photo: Flash90

It’s fair to say that Peter Beinart’s recent article for Jewish Currents, in which he publicly announced his abandonment of the two-state solution, represents something of a milestone in American discourse on Israel-Palestine. As a well-known political thinker and commentator, Beinart’s ideas carry a great deal of weight in the liberal Jewish establishment. His 2010 article in The New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” and his subsequent book, “The Crisis of Zionism” were widely read and touted as critical cautionary manifestos for the American Jewish community. For years he has positioned himself on the left edge of the Liberal Zionist camp, and has regularly sounded warnings about the increasingly illiberal nature of Israel’s actions. It is thus hugely significant that he has now officially crossed a red line (his term) by so publicly and openly declaring the two-state solution to be dead.

Indeed, many are saying that his article is a game changer. Mondoweiss editor Phil Weiss, pointing to Beinart’s “prominent stature in liberal Jewish communal life,” wrote that he now  “joins a list of liberal Zionists who have abandoned the two-state solution,” predicting that “his joining that list means it is only going to grow.” Liberal commentators are likewise singing its praises;` the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg called it “brave and persuasive” and Vox editor Matt Yglesias claimed it has now “widened the boundaries what is acceptable on Israel/Palestine.”

In his Jewish Currents article, (which the New York Times published today in a much shortened version under the headline, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State“), Beinart begins by describing how central Zionism has been to his Jewish identity. With sadness, he notes that “with each passing year, it has become clearer that Jewish statehood includes permanent Israeli control of the West Bank.” He continues:

The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades—a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews—has failed. The traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israel’s current path. It risks becoming, instead, a way of camouflaging and enabling that path. It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.

Beinart does not formally break with Zionism, however. He claims that the “essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel,” but rather, “a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world.” Unfortunately, Beinart writes, such a “Jewish home” is impossible under the classic two-state solution model, which he now declares “dead” because it “requires subjugating another people.” It’s time, he says, to explore new one-state options, “from a confederation to a binational state.”

To drive his point home, Beinart invokes the history of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who, in 70 CE, changed the paradigmatic nature of Judaism itself from animal sacrifice to prayer/study after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. So too, Beinart writes, “our task in this moment is to imagine a new Jewish identity, one that no longer equates Palestinian equality with Jewish genocide. One that sees Palestinian liberation as integral to our own.”

Beinart then goes on to write a long, impassioned and impressively researched essay on how this new one-state paradigm might be realized, quoting a number of Palestinian activists and thinkers including Ali Abunimah, Walid Khalidi, Edward Said and Yousef Munayyer. He ends up advocating for a binational state using Belgium and Northern Ireland as potential models: a “democratic Israel-Palestine” that would ” protect not merely individual rights but national rights as well,”

He concludes his essay with this moving paragraph:

Imagine a country in which, at sundown on the 27th of Nissan, the beginning of Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—Jewish and Palestinian co-presidents lower a flag in Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem as an imam delivers the Islamic du‘a’ for the dead. Imagine those same leaders, on the 15th of May, gathering at a restored cemetery in the village of Deir Yassin, the site of a future Museum of the Nakba, which commemorates the roughly 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled during Israel’s founding, as a rabbi recites El Malei Rachamim, our prayer for the dead. 

I agree with those who believe that this article is powerful and significant. It may well represent a tipping point – and to the extent that his primary audience is his fellow Liberal Zionists, this is all to the good. But without denying what Beinart’s article represents, I remain troubled by his essential analysis. In the end, I believe the very framing of his essay ultimately compromises his brave vision of “a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.”

Beinart’s article is at its heart a political argument. And as such, it locates the central issue of the “conflict” as the failures of the peace process, which he largely places at the door of successive Israeli governments. However, while the injustices of the peace process were undeniable, nowhere does Beinart mention a deeper and more fundamental injustice: i.e., the Nakba itself. In fact, throughout this long and powerfully argued manifesto, Beinart never once states that Jewish statehood resulted in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people – a dispossession that is in fact ongoing even now.

In a very telling sentence, Beinart writes “averting a future in which oppression degenerates into ethnic cleansing requires a vision that can inspire not just Palestinians, but the world.” Whether inadvertently or not, he treats ethnic cleansing as something we must forestall in the future, not something that has been very much ongoing since 1948. And therein lies the problem: such an attitude betrays a mindset that views this issue as a political conflict to be solved, not a moral injustice to be confronted. 

In the end, however, both of these things are intrinsically connected. There can be no political solution without a restorative/reparative process through which Israel ends its oppression of the Palestinian people and formally admits to the historic wrongs it has committed against them. For a contemporary model, we have to look no farther than South Africa and the creation its Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It would have been unthinkable to pretend apartheid could have been dismantled without such a process. And while it was by no means perfect or completely successful, South African leaders understood that there would never been any hope for reconciliation if white South Africans did not engage in some form of political confession and repair.

I am struck that Beinart chose to end his article with poetic images of reconciliation, in which Palestinians and Jewish Israelis mourn the dead of the Nakba and the Holocaust respectively. But it is deeply problematic to leap to such a vision without honoring the difficult and painful process of restorative justice that would make it at all possible. Even more problematic is Beinart’s juxtaposition of the Nakba – a wrong perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians – with the Holocaust: a wrong committed against European Jewry that had nothing to do with the Palestinian people. To be sure, the legacy of the Holocaust is a complex and painful one – but it is difficult in the extreme to share Beinart’s hope in this restorative vision if he is unable to admit the need for a restorative process at all.

I know that for Liberal Zionists, defining Israel’s birth with the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of another people is very likely a bridge too far. It might well be that Beinart made a conscious calculation that if he was to reach his desired audience, he would not be able to go there in this particular essay. But in the end, if there is to be a just and sustainable peace in Israel/Palestine, this essential injustice will sooner or later have to be confronted.

In the end, Liberal Zionists will not only have to give up on the two-state solution, but on the myth of innocence at the heart of political Zionism itself. I’m not sure that this is a place Liberal Zionists, including Beinart, will ever be able to go – but if and when that happens, what a brave step that would be.