When Wright is Wrong

Robert Wright has an opinion.

Lucky him, he gets to let us know what it is thanks to the pluralistic journalistic policy of the NYTimes, which opens its op-ed columns to everyone except people like me who are usually the targets of many of the op-eds, like this one by Wright - a Jewish revenant who resides in a community village in the territory the international world guaranteed us as our Jewish national home but reneged.

It's entitled:

A One-to-Two-State Solution

I had dealt with this with my own take recently, here, so, let's pick Wright apart a bit. Oh, Wright is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation., with its links to the Soros Family.

Here are some extracts and my comments:

...For the past few years, more and more people who follow these things have been saying that the perennial goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks — a two-state solution — will never be reached in any event.

...But there’s a third possibility that nobody ever talks about. Pursuing a one-state solution could actually lead to a two-state solution. Instead of following the current road map to a Palestinian state, maybe we can get there by detour.

...For a peace deal to happen, Israel’s centrists need to get jarred out of their indifference. Someone needs to scare these people.

There’s a way for Palestinians to do that — and not the usual way, with bombs and rockets. Quite the opposite.

If Palestinians want to strike fear into the hearts of Israelis they should (a) give up on violence as a tool of persuasion; (b) give up on the current round of negotiations; and (c) start holding demonstrations in which they ask for only one thing: the right to vote. Their argument would be simple: They live under Israeli rule, and Israel is a democracy, so why aren’t they part of it?

Well, since we have a significant population of Arabs already citizens of Israel, yes, than can work. But since that population sector has become increasingly radicalized, they first have to undo that before we deal with the Arabs of Judea and Samaria.

A truly peaceful movement with such elemental aspirations — think of Martin Luther King or Gandhi — would gain immediate international support.

That has quite a slim chance of ever occurring.

...Suddenly facing a choice between a one-state solution and international ostracism, reasonable Israelis would develop a burning attraction to a two-state solution — and a sudden intolerance for religious zealots who stood in the way of it. Before long Israel would be pondering two-state deals more generous than anything that’s been seriously discussed to date.

But why can't Jordan be that second state? Or an interim period of federation with the Kingdom? Wanna try that?

There's a lot more there if you want to continue.


And here is an update from Jonathan Chait in The New Republic:-

...I agree that it would be fantastic if Palestinians adopted such [non-violent] tactics. But to do so, they actually have to want a two-state solution. And the evidence for that proposition is weaker than the evidence that Netanyahu is willing to make sacrifices for peace. A 2009 poll I've cited before shows that 71% of Palestinians deem it essential that their state comprise all of Israel and the occupied territories. (Only 17% of Israelis deem it essentially that their state control all that land.)...Most Palestinians seem to think, like Helen Thomas said, that the fair solution is for the Jews to go back to Europe.

...Palestinian political tactics are not an endless series of blunders but a perfectly rational strategy of alternating guerrilla or terrorist attacks on Israel with ceaseless political pressure designed to make Israelis, like the Crusaders, unwilling to pay the price of defending their state over however many decades or centuries it takes...

...The other problem with Bob's analysis is that it gets the causality problem wrong. He essentially considers the occupation as a strategic desire by Israel unconnected to any judgment of Palestinian motive -- Israel wants to hold on to the West Bank, and Palestinians can pressure them to leave via the correct nonviolent tactics. I think Israel is occupying the West Bank precisely because it fears violent Palestinian tactics. A counterfactual world in which Palestinians adopt non-violent tactics is a world in which Israel wouldn't be in the West Bank to begin with.

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