It is not and has never been impossible to approach the issue of Israel-Palestine from a framework of equal rights that embraces, rather than ignores, the strong national movements of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. That approach can lead to a future of equality and peace that the unequal compromises demanded by the two-state solution envisioned in the Oslo peace process could never deliver.Continue Reading

It has never been clearer that the issue is equal rights. Are Palestinians entitled to equal rights? Are both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, through the vehicles of their individual nationalist movements—which are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future and so must be dealt with by both sides as permanent realities—entitled to self-determination? Can those paths be reconciled with cooperation, which is the only way out of conflict and away from bloodshed? Answer those questions affirmatively and all the other issues—Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, water, borders or the absence of them—become far easier to work out. The process begins with ceasing to hold the Herzogs of the world to a lower standard than racist Fox News pundits.Continue Reading