Debate Part 2: Reply — Pandering to the “absolute anti-Zionists”
Dear comrades,
I want to discuss the “Letters from the Editors”, entitled “Nakba One, Two, Three?”, in the May-June 2007 issue of Against The Current.
It seems to me that one of the fundamental responsibilities of those who fight for a rational, working-class, socialist, and consistently democratic approach to the Jewish-Arab conflict is to work to counter the demonisation of Israel and the pervasive falsification of the history of the Israeli Jews, to banish it to the dunghill to which history has consigned the other products of Stalinism.
Your editorial letter manages to combine politics which I think correct — “two states” — with that grotesque misrepresentations of the issues and of the history which is typical of the bitter opponents of a two states solution. By unravelling the issues here, I hope to contribute to the work of separating out rational socialist politics on these questions from the poisonous nonsense purveyed by the kitsch-left.
I want to discuss your article for a number of reasons, but mainly because I find the mixture of elements in the article both strange and shocking, and also, perhaps, instructive.
In terms of hard political line, though it is to an extent buried and obscured by other elements, broadly speaking I agree with you. I agree with many other things you say too.
You say that “socialists and principled democrats must support... an independent Palestinian state... a ‘ two state solution’ ...” — that is, being for a two-states solution, you accept Israel’s right to exist. By implication, though you don’ t say it, and maybe wouldn’ t choose to say it, you accept Israel’ s right to defend itself.
You identify as “one of the poisoned fruits of 1967” “Israel... becom[ing] the prized strategic ally of the United States”. By dating that in 1967 and not earlier you implicitly cut away a large part of the myth-poisoned “history” propagated by the kitsch-left (in Britain anyway), which typically portrays the whole history of the Jewish community in Palestine as an imperialist conspiracy.
You say, I think rightly, that the Palestinian nation that exists now was forged in the struggle with the Zionists in the 20th century and “became an identifiably Palestinian nation in the course of the... crises of the twentieth century”. This recognition should make it possible to discuss the real history of the interaction of the two nationalisms. (Unfortunately, you do the opposite in your article).
You side with the weakest, with the oppressed — with the Palestinians. Of course I agree with you here, too. As James Connolly said well about those who fail to do that: “To side with the oppressor against the oppressed is the wisdom of the slave”.
You rightly add, “No solution... can occur except through the struggle to get the oppressor nation’s boot off the oppressed nation’ s neck”.
However, for Marxists, siding with the oppressed should not, and if we are committed to our own political outlook, cannot mean accepting and bowing down to the chauvinist and other myths about their own history held by the oppressed. Still less does it imply the role of succouring the oppressed and their unschooled sympathisers with myth-spinning and myth-guarding — and doubly less when those myths stand in the way of rational politics for the oppressed and their supporters.
It should not mean adopting the nationalism, or the chauvinism, of the oppressed. If it does do that, then not only do the Marxists in question fail to hold to an independent working-class line. They also muddle, weaken, or destroy their own capacity to think about the issues, and other issues, clearly and honestly.
As well as the fundamentally correct politics — two states, one of them Israel — your letter contains what is, for so small a space, a vast quantity of myth-spinning. I had to read your letter twice before I properly grasped what the hard politics under the conventional left glosses of history — with all due respect, Arab-Palestinian nationalist misrepresentations — were.
That may have been because of my incapacity to absorb what I read, but it wasn’t only that. The politics are obscured and half-hidden in the gross bias and misrepresentation which compose so much of your letter. Taking the points on which we agree as given, it is the elements of misrepresentation that I want to discuss. It shows up very clearly what is wrong with so much of the left on Israel-Palestine.
Some of the traits of your article may be the result of putting together a text agreeable to a number of editors with differing views. In principle there is nothing wrong with that — provided that the result is coherent, and not unprincipled for any of the participants. And provided that the result does not resemble a pantomime horse in which the two people encased in one skin are going in different directions. I think the politics of your letter — which, to repeat, I agree with — are seriously at odds with the version of history in it, and with the nods and bows to the views of people who erect politics opposite to yours and mine upon gross historical misrepresentation.
