which country?

The ultimate goal of the judicial upheaval led by the Netanyahu government is to create Israel's ability to annex occupied territories without granting Palestinians civil, political, and human rights. The main forces for this are of course those who are called "religious Zionists" and are at the heart of the Israeli settlement movement. Their distorted interpretation of Judaism provides them with the justification for destroying the liberal democracy they wish to replace with their own version of Jewish religious law. For these distorted minds, their interpretation of the word of God that they created is that the Old Testament is an earthly work of the land of Israel and the word of God to the prophet Joshua to destroy and eliminate the inhabitants of the land who were here before the conquest of the land, refers to the other original inhabitants of this land - the Palestinian people.

As I wrote last week, this distortion of the worldview has won. They have won, at least for now. If they continue to succeed, it will be the end of the vision shared by most Israelis of a liberal democratic Jewish state. Seventy-five years of history has proven that Israel has never been and never could be a liberal democratic Jewish state because it is built on the idea of ​​Jewish sovereignty in a reality where more than 20% of the citizens are Palestinian Arabs. Most of the people who live here are Palestinian Arabs. Israel may have been a liberal democracy for most Jews, but it was not for most Palestinian Arabs - citizens of Israel or those living under Israeli occupation.

There was a lot of pushback last week when I declared that the two-state solution might be dead. Anyone familiar with the reality on the ground in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem can easily see that there is probably no possibility for a sovereign Palestinian state to exist. Besides the vast land grab and military control everywhere, there is a small area that can be a sovereign Palestinian state.

The occupation's blatant oppression continues to underpin Palestinian hatred and hostility toward Israelis, which will take generations of building peace and trust to enable a peaceful two-state solution. It is the oppression of the Palestinians that leads directly to Palestinian violence against Israel today. But even those who are aware of this assert that there is no other solution and that the two-state solution is the best solution. This may be the best solution, but I challenge them to tell us how this is possible. Even in the best of circumstances during the Olmert-Abbas negotiations, Israel's annexation of 4-5% of the West Bank with a 1:1 land swap with the Palestinians would enable about 80% of Israeli settlers to fall under Israeli sovereignty without leaving their homes. But 20% will remain within the territory of the Palestinian state, and these are the more hardline ideological settlers—the same people who drive the judicial turmoil forward. They will not leave their homes and will not agree to live in a Palestinian state. Their life mission was to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. They also represent those who use violence in massacres of Palestinians and those who are likely to take up arms against the Israeli soldiers and police who might be sent to remove them from their homes.

Why do we need a Jewish state? So that we can express our identity within a territory that we control. What is this identity? Is it the Haredi onslaught that quickly took over the Kiryat Haovel neighborhood of Jerusalem where I have lived for the past 32 years? Or is it the Jewish identity of multicultural Tel Aviv? Who controls the formation of the identity we want to preserve? Is the current Minister of Education with the tendencies of a ministry where increasing religiosity enters the curricula of secular Jewish schools in Israel? Is this the same ministry that has always prevented Palestinian citizens from learning about their identity, their own narrative, and their literature? What democratic Jewish state do we want? Many people have told me that we need a Jewish state because of the Holocaust. A non-Jewish European ambassador said that we need a Jewish state because there are peoples who seek to destroy the State of Israel and the Jewish people. I understand their fears and I know the trauma of the Jewish people, but these reasons may justify why the creation of Israel was a moral imperative after the Holocaust but they do not justify what Israel has become and how Israel treats the Palestinian people. Resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the way forward, not nuclear bombs and periodic military operations aimed at winning votes and testing new military technologies that Israeli military industries can sell as "field-tested" weapons.

The view of Israel and the global Jewish world regarding anti-Semitism is a falsely concocted reality. I do not deny the existence of anti-Semitism. I am saying that being anti-Israel, or anti-Israel policies regarding Palestine, or even supporting BDS is not always anti-Semitic. In fact, most of the time it is not. But we have been manipulated by the same people who are currently shaping our reality and who intend to turn Israel into a completely undemocratic state. Their success now would officially move Israel from a new form of apartheid state to a reality of full apartheid. Not only will Israel be a pariah state from the world's point of view, it will be a pariah state and perhaps half of Israel will not want to join it.

The current struggle for the soul of Israel must look deeply in the mirror and understand that what we are fighting for is not just preventing the appointment of political judges to the Supreme Court, or preventing corrupt leaders from appointing whomever they want, qualified or not. It is about being truly able to be a true liberal democracy for the first time. It is finally about making a decision about the relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians and about how we can live in peace with our Palestinian neighbors. It is about demanding the abolition of the Jewish nation-state law and the adoption of a constitutional law of equality for all citizens. If you want to protect our liberal democracy, Israel must be a state of all its citizens where every citizen and every group of citizens has the same rights - including the right to express and promote their separate identity.