The Beinart Controversy over the End of the Two-State Solution and Juan Cole On Palestinian Statelessness

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, has caused a stir in the past week with articles and interviews in which he says he has given up on the project of a Jewish state in Israel. He still likes the idea of a Jewish “homeland.” What clearly drives his position is the collapse of the two-state solution around the year 2000. By now it is clear that there cannot be a Palestinian state, what with 650,000 Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank (if you count the parts of it that Israel annexed and made part of its district of Jerusalem). Not only that, but the rise of an Israeli illiberalism inside Israel proper that is determined to make the over 20% of the population that is not Jewish permanent second-class citizens underlines for him that Jewish power as now configured as a zero-sum game. Jews have rights, citizenship, and sovereignty inside Israel; non-Jews have no sovereignty even though they are Israeli citizens, and their rights are fewer.

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