[wvns] The Nation Considers Palestine

Endless Occupation?
By Meron Benveniste
The Nation

It will not escape readers' notice that the three writers who reflect
on the occasion in this issue, although coming from widely different
backgrounds and perspectives--Meron Benvenisti is a native-born
Israeli and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Saree Makdisi is a
Palestinian-American academic and Brian Klug is a British (and Jewish)
Oxford philosopher--express a similar pessimism regarding the
two-state solution. Each of them favorably discusses some form of
binational or democratic state in all of Israel-Palestine, whose
citizens would have equal rights or shared sovereignty.

Nation editors didn't seek out these conclusions, nor do they
represent a change in our policy. For many years this magazine has
supported a two-state solution in which Israel would fully withdraw
from the territories occupied in 1967, in accordance with UN
resolutions, and a State of Palestine would be formed in those
territories, with its capital in East Jerusalem. But we recognize that
as realities on the ground shift, so must our thinking.

Many have begun to wonder whether partition is still possible, given
the growing settlements in the West Bank; the collapse of the peace
process; the hardening of Israeli attitudes in the face of a second,
bloody intifada; the descent of the Palestinian national camp into
fratricide; and the unwillingness or inability of the Bush
Administration to re-engage in serious peace talks or even to
recognize the democratically elected Palestinian government.

But to abandon the two-state solution, as a way out of today's
seemingly insuperable barriers, doesn't so much answer questions as
raise new ones. The chief difficulty is perhaps in popular reception,
from both Israelis and Palestinians: While a large percentage of
Israelis--anywhere from 40 to 60 percent, depending on when and how
they're asked--support a two-state solution, 95 percent or more
viscerally, emphatically oppose both the binational and secular
democratic models. The mainstream of the Palestinian liberation
movement, for its part, has for three decades supported the two-state
solution, and even the Islamist Hamas has indicated that it would
acquiesce. As with the Israelis, there's no real political
constituency in the Palestinian community for the binational or
democratic model, just support from a certain, if growing, number of
intellectuals. Also, the Palestinian case for a separate, independent
state is supported by a vast body of international law and many UN
resolutions. If the movement were to abandon that model of national
liberation in favor of participation as equal citizens in one state or
a binational polity, it would weaken these legal and diplomatic
defenses, and the overwhelming consensus of the international
community, in favor of the unknown.

And while the chances for a two-state solution look particularly bleak
now, circumstances can change rapidly. Witness the 2005 disengagement
from Gaza: Apocalyptic settler resistance was predicted, and yet it
came off without a hitch. Disengagement might have been a cynical ploy
on Ariel Sharon's part to forestall negotiations, but it did seem to
break the back of the Greater Israel movement. In its wake, some 50
percent of West Bank settlers have indicated their willingness to
return to Israel. Furthermore, there is, despite the current
diplomatic stasis, a living model for a fair two-state solution that
could lead to peace not only between Israel and Palestine but between
Israel and the entire Arab world: the recently reiterated Arab League
proposal. The offer is there, if Israel and Washington have the
courage to act on it.

From the Palestinian point of view--and from that of anyone who
supports minimal standards of human rights--it's inevitable that if
the two-state solution fades, the calls for inclusion on fully equal
terms in one state will grow. And from the Israeli perspective, every
"defeat" of Palestinian resistance, every new settlement, will only
hasten the day when two populations of roughly equal size, one Jewish
and one Palestinian, will be seen by the international community as
functioning in essentially one state, under an apartheid system. The
"separation wall," which divides the two populations while imprisoning
one under the control of the other, will only accelerate that
perception. In other words, the Jewish state, qua Jewish state, will
in the long run be just as threatened by continuation along the
present unilateralist path as by a major shift toward negotiations and
reconciliation.

All Americans, whatever their ethnicity or religion, are deeply
implicated in what happens in Israel/Palestine, given our government's
identification with and massive aid to Israel. The conflict is a
Middle East crisis, but whether we like it or not, it is very much an
American dilemma. No issue inflames opinion against the United States
more than its support for Israel's policies toward the Palestinians,
which has put us on a collision course with the Arab and Muslim world.
We must therefore continually rethink our assumptions. We at The
Nation see it as our task to further the debate by providing a forum
for it and by exploring all creative solutions. As in the past, we
adhere to a general principle that's more important than any
particular state formation: The two peoples must be afforded the right
to live in peace and dignity, on fully equal terms, whether in one
state or two.

