Juan Colewrites of me:
I can’t speak for people like Goldberg, but Goldberg himself has stated publicly for years what he expects to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. If Juan Cole has ever read anything I’ve written, in The Atlantic and elsewhere, he would know that:
I’m for the creation of a Palestinian state on one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (or a Palestinian state that equals one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, through land swaps); a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem that mirrors the Israeli capital in West Jerusalem; an immediate end to all settlements; Israeli negotiations with Syria that would bring about peace and an end to Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. I’m a defender of J Street and I’ve been critical of AIPAC on the op-ed page of The New York Times. And I’ve often written that the status quo is untenable. In 2004, for instance, I wrote: “If a self-sustaining Palestinian state -- one that is territorially contiguous within the West Bank -- does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority.” I wrote this in The New Yorker, which is not a difficult magazine to find, especially for such an educated person as Juan Cole.
And yes, I’ve stared clear-eyed the problem, and the problem is people like Juan Cole, who want to deny to the Jewish people a state in their ancestral homeland.
