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Could Cantonizing Palestine Bring Peace?
An interesting plan for dividing Israel into provinces was published a few months ago by Haaretz. It suggested a remedy for the fragmentation of Israeli society and its failure to create a melting pot for Jews immigrating to Palestine.
In this article I provide a critique of the pros and cons of this plan and offer an alternative. The scheme, laid out by Carlo Strenger and Judd Yadid in a 7 October 2014 article entitled “How Cantonization can save Israel,” admits that Israel’s leaders failed “to impose a monolithic ideological and cultural hegemony on the country’s population.” The Ultra-Orthodox Jews, for example, were not “converted into card-carrying Zionists.” Tel Aviv residents will not “put up with marriage laws” with a foreign and invasive nature.
Strenger and Yadid find that the answer to “the country’s myriad identities” is to quarantine “the feuding peoples of Israel” into several different provinces with different regional powers with which they would exercise the life they are used to, according to their cultural and religious values. Or perhaps, more practically, they could continue to live as they did in their mother countries before they emigrated to Palestine, ranging from ghettos in Eastern Europe to affluent neighborhoods in London.
If this looks like a stark admission of the failure of “in-gathering of the exiles,” Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin was not mincing words when he declared at a conference on racism and hatred in Jerusalem last October that “Israel is a sick society with an illness that demands treatment.”
Source: electronicintifada.net
