Thursday, September 26, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
How to End the One Hundred
Years War on Israel?
Review of David Friedman, One Jewish State (Humanix Books, 2024)
Few are more accomplished than David Friedman. After several decades of a successful legal career Friedman became, in 2017, the U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Donald Trump, in which role he orchestrated such major diplomatic advances as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and brokering the Abraham Accords. With his new book, One Jewish State, Friedman may be on the cusp of his greatest work yet. The odds are long, the obstacles are large and many—but ignore this book, whose game-changing potential dwarfs the previous accomplishments combined, at your peril. Indeed, it’s already serving as the inspiration of a brand-new party for the upcoming World Zionist Congress, named, aptly enough, the One Jewish State party.
“Insanity,” allegedly quipped Albert Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It’s hard to deny that the “two-state solution,” a mantra for nearly a century now, has become the paradigm of that famous trope. That insanity is nowhere clearer than in the insistence of too many politicians (including President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Vice Presidential candidate Walz) that the proper path forward from Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre is the “two-state solution.” Most recently, Walz, responding specifically to Hamas murdering six Jewish hostages (including an American) in cold blood, remarked, “We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution.” Hamas’s mass murders motivate him, in other words, to reward Hamas by pressuring Israel to give them a state, thus more power and territory to continue and strengthen their exterminationist campaign against Israel and the Jews. You don’t need to be an Einstein to see that that is not a good idea, at least if you do not wish to exterminate Israel and its many Jews.
The two-state solution is great, of course, if you do side with those who wish to destroy Israel and to genocide, ethnically cleanse, or subjugate its seven million Jews. The two-state “solution,” as Yasser Arafat himself made clear, is really a two-stage solution: establish the State of Palestine, then use it to advance the war to destroy the State of Israel. Hamas, along with its innumerable student supporters, in fact reject it—“We don’t want two states, we want 1948!” the latter proclaim across campuses—because they want to go directly to the endgame of destroying the Jewish state. They don’t hide this; they say it openly; they scream it. October 7 illustrates that strategy unambiguously explicitly, as we’ll elaborate in a moment. For those who do not wish to destroy Israel and its Jews, then, October 7 should be, if not the absolute death knell of the two-state solution, then an automatic postponement of the idea for minimum, say, a half-century.
Enter the painfully timely One Jewish State.
As the “Author’s Note” starts the book, “Please read this with an open mind.”
The book challenges, head on, “the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy: the two-state solution.” Though the two-state appeal from a certain abstract perspective is clear—when parties fight over something, isn’t it generally fair to split it?—the case against it, from the pro-Israel perspective, is compelling. The Palestinians just don’t want it. They have never wanted it, going back at least to their rejection of the 1937 Peel Commission partition proposal. Palestinian leadership, and most polls suggest most Palestinians, simply do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Any state given to them will only advance their agenda of destroying the Jewish state. If that wasn’t clear before the October 7 massacre it is indisputably clear now. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, laying the foundations for an independent Palestinian state. Instead of using that to advance a peaceful two-state solution, Palestinians voted Hamas to a parliamentary majority—immediately after the Second Intifada, when Hamas was best known for its suicide bombings that murdered a thousand Israelis and maimed ten times that. Hamas then took over Gaza in 2007 and, instead of building it into a “Singapore on the Mediterranean,” militarized the entire region in pursuit of Jewish genocide. Sixteen years were spent launching tens of thousands of rockets toward Israeli civilians, perpetrating hundreds of terrorist attacks, and starting five wars, culminating in the genocidal rampage of October 7. That is what they did with their proto-“state,” and that is what they repeatedly say they will do with any future state. And lest you think that’s “just Hamas,” remember that several thousand “civilians” participated in October 7, tens of thousands celebrated jubilantly in Gaza and the West Bank throughout the following days, and opinion polls as late as mid-December, 2023, showed massive support for the operation. Just this week, nearly a year into the destruction of Gaza, a poll still shows that Hamas is the most popular Palestinian party by far.
