The July 8 issue of The New York Times Magazine has a cover story on Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni by Roger Cohen. Mostly a puff profile, although the net effect is to show her as a dangerous ideologue -- her claim to be the one who put the words in Bush's mouth trashing the right of return is just one example. Still, two quotes struck me as interesting:

One of Livni's catchphrases is, "There is a process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state." She sees herself in a race against time.

The second expands on the first:

"Stagnation works against those who believe in a two-state solution," Livni said in our first conversation. The West, she suggested, needs to tell Hamas, the Islamist movement battling Fatah for control of a Palestinian movement now split between Gaza and the West Bank, that it must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but also "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is not that obvious anymore."

The West needs to get on speaking terms with Hamas before any telling becomes possible, but that's not what's important here. What matters is that Livni is acknowledging that in the eyes of more and more of the world the very concept of a Jewish State is untenable. This is obviously a big problem for Zionists, who see the Jewish State as existential. This happens routinely when someone -- more recently President Ahmadinejad of Iran -- offers an opinion that "the Zionist Entity" cannot persist, and this gets translated into a call for genocide against Jews. While it's possible that's what a few folks really think, the necessary linkage between the Jewish State and the Jewish People is pretty much a figment of the Zionist imagination. The Jewish State is a metaphysical ideal most parties in the Israeli body politic pledge allegiance to, but it's not even the same thing as the actual State of Israel -- the differences due to both secular and ethnic erosion within Israel, and to a worldwide distaste for racist colonial regimes.

The modern view, indeed the basic precept of democracy, is that states should reflect the interests and composition of the people they represent, with all due respect for minority as well as majority rights. Israel doesn't fit that view. For a long while lots of folks, especially those of pale complexion in Europe and America, gave the Zionists special dispensation, partly due to guilt over past crimes against Jews, partly out of indifference or worse regarding Arabs. But both of those rationales have softened over time, while we've witnessed the actual effects of allowing Israel to lord it over Palestinians and others. The net effect is that the Jewish State has mutated from being seen as a hypothetical sanctuary for Jews to an actual ghetto for Arabs. Little wonder the romance is fading; what's remarkable is that it's lasted as long as it has.

Livni is as committed to the Jewish State as ever, but at least she recognizes the dynamic. This is exceptional -- most Israelis still cling to the notion that time is on their side, that somehow all they have to do to win is to run out the clock. And this makes Livni more dangerous than your basic do-nothing Likudnik, since she feels the need to force something to happen. The thinking here is that if the Palestinians recognize the Jewish State the rest of the world will accept its legitimacy. The problem is that her notion of the Jewish State is unrecognizable, as it demands that Palestinians give up their history and accept a permanently subservient role to a nation built on their land in their forced absence. No such deal is possible, especially where Palestinians, too, see time as on their side.

Later in the article, Cohen looks at the other side:

You don't so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers' cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. Donkeys, carts and idle people replace Israel's first-world hustle-bustle. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers. The whole desolate West Bank scene, described recently by the World Bank as "a shattered economic space," is punctuated with shining garrisonlike settlements on hilltops and checkpoints where Palestinians see themselves reflected in the stylish shades of Russian-immigrant Israeli soldiers. If you are looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

Cohen goes on to visit Saeb Erekat, a key Palestinian negotiator under Arafat and now Abbas, who says: "Palestinians are tired of the no-partner-for-talks symphony. Livni has an interlocutor in me and Abbas. We don't ask why Israelis choose Labor or Kadima; she doesn't need to ask about Hamas. With a decent peace accord we can go to a referendum. Moderates would win. That would be Hamas's fig leaf. But Livni has to learn that peace and settlements don't go together, walls and peace don't go together and nothing is solved until everything is solved."

By making the issue recognition of the Jewish State, Livni subsumes all the inequities of the last sixty years into a precondition for any settlement. The settlements, the walls, the dominating security state, most of all denial of the right of return, those are all necessary parts of her Jewish State. Abba Eban used to quip that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. The punch line is that they never had one, because the Jewish State was predicated on dominance, and therefore on war. Ironically, only when that vision of the Jewish State is ended will Jews be able to live in peace -- which is pretty much the normal state these days for diaspora Jews who don't live in thrall to the metaphysical Jewish State.

