Let’s say that I’m a From the River to the Sea person. Let’s say that I think the only way to free Palestine is to erase Israel and send its populace back where they “came from.” Let’s say we reject genetic research about where the Jews “came from” and assume that Jewish history magically started in 1000 CE and now everyone has to “go home.” What would this require? At its most basic level?
-mass buy in from the SE Asian subcontinent to the British Isles. I’m talking government, populace, infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Every government from Bangladesh to Morocco to Scotland will have to issue immigration papers, determine sources of income, and set up social safety nets. Etc etc etc.
That in turn will require:
-populations the world over to commit themselves to never creating an environment so hostile to Jews that Jews come to feel that a nation state in the Southern Levant is the only option.
Now let’s go full idealistic. Let’s say that the world decides to free Palestine and send the Jews “home.” Let’s say all the people and governments are committed to making that happen humanely and equitably. What would that look like?
-trillions of dollars in reparations for murder, property theft, bank accounts, businesses, etc compounded over minimum 80 years
-full buy in from all levels of society to educating themselves about anti-Semitism, and eradicating it. I’m talking from executive branch to the working poor.
If you want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, you really need to sit down and actually think about where you will send those Israeli Jews and descendants who only ended up there in the first place after they were violently expelled from somewhere else. I’m not talking about the Yishuv. I’m talking about the world after 1945. Are they supposed to go back to Poland? Or Yemen? Or France? Or Syria? What would that look like? Genuinely, how do we administrate and create the infrastructure for that?
It’s a hard, shitty question which flies in the face of blind optimism and overly simple narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But from where I’m sitting as a non-Zionist (I don’t do nationalism point blank; this is not a value judgement or a smug assertion of diasporic Jewish moral superiority) Holocaust scholar, it seems like those Jews are supposed to disappear or like, painlessly immigrate somewhere?
This is another iteration of The Jewish Problem, and if we’re going to seriously say that Israel should cease to exist and be replaced by a Palestinian nation state, we have to answer these questions.
Because in the current global climate? The “solution” to the “Jewish Problem” in the Southern Levant looks like mass murder. And that’s half the Jews in the world right there.
That bothers me. Does it bother you? Or is it the price you’re willing to pay? You don’t have to answer that. Deep in your heart you already know exactly what your answer is.
It’s ok if this post makes you angry, and triggers intense cognitive dissonance that make me you want to yell. But I will not be engaging with abusive and/or anti-Semitic responses, and whoever replies with that material will be blocked.
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