Gershom Gorenberg: The Unmaking of Israel

1. The Road to Elisha (pp. 2-4):

To start, Elisha is an illegal outpost, one of about a hundred small settlements established across the West Bank sine the 1993 Oslo Accord committed Israel to a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians. Sine that agreement, the Israeli government has not approved new settlements in the West Bank. Ostensibly, the settler activists who established the outposts defied the government and the laws in force in Israeli-occupied territory. In reality, multiple state agencies lent a hand, while elected officials ignored or helped the effort. The Housing Ministry spent over $300,000 on infrastructure and buildings at Elisha alone. The army provides soldiers to guard the spot. The purpose of the outpost enterprise is to fill in the gaps between larger existing settlements, to extend Jewish control over West Bank land, to fragment the territory left to Palestinians. It is actually a massive rogue operation, making a mockery of the rule of law.

At the same time, Elisha is an institution of Orthodox Jewish religious study. The students are young men at the end of their teens. The dean is a charismatic rabbi with a quiet, warm voice. By coincidence, he was born in 19676, the year of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. Because of that perceived miracle, a new theology swept much of Israeli Judaism. It described the battlefield triumph as part of God's plan for redeeming the world, for bringing humankind into the perfected age of the messiah. The theology assigned sanctity to the state of Israel and its military. It made settling Jews in the newly conquered territory a divine commandment "as important as all the others combined." [ . . . ]

Elisha, however, is a very particular kind of school: a pre-military academy. In principle, Israel has a universal draft at age eighteen. But the army grants deferments to high school graduates to spend a year or more at preparatory academies that combine physical training and studies that boost motivation to serve and to rise through the ranks. At Orthodox academies, one goal is to strengthen students' faith, so they can resist pressure to give up religious practice during their service. Another goal is to create a cadre of ideologically committed Orthodox officers. Despite being an illegal outpost, Elisha appears on the Defense Ministry's Internet page of pre-military academies. The Education Ministry has provided a third or more of its budget.

(p. 8):

Ironically, the Six-Day War of June 1967 was a turning point -- a military victory that led to political folly. It marked the beginning of what I like to call the Accidental Empire. The war took Israel by surprise; the conquests of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula were unexpected. But afterward, an Israeli government suffering from paralysis and hubris was unable to make hard political choices, especially about the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, it kept the Palestinians who lived in those territories disenfranchised, under military occupation, while settling Israeli citizens in the occupied lands.

So at the moment of its triumph, Israel began to take itself apart. Long-term rule of Palestinians was a retreat from the ideal of democracy, a retreat that governments denied by describing the occupation as temporary. The settlement enterprise was a multipronged assault on the rule of law. Contrary to a common portrayal, secular politicians initiated settlement in the occupied territories and have continued to back it ever sine. But the most ideologically committed settlers have been religious Zionists -- and the government's support for settlement has fostered the transformation of religious Zionism into a movement of the radical right.

2. Remember the Altalena: The Altalena was a ship carrying arms and volunteers for the Irgun. After Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence, he demanded that the Irgun militia disband and be folded into the IDF (as the Hagannah was renamed). Menachem Begin refused, and attempted to set up his own government with his own militia. The IDF wound up shelling the Altalena (pp. 22-23):

Altogether, sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers were killed in the fighting. The shell that hit the Altalena did not quite end the affair. Troops under Allon's command mopped up in Tel Aviv. The Irgun issued a statement calling Ben-Gurion a dictator, and warning that his government would rule "by means of concentration camps, torture cellars, and hangings." At the same time, it labeled the provisional government a "Judenrat." To avoid "terrible bloodshed between Jews in the hour of danger," however, it ordered its fighters not to use their weapons. Only in September did the Irgun accept a final ultimatum to disband. Yet the shell that hit the Altalena -- Ben-Gurion's willingness to order it fired, the extremely reluctant willingness of the cannon's crew to fire it -- effectively ended the Irgun's challenge to the government.

Had Begin succeeded in building up his militia and maintaining its separate command structure, the Jewish militia forces would have broken down into factions, each under control of a warlord. (Aside from Irgun and Lehi on the right, the Palmah was dominated by Mapam leftists, and had not yet fully integrated with the IDF.) (p. 25):

The Irgun saw itself as representing the purest Zionism, unwilling to concede any part of the Land of Israel and unadulterated by other ideologies, such as socialism. It asserted that liberation could come only by the gun. In the statement after the sinking of the Altalena, it referred to weaponry as "precious beyond all value." That love of "iron," as Begin called weapons, came from the emotional as well as pragmatic need. The Zionist right carried a small stick and loved to speak very loudly. The mainstream, meanwhile, saw the Irgun as separatists and terrorists. [ . . . ]

For Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, statehood meant that the civilian government along could possess military power. To be sure, the Israeli army was never quarantined from politics. The political leanings of top officers were known, especially in the state's first years. Ex-generals dominate Israeli politics to this day. The military's analysis and policy proposals, biased toward force, have strongly influenced government decisions.

(pp. 44-46):

The partition map was based not only on the 1947 population of Palestine. It assumed that the Jewish state would absorb up to half a million European Jewish refugees, who did not want to return to their pre-Holocaust homes and were not wanted there. In this sense, the argument that the Palestinians paid for Europe's crimes is correct. Nor were the European refugees the only prospective immigrants; the founders of Israel hoped to "ingather" Jews from around the world. Their most basic belief was that the proper place for Jews was their homeland. Practically speaking, they expected immigration to create the necessary Jewish majority.

Even so, Zionist leaders were concerned about the expected size of the Arab minority. A good example of that concern is a telegram from the Jewish Agency's "foreign minister," Moshe Shertok, to Ben-Gurion, then head of the agency, in October 1947. Shertok (later Sharett) was in New York, where the final version of the partition plan was being hammered out. The plan allowed Arabs living in the Jewish state to opt for citizenship in the Arab state, and vice versa. (Jerusalem residents could also choose to be citizens of one of the states.) Shertok told Ben-Gurion of a U.S. proposal requiring anyone who chose citizenship in the other state to move there within a set time. Shertok opposed the idea because it would "not result [in] transfer but discourage Arabs [from] opting out." The Zionist interest was to "reduce [the] Arab political minority even if [the] economic minority [is] irreducible." Were the UN plan to include a population transfer, that would be ideal, Shertok implies, but this was not in the cards. Sine the Arabs would stay put, it would be best if they chose citizenship in the Arab state, so that they would not be able to vote in the Jewish one. Meanwhile, the Jewish political majority would be boosted by Jews living outside the state.

