Rick Hertzberg's post about proportional representation precipitated unusually informative comments about how Israel's political system has helped to create the current stalemate, presumably by empowering smallish parties to hold bigger ones hostage to marginal views. There may be some lessons here for Americans.

Strict proportional representation was always good for national solidarity in that it gave (as Rick would have predicted) all views the guarantee of a voice; rates of voter participation were close to 80% in the 1960s and 70s. A downside was that it tended to empower party secretaries (and simple hacks) who waited their turn to rise to the top of party lists which they controlled, sort of the way junior professors work their way up to tenure and ultimately to control of their departments. (Peres had been an aid to Ben-Gurion, Olmert, to Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, Sarid, to Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir, etc.; only top army officers were considered to have achieved something in their own right.)

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Today, 9/11, seems the right day to ask how American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflict particularly, are playing out in the presidential campaign. What, if anything, can Barack Obama do to frame the conversation and, not coincidentally, get himself elected?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which we have been discussing in this space over the past few days, may seem a side issue here. It is not. Obama himself made the case when he returned from the region in July that any US advance toward diplomatic normalization with Iran, or toward a regional alliance to help out in Iraq, would be tied-up in large measure with Israeli-Palestinian peace. It is a matter of hearts and minds in the greater Arab world.

Moreover, as many of us have argued, the US is the key to any future deal. Given the strength of the Israeli right (and the vendetta culture of Israelis and Palestinians more generally), we cannot expect an Israeli leader to rally an incipient Israeli majority to an actual deal, that is, risk undermining national solidarity for a long while--not unless an American administration and Europe together force the issue, offering a larger, plausible vision, boots on the ground, new investment, and so forth.

Rightist notions like "the global war on terror" have shown how Israel's conflicts are consonant with America's. The Israeli government's ambivalence about ending its occupation, its default to military force, its tensions with Iran, etc., have seemed a kind of US policy agenda in microcosm. And if America approaches its Middle East problems, as Obama insists it must, not with military preemption but with an emphasis on collective security, patient alliances, containment, the power of the global economy, and so forth, how can this not imply a verdict on Israeli occupation?

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Three big issues seem worthy of clarification outside the strings of comments.

1. Alvaro de Soto shrewdly suggests that Israel has need of (at the very least) a two-state solution, but lacks a leader with the brass or brains to take the country there. He is, of course, right. And I would take this observation one more step. Given the peculiar features of Israeli politics, it is structurally almost impossible for any such leader to emerge. I am not exactly speaking about the power of the religious parties, and so forth. I am thinking about something rather worse, which is that although polls show a decisive majority support the two-state solution (the elements of the Clinton parameters, etc.), this support drops precipitously when pollsters suggest a violent fight with the right to get there. 

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So far, a number of quite reasonable objections to the path implied by The Hebrew Republic have cropped up, the most challenging (and authoritative) from my friend, Alvaro de Soto, who was the UN's chief diplomat to the Quartet's peace process a few years back. Alvaro writes:

There is plenty of room to doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible, whether the chance wasn't missed at some indeterminate point not too long ago. The Hebrew Republic may be a Hail Mary pass (an expression which I hope I don't have to explain to non-Catholics), but, I say, let us pray.

I agree that a two-state solution, such as the one we all imagined 20 years ago, is not easily imaginable now.  That is in part because (as I've written here before) Israel is itself something like two states now, secular Israel (anchored by Tel-Aviv) and orthodox-settler Judea (anchored by Jerusalem), and it is by no means clear that Israelis will be prepared to confront Judeans for the sake of Palestinians. Moreover, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are highly inter-penetrated. It is not clear that they can be disentangled. But if objections to a two-state solution, or even just a grim prognosis for it, imply endorsement for a one-state solution (some of the other commentators clearly endorse this), then we are into even more unimaginable territory.

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First, I would like to thank everyone at TPM Café for hosting this discussion.  And I would particularly like to thank friends and associates who have agreed to keep the discussion going over the next week.  Somewhere in the back of every writer's mind is the dream of enabling this kind of give-and take.  I do not take such gifts lightly.

Let me briefly set the stage.  My first book, The Tragedy of Zionism came out in 1985, three years after the ill-fated Lebanon War.  The book focused on how Israel's mounting military crises grew, not only out of Arab enmity, but out of certain failures in its own democracy: that the settlement movement, especially, was not simply the result of some post-1967 intoxication with the land, but that settlement was inspired and materially supported by residual Zionist institutions that should have been retired in 1948.  That Israel's state apparatus was only doing outside of the Green Line after the Six Day War what it had been doing inside the Green Line after the War of Independence. 

I argued, in effect, that the State of Israel had been founded as two states: a democratic state encasing a revolutionary Zionist settler state, the former developing a Hebrew civil society, the latter privileging Jews (defined by Rabbinic strictures) over non-Jews, which developed a world of its own in and around Jewish Jerusalem and the settlements of Judea and Samaria.  (In recent years, many of the settlers have actually begun to say they live in Judea, not Israel.) 

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