19 about John Rawls and John Locke, a social contract between the government and the governed. A Palestinian government that denies his rights, he insisted, is as offensive as an Israeli one. When I pressed him on whether his colleagues want two states—one Palestinian, one Jewish—or a secular binational one, he seemed strangely agnostic. He said that in an ideal world one democratic state would be better, before adding that of course such a state would have to guarantee the safety and cultural autonomy of Jews. (One of his inspirations, he said, was Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher who advocated a binational state in the 1920s and 1930s). When I said I didn’t consider a binational state very realistic, he conceded the point, before noting that in the age of Netanyahu and Lieberman, most Palestinians don’t consider a two-state solution very realistic either. After a while, it hit me: This is what Israelis and American Jews have been demanding all along. Didn’t we always say, during the bloody Arafat years, that when the Palestinians produced Gandhis everything would change? We’d never be able to resist; our Jewish hearts would melt. Now that it’s starting to happen, I suspect the response will be exactly the opposite: Yes, there’s something admirable about young people like Fadi Quran, but who are they kidding. This is the Middle East, not Palo Alto. It’s no place for dreamers; they’ll get eaten for lunch. Privately, many in Congress consider settlement expansion a catastrophe and the occupation a disgrace. Maybe so. But watching over Fadi’s shoulder as members of Congress robotically rose to applaud Netanyahu, I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast. Anyone who has spent any time around Congress knows that many of the people who applauded Netanyahu— the Jewish Democrats in particular—don’t actually support his policies. Privately, many consider settlement expansion a catastrophe and the occupation a disgrace. But they don’t want to create HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_02353