HAIFA REPUBLIC

An Israeli philosopher gives a convincing argument for a return to the Zionist founders’ earliest binational one-state solution to attaining peace in Israel, as the two-state dream has long been abandoned.

With dreams of peace shattered yet again by recent violence between Palestinians and Jews—and before that, “Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century”—Boehm puts forth a bold solution of universal citizenship in Israel and Palestinian sovereignty. The former president baldly supported Benjamin Netanyahu in what his right-wing Likud Party wanted all along yet could not openly espouse—namely, to prevent a Palestinian state and encourage the annexation of territories. The author does not see today’s liberals, even the Biden-Harris team, paying “lip service” any longer to a two-state solution in the wake of the right-wing calls for annexation, apartheid, and expulsion. Even so, Boehm urges a return to Zionism’s original binational tenets, espoused by founders like Ze’ev Jabotinski and David Ben-Gurion and later codified by Menachem Begin. In this concise, elegant study, the author examines some of the early language calling for a binational state (“the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty”) and the reasons why the Zionist agenda changed from a binational one to that of an ethnic nation-state—specifically, the horrors of the Holocaust, which resulted in the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Nakba. Boehm proposes forgetting these traumas as a way of mutual accord, which is certainly a controversial notion. It’s important to note that by “forgetting,” the author doesn’t mean erasure from memory but rather not allowing the traumas of each side to be used as a cudgel in negotiations. He returns to Begin’s “autonomy plan” of the 1970s as a way of establishing what he calls a Haifa Republic, which would recognize the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination in their own states, separated along the 1967 Green Line.

Boehm elegantly synthesizes a tortuous history and offers an imaginative model for Israel’s political future.