For anyone who supports Israel, Israeli security, and the right of Jews to live in this region in safety, then, a Palestinian state should simply be a non-starter. To bolster the point Friedman goes through several other important instances where Israeli withdrawal from territory only made Israelis less secure, including from Southern Lebanon (now a Hezbollah stronghold) and Areas A and B of Judea-Samaria (now terrorism strongholds).) As he concludes, “The wishful thinking that a Palestinian state will not threaten Israel is completely contradicted by the facts and history of the region.” To this we may add that it’s also contradicted by what Palestinian leaders, and most Palestinians, openly say. Hamas leaders have stated publicly multiple times, “We will repeat October 7 again and again.” When people tell you who they are, it’s generally advisable to believe them.
So what’s left if we jettison the two-state solution?
Though various permutations have been floated, they all boil down, basically, to “one state.” The one Palestinian state, “from the river to the sea,” whether that involves the genocide, ethnic cleansing, or merely subjugation of the region’s seven million Jews, is obviously off the table for the pro-Israel side. Friedman does not consider the “binational state” idea, but one can speculate why: the binational state is not a Jewish state, and his starting point, and ending point, is that there must be a Jewish state. (To which we might add that almost all the reasons that undermine the two-state solution also undermine the binational state.) That leaves, then, the “One Jewish State.”
All three words, Friedman tells us, are significant. The world hosts over 100 Christian-majority states, some 50-plus Muslim majority states, and several Buddhist and Hindu states, but only the one sliver of a Jewish state (32 of which would fit inside Texas!)—and, oddly, it is only that one whose identity and existence is relentlessly challenged. There must always be room in this world, Friedman insists, for one Jewish state. (And not two: history teaches us of the bad things that follow when the Jews become divided amongst themselves.)
“Jewish”: Friedman waxes eloquently on the Jewish history in this land and the Jewish character of the state, including with respect to Jerusalem. Though he’s no Bible scholar (he admits) he is deeply steeped in the Book of Books, and no one can read the Hebrew Bible without grasping the intimate relationship between the Jewish people and this land—land that includes Judea-Samaria, which are the Biblical heartland and home to many significant locations, incidents, and holy places in Jewish history and identity. Jews should proudly affirm their Jewish identity, demand respect for Judaism, and assert their Jewish rights, he urges. The idea that Jews should abandon, i.e. not assert their claim to, this land is clearly painful to him, but he is not an ideological fanatic: he is aware, as a student of the past two centuries, that the Jews have often been willing to make painful compromises to obtain peace. One infers that were there any genuine possibility of a peaceful two-state solution, even Friedman might be willing to yield Gaza, and even Judea-Samaria, or swaths thereof. But once that possibility is finally understood to be dead—as it should be, after October 7—then there should be nothing to compromise: this land is part of the soul of the Jewish people, and a Jewish state should proudly assert and exercise its rights over it.
And finally, “State”: Israel is and must remain a sovereign state, that proudly asserts its sovereignty over that which rightly belongs to it. Israel has not done this to the extent Friedman believes is necessary, being too eager to please those who challenge its sovereignty not merely over Judea-Samaria but even over any portion of the Land of Israel. The State of Israel was founded by “people of great courage and vision, and they rose to the challenge of building their state in defiance of overwhelming odds.” But Israel has become too soft over the years, perhaps in response to unrelenting unfriendly international pressure. It is time to be, to become, what a true state should be: the master of its domain, ready to stand up and fight for what rightly belongs to it.
So, yes, Friedman defends the “One Jewish State” as the option best to pursue, at least by those who believe in a Jewish state or any Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Though quite readable, the book is at the same packed with arguments. Friedman does not shy away from Biblical arguments, that may roughly be summarized as “God promised the Jews this land.” But the book does not depend on the Bible, having plenty for the secular crowd to justify Israel’s claims. The basic idea is that if you accept that Jews have any right to live in this region at all, then you should conclude that Israel must finally exert its sovereignty over Judea-Samaria as well—including Areas A and B, currently allotted, by the Oslo Accords, to the Palestinian Authority. (Gaza is a separate, and very difficult, case, as Friedman acknowledges in a chapter devoted to it, which we shall not treat here.)