I approach the discussion, of course, from the perspective of Britain, where most of the would-be left is openly allied with Islamist clerical fascism and where the bourgeois liberals (the Guardian newspaper, for instance) are “soft” on Islamism. I understand that the political climate on this question is different in the USA.
My essential problem with what you’ve written is this. We are faced with recreating a rational left. We need a left that does not run away from reality; one that does not, instead of working to change reality — and it is usually instead — manipulate fantasies in its head. You do the opposite in your article.
Your blur and mis-state the issues as you survey the history, often by suggesting associations or implying cause and effect in a sense that is both wrong and grossly biased against the Jewish settlers and Israel. People of different viewpoints can read your assessments in their own different ways. That may indicate skill in drafting a compromise text, but it produces something that to the unknowing reader serves not to clarify and enlighten, but to do the opposite. Not to clear the way for your politics, but to bury them in a miasma of anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli nonsense originating with Stalinism.
You pay a mumbling lip-service to the poisoned mythology of the “absolute anti-Zionists” of the kitsch-left, who reject your politics (“two states”). Their historical mythology is at least in line with their policy of wanting the destruction of Israel. Yours is not only false in terms of history, but at stark odds with your own politics.
Sometimes facts are so wrapped up in the “tribute” you pay to conventional kitsch-left pieties that they are probably invisible to those who don’t already know those facts. For instance, take the number of Palestinian refugees in 1948. In the first two paragraphs, you say “around the same number”, “something over 650,000”, of people may have died in Iraq as a result of the US/ UK invasion.
That implies a number, but three paragraphs down you write: “Three generations after the expulsion from their homeland, among roughly six million Palestinians living in exile... many remain refugees or in officially ‘stateless’ status with few rights or security”.
Leave aside the fact that “expulsion” does not cover all the 700,000 or so who fled in 1948, during conditions of communal war and attacks by five Arab armies on the territory allocated to Israel by the United Nations. The idea that there are now six million Palestinian refugees or semi-refugees begs too many questions, and attributing all their plight to Israeli “expulsion” begs even more.
It is plain from your own description of the conditions where the Palestinians live “with few rights or security” that you know that the treatment of the Palestinians by the Arab states, too, has shaped the terrible and tragic situation in which the Palestinians find themselves. Palestinians have often been refused the right to work in Arab states. In both Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1970s and 80s) large numbers of them have been butchered.
In reviewing a long space of history in which — as you plainly know — the policies of the Arab states have shaped the consequences of the population shift of 1948, to attribute to Israel all responsibility — except obliquely and gnomically — for the evils which afflict the Palestinians is not history, but political special pleading and scapegoating. Isn’t it?
And in your ruminations about the partitions of India and of Palestine, and the “ironic” coincidence of numbers between Palestine 1948 and Iraq 2003-7, you might have broadened your reflection to include another pertinent “around the same number”. Around 600,000 Jews fled from or were persecuted out of the Arab countries, to Israel, in the years after 1948.
You note and properly regret that “the Arab Palestinian nation was cheated of the state that was promised to it under the 1947 [United Nations] resolution”. By whom? Someone who doesn’t know would, from the whole tone and content of the letter, assume: by the Jews, or Israel. In fact the Jewish community accepted the UN resolution. After the 1948 war, Israel gained extra territory, but the bulk of the territory allocated to the Palestinian state was taken by Jordan and Egypt.
Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 was the occupation of territory that had been Jordan’s for nearly two decades. I agree with you that Israel should give up that occupation immediately. But you think it is useful to let the story seem worse for Israel than the 40-year continuing occupation does? Why? You think the kitsch-left does not need to be told the truth? Why? You want to sing in consonance with the myth-addled kitsch-left? Why? You think you can best propagate your own two-states programme if you wrap it up in the poisonous historical myths of the Stalinists and the present-day absolute anti-Zionists whose programme of eliminating Isreal is the opposite of your own?
You half-apologise for your own “two states” politics with this comment on the Palestinian state projected in 1947: “however sad that solution would have been by comparison to the potential of a united democratic binational country”.
