By Juan Cole | – –
I’d like to return today to an argument I made two years ago in The Nation, which is that President Obama should recognize Palestine before he goes out of office. For different but related reasons, Jimmy Carter made a similar plea last month.
One of the arguments often heard is that Israel cannot survive as a Jewish state if it annexes all of the West Bank, since it will ultimately acquire 4 million Palestinians (West Bank & Gaza residents) as citizens in that case.
I don’t really care whether Israel has a Jewish majority, just as I don’t care if Egypt has a Sunni Muslim one or if Germany has a German one. In the tradition of the French revolution, I think states should be civil states, for the people of the Republic, whoever they may be. The United States in 1789 was mostly British and had a population of 4 million. Now it is 80 times as big, and has large Italian, Latino, German and Irish populations, not to mention over three million Muslims. So what? All those groups have brought gifts to enrich the nation. In an age of globalization, trying artificially to maintain one ethnic group as a majority is probably a fool’s errand, anyway. (Not to mention that “ethnic groups” are fluid and change definition over time). Israel is importing Thai agricultural workers and initially was welcoming African refugees.