(pp. 48-49):

In some places, Jewish commanders expelled Arabs from conquered villages. In many more, panic led to mass flight, especially after the Irgun and Lehi fighters perpetrated a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem.

By early May, Shertok was speaking of the "astounding" and "unforeseen" Arab exodus, as if describing an unexpected inheritance. Going back to the status quo ante was unthinkable, he said. When the provisional government discussed the issue in June, the consensus -- supported by Ben-Gurion -- was to keep the refuges from returning. A later cabinet decision said that "a solution to the refugee problem" would have to be part of a formal peace agreement. The policy was partly defensive, to avoid a fifth column. But in the June cabinet meeting, Shertok also described all "the lands and the houses" as "spoils of war," and as compensation for what Jews had lost in a war forced on them.

Afterward, as the fighting continued, cases of the IDF expelling Arabs grew more common. The decision to prevent return was the turning point, transforming what began in the chaos of war into a choice.

To understand later events, it's worth noting that Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled. But they could do so rarely, because the Arabs were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Transjordan's Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of Kfar Etzion, a religious kibbutz south of Bethlehem, after they surrendered. Several other isolated Jewish farming communities were abandoned. Though relatively small, those losses would help shape Israeli policy nineteen years afterward.

(pp. 51-53):

The policy on land ownership expressed the attitude that the state served Jews. From the start of Zionism, purchasing real estate in Palestine was central to its efforts. The goal, especially on the Zionist left, was to bring Jews back not only to their homeland but to the soil itself. So Jews needed places to live and, just as important, to cultivate. To buy land, the Zionist Organization created the Jewish National Fund, which held the property it acquired in perpetuity for the Jewish people. But British legal restrictions, an Arab nationalist campaign against selling land to Jews, and a lack of cash showed the buying effort. At independence, the JNF owned less than 5 percent of Israel's land; total Jewish landholdings were less than a tenth of the country. Land previously owned by the British government was now the property of the Israeli government, but most of that was unusable. As for the rest of the country, the government was sovereign, but sovereignty doesn't mean holding property rights.

But there were the abandoned fields, orchards, and houses of Arabs who had fled. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Absentees' Property Law, which put such real estate in the hands of a government custodian. An "absentee," according to the law, wasn't only someone now living on the far side of the border. It was anyone who had left his home after November 29, 1947, for another country or for part of Palestine then held by Arab forces. You were an absentee if you had been expelled and came back. [ . . . ]

The law allowed the custodian to sell absentee property to a newly created Development Authority, which under another law could sell land to the JNF. By the end of 1950, title to nearly 12 percent of the country's land had been shifted to the JNF in this way. The JNF leases rather than sells land. It does not lease to non-Jews. The state was using its considerable power to accomplish the Zionist movement's goal of acquiring land for Jews. In the process, it treated Israeli Arabs as ethnic adversaries, rather than citizens to be integrated into a new, shared civic community.

This chapter also includes a fairly useful discussion of the early formation of the Israeli state -- especially Ben-Gurion's decision not to write a constitution, and his preference for forming a coalition with the religious parties instead of allying with secular parties to the left (Mapam) or right (Herut) of his Mapai party. The result of his initial coalition was cede civil law authority to the rabbis, but he managed to avoid locking that into a constitution.

3. The Capital of Lawlessness: Ofrah, north of Ramallah, with "over 2,700 residents and over 500 buildings," none built with permits (p. 58):

Ofrah is also the embodiment of lawlessness. Like other Israeli settlements in occupied territory, it was built in violation of international law. It was established in 1975 without government permission, with the express goal of undermining the foreign policy of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin -- but with the help of Rabin's defense minister and rival, Shimon Peres. Its founder, Yehudah Etzion, was a leader of the Jewish terror underground that carried out attacks on Palestinians in the early 1980s. The first proposal for building private homes at Ofrah notes a minor complication: "the strange act of building without permission of the owner of the land," which the settlers mistakenly believed to be the government of Israel. Ofrah epitomizes casual disregard for property rights and for the land-use laws of Israel's military government in occupied territory. Yet like other settlements, it has benefited from the authorities' support. One piece of that support is a legal system that mocks equality before the law, applying entirely separate rules to Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the same territory. Ofrah, the quintessential Israeli settlement in occupied territory, is where the state of Israel unthinkingly attacks its own foundations.

Gorenberg asserts that the 1967 war was one that neither side wanted, basing Israel's innocence on a single interview with a strategically placed but unimportant military planner (p. 63):

Years later, Azaryahu described the resulting political dilemma. "We had no goals for the war . . . and therefore no one knew what to do with the gains of the war." War had not been an extension of policy. The empire was an accident. A policy had to be invented after the fact.

The government of national unity set up on the war's eve was unfit to do that. It included everyone from Mapam on the left to Menachem Begin on the right. Galili and Allon represented Ahdut Ha'avodah, the socialist party with visions of the Whole Land of Israel. Within the prime minister's Mapai party were people representing almost every view on the future of the conquered land. It was a government of national confusion.

The paralysis went deeper than disagreements between parties. The national mood -- to be precise, the mood of the Jewish majority -- mixed prewar dread and postwar hubris. This did not foster calm judgment.

Proponents of keeping the land argued from security and history. The Sinai would protect Israel from Egypt, they asserted. The West Bank gave Israel strategic depth; keeping the Golan would prevent Syrian artillery from using the heights to bombard Israeli communities. As for history, Jerusalem's Old City and its holy sites, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, were part of the spoils. So were Hebron, Bethlehem, and a host of other places whose biblical past intoxicated secular Jews along with Orthodox ones.

(pp. 65-66):

Others suggested holding the land and figuring out later what to do about the people. "For the interim, military government will continue, along with a search for a constructive solution," Galili proposed in the June cabinet meeting. Menachem Begin agreed. In the end, the government decided not to decide. In practical terms, that was the same as accepting Galili and Begin's position.

