[lbo-talk] Cry, the beloved two-state solution

[Bryan Atinsky]

As negotiations with the Palestinians lurch forward and the separation wall
snakes its way through the West Bank, two veteran leftists have reached a
startling conclusion: There cannot be two states for two peoples in this
land.

By Ari Shavit in Ha'aretz

1. The groundwater

Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi did not exchange views. Benvenisti lives
in Jerusalem, on the edge of the desert, and is trying to write a last book,
a summing up. Hanegbi lives in Ramat Aviv, not far from the sea, and is
trying to formulate a last, definitive, manifesto. Yet this summer both
Benvenisti and Hanegbi reached an intriguing point in their conceptual
development. They both reached the conclusion that there is no longer any
prospect of ending the conflict by means of a two-state solution. Each of
them separately has come to believe that the time has come to establish one
state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a binational
state.

On the face of it, they come from utterly different worlds. Benvenisti's
roots lie deep in the old Zionist establishment. He was the deputy mayor of
Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek's right-hand man, a candidate of Ratz (the
predecessor of Meretz) for the Knesset. Hanegbi, in contrast, is a retired
revolutionary. He was a central activist in the radical-left Matzpen group,
one of the founders of the Progressive List, a partner in the leadership of
the peace movement Gush Shalom. However, Benvenisti and Hanegbi also share a
deep common background. Both are from Jerusalem and are graduates of the
city's Beit Hakerem high school, both are Ashkenazi-Sephardi whose ideas
were shaped in the latter stages of the British Mandate period. And both of
them love this land and love human beings. Both are surging rivers of
emotions and stories and sheer human vitality.

It's precisely because they are not cut of the same cloth, because they are
not from the same ideological circle, that the parallel, albeit not
identical, processes they are undergoing are so fascinating. True, they are
both end-figures, lone wolves, sensitive sentimentalists who are sometimes
perceived as eccentrics. Nevertheless, each is an original thinker with
finely tuned senses. Both have a knee-jerk aversion to falsity,
whitewashing, and uniform thought. So perhaps the fact that the two of them
arrived during the past year at the conceptual place they now occupy is of
some significance. Possibly it says something about the groundwater of the
current Israeli reality.  [...]

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