============================================

The State of Zionism
by BRIAN KLUG
The Nation
[from the June 18, 2007 issue]

On June 20, 2006, at the thirty-fifth World Zionist Congress, Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert welcomed the delegates--representatives of
Jewish organizations from around the world--to "Jerusalem, which is
Zion, the beating heart, and the object of yearning and prayers of the
Jewish people for generations." Recalling the first congress, convened
by Theodor Herzl in 1897, Olmert said, "There is a straight line
between Basel and Jerusalem, the line of political Zionism, whose aim
was the return of the Jewish people to the stage of history as an
independent and sovereign nation, which takes its fate into its own
hands, in the Land of Israel, the heritage of our forefathers."

Herzl's seminal 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, better
translated as "The Jews' State" or "The State of the Jews") was
subtitled "An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question."
The indefinite article is misleading. Herzl wrote to Bismarck, "I
believe I have found the solution to the Jewish Question. Not a
solution, but the solution, the only one." Decades later, Nazi Germany
pursued its own "final solution" to the Jewish question:
extermination. This gruesome project and its grisly success--the
murder of roughly two-thirds of European Jews and the destruction of
Jewish community life on much of the Continent--propelled Herzl's
proposal to the foreground of international affairs. Within three
years of Hitler's defeat, the State of Israel was created. But has
this settled the question?

Not according to Olmert. In his address to the World Zionist Congress,
he declared that the question will not be resolved until "every Jew in
the world" comes to live in Israel and "all the peoples of the region"
accept Israel's "right to exist as a Jewish state." Since neither
condition has yet been met, "we must gather to discuss the 'Jewish
question' here at the thirty-fifth Zionist Congress as well."

Must we? Or must we, on the contrary, stop giving legitimacy to the
question itself, which tends to insinuate that we Jews are a problem
people, like a problem child? And even if the question was inescapable
in Herzl's day, even if Europe forced it on Jews by alternately
offering and withholding emancipation, and promoting or permitting
anti-Semitism, is this the question that faces us--Jews and
non-Jews--today? Or is it not Herzl's solution that is in question?

Every element in Olmert's address to the Zionist Congress is
questionable, beginning with the slide from Zion, ancient religious
and poetic heart of Jewish dispersion, to Zionism, modern political
movement for the liberation of the Jewish people. Could it be that
Zionism, "whose aim was the return of the Jewish people to the stage
of history," is caught in a time warp? Could Israel, under its
influence, be continually undermining itself, while millions of Jews
who have no say in the matter are implicated in its policies? (Is this
what is meant by a nation "which takes its fate into its own hands"?)
What, in short, if our "liberation" entraps us in an illusion?

Furthermore, contrary to Olmert, the line that leads from Basel to
Jerusalem has been anything but straight. Since its birth more than a
century ago, Zionism has veered from secular to religious and from
left to right, with tangents that have not altogether disappeared.
It has led, on the one hand, to a fight against British imperial
power, while it has resulted, on the other hand, in the dispossession
and dispersion of Palestine's indigenous Arab population. And the
Jewish state created by the Zionist movement has become increasingly
woven into the tangled web of Western influence in the Middle East,
with Israel now serving as a Mediterranean Fort Laramie in America's
"war on terror."

Tragically, the same line has led from the walled ghettos of Europe to
the West Bank barrier, separating Jews from the surrounding Arab
population; and it has failed to secure Israel's integration into the
region--to the point where Israel fashions itself as a "villa in the
middle of the jungle," in Ehud Barak's revealing image. Not that
integration is entirely within Israel's control. No modern state could
adapt sufficiently to satisfy the extreme demands of radical Shiite
fundamentalism, and no prudent state could disregard the bellicose
pronouncements of Iranian president (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Nonetheless, Israel's existence has been accepted,
however grudgingly, by most of its neighbors. In March the Arab League
reiterated its commitment to peace and normal relations if Israel
withdraws from the land it has occupied since 1967 and agrees to both
the creation of a Palestinian state and a "just solution" for
displaced Palestinians. Yet Israel has largely dismissed the Saudi
peace initiative since its launch in 2002 and persists in
behavior--inside and outside its (still undeclared) borders--that
entrenches its isolation.

