On the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Forty-One years ago, I visited my friends, Jill and Fred Heilpern, in Eugene, Oregon, where I had been a graduate student, getting my Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1966. This was January, 1968, six months after Israeli-Arab six day war in June, 1967.

I had gone to SUNY Stony Brook as an Assistant Professor after getting my Ph.D.. One of my closest friends there was Hugo d'Alarcao, an unabashed Marxist, who had filled my head with all sorts of arguments supporting the "poor" Palestinians who had been vanquished by the Israelis.

During the 1967-68 holiday season I visited friends and family on the west coast, including Eugene. The Heilperns had a party for me, and Bisno, a social work professor whose wife, Ziona, was an Israeli, decided to come to the party to do a number on me, having heard about my anti-Zionist position. He did indeed "clean my clock", ending with the statement, "At least I admit I don't know anything about mathematics."

All the people at the party were friends from my graduate school days, including the Bisno's. It was extremely humiliating for me when Herb Bisno decided to turn the party into a "de-boning" of me because of my views on the Israeli-Arab conflict.

I feel that my arguments were in fact correct, although I didn't supply much depth without Hugo there to help me. There was in fact a Palestinian people who had lived in the land of Israel and had been pushed out by the Israelis. Israeli President Shimon Peres, among others, has bought into this argument.

Here we are, 41 years later, with that conflict still with us. So, what is my position on Israel's recent invasion of Gaza?

There is no "military solution" to this problem. Israel will never be able to live in peace with its neighbors. Most Israelis should emigrate, the majority probably going to the United States. The Arabs didn't do the Holocaust, and in any case Israelis should quit bringing it up. The fact that there was a Kingdom of Israel over 2,000 years ago is irrelevant.

Otherwise, Israel will become more and more a garrison state. They have been enabled in their militancy by the Bush administration. Hopefully, Obama will be more even-handed. But there is no "two-state" solution. The best solution is for most of the Israelis to go elsewhere, where they will continue to thrive. This is hard for me to say, and in my opinion most Jews in the United States tend to view Israel as a glorified "summer camp". Well, the summer is over.

I digress for some personal history. I am a non-observant Jew. My only year in Hebrew School coincided with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. As I was precocious when it came to politics, my entire political life has coincided with the existence of Israel. I have lived through the whole thing. The initial war of independence. The attacks by Syria on Israeli villages from the Golan Heights. The 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. The rise of Arafat's Fatah. The Six Day War. The Yom Kippur war, and so forth.

Don't forget that the Israel of today is a very different entity than the one of sixty years ago. That one was Socialist, anti-colonialist, supported by the Soviet bloc more strongly than by the U.S. (The arms they used in 1948 came from Czechoslovakia.)

Some people argue for a "one-state" solution. Fine, but that would mean the end of the Jewish state, thanks to the Arab womb. And would the Arabs really buy into it, or would it just be another step in their plan to reclaim the entire land of Israel, from the River Jordan to the Sea? And how many Israelis would buy into it? Certainly not those like the Jewish settlers who live in Hebron. They are just as crazy as the Hamas leaders are.

There could have been a peaceful solution years ago, but Yasir Arafat saw to it that it never really happened. Don't forget, he founded Fatah before the Six Day War, when Israel was still within its 1948 borders. Now, I don't think a peaceful solution is possible. What worries me now is the possibility of "reprisals" against "soft" Jewish targets outside of the Middle East.

I am not the only one who thinks that Israel may indeed be "finished". Here are some interesting articles on the subject, published in recent years.

Unforgiven , Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, May 2008.The Apostate , David Remnick, The New Yorker, July 30, 2007In A Ruined Country , David Samuels, The Atlantic, September 2005Among the Settlers , Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004