Danny Rubinstein

Danny Rubinstein, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and an expert on Palestine who speaks fluent Arabic, thinks it very possible that the two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) has been left behind in the dust kicked up by history.

In a piece for the US-based quarterly Dissent Magazine, called One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine, he posits that the waning of the Palestinian national movement will ultimately be the catalyst for a single state. Rubinstein’s theory, which he supports with facts and anecdotes, deviates from the received belief on the Israeli mainstream left – that the settler movement has or will destroy the chance of a negotiated two-state solution with its ‘facts on the ground.’

It’s not that a one-state solution is desirable, posits Rubinstein; he is not even speaking of one state in terms of a solution. He is simply telling his readers what is happening, on the ground – and warning that it might not be possible to reverse the process.

Rubinstein describes a growing and significant movement amongst Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Israel to demand their rights as citizens of Israel, rather than continuing to agitate for a Palestinian state. The failure of the Oslo Accords and the Israeli military response to the Second Intifada caused the decline of the Palestinian national movement and the fracturing of Palestinian society. Young Palestinians who were born and raised in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have lost hope in a negotiated two-state solution. They have also lost faith in the Palestinian leadership.

These young Palestinians, many of whom speak fluent Hebrew, have Israeli friends and know Israeli society well, are now discussing openly the possibility of one state encompassing pre-1967 Israel and the occupied territories (excluding Gaza), with citizenship and civil rights for Palestinians.

In the past, thousands of young Arab citizens of Israel supported the PLO. One example is the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who left Israel to work with the PLO. But for the past few years the aspiration of many has been in the opposite direction. Some Palestinians who defined themselves as PLO loyalists have returned, or asked to return, and become regular Israeli citizens. … In one of the last polls, 96 percent of the villagers of Wadi Ara [a region of the Galilee with a high concentration of Palestinian-Arab-Israeli citizens] said that they were not willing to accept any arrangement in which the Palestinian Authority would rule their area.

Extraordinary things are now happening, without much publicity, in another Palestinian community, that of the 300,000 Arabs of East Jerusalem. In the past few years, tens of thousands of them have applied to the Ministry of the Interior for full Israeli citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership that migrated back to the West Bank from Tunis in 1994 is leaving Ramallah. Sick of the occupation and disillusioned by the failure of Oslo, they are shifting their families to the luxurious Palestinian neighborhoods of Amman and other cities. Amman, writes Rubinstein, is not a place of exile for these cosmopolitan Palestinians who lived only briefly in the West Bank. The large Palestinian presence in Jordan has its own political consequences:

What the Jordanians want is quiet and stability in the West Bank. And they want to see a Palestinian national entity, non-militant and non-revolutionary, which will collaborate with the conservative regime in Amman. This is also the objective of Abu Mazen and his colleagues from the Fatah leadership, most of whom have homes and property in Jordan.

Click here to read the rest of this fascinating article.

Readers might also be interested in this 60 Minutes report that offers a similar theory – that the facts on the ground might well preclude a two-state solution from ever happening.

Cross-posted on +972 Magazine.

Promotional poster for "2048," a film by Yaron Kaftori.

An Israeli director has made a film that imagines a near future in which Israel has ceased to exist, fading into history. Yaron Kaftori’s “2048″ was screened at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque last summer on Tisha b’Av – the date on which observant Jews mourn the destruction of the first and second temples, which preceded the dispersion of the Jewish people into exile. In the year 2048, a young cinematographer travels the world, interviewing Israelis in exile, trying to understand what happened to his grandfather’s country.

The date of the Tel Aviv screening was not coincidental. As Kaftori explains, in this Hebrew-language interview that was screened on Channel 2′s evening news broadcast, the circumstances that led to the first and second exiles of the Jewish people seem startlingly similar to the state of contemporary Israeli society. “How can we not notice this?” wonders the director.

Kaftori is the grandson of one of the founders of Kibbutz Mizra, which is famous in Israel for producing high-quality pork products like smoked ham, bacon and salami. The kibbutz restaurant, which specializes in bacon and egg breakfasts, is popular with Jewish families on Saturdays. But for Kaftori, who is described by the Channel 2 narrator as “salt of the earth: a kibbutz veteran and army officer who served in an elite unit,” Mizra represents a different type of Jewish religion – the religion of secular, social-democratic Zionism – a society that is strong because it values the collective over the individual. In the clip the director speaks about his grandfather, Shmuel, an idealistic pioneer who worked the land, paved a road and helped found a kibbutz.

Kaftori mournfully enumerates the many contemporary issues that illustrate Israel’s decline – the religious-secular divide, the way the state treats foreign workers, the government corruption, the materialism, the drunk driving, the organized crime, the insouciant attitude to petty corruption in everyday life.

The issue Kaftori does not mention is the occupation. This is a rather fascinating oversight, given that the occupation is the one issue that affects every single aspect of Israeli life, society and culture. It would be interesting to ask the director why he neglects to mention it as one of the factors leading to the third exile of the Jewish people in 2048.

Below is my translation of the film synopsis, taken from its website*, followed by the trailer with English subtitles. Click here to view a longer trailer, without subtitles. The film stars some major Israeli actors, including Gila Almagor, the grande dame of Israeli cinema and theater.

The year is 2048. Following the death of his grandfather, Yoju Netzer, a young cinematographer, sets out to complete the documentary film his grandfather began 40 years earlier.

The film “2048″ is about Israel in its centennial year.

 But in the year 2048, the Israel we know does not exist anymore. The Israeli government has collapsed and the Jewish residents of Israel are scattered around the world. The reason for the collapse is never explained clearly; nor is it the most important part of the film. Instead, it is hinted at in ways that lead the viewer to draw his own conclusions.

The film develops in two different structures.

The first, the dramatic-documentary structure, in which the contemporary protagonist of the film (2048), Yoju, watches documentary excerpts that his grandfather filmed during the 1960s in Israel (most of the documentary clips are from actual news footage that was filmed throughout 2008, Israel’s sixtieth year).

The second is a fictional documentary structure, in which Yoju interviews protagonists that experienced the collapse of the State of Israel and, with the perspective of hindsight, tell Yoju about his grandfather, as well as what happened during the years that disappeared into history.

Note that in Kaftori’s imagined future, the archive of the defunct state of Israel is now located in a Berlin library, presided over by an historian who speaks Yiddish in addition to his native Hebrew and adopted German. Also interesting is that Kaftori’s Israel is very Ashkenazi, with Yiddish mentioned as a Jewish language but Ladino ignored; and with the kibbutz, which is the ultimate Ashkenazi institution, held up as the ideal manifestation of the state. The Hebrew trailer also features an Arab character who, in the year 2048, lives in the land that was once Israel, where he owns a shop – Nasser’s Souvenirs – that deals in Israeli and Zionist memorabilia. The ultimate Jewish-Israeli nightmare has become reality: Israel has fallen into the hands of “the Arabs.”

*Click here to read a bit more about the film in English, and to purchase a DVD of 2048.

This post is cross-posted from +972 Magazine.