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We Should All be Zionists

Einat Wilf

Distilled Knowledge

Source contribution

Wilf presents Zionism as the Jewish people’s movement for sovereign self-determination and rescue, and argues that peace requires abandoning political programs intended to reverse that sovereignty. Her essays are especially useful for understanding one coherent Israeli narrative and its strategic interpretation of “return,” anti-Zionism, and recognition.

  • The account separates criticism of Israeli policy from denial of Jewish collective legitimacy.
  • It interprets recurring diplomatic failure through the persistence of anti-sovereignty goals.
  • Its strongest challenge is to show, claim by claim, when rhetoric denotes literal end-state intent rather than bargaining, symbolism, factional politics, or despair.

Routes: Narrative Recognition and Material Compromise · Colonizers · Peace Offers

Evidence boundary

Preserve Wilf’s authorship. Test historical, legal, polling, and intention claims independently and against Palestinian and critical Israeli accounts.

Misc/Documents/We Should All be Zionists - Einat Wilf-1759290958379.jpg

We Should All Be Zionists- Essays on the Jewish State and — Dr_ Einat Wilf.pdf (file not included in this release)

zionistnotes1.pdf (file not included in this release)

Q: If Zionism matters since it already succeeded

Wilf would probably say the statement is half right but dangerously incomplete.

She does agree that Zionism succeeded in one major historical sense: the Jewish people reestablished sovereign political power in their ancestral homeland. In the book, she explicitly says Zionism is no longer simply “a movement to build a state,” because “happily that has already been accomplished.” But she immediately says Zionism has now re-emerged as “a form of confident Judaism” and that the best answer to anti-Zionism is still Zionism.  

Her answer would be something like this:

Zionism succeeded in creating Israel, but Zionism is still necessary because the conflict is not merely about whether Israel currently exists. It is about whether the Jewish state is regarded as legitimate, permanent, and morally equal to other nation-states.

For Wilf, the core of the conflict is not mainly the 1967 occupation, settlements, or borders. Her framing is that the Jewish side wanted a state, while the Arab/Palestinian anti-Zionist side has historically wanted the Jews not to have a state in any borders. She says the conflict ends only when one side gives up its fundamental goal: either Jews give up Zionism, or Arabs/Palestinians give up anti-Zionism. In her words, “either Jews forgo their Zionism” or Arabs “forgo their belief that a Jewish State should not exist within any borders whatsoever.”  

So if someone says, “Israel exists now, so Zionism is obsolete,” Wilf would likely respond:

That assumes Israel’s existence is already accepted as permanent. But anti-Zionism is precisely the belief that Israel’s existence is not legitimate and should eventually be undone.

She argues that many Palestinians and much of the anti-Zionist world do not see Israel as a permanent national home of an indigenous people, but as a temporary colonial project like the Crusader states, French Algeria, or the Americans in Afghanistan. She says Palestinians often read the map — a small number of Jews among a much larger Arab and Muslim world — and conclude that time is on their side.  

That is why, in her view, “Israel isn’t going anywhere” is not enough. The point is not only military survival. It is political, moral, and civilizational legitimacy. Zionism remains necessary as the defense of the Jewish people’s equal right to collective self-determination.

She would also reject the idea that anti-Zionism is just criticism of Israeli policy. She argues that anti-Zionist movements often demand that Jews sever part of their Jewish identity: connection to Israel, Jewish peoplehood, Jewish solidarity, or the land of Israel. She calls this the “Pound of Flesh” dynamic: Jews are pressured to become “acceptable” by renouncing Zionism.  

So her fuller argument would be:

  1. Zionism as state-building succeeded.
    Israel exists. The Jewish people regained sovereignty.
  2. Zionism as defense of Jewish self-determination remains necessary.
    The right of Jews to a state is still uniquely contested in a way most other national movements are not.
  3. Zionism is still needed because anti-Zionism still exists.
    If the goal of anti-Zionism is to delegitimize or eventually dismantle Israel, then Zionism remains the counter-principle.
  4. Zionism is now also about confidence.
    It means refusing to treat Jewish sovereignty as something shameful, provisional, or morally inferior.
  5. Peace, for Wilf, requires Arabs and Palestinians to abandon anti-Zionism, not Jews to abandon Zionism.
    She supports a two-state framework, but only if the Palestinian state is meant to exist next to Israel, not instead of Israel.

