di Roberto Massari e Nathan Novik
ENGLISH - ESPAÑOL - ITALIANO
ONE STATE
by Roberto Massari
I find it useful to publish this text by Nathan Novik, even though - along with other comrades of Utopia Rossa - I have long declared myself against the perspective of the "two States" to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It is an unrealistic perspective, which will never be seriously realized and which, if implemented, would inevitably lead to the formation of two confessional States (identified with different religions) that will never stop being hostile to each other or continue to wage war. One of the two will also inevitably be dictatorial (as has always been the case with Al Fatah and continues to be the current Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank).
The very nature of Islamic fundamentalism (fanatical and aggressive) ensures that there will never be peace between a Jewish State and a Muslim State.
For some time now, I have been convinced that the only realistic perspective to put an end to a bloody conflict that has been bleeding the country since 1948 (when some Arab states aggressed the newborn Israel to seize the lands assigned to it by the United Nations, thus causing the massive exodus of 7-800,000 Palestinians and the expulsion of a nearly equal number of Jews from Arab countries) is one State: a secular, democratic, multiethnic State (also federative, if possible).
This perspective is becoming more realistic every day, as I will show shortly. But fortunately, there are already some premises in present-day Israel where Arab components live peacefully with the rest of the population (which is not all Jewish and even Jews have different ethnic backgrounds, making Israel already partly multiethnic) and where the regime of imperfect democracy is among the most democratic in the world.
Just think of the following fact: how many examples in history are there of warring States where anti-government demonstrations are allowed? The mind immediately goes to Russia of 1917 and the US during the Vietnam era, but it risks stopping there. In Israel, on the other hand, there are practically anti-government demonstrations every week and openly so. There were even some in the emergency situation caused by the inhuman pogrom of October 7. Not to mention the struggle between different parties to go into government or form alliances. Well, such concrete evidence of democracy for the opposition makes the perspective of imperfect democracy in a future multiethnic, Israeli-Palestinian State realistic.
The most serious thing (of which the Netanyahu government is only the most visible expression) is that the current Israeli State lacks a secular character. It was not always like this because at its origins Israel was born with a secular and social-democratic perspective (including the collectivist utopianism of the kibbutzim), which was broken by the first and subsequent Arab aggressions. Secularity means that the State must be able to represent not only other ethnicities and other religions, but also Jews who are not religious. Israel and the rest of the world are full of non-believing Jews, atheists, agnostics, etc., demonstrating that belonging to the Jewish people is primarily measured by historical-cultural data ("ethnic" in a general sense of the term). And only to some extent or secondarily religiously. But the latter should not prevail over the former, nor identify with them.
As long as Jewish fundamentalism (reactionary and post-medieval in turn) is not politically and culturally defeated, the secularism of the State of Israel indispensable for the peaceful and unitary perspective of one State cannot be guaranteed. But this is a point that can only be resolved by progressive Jews in Israel, with the help of progressive sectors in the rest of the Diaspora.
