Four American professors of foreign policy have jointly written an article declaring that Israel “resembles an apartheid state,” a slippery description that allows the authors to deny claiming Israel “is” such a state, but only that it “resembles an apartheid state.” These four professors promote the notion that there is only a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and that in order to force Israel to accept this solution, Washington should threaten stiff sanctions against the Jewish state, including a sharp cut in aid. The assumption is that if sanctions are severe enough, then Israel will have no alternative but be willing to yield to this one-state solution, even though almost all Israelis believe this would be national suicide. For a “one-state solution” in “all of Palestine, from the river to the sea” means that 2.1 million Arabs in Gaza, and another 2.4 million in the PA-run territories in the West Bank, would become part of “Israel/Palestine.” The Jews in this new state would be demographically overwhelmed, both from the 4.7 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank joining 2 million Israeli Arabs to form a demographic majority in what would no longer be a Jewish state, and what’s more, that state’s voters would “democratically” vote for Palestinians outside the area to exercise their “right of return,” allowing still more Arabs into “Palestine/Israel.” More on this article, and its sinister “one-state solution,” can be found here: “Foreign Affairs Article Urges Sanctions Threat Against ‘Apartheid’ Israel,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, May 2, 2023:
Foreign Affairs, the journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, greeted Israel’s 75th birthday with a long article claiming that the country “resembles an apartheid state” and urging Washington to threaten Israel with sanctions and “sharply reducing aid.”
The article, which runs more than 5,000 words, is by four professors—Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, and Marc Lynch of George Washington University and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. They are editors of a book, The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?, that was published in March by the Cornell University Press.
The article might be dismissed as an irrelevant rant by academics, but the hundred-year-old journal and the Council that published it have close ties to business, government, and media elites. The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Council’s board, Jami Miscik, is a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency who sits on the boards of Morgan Stanley, General Motors, and HP Inc. The authors have also been on a tour of other institutions—Columbia, Harvard, the Brookings Institution—to promote their work.
The article is getting negative reviews from more accurate and responsible scholars, who say that it is misleading to focus only on Israeli actions and policies without also providing more detail about the context in which they arose. “As an Israeli who wants to end the occupation, it’s beyond me how an article like this, by serious [sic] analysts, scarcely mentions the Palestinian Authority and its failures — not all of which can be laid at Israel’s door — or the Palestinian violence that also shredded the Israeli Left,” wrote Yehuda Mirsky, a professor at Brandeis who was a State Department official during the Clinton administration.
The article is written as if Israel exists in a vacuum. The non-stop terror threat posed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and even, at times, Janus-faced Fatah, as well as the genocidal threats emanating from Iran as it rushes headlong toward being able to produce a nuclear weapon and the means of delivering it – all of this is scarcely mentioned. The fact that Israel has in its brief existence had to fight three wars – in 1948, 1967, and 1973 – for its very survival, appears not to have penetrated the consciousnesses of these four comfortably situated academics.
Headlined “Israel’s One-State Reality,” the piece is a mixture of false claims and half-truths paired with a policy agenda that is not justified by those false claims and half-truths.
Among the false claims is the assertion that, “Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former.” There’s been no such choice. And the two aren’t necessarily in conflict, especially when “liberal” is used, as the article uses it, not to mean left-wing but generally to mean respectful of individual rights and human dignity. How “liberal” is any democracy that is unable to tolerate Jewish identity? And how “Jewish” is anything illiberal and undemocratic? In addition, of all the moments to accuse Israel of having abandoned liberal democracy, a moment when Israelis are literally gathered by the tens of thousands in the streets to advocate for liberal democracy sure is a strange time to do it. The Foreign Affairs claim is not just false; it’s visibly false.
The Foreign Affairs article falsely depicts fringe views as representing a majority position of Israeli society. The article says:
The man he [Prime Minister Netanyahu] appointed as minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has declared that Gaza should be “ours” and that “the Palestinians can go to . . . Saudi Arabia or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” This extremist vision has long been shared by at least a minority of Israelis and has strong grounding in Zionist thought and practice. It began gaining adherents soon after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in the 1967 war. And although it is not yet a hegemonic [sic] view, it can plausibly claim a majority of Israeli society and can no longer be termed a fringe position.
This is a preposterous misreading of what Ben Gvir said. Ben Gvir’s remark about some Palestinians “going to Saudi Arabia” has to be understood from the context. He was discussing the situation in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in eastern Jerusalem, where Palestinians were preventing Jewish owners of property to assert their rights.
