The first kind is admirable. They believe in ideal solutions that can be put into practice by ideal people in ideal circumstances.
I do not underrate such people. Sometimes they prepare the theoretical path for people to realize their dream after two or three generations.
(One historian once wrote that every revolution has become irrelevant by the time it has achieved its goals. Its foundations are laid down by a few theoreticians in one generation, it gathers adherents in the next generation, and by the time it is realized by the third generation it has already become obsolete.)
I will settle for a realistic solution -- a solution that can be implemented by real people in the real world.
The form of the One-state Solution is ideal but unreal. It can come about if all Jews and all Arabs become nice people, embrace each other, forget their grievances, desire to live together, salute the same flag, sing the same national anthem, serve in the same army and police, obey the same laws, pay the same taxes, adapt their religious and historical narratives, preferably marry each other. Would be nice. Perhaps even possible -- in five or 10 generations.
If not, a one-state solution would mean an apartheid state, perpetual internal warfare, much bloodshed, perhaps in the end an Arab-majority state with a Jewish minority reduced by constant emigration.
The two-state solution is not ideal, but real. It means that each of the two peoples can live in a state it calls its own, under its own flag, with its own elections, parliament and government, police and education system, its own Olympic team.
The two states will, by choice or necessity, have joint institutions, that will evolve in the course of time and by free will from the necessary minimum to a much wider optimum. Perhaps it will come close to a federation, as mutual relations widen and mutual respect deepens.
Once the borders between the two states are fixed, the problem of the settlements will be soluble -- some will be attached to Israel by exchange of territories, some will be part of Palestine or be disbanded. Military relations and joint defense will be shaped by realities.
All this will be immensely difficult. Let's have no illusions. But it is possible in the real world, worked out by real people.
IT IS for this fight that I call the sons and daughters in Berlin and around the world, the new Israeli Diaspora, to come home and join us again.
Despair is easy. It is also comfortable, whether in Berlin or Tel Aviv. Looking around at this moment, despair is also logical.
But despair corrupts. Despairing people create nothing, and never did.
The future belongs to the optimists.
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