One did not need prophecy to know this would be disastrous. Clear-sightedness was enough. In the cabinet debate, justice minister Ya'akov Shimshon Shapira warned that were Dayan's ideas adopted, "every progressive person will rise against us and say . . . 'They want to turn the West Bank . . . into an Israeli colony.'" The only acceptable way to keep the West Bank was to annex it, in which case Jews would eventually become a minority. Annexation, Shapira argued, meant that "we're done with the Ziopnist enterprise." In the public arena, philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel tried to maintain its rule over another people, "the corruption characteristic of every colonial regime will also prevail in the State of Israel."

(pp. 68-71):

What actually happened is this: the policy vacuum allowed a cultural disposition to take control. Settlement was a Zionist value, especially a Labor Zionist value. Now there was new land to settle. Time had rolled backward; partition had never happened. Pioneers could again set borders for the Jewish state before negotiations began. they would act like members of a movement again -- but a movement with the power of a state behind it.

The initiative to start settling came mainly from Labor politicians, officials, and activists. At first, religious Zionists were junior partners. Labor governments approved new settlements on a piecemeal basis. The map of what they expected Israel to keep was drawn one fact at a time. The spread of settlements roughly fit the Allon Plan. Cabinet ministers who wanted Israel to keep a maximum amount of territory were satisfied to see new settlements; those opposed to permanent rule over the Palestinians could live with settlements in lightly populated areas. Labor governments never formally approved the Allon Plan or any other coherent strategy. But indecision allowed pro-settlement ministers -- led by Allon, Galili, Dayan, and Dayan's successor as defense minister, Shimon Peres -- to pursue creeping expansion. Tension between Labor and Orthodox activists began in earnest only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the religious settlers feared that the government might return a piece of the West Bank to Jordan. [ . . . ]

The first settlement in occupied territory was a kibbutz established in the Golan Heights in mid-July 1967, less than a month after the government told Washington it was willing to retreat from the heights. The organizers were members of Galilee kibutzim, disciples of the United Kibbutz movement's octogenarian ideologue, Yitzhak Tabenkin. They wanted the Golan to stay in Israeli hands to keep Syrian artillery from returning to the area. Tabenkin's view that the Golan was part of the Whole Land of Israel also influenced them. So did the chance to act like pre-state pioneers and stake a claim to the land through direct action. [ . . . ]

The Golan settlement set several precedents. Individuals sought to set foreign and defense policy, preempting the government. Some of those individuals played two roles: they started as high government officials, and as rebels. As in pre-state days, the cause took precedence over the law. Yet the government was no longer a foreign regime; the laws were no longer decreed by outsiders. As rebels, they were defying the state they had created.

(p. 72):

Ofrah's founders -- led by Yehudah Etzion -- moved into an abandoned Jordanian army base next to the Palestinian village of Ein Yabrud in April 1975. They claimed they were creating a temporary "work camp," a place to spend their nights, while subcontracting to build a fence around a new Israeli base. Though Yitzhak Rabin's government favored settlement, it barred settling on the mountain ridge north of Jerusalem. Legally, establishing a new settlement required the approval of a ministerial committee. But Peres secured Rabin's permission for the original twenty-four "workers" to "lodge" at the abandoned base, on the strict condition that the number did not increase and that the camp did not become a settlement. Peres's office files -- kept classified until 2007 -- showed he received regular reports that more settlers were moving in with their children and refurbishing the Jordanian buildings. In December 1975, Peres approved connecting the "work camp" to the Israeli electricity grid. Like Allon, Peres was happy playing two roles -- a minister sworn to uphold the country's laws, and a rebel ignoring them in the name of the obsolete value of settlement.

There is a memo here (pp. 73-75) by Foreign Ministry legal counsel Theodor Meron which unequivocally states that "Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention." Starting with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Israeli officials in various positions of power realized that the settlements were illegal under international law yet still went on to support them under various subterfuges. It was widely expected, especially in the US, that Israel would return the territories seized in the 1967 war in a "land for peace" swap, a prospect that Israel's settlement building steadily undermined.

On the lax enforcement of laws in the settlements, especially where settlers victimized Palestinians (pp. 86-88):

Theft was only one of the offenses that went unpublished. In 1981, attorney general Yitzhak Zamir appointed a high-level team headed by his deputy, Yehudit Karp, to monitor investigations of offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank. The Likud's settlement drive was still in its early stages. Just 16,000 settlers lived in the West Bank, about one-twentieth of today's figure, but the contagion of lawlessness was already blatant. A year later, Karp wrote a strongly worded, despairing report, a window on that one early year in the occupation.

Incidents of Israeli civilians shooting and wounding Palestinians had been on the rise, Karp wrote. But the police said "they were unable to keep track" of such cases, so they did not investigate. They did little more when a Palestinian was shot dead. After an apparent murder in the village of Bani Na'im, near Hebron, a delegation of settlers, including the mayor of Kiryat Arba and one of the suspects, arrived at a police station and announced that settlers would not cooperate with the investigation. The police did not bother to detain or question the suspect. Kiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron, had been built by the government to house the Orthodox activists who had tried to settle inside the Palestinian city. It was known for its particularly intense mix of religion and nationalism, and appears several times in Karp's report as the apparent home of perpetrators of violence against Palestinians. [ . . . ]

Even when Jews were tried for attacks against Palestinians, the justice system showed a split personality -- treating the perpetrators as criminals, but also as misguided patriots and sometimes as victims of Palestinian violence. In 1988 Moshe Levinger went on a rampage after Palestinians threw rocks at his car in Hebron. Levinger walked down the street firing his pistol wildly and killed a shopkeeper standing in front of his show store. In a plea bargain, he was convicted of "causing death by negligence." Sentenced to five months in prison, he served three.

Levinger, by the way, is not a random name: he was one of the founders and leaders of Gush Emunim, a very prominent figure in the settler movement. Next paragraph describes the case of the "Jewish terror underground": a group of 28 Israelis who routinely carried out assassinations and bombings, who plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock. One example: "Ze'ev Hever, charged with attempted murder for trying to booby-trap another Palestinian leader's car, was free on a plea bargain a year after his arrest." Of course, his real crime was free-lancing, since attaching bombs to cars is something the Israeli government does routinely (cf. the recent assassination of an Iranian scientist in Tehran).

