The Democrats Are Not a Pro-Palestinian Party
By Eric Levitz
December 30, 2016
10:32 a.m.
On Thursday, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrote an obituary for the bipartisan consensus on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In it, Smith argues that Donald Trump’s zero-sum worldview will speed his party’s transition away from the two-state solution and toward the ideal of a single Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
“The concept of Palestinian Arab was created to exist only in opposition to Israel and with them it’s always been a zero-sum game,” Jeff Ballabon, a lawyer and Republican activist who has worked for years to build support for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, told Smith. “And because it’s a zero-sum game it’s never really been about negotiating issues — it’s always been: ‘Somebody’s going to be ethnically cleansed and it ain’t going to be me.’”
That reasoning comports with Trump’s understanding of global trade (substitute “fleeced” for “ethnically cleansed” in Ballabon’s last sentence, and you have the CliffNotes version of the president-elect’s trade platform). And, as Smith astutely notes, the one-state position is of a piece with Trump’s Islamophobic brand of nationalism, which imagines an intractable “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim world and the West.
Considering this, it isn’t surprising that Trump would pick a man who thinks liberal Jews are “worse than kapos” as his ambassador to Israel — or that he would spearhead his party’s apoplectic response to last week’s U.N. resolution, which merely reiterated the illegality of Israel’s West Bank settlements.
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