Beyond the Two-State Solution
Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel
by Omri Boehm
The New York Review of Books, 186 pages, $14.95
Reviewed by Yoav Schaefer
Yoav Schaefer is a PhD candidate in Religion at Princeton University and a David Hartman Center Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
It’s no secret that liberal Zionism—the belief that Israel can reconcile its dual commitments to its Jewish and democratic character—is in serious trouble. The dwindling prospects for a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict threaten to further entrench Israel’s decades-old occupation of the West Bank and its vast settlement enterprise, making permanent what has become a de facto one-state reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—a situation that spells doom for liberal Zionism. Without a two-state solution, liberal Zionists may be facing a choice they have long sought to avoid: either support a state that denies full citizenship rights to a substantial subset of its population or insist that Israel become a democratic state of all of its citizens.
In Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, Omri Boehm—an Israeli professor of philosophy at The New School—confronts the crisis of liberal Zionism head-on. As its title suggests, Boehm’s book imagines an alternative future for Israel rooted in democratic principles rather than in an ideal of exclusive Jewish sovereignty. Given the two-state solution’s collapse, liberal Zionists, insists Boehm, must dare to imagine Israel’s transformation from a sovereign Jewish state into a federal republic. Only then will liberal Zionism be able to offer a compelling moral and political vision for Israel’s future that avoids the extremes of either right-wing ethnonationalism or left-wing anti-Zionism.
For many, the central issue threatening Israeli democracy is Israel’s 55-year occupation of the West Bank. Boehm, however, argues that the root of the problem is that Israel’s Jewish character is altogether incompatible with its core democratic and liberal commitments. While such claims are not new, Boehm is especially intent on showing that the arguments put forth by liberal Zionists in America and left-wing intellectuals in Israel concerning the possibility of reconciling liberalism and Zionism are often incoherent. He criticizes liberal Zionists for clinging to their hope for a two-state solution. (“At some point,” Boehm writes, “one must admit that the two-state dream has faded into a two-state illusion. Ignoring this fact is akin to denying global warming.”) More significantly, he argues, liberal Zionists overlook the fact that Israel, unlike other nation-states, defines national identity in ethnic terms, designating the people to whom the state belongs as Jews rather than Israeli citizens. Put simply, sovereignty in Israel lies in the hands of the ethnos, the Jewish people, rather than in the hands of the demos, the citizenry of the democratic republic. It follows that Israel, properly understood, is not a democracy but an ethnocracy, a state that explicitly prioritizes its commitment to a particular ethnic group over its commitment to democratic principles. That Israel often cares more about Jews who are not Israeli citizens than it does about Israeli citizens who are not Jews is one such example of how Israel’s Jewish character actively undermines its democratic foundations.
According to Boehm, in other words, the problem is not so much that Israel has failed to live up to the democratic ideals enshrined in its Declaration of Independence, which ensures “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex,” but that exclusive Jewish sovereignty is fundamentally incompatible with liberalism. It’s no coincidence, he argues, that non-Jewish Israelis—who make up about one-fifth of Israel’s citizenry—are subject to manifold forms of discrimination in virtually every aspect of Israeli society, rendering them, in effect, second-class citizens in their own state. Such systemic inequality, Boehm alleges, is a feature, not a bug, of Zionism’s insistence on exclusive national sovereignty in a Jewish-majority state. Israel’s recent “nation-state law”—which declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”—makes that inequality explicit. As Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of Israel’s Knesset, put it: Israel is indeed both Jewish and democratic, “democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.”
In light of the contradictions between Israel’s Jewish character and liberal-democratic principles, Boehm advocates for a single, federal state in which both Israelis and Palestinians can exercise their right to national self-determination, a vision he claims is consistent with the political aspirations of early Zionists. In such a way Boehm casts his political proposal in decidedly Zionist terms, alleging that “binational Zionism” has deep roots in Zionist thought. While it’s well known that a handful of Jewish intellectuals active in Brit Shalom like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes championed binationalism, Boehm’s argument is that leading Zionist theoreticians—from Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am to Zev Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion—in fact advocated for limited Jewish autonomy in a binational state as well. And even though Boehm sometimes overstates his case—as when he claims that Menachem Begin’s “Autonomy Program” represented a proposal for transforming Israel into a federal republic—there is nonetheless much truth to his claim that, as the historian Dmitry Shumsky has shown, the Zionist movement did not coalesce around the goal of establishing a sovereign state until the 1940s.[1]
What then accounts for the shift in Zionist thinking away from limited autonomy and toward full-fledged sovereignty in an ethnically homogenous nation-state? Boehm identifies two factors: the 1937 Peel Commission, which proposed not only partitioning Palestine but also a population transfer; and the near-total extermination of Europe’s Jews in the Shoah. If the latter convinced Zionists of the need for an exclusive Jewish state, the former gave a new lease on life to something Zionists had long dreamed about but never thought possible: expelling Palestinians from a future Jewish state in order to secure a Jewish majority.
Recalling Ernst Renan’s famous quip that “forgetting” is a necessary precondition for national identity, Boehm calls on Jewish Israelis and Palestinians to practice what he, following Nietzsche, calls the “art of forgetting.” Each national group, he argues, must learn to forget their respective tragedies—the Holocaust for Jews, the Nakba for Palestinians—in order to be able to imagine a shared a future. Boehm’s suggestion is not that Jewish Israelis and Palestinians literally forget their national traumas but only that they cease to be defined by them. There are times, he reminds us, when forgetting the past is more important than remembering it, since a preoccupation with history can, as Nietzsche cautioned, become a crushing burden for the living. In order to forget their past, however, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians must first come to terms with it.
