Plan Bibi

The most recent Israeli election compels Zionists to examine our principles. If the right of the Jewish state to exist is taken, as I and others hold, to entail a concomitant right of a Palestinian state to exist, Benjamin Netanyahu's victory is a distressing watershed. Given his declarations prior to the vote, what can Bibi's triumph mean except that a plurality of the Israeli electorate has rejected a two-state solution?  That being the case, Zionists both inside and outside Israel must radically rethink their commitments and weigh the relative importance of their priorities.

Herzlian Zionism has always been a conceptually vexed enterprise. The marriage of Jewish nationalism and liberal democracy is a shotgun wedding at best.  There is no practical way to perfectly reconcile the dual imperatives of maintaining a Jewish majority and safeguarding the equal rights of all citizens, thus under ideal conditions the Zionist state was foreordained to be beset by virtually perpetual civic turmoil and identity crises. This is why, before 1948, many of Zionism's most salient and intellectually astute spokespersons, such as Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, rejected the basic precepts of Theodore Herzl's state-Zionist vision.

This is not to declare, as anti-Zionists do, that Zionism is intrinsically illegitimate (or that it is, as the phenomenally malicious 1975 UN resolution deemed it, "racism"). The Holocaust proved Theodore Herzl's arguments for the need of the Jewish state to be prophetic and the idealism of anti-state Zionists such as Einstein and Buber to be naive.  However, the legitimacy of the Zionist state is contingent upon its continued and robust commitment to grappling with the contradiction between its liberal democratic and Jewish nationalist imperatives.

Since 1967, moreover, the strains upon that legitimacy have been egregious. The slim chance to maintain basic fairness for all living under the aegis of the Jewish state that would have existed under ideal conditions has been effaced by the occupation of 2.4 million Palestinians on the West Bank and the enforced deferment of sovereignty for 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Under those conditions, the Zionist project can only legitimately persist under the onus of an eventual end to the occupation and establishment of a Palestinian state. In the absence of a formal commitment to those ends, Israel devolves from a state of effective to constitutional apartheid. The legitimacy of the Zionist state thus hangs by a very slender thread.

No one understands this better than Benjamin Netanyahu. This is why his pre-electoral repudiation of a two-state solution was followed so swiftly by a post-election volte-face. The critical awareness evinced by his verbal gymnastics testifies to the rashness of his tactics. He knowingly gambled the international standing of the Zionist project on a bid to rescue his political career, a move that must mark him as one of the most un-statesmanlike politicians of recent times.

In the shadow of the Janus-faced prime-minister elect, Zionists across the globe, Jews and non-Jews alike, are compelled to reassess their positions. We are forced to reconcile our secular Zionist creed with the increasingly incontestable  and immutable reality that Israeli troops will never be withdrawn from the West Bank. One possibility is the embrace of a so-called "bi-national state." In this scenario, all current residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (and potentially many members of the Palestinian diaspora) would receive full citizenship in Israel (then Israel-Palestine), which would no longer be the unique sovereign representative of the Jewish people, but would jointly embody the sovereignty of both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples.

This would be a fair resolution of the crisis. Yet even if the many practical obstacles to such a resolution could be overcome, Zionists might well resist the formation of a "bi-national state" as an inadequate agent for their political needs. Having witnessed the sheer malevolent destructiveness of modern anti-Semitism, the world should need little further demonstration of why the Jewish people desire a uniquely sovereign advocate among the community of nations, and why they might feel that a state whose focus was split between the Jews and any other people would be insufficient to the task warranted by the post-Holocaust world.

Are Zionists then forced to choose between a grudging (or hypocritical) endorsement of the status quo and continuing lip-service to an ever less-plausible two-state solution? A drastic re-conceptualization of the Zionist project is in order. If the occupation can not be ended, and a bi-national state is not acceptable, we are forced to imagine an alternative future in which Jewish sovereignty and Palestinian rights both find just expression and fulfillment.

Such ends might be served by a "two-state nation." That is to say, a single contiguous national territory (constituting all of pre-1967 Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank) housing two sovereign governments, that of Israel and Palestine, respectively. Israeli citizens living within the space would participate in the governing institutions of Israel, which would continue as they do now. Palestinian citizens would vote for and pay taxes to the Palestinian government, which could remain in the Palestinian Authority's current residence at Ramallah or be moved to some other location. The jurisdiction of both governments would run through the whole of Israeli-Palestinian territory, and the citizens of both states would have unrestricted freedom of access, able to work or reside at any location from the Golan Heights to the southern Negev, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. 

Before enumerating the obvious obstacles to this concept, let me list the problems it would solve. First and foremost, it would (at least notionally) end the occupation. As long as Palestinian forces were allowed to jointly patrol the streets of Tel Aviv, it would no longer be an impingement on Palestinian sovereignty for Israeli soldiers to protect Jewish settlers in the West Bank (or even the Gaza Strip). As long as religious Zionists respected the rights and property of Palestinian citizens, it would no longer pose a problem that they desire to reside within "Judea and Samaria." Congruently, the issue of the "Palestinian right of return" would no longer pose an existential threat to the Zionist project. Since geographic residence and citizenship would be disaggregated, it would no longer matter how many Palestinian refugees returned to homes within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel, as they would do so as citizens of the new Palestinian state.

The practical complexities of such an arrangement are obviously rife. How two sovereign governments would share revenue, jointly police crime, divide the burden of national defense, and maintain the peace within the same territorial space are problematic questions, especially given the long-simmering resentments and destructively violent conflicts that roil the communities to be joined under this scheme. The concept may thus seem absurd, but it only appears more so than the status quo because we have become acclimated to the latter through long acquaintance. If we are forced to choose between absurdities, we are compelled toward those that are more just. The burden of living with the status quo might seem easier than that of grappling with a radically new future, but Benjamin Netanyahu's machinations have presented Zionists with an intractable conundrum. To call oneself a Zionist in the post-Bibi age is to be faced with a choice: either assent to the perpetuation of a manifestly unjust system; or explain how the dual imperatives of Jewish sovereignty and human rights can both be fulfilled given current realities on the ground in the Middle East.