The Crisis of Zionism by Peter Beinart

Author:Peter Beinart [Beinart, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction: General
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-03-26T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

On March 27, 1949, with death closing in, Rabbi Stephen Wise reviewed his life before a Boston crowd. He had spent it agitating for an America in which women could vote, workers could unionize, dissenters were not jailed, and African Americans were not lynched. And he had spent it dreaming that after two thousand years of exile, Jews would make those same “egalitarian and democratic” principles the basis of a state. Ten months earlier, such a state had announced its birth, pledging in its declaration of independence to ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and to pursue “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the Hebrew prophets.” In its founding document, Israel had pledged not merely to safeguard the Jewish people but to cherish democratic ideals, and Wise told his audience that he could now meet his creator a contented man. “I have lived to see the Jewish state,” he declared. “I am too small for the greatness of the mercy which God has shown us.”

In those words, Wise captured the immensity of Israel’s birth, the immensity of a Jewish state that—in the shadow of the greatest assault on human dignity in Jewish history—promised equal dignity to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex. Now, more than six decades later, American Jews must face the immensity of the fact that, in our lifetimes, that kind of Jewish state may die.

The day is not far off. We tell ourselves that Israel is a democracy, but in the West Bank it is an ethnocracy, a place where Jews enjoy citizenship and Palestinians do not. We tell ourselves that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is temporary, but it has lasted for more than four decades, two-thirds of the life of the state. We tell ourselves that the Israeli government has no desire to hold the West Bank, but it has subsidized hundreds of thousands of Jews to move there and built a bus system, a road system, a rail system, a water system, a telephone system, and an electricity grid that treat democratic Israel and settler Israel as one and the same. We tell ourselves that since most settlers live near the green line, Israel can draw a border that incorporates them while still offering the Palestinians a viable state. But to annex the land on which 80 percent of settlers live—as Ehud Barak demanded at Camp David—Israel would have to annex settlements like Ariel, Immanuel, Kfar Adumim, Ofra, and Beit El, which sit deep in the heart of the West Bank. And close observers fear that if Israel tried to incorporate many fewer than 80 percent of the settlers, the result might be civil war.

For a long time, we have evaded these painful truths by evading Palestinians. Rarely do American synagogues, American Jewish organizations, American Jewish newspapers, or American Jewish schools invite Palestinians to write or speak; rarely do American Jewish officials travel to the West Bank,

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