A condensed Wilf-style formulation would be:

Zionism succeeded in building the Jewish state, but it has not become obsolete because the legitimacy and permanence of the Jewish state are still denied. As long as anti-Zionism seeks to turn Israel from a permanent national home into a temporary experiment, Zionism remains necessary — not merely as a movement of state-building, but as the confident defense of Jewish peoplehood, sovereignty, and equality among nations.

Highlights

The 1990’s came to a pinnacle in 2000 when Ehud Barak – the head of the Labor party, the head of the Israeli Peace Camp – went to Camp David. Camp David is symbolic: this is where Israel negotiated the peace agreement with Egypt. He goes to Camp David to meet with Arafat and negotiate a final peace agreement over the future of the West Bank and Gaza. When Ehud Barak – who was elected on a platform of making peace based on the “land for peace” formula – went to Camp David, he put forward a far-reaching proposal, something that was not on the table before, certainly not directly with the Palestinians. His proposal addressed everything that Israelis were told are the obstacles to peace and the things the Palestinians wanted. (Page 5)

Israelis were told that the obstacle to peace was the occupation: Palestinians wanted to end the military presence of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. The proposal was that the Palestinians would have a fully sovereign independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, thereby ending the occupation. Israel was going to retreat; there would not be a military presence. So, ending the occupation was part of the proposal. What was the other obstacle to peace we were told? Settlements. So, the State of Palestine, the sovereign independent State of Palestine, would have no settlements. Settlements were either to be dismantled or exchanged for equivalent land. The independent sovereign State of Palestine would end the occupation and have no settlements. So, two obstacles were removed. Then, what were we told? Jerusalem. Jerusalem was going to be divided: the Jewish neighborhoods for Israel, the Arab, secular neighbors for Palestine, and, then, the question of the Old City: the one square kilometer, which I (Page 5)

fondly refer to as “insanity central”. That one square kilometer was also going to be divided. We sometimes forget how far-reaching the proposal was: the Holy sites within the Old City were going to be divided between Israel and Palestine. We were told Jerusalem is the problem, an obstacle to peace, but that was also taken care of in the proposal. So, check, check, check. All the Palestinians had to do was say “yes”, and they would have had an end to the occupation, a sovereign state, no settlements, a capital in East Jerusalem, including Holy sites. What do they do? They walk away. (Page 6)

OK. You might say walking away is a negotiating tactic. You know, that happens. Fair enough. But Arafat walks away, and eight years later, in 2008, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], the heir of Arafat, steps away from a similar proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Arafat walks away, and Abu Mazen later walks away to no criticism from their people. If this is the Palestinian aspiration, you would expect, at least, someone to write an op-ed, a small NGO to be established, something saying: “Are you crazy? We could have had everything we wanted. Go back there into the negotiating room and get us our state”. But there were no such voices. I know that sometimes people say: “It’s because you cannot criticize in this society, Palestinian society is not democratic.” Look at Russia today. People are holding signs and protesting, and the stakes there are much higher. Palestinian society has never been as oppressive as Russia, yet you see protests in Russia. You did not see protests against Arafat walking away among the Palestinians. Arafat and Abu-Mazen walk away with no criticism from their people, meaning they fulfill what their people want by walking away. (Page 6)

It turns out that the answer was staring us in the face. Palestinians told us all along what they wanted. We did not listen. Or when we did listen, we explained it away. We did not take it seriously. What did the Palestinians want more than a state, more than ending the occupation, more than no settlements, more than Jerusalem? They told us: “From the river to the sea, that is from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will be free.”. (Page 7)

