In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University

[Brittain33]

I can completely understand and agree with the notion that Jews have a right to a homeland, and that it is not my place to dispute if Jewish people say that their religion requires Israel to be their homeland. While at the same time, I can also understand and sympathize with people who find it hard to accept that someone else's religion requires what they perceive to be their homeland to be violently taken away, and to resist that. In essence, both sides have a defensible position in theory, and this is why the issue is so hard.

The problem is that Zionism as a theory was resolved 75 years ago with Israel defeating Arab armies and securing its viability except for what settlers are doing in the West Bank. Israel is a country with 7 million Jews who were mostly born there or arrived as refugees from ethnic cleansing and either it stays a country with 7 million Jews or else “Palestine is free from the river to the sea” and the Jews disappear. If the argument is over Zionism as a justification for settlements in the West Bank, well I’m a Zionist and I think that’s indefensible and bad and should stop.

[Brittain33]

At one point early in the conflict, I seem to remember that almost everyone on the Forum agreed that Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Arabs. What struck me at that time was, that is exactly the demand of those who cry "Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea", except that the name of the state would be 'Palestine' instead of 'Israel'. In such a state, the 7 million Jews would live there. No one, to my knowledge, has called for an Arab ethnostate.

I don’t think such a state would be a stable polity even if October 7 hadn’t happened. The closest precedent is the Bosnian federation and that only works as a decrepit two-state federation kept alive on foreign aid and mass emigration. Israel started down the path of strict separation and walls because of constant violence from Palestinians. The existence of Hamas, “we don’t want no two-state, we want all 48” demonstrates a good chunk of Palestinians wouldn’t be satisfied sharing a state with an equal Jewish population so we could reasonably expect more armed resistance. And I won’t pretend Israeli Jews would be much more accommodating! The whole thing is a fantasy.

[Brittain33]

I mean, neither Israel nor the Palestinian Territories can reconcile their own internal conflicts democratically. Combining them would make it exponentially worse.