“Whom the Gods Destroy” was the title of an episode of the original “Star Trek” series, broadcast first in 1969. It loosely derives from the classicism: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”
I bring it up because 1969 was about the same time that a mordant witticism, also based on the quotation, emerged. I cannot find the exact source, but it ran something like “Those whom the Gods wish to make mad, they first inspire to try to make Middle East peace.”
My friend, Martine Rothblatt, a lawyer who helped found Sirius satellite radio as well as the pioneering drug company, United Therapeutics, has two books to her credit that have made quite a buzz. The first, The Apartheid of Sex (1996) marshaled both her own transgender experience and impressive scientific evidence to make the prediction that the traditional, binary “war of the sexes” is a passing phase, to be succeeded in the twenty-first century by a new world of gender variability. The second, Virtually Human (2015) argues that a new age sentient, feeling “mind clones” uploading for all time individual human experience is at hand.
About halfway between these books, she authored Two Stars for Peace: The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Lasting Peace in the Middle East (2003) that, at least in my opinion, is very much worth reading. I discuss the book here not to convince you of the validity of its thesis, but to argue that it offers a unique perspective on the past and future of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute from which even the most skeptical reader can learn much that’s new.
Martine Rothblatt does indeed offer an extraordinary vision of how to make Middle East peace, but not because she’s been struck mad by the gods!
For thirty years, Rothblatt has closely followed Israel’s business, technology, and political scene. Rothblatt considers herself a Zionist—or, at a minimum, immensely indebted to Herzl. “Two Stars” is the thought-provoking attempt by a visionary who loves both the USA and Israel (and is a well-wisher of Palestinians) to think originally about how to ensure the survival of Jewish national identity in a world that that must somehow be fundamentally changed so that it abandons its congenital indifference or hostility to the essence of the noble Zionist experiment.
Rothblatt’s starting point is two-fold. First, she sees globalization transforming unitary nation states: “Newly-liberated former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe are falling over each other to cede sovereignty to the transnational European Union. It is a bit too soon to declare single-state nations moribund, but multi-state unions are the wave of the future.” Second, her master premise is the same as Herzl’s, i.e., that a majority Jewish polity of some sort is the only sure guarantee against Jewish victimization as a dispersed minority. Rothblatt wants to preserve Jewish majority status as well as Jewish cultural predominance in Israel, yet she rejects “the two-state solution” as a prescription for never-ending conflict between Israelis justifiably concerned over secure borders and Palestinians with irredentist designs on the Jewish state. Instead, Rothblatt advocates a “Two Stars” solution with Israel and Palestine joining the United States, respectively as the fifty-first and fifty-second states, within borders that would roughly follow those before the 1967 War!
As to practicality, Israel and Palestine would no longer be sovereign over defense, immigration, or currency, but would have the compensation of joining the world’s only military and economic super power. The IDF would be reconstituted as a National Guard (special units could even be incorporated in the Army), and the Dollar would replace the Shekel. Judaism and Islam could not be given privileged status, but Israel’s state flag could feature the Star of David (“simply another way of saying ‘Don’t tread on me’”)—and Palestine’s the Crescent—because these are secular as well as religious symbols. Judaism would luxuriate in the American State of Israel because it “does not need state support to thrive. Its intrinsic beauty enables it to thrive securely only if the state is friendly and the environment is peaceful.” West and East Jerusalem would serve as respective state capitols. A majority Jewish state could close government offices on the Jewish Sabbath for secular reasons, while a majority Palestinian state could be bilingual in Arabic.
As to “the right of return,” Palestinians in refugee camps outside Palestine whose parents or grandparents were born in Israel would be offered naturalized U.S. citizenship, but would have a hard time regaining property in Israel claimed to have been held by their families prior to 1948 because Israeli titles would be respected under American legal precedent. On the other hand, Jews would have as much right to maintain and expand settlements in Judea and Samaria (and even reestablish settlements in Gaza) as New Yorkers who move to the Sunshine State have to maintain and expand Florida retirement communities on land they own or buy. For the United States, Rothblatt argues that the initial expense of absorbing perhaps six million Israelis and three million Palestinians would put no more additional strain on the federal budget and national economy than the current costs of absorbing millions of immigrants each year, while the long-term economic and security benefits to the United States of her “Two Stars” solution to the Mideast problem would be immense.
Palestinian and Israel are only one thousand miles further from Washington, D.C., than Hawaii, and—in terms of travel and communications logistics—much closer to Washington than Texas and California were when they entered the Union. How would the rest of Americans react to the first “majority Jewish” and “majority Muslim” states? Well, the U.S. absorbed majority-Mormon Utah as well as majority-Hispanic New Mexico and majority-Asian Pacific Hawaii. Even if Americans are not enthusiastic, the U.S. cannot avoid considering the “Two Stars” solution because it is “unavoidably involved” in the Middle East.
It’s hard to imagine a proposal more out of tune than Rothblatt’s with the current neo-Isolationist U.S. mood regarding American global involvement, especially in the Middle East. Yet much can be learned from her provocative explication of historical, legal, political, and economic arguments.
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