In our book “The war of return,” my co-writer Adi Schwartz and myself focus on one of these means, the so-called “Right of Return,” which, if you read the book, is neither a “right” nor by now “return”. It is a mechanism established by the Palestinians, following the war of 1948, to ensure that the war never ends and that the concept of a sovereign Jewish state in even part of the land remains unacceptable and, hopefully in their view, something that can be undone. This has been the goal. (Page 7)

Sometimes I say that the conflict is between Jewish Zionism and Arab antiZionism. For the conflict to end, either Jews forgo their Zionism, forgo their desire for a sovereign State, or Arabs forgo their anti-Zionism, forgo their belief that a Jewish State should not exist within any borders whatsoever. That’s it. In the absence of one of these two outcomes, the conflict continues. One could argue that the conflict has been a century-long battle of mutual exhaustion, where the Arabs are trying to exhaust the Jews into giving up on their aspirations for a State and for maintaining that State and the Jews are trying to get the Arabs to forgo their aspiration for them not to be a Jewish State. That’s it. And we have been engaged for more than a century in this battle of mutual exhaustion. (Page 9)

And really, everything is in one word: Abraham. You could not think of a better word to flip the narrative. The current dominant narrative in the Arab world remains still that Israel is a foreign, colonial implant in the region to which it has no connection and, therefore, is a temporary presence that will be ousted with enough resistance, patience, and violence. In that case, there is no better single word to flip this narrative than saying “Abraham”. When you say “Abraham,” you acknowledge the Jews as kin, you accept the Jews as people with a history in the region, not as foreigners, but as a people who belong, who have deep-seated historical and cultural roots in the region. Their very identity as a people is wrapped up in the Land of Israel. You can convey all of this by saying, “Abraham.” (Page 11)

In the West today, quite a few are trying to claim that anti-Zionism is not against the Jews. As long as the Jews are against Zionism, we love Jews. Anti-Zionism is just an ideology about Israel. Now, I can split those hairs: anti-Zionism does not necessarily have to be anti-Jewish. This is true in theory. Except that in practice, it always is. In short order, every country, society, party, and campus that turned virulently anti-Zionist became hostile to Jewish life. When the Arab world made anti-Zionism a central tenet, it had no Jews within short order. And those are Jews that pre-existed the Arab and Islamic conquest of the 7th century. The Soviet Union, as soon as it became anti-Zionist and made anti-Zionism a central tenet, became a place that was hostile to Jews, and where Jews left as soon as they could. I could go on: Corbyn’s Labor Party [in the UK], certainly American campuses. (Page 12)

Young Jews were once again subjected to the most recent guise of the ancient bullying of Jews to be “less Jewish” - less visibly Jewish, less confidently Jewish - so that they could be accepted, or at least tolerated, by their host society. (Page 18)

When the demand made to Jews to hand over a Pound of Flesh is metaphorical it constitutes a demand to mutilate Jewish identity so that it becomes somewhat more acceptable to those making the demand. Sometimes the mutilation is visual, demanding that Jews be less visibly Jewish in the public sphere from removing Kippas to pendants to IDF t-shirts. Sometimes it involves severing elements of Jewish identity such as denying Jewish solidarity or the interconnection between Judaism and the Land of Israel. Sometimes nothing less than a public ceremony of exorcism and renunciation, where Jews mutilate their identity vocally and in public, is sufficient so that those around them could be assured that the pound of flesh has indeed been paid. (Page 18)

longer alive. The ancient roots of the Pound of Flesh dynamic mean that it is relentless. It always wants more, and more, and more, until there are no more pounds of flesh remaining to hand over. Either Jews are no longer Jews, or they are no (Page 19)

Based on my own experience, I was able to recognize the Pound of Flesh dynamic as it was playing itself out for Jews in American colleges. When I attended college in the US in the mid 1990’s, liberal left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC. With the emergence of J-Street such Jews found it necessary to move there and then to J-Street U. Then I learnt that many of these young Jews found their new home in the newly established “If Not Now” and then in “Jewish Voices for Peace”. Finally, I learnt that if a Jewish student did now show herself to be the militant co-chair of “Students for Justice in Palestine” or wrote an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson proudly supporting the Crimson’s editorial endorsing the boycott movement against Israel, she was simply not a good enough Jew. (Page 20)