“I don’t have a problem with Arabs,” Ben-Gvir said at the time. “Those who are loyal and want to live peacefully, are welcome.” But,” he added, “the Palestinians [who are not loyal and do not want to live peacefully] can go…. to Saudi Arabia or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” That should have been made clear by the authors of the Foreign Affairs article: Ben Gvir clearly had no designs to push out Palestinians who were “loyal” and “wanted to live peacefully.” But in any case, Ben Gvir’s is not a view shared by “a majority of Israeli society” as those authors inisist; Ben Gvir represents a very few people who are far to the right even of Likud.
It’s an internal contradiction for the article to claim, simultaneously, claim that “by any reasonable definition” Israel should be considered to include “all lands from its border with Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea,” and also that “a majority of Israeli society” wants to expel the Palestinians to Iran and reclaim Gaza. There’s not a majority for these positions among Israeli Jews, let alone for “Israeli” society under the maximalist definition that the authors ridiculously claim is reasonable.
The Foreign Affairs article claims that Israel “has control over a territory that stretches from the river to the sea, has a near monopoly on the use of force, and uses this power to sustain a draconian blockade of Gaza and control the West Bank with a system of checkpoints, policing, and relentlessly expanding settlements. Even after it withdrew forces from Gaza in 2005, the Israeli government retained control over the territory’s entry and exit points. Like parts of the West Bank, Gaza enjoys a degree of autonomy, and since the brief Palestinian civil war of 2007, the territory has been administered internally by the Islamist organization Hamas, which brooks little dissent. But Hamas does not control the territory’s coastline, airspace, or boundaries. In other words, by any reasonable definition, the Israeli state encompasses all lands from its border with Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.”…
These are a series of falsehoods. Israel does not have control over Gaza, which is under the iron rule of Hamas, and where two terror groups – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — have stockpiled tens of thousands of rockets in civilian areas, and launch those rockets intermittently into southern Israel when the spirit moves them. The “blockade” of Gaza is not only by Israel; Egypt, which the writers do not mention, also has its own blockade of Gaza. Nor is Israel’s blockade “draconian.” Israel lets in food, medicine, household goods, clothing, medical equipment, and appliances of every kind. The only thing Israel keeps out of Gaza are “dual-use” materials, like steel rods, that can have a military application, in building weapons or terror tunnels. Residents of Ashdod and Ashkelon in southern Israel who have been on the receiving end of rockets from Gaza over many decades would laugh at the assertion that Israel has a “near monopoly on the use of force”; so would residents in the Galilee who have suffered from Hezbollah attacks; and so, too, would those tens of thousands of Israelis whose relatives have been murdered by the Palestinian terrorists’ own “use of force. ”
The system of checkpoints and policing that the authors decry as an inexplicable act of wanton cruelty by Israel is the direct result of the need to protect its people from terrorist attacks.
Fortunately, the Israelis, chastened by experience with Arab promises and solemn treaty commitments, have no stomach for either a two-state “solution, or the one-state “solution” offered by these Foreign Affairs authors. There is a third possibility, which those writers do not consider, which is to incorporate both Gaza and Areas A and B in the West Bank — where 90% of the West Bank Palestinians live — into one state, along with Jordan. This “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine” would allow Palestinians to be citizens of their own, Arab polity, while Israel would be relieved of the headache of having to monitor their every move. A version of this possible “solution” was presented in 2022 by Ali Shihabi, a Saudi and close confidant of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. If enough Saudi billions are distributed among both Palestinians and Jordanians, such an idea might just win favor.
Tony Naim says
Nothing will work !
Neither a one state nor 2 state solution will work. As long as Sharia Law is not reformed to abolish: the code of Dhimmitude (the true source of Apartheid) , Polygamy ( the tool of demographic Jihad) and the Dogma of abrogation ( ideological facilitator of violent Jihad).
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Actually, for any country that has muslims as a minority, an apartheid system is, on close examination, the right way to go. Essentially, muslims would be restricted to their ‘homelands’ (using the same term that was used in South Africa), would be banned from marrying infidels, would not be allowed to settle in infidel areas, not be allowed to work in infidel establishments and so on
If this were to be done, the things we read about here every day, like muslim trafficking of non-muslim girls/women, migrating to non-muslim areas as they grow in population and then making them no-go zones for others, getting control of complete sectors of the economy and then cutting off infidel participation in it,… would all be impossible. Which is why odious as the ‘Apartheid’ word is, it’s actually the right way to have muslims live in any non-muslim country, short of mass deportation or a genocide
somehistory says
If the living areas were controlled and where they could go was restricted, and they were not allowed to vote or hold office…
And the more children they had with multiple wives, the higher the taxes and no welfare….
mozlums want control and they work in various ways to get it. One is by loud whining and too many *leaders* listen to the whining.
Deodata says
Israel is an apartheid country, but it’s the other way around, Arabs go everywhere, but Israelis are banned from some areas
James Lincoln says
Yes, Deodata,
I do not know of any “no go” zones in Israel for Arabs.