 John Kerry has offered us a reminder that in American politics, the debate about our closest ally in the Middle East has all the candor and thoughtfulness of a cabinet meeting in North Korea. 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. In most of Israel -- the pre-1967 Israel, not the occupied West Bank -- Arabs have more rights as citizens than they have in most any Arab country. As difficult as the facts of that case were to stomach, there was great happiness in Israel that an Arab citizen could send an Israeli president to jail without discernible complaint, even from the Israeli right. The settlers who entangle Israel in the lives of Palestinians believe that they are the vanguard of Zionism. The situation seems unsustainable, and is starting to draw comparisons to apartheid-era South Africa even in Israel itself. (A full report on Kerry's remarks can be found at the Daily Beast, whose reporter apparently taped the remarks.)
– John Kerry had to backpedal after he suggested that Israel was on the path to becoming an apartheid state, and that's a sad commentary about the level of candor we have on the topic of our Mideast ally, writes Paul Waldman at the Washington Post. Kerry didn't say Israel was an apartheid state, he said it could become one—and that happens to be true, writes Waldman. Given current birth rates, the number of Palestinians will eventually exceed the number of Israelis, meaning "you have a minority government ruling over a majority population without citizenship rights." Others have made this point before, but Kerry took immediate flak from pro-Israel groups and lawmakers, who seem more concerned with making sure "all public officials are being sufficiently 'pro-Israel' in their every utterance" than with making actual progress in negotiations, writes Waldman. It's tantamount to censorship. At Bloomberg, Jeffrey Goldberg writes that he has used the word "apartheid" himself in writing about Israel's potential future—laying the blame on the settlement movement—though he spells out the reasons why he no longer uses the volatile term. For starters, "deployment of the word doesn't start conversations, it ends them," he writes. Still, he's not going to criticize Kerry. "Israeli leaders must open their minds to the possibility that he has their long-term interests at heart." Click for Goldberg's full column. Or for Waldman's full column.