It’s unbelievable how often the very concept of Israel as a regular sovereign state comes under attack in the New York Times, and indeed across the media.
A recent article, titled “Want Israeli-Palestinian Peace? Try Confederation“ by Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour encourages readers to toy with the concept of Israel as a state like any other and view it as a theoretical plaything that can afford to, “share a capital city, a transportation and urban infrastructure, and a business ecosystem.” Before proceeding with an analysis of this piece, it’s vital to note one fundamental fact: this view is not so much a minority opinion amongst Israelis and Palestinians as practically non-existent.
That the New York Times affords such a perspective means it gains prominence amongst the influential. But while the idea of doing away with Israel as a sovereign state with control over its population and a capital city like any other nation gain currency amongst outsiders, back in the Middle East – where people have to grapple with reality – such impractical ideas are laughed at by Arabs and Jews alike.
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The New York Times’ Distortions and Impractical Ideas
Back to the New York Times’ piece. Among the impractical ideas and distortions of reality that the op-ed promotes are:
A “dotted-line border in Jerusalem”
The suggestion that Jerusalem can be split is something many Israelis and Zionists – as well as Palestinians, by the way – have extreme difficulty accepting. For millennia, Jerusalem was a single city. For precisely 19 years, it was divided by an ugly barrier, the frontier between Israel and Jordan. Since 1967, the city has been reunited, and while life is far from perfect, it has become immeasurably better for citizens of both sides. Not least because there are no more no-mans-land zones that citizens cannot approach out of fear of being fired upon by soldiers on the other side.
Nevertheless, Avishai and Bahour suggest that “Confederal institutions would permit dividing sovereignty in Jerusalem with a dotted-line border, actually keeping the city open to all.” As if the presence of armed Palestinian police in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, with no real border separating them from Israeli citizens, is something Israel could tolerate. Even more so when considering the reality that over 25% of Jerusalem’s Jewish population live in the neighborhoods of Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Ramot, all of which are on what would be on the Palestinian side.
All told, over a third of Jerusalem’s Jewish population live in such neighborhoods. Trusting the Palestinian security administration with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, or effectively creating Israeli enclaves surrounded by Palestinians with the means of attacking them, and hoping for the best is no more than a wild fantasy.
“The Oslo peace process, begun in 1993, proposed two states separated by a hard border…”
This is quite simply untrue. The Oslo accords quite deliberately avoided any mention of a Palestinian state. The underlying principle was to develop Palestinian autonomy in such a way that a Palestinian state could indeed be considered at a future point, but without ever formally proposing two states sitting side by side.
“Palestine’s Jerusalem Airport, made inoperative by Israel, will require planes to overfly Israeli airspace.”
The sentence reads as if Israel shut down an airport operated by the Palestinians. That is a woeful distortion. The Palestinians never had an airport in Jerusalem. The airport the authors seem to be referring to is Atarot, a facility which was operated by Israel since 1967. It was originally constructed by the British in the 1920s and later fell into Jordanian hands, after the British withdrew from the Holy Land.
It has never been under sovereign Palestinian control. Furthermore, the reason why it was “made inoperative by Israel” was due to heightened security fears following the beginning of the Second Palestinian Intifada and the waves of violence that followed.
“Route 5, reviled by Palestinians as a settler expressway”
The authors conveniently omit that Route 5 also serves Palestinians. The writer of this critique has personally boarded buses on this road on numerous occasions, and each time has observed how Palestinians commuting to work in the Tel Aviv area routinely board buses along this route.
Media Treating Israel As An Abstract Concept To Be Toyed With
Just last year, commentator Peter Beinart took to the opinion pages of the self-styled ‘newspaper of record’ to declare his support for a single binational state for both Jews and Palestinians, and very publicly backtracked on his previous conviction that each people deserve to have a state of their own. Three months later, Beinart announced that he was joining the paper as a contributing opinion writer.
Support for such an idea is hardly something new. For years, the Times has allowed itself to serve as a platform for opinion pieces pushing the demise of the Jewish state, suggesting that the best way of achieving peace would be to dissolve Israel in its current form and replace it with an Arab-majority state, conveniently sidestepping why Israelis view the end of Israel as unacceptable, as this 2014 article did.
Further afield, the concept of a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is repeatedly aired in the western media, despite receiving negligible support from either Israelis or Palestinians. In 2019, an LA Times op-ed conflated the end of the South African apartheid regime with a proposed one-state solution to the conflict in the Middle-East.
In 2017, an opinion piece in Time magazine by notorious BDS advocate Youssef Munnayer made false claims, such as “the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu…want to retain all the land [in the West Bank]”, leading to the conclusion that for there to be equality, the world’s only Jewish state must be dismantled. And back in 2014, the Washington Post chose the day of the Jewish New Year to publish a disingenuous opinion piece ostensibly calling for “equal rights for all” as a means of arguing for the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Although the latest iteration initially comes across as considerably more realistic than the one-state visions endlessly recycled in the op-ed pages of these media outlets, the latest New York Times article is a simply complicated piece of pseudo-academic speak that has little bearing on reality.
There is no disguising, however, the New York Times’ penchant for publishing op-eds that don’t just criticize Israeli policies or actions, but strike at the very heart of Israel’s existence and identity as a Zionist and Jewish state.
