Thoughts on Peter Beinart's new assessment of the way forward in Israel/Palestine.

Peter Beinart has made quite a splash with his recent Op-Ed in the New York Times and longer essay in Jewish Currents, arguing that it is time to think in terms of a single, bi-national state in Israel/Palestine.    

My friend Rabbi Michael Feshbach (who accuses me of not knowing how to spell my own last name) posted on Facebook Yehuda Kurtzer's Tablet Magazine critique of Beinart's essay.  My comments were too long for a FB response, so I have place them here.  I think Kurtzer may make too much of the Yavne metaphor, a reference to the rabbinic surrender to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and Jewish sovereignty in return for a safe place to study and develop principles for what became the Jewish Diaspora.  Beinart does not even mention Yavne in his New York Times Op-Ed and only discusses it in the eighth paragraph and at the very end of the Jewish Currents essay, where he suggests that the metaphor is apt in the sense that it was an "acknowledgement that a phase of Jewish history had run its course."  Beinart poses the question of whether a sovereign Jewish state is the ultimate goal, or whether the ultimate goal is a safe place for the Jewish people in our ancestral home, regardless of purely Jewish sovereignty. Kurtzer asserts that it must be the former.  Beinart concludes that it will have to be the latter, in large part because he sadly has determined, with much justification, that the former is no longer possible without our becoming the very sort of people we do not want to be. 

I tend to agree with the late analysis of the late writer Amos Oz, set forth in Rob Eshman's Forward article about Beinart essays:

 "In a 2015 speech to the Institute for National Security Studies, . . . Oz sounded the alarm [about the dangers of annexation], but with far more pessimism than Beinart. 'I think the idea of a bi-national state is a sad joke,' he said. 'You can’t expect Israelis and Palestinians after 100 years of blood, tears and calamity to jump into a double bed and begin the honeymoon.'” 

That is why Oz so strongly supported a two-state solution, as did Beinart until now. 

But events of recent years seem to have made such a solution impossible. While I understand and appreciate Beinart's view and wish it was a viable solution, I am extremely skeptical. But I am also aware that of the various scenarios, Beinart's newly-arrive-at-approach -- while a long shot -- may well be the most likely way that the Jewish people can survive in Israel and still keep their souls.