Giving up on the Two-State Solution

Good news: With Biden agreeing to sacrifice his personal goals for the good of the country and his party, we can stop with the dread and allow ourselves to hope once again that the United States of America might regain the place it once held, rightly or wrongly, as a beacon of democracy for the world.

Bad news: Kamala has to choose a vice-presidential candidate to run with and soon. Well, that's not really bad news so much as it is discomfort-making news, because although she has a pretty good selection of democratic politicians to choose from, the fact that she can choose only one of them is going to piss a bunch of people off.

My favorite human being among the candidates is Pete Buttigieg. How could I not love this guy?  A fellow gay, he has done more to further a positive image of LGBT people than anybody else I can think of. I just love the guy to pieces. Love his husband, Chastain, love his cute kids, swell with pride when I observe how articulate he can be in talking back to the trumpist me-me-me crowd.

I hope Pete isn't selected, though, because I'm among those who worry the country isn't ready for a gay man a heart-beat away from the Oval Office. There are others with more experience; Pete can wait four or eight more years and continue to build his resume. He appears to be doing a bang-up job building bridges and making trains run on time.

My favorite among the candidates who I think would make a great companion party leader is Tim Walz of Minnesota. He comes across as warm and caring, and when you dig into his record, he's clearly been walking the walk and not just saying nice things as governor of a very civilized state.

If I were putting money on her choice, I'd go with Josh Shapiro. Also articulate.  And I understand that people like him for his potential for carrying Pennsylvania and its large number of electoral votes.

And, by the way, back to Pete Buttigieg for a minute, can't we more of us get on the bandwagon he's driving to rid the country of this undemocratic idiocy of allowing a minority of rural voters more say in the direction of the country than the rest of us?

But let me get back to my intended point of this morning's ramble: choosing Josh Shapiro as VP candidate. While he's got so much going for him, looks, smarts, political creds, he's also got his Jewishness going against him. Just as I fear the country might not be ready for a gay man, I fear Shapiro's pro-Israel remarks might lead too many Americans pissed off at our lockstep support of Israel, right or wrong, to pull the lever for the other party - or maybe for the current political buzz-kill, Robert Kennedy's child wandering in the no-vaccinations wilderness.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place... Hamas gets it all wrong. They start with a legitimate cause: the fight against Israeli injustice vis-a-vis its Palestinian minority and fuck it up with its policy of kidnapping, rape and murder on October 7th.  And what does Israel do?  Come back with a policy Israelis can be proud of?  Not on your life. They fall into the trap Hamas sets for them by using its own people as shields, and mows them down. The nation formed to provide a refuge for a people victimized by thuggish fascists now drops bombs on Gazan civilians and has already killed more children there than the number of Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion of their country - just to get some perspective here.

Kamala Harris has to tread the thin line between showing support for Israel as a nation of Jewish people like her husband without losing the support of not just Arab-American voters who worry about what they see as an unjustifiable "Israel right or wrong" approach to American diplomacy. With or without Josh Shapiro next to her in the front seat.

Since this is a blog, and not an academic article where expository writing rules ought to apply, allow me to spin off on an update in my views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which I just sent off to a friend of mine:

Two comments come to mind each time the conflict grabs my attention. One is the Abba Eban observation, "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" and the other is Golda Meir's insight: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." 

My focus on these two remarks reveals the fact that I am drawn emotionally to the culture of Ashkenazi Jewishness but feel neutral, at best, toward Sephardic Jews and Palestinians. Back in the day when Leon Uris published Exodus, I had total sympathy with the Zionist project of building a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust. And ever since then I've felt that unbalanced enthusiasm for one side over the other slip away as I watched the Israelis use their material (and intellectual) superiority and organizational skills over the Palestinians to grind them into the dust - all with the dubious justification that Jewish survival as a people depended on it.

It doesn't. Jews live well in the United States and Canada and many other countries as well, whether being Jewish means lighting candles on shabbat or simply preferring lox and bagels to fried rice; they are no longer in danger of extinction. And if the project of trying to out-birth their Palestinian neighbors (on the part of the ultra-orthodox among them) flops as a means of achieving their ends, you won't see a tear in this eye.

The nationalist goals of the 19th century are no longer valid, in my view.  I have serious doubts they ever were, although I won't take a stand on that.  In any case, they seem to have screwed the pooch by (apparently) ruining any chance of a two-state solution and must now deal with a one-state solution or endless war. So be it.

Long live Israel, I say.

Home of Jews and Palestinians and anybody else who is ready to do what it takes to make it their home.

I would prefer to say "not my farm; not my animals" except for the fact that my country insists on spending billions of U.S. tax dollars to maintain an only-Jews-as-first-class-citizens state and to prop up sleazeballs like Bibi Netanyahu simply because he has managed to get control of the reins of power.  (And because using a metaphor which will no doubt lead people to call me an anti-semite for allegedly referring to Jews and Palestinians as animals is something one ought not do in such a humorless day and age.)

A.