In his speech to the Zionist Congress, Olmert affirmed "the
unification of the Jewish people with the State of Israel." This is
the nub of Zionism: a Gordian knot of seamless identity. But with the
fortieth anniversary of the occupation this month, and one year after
a landmark war in which Hezbollah fought the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) to a standstill, not only is Olmert waging a desperate battle
for his political future but Zionism, the official ideology of the
Jewish state, is in crisis. The crisis threatens the future of Israel
as a "normal" state, deepens the oppression of the Palestinians, fuels
conflict in the region, feeds Muslim-Jewish tensions abroad and (as
recent controversies in the United States, Britain and elsewhere
demonstrate) rancorously divides Jew against Jew. For all these
reasons, we need to understand the trajectory of this movement. Where
did it begin? What has it become? And can the Gordian knot at its
heart be untied?

In the early days of Zionism, two different trends, cultural and
political, jostled with each other, as Bernard Avishai reminds us in
The Tragedy of Zionism, his magisterial retelling of the movement's
development, now available in its second edition. On the one hand,
"Zionist theories, institutions, and language...were meant to advance
a wide-spectrum revolution: against Rabbinic scholasticism,
anti-Semitism, Yiddishkeit, softness." Like Communism and other
ideologies to which European Jews flocked, Zionism sought, for better
or worse, to transform the whole character of Jewish life. On the
other hand, there was the aspiration for a homeland. But on the most
basic constitutional question--to be or not to be a Jewish state-
-opinion was divided.

Thus, in the 1930s, the radical Labor Zionist party Ha'Shomer Ha'Tzair
(The Young Guardians) supported a binational state with Palestinian
Arabs. Among other Zionists who shared this view were Judah Magnes,
first chancellor of Hebrew University, and philosopher Martin Buber.
Even David Ben-Gurion, the key figure in Labor Zionism, the man who
was to become Israel's first prime minister, "did not at first reject
the idea."

With the creation of the State of Israel, proclaimed on May 14, 1948,
the die was cast. But it was a crucially ambiguous moment: Was this
the culmination of Zionism or its reinvention as a state? It turned
out to be the latter. "It would be wrong," says Avishai, "to confuse
Israel with the movement that produced it." Indeed, he describes Labor
Zionism as "a good revolution that long ago ran its course" and
believes that "historic Zionism" has "radically, and for the better,"
changed Jewish culture. Be that as it may, this confusion between
movement and state, in my view, is precisely the "tragedy" to which
Avishai's title refers.

The confusion goes both ways. On the one hand, the State of Israel is
not just a state; it is the focal point of a movement. Any normal
country should be a home for its citizens, enabling them to get on
with their lives. But Israel is something more than this for many Jews
around the world (and something less for millions of Palestinians who
live within its extended borders): It is a transcendent ideal, the
"state of the Jewish people," an object of their unqualified love.

On the other hand, the movement turned into a state. Zionist concepts
and principles were incorporated into national institutions, public
policy and basic laws, notably the Law of Return, which allows any Jew
in the world to make aliyah (immigrate; literally "ascend") and
automatically become a citizen. This has driven a sharp wedge between
Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, creating, according to Israeli
academic Oren Yiftachel and others, an "ethnocracy": a country that
effectively belongs to one ethnic group. Others describe Israel
as an "ethnic democracy." For Palestinian citizens of the Jewish
state, it comes to the same thing: They are second-class citizens,
subject, as novelist David Grossman said at the Rabin memorial in Tel
Aviv in November 2006, to a "deeply ingrained institutionalized
racism." Some steps have been taken in recent years to mitigate these
inequalities. Nevertheless, Israel remains "the state of the Jewish
people."

Because of this confusion (or fusion) between movement and state,
Zionism was reinvigorated when, after the 1967 war, Israel suddenly
found itself in control of new territories, the so-called Jewish
heartland of biblical Judea and Samaria. The capture of these
territories and the "unification" of Jerusalem were understood as
national restitution by many secular Zionists for whom the Bible is a
national epic. And as Avishai observes, many religious Jews, such as
the leaders of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), "young men with
gleaming eyes," believed that "the Promised Land was united and the
Messiah was at hand." Within a short time, settlements were being
established by religious Jews who viewed themselves as heirs of the
original chalutzim (Jewish pioneers)--with a wink and a nod from
Israel's Labor government. It was a turning point in the history of
the movement and of the state.

I remember the period well. It was as if all of Jewry had linked arms
and was dancing the hora together. (For a while I, too, was part of
the joyful circle.) But this embrace between the religious and the
secular was not merely a marriage of convenience. The bonds were more
than skin-deep; they were inscribed in the flesh of the movement by
the circumstances of its birth and by the language in which it told
its own story.