In this way you chime in with the opponents on the kitsch-left of a “two states” settlement: in a shamefaced sort of way you bow to (though seemingly without sharing) the idea that Israel is an illegitimate historical formation. That idea and the vicious historical myths on which it is erected serves to license the politics of all the “destroy Israel” left, and their projects of replacing it with something more to their taste.
Is it that you, or some of you, believe in a binational state settlement? Not just that (of course) it might have been better, but as something that might have been feasible? Surely it never was remotely feasible. Those who advocated it in the mid-1940s like Judah Magnes had little influence. As a proposed “settlement” to the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, it did not deserve to have influence.
Suppose that somehow a binational Jewish-Arab state had been set up in 1948, something like the arrangement in Lebanon established in the National Pact of 1943. Surely such a binational state could not have survived the rise of Arab nationalism without collapsing into civil war as Lebanon did in the late 1950s?
Arab nationalism would not have arisen without the stimulus the Arab defeats in 1948 gave it? In the decolonising world of the 1950s, surely it would, maybe with some details and the tempo different.
Alternative history is tempting. I’ve read one effort at alternative history about what would, or might, have happened to the much-despised and ill-treated native Palestinian Jews if the Zionist colonisation had not happened — that in the period of the anti-colonial movements they would have been likely to reach a sort of nationalist consciousness of their own and revolt against their overlords.
The problem with “alternative histories” of the Middle East and repinings over the binational state “that might have been” is that they all start from or arrive at the idea that Israel is an illegitimate state, the root idea for all the poisonous vicarious Arab (or, now, Islamic) chauvinist nonsense that engulfs so much of the would-be left (and in Britain almost all of it).
The same is true of Hal Draper’s article on the 1948 war, some of which you reprint. Another largely forgotten fact — like the fact that the UN projected a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish one, and what happened to the territory allocated to the Palestinians — is that none of the Trotskyist groups, either in the USA or in Israel-Palestine, supported the Arabs in the 1948-9 conflicts. None of them, that I know of. The “orthodox” Trotskyists didn’t; and the “Other Trotskyists”, the Workers’ Party of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, positively, though with important caveats, supported Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.
Draper’s 1948 article, with its implicit idea that Israel, or working-class Israel, could play the sort of role in the region which France played in Europe for a while in the 1790s — that it could sink the national, cultural, and religious differences in an all-embracing anti-colonial battle, which it would spearhead — was the sheerest fantasy. He had imaginatively cut loose from all the circumscribing elements in the situation.
Attractive fantasy, yes. But it was a programme for a different Middle East, not for the real one. It became pernicious when the real Israel, the real Israeli Jewish people and the real Jewish working class, were afterwards condemned for not living up to the fantasy-Israel which in Draper’s utopia had replaced the real one.
I agree with you that the possibility of an independent Palestinian state is itself threatened with relegation to the museums of historical might-have-beens, and that therefore a solution is very urgent. But your way of putting things about “two states” (some sort of compromise formulation, I guess) gives away far too much to the malevolent political obscurantism of the kitsch-left. “So long as an independent Palestinian state remains the demand of the population under occupation, socialists and principled democrats must support this struggle for self-determination, whatever its constraints and limitations”.
Only because it is the majority view in the Occupied Territories? Not because it is the only conceivable arrangement that will secure the best that the Palestinians can hope for? And because it also offers justice to the legitimate claims of the Israeli Jewish nation too?
What if the Palestinian “population under occupation” were now in its majority to revert to the old slogan of Egypt and one-time PLO leader Ahmed Shukhairy — “Drive the Jews into the sea”? Would socialists and principled democrats then accept an obligation to support that? Would they then lose the moral or political right to do other than support it? That is what is wrong with your way of putting it: it implies that socialists and principled democrats do and must follow the majority view. No: we should make and argue for our own independent assessment of the situation, its possibilities, and what is desirable.
The PLO is for two states. What if it weren’t? Two states would still be the only democratic as well as the only conceivable solution. It was that before the PLO formally adopted it in 1988.
