state. If the Arabs become the majority and try to assume power, there will be a struggle that may become a civil war. A new edition of 1948.
Even an advocate of the one-state solution must admit that the struggle will go on for several generations. Much blood may flow, and the results are far from assured.
The idea is utopian. To realize it, one has to change the people, perhaps the two peoples. One has to create a new human being. That's what the Communists tried to do at the start of the Soviet Union. That's what the founders of the kibbutzim tried to do. Unfortunately, the human being has not changed.
Utopianism can bring about terrible consequences. The vision that "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" requires the provision of a new lamb every day.
There are some who cite the model of South Africa. A beautiful and encouraging example. Unfortunately, there is hardly any similarity between the problem there and the problem here.
In South Africa, there were no two nations, each with a tradition, a language, and a religion that go back for more than a thousand years. Neither the whites not the blacks wanted a separate state of their own, nor did they ever live in two separate states. The one state had already existed for a long time, and the struggle was over power in this one state.
The bosses of South Africa were racists, who admired the Nazis and were incarcerated during World War II because of that. It was easy to boycott their state in all fields of activity. Israel, on the other hand, is accepted by the world as the state of the Holocaust survivors, and apart from small groups, nobody will boycott it. It is enough for the Israelis to point out that the first step on the way to Auschwitz was the Nazi slogan Kauft nicht bei Juden-Don't buy from Jews.
Furthermore, a worldwide boycott will arouse in the hearts of many Jews all over the world the deepest fears of anti-Semitism, and will push them into the arms of the extreme right.
A quite different thing is a focused boycott against specific elements of the occupation. We were the pioneers of this approach, when, more than ten years ago, we started a boycott of the products of the settlements and pulled the European Union along with us.
By the way, experts on South Africa tell me that the effects of the boycott are much overrated. The boycott was not the main factor that brought the apartheid regime down, but the international situation. The United States supported the regime as a bastion in the fight against Communism. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Americans just dropped South Africa.