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Boehm is especially critical of the role the Holocaust plays in shaping Israeli national consciousness. In addition to instilling each new generation of Jewish Israelis with a victim mentality, memorializing the Holocaust—something of a sacred duty in Israel—is inimical to the cultivation of a shared civic identity with which both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians can identify. But it’s not enough, Boehm argues, for Jewish Israelis to assume a more mature relationship to their own past suffering. Jewish Israelis must also acknowledge their role as perpetrators in a conflict in which they have grown accustomed to thinking of themselves primarily as victims. This means, above all, accepting responsibility for the Nakba, when over 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were violently expelled from their homes in what became the state of Israel. Despite the fact that Israeli writers like S. Yizhar raised painful questions about the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 War in the years following Israel’s establishment, public commemoration of the Nakba is heavily censored, even criminalized, in Israel today. Just as Palestinians must recognize Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, so too must Jewish Israelis acknowledge the Nakba and take meaningful steps to redress this historical wrong. Only then, Boehm claims, will reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians truly be possible.
Boehm’s vision for Israel’s future, which he outlines in the book’s concluding pages, draws inspiration from the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Haifa. He essentially advocates for Israeli-Palestinian confederation, loosely based on the model of two independent states sharing sovereignty in a single territory. Unfortunately, Boehm has little to say about the complicated practical, logistical, and security issues such a solution would entail. Those interested in a more fleshed-out analysis of a confederal framework—an idea that is gaining some traction among both Israelis and Palestinians today—would be better served looking to organizations like A Land for All instead. And notwithstanding enduring prophecies about the impending death of the two-state solution, most observers still consider it the only paradigm for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Likewise, Israel has proven quite capable of maintaining a political regime in the West Bank that leading legal experts and human rights organizations now routinely describe as a form of apartheid, rendering hollow warnings that Israel’s occupation is unsustainable in the long run. It will therefore take much more than threats about the two-state solution’s imminent demise to loosen its firm grip on the political and moral imaginations of most liberal Zionists. So long as there remains a chance, however slim, that a two-state solution might still be possible, liberal Zionists will continue to defer the crisis facing Israel into some hypothetical future.
Yet it would be, in my view, a profound mistake to dismiss Boehm’s arguments. For if Boehm takes it for granted that a two-state solution is no longer feasible, that’s because he’s ultimately concerned less with practical political questions than with moral ones. Boehm’s is a work of philosophy, and it is intended, above all, to invite reasoned reflection, discussion, and contestation about the challenging ethical and political questions it raises. The fundamental question he asks his readers to consider is whether shared democratic citizenship within the framework of a confederal state offers a more compelling moral vision for Israel’s future than one based on hegemonic Jewish sovereignty. At issue, in other words, is not so much whether a two-state solution is still practically possible but whether it is morally desirable. Boehm insists that it is not, and he devotes considerable energy to arguing that liberal Zionists have strong moral (and perhaps practical) reasons for preferring a confederal framework to a traditional two-state solution. Especially problematic for Boehm is that liberal Zionists, in their unwavering commitment to Israel’s Jewish character, ignore the fact that traditional two-state politics rely on a separatist premise—namely, that maintaining Jewish demographic superiority necessitates separation from Palestinians. But once such a premise is accepted, it’s a short leap, Boehm argues, to the policy proposals of the Israeli right, including annexation and transfer—proposals that, once consigned to the extreme margins of Israeli society, are being championed by mainstream politicians today.
Ultimately, Boehm wants to give liberal Zionists a political goal that’s worth fighting for, and he insists that any credible vision for Israel’s future must be based on democratic principles like equality, dignity, and freedom. It is only on the basis of such principles, he argues, that liberal Zionism will remain a viable political ideology in the twenty-first century. His wager is that the ideals of Arab-Jewish equality and shared sovereignty will not only sustain liberal-Zionist aspirations in a post-two-state era but that they also offer the best hope for a peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians—something that’s hardly insignificant in a region where despair and hopelessness can have disastrous consequences. At the very least, Boehm’s book makes it clear that liberal Zionists can no longer simply assume that a two-state solution is morally and politically preferable to alternative frameworks—like confederation—for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It is long past time,” he writes, “for liberal Zionist thinkers to think again.”
Boehm’s political proposal may seem utopian, though it’s arguably no less fanciful than a traditional two-state solution. Yet to call something utopian is hardly a reason for dismissing it. Zionism, after all, was once defined by the utopianism of its political aspirations, even if most present-day Zionists prefer hard-nosed realism. Boehm—who opens and concludes his book by quoting Herzl’s maxim that “if you will it, it is no dream”—laments the fact that liberal Zionists concede far too much to reality when they refuse to question their commitment to national sovereignty. He therefore urges them to recover the audaciousness of Zionism’s founding fathers. This time, however, their vision for Israel’s future must be one that Israeli Jews and Palestinians can dream together.
This article appears in the online version of Sources, Fall 2022.
Notes
[1] Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinkser to Ben-Gurion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)