Section on the influence of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, who died in 1935, and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook (pp. 91-92):

Until June 1967. For many religious Jews, especially younger ones, the miraculous victory demanded explanation. Tzvi Yehuda Kook provided one: the conquests were the next step in God's plan, in the process of redemption. When the government of Israel had acted as if "redemption stopped at the Green Line," God had forced the Jews to conquer the rest of the homeland. So wrote Rabbi Yaakov Filber, another Kook disciple, stressing that "there is no complete redemption without the complete Land of Israel." As reframed by the younger Kook and his followers, mystical nationalism not only justified taking part in the secular project of nation building. It taught that the world's spiritual condition was measured by Jewish military power and territorial expansion. Religion swallowed whole the hard-line nationalism of soil, power, and ethnic superiority, and took on its shape.

4. Children of the Hills: Starts with a leaflet that encourages Israelis to steal olives or destroy trees to economically harm Palestinians, all the better to drive them from the occupied land (p. 101):

The handbill's concluding prayer expresses the furious antipathy of many outpost settlers toward "the establishment." That term is a catchall: It includes the Israeli government; the Civil Administration; the police, Shin Bet security service, and IDF; and often the first-generation leadership of the settlement movement, Orthodox politicians, and insufficiently radical rabbis -- all of whom are judged to lack Jewish consciousness. The irony is that the outposts are actually a joint project of the young settlers and much of that establishment. The outpost settlers are a far-right twist on the college student who despises her parents' bourgeois hypocrisy, demands independence, and awaits the next cash infusion from home. Politicians, government agencies, and middle-age settlement leaders play the role of parents who oscillate between encouraging their child's idealism, lecturing her about restraint, and arguing with each other and themselves.

The Oslo Accords, which Yitzhak Rabin's government negotiated with the Yassir Arafat to end the Intifada, but the PLO was so weak Israel had to concede next to nothing -- just recognition, a tiny patch of territory Israel couldn't manage anyways, and a vague promise of some future agreement (p. 105):

Since settlements remained in place, the Rabin government embarked on a West Bank road-building program so that Israelis could drive around Palestinian-controlled cities. The bypass roads made the commute from settlements to Israeli cities safer, and had the unintended effect of shortening the drive considerably -- thereby making it easier for Israelis to move to settlements deep in the West Bank. The new roads were a particular boon for rightists who had been dithering between convenience and their desire to join a settlement to help block a future withdrawal. Rabin quite literally paved the way for his opponents. "The greatest of settlement builders was Yitzhak Rabin. What caused Ofrah to develop? The road came to us," says Pinchas Wallerstein, the longtime head of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, the local government for settlements north of Jerusalem.

(pp. 106-107):

Though the agreement did not immediately require evacuation of settlements, it pointed in that direction -- threatening their homes, their understanding of their place in society, their life's work, and the theology that gave it meaning. After years of believing they were Israel's vanguard, settlers now felt like a betrayed minority. The sacred state was relinquishing sacred land, introducing a contradiction into the heart of their beliefs.

Rabbis of the religious right described the threat in incendiary language. Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, head of the state-supported Birkat Moshe yeshivah in the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim, compared anyone who carried out orders to evacuate a settlement to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. In an article published by the Committee of Rabbis in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, Rabinovitch described "any activity reducing our hold on the Land or banishing Jews from regions of our soil" as violating an underlying "purpose of the Torah" and referred readers to a medieval text prescribing capital punishment for blasphemy."

"Visionaries have seen their vision torn asunder before their eyes," wrote ideologue Dan Be'eri in the settler journal Nekuda, half a year after the accord. Be'eri was describing the spiritiaul crisis among believers in "redemptive Zionism." More specifically, he was explaining what brought Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein to murder twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Hebron holy place known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque on February 25, 1994. Beforehand, Goldstein told friends he had a plan for ending the Oslo process. He stopped shooting only when Palestinians managed to kill him.

Yitzhak Rabin was not alone in describing Goldstein as "mentally ill," a description that erased the context of the settler movement rebelling against the state that had nurtured it. Meanwhile, the extreme edge of the religious right eulogized Goldstein as a hero and martyr. Among his posthumous admirers was Bar-Ilan University law student Yigal Amir. On November 4, 1995, Amir carried out his own plan to prevent dividing the Land of Israel. He assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.

(pp. 108-109):

Between 1993 and the unsuccessful Camp David summit in 2000, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip grew 70 percent, from 116,000 to 198,000. Throughout the Oslo years, Palestinians could watch the red-roofed houses of the settlements spreading on the hills, making it harder to believe that Israel really intended to allow Palestinian independence. [ . . . ]

By mid-2010, despite Israel's pullout from Gaza, the number of settlers had grown to 300,000. That is, during seventeen years in which Israel was officially committed to reaching a permanent agreement with the Palestinians, the settler population increased by over two and a half times. These are official Israeli figures, which do not include another 185,000 Israelis living in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem.

(pp. 118-119):

Yet none of this interrupted the momentum of state support for settlement, or for institutions that barbarized Judaism. One example: Od Yosef Hai yeshivah is located in the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus. The yeshivah's violent history goes back at least as far as a 1989 rampage in the Palestinian village of Kifl Harith, during which sixteen-year-old Ibthisam Bozaya was shot dead. Four yeshivah students received brief sentences for that incident after a plea bargain. The head of the yeshivah, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, responded to their arrest by declaring, "Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice." Ginsburg went on to write a eulogy for the mass murderer of Hebron, Baruch Goldstein.

In late 2009, two other rabbis from the yeshivah, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, published a book called The Law of the King, which purports to elucidate Jewish religious law on when it is forbidden or permitted for a Jew to kill a gentile. The book's repeated themes are that a Jew's life is worth more than a gentile's, and that for a Jew to kill a gentile is a lesser sin than killing another Jew. In a war between Jews and non-Jews, Shapira and Elitzur assert, Jews are permitted to kill anyone from the opposing side who poses a threat, even in the most indirect way. Enemy civilians who show emotional support for their troops are therefore legitimate targets, they say. There is no moral problem, the authors state, with the death of civilians who live near an army base or weapons plant, even if they are children, because they stand in the way of a legitimate target. Indeed, they claim there is even a basis in religious law to argue that children may be intentionally targeted, "if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us."

