Israel's situation is "close to hopeless," writes a prominent American Jewish historian, who, with others, now believes the only solution to permanent bloodshed is to form a single nation of Israelis and Palestinians.

It is a transforming idea, one openly discussed by Israelis and Palestinians appalled by what they are becoming. Israel's rocket attacks on a Gaza refugee camp last week prompted this question in Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot:

"Is it conceivable that somebody on our side has decided that all of Palestinian society is the target?" asked military analyst Alex Fishman. Israel's "war without questions," he wrote, "intensifies and broadens the circles of hatred for generations."

The rationale for a single Israeli-Palestinian nation is laid out by Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, in the Oct. 23 New York Review of Books. The article is titled "Israel: The Alternative."

"The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution is probably already doomed. ... What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome. It is not such an odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states, which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians and many others – as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know."

Judt did not invent the idea. It has gained currency with the carnage and as hopelessness has increased, fed by the Bush administration's shameful withdrawal as arbiter of the conflict.

Edward Said, the militant Palestinian-American classicist, rallied to the one-state idea before his death last month. Avraham Burg, the former Labor speaker of the Israeli Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, writes that "the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly."

Utopian, the one-state idea is born of desperation. For a generation, moderate Palestinians and Jews have clung to the two-state idea, believing that, with Washington as facilitator, the differences between them could be arbitrated. America would help to marginalize the extremists and save both peoples from their worst instincts, which was to destroy each other.

With its military prowess, it has long been possible for Israel to target "all of Palestinian society," as Fishman writes. It has long been possible to steal more land for settlements, forts and fences. For just as long, Israel was saved from its worst instincts by two things: an abhorrence of "war without questions," (euphemism for Hitlerian war); and by the United States.

For more than a decade, until the Bush election in 2000, the United States, on which Israel depends, used its moral, political, economic and diplomatic capital to keep Israel policy on a course toward compromise. The result was steady progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

Bush's abandonment of the Middle East, his devious conflation of it with Sept. 11 and Iraq, have caused the conflict to spin out of control. Bush has embraced an Israeli far-right government that has violated every principle on which U.S. Middle East policy has been based for a generation. Bush has aligned America, in Burg's words, with an Israel that is "a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique, which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."

Americans may find Burg's words applicable not only to Israel.

Judt's essay, giving general expression to an idea that is not ripe but may well be inevitable, was immediately denounced as heresy. Foremost among the critics was Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and a normally lucid writer, who answered with an ad hominem attack on Judt that failed to address the core issues being raised.

Judt mentions diaspora Jews, stating that, "non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance."

The crux of Judt's essay, however, concerns Israel, not diaspora Jews. Israel must choose, he writes, between becoming a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state," and a multicultural, multi-religious state comparable with other democracies.

Wieseltier ignores the anguished cries of people like Judt, Burg and Fishman, dismisses the one-state idea as "Greater Palestine," and turns on Judt like someone found slurping soup at the dinner table.

The notion that "all Jews are responsible for whatever Jews do, that every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion," Wieseltier replies. "It is an anti-Semitic notion."

The policies of almost any nation – France, China, Germany, Russia, America, etc. – can be criticized without being accused of ulterior motives.

To criticize Israel's policies – even in a positive context – in Wieseltier's view is to be anti-Semitic.

He makes the point better than Judt could have done himself.

© Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

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