Shibley Telhami writes:

As a new Israeli government takes shape, the Biden administration must rethink its messaging about Israel and the Palestinians, especially in the absence of a clear path to ending their conflict. Beyond offering humanitarian aid to Gaza and dispatching Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Middle East to solidify the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, President Joe Biden offered two principles: that both Palestinians and Israelis “deserve equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy”; and that the region must “acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state.”

What is remarkable is that commentators saw the advocacy of equal rights for Palestinians as unusual — but not Washington’s unique advocacy of Israel’s Jewishness, which has become second nature. The latter went practically unnoticed, as did the inherent contradictions in advocating for democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the Jewishness of Israel, on the other — which, by definition (and law), provides lesser rights to its non-Jewish citizens. As Americans have shifted their own attention to addressing systemic racism and inequality here at home, the deep inherent contradictions of our policy toward Israel are coming to a head.

It may seem at first glance that the American stance on Israel’s Jewishness isn’t unusual. States often define themselves in ethno-religious nationalist terms; as a Jewish state, Israel is not an exception in that way. There is the Syrian Arab Republic, despite the presence of many non-Arabs, such as Kurds, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite the presence of many non-Muslim Iranians. Historically, the United States has backed non-democracies, even ruthless dictatorships, for reasons of expediency, and has accepted ethno-nationalist states in the context of conflict-resolution arrangements. Much as we may not like how states define themselves, we reluctantly go along, based on their membership in the United Nations and a degree of realism. But there is no case except Israel’s in which the United States specifically and actively advocates for a form of an ethno-nationalist state that discounts a large portion of its population and demands that others do the same. [Continue reading…]

Yousef Munayyer writes:

In recent weeks, as Palestinians rose up in their homeland, in the wider Middle East, and around the world, you probably heard the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In cities across the globe, protesters responded to the pending expulsions of Palestinian residents from their homes in Jerusalem, Israeli attacks on holy sites, and the bombardment of Gaza. If you watched or attended any of these protests, you likely saw the slogan printed on a sign, or heard it drifting over the crowd.

You may also have heard claims that this slogan is antisemitic or even genocidal. On May 19th, for example, the New Yorker Union was widely attacked for tweeting, “Solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea who went on a 24-hour strike yesterday for dignity and liberation.” Whether in earnest ignorance or in bad faith, critics of the river-to-the-sea formulation argued that the union, and others who used the slogan last month, were implicitly calling for not only dismantling the State of Israel, but cleansing the entire region—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, an area encompassing the West Bank, Gaza, and all of Israel within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders—of its Jewish population. (Unfortunately, the union backed down in the face of these smears.)

Like many Palestinians, I’ve long used this phrase. About a decade ago, Peter Beinart started a blog at The Daily Beast called “Open Zion” aimed at bringing together a range of perspectives on Israel/Palestine. He invited me to participate regularly, and at first I was hesitant, given the name. Would a project called “Open Zion” really be open to arguments that challenged the tenets of Zionism? I agreed to participate on the condition that I could write what I wanted and that my column could be called “From the River to the Sea.” As I explained to Peter, I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived. [Continue reading…]