The Reemergence of One-Statism

frontiers, and international law.” Judt implied that, at least intellectually, the nation state was dead and “the very idea of a ‘Jewish state’... rooted in another time and place... is an anachronism... [in] a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry... ; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities... ; in such a world Israel is truly... [a] dysfunctional [anachronism].”

To this overarching, principled contention Judt added a second, of a more practical turn: the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process of the 1990s, based on an assumed ultimate outcome of two states, had died, essentially because of Israeli obstructionism, and could not be resurrected. There could and would be no partition of Palestine/Israel into two states. And the demographic facts on the ground, given the Arabs’ far greater birth rate, as well as the current demographic reality of Israel’s Jewish population of 5.4 million and 1.3 million Arabs and the West Bank–Gaza Strip’s combined population of 3 – 3.8 million Arabs— the exact number is in dispute—mean that Israel can not long remain both Jewish and democratic.

Within a decade or two, continued Judt, there would be more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. (Indeed, Haifa University geographer Arnon Sofer has argued that by 2020 the total population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean will reach 15.5 million, with only 6.4 million of them being Jews and most of the rest, 8.8 million, being Arab,