---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 6:46 PM
Subject: re: The Embattled Dream of Palestine
To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
Theorists of democracy have long acknowledged that if democracy is ever to be legitimate, it must be in a group enjoying what Rousseau called a "large measure of equality". Not only must there be no wealthy elite holding disproportionate power, but those who find themselves in the minority today on one issue must look forward to being in the majority tomorrow on another. That is, a democracy must be comprised of one polity. Attempts at binational states in which two immiscible groups oppose each other issue after issue, year after year, haven't worked. Czechoslovakia broke up peacefully, Burundi and Rwanda haven't broken up yet but have fought dreadful civil wars, Belgium is struggling towards a divorce.
It takes no prophetic insight to dismiss Bennett's "one state solution". What is needed is not prophecy but the guts to implement what the U.N. Charter promised: Self-determination of peoples. It's as right for the Palestinians (and the Kurds, and the Tibetans and the Chechens...) as it is for the Jews. ben Gurion signed on to the Two State plan in 1948. It's still the shape of the future.
Barry Haskell Levine
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/the-embattled-dream-of-palestine.html
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