To Palestinians, a Two-State Solution Means Something Different

When Americans or Israelis speak of a “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, they usually mean a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish one. Eric Mandel points out that when Palestinians use this locution, they mean something else entirely:

From my extensive experience speaking with Palestinian leaders and laymen alike, I have come to learn that the Palestinian version of the two-state solution leaves no room for a Jewish state. . . . To almost all Palestinian citizens of Israel I spoke with, from Arab mayors to teachers, a state of the Jewish people is illegitimate; Zionism is a colonizing enterprise of Jews stealing Arab land. Judaism, to them, is exclusively a religion, without a legitimate civilizational or national component. They view the Jewish historical claim to the land as fictional. . . .

Their idea of a fair “two-state solution” is one completely Arab state in the West Bank and one democratic binational state of Israel that allows the right of return for descendants of Palestinian refugees. It is a “two-state solution,” but not the one American Jews would recognize or Israel could survive.

I asked these Palestinian citizens of Israel if, were they to have every economic advantage that Jewish Israelis have without performing any compulsory civil service, they would then consider Israel a legitimate democracy. Almost all said no: not until the Jewish star is removed from the flag, ha-Tikvah is no longer the national anthem, and the right of return for diaspora Jews to Israel is rescinded. . . .

There is little doubt that future American administrations will re-attempt negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians in hopes of achieving some form of a two-state solution. But it would be wise, before proceeding, to have both parties sign an agreement that, at the end of the negotiations, one of those states must be the state of the Jewish people, with the final resolution including a signed end-of-conflict agreement that unambiguously states that . . . all Palestinian claims [against] that state are settled.

Read more at Forward

More about: Israel & Zionism, Palestinian public opinion, Two-State Solution

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society