You express it as: “support this struggle for self-determination”. The struggle for a Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only conceivable form, and for socialists and consistent democrats the only supportable form, of Palestinian self-determination. Two states is the only practicable solution. There has been and is a Palestinian — and Arab, and Islamic — “struggle” against Israel which is not for two states and not for Palestinian self-determination, but which sets as its goal to forcibly deprive the Israeli Jewish nation of self-determination. Hamas, which won what you praise as “the free and transparent Palestinian democratic election of January 2006”, has that goal.
Because of the confusion on the left, two states needs to be advocated with conviction and, where necessary, with aggressive debunking of nonsensical alternatives. How would you answer someone who, following your own method here, insisted with you that Hamas won the election and therefore “the” Palestinian policy now is that of Hamas, “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”.
Either you would bow down to their reasoning, and apologise for having trifled with “two states”, or you would have to assert your right to think things through for yourselves. As it is, your way of presenting the issue, in terms that suggest that you root yourselves in an obligation to reflect or follow the Palestinian majority (at any time? That’s how I read it) contradicts your advocacy of two states. Two states — concretely, a sovereign, independent Palestinian state, in contiguous territory — will remain the only socialist and democratic programme for the Israel-Palestine conflict whatever the fluctuations in support for Hamas.
I agree with the first four paragraphs of your letter under the cross-head “Tragic Missed Chances”. In fact, it is well done: it cuts away the malevolent anti-Zionist mythology which mystifies and muddles the kitsch left. Both the Palestinian Arab and the Israeli Jewish nations were formed in the 20th century, in their mutual conflict (though of course the roots of Israel, the impulse to mass Jewish migration in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, were not only in Palestine).
Yet even here you weight the scales a bit. It was not just the interaction of an “indigenous Arab population” and “the intrusion of a colonial settler movement”. A proportion of the Arab population in, say, 1948, were recent incomers, attracted by the economic dynamism that came with the Jewish colonisation. There was a Jewish population before the Zionist incoming. A majority of the small population of Jerusalem in about 1900 was Jewish.
You describe the formation of Israel as the “desperate survivors of Nazi genocide... herded to Palestine against their own wishes” you should have added the 600,000 or so “herded” from the Arab countries to Israel. And going to Palestine was not against the wishes of the survivors of Hitler’s death camps who found themselves in the displaced persons’ camps after 1945. According to reports at the time, the big majority of such people wanted to go to Palestine, and nowhere else.
Your true picture of the interactive formation of two nations begs questions which you either don’t answer, or answer falsely.
Why, for instance, did the Jewish segment of 1930s and 1940s Palestine not have the right to receive people whom they thought of as their own, fleeing for their lives from Europe? Or to receive the survivors of the Nazi massacres languishing in DP camps? The same right as the Arab population surely had to “receive” Arab incomers in the 1920s and 30s?
All this is an example of true and urgent things you say being marred and mired and obscured by bias and prejudice — or the bows you make to bias and prejudice, for you are absolutely right that “any morally and politically viable analysis” must include recognition that “there are two peoples, two nations, living in historic Palestine”, that both have rights and must learn to accommodate each other — and that the Israeli Jewish nation must “get the oppressor nation’s boot off the oppressed nation’s neck”.
Historical demonisation of Zionism and Israel, or the echoes and smudges and half-revised residues of that demonisation in your letter, will not help either of those objectives. Very much the opposite, I believe.
All details aside, Israel can be made the villain of the long failure to reach a peaceful settlement between itself and the Arab states only from when Israel gained the predominant power. That is how things are now? Yes, though the failure — all in all, the defeat — of Israel in Lebanon last summer shows how relative and insecure that may be. But I agree that the responsibility of power puts the onus on Israel to sort out a settlement that is just to the Palestinians and liveable for both the Palestinians and the surrounding Arabs.
Israel deserves condemnation for not doing it — for its relentlessly savage treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and for its evident intention — and activity — to hold on to as much territory that was Palestinian before 1967 as possible.
But it is nonsense to read the present situation backwards through the many decades of the Israel-Arab conflict. The section of your letter where you do that is the least emancipated from the “all-powerful Zionist demon” Stalinist and now kitsch-left accounts of the history of Israeli-Arab relations.
