Elliot Abrams
Council on Foreign Affairs, May 9, 2023
”Their claim that Israel, because it is a Jewish state, “fosters a form of ethnic nationalism” is akin to their claim about apartheid: they don’t quite have the courage of their convictions and do not say what their article logically leads to—the belief that Zionism is indeed a form of racism.”
The effort to prevent the formation of the Jewish State, and then to eliminate it, has taken many forms over the years and continues even as Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary. Sometimes the effort takes the form of war, as in 1948 or most recently 1973, or terrorism, as in the intifadas. Sometimes the form is diplomacy, such as the Arab League’s “Three Nos” of 1967 (“No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel”) and the UN’s 1975 resolution that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” All have in common the belief that one Jewish State, one Jewish homeland, is one too many and cannot be tolerated.
These views are receiving new energy nowadays from academics and intellectuals whose hostility to Israel overcomes fairness in argumentation. An excellent example is a new article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Israel’s One-State Reality,” authored by four well-known professors: Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami.
Their argument is in a way simple. The two-state solution is dead because there is already a one-state reality, they say; Israel dominates the area from the Jordan River to the sea and there is no real prospect of negotiating a Palestinian state. The only question, then, is how Israel treats non-Jews living in that area, and the answer is that they are treated very badly in law and in reality. They live under “Jewish supremacy” with very limited rights. To defend Israel is “defend colonialist principles.” The extremist views of Itamar Ben-Gvir can “plausibly claim a majority of Israeli society.” The United States should acknowledge all this, denounce it, and begin punishing Israel for it with “sanctions on Israel and Israeli leaders.” The way to treat Israel is the way the Biden administration has been defending “international laws and norms in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” … [To read the full article, click here]