In addition to the main negative argument above—that the two-state solution is a non-starter—there are plenty of positive arguments for the One Jewish State idea as well. These might perhaps be boiled down to this: only under Israeli sovereignty will Palestinians be able to lead full lives of dignity and prosperity, and thus ultimately produce a peaceful outcome for all the residents of the region. (The subtitle of the book is “The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” which presumably remains the goal for all supporters of Israel.) Israel is a vibrant democracy “with a track record of respecting the civil, religious, and human rights of its minority population, almost all of which is Arab.” And indeed most Arab-Israeli citizens “patriotically support living in their country,” where their standard of living, their opportunities, and their prosperity are orders of magnitude greater than that of their Arab neighbors in surrounding countries, including in the territories administered by the Palestinians themselves. To support that claim Friedman provides many sobering economic statistics about life under the corrupt, incompetent, human-rights-abusing dictatorial Palestinian Authority. So the idea now is to extend the same situation, i.e. Israeli sovereignty, to the Palestinian Arabs living in Judea-Samaria.
With one essential difference between the cases, of course. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel, with equal rights to all other citizens. Judean-Samarian Palestinians unfortunately cannot be. A thriving (or even enduring) Jewish state simply cannot swap the security risk currently posed by Judea-Samarian Palestinians for the demographic risk of making them full citizens, particularly given their massive support for October 7 and for Hamas: “Israel simply can’t pick up an additional two million citizens, especially now when they have expressed a desire to destroy it.” They may become “residents” of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, but they cannot become full citizens.
Here we reach the crux of the book, the point at which the critics will explode with outrage, at which Israel-haters have (falsely) been exploding with outrage for at least the past couple of decades: “Some reflexively will call this apartheid.”
One could conceivably, if glibly, respond that the haters have already been (falsely) charging Israel with “apartheid” for two decades now, so, if it will benefit Israeli security, Israel may as well go all in and live up to the charge. But that is not Friedman’s response. The audience here is not the haters, who will never stop slandering Israel with every terrible deed they can find and then make up some new ones (“Scholasticide!” “Pinkwashing!”). The audience is the pro-Israel crowd, the people who believe there should be a Jewish state, but who also believe many other things—including that this state must also be democratic and live up to a set of liberal values including the equality of its citizens. Members of this audience will also “reflexively” cry “apartheid,” and no glib answer will do.
And so two detailed chapters amount to a response to the charge. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is a deep dive into the case of Puerto Rico, which Friedman sees as a possible model for the “One Jewish State”: roughly, Puerto Ricans stand to the United States as Judean-Samarian Palestinians might stand to Israel. The U.S. has absolute sovereignty over the territory; Puerto Ricans have extensive rights of self-government but not collective national rights to vote in U.S. elections. Why does it work? Because Puerto Ricans with that degree of autonomy live better lives than they would if they were entirely independent. They derive numerous political, economic, and civil benefits from the arrangement and enjoy all the same basic human and constitutional rights as any U.S. citizen, but pay less in federal taxes in exchange for not being full citizens. The situation isn’t perfectly analogous to Israel but is close enough to be illuminating. With Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea-Samaria, Palestinians there would have all the civil and human rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity; without the collective right to self-determination they will pay less Israeli taxes and not vote in national elections. They can, however, enact their own local government, to which they will pay taxes. They will give less to Israel than Israeli citizens, and receive something less in return. It amounts to getting all sorts of concrete benefits—Israeli prosperity and more or less liberalism—by giving up some rather abstract right of self-determination, or one form thereof as we’ll see in a moment. Drawing further inspiration from the Biblical precedent, Friedman suggests they should have the status of ger toshav, or resident alien.
One might add here that other models are also possible, emphasizing that the Palestinians have some form of autonomy even within Israeli sovereignty: federal arrangements, administrative regions, or other forms of what are called “internal self-determination” short of the “external self-determination” of independent statehood. There are numerous such precedents: Greenland, an autonomous territory within Denmark; Hong Kong and Macau, special administrative regions under Chinese sovereignty; Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, etc. The idea, again, is neither unique nor unprecedented.
A chapter providing a “template for coexistence” then develops the theme further. Friedman starts by asking which is a better option for Palestinians: creating a Palestinian state that by all evidence is likely both to fail by every metric and be overrun by terrorists such as Hamas and thus reproduce Gaza, or absorbing Judea-Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and providing them resident status? Here he presents extensive data about Israeli Arabs as noted above, using them as a basis of comparison for the future Palestinian residents in Judea-Samaria. Most Israeli Arabs have no desire to become citizens of a Palestinian state; large numbers openly rejected proposals in 2006 and 2020 to redraw Israeli borders to place a number of Arab villages on the Palestinian side of the border. Friedman is neither pollyannish nor rose-tint bespectacled: he openly addresses complications with and obstacles to his analysis, including some of the social problems, including discrimination, sometimes faced by Israeli Arabs. There is no absolutely perfect solution to anything, in the real world. But the preponderance of the evidence points to the conclusion: Israeli Arabs not only prosper under Israeli sovereignty but openly prefer it to the alternative. It’s clearly possible, in other words, that Arabs might prefer to live under Israeli sovereignty even under conditions of imperfect equality than to live under Palestinian sovereignty.
