Summary
The binationalist association as Dowty presents it: the small circle of intellectuals who pursued a solution to the Arab question not dependent on relative numbers, giving explicit and equal recognition to the two nations in Palestine (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 940-1088).
Details
- In the 1930s Rabbi Benjamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann), founder of Brit Shalom, a movement that advocated [as printed] a binational Arab-Jewish state, was still promoting his version of pan-Semitism after the naive-assimilationist ideas of earlier settlers had withered (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 940-960).
- Except for the few supporters of binationalism clustered around Brit Shalom, majority rule was the spoken or unspoken aim that unified all Zionists from left to right in the Mandatory period (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1000-1030).
- Dowty argues that even the advocates of binationalism assumed Arab national aspirations could be limited and accommodated within a partly non-Arab framework, and in this also misread Arab thinking; the lack of Arab interest and response, no less than the lack of Jewish support, led to Brit Shalom’s demise (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1010-1040).
- Dowty’s Chapter 3 notes cite Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-National Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times (1970), for the movement (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1089-1278).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Zionism, Ahad Ha’am, One-state solution