The more one feels shame, the more the antiZionist bully can extract more pounds of flesh. (Page 21)

The BDS movement has been one of the most effective users of this “Pound of Flesh” dynamic, inviting young Jews to the cause of “Justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that Jews not only criticize Israeli actions but sever their relations with Israel completely. (Page 21)

A moving of the goalposts is literally how the “Pound of Flesh” dynamic works. Creating standards that make it nearly impossible for Jews to be fully Jewish is the ancient goal. (Page 22)

The only effective response then is to resist it with confidence and pride and thus rob it of its power to prey. It is difficult to bully confident and proud people. If Anti-Zionists are met with Jews who are proud Zionists, who embrace their Jewish identity fully, it is nearly impossible to shame them into handing over another pound of flesh. Faced with pride and confidence, bullies seek other easier targets. (Page 22)

when there is a crisis of certainty, a crisis of identity, when societies don’t know who they are, what they stand for, or why they exist, there is no greater comforting certainty than that the Jews are responsible. (Page 25)

even though we recognize that growing hatred means that societies are in crisis, we are now less inclined to allow these societies to resolve their issues on our backs (Page 25)

I want to offer the idea that being progressive, first and foremost, means looking at individuals, civilizations, and cultures as equals by giving them the respect of actually taking them at their word and not “Westsplaining” away their motivations. (Page 27)

Now, I certainly believe that Zionism is one of the world’s most inspiring stories of a people who rose up to change their destiny of being victims, to (Page 27)

change their future, to pick themselves up and do something different, truly inspiring. But I’ve also learned that in this life there is a very fine line between inspiring and insane. Truly, this is an insane story. Theodore Herzl [the father of modern Zionism] could have told you that this is how Zionism in his time was received. One of my favorite refrains is from when he published his first book, Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State]. It was the talk of Vienna, which was a very Jewish city at the time, kind of like New York today. In all the cafes of Vienna they talked about this crazy new book, and the common refrain was: for 2000 years the Jews waited to have their state and it had to happen to me? (Page 28)

Then, suddenly, not only were they appearing with this crazy story that they were coming home after 2000 years, they were also saying they were equal, they were a nation no less proud, no less important, than the great Arab nation, and they were laying claim to land in the midst of the Arab and Muslim world. (Page 29)

of course the Arab world is going to say no to Israel. It is entirely rational, it’s not about Arabs being evil and Israel being good, it’s about Israel being small and the Arab world being big. (Page 30)

Their engagement in the conflict is not that of some helpless victims who are just at the mercy of outside forces. (Page 30)

If people can make a conscious choice to say, “Better to suffer the daily humiliations of a military occupation than to suffer the far greater humiliation of accepting that aberration, that presence, as legitimate and final,” that is a conscious choice of a people who are masters of their narrative, who in their mind are resisting and suffering for something that is honorable. (Page 30)

Have you ever wondered why the emphasis in the Palestinian narrative is on the word “justice”? Never on the word “peace,” never on the word “sovereignty,” never on the word “self-determination.” (Page 30)

justice for Palestine is a very clear Arab conception that literally means injustice for the Jewish people, and that needs to be exposed. (Page 31)

do you accept that the Jewish people, as a people, as a nation, have the equal right, no more or no less, to sovereignty in their land? I have yet to find large numbers of people who will respond with a resounding “yes.” (Page 31)

I believe this is the most effective way for us to argue: the idea of the equal right of both collectives as indigenous people to the land. (Page 31)