In the “One Jewish State,” then, Judean-Samarian Arabs would gain essentially all the benefits enjoyed by their Israeli kin, plus local autonomy, and pay less Israeli taxes. That would leave them—as Israeli Arabs currently are—far better off by most quality-of-life metrics and liberal norms (such as freedoms of speech, assembly, privacy, etc.) than Arab citizens or subjects in almost every single other Arab country, if not all, including those currently under the dictatorial thumbs of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. It may not be perfect, 100% “equality,” but the claim that this—i.e. affording them a high degree of autonomy while dramatically improving their lives by all measures and leaving them better off than all other Arabs under Arab sovereignty—is “apartheid,” or even objectionable, becomes on this understanding something truly obscene.
Those who persist in calling it “apartheid,” Friedman answers, show “that they don’t understand apartheid. In South Africa, the white minority government forced blacks from their homes into ‘bantustans’ with substandard living conditions. Here, Palestinians in Judea and Samaria will receive legal title to their homes, and they will live with assurance that they and their progeny will be permanent residents within the Land of Israel. And their standard of living will rise dramatically.” No one calls the U.S. an apartheid state because of Puerto Rico, because the situation works well for all concerned. So too it could work here, as a win-win for all.
And we might add: perhaps every country in the world has something akin to a non-citizen residency status, generally for very good reasons, in some cases applying to quite substantial percentages of the population. Only the application of blatantly antisemitic double standards would condemn Israel alone for such a status, particularly when it actually benefits Judean-Samarian Palestinians greatly compared to the alternative of Palestinian sovereignty.
Nachum Kaplan elsewhere develops this last point at great length. Kaplan agrees that Jewish sovereignty over Judea-Samaria is best not only for Israel but for the Palestinians, and contends that the standard objections (such as “apartheid”) are actually predicated on the “flawed and ultimately racist premise that Israel must be a perfect democracy.” Non-citizen residency in fact is common: in addition to Puerto Rico he also presents data from Australia and Canada, the latter boasting a “whopping 8 million” non-citizen residents. Meanwhile Britain’s ruling Labor Party has two-thirds the seats in the House of Commons despite winning only a third of the vote: that is hardly a “perfect” democracy. Nor does anyone object that most of the world’s countries are not democracies at all, including the entire Arab world, nor is there any serious objection against the apartheid actively leveled against half the world’s population, i.e. women, in many countries including especially Muslim countries. Nor does anyone point out that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority run brutally and openly apartheid regimes: not only are no Jews allowed, but with the infamous “pay to slay” program, for example, there are explicit incentives for their citizens to murder Jews. You don’t get more apartheid than expelling all your Jews, as essentially all the Arab countries have done, and then incentivizing people to murder them.
As Kaplan puts it, “It is bizarre that people can oppose a single Israeli state on the grounds that it is not a pristine democracy yet be perfectly okay with an undemocratic Palestinian state under a two-state solution.” Somehow Israel comes out worse than those countries that offer no rights nor freedoms to their citizens at all. If that isn’t a profoundly racist double-standard against the Jews, then nothing is.
But wait—what about the Palestinians? Doesn’t what they want matter? Would they ever accept such a scenario, Friedman’s invocation of the status of Israeli Arabs notwithstanding?
Remember that the book isn’t directed to the Palestinians. They, the evidence shows, desire the destruction of Israel and seem okay with the genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass subjugation that that would entail, so perhaps they shouldn’t really be given a vote—now, or in the future “One Jewish State.” The book starts from the premise that the two-state solution is dead, that the Palestinians, with their hundred years war on the Jews, have lost the privilege of getting their own state. The target audience therefore is those who are supportive of Israel and the Jews, and the aim of the book is to convince them that “One Jewish State” is the position they should advocate. Once you agree, you can start to work out the details of how to bring it about. Friedman offers several chapters on practical matters such as who will fund the mission, who will lead the process, the role that future American administrations might play, as well as the importance of the Abraham Accords that he helped broker. There is no expectation that the Palestinians will go along, initially or ever, but that is neither unexpected and not in fact a demerit: they’re currently in yet another war with Israel after all, so their cooperation is simply not part of the equation.