Zionism is a hope born of despair. Taking ethnic nationalism as its
rubric, it is a child of its times. But fundamentally, it is the
stepchild of anti-Semitism. As Jacqueline Rose observes in The
Question of Zion, "no discussion of Zionism can make sense" if it does
not start here. Only then can we begin to understand the hold that
Zionism has over its adherents and its resistance to any whisper of
self-doubt. As Rose writes: "How do you begin to address...the
problem of a political identity whose strength in the world...relies
on its not being able, or willing, to question itself?" The title of
her book (an homage to Edward Said's The Question of Palestine) can be
heard as an elliptical expression of a wish: Would that Zionism could
become a question! The question of Zion is a desideratum.

Rose's conundrum can be put this way: How do you address an identity
when people fear they will fall apart without it? How do you ask them
to be uncertain about something they affirm precisely because it
relieves them of uncertainty: the predicaments and insecurities of
existence as a Jew? "We are a nation now, and there's an end to it!"
says the collective voice. How do you get a hearing when this voice is
so insistent and when you are unsettling an idea that was supposed to
have settled the issue once and for all, an idea that is practically
sacred: Israel, seen not merely as the "solution" to "the Jewish
question" but (recall Olmert's opening words to the Zionist Congress)
as the answer to a Jewish prayer?

I say "prayer." Call it a hope, if you will; but when hope is
conceived in the midst of despair, then it amounts to prayer, even if
it is not addressed to heaven. It becomes, in Rose's phrase, "a
secular prayer." "I am totally secular," said David Grossman in his
Rabin memorial speech, "and yet in my eyes the establishment and the
very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts." A
miracle (of sorts) in answer to a prayer (of sorts): The hold of
Zionism, with Israel as its expression, is not intelligible unless it
is seen in this light.

Zionism arose from disillusionment with European modernity, or more
precisely, with Europe as the site of the modern. (In a way, when
Herzl spoke of a modern solution, what he meant was this: "If we Jews
cannot have Europe in Europe then we shall have it in another place.")
The foundations for despair had been laid for centuries. But the sense
of betrayal had become unbearably acute by the late nineteenth
century, with the intensification of pogroms and the rise of
anti-Jewish legislation in Eastern Europe; the formation of openly
anti-Semitic political parties in Western Europe; and the Dreyfus case
in France. And none felt more betrayed than secular, assimilated Jews
such as Herzl.

On the face of it, the ambitions of early Zionism could hardly be more
different from--even opposed to--the age-old messianic hope in Judaism
for divine intervention. The "wide- spectrum revolution" of which
Avishai speaks was, by and large, aggressively secular. This implied
not only rejection of religion in general but also a specific quarrel
with Jewish particularism: the idea of the Jews as a people apart,
quietly existing as am hasefer (people of the book), patiently
suffering until the coming of the Messiah in God's good time.

For this reason, as Yakov Rabkin explains in A Threat From Within,
rabbis generally spurned the new movement. (Some strands, especially
among the ultra-Orthodox, still do, as Rabkin meticulously documents:
a useful reminder at a time when it almost seems as if Judaism has
converted to Zionism.) It is true that, virtually from the outset,
there was a small religious presence within the Zionist movement in
the form of the Mizrachi Organization, and that Rabbi Abraham Kook,
the spiritual ancestor of the post-1967 religious settlers, gave the
movement his blessing. But the aim of the Zionist revolution was, in
large part, to put an end to the old way of life, not just to create a
new future for Jews but to craft a "new Jew" for the future. The new
Jews would not speak Yiddish, much less Arabic or Ladino, but Hebrew,
a properly "national" language, the language of the ancestors. Jews
would be like other people; they would be normal. This sounds like a
Jewish joke. But normalization was the hope that animated the
mainstream of the Zionist movement.

However, as Rose perceptively points out, "messianism colors Zionism,
including secular Zionism, at every turn." This coloring affects its
most basic vocabulary. In the Bible "Zion," initially the name of one
of the hills of Jerusalem, refers poetically to the city itself and by
extension to the whole of the Promised Land--indeed, to the land as
promised in the context of an eschatological narrative of return. "The
very name of the movement," the late liberal rabbi and scholar Arthur
Hertzberg observed in The Zionist Idea, "evoked the dream of an
end of days, of an ultimate release from the exile and a coming to
rest in the land of Jewry's heroic age." So, too, did "the very name
of the nation," as Rose points out. Calling it Israel (rather than,
say, Western Palestine) conjures up the eternal hope of an eternal
people in an everlasting covenant with God. Moreover, the rhetoric of
messianism--"ingathering of the exiles," "redemption of the land"--is
part and parcel of the political lexicon of this movement-cum-state.