Example: “In 1967, Israel deliberately provoked a war, the Arab rulers fatally fell for it, several Arab armies were destroyed...” Israel “provoked” a war and the Arab rulers “fell for it”? That account, I suppose, is a little better than the notion that in June 1967 Israel launched a treacherous surprise attack on Arab states which wanted nothing but peace, but it is as partial as a mother describing how her aggressive child got the worst of a fight.
“My Johnny did nothing. He was only acting as if he intended to kick the other boy in the crotch. Then the big bully, whose provocation he fell for, got a kick in first, and flattened him”.
In a world in which the then Egyptian-controlled Palestine Liberation Organisation still talked of driving the Jews into the sea, Arab leaders made war-mobilising speeches, Egypt ordered out UN peacekeepers which had been in place for a decade, and blockaded the gulf of Aqaba. Against that background, Israel struck first, devastated the military power of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and (until 1982) Sinai.
That Israel seized the chance to do to the threatening armies what it surely wanted to do anyway, and improved its victory by seizing the maximum of bargaining points, is true. That is the sort of thing that states in a condition of latent war with neighbours do, if they can. Audacity, ruthlessness, and motivation achieved results for Israel that surprised both sides.
Certainly Israel’s victory could not have been predicted. The Arab victories at the start of the 1973 war showed that the 1967 Israeli victories were not just a mechanical registration of the static strength of the powers involved; and Lebanon last summer disabused believers in the limitless power and self-sufficiency of Israel’s superiority in military technology.
To present 1967 as the leaders of the Arab dictatorships of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan being ensnared by Israel is perilously close to either an Israeli-chauvinist notion of an all-dominating ingrained superiority, or a paranoid vision that “the Jews” control everything. As you will know, segments of the anti-Zionist kitsch-left argue in a way that implies Jewish control over, or successful manipulation of, even the Nazis when they massacred Europe’s Jews — that is, over the Holocaust (Lenni Brenner, for instance; Jim Allen, in Perdition)..
The same when you discuss the aftermath of the 1967 war. What you write reads as if it was the Israeli government’s authorisation of the first settlements, in September 1967, that frustrated “the broad Israeli and international consensus” that “anticipated” Israeli withdrawal in exchange for a peace deal with the Arab states.
Such a deal was forthcoming from the Arab states? Surely it was not. It would have been forthcoming, and was deflected by the authorisation of settlements? To define the problem of the settlements as it has emerged over four decades — into a great power in Israeli politics — as already existing on that scale or anything comparable to it in the aftermath of the 1967 war is ridiculously anachronistic. (In 1972, for example, there were 800 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Today there are nearly 300,000.
The growth of the settler colonies was a result of the failure to reach an agreement after 1967, not the cause of that failure. No, saying that is not to justify the settlements! The point that matters here is that Arab — including Palestinian — unrealism and unwillingness to reach a modus vivendi with Israel have, in changing forms, been one of the great engines of Arab and Palestinian political destruction, back over many decades.
The settler movement, you write, is “the entrenched base for Israeli nationalist-religious fanaticism... [it has] poisoned Israeli-Palestinian relations, blocked the possibility for withdrawal and set in motion Israel’s slow-motion course toward national suicide”. True, I think. And successive Israeli governments of all colours authorised and encouraged the settlements. But all that grew out of a situation that the Arab states too, after 1967, shaped for Israel and for themselves.
You give the same sort of warped account of the 1973 war: Egypt attacked Israel not by any decision of its own, but only because the Nixon administration would not help it make peace. “Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sought US sponsorship for peace and Israeli withdrawal from Sinai; his snubbing by the Nixon-Kissinger administration led to the 1973 war”.
Your chronicle of fatal choices omits mention of the breakdown of the peace talks in 2000, which signalled the reverse of the seven years of tentative improvement after the Oslo agreement and the start of a succession of horrors that have engulfed the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Nor do you even mention the Hamas-initiated suicide-bomb campaign in Israel which has had such a part not only in killing innocent people but in turning Israeli public opinion away from belief that peace is possible.