So pretty clearly what is necessary will be, to cite scholar Daniel Pipes, who has been advocating for this for some years, a genuine Israeli “victory,” in the fullest sense of that word. Einat Wilf has also been advocating something similar, noting that until the Palestinians realize that their project of destroying Israel is a dead-end game that only perpetuates misery, there will not be peace. So what is necessary then is an Israeli victory, and a Palestinian defeat—a complete, thorough, unmistakable defeat.
But there can’t be an Israeli victory unless the Israelis know what they are fighting for, and Friedman makes a compelling case that that should be for the “One Jewish State.” And while it may be born only in the context of a decisive Palestinian defeat, it does contain within it the seeds of an actual “solution” to the conflict, unlike the “two-state solution” which has proven for a century to be anything but. For suppose the Palestinians give up on destroying Israel, and come to accept their status as residents under Israeli sovereignty. What can reasonably be hoped for is a gradual transformation: a better life, more prosperous, higher standards, more freedoms, more rights, all the benefits and privileges of life in a modern democratic (if imperfectly so) liberal state. And in time, like their Israeli Arab kin, they might perhaps come to see that all that is a good thing, or at least far better than the path of perpetual war and its concomitant suffering and victimhood that constitutes their first hundred years, and may even come to see Jews not as their oppressors and enemies but as their benefactors and then colleagues and then maybe even friends.
There’s another word for all that: peace.
Admittedly that may all be a fantasy; but the fact that it is even fantasizable at all on the “One Jewish State” is an advance on the two-state solution, which has already died many times over and leaves nothing left to fantasize about.
And bare minimum, one additional argument for the “One Jewish State” that I might suggest: it’s worth getting behind if only to move the “Overton Window” a little further to the right. Currently the public square, the dominant world opinion, the view of most countries, of the United Nations and its organs such as the International Court of Justice, and of the current U.S. administration is that Judea-Samaria are rightfully part of the Palestinian state in the “two state solution.” It follows that Israel is in the wrong in “occupying” it, its Jewish residents there are “illegal settlers,” and Israel is morally and legally obligated to withdraw. That entire worldview is contestable in all its details, but one advantage of getting behind the “One Jewish State” idea is that it pushes back against all that. If Jews actively assert their rights to the territory, if Israel asserts its sovereignty, then, should it choose to withdraw, should it choose to accept something like a “two state solution,” then doing so would be not an obligation but a concession—one that then demands some concession from the other side in return. From a purely strategic point of view, then, “One Jewish State” is advisable if only as a negotiating strategy.
Ironically, then, for those who still cling to the two-state solution, down the line, in some future time—getting behind the “One Jewish State” might be the best, or only, way to go.
Everything old is new again, they say; in some ways Friedman’s proposal is a twenty-first century version of Herzl’s original 19th century vision, where the latter believed that when the Jews brought prosperity the local Arabs would welcome them heartily. But Herzl, tragically, was mistaken on this, and doesn’t Einstein’s observation above suggest we would be insane to try it all over again? No, because it’s not trying “the same thing” over again. There is an enormous difference between the age of Herzl and that of Friedman. The latter’s proposal comes after, to paraphrase the title of Rashid Khalidi’s recent book, the One Hundred Years War on Israel waged by the Palestinians—a war whose battles they have repeatedly lost and which, for Friedman’s proposal to work, they must still lose decisively. The hope is that maybe after a hundred years of their trying the same thing over and over, and of the resultant suffering and misery, the Palestinians will finally realize the insanity of that and adopt a new path. Maybe just maybe enough Palestinians will get sick of it and choose peace. It may just be a dream—there may be no solution at all to the complicated mess I prefer to call the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict—but if the Palestinians will it, it is no dream.
Friedman’s book thus makes an absolutely essential contribution to the
conversation, and should be read and discussed by all who are invested in the
future existence, much less flourishing, of the Jewish state.
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