This is not to deny that Zionism gives this vocabulary "a radically
new meaning," as Hertzberg insisted. Of course it does. But the
phrases have a life of their own. The genius of Zionism is that it
speaks the familiar language of tradition with a revolutionary accent.
This makes its message ineluctably poetic: It constantly stirs the
waters beneath the surface of its words, arousing emotions that, in
their ambiguity and volatility, unite left and right, religious and
secular--even when, like mishpocheh (an extended family), they are at
each other's throats. In unison, all rise to sing the national anthem,
whose title, "Hatikvah," means precisely "the hope." In short, Zionism
at heart is, as Rose writes, a "collective passion," an authentic
reaction (one among several) to anti-Semitism, one whose flexible
language has enabled it to evolve after 1967 from secular left to
religious right. Its variety has not disappeared, nor are the
differences between the various camps immaterial. But they are apt
to merge with or adapt to each other as circumstances change and as
passion dictates.

Just as Zionist concepts and principles were translated into Israeli
law and institutions, so its passion--its "prayer"--persists as a
dominant mindset, shaping national policy and systematically deforming
Israel's dealings with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states.
For who are the Palestinians--who are the Arabs?--in a worldview
transplanted from the Jewish historical experience in Europe to a
region that, for reasons having nothing to do with European
anti-Semitism, is hostile to the presence of a Jewish state?
Certainly, as neighbors and enemies, the Arabs are real. But
simultaneously they are demonic characters in a recurring nightmare:
cossacks on horseback attacking the shtetl, jackbooted Nazis enacting
another Kristallnacht. It is difficult enough to make peace with
flesh-and-blood enemies. But how do you negotiate with ghosts? How can
a phantom be a partner for peace?

And what is Israel in this phantasmagorical landscape? Not merely a
state at odds with its neighbors but the persecuted "Jew among
nations," as Alan Dershowitz and others argue. The trouble with their
argument is that the more it succeeds as a defense of Israel, the more
it fails as a defense of Zionism; for if Israel is the old Jew writ
large, an eternal victim of an eternal anti-Semitism, then the
movement has failed its own test. Herzl's vision was not to export the
so-called Jewish question from Europe to the Middle East but (as
Olmert reminded the Zionist Congress) to solve it.

There are, to be sure, critics of Israel who are motivated by hatred
of Jews, just as there are Arab and Muslim opponents of the state who
have embraced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Holocaust
revisionism to underwrite their hostility. But by and large, both the
fate of the state and its reputation are more in its own hands than we
are led to think by "defenders" of Israel who, lovingly polishing its
image as if this were its very being, cannot bear to hear that Israel
is ever culpable. Not that they view the Jewish state as powerless in
its own defense; on the contrary, the critical difference between the
"new" Jew and "old" (as they see it) is that tough Israel does not go
like a lamb to the slaughter. But nor (they insist) does it go like
the slaughterer to the lamb; not even when the IDF launches airstrikes
against targets in densely populated civilian neighborhoods in Gaza or
invades Lebanon and lays waste its infrastructure. In the dominant
mindset that I am describing, Israel's hand is forced by hate-filled
enemies, and nothing it can do will assuage that hate.

Thus, paradoxically, the reliance that Israel places on power derives
from its sense of powerlessness: the conviction that it is condemned
to be hated, that every apparent thaw in its relations with its
neighbors is a cunning Arab stratagem and that the Palestinians are
simply waiting to throw the Jews into the sea. This, mutatis mutandis,
is the same conviction about Europe that gave rise to Zionism in the
first place. Sticking to its stock narrative of the Jewish past, this
state-cum-movement is frozen in time on the shifting "stage of
history," in Olmert's phrase.

In his recent account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Scars of War,
Wounds of Peace, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami
observes, "Israel could never really decide whether she was an
intimidating regional superpower or just an isolated and frightened
Jewish ghetto waiting for the next pogrom to happen." Deep down it is
both: the "old" Jew within the "new," the implacable despair coiled
like an incubus inside the Zionist hope.