On the other side of the equation, it never says Zionism equals the political movement for the liberation of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. You have yet to see such a placard. Even though the people at this conference (Page 32)

are here to fight for Israel, Zionism, and the right of Jews to support Israel, the placard strategy has been so effective that you all know the litany of charges that have been placed against Israel and Zionism: apartheid and racism and colonialism and imperialism and Nazism and genocide. And these words are chosen not because they reflect reality, but because they all share the fact that they are synonyms for evil. (Page 33)

When you create a global intellectual mindset that says there is a specific evil out there, this is an invitation to violence. Because what we know about human beings is that, unless they are psychopaths, and that’s happily the minority, human beings do not engage in violence unless they believe it’s for the good. And there is no greater good on this earth than the eradication of evil. So, in order to prepare the most extreme form of violence, you need to get people to believe that what they are about to accomplish is the most noble cause of all: the eradication of evil. And this is how a non-violent struggle can have a very violent goal. In this way, the story of Zionism has been hijacked, disfigured, trampled upon, and made into something that no serious Zionist would recognize. (Page 33)

This is an intersectional story that Jews must share with all marginalized, oppressed people everywhere - that it can be done. But can it be done by relying on the American individualist model, which says, “Stop whining, go and succeed in life because you’re facing no barriers”? No, success is about acknowledging the barriers, the biases, the problems, and then taking collective action. Zionism is about saying that it is collective action that changes history. If you want to break down those barriers, you will not do it alone; instead, you can do it as a group. (Page 34)

This is how the mechanism of antisemitism works: it begins by creating a new collective designation for the Jewish people, which distinguishes them from the general population and sets them apart as different in a way which is relevant to each age in which the mechanism occurs (Page 36)

The mechanism then operates by projecting onto this designated group the qualities that society finds most loathsome at the specific age and time. (Page 37)

In Christian Europe Jews were all Christ killers and collectively bore that sin. To the Nazis in secular 20th century Europe, the Semites were an impure race. To the Soviets, Zionists were inherent capitalists and imperialists. And today? Israel is described as “born in sin” and Zionists and the State of Israel are the ultimate violators of human rights. (Page 37)

The vilification and resulting subsequent persecution of the designated group is then justified by appealing to the most highly regarded and respected source of authority of the given era. In Christian Europe it was the authority of the religious doctrine of the Church. For secular 19th and 20th century Europe, and ultimately the Nazis, the claimed authority switched to science as the focus on Jews morphed from their religion to their race. Yet continuity with previous Jew hatred was maintained as German theologians claimed that Jesus was an Aryan descended from Galilean gentiles. For the Soviets, the authority was the Communist Party and its doctrine. In our own era, it is international law and human rights. And again, preserving continuity with previous forms of antisemitism, the fact that Jesus was a Jew is again denied and replaced with the a-historical idea of Jesus as a retroactive Palestinian. (Page 37)

The reason is that human beings have a primal need for scapegoats. According to French anthropologist Rene Girard, when societies are in crisis, a psychosocial mechanism of directing communal anger at a single individual or group is activated. This enables the society undergoing the crisis to unite its efforts as people communally project their anger onto a specified enemy, thus avoiding conflict with one another. Girard called this process ‘scapegoating’, referring to the ancient ritual where communal sins were metaphorically imposed upon a sacrificial goat. (Page 38)

For whatever reason, throughout history and across nations, religions and cultures, the Jewish people have repeatedly been designated scapegoats. (Page 38)

While the process of scapegoating might initially help a society maintain its cohesion through crisis, it becomes dangerous and deadly when the scapegoat is identified as the sole obstacle to society’s ability to emerge from the crisis – an obstacle which therefore must be removed by whatever means necessary. (Page 39)

In this manner, for medieval Christianity, the very continued existence of Jews stood as the obstacle to personal and collective salvation through Christ. For Germans and other Europeans, those of the Semitic race stood between them and the true glory which belonged to the Aryan Race by right. For Stalin, Zionists stood in the way of a Communist utopia. And today, Israel and Zionists somehow stand as the obstacle to justice and peaceful coexistence in the Middle East and even as the sole obstacle to a better world anchored in full respect for human rights. (Page 39)

