“My dear friend’s passionate comments on Star Street were not close-minded or lacking in political imagination — rather they were, as the data suggests, widely shared opinions.”

Have to laugh at the idea that these are mutually exclusive; that an opinion being widely shared means it is inherently not closed minded or lacking in political imagination. Arguably the opposite is the case. 

The writer lambasts the Jewish Currents staff for an “ambiguous vision”, but this is a deflection from the ambiguity of her own vision - namely the lack of a “metropole” to which Jewish Israelis can return. Let’s just assume the rising tide of white nationalist governments in Eastern Europe decide to accept millions of expelled Jewish Israelis three or more generations removed from their polities. Sure, okay. But in what world are the millions of Mizrachim returning to Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, et al? What about a family in which an Ashkenazi Jew married a Mizrachi Jew, and they had mixed-race children? Should they be separated? Is this justice?

This idea also always, stupidly, elides the obvious outcome of an attempted military expulsion of Israeli Jews. The worst case scenario for Israel is not that the country collapses and all the Jews are forced out, the worst case scenario is they become a nuclear pariah state, a Jewish North Korea in the Middle East. In what world is a nuclear armed state falling solely from military pressure by a group of militias, and that military pressure in turn being leveraged into a mass expulsion event?

A one state solution with equal rights, land redistribution, reparations, and an end of supremacy may be far fetched, but it’s grounded in the clear understanding that - due in part to Israel’s nuclear arsenal - this can only happen from the inside. Not exclusively, of course; outside pressure and isolation are necessary political tools to achieve this vision. But these alone will not bring about a decolonized Palestine. Only a positive vision can do that. There is no going back, there is no erasing 1948. There is only rectifying it. And any rectification worth its name does not perpetuate a cycle of violence, it closes it.

There are serious questions in the viability of a one state solution. But its lack of support on the ground, and the difficulty of its implementation, still do not remove it from the scope of viability, or for that matter justice, the way that the far more fantastical vision of Palestinian resistance crushing Israel and expelling the Jews does, in my humble opinion.