Gadi Taub: Opposites Attract
[Gadi Taub is an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.]
It is an old adage that political opposites converge. But when it actually happens, it’s still a surprise. And in the last year or so, in Israel, it did: Extreme hawks on the right, and extreme anti-Zionists on the left, seem to have arrived at more or less the same plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The surprising change came from the right, which so far was vague on its vision of the future. What the moderate left wanted was clear for many years: a two-state solution. What the extreme anti-Zionist left wanted was also clear: accepting the Arab position which was in place ever since the idea of partition was first put on the table, back in the 1930s: one democratic state over the whole of Palestine. In the 1930s and 1940s Palestinians favored that solution since they were the clear majority. Those Palestinians who still favor it, favor it because they assume—rightly—that they will eventually be a majority. The anti-Zionist left adopts that position.
But what was exactly the endgame of the right? The right was explicit about what it didn’t want—partition—but not about what it did want. By building and supporting settlement it aimed to block the road to partition, but it also refused to annex the territories. Annexation would mean extending Israel’s constitutional framework into the territories, which would entail granting the Arab population there the same political rights that their brethren in Israel proper have, thus risking the loss of the Jewish majority. And without a clear Jewish majority, the very idea of a Jewish democratic state makes no sense....
Read entire article at The New Republic
It is an old adage that political opposites converge. But when it actually happens, it’s still a surprise. And in the last year or so, in Israel, it did: Extreme hawks on the right, and extreme anti-Zionists on the left, seem to have arrived at more or less the same plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The surprising change came from the right, which so far was vague on its vision of the future. What the moderate left wanted was clear for many years: a two-state solution. What the extreme anti-Zionist left wanted was also clear: accepting the Arab position which was in place ever since the idea of partition was first put on the table, back in the 1930s: one democratic state over the whole of Palestine. In the 1930s and 1940s Palestinians favored that solution since they were the clear majority. Those Palestinians who still favor it, favor it because they assume—rightly—that they will eventually be a majority. The anti-Zionist left adopts that position.
But what was exactly the endgame of the right? The right was explicit about what it didn’t want—partition—but not about what it did want. By building and supporting settlement it aimed to block the road to partition, but it also refused to annex the territories. Annexation would mean extending Israel’s constitutional framework into the territories, which would entail granting the Arab population there the same political rights that their brethren in Israel proper have, thus risking the loss of the Jewish majority. And without a clear Jewish majority, the very idea of a Jewish democratic state makes no sense....