Excellent article on Zionism & One State Solution.

The article is long so I'll exerpt what struck me as interesting.
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The One-State Solution
by Daniel Lazare


Is Zionism a failed ideology? This question will strike many people as absurd on its face. Israel, after all, is a nation with an advanced standard of living, a high-tech economy and one of the most formidable militaries on earth. In a little over half a century, it has taken in millions of people from far-flung corners of the globe, taught them a new language and incorporated them into a political culture that is nothing if not vigorous. If this is failure, there are a lot of countries wishing for their share of it.

But consider the things Israel has not accomplished. In his 1896 manifesto The Jewish State, Zionism's founding document, the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl predicted that such a country would be at peace with its neighbors and would require no more than a small professional army.

In fact, Zionist settlers have clashed repeatedly with the Arabs from nearly the moment they began arriving in significant numbers in the early twentieth century, a Hundred Years' War that grows more dangerous by the month. Herzl envisioned a normal state no different from France or Germany. Yet with its peculiar ethno-religious policies elevating one group above all others, Israel is increasingly abnormal at a time when almost all other political democracies have been putting such distinctions behind them.

Herzl envisioned a state that would draw Jews like a magnet, yet more than half a century after Israel's birth, most Jews continue to vote with their feet to remain in the Diaspora, and an increasing number of Israelis prefer to live abroad. Israel was supposed to serve as a safe haven, yet it is in fact one of the more dangerous places on earth in which to be Jewish.

... Herzl emphasized again and again that hatred and competition would melt away once Jews removed themselves from their increasingly reluctant host countries, returned to their ancient homeland and took their place as separate but equal members of the international community. Yet anti-Semitism is mushrooming in the Muslim world and, based on anecdotal evidence, may be undergoing a resurgence in Europe and the United States. Is this because the world is intrinsically anti-Semitic and is therefore always looking for an excuse to bash the Jews? Or does Zionism bear responsibility in any way for the upsurge?

There is no doubt that the approach to such questions, especially in the United States, has reached a turning point. The collapse of Bush's farcical "road map," the Berlin wall that Israel is building deep inside Palestinian territory, the threats to exile or even assassinate Yasir Arafat and now the extension of hostilities to Syria--the old consensus is crumbling under the impact of such developments, and it is now possible to say things that would have been verboten only a few months ago.

In Israel, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, recently warned that if Israel wishes to preserve what little democracy it still has, it must either withdraw to its pre-1967 boundaries or grant full citizenship to the approximately 3.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, a step that would spell the virtual end of the Jewish state.

Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, has pronounced the two-state approach "inapplicable" to the problem of Israel and Palestine and is calling for a single binational state based on Arab-Jewish equality.

In the United States the historian Tony Judt, declaring the Middle East peace process a dead letter in The New York Review of Books, says that the very idea of a Jewish state has become an "anachronism" in a multicultural world in which citizenship is increasingly separated from race, religion and ethnicity. "In today's 'clash of cultures' between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states," he adds, "Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp."

... As a University of Tel Aviv archeologist named Ze'ev Herzog wrote in the newspaper Ha'aretz in 1999, "The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign, and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Furthermore, the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom." The Israelites were merely one indigenous culture among many. The idea that they had some sort of pre-eminent claim to the Holy Land has no basis in historical fact. Zionist archeology thus turns out to subvert Zionism.
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Hertzberg, a rabbi, a former president of the American Jewish Congress and the author of such well-known studies as The French Enlightenment and the Jews, opens with a description of a Labor Party conference in Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The mood at the conference was euphoric....

But then, Hertzberg writes, the guest of honor, David Ben-Gurion, arrived and proceeded to throw cold water over the festivities. By this point in his early 80s and living in retirement on a desert kibbutz, Ben-Gurion demanded that the speaker (who happened to be Hertzberg) cut short his remarks so he could take the podium. When he did, Ben-Gurion sternly told the party faithful that Israel was overextended, that it had bitten off more than it could chew and that it should return nearly all the conquered territory immediately. ...

