Boehm elegantly synthesizes a tortuous history and offers an imaginative model for Israel’s political future.
An Israeli philosopher gives a convincing argument for a return to the Zionist founders’ earliest binational one-state solution to attaining peace in Israel, as the two-state dream has long been abandoned.
With dreams of peace shattered yet again by recent violence between Palestinians and Jews—and before that, “Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century”—Boehm puts forth a bold solution of universal citizenship in Israel and Palestinian sovereignty. The former president baldly supported Benjamin Netanyahu in what his right-wing Likud Party wanted all along yet could not openly espouse—namely, to prevent a Palestinian state and encourage the annexation of territories. The author does not see today’s liberals, even the Biden-Harris team, paying “lip service” any longer to a two-state solution in the wake of the right-wing calls for annexation, apartheid, and expulsion. Even so, Boehm urges a return to Zionism’s original binational tenets, espoused by founders like Ze’ev Jabotinski and David Ben-Gurion and later codified by Menachem Begin. In this concise, elegant study, the author examines some of the early language calling for a binational state (“the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty”) and the reasons why the Zionist agenda changed from a binational one to that of an ethnic nation-state—specifically, the horrors of the Holocaust, which resulted in the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Nakba. Boehm proposes forgetting these traumas as a way of mutual accord, which is certainly a controversial notion. It’s important to note that by “forgetting,” the author doesn’t mean erasure from memory but rather not allowing the traumas of each side to be used as a cudgel in negotiations. He returns to Begin’s “autonomy plan” of the 1970s as a way of establishing what he calls a Haifa Republic, which would recognize the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination in their own states, separated along the 1967 Green Line.
Boehm elegantly synthesizes a tortuous history and offers an imaginative model for Israel’s political future.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68137-393-5
Page Count: 136
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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