But even when Jews begin to sense the looming danger, the antisemitic mechanism lures them into dropping their own defenses by convincing them that by “opting out” of the collective group designation they will, as individuals, be spared. In Nazi Germany Jews were told initially that if they were the “good kind” of Jew – for example, those who fought for Germany in WWI – they would be spared. (Page 40)

It is therefore no accident that two of the primary targets of the campaign to scapegoat Jews are the two places where Jews have organized most effectively for their defense: The State of Israel, and the pro-Israel lobby in the US. (Page 41)

Those who engage in the scapegoating of Israel and Zionists claim this is all a coincidence. They try to convince the world that the fact that the targets of this latest form of virulent hatred – Jews - bear a striking resemblance to those who were targets in previous times – also Jews - is sheer coincidence. (Page 41)

But the truth is that Anti-Zionism is no different than any of the previous iterations of Jew hatred and antisemitism. It is merely the new, shiny, innocent-looking, incarnation. (Page 41)

Thus, it was the threat to the Church hierarchy from the split between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy in the 11th century and the successive waves of Muslim conquest which triggered the rise of the virulent antisemitism of medieval Christianity. Another peak was triggered by the Black Death plague which swept across Europe in the mid-14th century annihilating more than third of the population, and for which the Jews were blamed. The depth and extent of the economic, financial and social crises of 1920’s Germany facilitated the rise of Nazism, and the post war Soviet Union had to contend with the devastation of the Second World War and the stalling of Soviet industrialization. (Page 42)

Drawing parallels to cast one side in the conflict as evil and the other as good might have the effect of marshaling support and resources for the side that one favors, but such a strategy is counter-productive, and even just plain stupid, if the goal is actually to engage with the real issues at hand, to solve the conflict and attain peace. “Evil” must always be fought and defeated — so to cast the conflict as a fight between good and evil is effectively to argue that no compromise can be made until the other side disappears or signs an unconditional surrender. (Page 51)

a “Disneyland of Hate”: For those outside the actual Israeli– Palestinian conflict, it was a safe — Disneyland — way of experiencing a roller coaster of intense emotions missing from their dull post-peace lives. (Page 52)

No matter how much actual power Jews in Israel amass, their miniscule size, in the region and otherwise, means that they would be wise to recognize its limits and refrain from pursuing the corrupting territorial and (Page 58)

other ambitions that ignore that basic insight. For Jews in America, no matter how comfortable the current reality appears, it would be wise to resist the temptations of moral purity that comes from powerlessness. (Page 59)

Arab identity can and should stand on its own merits and has no real need to resort to the negation of Jews, their peoplehood and their history, to assert itself. There is simply no negative correlation between being a proud Arab and being a Zionist, believing in the Jewish state’s right to exist, thrive and be able to defend itself. (Page 71)

Seventy years after declaring independence, Israel is (by one reckoning) the world’s tenth oldest continuous democracy. It had universal suffrage from its first day – yes, Arab citizens too, and it has continued to operate without military coups, civil wars, or suspension of elections to this day, surviving even the assassination of a prime minister. (Page 76)

Perhaps the notion that Israel became a democracy out of necessity sounds less inspiring, as if somehow such a democracy is ‘less noble’ and ‘less worthy,’ but over time, just as having no choice in war has meant that Israel had to win, having no choice but to be a democracy has meant that, over time, Israel has become one of the world’s most successful and effective democracies. (Page 78)

In Israel, the greater the debate, the stronger the democracy. As much as Israelis might crave consensus, it is in periods of greater consensus that Israeli democracy has been weakened, and in periods of great strife that Israeli democracy has shown itself to be vibrant. This is the paradox of Israeli democracy; it is more democratic, more open, more inclusive, and more liberal than at any point in its history, but there is greater voice and representation for illiberal, religious, and supremacist worldviews that were once suppressed in the debate. (Page 79)

There is a common mistake and misperception that occupation of territory is illegal. One is often likely to hear that “the Israeli occupation is illegal.” Military occupation of territory acquired in war is actually legal, sanctioned by international law in both The Hague Convention of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Both these documents specify the responsibility of occupying powers, but the occupation itself is legal. (Page 79)

