I’ve spent the last two days at the first  J Street Conference, an exciting and historic event.  For those who don’t know, J Street is the new “pro_Israel, pro-peace” lobby formed by a younger group of American Jews, supportive of a two state solution, and willing to grapple with the idea that Israel has done a serious wrong to the Palestinians.  As I’ve long believed that America’s knee jerk support of the Israeli occupation is a big reason for this country’s terrible reputation in the Muslim world, I am enthusiastic about the group—which is generally much more calm and lucid about the supposed threats emanating from the Muslim world than the more established and more powerful AIPAC related lobbies.

There’s much to post about J Street and I hope to  get to some of it here and elsewhere.  But there is one element that might be especially interesting to fans of Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West.   J Street and other Israeli two state solution advocates often couch their arguments not in terms of justice, or fairness, or even peace, but in terms of the demographic threat to Israel.  As of now, about half the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are Muslim or Christian Arabs, so Israel can maintain control only by denying the Arabs the right to vote or elementary political rights.  (The Arabs who live within the green line, west of Israel’s 1967 borders,  do enjoy  basic  political and civil rights).  So one J Street argument is to play on Israel’s great fear that Arabs will being lobbying in earnest for a one state solution and a right to vote.  Liberal Israeli politicians refer to it fearfully as the “Nelson Mandela scenario” – as in what will happen in ten years time if a Palestinian comes to Washington and says we want nothing more than the right to vote.  What will Washington say?

I  don’t believe that such co-mingling and one state could work in the near term – and that for at least a generation or two and perhaps indefinitely  the Palestinians should have their own state, with time to  gradually learn to get along with and actually benefit from Israel’s presence. This is the goal of Obama’s policy. But the element of demographic fear is  ironic to contemplate—especially in a liberal and  progressive audicence that would be mortified to hear Jared Taylor make  directly parallel assertions about the fearful day when whites will become a minority in North America.  (Pretty soon, I think.)  For the record, I think America will survive quite decently without a white majority, though this isn’t the course I would necessarily have chosen. And I’m not sure Israel would survive a one-man one-vote situation sharing a land with a people they’ve oppressed for sixty years. And of course there are liberal Israelis, (the brilliant Bernard Avishai for one) who find this demographic threat talk  offensive.  But it is becoming mainstream, so that a liberal Israeli argument has some surprising similarities to a racialist American one.