We disturbingly have our first member of Congress to publicly support a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To be abundantly clear, a one-state solution inevitably leads to the gradual genocide of the Jewish people. It’s an unequivocally racist proposal.
Close to half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel, the ancestral homeland of the Jews, where they have continued to maintain a presence for the past 3,000 years. The areas debated in the Israel-Palestine conflict were dominated by Christians until 800 years ago, when Muslims came to form the majority of the population. While an estimated few thousand Jews remained in Medieval Israel and under Mamluk then Ottoman rule, the rest spent centuries being expelled in the hundreds of thousands from France and Spain. For better, but mostly for worse, Jews have been simultaneously treated as both a religion and a race, with anti-Semitic animus running rampant, consistently, since the emergence of the Jewish identity.
As early as 1882, Jews comprised eight percent of the population of the Israel-Palestine region. Following the genocide of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust — more than a third of the world’s total population of Jews at the time — the state of Israel, already 82.1 percent Jewish, was formally established as the only Jewish nation in the word and admitted as a member to the United Nations.
Yet the notion that outside colonizers plopped 700,000 Jews into the area in 1948 has persisted. The Zionist movement, geared toward returning to the historic Land of Israel and the Jewish people and creating a single state as a protection from another genocide attempt, formally began in 1897. And Jewish exoduses to Israel began in the decades before that.
They don’t need their own state in the first place, you may say. Can’t they just live in other countries? That hasn’t worked out so well for the past millennium, which has seen an abundance of genocide, exile, and legal persecution.
Of the remaining half of the Jewish population that lives outside Israel, the overwhelming majority live in the United States. The next highest population of Jews, less than one-tenth of the amount living in the U.S., is in France, where Jews are now the victims of 40 percent of violent hate crimes, despite comprising just one percent of the overall population. As anti-Semitic attacks have skyrocketed in the nation, thousands of Jews have fled from France to move to Israel. Nearly 8,000 have done so since the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Hate crimes against Jews in Canada, the fourth most populous nation for Jews, have risen by 60 percent in the last year. Jews are now the most targeted minority in the country.
CNN International found that one-third of Europeans say Jews “use the Holocaust to advance their own positions or goals.” One-third have no opinion in the matter.
Since 1948, the Muslim population of Israel has grown at a greater rate than that of its Jewish population, even though Israel grants all Jews worldwide the right to citizenship. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East with guaranteed universal suffrage for all citizens of voting age. Arabs and Muslims have equal rights as Jews and serve in the Israeli government and on Israel’s Supreme Court.
By contrast, the Hamas covenant declares, “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” attributing the world wars and colonialism to a vast Jewish conspiracy. The U.S. State Department has repeatedly pointed out that Palestinian television and political groups spew anti-Semitism and celebrate suicide bombings. Palestine criminalizes the sale of land to Israelis under the threat of execution, and Palestinian media tend to be racist against black people as well.
It is perfectly legitimate and fine to criticize the Israeli government and its laws. A two-state solution of the independently and legally recognized Israel and Palestine is not racist by any inherent means. But to call for the only Jewish state on the planet to be eradicated as the rest of the world continues centuries of anti-Semitic bloodlust is tantamount to calling for complete genocide.
