Jerusalem-born thinker Meron Benvenisti has a message for Israelis: Stop whining

There will NEVER be peace until Jews and Muslims realize that their very identification with primitive ideas such as religion, god and culture is the very root of their suffering combined under one and only one common ground, which is 'Ignorance'. healthy adults do not create 'Crutches' such as god/religion/race etc., they realize that we must grow and prosper as a global unit and that 'ANY' categorization in whatever form leads to conflict, because of it's inherent weakness that immediately creates opposites. The answers are easy, but childish clinging to gods/religions/languages/cultures seems to be the preferred choice, even if it means to ultimate destruction of both parties involved.

Indeed, when you have supremacists speaking like he does of fellow Jews, whom he clearly regards as inferior, you can't speak of a Jewish-democratic state. I expect that posterity will remember Meron Benvenisti like it remembers Haim Hefer.

The problem is real. But the answer given by Benvenisti is simplistic. The fact is that the two national groups are distinct in so many ways, that their 'sharing power equally' just does not speak to the reality. There are different levels here in so many ways, different values, different ideas of education. This does not mean the problem is not real. As everyone knows it is tremendously real. As it appears now though it appears that a two- state solution is as impossible as a one- state solution. I don't know the answer either.

Stop whining? Zionism as an ideological movement erred from the beginning. Benvenisti is correct. The land exists for not only one people irrespective of how that people is defined. Any ideology or religion imposed by force (Israel's modus operandi) is disintegrating.. The Zionist error from long before 1948, was not to include the Arabs into the Zionist vision. Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" was applied with vigor---the Arabs were not engaged in creating a democratic state; they learned quite early that they were personae non gratae. This Zionist error has become Israel's achilles heel.

blah,blah,blah, all this can be said in a few sentences.... this articlle is a lot of non-sense....

The one-state idea isn't even on the horizon. Not one single nation-state has official policy for it. Only the two-state settlement does. And it's declared by law in repeated UN resolutions.

"I went to Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra in the 1950s and experienced the transcendent feeling of working in the banana groves − without noticing that in order to plant the banana trees, I was uprooting olive trees, thousands of years old, of a Palestinian village." The olive tree is one of the classic associations with the Land of Israel in traditional Jewish iconography and yet the Jews uproot them and the Arabs maintain them... But Israel in its different guises uproots olive trees and continues to do so... What kind of Eretz Yisrael is that?