it has become increasingly clear to many people around the world and among many American Jews that the Israeli government has no intention of creating a politically and economically viable Palestinian state. On the eve of his reelection, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that no Palestinian state would emerge under his next five-year government. Although Netanyahu subsequently qualified this promise by claiming he only meant that the conditions for creating such a state do not yet exist, his party almost certainly owed its electoral victory to his display of staunch opposition to Palestinian statehood. The government he subsequently appointed contains members who are even more extreme and overtly racist than Netanyahu himself. Such a far right government was made possible because Israeli public opinion has shifted significantly against any two-state solution. This opinion is likely to hold until massive external pressure compels Israel to consider a different direction.
Israel faces growing international pressure either to move now to create a viable Palestinian state (not a series of isolated cities with no control over their own borders and surrounded by Israeli West Bank settlers and the Israel Defense Forces) or else give Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the same voting rights that Palestinians enjoy as citizens of Israel within the pre-1967 borders.
“One person, one vote” is not an ideal solution, and history leads many to doubt that a one-state solution is viable: forcing multiple peoples into one state did not, for instance, lead to peace in Yugoslavia or Iraq. Unless both parties really desire such a state, its creation through international pressure might lead to a bloody civil war. On the other hand, if the Palestinian people were to launch a campaign for “one person, one vote,” it would have resonance not only globally but also within Israel and among many American Jews. The democratic aspiration embodied in that demand, made by a people who are now occupied and subjugated, resonates far beyond the demand for two states. Insisting on equal suffrage might weaken Israel’s ability to withstand international pressure for a more democratic society. The fear that a “one person, one vote” policy might eventually be imposed on Israelis could move those at Israel’s center away from the right-wingers they increasingly support and toward those who are building pressure for a two-state solution. So strategically speaking, Palestinians who favor a two-state solution might get one more quickly by demanding voting rights within Israel. But this approach will feel contrived and dishonest unless it represents a change in what the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza really want — and there’s little evidence for that.
I have little hope that either pressure on Israel from the international community to create a two-state solution or pressure to give Palestinians the vote will actually work. Both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some Palestinians remind us that there is nothing “post” about the trauma of the Occupation or of living in Gaza, parts of which were reduced to rubble by the Israeli offensive in the summer of 2014, leaving thousands dead or wounded and tens of thousands homeless. And Israelis who spent much of that summer fleeing to bomb shelters several times a day remind us that they too are not just responding to the oppression of bygone eras, but have recently had that history dramatically reinforced. By attempting to bomb Israeli cities in the summer of 2014, Hamas also ensured that Israelis would have recent evidence that their fears are justified. Once again, a de facto extremist alliance — of Israeli right-wing extremists who wish to rule over the Palestinian people (or push them out of Palestine entirely) and Hamas extremists who wish to eliminate the State of Israel — has managed temporarily to marginalize those on both sides who believe in nonviolence and mutual reconciliation. And all this takes place while the military expansion and brutal fundamentalism of the Islamic State (ISIL) increase these fears.
One of the lessons I have learned from my psychotherapy practice is that you cannot coerce people suffering from PTSD to give up their fears — in fact, trying to do so almost always worsens them, a theme I’ll explore more fully in the Winter 2016 issue of Tikkun.
It would be far more productive if both peoples could recognize the humanity of the other and thus become able to take positive, peace- and reconciliation-oriented political action.
Hundreds of dialogue and peace groups in Israel and the Diaspora have attempted to generate this kind of recognition, only to be foiled by some action on “the other side” that undermines faith in that side’s humanity and decency. Observing this tendency, increasing numbers of social change activists have come to doubt that reconciliation is likely to happen in a world structured around fear and militarism.
So long as the dominant global common sense is determined by notions of homeland security that depend on military might and violence, and so long as the ethos of global capitalism continues to teach us to “win” for ourselves rather than share with others, the logic of power and domination will appear to be the world’s only “truth”— and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine will remain unlikely. Memories of the Holocaust still shape Israelis’ view of the dangers of being “too soft,” and fears of Iran’s nuclear ambitions strengthen the appeal of Israeli ultranationalists, religious fundamentalists, and militarists. Those of us who still wish to foster a consciousness of reconciliation and peace thus appear to most Israelis as naïve.
But transformations in consciousness, often quite radical, have happened in Israel around the status of women and around the treatment of gays and lesbians. Those who thought this possible thirty years ago were similarly dismissed as naïve. When the Western world changes its sense of what is naïve and what is smart and realistic, Israel and then the Palestinian people are likely to be deeply influenced.
It will take a larger transformation in the global ethos to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East. We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives challenge the notion that homeland security can be achieved through domination and power over the other. We urge the U.S. government to replace that strategy with one of generosity toward the other. To make this demand concrete, we’ve developed a detailed Global Marshall Plan, and Congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapolis has introduced a resolution in support of that plan in the House of Representatives.
The biggest contribution the rest of the world can make toward achieving peace in the Middle East is to work to transform consciousness in our own countries so that masses of people might accept this new paradigm of security through generosity rather than through militarism.
Admittedly, that is an “unrealistic” path. But fifty years ago, it was no less unrealistic to believe that segregation and apartheid could be defeated. Forty years ago, it was naïve to think that patriarchal assumptions could be put on the defensive, just as only twenty years ago it was wishful thinking to believe that gays could gain the right to marry in some states.
Changes of consciousness take huge efforts, but when they are achieved, they can have equally huge consequences. When the strategy of generosity becomes the central way that people in the West think about homeland security, Israelis and Palestinians will no longer be trapped in the old, militaristic paradigm. And what seems impossible today will become practical politics in Israel and Palestine.
In this special section of Tikkun we print responses to a question we put to a variety of thinkers: Given the current government in Israel, what’s next for those of us who are not content to turn our backs on the suffering that the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza continue to cause to the Palestinian people, and the suffering that the Occupation also inflicts, albeit in more hidden ways, on the Israeli people? What are the strategies we should all pursue together? As you will see, we asked people whom we knew would disagree with our premises, as well as those who agree with our premises but not our conclusions. Aside from the voices in this segment of the magazine, we’re also publishing more responses in the web-only portion of this debate — you can read them all at tikkun.org/whatnext.
