Should Peter Beinart and Co. Ally with the Israeli Right?

One of life's little paradoxes is that a prerequisite for a one-state solution, which many on the left support, is Israel formally annexing the West Bank, which most on the left bitterly oppose.

I was thinking about this in relation to Peter Beinart's bombshell announcement that he no longer supports a two-state solution but instead will now back a secular, one-"state for all its citizens" solution. Many have noted that this proposal has essentially no backing among any constituencies of note in either Israel or Palestine (in both, the main divide is between two-staters versus "one state for me but not for thee" sorts).

But, in another of life's little ironies, the camp in Israel who probably comes the closest to supporting Beinart's view and those of "left-wing" one-staters abroad is ... the Israel middle-right. A great many of them are, of course, avowed supporters of a one-state solution. But many of them forthrightly say that in that one state all residents should gain full citizenship and voting rights. President Ruvi Rivlin is in this camp, but it also includes folks with a more hardline reputation like Tzipi Hotovely. It also has representation in the rank-and-file -- interviewing some of the right-wingers who have joined recent anti-Bibi protests that have rocked Israel, we saw people who claimed to be security "hawks", delighted at the prospect of annexation, but only if "Palestinians living there receive full rights."

We shouldn't overstate things. For one, there are plenty of folks on the settler right who are equally clear that their "one-state" vision is one where Palestinians are permanently subjugated and/or expelled. And in the case of folks like Hotovely, I can't help but think she hasn't quite thought through the implications of one-state with democratic equality with respect to our right-wing politics (Hotovely thinks that mass Jewish migration to Israel will preserve a Jewish majority, but even if that's the case it is very unlikely that the Jewish right she's a part of will be able to maintain its hammerlock on political power once 40% of voters are non-Jewish). 

Yet I can't help but think that one state with nominal equal rights will be the inch that gives a mile -- even if people like Hotovely get cold feet, it will be much harder to resist more extensive equality claims in this context than in the status quo. It's even possible we'll end up seeing what I've termed the "Czechoslovakia gambit" -- one state leading to two states.

Ultimately, the fact is that with the left in Israel essentially moribund, the most viable political actors who could push for something resembling "one state with equal rights" lie on the Israeli right. There is yet another layer of irony here, since frustration with the anti-democratic and illiberal actions of the Israeli right in its decades of power are largely responsible for people like Beinart abandoning the two-state solution. Given that history, can Beinart and company stomach working with them? Politics makes for strange bedfellows indeed.