November 22, 2003

CONNECTIONS

Seeking an Alternative to a Jewish State

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

When the distinguished historian Tony Judt declared in the pages of The New York Review of Books recently that "the time has come to think the unthinkable," he must have expected a shocked reaction. The unthinkable was that Israel should be replaced by a binational country in which Jews and Palestinians would live together in democratic harmony. There is, Mr. Judt suggested, "no place in the world today for a 'Jewish state.' "

But maybe his proposal should not have been shocking. Of course, it might seem a bit absurd to suggest that a country should dissolve itself. And it might seem a bit selective to ask Israel to sacrifice what Mr. Judt calls its ethno religious character when so many other countries are uninterested in the prospect.

Still, the selective application of such ideals has a respected pedigree going back at least to the 1970's, when international terrorism was being pioneered by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which fought for what it euphemistically called a "democratic, secular state" in all of Palestine . Today sympathy for the consequences of such an idea is still more widespread; in a recent poll, 17 percent of Italians said that Israel should "cease existing."

Mr. Judt's conclusions are also no different from some offered by Israel 's most accomplished intellectuals and no more caustic. In fact, in the Dec. 4 issue of The New York Review, Mr. Judt, responding to his critics, echoes Lenin and describes American defenders of Israel as "useful idiots." He also argues that they don't recognize that Zionism is now "the dogma of intolerant, belligerent, self-righteous, God-fearing irredentists." He actually sounds Israeli.

Mr. Judt himself points out this empathy. Some distinguished American professors canceled subscriptions to The New York Review to protest his piece, he notes, while Israeli letter writers "welcomed the disagreement." He cites an Israeli playwright, Joshua Sobol, who also envisions replacing Israel with a Jewish-Arab state. And in a letter, the Israeli writer Amos Elon praises Mr. Judt for "cutting through a forest of clichés" with his proposal.

In August, in interviews in Haaretz, two leftists Israelis, Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi, went even further in their expressions of disgust with Israel 's sins and settlements. "A Jewish state can no longer exist here," Mr. Hanegbi says. Mr. Benvenisti, who has long argued about the baleful demographic consequences of holding onto the West Bank , sees a binational state as inevitable: "The Zionist revolution is over."

And in Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli daily, Avraham Burg, a Labor Party member of parliament and its former speaker, was just as blunt when he said: "The Zionist revolution is dead." His indictment was translated in The Forward, then reprinted in The International Herald Tribune and The Guardian and translated again for Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

"We were supposed to be a light unto the nations," Mr. Burg concluded. "In this we have failed." Instead, he wrote, Israel is constructed with "scaffolding of corruption" and "foundations of oppression and injustice."

Like Mr. Judt's essay, these proclamations are not policy analyses, attempting to suggest how settlements are to be treated, how agreements with Palestinians are to be regulated, let alone how to prevent the kind of armament that took place when Israel withdrew from territories under the Oslo accords of 1993.

They are instead moral ultimatums, bitter and sweeping. Mr. Burg may harbor some hope, but the others declare that nothing else is possible, and if that is painful, well, the suffering suits the sin.

There is, though, something cartoonish in the indictment. While the Palestinians loom large as a demographic challenge and as victims of Israeli policy, in other respects they remain stick figures. There is rarely any sense that they, too, are responsible beings who make decisions, act on their beliefs, teach their children and bear blame. And of course, not all Israeli trauma is self-inflicted; not all failures to reach peace are due to shortsightedness; not all self-disgust is rational.

In fact, the self-blame and binational impulses are only partly responses to current problems. In his new book, "The Fate of Zionism" (HarperSanFrancisco, $19.95), Arthur Hertzberg refers to the "tension between the universal and the particular at the heart of Zionism." A binational country promises to eliminate Zionist particularity, shedding it for the sake of a universalism vision.

This tension was present from the very start. In "The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel 's Soul" (Basic Books, 2000), the scholar Yoram Hazony followed one of its strands. Theodor Herzl, he points out, advocated Jewish sovereignty. But such imposing figures as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem and other German Jewish settlers in Palestine , in forming Brit Shalom in 1925, opposed Jewish political power, hoping at most for what Buber called a "binational social political entity" binding Arabs and Jews.

That vision persisted; even when it was clear neither party found it attractive (though responsibility for the failure was often laid at the feet of the Jews). When Arabs massacred Jews in 1929, for example, Buber said Jews had provided "the motive for the religious fanaticism." As late as 1958, Buber accused the Jews of mistakenly following the way of power, saying that the "Jewish people preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."

Mr. Hazony argues that this perspective, its uneasiness with nationalism, its exaggerated self-criticism and its universalist ideals persisted until it reached the center of Israeli cultural life in the 1990's. The education system filtered out Jewish history from textbooks; a guide for the Israeli army specified 11 values and 34 principles without referring to the idea of a Jewish nation or people; and post-Zionist historians chronicled Israeli sins that had previously been glossed over, intending to demolish Zionist ideology.

Shimon Peres, in his 1993 book "The New Middle East," envisioned the end of all nation states, the weakening of religious identities and the rise of new regional allegiances. " Western Europe ," he wrote, "is a shining example." Mr. Judt apparently agrees.

But the notion that by renouncing one's identity — by assimilating or converting — a root cause of hatred might finally be eliminated is also a familiar response to anti-Semitism. Could that lie behind the binational impulse as well? Mr. Judt practically acknowledges as much when he suggests that Israel embarrasses some Jews and inspires what he refers to as misdirected attacks on them.

Perhaps then, despite Mr. Judt's embarrassment, the binational experiment might first be tried elsewhere? Say between Iran and Iraq ? Or Pakistan and India ? Or France and Germany ? Until then attention might return to the real world and to the details that inspire such proposals of despair.