Germany, BDS and a one state solution

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Alan Gold writes on the failure of Germany’s multicultural initiative and the international unions rising interest in boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

Alan Gold

If ever a lesson should be learned about the impossibility of a one-state solution imposed by the Arab nations and their collegial “useful idiots” in the West upon Israel, one need look no further than Germany today.

In a speech given to the youth division of her Christian Democratic Union party at Potsdam last weekend, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has conceded that her nation’s attempts to create a multicultural society in which people from different cultural backgrounds live together peacefully, has failed.

Multikulti was a concept touted by German sociologists and academics as the best way for the post-Hitler nation to bond its different factions together. Multiculturalism gained speed with the vast influx of Turkish workers into the rapidly expanding German economy, at the same time as which Germany was dealing with massive problems caused by the integration of East and West Germans following the dismantling of the Iron Curtain.

Indeed, Merkel’s colleague, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, told the same meeting that Germany was committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one.

At a recent meeting between Merkel and Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the poor integration record of Germany’s two and a half million strong Turkish community.

Which makes one have to look very closely and question the reasoning behind the upsurge in support for the international Union movement’s support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, a transparent device to force a one-state solution on Israel by collapsing the Israeli economy.

Even the most cursory investigation of the Palestinian problem shows that Israeli Arabs have more rights, a better standard of living and greater equity, than any other general Arab population (excluding, of course, the ruling potentates and oil plutocrats). Where Germany and France have so patently failed in their multiculturalism, against all odds, and despite the voices screaming ‘apartheid’, Israel’s integration of its diverse populations, seems to have succeeded. How? Because it was a process of consensus and cooperation, and not one imposed from outside.

Multiculturalism, and the successful melding of disparate units into one, can only succeed given willingness and time. Which is why the BDS program is destined to backfire on itself.

Because of the cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank, the Palestinian economy (though not obviously that of Gaza) is going ahead in leaps and bounds. Any BDS success will have the effect of strengthening Israeli resistance to a settlement, and of ruining the Palestinian economy.

So will the Unions, and universities, running the BDS campaign, now turn their focus against Germany, where it has admitted that its multicultural program is not working? Presumably not, because despite the fact that there are so many immoral dictatorships, repressive regimes, one party governments and totalitarian rulers who seem to escape the notice of Union leaders and academics, they have shown themselves to be concerned only with Israel.

Merkel’s statement, especially in light of vast sums of money spent over decades in attempting to make Germany into a multicultural nation, needs closer attention than just its admission of failure. For there is a growing mood in the West, including many Jews, that Zionism and Israel are a 19^th century anachronism, and that the only proper solution to the hatreds, is a one-state solution; one in which Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians, will live in some sort of utopian harmony.

This nonsense might have appeal in some academic sociological paper, propounded by such usual suspects as Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky or Australia’s hairy-chested Anthony Loewenstein, Peter Slezak and Peter Singer, but their eyes, shielded from reality, have probably not looked at the mess German society is in today. And should they look at other European nations, they might also examine France, whose recent Islamic demonstrations caused terrible ructions in the French disposition, or the UK which is a new breeding ground for violent Islamism.

Israel’s proposal of a two-state solution, with an border that enables trade, security and humanitarian exchanges, very much like the border between the USA and Canada, or France and Germany, has always been the most logical way to end this interminable conflict.

One can only hope it arrives with this series of negotiations. Because if it doesn’t, and Israel is forced to accept an imposed solution, there will be no Israel.

Alan Gold is a novelist and literary critic