Israel, Palestine, and the Diaspora

Why Israel seems headed towards a one-state solution when two states is the better way.

The blogosphere is again abuzz over University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer. In his April 29 remarks at the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) and the bête noir of Israel advocacy, laid out his predictions for the fate of Israel as a Jewish state.

In his speech, Mearsheimer acknowledged that the two-state solution – what he outlines as a Palestinian state in at least 95 per cent of the West Bank existing alongside the State of Israel – is the ideal outcome to the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he concluded that the current path is pointing to a single, binational state. There’s more, however. He first sees an apartheid state coming about, at which point the “great ambivalent middle” of American Jews will be so morally horrified that they will push Israel to create a democratic, binational state.

As any social scientist well knows, prediction is the hardest part of the business. We explain, describe, prescribe, and only occasionally try to predict. Sadly, I think his predictions have much merit. But he does not sufficiently flesh out the explanation side of the dynamic.

Mearsheimer writes of the “blind loyalty” that the “New Afrikaner” Jews (as he calls much of the Israel lobby) maintain for Israel. He contrasts these Jews – the Abraham Foxmans, Malcolm Hoenleins, and Morton Kleins of the American Jewish world – with the group he calls Righteous Jews. These include well known critics of Israeli policies, such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Sara Roy, and Tony Judt.

But what is leading the ambivalent middle to be swayed by the “blind loyalists”? Mearsheimer invokes the important emotional driver of loyalty – without a whole lot of analysis – but leaves out two other important factors that explain this dynamic: empathy and the politics of legitimacy.

Empathy would seem a strange notion to invoke here, since it’s the plight of the Palestinians that gets so little attention in the halls of Israel advocacy. And true, empathy with the Palestinians is a tough sell for many mainstream Jews.

But Diaspora Jewish support for Israel entails a degree of empathy in its own right. For North American Jews, a population that is overwhelmingly secular to moderately religious (only one-sixth of American Jews heed kosher dietary laws, for instance), Israelis are becoming increasingly different culturally. As is well known, the Israeli Jewish population is moving more and more to the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox end of the spectrum. Israel has also long been the melting pot of the Jewish world, where disadvantaged immigrants have historically needed Diaspora Jewish dollars to be properly absorbed into their new Israeli home. In most cases, North American Jews are more likely to feel cultural kinship with their own fellow non-Jewish Americans and Canadians than with Israelis.

Add to this the everyday culture clash that many Diaspora Jews note when they first visit the Jewish state (the lack of queuing and the “straight talk” known as dugri are but two examples), and the North American Jewish connection to Israel does not always feel like it’s about protecting the perceived interests of one’s own group. The politics of Israel support has become as much about the soul as about security.

Empathy is one part of the equation. The other is the politics of legitimacy. The “one-state solution,” as the binational state option has come to be known, is increasingly promoted by Israel’s critics. The annual Israel Apartheid Week held on campuses across North America is vague about its political endgame. But in its demand that all Palestinians be allowed to return to their homes (i.e. within pre-1967 Israel), these activists are effectively promoting the dismantling of the Jewish state. If there’s one thing that Israel represents to Israelis and to Jews worldwide, it’s the sovereign expression of Jewish nationhood.

True, the younger generation of Jews Mearsheimer turns his lens on are in some ways turning away from the automatically enduring connection to Israel that the previous generations experienced. (A well cited recent study by American sociologist Steven M. Cohen documents this.) But the delegitimation campaign afoot on their campuses leaves Jewish students little room to push for the two-state solution that Mearsheimer (and I) acknowledge is the best of all possible outcomes.

Acknowledging these factors suggest two sets of actions. The first is bolstering Jewish groups that help students experience their Israel-connected identity in a way that allows for more policy options than the current Israeli government is embracing. J Street (as Mearsheimer mentions in passing) is a great start. The second is to acknowledge that for many North American Jews, supporting Israel is an act of expanding their sense of collective identity as much as it is of parochial loyalty.

This means that interested observers should be tapping this generation’s intrinsic moral virtue – acknowledging the set of complex emotions that includes not only loyalty but also empathy for others – rather than flatly berating Israel supporters for the wrong virtue. Taking these factors seriously may help steer Diaspora politics more gently in the direction that is sorely needed – while expanding the objects of empathy to include the stateless within Israel’s midst.