You describe Ariel Sharon’s soldier-surrounded visit to Temple Mount on 28 September 2000 as “touching off the Second Intifada” as if those who decided to respond as the Palestinian organisations did simply did not have a choice, instead of branding the actions of those responsible for the suicide bombs — as utterly self-destructive of the Palestinian cause as they were murderous of Israeli civilians.
You depict the Palestinian organisations as will-less, politics-free, forces which only react, mindlessly and automatically, to Israeli stimuli. To put it at its mildest, the ineptitude and incapacity of the Palestinian leadership was one of the elements shaping the last seven terrible years for the Palestinians.
The grounds for condemnation of Israel now are that, especially, as you say, after the proposals of the Arab League for peace, Israel is in a position to secure all its legitimate interests and to reach a just settlement with the Palestinians, and it does not do that. Israel and its international allies did not need to respond to the Hamas election victory in 2006 as they did. Israel should, I agree, be condemned for that.
And yet your account here too is seriously skewed. Hamas was the initiator and main perpetrator of the suicide-bombing campaign. It is a clerical-fascist organisation linked to others outside Palestine, a religio-political formation committed to the destruction of Israel. Even if we disagree with what Israel did, as you and I do — from what point of view did Israel not in principle have the right to respond to Hamas’s victory as to a declaration of war, as the victory of a movement that would turn what there was of a Palestinian state into an entrenched forward position from which to make war on Israel as soon as it could? What has the democratic character for Palestine of Hamas’s election got to do with that?
You invoke the right of the Palestinians to democratically elect any government they liked, and the right of the Palestinian nation to prepare for war against the oppressor. To do that, comrades, is automatically to conjure up the reciprocal right of those who are the intended target to resort to their own sacred national egotism. Isn’t it? How can it not be?
For the opponents of two states, the candid answer is: “No, Israel doesn’t have such a right. Israel, unlike other nations, has no rights”. And for you, advocates of a two-states settlement?
You do not even address the issue. I would condemn Israel for acting with unnecessary brutality: yes, Israel has acted to pulverise the Palestinians politically as well as to defend itself. But you do not deal at all with the character of Hamas or with what Israel might reasonably fear from Hamas-controlled Palestinian territories.
Finally, the worst and in my opinion the most confused segment of your letter is the one headed “Jewish supremacy”. Here, you have let yourselves get bogged in the hopeless mireland of “definition” of “Jews” and “Israel”. Here too, the result looks like a pantomime horse, with two or three people trying to take the outer skin in two or three different directions.
You write: “Israel’s right to exist is never posed like that of any other independent nation-state — on the straightforward basis that its citizens want it to exist. Rather, the demand imposed on the Palestinian people is unique, to ‘recognise Israel as a Jewish state,’ which has come to mean the unique historical privilege of their oppressors to establish unconditionally and forever a ‘state of the Jewish people,’ a Jewish-supremacist state, on the land taken away from them and in which non-Jews would never have full equal rights”.
However they define themselves, or some of them define themselves, or the constitution of the state defines them, there is as you yourselves say a Jewish nation in what 60 years ago was Palestine. Whatever frills and definitions are juggled with, that nation is what is being discussed in all talk of Jewish rights, and so on.
Plainly for socialists and principled democrats the Arab minority in Israel should have full and equal citizenship rights with all the other Israeli citizens, just as any national minority anywhere should have equal rights. That the Israeli Arabs, or some of them, will have, or can reasonably be expected to have (indeed, must have!), divided loyalties, is inbuilt in the situation, and will remain so at least until the Jewish nation’s relations with the Palestinians and other Arab nations are regularised and Israel is recognised. Those who fight for equal rights for Arabs in Israel should be supported. Yet here again you blur things seriously. As with any nation, the right to equal treatment for minority citizens cannot undo the right of the nation to self-determination. Unequal treatment of a minority cannot invalidate the right of the majority to self-determination.
You go on: “This special demand... forecloses the Palestinian right of return... This is not political recognition of a state, but rather a demand to surrender to racism. The former is legitimate and ultimately necessary, while the latter is unacceptable and repulsive. For socialists above all, and for partisans of the rights of the Palestinian people, it is essential to ‘recognise’ and insist upon the difference”.
