Federation, cantonisation and confederation alternatives?
JVL Introduction
“Israel and Judah? Swiss-style autonomous provinces? As the protest movement surges, some think it’s impossible to continue in the same way as before. New initiatives to partition the country abound.”
Thus the standfirst to this fascinating (and long!) discussion of the various solutions Israelis on the left and the right are offering to what increasing numbers see as a broken society.
Some see the Israeli-Palestinian divide as the reason to search for alternatives, but many discussed below arise more from the growing religious-secular divide.
It’s fascinating stuff, a reminder of how fragile the current balance of forces in Israel is.
But the absence of active Palestinian interlocutors is a warning (expressed here by Ameer Fakhoury) that without their consent any restructuring of the terrain will be experienced as just another form of settler colonialism.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Fri 5 May 2023. Read the original here.
A Federation, Cantons, Autonomous Regions? Suddenly Everyone Is Talking About Dividing Israel
Israel and Judah? Swiss-style autonomous provinces? As the protest movement surges, some think it’s impossible to continue in the same way as before. New initiatives to partition the country abound
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I keep thinking ofthe China Mieville book “The City & TheCity”.. two communitees sharing space but pschologically equipped not to see each other. Unity in diversity ?
………….but the Nakba is unfinished business!
No offence, seems well-meaning, but apart from the word cantons I really don’t understand what they’re talking about. In reality the only game in town is still “two-state solution”, which of course means different things to different groups.
Meantime in the real world, Israel’s U-20 “Apartheid?” football team beat Brazil 3-2 to advance to the U-20 World Cup semi-finals with two Arabs being among the goalscorers.
This is “how many angels can dance on the end of a pin?” stuff isn’t it … Israelis trying to resolve by geographical separation from each other differences between various strands of the Israeli community.
Israel is on too small a strip of land for effective separation to be a practical means of reducing inter-Israeli conflict.
Fragmenting the warring communities and making it more difficult for them to act with common purpose is also tactically unwise given that Israel has made itself many enemies.
Little as they probably like it, the only practical solutions are for all Israelis in the different traditions and cultures to learn and PRACTISE at community-level how to listen RESPECTFULLY to each other.
There is, I think, an “Alternatives to Violence” programme which has been run out at national level in a variety of conflicts; it might produce a good starting point for the process.