Instead of these self-defeating measures, liberal American Jews should support all of the various battles actual Israelis, living in Israel, wage on behalf of greater secularization and less religion in public sphere. (Page 89)

American Jews need to also stop trying to get crumbs of recognition from the Chief Rabbinate. They should seek to sideline it completely. The goal should not be to get the state to allow Reform and Conservative Rabbis to perform marriages in Israel. The goal should not be an additional prayer (Page 89)

area next to the Kotel. The goal should be breaking up the Rabbinate’s monopoly altogether, on matters of conversion, marriage, Kashrut, and yes — the Kotel. (Page 90)

Once American Jews accept that the Israeli Zionist operating system is fundamentally different than the American one, and that they should abandon their proselytizing project of injecting more religion, in any form, into the Israeli public space, they will finally be able to tap into the most important resource of power that exists in Israel to oppose Orthodox illiberalism: Zionist secularism. (Page 95)

In America, American Jews can be whatever kind of Jews they want. But when American Jews seek to have an impact in Israel, in a direction of greater liberal values, and especially greater acceptance and recognition of their own form of Jewish life and practice, their best political allies are secular Israelis. (Page 96)

We, proud members of the Jewish collective, who believe that the purpose of Zionism was not to create a concentrated Jewish minority in a majorityArab Muslim state, prefer that the Jewish people be sovereign in a state of their own, and that the Arab Palestinians exercise sovereignty in a state of their own as well. As the numbers stand, this means partition: dividing the land between the two collectives so that each enjoys a solid and overwhelming majority in a state of its own. This is the only path that enables all the millions of people living between the River and the Sea to exercise sovereignty. (Page 98)

Far more than the attacks from Gaza, these attacks within Israel’s borders touched the deepest historical fears of Israel’s Jews and enforced our sense of being under siege. And they reminded us of something that few outside of Israel seem to understand: Despite representing the majority of the citizens living within the sovereign territory of Israel Jews, many Jewish Israelis view themselves as a minority amidst an Arab majority. (Page 101)

Understanding this minority-majority inversion is critical to grasping the paradox that stumps many observers of Israel, even the sympathetic ones, of what appears like a massive gap between Israel’s military and economic power and the overwhelming sense of vulnerability that pervades Israeli Jewish thinking. Zooming out resolves this tension: It is our numerical vulnerability in the region that we feel so deeply, that demands we build our military and economic might to prevent the overwhelming majority in the region from successfully acting on its numerical dominance, as it has on multiple occasions. (Page 103)

What doomed the Oslo Accords is also what made them possible in the first place: constructive ambiguity. (Page 115)

This constructive ambiguity, imbued in each element of the Accords, proved to be utterly destructive. Instead of building trust and allowing the parties to adjust to the reality of the inevitable compromises which were necessary for peace, it merely allowed each side to persist in its own self-serving interpretation of what the Accords implied and to continue the very behavior which destroyed trust on the other side. And so, when the time came, a few short years later, to settle the core issues, the ensuing failure was all but inevitable. Throughout the interim years of the Oslo Accords, Israeli settlement activity was allowed to continue unhampered, with the number of settlers increasing from 110,000 on the eve of the Accords in 1993 to 185,000 in 2000, during the negotiations over a final status, to 430,000 today. That increase seriously undermined the notion that Israel was sincere about (Page 115)

making way for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. (Page 116)

if we have learnt anything over the past 25 years, it is that being ambiguous about the simple fact that neither side is going to have the entirety of the land does no one any favors. Israelis will have to accept the fact that they cannot build settlements all over the West Bank, and Palestinians will have to accept the fact that they cannot settle inside Israel in the name of return. (Page 117)