Without mentioning the Israel Defense Forces, the book is a broadside against the army's rules on avoiding harm to enemy civilians. Such restrictions , in the authors' views, are un-Jewish. Rather than a leaflet rationalizing theft, this is a full volume justifying war crimes, desecrating the faith in whose name it is supposedly written.

It goes without saying (at least by Gorenberg) that even though this doctrine seems extreme, it is neatly reflected in Israel's practice of extrajudicial assassinations of alleged non-Jewish enemies, often using weapons like 1000 lb. bombs that ensure extra casualties, while Israel's judicial system doesn't practice the death penalty -- one result being that the Jewish assassin of an Israeli Prime Minister is merely sentenced to jail.

(pp. 124-127):

For all practical purposes, Israeli governments have not approved any new settlements since before the Oslo Accord. When Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992, he froze settlement planning, though some building continued in existing settlements. In July 1996, after Netanyahu took power, his government lifted the planning freeze. The same cabinet decision, though, stated that no new settlement could be established unless the full cabinet voted to make an exception. That hasn't happened. [ . . . ]

In an era of peace talks, the government understood that it was "internationally impossible" to approve new settlements. Yet the "ideology of expanding the state" through settlement continued to guide government officials, says Sasson. [ . . . ]

Returning home [from the 1998 Wye River Plantation negotiations], Sharon used an appearance on Israel Radio to urge settlers to take action.

"Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory," he said. "Everything that's grabbed, will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands." [ . . . ]

In 2001 -- the year that Sharon became prime minister and that immigrant political leader Natan Sharansky became housing minister -- the Housing Ministry "created a special budgetary clause, named 'general development misc.,' and used it for financing unauthorized outposts," Sasson wrote. Responding to her questions, the ministry admitted to spending $16 million between 2000 and 2004 on outposts -- but "it seems the actual sum considerably exceeds" that amount, she wrote. The ministry also bought hundreds of mobile homes for the regional councils of settlements in the West Bank, deliberately evading regulations on government purchases. Many of the dwellings were placed in outposts, including five at Amonah. The decision, the ministry told Sasson, was made by housing minister Effie Eitam, Sharansky's successor and leader of the National Religious Party.

The lawbreaking extended further. The IDF failed to prevent the violation of property rights. The Civil Administration illegally approved hooking up outposts to the Israeli national electric grid. The Settlement Division illegally allocated state land to outposts. This is a very partial list from the 343-page report that Sasson marked as "interim" because she had exceeded the time she'd been given and was far from completing the picture of the state's attack on its own laws.

(p. 133):

The Supreme Court justices, however, are painfully aware that the proceedings in settlement cases have become a mockery. In September 2009, the court held a hearing on a petition by Yesh Din to implement demolition orders against five apartment buildings on stolen Palestinian land net to the Beit El settlement. the state's representative in court gave what had become the standard answer: the government has to set priorities in enforcing demolition orders in the West Bank, and the court should not interfere. Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch answered angrily, "We have heard many cases like this, and out of all the declarations about law-enforcement priorities, in not one case have we seen the orders implemented," she said. "There are no priorities, because nothing is ever done."

5. Disorderly Conduct: starts with Captain Moshe Botavia, who in 2005 refused an order to demolish an outpost in the West Bank that was part of the Gaza disengagement plan; Botavia was court-martialed but treated leniently, allowed by remain an officer in the reserves (pp. 138-139):

Formally, Israel has had a universal draft from its birth. [ . . . ] In reality, the army was never the great equalizer of Israeli myth. Only small groups of Israeli Arabs, minorities within the minority, were subject to conscription. The deferral for a few hundred yeshivah students developed into a near-blanket exemption for the ultra-Orthodox. Orthodox women could opt out of serving. Returning to the army annually for reserve duty was a ritual that lasted into one's fifties -- for Jewish men. Civilian class differences carried over into the military. Secular Jews of European ancestry -- especially from kibbutz and moshav -- were more likely to serve in the most respected combat units and the officer corps, with Middle Eastern Jews assigned support jobs. Combat roles, until recently, were entirely closed to women. If service and sacrifice equaled citizenship, some Israelis were more authentic citizens than others. They also had an avenue of advancement closed to others. In Israel's early years, the economy was largely controlled by politicians, and the founding politicians held on to power. An army career was a way for a man from the right background to climb toward leadership and prominence.

(pp. 140-141):

In the 1960s, the IDF agreed to a new program for Orthodox men -- the hesder ("arrangement") yeshivah. It was modeled on the Nahal Brigade, whose soldiers alternated between active duty and paramilitary farming outposts. Instead of farming, hesder soldiers studied Talmud. During active duty, they served in separate companies, or later in separate platoons. While in yeshivah, they were available for immediate call-up. Hesder soldiers had to commit themselves to extra time in the combined program, but spent fewer months than other conscripts in active service.

Only one hesder yeshivah existed before the Six-Day War. Afterward, amid the messianic fervor that merged nationalism and religious revival, more Orthodox men wanted to combine combat service and religious study. The government had a practical reason to lend support: like a Nahal outpost, a hesder yeshivah was a way to create a presence in newly conquered territory. [ . . . ]

Yet the hesder program had limited appeal. [ . . . ] A new kind of religious institution, the premilitary academy, offered an alternative. The first academy, Bnei David, opened in 1987, in the settlement of Eli on the road from Ramallah to Nablus. [ . . . ] They aimed at preparing Orthodox recruits to serve in the same units as secular soldiers and resist pressure to give up religion. They also sought to inspire their graduates to volunteer for elite units and rise through the ranks. To enroll, students received a one-year draft deferment. The academy put less stress than a yeshivah would on Talmud study. Instead, it served up large portions of "faith studies," inspirational lessons intended to fortify students' belief and imbue in them the sacred significance of being a Jewish soldier. The program included physical conditioning to help graduates qualify for top combat units.

(pp. 144-145):

Here I must pause. The classic Israeli ideal of military service deserves to be judged with care, with respectful ambivalence. So does selective refusal of military orders.

