Can Israel remain a democracy?

Eleven years ago, I carried my infant daughter into a synagogue basement and plunged her tiny body, head to toe, underwater.

She emerged sputtering and coughing, then wailing. The procedure, immersion in a Jewish ritual bath called a mikvah, felt barbaric. But it was for an important reason: Her mother isn’t Jewish, and by Jewish custom — and Israeli law — the faith is passed on by matrilineal descent, so I converted my daughter. Making sure she is Jewish in the eyes of the Jewish state gives me peace of mind. If the Gestapo ever comes again, she and her descendants will have a place to go. Just in case.

Without a Palestinian state, Israel can be either a Jewish state or a democracy but not both. If it annexes the Palestinian territories and remains democratic, it will be split roughly evenly between Jews and Arabs; if it annexes the territories and suppresses the rights of Arabs, it ceases to be democratic.

There are roughly 4.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and another 1.4 million living inside Israel . That puts them in rough parity with Jews, who number just over 6 million. Higher Palestinian population growth and fertility rates indicate that Jews will be a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean in a few years.

Some right-wing outfits contest these numbers and try to make the dubious case that Israel can annex the Palestinian territories and still survive as a democratic Jewish state. Those were the type of voters Netanyahu was fishing for when he said before the election that he would not allow a Palestinian state — and when he warned on election day that “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” But in the end there can be no democratic Jewish state unless there is also a Palestinian state.

My friend Jeffrey Goldberg, in a powerful new article in the Atlantic on the tenuous future of Europe’s Jews, recalled an event he attended in the fall with American Jewish leaders at Vice President Biden’s residence. Biden, Goldberg recalled, told the story of a long-ago visit with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who told him that Israel’s “secret weapon” was that the Jews “have no place else to go.”

“Folks,” Goldberg quoted Biden as saying to the American Jews, “there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.”

Goldberg thought Biden had “antiquated notions about Jewish anxiety.” And it’s true that Jews are safe and happy in the United States today — but that could change. This is why I plunged my baby in the mikvah. And this is why I was appalled by Netanyahu’s disavowal of a two-state solution.

Without two states, there won’t be even one Jewish state if — God forbid — my daughter or her progeny someday have no place else to go.

Take out the word “destroy” and why is that a bad thing? Dismantling and reforming a state of Jewish privilege built on others’ suffering would be a great achievement, a light unto the nations. A couple of years ago Beinart told J Street that if we lose the Jewish state, American Jews will be stumbling spiritually through the rubble of that experience for decades to come. He is right; but what he fails to see is that the Jewish community is spiritually stumbling horribly now. Denying Israeli atrocities, denying the existence of apartheid, denying the existence of the Israel lobby– this work does a lot of damage to people’s sensibility and intelligence. Dana Milbank once smeared Walt and Mearsheimer as “Teutonic” — i.e. Nazis — just for questioning the power of the Israel lobby. This is a Jewish tragedy. Black people didn’t choose the Marcus Garvey option; many supported it for understandable reasons, but in the end it didn’t happen. Meantime, the Jewish community bought totally into the Marcus Garvey option, and now we have a situation where many in the American Jewish community are devoted 24/7 to protecting Israel and denying the persecution of Palestinians.

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:It is - even with 18% arab muslims within its population. It may not remain a democracy if an independent Palestine is created bcz it will be used by every islamic terrorist group as its base with a single-point agenda of destroying iSrael.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:It is - even with 18% arab muslims within its population. It may not remain a democracy if an independent Palestine is created bcz it will be used by every islamic terrorist group as its base with a single-point agenda of destroying iSrael.

Like the author put, This is a Jewish tragedy, living in denial. Who is being persecuted and denied of basic rights on a daily basis, not the Jews; who has a few hundred of nuclear weapons in their arsenal, not Palestine or Iran. How do you think they will destroy Israel?

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:It is - even with 18% arab muslims within its population. It may not remain a democracy if an independent Palestine is created bcz it will be used by every islamic terrorist group as its base with a single-point agenda of destroying iSrael.

Like the author put, This is a Jewish tragedy, living in denial. Who is being persecuted and denied of basic rights on a daily basis, not the Jews; who has a few hundred of nuclear weapons in their arsenal, not Palestine or Iran. How do you think they will destroy Israel?

The same way they are destroying India, Europe and the U.S.

Hellsangel wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:It is - even with 18% arab muslims within its population. It may not remain a democracy if an independent Palestine is created bcz it will be used by every islamic terrorist group as its base with a single-point agenda of destroying iSrael.

Like the author put, This is a Jewish tragedy, living in denial. Who is being persecuted and denied of basic rights on a daily basis, not the Jews; who has a few hundred of nuclear weapons in their arsenal, not Palestine or Iran. How do you think they will destroy Israel?

The same way they are destroying India, Europe and the U.S.

You should simply let Comrade rant and whine.

"The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government," reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.

The documents, published on the archive's website under freedom of information laws, describe in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain's MI6.

Britain, and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, latterly known as BP. But the UK needed US support. The Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.

confuzzled dude wrote:When was the last time Iran initiated a war by proxy?