There are no unicorns. There's no Santa Claus. And there's no Two State Solution.
The sooner we get that through our heads, the more likely we are to make good decisions, instead of really bad ones. Ronald Lauder, the head of the WJC, unfortunately decided to demonstrate a really bad one with a New York Times op-ed, "Israel’s Self-Inflicted Wounds".
"Israel’s Self-Inflicted Wounds," reads like it was written by a Peace Now member. Or a member of Obama Inc.
The first threat is the possible demise of the two-state solution. I am conservative and a Republican, and I have supported the Likud party since the 1980s. But the reality is that 13 million people live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And almost half of them are Palestinian.
If current trends continue, Israel will face a stark choice: Grant Palestinians full rights and cease being a Jewish state or rescind their rights and cease being a democracy.
To avoid these unacceptable outcomes, the only path forward is the two-state solution.
Okay then. How is this unicorn of a solution supposed to work?
Israeli leaders from across the spectrum have tried and failed to make it work. The PLO has repeatedly sabotaged and walked away from negotiations. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama couldn't sell Arafat and Abbas on their peace plans.
But... but... the two-state solution is the only path forward. The. Only. Path.
And since it's "the only path forward", it must be Israel's fault that it hasn't been achieved. Even though the PLO and Hamas already have two states and can't get along with each other.
...senior Palestinian leaders are, they have personally told me, ready to begin direct negotiations immediately...
I hope they can throw in a fake Rolex and the Brooklyn Bridge.
They're ready to begin direct negotiations. Immediately. Except then they'll have twenty preconditions and after wasting everyone's time for two weeks, they'll storm out. And everyone they roped in, including likely Lauder, will blame Israel.
We've done this so many times it deserves its own opera.
Palestinian incitement and intransigence are destructive. But so, too, are annexation plans, pushed by those on the right, and extensive Jewish settlement-building beyond the separation line. Over the last few years, settlements in the West Bank on land that in any deal is likely to become part of a Palestinian state, have continued to grow and expand. Such blinkered Israeli policies are creating an irreversible one-state reality.
I like how the PLO's mass murder of Jews (though Lauder reduces the charges down to incitement) gets one sentence and 6 words. But Lauder reserves several sentences for the true horror of Jews building homes and living in them.
Sure, stabbing a Rabbi to death isn't nice, but if something isn't done about Jews living in territory that in the deal that will never happen might become part of the PLOstanian state, it'll destroy Israel.
That's followed by the bogeyman of Orthodox hegemony.
Many non-Orthodox Jews, myself included, feel that the spread of state-enforced religiosity in Israel is turning a modern, liberal nation into a semi-theocratic one... They are bewildered by the impression that Israel is abandoning the humanistic vision of Theodor Herzl and taking on a character that does not suit its own core values or the spirit of the 21st century.
Like the rest of this Israel-bashing article, this is ahistorical nonsense.
Israel had far more state-enforced religiosity under Labor generations ago than it does today. There was a time when pork was hard to come by, marriage options were far more constricted and there were far more mandatory Sabbath closings. If anything things have been going the other way with the debates over Haredi military service. There is a far larger Reform and Conservative presence in Israel as well.
Lauder should know this. But I'm skeptical that he wrote this nonsense. It reads like boilerplate Israel bashing from someone who knows media talking points better than they know Israel.