After decades of discussing “territories,” “borders,” “settlements,” “two states” and “occupation,” and lamenting the lack of trust between the sides and the absence of leadership, we are finally discussing the key question, which is: Is the Arab and Islamic world, and the Palestinians among them, ready to acknowledge that the Jewish people, as a people, have the equal right to self-determination and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland? (Page 118)

It is precisely the reason why despite Israel retreating fully to the 1967 lines between Gaza and Israel, the people of Gaza are demanding to take what is beyond those lines, which they still believe is very much theirs. (Page 119)

The problem is that Gaza’s inhabitants do not view that piece of land as their home, but rather as a transit camp they will inhabit until the day they can return to what they believe is their home. Because of this, they will far prefer to invest their efforts and resources in returning to their “true” home – by force if necessary – than in cultivating the temporary one where they currently reside. (Page 121)

Israel must demand that the donor countries assert that, because (Page 124)

Gaza is part of Palestine, and because Israel has no territorial claims on it – all residents of Gaza are Palestinian Gazans and they have no right to make claims to the sovereign territory of the State of Israel, or demand “return” by virtue of their being registered as “refugees” from Palestine. They already live in Palestine. (Page 125)

LET’S LAY THE MYTH TO REST: RABIN WOULD HAVE NOT BROUGHT PEACE (Page 127)

If Arafat walked away from a proposal that was far more ambitious than anything Rabin would have put on the table, what reason is there to believe that Rabin would have brought peace? (Page 128)

There has never been a Palestinian vision of peace where the sovereign state of the Jewish people is allowed to remain as is, because there has never been a Palestinian vision that didn’t include the right of return for millions of Palestinians. (Page 131)

He understands that the Palestinian demand to settle inside the sovereign territory of the state of Israel in the name of ‘return’ — known as ‘The Right of Return’ — is far more important to Palestinians than those issues related to the ‘occupation’, ‘settlements’, and even Jerusalem. (Page 140)

this idea of a ‘Right’ of all Palestinians to settle en masse in Israel, in breach of its sovereignty, which was never recognised as a right under international law, was developed by the Arabs after their defeat in the war of 1948, purposefully as a means of continuing that war by other means (Page 141)

This is how the Palestinian demand to return was born, and this is the reason for its perpetuation for more than 70 years. Its purpose is to serve the goal of undoing Israel. Therefore, whenever an opportunity arose to solve the humanitarian aspect of the problem, without fulfilling the political goal of Arab dominance in the land, it was rejected. (Page 144)

their descendants had multiple In fact, Palestinian refugees and opportunities to mimic the Jewish Zionist version of return into a sovereign state of their own. Palestinians could have returned to a Palestinian state, that, like the Jewish state, would not encompass each and every place to which they have a historical and emotional connection. This was offered to them by Bill Clinton in 2000 and by Ehud Olmert in 2008. But Palestinians repeatedly rejected these offers, making it clear that return to an independent sovereign Palestinian state in part of the land was simply not what they wanted. (Page 148)

There is no averting one’s eyes from the simple realisation that the conflict between Jews and Arabs ends and is fully resolved under one of only two stark outcomes: either anti-Zionism renders the Jews no longer in possession of self-determination in the land, as Beinart seems to suggest, or Zionism is finally accepted by the Arab world, and Jewish selfdetermination is allowed to stand. Short of these two outcomes, the conflict continues, with violence ebbing and flowing and changing forms and means. (Page 149)

Like many on the Israeli Left, I would have preferred the US President’s plan to provide the Palestinians with more land, greater presence in east Jerusalem (almost all of the city’s Arab neighbourhoods, rather than just three of them), more of a say in the holy sites, and greater control over their future borders. However, decades of determined words and actions have made it very clear that the Palestinian leadership will say yes only to plans that bring about the end of Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people. (Page 172)

The Biden Administration announced last week that it is resuming funding for UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, allocating $150 Million a year as “a means to advance a negotiated two-state solution.” Whatever the Administration’s true intentions are, advancing a two-state solution cannot seriously be the goal. The Administration is consciously choosing to fund an agency that is institutionally committed to ensuring that peace will never be possible. (Page 175)