Yet according to the Zionist script, it is hope triumphant: The
wandering Jews have come home, and the Citadel of David has fallen
into their hands. In Booking Passage, a study of the "poetics of exile
and return" in the modern Jewish imagination, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
locates Zionism on the mental map of a people who, for 2,000 years,
have seen themselves as "on the road," forever longing for Jerusalem.
What happens when spiritual longing is replaced by material
fulfillment? What becomes of Zion, "the beating heart" (Olmert) of the
Jewish people, when it is possessed, when its status changes from
poetic center to capital city? Can its heart continue to beat? Or does
it atrophy into a trophy that must not, at any cost, be surrendered?
The Zion of the Psalms lies on the horizon, where heaven and earth
appear to meet. "When this poetic image denies its status as poetry,"
writes Ezrahi, "it makes such claims on the political imagination that
the 'final status' of Jerusalem becomes non-negotiable."

If in this triumphalist script Arabs in general are the foil to the
"miracle" of Israel's birth, then the 1.4 million Israeli citizens who
are Palestinian (about a fifth of the population) are the remnant
within. They are "insider outsiders," a phrase with historical
resonance for Jews. (The nearly 4 million Palestinians in the occupied
territories and East Jerusalem, neither inside nor outside, are left
in limbo.) Thus, the national myth divides the Israeli people against
itself. As do the symbols of state. Hundreds of thousands of Arab
children in Israeli schools "are expected to sing an anthem that
ignores their very existence," as veteran peace activist Uri Avnery
wrote after this year's Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day). There are
many Israelis for whom "Hatikvah" means despair.

Yet Palestinian citizens of Israel ("Israeli Arabs") are not just
figments in another people's narrative. As Ezrahi points out, they are
themselves "narrating subjects" with a stake in the country they call
home: Israel. In an eloquent appeal for inclusiveness, she refers to
"the Arab voices that have begun to be heard." Yet there is reason to
think that Azmi Bishara, the leader of the Arab Balad Party and a
former Knesset member who is now in exile to avoid prosecution on
charges of treason, is being pursued for "aiding the enemy" during the
most recent Lebanon war primarily because he has promoted the view
that Israel should become a "state for all its citizens." Yuval
Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, has reportedly gone so
far as to describe Israeli Palestinians as a "strategic threat" to the
state. And recent documents calling for recognition and equality, such
as the "Future Vision" report by the Committee of Arab Mayors in
Israel, have largely fallen on ears deafened by fear.

These documents are not the last word on how Israel should reconfigure
itself. But the fear they inspire inhibits open debate. Au fond, it is
Israel's fear of abandoning its Zionist script; fear of being a normal
country, one that is home to all its citizens; fear of equality, of an
inclusive and open-ended society that evolves into something that is
and is not Jewish. But if Israel cannot give up this fear, what hope
is there for the future? A state that does not believe in its own
possibility, except as a perpetual interloper at odds with its
neighbors, has no future.

For forty years, Israel's occupation has dominated the national agenda
and the international perception of the state. In one way, this has
been a distraction from the deeper question of the national myth and
how the state defines itself. But ultimately it concentrates the mind,
for as Avishai argues, it is "the persistence of Zionist principles--
or at least over-simplified versions of them--which engendered the
political climate in which the West Bank settlers took up their cause."

Zionism is not all of a piece. There are Zionists strongly opposed to
the settlers and the occupation. But the momentum of the movement has
brought it to this pass; the line that began in Basel has led to
Nablus. It is time to cut the cord and begin anew. For the sake of
everyone concerned, whether there are two states or three states or
one, Israel needs to shed the burden of Jewish fears and hopes and
become its own state pursuing its own good for its own people--all of
them equally.

Jews around the world need Israel to do this too. They certainly do
not need the kind of "protection" given by Olmert, who during the
Lebanon war last summer said, "I believe that this is a war that is
fought by all the Jews." He implicated the whole of Jewry in a
military campaign that inflamed the opinion of millions of people
around the world. Is this the "solution" to "the Jewish question"? Is
this Israel coming to the rescue of Jews in distress?

The Zionist doctrine that the State of Israel must be the "center" of
Jewish life, or that "every Jew in the world" (as Olmert said to the
World Zionist Congress) must make aliyah, or that Jews are self-hating
if they do not show "solidarity" with the Jewish state, or that Jewish
identity in the Diaspora is incomplete--all of this prevents a normal
conception of life, as a Jew, outside Israel. The very term "diaspora"
is misleading. Israel certainly has one: At least 350,000 Israelis
living in the New York area are part of it. But I (a British Jew or
Jewish Brit), for example, am not.

