Jews and Palestinians) can ever be made-to (or otherwise arrange to) live together democratically and w/o discrimination. Those people may be right! I/P is not and has never been a place where Zionist-Jews and non-Zionist Palestinians lived comfortably together. While it is true that Jews and Muslims and Christians lived for a long time w/i Palestine under the Ottomans, the Jews were religious, non-nationalist, and a tiny minority. My late wife’s family were Quakers, part of the Ramallah Friends Meeting, and became Quakers after being Greek Orthodox Christians. As far as I know they got along fine with all the others who lived in Ramallah (mostly Christians before 1948) and in El-Bireh (mostly Muslims). But the Zionists arrived with an agenda of armed theft and believed they arrived with a “right” to make a reality that agenda, and believe it to this day (whoever said that all property is theft might as well have been talking about ZIonists). So it seems a bit hard to imagine Zionist-Israeli-Jews living w/o discrimination in an equal society with Palestinian-non-ZIonist-non-Jews.

    But the present apartheid (1967-and-not-letting-up) would be far worse than a non-discriminatory “democratic 1SS” imposed by international pressure *(presumably energized by BDS and human-rights sensibilities).

    When the American-media-Mandarins say 2SS has failed and Israel will not willingly accept democratic 1SS, they are in a way saying it all. They are saying that there must be intervention from outside, something to overcome Israeli refusalism.

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