The importance of subordinating one's life to a collective need is rooted deeply in Israeli history. In American English, the word pioneer conjures up a lone frontiersman. The equivalent Hebrew word calls up an early kibbutznik, the very shirt on his back belonging to the commune. A friend of mine, born on a kibbutz in the 1940s, was given her name not by her parents but by a vote of the kibbutz general meeting. This symbolized an era: selflessness, living for the cause, could give an individual a great deal of meaning, but not a large amount of room to be an individual.

After independence, the army became the last great communal effort in which everyone could, supposedly, take part. At the peak of conscription, Israel drafted over 90 percent of eligible men, more than any other country in the twentieth century -- so Reuven Gal, formerly the army's chief psychologist, told me in the mid-1990s. This figure was misleading: Arabs were not eligible. The egalitarianism of universal service was a facade for an ethnic definition of being Israeli.

(p. 162):

In reality, a vicious cycle is at work. Israel continues to hold the West Bank and expand settlements. Policing occupied territory and protecting settlers are military burdens, increasing the need for combat soldiers and officers who have no qualms about the occupations. To meet that need, the army depends ever more on recruits from the religious right. Yet this increases the danger of fragmenting the military when an Israeli government finally does decide to pull out of the West Bank.

For politicians, this is one more reason to postpone difficult, necessary decisions. The longer they wait, though, the greater the risks. The problem is not one of individual conscientious objectors. There are already whole units that the IDF fears using. As men who believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Whole Land of Israel climb the ladder of command, possibilities loom that are worse than refusal: outright mutiny, even decisions by senior officers to deploy their units to prevent withdrawal.

6. The Labor of the Righteous Is Done by Others (pp. 166-167):

Rather than being a diorama of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, as many Israelis and visitors believe, Israel's present-day version of ultra-Orthodoxy is a creation of the Jewish state. Policies with unexpected effects fostered this new form of Judaism, at once cloistered and militant. [ . . . ]

In economic terms, the haredi revival in Israel has been disastrous. Israel's ultra-Orthodox community is ever more dependent on the state and, through it, on other people's labor. Exploiting political patronage, ultra-Orthodox clerics have largely taken over the state's religious bureaucracy, imposing extreme interpretations of Jewish law on other Jews. By exempting the ultra-Orthodox from basic general educational requirements, the democratic state fosters a burgeoning sector of society that neither understands nor values democracy. And to protect their own growing settlements, Haredi are now essential partners in the pro-settlement coalitions of the right.

(pp. 167-170):

[T]he critical, unnoticed catalyst of the transformation of ultra-Orthodox society in Israel was the 1949 law instituting free, compulsory education.

In the Palestine of the British Mandate, ultra-Orthodox schools were few, scattered, and short on cash. After independence, most joined a school system under the roof of the Agudat Yisrael party. [ . . . ] State funding made it possible to open new ultra-Orthodox schools and pay steady salaries. Young haredi women could finish teacher training at Agudat Yisrael's Beit Ya'akov seminaries by age eighteen or nineteen and get elementary school jobs. Meanwhile, some of the Jews pouring into Israel from the Islamic world chose haredi schools for their children, creating more teaching positions. The absolute numbers were small, but the growth was astounding: In the state's first four years, Agudat Yisrael's elementary schools went from 7,000 to 24,000 pupils.

In 1953, when the Knesset voted to eliminate party-run schools and create a national educational system, it left loopholes in the State Education Law that allowed the Agudat Yisrael schools to keep operating and receive funding from the state. As the Israeli economy modernized, high school education became the norm. The state helped fund ultra-Orthodox secondary schools along with others, but the high schools for haredi boys were yeshivot devoted entirely to religious studies. Most were boarding schools, where students lived in a day-and-night realm of Torah study, with rabbis substituting for parents. From there, young men -- not only the few brilliant scholars, as in European Europe before the Holocaust, but the mass -- proceeded to advanced yeshivot. [ . . . ]

Ironically, the army's centrality in Israeli life promoted the change, precisely because haredi society wanted young men to avoid what it saw as the IDF's secular press gang. Remaining a full-time Torah student allowed a man to stay out of uniform. Gradually, the state allowed the quota of deferments for yeshivah students to rise, from 400 in 1948, to over 1,200 in 1953, to 4,700 in 1968.

The deferment helped lock young men into the kollel lifestyle. So did the education gap: though ultra-Orthodox men spent years engaged in study, their schooling did nothing to prepare them for jobs in a modern economy. From their teens on, their curriculum was devoid of mathematics, sciences, foreign languages, and other general studies. [ . . . ]

The marriage age for both men and women dropped: between 1952 and 1981, the average marriage age of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel fell from 27.5 to 21.5. At the beginning of that period, the typical haredi groom was slightly older than the average for Israeli Jewish society. By 1981, he was four years younger than the Israeli Jewish average. Among haredi women, marriage before age twenty became the standard. Ultra-Orthodox couples started having children early and continued to have them often. This, too, made leaving haredi society much more difficult, for women as well as men. [ . . . ]

Young Haredi Israelis saw the previous generation as insufficiently religious -- a paradox in a community for which religion and tradition were synonyms. To show they made no compromise with modernity, young haredim sought to follow Jewish law in the strictest fashion. They thereby created a new interpretation of Jewish practice, a strict constructionism that was itself a product of modernity. This is the shared attribute of fundamentalist movements -- they are creations of the present claiming to be old-time religion. [ . . . ]

The Hazon Ish [Karlitz] applied the same innovative rejection of innovation to belief and science. The scientific knowledge of ancient and medieval Jewish sages, he asserted, exceeded that of modern scientists, and had to be accepted without question. [ . . . ] As a twentieth-century reactionary, the Hazon Ish honored the shell of medieval Jewish scholarship while negating its core. The very practical implication was that secular studies were at best a waste of time better spent studying Torah, and at worst an intellectual siren song, luring the young to the rocks where their faith would be shipwrecked.