At the heart of the crisis of Zionism is the axiom that Israel and the
Jewish people are central to each other's identity. How do you pry
apart a knot as closely knit as this--a Gordian knot that has no ends?
Partly by remembering the venerable idea of the Jewish people as
centered on a book--the Torah--and not a state; partly by observing
how Jewish life, secular and religious, is flourishing in ways that
are not focused on Israel; and partly by looking in an unexpected
place: The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,
where the principle of equality, like a shining light, burns a hole
through the middle of the document.

The text proclaims "complete equality of social and political rights
to all its inhabitants." If someone wants to say that this is what
they mean by Zionism, they are welcome to the word. To adapt a remark
of Wittgenstein's: Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent
you from seeing the light. But on the whole, it is better to let go of
the word along with the illusion. Jewish ethnic nationalism is no
solution to the problems we face today, while the name "Zionism"
evokes as much fear and loathing as love and pride. We cannot
formulate today's questions in yesterday's language.

It is time to move on. I like to think that forty years from now,
under the aegis of full civil equality, Arab and Hebrew cultures will
thrive and mingle together in the area currently called Israel and
Palestine. It seems like a pipe dream. But a phrase of Herzl's comes
to mind: "Wenn ihr vollt, Ist es kein Maerchen"--If you will it, it is
not a dream. His motto gives us hope.

========

For a Secular Democratic State
by SAREE MAKDISI
The Nation
[from the June 18, 2007 issue]

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of
the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control
established and maintained by force of arms--in defiance of
international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most
recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of
Justice in The Hague--have enabled Israel to impose its will on the
occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.

The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of
historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial
world ("a world cut in two") famously described by Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon's 1961 classic still enables an
analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful
and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it
made available when it was first published.

Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for
example: one for the territory's immigrant population of Jewish
settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian)
population.

The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well
lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the network of Jewish
"neighborhoods" and "settlements"--all of them in reality colonies
forbidden by international law--to each other and to Israel. The roads
for the West Bank's native population, by contrast, are poorly
maintained, when they are maintained at all (they often consist of
little more than shepherds' trails); they are continuously blockaded
and interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks (546 at last
count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank's indigenous
population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of
Jewish settlers--who are, moreover, allowed to drive their own cars on
the roads set aside for them, whereas Palestinians are not allowed to
drive their cars beyond their own towns and villages (the entrances to
which are all blockaded by the Israeli army).

The wall that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in concrete and barbed wire the
outlines of the discriminatory regime that structures and defines
everyday life in the occupied territories, separating Palestinian
farmers from crops, patients from hospitals, students and teachers
from schools and, increasingly, even parents from children (it has,
for example, separated one parent or another from spouses and children
in 21 percent of Palestinian families living on either side of the
wall near Jerusalem)--while at the same time enabling the seamless
incorporation of the Judaized spaces of the occupied territories into
Israel itself. And a regime of curfews and closures, enforced by the
Israeli army, has smothered the Palestinian economy, though none of
its provisions apply to Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.

There are, in short, two separate legal and administrative systems,
maintained by the regular use of military force, for two populations
--settlers and natives--unequally inhabiting the same piece of land:
exactly as was the case in the colonial countries described by Fanon,
or in South Africa under apartheid.

All this has enabled Israel to transplant almost half a million of its
own citizens into the occupied territories, at the expense of their
Palestinian population, whose land is confiscated, whose homes are
demolished, whose orchards and olive groves are razed or burned down,
and whose social, economic, educational and family lives have been, in
effect, all but suspended, precisely in order that their land may be
made available for the use of another people.

The result has been catastrophic for the Palestinians, as a World Bank
report published in May makes clear. While the Jewish settlements in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem enjoy growth rates exceeding those of
Israel itself, Palestinian towns and villages are slowly being
strangled. While Jewish settlers move with total freedom, the
combination of physical obstacles and the bureaucratic pass system
imposed by the Israeli army on the Palestinian population has not only
permanently separated the Palestinians of the West Bank from those of
Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel (movement among which is forbidden for
all but a tiny minority) but has also broken up the West Bank into
three distinct sections and ten enclaves. Half of the West Bank is
altogether off-limits to most Palestinians; to move from one part of
the rest of the territory to another, Palestinians must apply for a
permit from the Israelis. Frequent bans are imposed on movement into
or out of particular enclaves (the city of Nablus, for example, has
been under siege for five years), or on whole segments of the
population (e.g., unmarried men under the age of 45). And all permits
are summarily invalidated when Israel declares one of its
comprehensive closures" of the West Bank--there were seventy-eight
such days in 2006--at which point the entire Palestinian population
stays home.

