>Of course, the true progressive position is the demand for a single, secular
>state. But in today's intellectual and political climate, that's as crazy as
>arguing for, say, socialism.
It is a sad commentary on the political and moral degeneration of liberalism that a basic idea like a "democratic, secular state" would be deemed "crazy". The same people would not be caught dead advocating that same here in the USA: A "Euro-Christian" identity state. But wait until 2050..
If that is "crazy", nothing to lose arguing for socialism. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Well, that *is* what the British thought they would set up after World War I--one land that would be a national home for Jews and for Palestinians. But the thirty years after the Balfour Declaration convinced the British that a two-state solution was the *only* solution that had a chance of avoiding violent anarchy.
Has something happened since to make a single-state solution more likely to work? Or is the "true progressive position" that it is good to burn everything to the ground and kill a hell of a lot of people? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The progressive position would not indulge in the fantasy that "two states" is a solution. For the Palestinians, it will only be apartheid dependency writ slightly larger. The conflict will resume, and ultimatey the state of Israel will disappear. It is a doomed state.
Liberals appear inconsistent in their apparently oppsed and hypocritical stands vis a vis Israel and Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Actually, liberals are very consisitently _in favor_ of ethno-cultural particularism and "flexible" separation enforced, when necessary, by selective "ethnic cleansing". This is what was implemented in Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo; this is what they want to implement, with a new "Berlin Wall" if necessary, in the Palestinian territory. It could also be the fate of Afghanistan.
The liberal NYT Op-Ed columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof (a relief from the bombastic egomanic Thomas Friedman), confessed as much today:
"The first delusion concerns the rising Palestinian hopes of a universal "right of return" — in other words, the notion that all Palestinians will be able to celebrate a peace agreement by moving back to ancestral homes within Israel proper. It won't happen. Allowing a large-scale return would mean the death of Israel as a state that is both democratic and Jewish, and Israel will never commit suicide."
"That's how the world works. My family was evicted in 1940 from what is now Ukraine, and I have no right of return. Neither do millions of overseas Chinese, nor Germans pushed out by the Russians, nor Japanese who lost their homes to Russian conquest, nor Jews forced from Arab countries."
That is how the world of liberal imperialism works, the better to impose the global financial dictatorship they love so much. It is the new form of colonialism, where what is colonized are ever flexible "identities", rather than the old colonial territories or the bounded nation-state. This explains the preference for international "non-recognition" of the redrawn ethno-cultural boundaries, the better to preserve their very useful flexibility under a direct military-financial tyranny. It promises us a future of endless warfare.
It is the very opposite of progressive cosmopolitinism. While it recognizes the reality of ethno-cultural differences, it aims at a politics that promotes their intermingling and "mongrelization" over time as, quite literally, "the greatest good for the greatest number", in the progressive appropriation of what used to be a principle of American liberal pluralism.
So, see you at your new Berlin Wall. I'll be on the other side.
-Brad Mayer