Solving the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

I’m grateful to the three distinguished thinkers who have responded to my analysis of Israel’s situation and to my suggestions for improving it. Rather than reacting to all of their individual comments, I’ll try to focus on a few core criticisms and arguments.

I should begin by noting the obvious: it is very hard to write about the Arab-Israeli conflict without being drawn into the solutions sweepstakes. In one way or another, once you confront the issues, you’re expected to offer a solution to them or at least to embrace one out of the several already publicly available. I’m no exception: although my essay was written less to propose or endorse a solution than to urge a basic shift in a prevailing Israeli mindset—a mindset for which we Israelis have paid a harsh price—I couldn’t avoid pointing to a few practical instances of a way forward. Regrettably, these have turned into a focus of discussion for more than one of my respondents as well as for others who have commented about the essay on the Mosaic website and elsewhere.

Hillel Halkin is right to place me in the camp of those advocating “a single, Jewish state west of the Jordan with a fairly accommodated Arab minority.” To him, however, this version of a “one-state” solution is as much a fantasy as the “two-state” solution that we both agree is a non-starter. He points to two major obstacles. The first is the “long-standing international consensus in favor of an independent Palestinian state,” which ensures that any Israeli effort to annex the West Bank would be intolerable to world opinion and result not only in harsh economic sanctions but in diplomatic and political isolation. The second is the so-called “demographic problem”: granting citizenship to so many Arabs, he writes, would threaten Israel’s Jewish identity, and conferring any other political or legal status on them would be morally repugnant.