The Reemergence of One-Statism

baffling... Is the restoration of Jewish homelessness, and the vindication of Palestinian radicalism, and the intensification of inter-communal violence, really preferable to the creation of two states for two nations? Only if good people, thoughtful people, liberal people, do not keep their heads. But these are deranging days.”

Judt’s response to these criticisms was at once provocative and faltering. He kicked off by postulating that “the solution to the crisis in the Middle East lies in Washington. On this there is widespread agreement.” (I would say that, on the contrary—and on this there really is “widespread agreement,” at least among those who know something about the Middle East—the United States is completely powerless to effect a change in the rejectionist position of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian majority that supports them, and it is only marginally influential with regard to Israeli policies on the basic issues. American [and European] aid cut-offs during the past two years have left no impression at all on the policy of the Islamic fundamentalists, and Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005 had almost nothing to do with American pressure and almost everything to do with Ariel Sharon’s character and calculations and Israeli self-interest.)

But this is to segue. After dismissing much of the criticism as “hysterical,” Judt distanced himself, at least chronologically, from the binational postulate that was the core of his argumentation. Mankind, he agreed with Walzer, had not yet entered “a post-national, transcultural, globalized paradise in which the state has become redundant.” “When I asked ‘what if there were no place for a “Jewish state”?’ I was posing a question, not ‘imposing’... a binational alternative,” he now argued. And he went on: “I wrote of binationalism... not [as] a solution for tomorrow... For the present... binationalism is... utopian.” But peoples, he argued, change (look at Franco-German relations), as do their ideas of what is possible.

The Judt article, the telling ripostes notwithstanding, spawned a host of articles and books advocating the one-state solution. Clearly he had opened the floodgates, tapping into a strong current in the Arab world and in the Left and Right in the West that sought, simply, not Israel’s reform or the reform of its policies, but its disappearance, however affected and however camouflaged. As to be expected, most of these publications were written by anti-Zionist, not to say anti-Semitic, Arabs and their Western supporters, though some professed to be doing this also for the sake of Israel’s Jews.

Hailing “the taboo [that] has finally begun to fall”—as if to say that, in past decades, no one had ever questioned Israel’s right to exist or lambasted the Jewish state—Daniel Lazar, a constitutional scholar and journalist, argued in the Nation in November 2003 that, contrary to Theodor Herzl’s founding vision, Israel is beset by war; is, with “what little democracy it still has,” “in-