I'm a little less than half way through Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. The annoying thing about the book is that, thus far at least, there is hardly anything about how anyone other than Israelis viewed the conflict -- well, a bit about the US, but that's it. On the other hand, the book is fascinating as a piece of Israeli navel-gazing. The nation appears to have been torn between militaristic hubris and existential dread, with both factors perfectly exemplified in Yitzhak Rabin's nervous breakdown. I suspect that Segev's final conclusion will be mine: that Israel found purpose in the 1967 war, and never dared risk peace again. Israel had two main opportunities to negotiate peace, and turned them both down. Following the 1949 armistices, Israel could have negotiated peace treaties with neighboring countries and worked to defuse the refugee crisis before it calcified into permanence, but chose to keep its borders unsettled, hoping for future expansion. The result was that they lost political ground to Arab nationalism, while building up military muscle, which led to the 1967 war. In 1967, Israel grabbed land it couldn't settle but could trade back for peace on more favorable terms, but preferred to keep the land and fight with the people on the land, trying to at last realize the expansion they dreamt of in 1949. (Some of it anyway: the Likud still insisted on both sides of the Jordan.) Again, failure to settle soon after the conflict hardened into long, self-perpetuating struggle.

I've always been somewhat sympathetic to the Israelis in 1967 -- although even then I had serious doubts about war as a solution to anything, and nothing since then has proven otherwise. The 1947-49 war occurred before I was born (in 1950), so I can only look back at it with hindsight. The original sin of the founding of Israel was the UN partition resolution of 1947, rejected by the Palestinian majority and radically reinterpreted by the Zionist leadership, in ways that were not uncommon nor surprising at the time. This led to the more/less forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, who were stripped of their property, denied their homes and their rights, to be replaced with Jewish immigrants from wherever the Mossad could find them -- mostly Arab countries, eventually extending to Ethiopia, with a later massive influx from the former Soviet Union. In effect, the refugees looked like several contemporary population exchanges -- between India and Pakistan, or the Germans of Eastern Europe who were driven west. The Palestinian case was different primarily in that it was done under the nose of the UN and was presumed to be covered by international law, which demanded peace settlements and the refugees' right of return. The conflict then was about two things: the right of Jews to create a predominantly Jewish nation in part of Palestine to serve as a haven for Jews from all over the world, which is roughly what the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate promised and the UN reaffirmed in 1947; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and live in peace. In hindsight the former is far more dubious, but it still held considerable sympathy in 1967, putting Israel in peril should its Arab neighbors eventually manage to reverse their previous military losses. This assumed, of course, that victorious Arab armies would kill or force into exile most Israeli Jews, but given the way both sides had fought in the past, that seemed likely enough.

Israel's quick victory in 1967 put an end to the Arab's ability to threaten Israel's existence, and Israel's development of nuclear weapons closed the issue once and for all. The subsequent wars up to 1973 were never more than border conflicts, as Egypt toned down its goals to recovering its lost territory -- eventually achieved diplomatically. Israel complained much about terrorists afterwards, but they were never more than nuissances, regardless of how hysterical Israelis got over them. The Intifada, as a mass revolt, was (and is) a more serious problem, but not an existential threat. So the net effect of the 1967 war was to shift power clearly enough to prevent future wars. While one could imagine other ways to do that, there is little reason to think that either side would have been interested. Given that, the 1967 war in itself could have been a starting point for peace.

Of course, we now know that it wasn't. Indeed, it's hard to find any wars that in the end promoted peace and justice. (Noam Chomsky is fond of the 1971 war that broke Bangladesh free of Pakistan, and may have one or two more. The abject defeat of Japan and Germany in WWII did encourage them to become more peaceable.) The usual pattern is that the winners want more, and the losers want a rematch. That's what happened in 1967, and why it took the less lopsided 1973 war to bring Israel and Egypt to an accommodation that was on the table but rejected by Israel in 1971.

We should have learned much since 1967, including that the Zionist solution to "the Jewish problem" was itself bogus, and has created far more anti-semitism than it ever defended against. Driving most of the Jews away from muslim lands has made those countries less tolerant and less cosmopolitan than they would otherwise be, while creating an underclass in Israel. Meanwhile Jews in Europe and America have fully integrated into secular democratic societies -- so much so that the closest thing they can find to anti-semitism is really just disappointment over Israel's unjust behavior. And in Israel Zionism has created the world's most militarist state to no purpose other than to deny citizenship and human rights to the descendents of the people who lived there before the Zionists moved in and took over. It's worse than a crying shame. It's sheer intellectual nonsense.