Begin's Likud won a narrow plurality in the 1977 election, so had the opportunity to form a government (pp. 174-175):

As usual in Israel, Begin needed to build an alliance with other parties to govern. And for the first time since 1953, Agudat Yisrael joined the ruling coalition. [ . . . ]

But the real push was practical: Begin needed coalition partners and was willing to pay them well. The ultra-Orthodox community had needs and desires it could meet only through the government. The 1977 coalition agreement was a long list of promises to Agudat Yisrael on religious and budgetary issues. The 1981 agreement, after the Likud barely defeated Labor again, promised even more. The commitments included more funding for Agudat Yisrael's schools, without touching the haredi system's autonomy to teach -- or not teach -- what it wanted. and "special consideration" for other ultra-Orthodox educational institutions.

(p. 176):

In 1984 a new ultra-Orthodox party entered parliament. Known as Shas, it was led by Jews from Middle Eastern countries educated in Israeli ultra-Orthodox yeshivot. In haredi society, Middle Eastern Jews were kept from leadership; Shas represented a rebellion. But Shas also extended its appeal beyond haredim to the larger Middle Eastern Jewish underclass in Israel, portraying the community's social problems as symptoms of loss of religious tradition. Combining faith with ethnic and economic resentment, Shas attracted former Likud and National Religious Party voters. As in Agudat Yisrael, the Knesset members followed orders from a rabbinic leadership. Adept at getting out the vote, Shas was a democratic success story on the outside and a theocracy internally. Haredi representation in the 120-member Knesset climbed from four seats in 1981 to eleven in 1988 to a high-water mark of twenty-two in 1999. Shas set up its own school system, generously financed and barely supervised by the state.

(pp. 177-179):

In 1979, during the Begin administration, just over 20 percent of ultra-Orthodox men aged thirty-five to fifty-four, the prime working years, were not employed. By 2000, 63 percent of haredi men in that age bracket were outside the workforce, and the number rose to 65 percent in 2008. By then, at least 55,000 men in Israel were kollel students, meaning that full-time study was the most common occupation of adult men. Despite the ideal of women supporting their scholar-husbands, employment was also low among ultra-Orthodox women. The National Insurance Institute, a state agency, reported that one-fifth of all Israeli families lived below the poverty line that year -- and about two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox families. [ . . . ]

And many more children are growing toward the ranks of the unemployable. Over a fifth of the Israeli haredi population is aged four or less. One-quarter of all kindergarten and preschool children in Israel were in ultra-Orthodox institutions in 2009. Unless those children receive a different kind of education than the one their parents and educators plan for them, they too will be lifetime dependents of the shrinking number of working Israelis. The pyramid scheme will bankrupt Israel and leave the haredim hungry.

(pp. 181-182):

The implications of the state's link to ultra-Orthodoxy begin with economics, but they go much further. For instance, one source of employment for haredi men has been the state rabbinate and rabbinic courts. The rabbinate has exclusive jurisdiction over marriage between Jews within Israel. The main function of the rabbinic courts is divorce, also a religious monopoly. [ . . . ]

Rabbinic court treatment of women has been particularly shameful. Under Jewish law, the husband grants the divorce to his wife. Rabbinic judges have allowed recalcitrant husbands to deny their wives divorces for years, or to use their advantage to dictate financial and custody settlements. [ . . . ]

The state's rabbinic court of appeals endorsed this view in 2008, when it upheld a rabbinic judge's ruling in a divorce case involving a Danish-born convert. Because she had not kept a strict Orthodox lifestyle, the appeals court affirmed, her conversion seventeen years earlier was invalid. Rather than issue a divorce, the judge annulled her marriage. The ruling meant she could not remarry a Jew without going abroad. Her children, raised as Jews, had just lost their identity, and were likewise added to a rabbinic court blacklist of people ineligible to marry Jews in Israel.

(pp. 183-184):

In Israeli political discussion, the standard explanation for the ultra-Orthodox parties' clout is that they hold the balance of power in parliament: sine they can sell their support to a coalition of the left or of the right, they can drive up the bids from both sides. This description is misleading. Haredi parties have consistently preferred right-wing governments. Yet even when Labor won the 1992 election and Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadimah did so in 2006, they sought alliances with the ultra-Orthodox. The real foundation of haredi strength lies elsewhere -- in the exclusion of Arab-backed parties from power. [ . . . ]

But the iron rule, ever sine Ben-Gurion disqualified the Communists, is that Arab-backed parties are not candidates for the coalition and cabinet. The most polite explanation is that as long as the Israeli-Arab conflict continues, Arab-backed parties cannot be trusted with sharing responsibility for national security. The less polite explanation is that much of the Jewish majority does not see a government resting partly on Arab voters as legitimate.

7. Importing the Revolution (pp. 201-203):

Akko is only one of the mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel that religious nationalists have set out to "save" by importing the settlement model. Two families from the West Bank settlement of Beit El established the original toehold in Lod, southeast of Tel Aviv, in 1995. By 2009, the Lod group had expanded to 250 families, and was building a housing development on the "seamline" between mainly Jewish and mainly Arab neighborhoods. That was the defensive tactic, meant to create a wall blocking Arab migration. For offense, the settlement group established a premilitary academy in a majority-Arab neighborhood. "We're absolutely starting a process that declares that we are not abandoning the area and that we're going to Judaize it," the group's director told Nekuda. [ . . . ]

"Akko is not alone," Knesset member Uri Ariel of the far-right National Union party wrote after the 2008 riots. Arabs were engaging in deliberate block-busting in Israeli cities, he said. After Jews were pushed out, neighborhoods became "hothouses of crime, drugs and prostitution," wrote Ariel. "In Israeli cities, a creeping Arab conquest is taking place." Religious groups, in his description, were a first line of defense, "stabilizing the situation in many cities and preventing Jewish flight." But on the national level, the solution was "to encourage voluntary emigration of the Arabs." Ariel, a veteran leader of the West Bank settlement movement, did not specify how Arabs were to be so "encouraged." His article does not make clear that in the view from the settlements, the Green Line had truly been erased. Israeli cities and West Bank hills were fronts in the same war.