Hertzberg wishes Israel had heeded Ben-Gurion's warning at the time. ... The fact that an "unimaginably bitter war of religion" would ensue, Hertzberg adds, did not bother "the new messianists" a bit: "They feel free to engage in the most dangerous provocations because they are certain that they will be forcing God to come down to earth and give them victory."

...Jewish opinion may not be as rock-solid in support of a Jewish state as Hertzberg thinks, if Marc Ellis's new book is any indication. Ellis, who heads the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, argues in Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes that Jews are torn between two poles: Judaism's traditional concern for ethics, and a Jewish state that makes a mockery of the very concept.

Where the Nazis never succeeded in destroying "the very essence of what it means to be Jewish," Israel has undercut it "at a fundamental level" through its relentless assault on Palestinian rights. As a result, he says, the fault line in international Jewish politics now runs between tribalists who believe in smiting the Philistines harder and harder, and universalists who believe that it is in the Jews' best interests to support equal rights for Jews and non-Jews alike.

******More religion, no matter how progressively construed, is the last thing this God-soaked piece of terrain needs. As attentive readers of the New York Times are aware, family law in Israel is in the hands of Orthodox mullahs--er, I mean, rabbis. But few really grasp all that this entails. To put it in American terms, imagine that you are looking to get married or divorced, or to adopt a child or undergo an abortion, or to bury one of your parents in a local cemetery, and that to do so you must first obtain the permission of your local Southern Baptist minister.

****Real Jews is chock-full of stories that in America, for all its sins, would be simply inconceivable. There is Eduardo Campos, a 62-year-old Uruguayan immigrant married to an Israeli, whom ultra-Orthodox Jews tried to get fired from his job at the Vita food company merely because he is a Jehovah's Witness. There is the Israeli ad company that yanked a poster for the Disney animated film Tarzan because an ultra-Orthodox watchdog group found the picture of the muscle-bound hero in a loincloth to be obscene.

There is the Israeli dairy company that discontinued a line of children's yogurts because ultra-Orthodox parents might have trouble explaining how the cartoon dinosaurs on the cover squared with a biblical tale of creation that supposedly occurred just 6,000 years ago. There is the health-and-fitness magazine that pulled an ad showing an attractive heterosexual couple arm in arm in workout clothes, because ultra-Orthodox pressure groups said it was improper to show physical contact between men and women.
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Under normal conditions, Israeli secularists would forge alliances not only with like-minded Palestinians but with others farther afield. But Zionism interferes not only by plunging society into a permanent state of war but by imposing a kind of conceptual prison. If not forbidden, contacts across religious lines grow very complicated in a "faith-driven ethno-state." "You don't understand," educated, secular Israelis say when European and American friends criticize the latest Israeli outrage. "You don't know what it's like to live in a society where a bomb could go off any minute. You don't know." But that is exactly the point.

The purpose of Zionism, and of nationalism in general, is to impose a barrier between one group and another, to limit contact and impede understanding. By emphasizing one aspect of human experience, the ethno-religious in the case of Israel, at the expense of all others, it hobbles communication with those outside the fold. The personality is truncated, and political options are reduced.

Instead of freely deciding what is to be done, people are forced to follow the logic imposed on them by the state. Hounded by rabbis, terrorized by suicide bombers, hemmed in by nationalism, Israelis see no alternative but to throw in their lot with a strongman like Sharon. The logic is irresistible but suicidal--unless someone can figure a way out of the ideological cage.


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Mango, I do agree with Hertzberg to the extent that Israel should have returned the land shortly after 1967, like Ben Gurion wanted.

A part of Hertzberg's ideas that I left out in the interest of brevity, which is in the longer artilcle, as I'm sure you noticed, is that he wants to withdraw from the occupied territories, but also prevent the Palestinians from having their own country, indefinitely.

This is the part I disagree with. Do you support this?