The Reemergence of One-Statism

state did not trouble Judt overmuch. It “would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds,” he suggested. And the United States and the international community could help. An “international force” could guarantee “the security of Arabs and Jews alike,” and anyway, “a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders.”

Judt’s article elicited a tidal wave of responses, most of them negative. An exception was Amos Eilon, an Israeli journalist and historian who recently decamped to a villa in Tuscany. He waded in with a few paragraphs of support (“Judt should be lauded,” he wrote)—though he added, tellingly, that should a binational state with an Arab majority materialize, “the end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa.”

But most of the responses published by the New York Review of Books were extremely critical of Judt’s piece, not to say thoroughly dismissive. Omer Bartov, a historian of Israeli origin at Brown University, wrote that the author was “strangely wrongheaded” and seemed to be writing from the perspective of “a café in Paris or London.” Compared to which nation state was “Israel an anachronism”? Compared to Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iran? And if the comparison was to modern Europe, surely Poland and Serbia were equally anachronistic because they, too, are “based on a unity... of nation and state.” Judt seemed to prefer, for Israel/Palestine, the model of interwar Poland, with its diverse populations, “rife with ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism.” Or

Yugoslavia, “which [recently] broke up in a sea of blood.” For Judt, these (unsuccessful) multiethnic models apparently were preferable to (peaceful) uniethnic nation-states.

In any event, according to Bartov, the binational model for Israel/Palestine is “absurd” because neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs want it. Both groups seek to live in a country inhabited and governed by their own. On the Arab side, the Islamic fundamentalists regard shared sovereignty with the Jews as “anathema,” and the moderates know that “a binational state... would spell civil war and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.” Two states, perhaps even separated by an ugly security fence, is a better idea by far, he concluded.

Michael Walzer, a political thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, took the ideological bull by the horns when he wrote: “Ridding the world of the nation-state is an interesting, if not a new, idea. But why start with Israel? Why not with France?... The French led the way into this parochial political structure that, in violation of all the tenets of advanced opinion, privileged a particular people, history, and language... Or [with] the Germans, or the Swedes, or the Bulgarians... all of whom have enjoyed these ‘privileges’ much longer than the Jews.”

But “the real problem” with Judt’s proposal, wrote Walzer, was that he was not really pointing the way to a binational state at all but “would simply replace one nation-state with another,” for in “a decade or so” there would be more Arabs than Jews between