The lucky few who are able to obtain passes from the Israelis are
channeled from one section or enclave to another through a series of
army checkpoints, where they may be searched, questioned, hassled,
detained for hours or simply turned back. "The practical effect of
this shattered economic space," the World Bank report points out, "is
that on any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping,
healthcare facilities and agricultural land is highly uncertain and
subject to arbitrary restriction and delay." Given the circumstances,
it is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of the Palestinian population
has been reduced to absolute poverty (less than $2 a day), and that
hundreds of thousands are now dependent for day-to-day survival on
food handouts provided by international relief organizations. Not only
has the international community refused to intervene; it has actively
participated in the repression, imposing--for the first time in
history--sanctions on a people living under military occupation, while
the occupying and colonizing power goes on violating the international
community's own laws with total impunity.

To all of these charges, Israel and its supporters have but one
response: "security." But as the World Bank report argues, it is
"often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access
restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and
protect settlement activity." Moreover, the Bank notes, it seems
obvious that Israeli security ought to be tied to Palestinian
prosperity: By disrupting the Palestinian economy and immiserating an
entire population--pushing almost 4 million people to the edge--the
Israelis are hardly enhancing their own security.

Such arguments miss the point, however. No matter how fiercely it is
contested inside Israel, there remains a very strong sense that the
country is entitled to retain the land to which it has now stubbornly
clung for four decades. Even while announcing his scheme to relinquish
nominal control over a few bits and pieces of the West Bank with heavy
concentrations of Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
insisted on his country's inherent right to the territory,
irrespective of the demands of international law, let alone the rights
and claims of the Palestinians themselves. ("Every hill in Samaria and
every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland," he said last
year, using Israel's official, biblical terminology for the West Bank.)

Although some people claim there are fundamental differences between
the disposition of the territories Israel captured in 1967 and the
territories it captured during its creation in 1948--or even that
there are important moral and political differences between Israel
pre-and post-1967--such sentiments of entitlement, and the use of
force that necessarily accompanies them, reveal the seamless
continuity of the Zionist project in Palestine from 1948 to our own
time. "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic
cleansing," argues Israeli historian Benny Morris, with reference to
the creation of Israel. "A Jewish state would not have come into being
without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was
necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that
population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the
border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse
the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

Israel's post-1967 occupation policies are demonstrably driven by the
same dispossessive logic. If hundreds of thousands have not literally
been forced into flight, their existence has been reduced to penury.
Just as Israel could have come into being in 1948 only by sweeping
aside hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel's ongoing
colonization of Palestinian territory--its imposition of itself and
its desires on the land's indigenous population--requires, and will
always require, the use of force and the continual brutalization of an
entire people.

Indeed, the discriminatory practices in the occupied territories
replicate, albeit in a harsher and more direct form, those inside
Israel, where the remnant of the Palestinian population that was not
driven into flight in 1948--today more than a million people --
continues to endure the systematic inequalities built into the laws
and institutions of a country that explicitly claims to be the state
of the Jewish people rather than that of its own actual citizens,
about a fifth of whom are not Jewish. Recognizing the contradiction
inherent in such a formulation, various Israeli politicians, including
Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, have explicitly called for
the territorial transfer--if not the outright expulsion--of as much as
possible of Israel's non-Jewish (that is, Palestinian) minority.
Although it would be intended to mark the ultimate triumph of the
dispossessing settler over the dispossessed native (Lieberman is an
immigrant from Moldova who enjoys rights denied to indigenous
Palestinians simply because he happens to be Jewish), such a gesture
would actually amount to a last-ditch measure, an attempt to forestall
what has become the most likely conclusion to the conflict.

For, having unified all of what used to be Palestine (albeit into one
profoundly divided space) without having overcome the Palestinian
people's will to resist, Zionism has run its course. And in so doing,
it has terminated any possibility of a two-state solution. There
remains but one possibility for peace with justice: truth,
reconciliation--and a single democratic and secular state, a state in
which there will be no "natives" and "settlers" and all will be equal;
a state for all its citizens irrespective of their religious
affiliation. Such a state has always, by definition, been anathema for
Zionism. But for the people of Israel and Palestine, it is the only
way out.

*********************************************************************

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