'Pope of liberal Zionism' says independent Palestinian state 'no longer plausible'

The current trajectory, he said, was moving “more and more towards one de facto political reality between the river and the sea”.

Asked about Israel’s role as a haven for Jews around the world, he said he could not guarantee that in the future set-up he envisaged, it would be free to mount the kind of rescue operations it had done for Ethiopian Jews some 30 years ago.

But he believed that Jews “would have enough power to have an asylum system by which a Jew who was in distress could get to the front of the line”.

Besides, he claimed: “I don’t think Israel as a Jewish state today is doing a particularly good job of safeguarding the welfare of Jews in the diaspora.”

The Israeli government had “made a set of alliances with a group of right-wing, hyper-nationalist authoritarians… who actually represent a kind of menace to the Jewish population” – citing American President Donald Trump and Hungary Prime Minister Victor Orban.

It was also probably true, he argued, that Israel’s “oppression of the Palestinians” had contributed to antisemitism, although “in no way” did it justify it.

His interviewer Jonathan Freedland pointed out that if “nobody could persuade these two peoples to work out an agreement to divorce, what possible chance is there to get them to work out a marriage?” Mr Beinart conceded it would take a “mass movement” to bring about change. But “history has shown that things that are in one moment unthinkable can be thinkable in another moment — and sometimes over fairly short periods of time”.