Thread by @YairWallach

So, @PeterBeinart endorses binationalism and imagines a future for liberal Zionism beyond Jewish statehood.
This is an important piece. I'll outline what I see as its strengths and weaknesses. THREAD
jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish…

First the strengths. Beinart acknowledges that decades of Israeli policies and settlement expansion have made Palestinian statehood all but impossible. The two state solution is dead, and the choice is between a quasi-Apartheid system and democracy. Beinart chooses democracy.

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This is important in a reality where most mainstream Jewish organisations (who try their best to pretend the question isn't there) are effectively saying "if the Jewish state has to look like Apartheid, so be it".

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The choice is real. People are coming off the fence, one way or another. Spelling it out, and choosing democracy, is not a given.
But Beinart is also right to point out that Apartheid is not the endgame. That there is a real risk of mass expulsion of Palestinians.

4/

This is not said often enough, and loud enough, and Beinart is right to say it so clearly here. There is a real risk of a second Nakba. The pro-settler neo-Zionist right is looking for opportunity. I've said it in my my piece a few months ago.

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vashtimedia.com/2020/01/30/tru…

If you care about a progressive future of Palestine/Israel, you should consider a second Nakba a real possibility, and you should think about how to stop it. In 2020, with the rise of global fascism, this is not an impossibility.

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Beinart is also correct in saying that Zionism historically did not require the current model of Jewish statehood. The minimal conditions wereJewish collective national rights in Palestine/Israel, which translated to different models

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In my words: the model of Jewish statehood with mass Jewish majority + no Palestinian national rights emerged in late 1930s, required mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, and lasted only 19 years. There is no reason to see it as the "normal" to which Israel must "return".

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Beinart points to Dmitry Shumksy's important work, that shows that binationalism - and recognition of Arab Palestinian rights - was not a fringe trend but rather taken for granted by most Zionist thinkers. It's the price they thought they had to pay, up until late 1930s.

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What Beinart does not address is the centrality of settlement and colonisation to Zionist and Israeli discourse and praxis. If there is an unchanging DNA there, it is the principle that the rebirth of the Jewish nation must be done through settlement.

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Important to note that settlement is both praxis and theory, and goes far beyond the technicalities of "building new villages". It's about viewing the landscape as empty, and its inhabitants as inferior and unworthy; it's about expansion and more.

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It's about the process of colonisation as one that transforms Jews from weak and diasporic to strong and rooted. It's an approach that always positions Israel as foreign to the region, and is tied closely to discrimination against Mizrahi Jews (as too Arab)

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And it has always involved dispossession of native people. It's simply inevitable: there is no "settlement" that does not require taking land from people who are already there (either live there, or own it, or use it) and giving it to other people. That's what it is.

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If you want to bring an end to this colonisation drive, you need to acknowledge head-on the deep seated settlement impetus within Zionist history and current Israeli practices; and you need to acknowledge its victims.
It's not going to work otherwise.

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But the thing that bothered me most was the notion that is is for "us" to decide that the time has come to talk about some kind of one-state or confederal binationalism.

And the question who is "us" here. Who should make that call.

As I see it: the Palestinian national movement decided decades ago to pursue statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, according to intl law. We can say many things about the sorry state of the movement, and about grim prospects of that happening.

But it's their call.

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Whether to abandon the struggle for statehood, and fight for some arrangement of equal rights in a single state, is a Palestinian decision. And it's not about identity politics: it's about simple democratic sovereignty. It's their choice. It should be their decision.

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I know plenty of Jewish diaspora progressives who would love to see the Palestinian struggle shift to a classic anti-Apartheid struggle for equality. And I know quite a few West Bank Palestinians who would much rather have their own state, if they could.

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Personally, I don't see viable path to Palestinian statehood (a conclusion I came to some 15 years ago).

And it's quite likely that Palestinians will reach this conclusion collectively sooner or late. But it's a difficult one for a movement of national liberation.

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What I fear is that we are giving to the Jewish diaspora a deciding role in determining the future of Palestinians. Which, if you want, was what Zionism was always about. And this seems to me wrong.

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A central problem with the current model of Jewish Statehood, where Israel is the nation state of "the Jewish people" worldwide, is that gives non-citizen Jews abroad have a constitutional role. Both symbolically and in material sense (thru WZO, JNF).

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Any move towards democracy must end this constitutional model. This is separate from cultural and symbolic ties which would no doubt continue. But it does open difficult questions about Jewish-Israeli identity vs. diaspora Jewish identity.

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To come back to the issue of a future for Israel-Palestine, personally I feel it's too early to discuss constitutional models for binationalism - given that there is not a single political party that supports this - YET.

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But we can affirm our basic commitment to democracy and equality, whatever shape it takes. Perhaps the right way is to allow Palestinians the space to discuss their response to the changing situation and the end of Oslo (whether through a revived PLO or otherwise).

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I think the article is good in encouraging people to think beyond the current model of Jewish statehood, based on inequality and dispossession. A few years ago, the Palestinian scholar Raef Zreik wrote the article "When does a settler become a native" "academia.edu/28692652/When_…

In which Zreik tried to think how to separate Zionism's settler impetus from Jewish-Israeli national self determination, and to think about a decolonial future in Palestine that would recognise Jewish-Israeli national rights.

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academia.edu/28692652/When_…

There is a separate question of what this "nativisation" of the Jewish-Israeli would do to the relations with the Jewish diaspora. It seems to me that it inevitably would require a redefinition of these relations.

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In any case, this is a long enough thread as it is, so I'll leave it at that.

/END