(pp. 204-205):

An example: the unnatural survival of the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund was a statement that Israel had not yet learned to see itself as a state rather than as a national movement. Both bodies were established to serve Jews in their struggle for self-determination. Independence made them obsolete, but they were not dismantled. Instead, their relation with the government was defined by law, and they provided services in its place. [ . . . ]

The JNF's role, which lasts to today, is just one expression of planning and land-use policies that reflexively serve Jews rather than citizens in general. A recent wave of eviction notices against Jaffa's Palestinians illustrates the problem. After 1948, Arabs who remained in Jaffa were forced to move into a small section of the city. Many moved into buildings that other Arabs had left behind, becoming the state's tenants in what was officially "absentee property." Jaffa as a whole was annexed to the municipality of Tel Aviv. When the city enacted a new town plan for Jaffa in the 1990s, it set rules that virtually forced gentrification. By finding Arab residents in breach of contract and evicting them, the state can sell the property at the new, high market value to developers who will sell to well-off Jews.

Land use, moreover, is part of a larger picture. In 2008, Palestinian citizens were 17 percent of the Israeli population, but only 6 percent of the civil service. The class size in Arab elementary schools was nearly one-fifth larger than in Jewish schools. The proportion of young Jews enrolled in Israeli universities was almost three times larger than the proportion of young Arabs. This is but a sampling of the effects of years of institutional and informal discrimination.

(pp. 209-213):

In recent years, the national figure who has most embodied political reaction is Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman's themes are a bellicose foreign policy, the need for a regime based on a powerful, unfettered leader, and -- most of all -- the danger of domestic enemies.

The enemies list begins with Arab citizens. "Every place in the world where there are two peoples -- two religions, two languages -- there is friction and conflict," Lieberman once told me, in an interview in his Knesset office. The solution, he asserted, was total political division, meaning that Israel had to rid itself of its Arab minority. [ . . . ]

In the 1999 elections Lieberman ran on his own ticket, flaunting his immigrant identity along with a hard-line rightist platform. Nearly a million immigrants had poured into the country from the former Soviet Union during the previous decade. The number of engineers in Israel quadrupled; the number of physicians doubled. Disappointed professionals became semiskilled laborers, sometimes competing with Israel's Arab underclass. The name that Lieberman gave his party, Israel Is Our Home, was the loud declaration of those actually not quite at home. [ . . . ]

In 2004, he suddenly declared that he favored partitioning the land between Jews and Palestinians. [ . . . ] But Lieberman had his own twist: he proposed that Israel keep its largest West Bank settlements -- and cede some of its own territory near the West Bank boundary, areas populated by Arabs who are Israeli citizens and voters. From the Knesset podium, he advocated expelling Arab citizens from elsewhere in Israel to the new Palestinian state.

Before the 2006 election, possibly to avoid having his party disqualified as racist, he stopped speaking of forced population transfer. Instead, his platform called for making citizenship conditional on taking a loyalty oath to the state, the flag, and the national anthem. Any Israeli adult who declined the oath would remain a resident but could not vote. [ . . . ] The meaning of Lieberman's political shift was that he changed targets: rather than focus primarily on Palestinians in the occupied territories, he portrayed Israel's own Palestinian citizens as the primary enemy.

This is followed with a long list of new laws pushed by the right to further discriminate against Israel's Arab citizens and also to hamper civil rights and other groups that might be critical of Israel.

8. The Reestablishment of Israel (p. 222):

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue -- freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

(pp. 223-225):

A second objection is that creating and sustaining two states between the river and the sea is no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is possible now is a one-state solution. [ . . . ]

In fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse. Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip are reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections are held. With the current population, the parliament will be split almost evenly between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and judiciary will face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants will demand return of their property. The problem of evacuating settlers won't vanish. Rather, it will divide the new state on communal lines.

Likewise for refugees. Palestinian legislators will demand that Israel's Law of Return be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish politicians will oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a threatened minority. Palestinians will demand the return of property lost in 1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages. [ . . . ]

Even in the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look northward to Lebanon.

A single state would not be a solution -- or even a workable arrangement, which is what politics normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the places marked on the globe as a country in which two or more communities do battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for refuge elsewhere.

This isn't, of course, how anyone I can think of who advocates a single-state solution imagines it playing out. Maybe it is what you get if you simply extend the franchise and let the chips settle as they may. But most one-state advocates start with the assumption that the settlements are permanent, and as such their legality is settled. Also that Palestinians are integrating into an Israel which at least initially is unchanged except for the extension of political rights to resident Palestinians along the same lines as currently exist for non-Jewish citizens of Israel. That isn't ideal, or even a very good deal from the Palestinians' viewpoint, but it is an extant model, and it leaves room for improvement with the moral force of a civil rights movement. Nor does it automatically impose the demographic disaster so many Jews fear. Moreover, there are ways to ensure Jewish rights even if demography turns against them (e.g., a constitution which would take a supermajority to amend).

Gorenberg's argument against single-state is primarily based on his preference for two-state.

(p. 226):

Politically, ending the occupation is also the precondition for disestablishing religion and creating equality for the Arab minority. Since 1967, Israeli politics has been clenched around the issue of territory. Once, during Israel's First Republic, "left" and "right" had the same meaning as in Europe. The left was socialist, the right capitalist. After 1967, the meanings shifted. To be on the left meant willingness to give up land; to be on the right meant compulsively keeping it. Building a coalition around other issues has become almost impossible. The conflict with the Palestinians provides legitimacy for excluding Arab-backed parties from coalitions. The right cannot rule without the ultra-Orthodox parties, but neither can the left form coalitions without including the ultra-Orthodox. So a government that would establish civil equality or separate religion and state is unachievable.

(p. 235):

Once a border is again drawn on the map, Israel can finally complete its long-delayed transition from national liberation movement to liberal nation state. The competition between Jews and Palestinians for control of the entire land, from river to sea, can be put in the past, where it belongs. Within its smaller and clearly defined territory, Israel will be a country with a four-fifths Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority that must enjoy equal citizenship.

Naturally, there will be no agreement among Jews about what it means to be Jewish or to live in a country where the public sphere is overwhelmingly Jewish. This, perhaps, is the best definition of a Jewish state: the place where Jews can argue with the least inhibition, in the most public way, about what it means to be Jews.

Many more prescriptions in the last pages of the book: on separating religion from state (including civil marriage and divorce), on education (keeping religious schools in a hybrid form), on the military (remains Jewish); he preserves the Law of Return in slightly refined form, while Palestinians can only return to the separate Palestinian territory.