Pierce

Compelling but less persuasive than I expected

Revisado: 03-11-24

This is one of those books that I read where I went in highly sympathetic to the author's thesis--that the Two State Solution is basically infeasible at this point--and came away with more doubts than I started with. Which is not to say that this is a bad book! It's insightful and thought-provoking. It just didn't provoke thoughts in me that moved me closer to the author's position.

I think the book does an excellent job highlighting the ways the TSS is politically infeasible and why it has been for a long time. If you're optimistic about a Two State resolution, it will be a good splash of cold water.

The book also does a great job of situating the TSS in the history of debates over the meaning and scope of zionism and the history of US support for Israel.

Here's what I found unpersuasive:

First, the author wants to apply a Kuhnian/Lakatosian analysis of paradigm change to argue that the TSS as a paradigm has reached a crisis. I can't tell whether this is supposed to be an analogy--the TSS is supposedly _like_ a scientific paradigm, and is failing in a way similar to how scientific paradigms fail--if the idea is that the Kuhn/Lakatos analysis applies to any kind of idee fixe, or if the author thinks the TSS _is_ a kind of scientific paradigm. (In political science, I guess? He gives the example of modernization theory as an example of a failed paradigm in political science.)

I would have thought there's a glaring disanalogy here. Scientific paradigms can be judged based on how well they help us _understand_ the world. Or maybe, if you're of a pragmatist bent, how we interact with and manipulate the world. But the TSS seems to be a normative proposal. It's a view of what we ought to do. It doesn't seem to aim primarily at predicting the behavior of various actors. So I don't see how the normative framework has failed in the way a scientific paradigm might just because people don't follow it.

The second weakness is related: A normative claim about what people ought to do in this conflict should be feasible. Maybe, if the author is right, the TSS is infeasible.

But why is the TSS infeasible? Basically, it's because the Israeli right seems to have convinced the broader Israeli public not to accept terms necessary for a viable TSS. And because the US has signalled that it will support Israel regardless of its fidelity to a TSS.

Feasibility is a claim about what can be done (given relevant constraints). To show that the agents who are the intended target of a normative claim won't do something does not show that they could not if they attempted to. If Israeli politicians and voter got serious about moving settlements, if the PA had apparent legitimacy and aimed for a TSS, and if American policymakers conditioned their support on steps to a TSS, then a TSS would be feasible. Sometimes it's pretty clear people aren't going to do what they ought to do. Does that mean they ought not to do it after all?

Maybe the TSS is just unrealistic, because too much would have to be different in the minds of those who make choices for it to happen. But the kind of motivational realism relevant here is comparative motivational realism. Is it more realistic to expect that Israeli politicians, the PA, or US policymakers make a serious attempt at a TSS one day, or that these groups accept annexation of Gaza and the West Bank and work toward the eventual extension of civic equality for Palestinians as citizens of Greater Israel within a democratic framework and without giving up on the Jewish identity of the state? The latter is the solution offered by the author, and this is where the book is weakest, because it seems woefully short on specifics when compared with the various formulations of the TSS and no better in terms of realism. I would expect the Israeli right to not be keen on eventual equal citizenship for Palestinians. And I'd expect Palestinians, if they get equal citizenship, not to be keen on preserving the zionist character of the Israeli state.

What ultimately toppled the ether theory was not so much its mounting difficulties explaining observed phenomena. It was that Einstein offered a competing theory that elegantly explained those phenomena and provided fruitful new ways to understand physical reality. I'm afraid the TSS will creak along until a Single State Solution or some other revolutionary paradigm is better fleshed out. The author in several places uses the lamentable phrase "a process" to explain the SSS, which elides the obvious difficulties it will face. (Imagine if that was Bohr's answers to how light can exhibit wave-like and particle-like behavioe! "Well, it's a process.") I wonder if the SSS isn't a paradigm stillborn.

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