In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,†Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, takes an indepth look at a New York Times op-ed that presumably dismisses the two-state solution, and the authors behind it.
An Aug. 11 New York Times op-ed with the provocative title “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything” brought authors Hussein Agha and Robert Malley back into the Mideast media spotlight.
Agha is senior associate member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and co-author of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine (June 2009). Malley, the director of the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group, was a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs to former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
The two first came to prominence almost a decade ago for writing a series of articles and exchanges in the New York Review of Books with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and historian Benny Morris. They defended former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat against the charge that he rejected Barak’s offer of a viable Palestinian state during the Camp David/Taba talks.
More recently, in “Obama and the Middle East” (New York Review of Books, June 11) Agha and Malley argued that “the more the two-state solution looks like an American or Western, not to mention Israeli, interest, the less it appeals to the Palestinians.”
Agha and Malley don’t entirely dismiss the notion that U.S. President Barack Obama, along with the international community, could succeed in getting both sides to make the “necessary compromises” for a two-state agreement. However, they see such an agreement, if not resting on a proper foundation, as leading to major instability. Instead, the two recommend “an attempt to transform the political atmosphere and reformulate the diplomatic process.” But how?
Their answer is that Israelis and Palestinians need to first and foremost deal with “basics – namely, acknowledging and redressing injustices suffered by Palestinians [1947-48] and providing Israelis with the recognition and normalcy historically denied them.”
This last point is reiterated in the New York Times op-ed: to make real, sustainable progress, Palestinians and Israelis must return to, and try to heal, the “core” issues of their conflict stemming from the 1948 war.
For Israelis, this means having Palestinians acknowledge the legitimacy of the Jewish character of Israel. For Palestinians, it means the recognition of their displacement in 1948 and of their “right of return” (to Israel).
Some Israeli analysts found the Agha-Malley Times piece refreshing in that it sets aside the conventional wisdom that issues like settlements and borders are key to unravelling the conflict.
However, the surface appeal of the argument masks an essential asymmetry which Agha and Malley did not acknowledge: Israel’s Jewish character is no threat to establishing a Palestinian state, while the Palestinian insistence on their “right of return” to present-day Israel means the end of Israel as a Jewish state – and the end of a genuine two-state solution.
Agha and Malley failed to extend their argument to its logical conclusion, writing instead that “the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, as in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel.”
In their longer New York Review essay, the authors suggest engaging Palestinians, especially refugees, in the Middle East and the Diaspora, and even Israeli settlers, in discussions about the past and their hopes for the future. No agenda was proposed, time frame set or outcome suggested. Just a loose proposal that would almost certainly protract discussions of grievances forever.
The Toronto Star went all out to correct the record about a quote wrongly attributed by columnist Haroon Siddiqui, in 2004, to former IDF chief Moshe Ya’alon. Siddiqui, along with other writers, had quoted Ya’alon as saying: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” The fact is Ya’alon never uttered those words.
In “Damaging Israeli misquote finally corrected” (Toronto Star, Aug. 8), Oakland Ross explained at length how the misquote came about, gained a life of its own and was finally corrected. In addition, the Star issued a formal correction in the same issue. The Star is to be commended for paying such attention to the essential journalistic standards of accuracy and fairness.
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