With all due respect, this reads to me like political gobbledygook. It goes with a statement earlier in the text: “The underlying destruction of Palestinian society, in the absence of self-determination and denial of the principled right of return — remains as brutally unresolved as ever”.
As with so much else, it is unclear what you mean by “principled right of return”. You mean the right “in principle”? You recognise that, as distinct from “principle”, the actual “right of return” is incompatible with recognising Israel’s right to self-determination? That is what both advocates and opponents of the “right of return” have always understood — that its call for restoring the status quo is an alternative to the right of self-determination of the Israeli Jewish nation.
For its advocates, it is precisely a way of denying Israel’s right to exist. But you advocate a “two states” settlement, and recognise the right of the Israeli Jewish nation and state to exist! Yet at the same time you seem — it is not clear — simultaneously to brand insistence on the Jewish character of Israel as “racist”.
I repeat: however it “is posed”, what is in question is the national rights of the Jewish nation in Israel. Plainly those citizens do want Israel to exist. The fact that all Jews everywhere are defined by that Israeli Jewish nation as having rights in Israel has no bearing on that. The demand on the Palestinians and the Arab states is to recognise the existing Jewish nation state.
One of two things, either the Israeli Jews have a right to self-determination — “two states” — or they don’t. Implicitly you seem to say that they don’t, while explicitly saying that they do!
If the entire Arab minority in Israel do not want it to exist — I don’t know — then that could not bind the Jewish nation (four-fifths of the population). If the Palestinians outside Israel do not want it to exist, that could not bind the Jewish majority either. The idea that it could, applied to any nation but that of the Israeli Jews, would be dismissed out of hand as an absurdity, wouldn’t it?
Those who reject a two-states settlement and want some all-Palestine state (in the real world, an unimaginable one) whose precondition is the destruction of Israel (secular democratic state, binational state...) say that the boundaries between Israel and the Palestinians should not exist and should not be taken into account, and that the unit for “self-determination” is majority opinion across both nations. You want two states, and therefore logically you can’t see it like that. Yet you present it like that — from a viewpoint that is not your own and is not in consonance with your advocacy of two states.
What does “Jewish-supremacist state” refer to? Relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs? In practical terms, that resolves into the struggle within the Israeli state for absolute equality of all its citizens, Arabs and Jews, and into the demand for a secular, a consistently secular, state. But in your text “Jewish-supremacist states” seems also to refer to the “supremacy” within the 1967 borders of Israeli Jews over other people outside those boundaries — or else what can your talk of the “right of return” refer to?
Israel is a “Jewish-supremacist state” because it gives its national majority rights above the claims of other people, outside its borders, who think that the territory should be theirs instead? But that idea is implicitly to deny the right of Israel to exist.
It has to be one thing or the other: either the Israeli Jewish nation has the right to self-determination, or it does not. Two states means that it does. Fifty or a hundred years in the future, “two states” might evolve into a Palestinian state and, beside it, not a Jewish but a binational state. But right now, and foreseeably, two states means that Israel has the right to exist — a state which the Jewish majority can if it likes define as a state of the Jewish nation.
You are, comrades, either for two states — one of which is a Jewish state, however the Israeli Jews choose to define “Jewish” — or for the right of return (that is, for a Palestinian right to take away the Jewish character of Israel). You can’t be for both.
The Arab minority can and should demand full equality, but surely it cannot claim the right to deprive the majority of its right to define itself and its state. The existence of a minority cannot reasonably mean that the majority nation ceases to have the right to national self-determination (though it may well imply some special national-minority rights).
How can you combine two states, which means the right of the Israeli Jewish nation to a state (with these or those modifications), with what you write? And why is it “racism” for the Israeli Jews to want a Jewish state? Nationalism, particularism, patriotism, chauvinism, racism form a continuum: there are no impassable walls between them. But there is a distinction. And why is what is nationalism in, say, Germany, racism among Israeli Jews? Why does opposition to chauvinism, and championing of equality for Israeli Arabs, demand that we define Israeli Jewish nationalism as racism?
Here you glibly repeat the poisonous nonsense that Israeli Jewish nationalism is, per se, racism. What is in others nationalism (or chauvinism) — insistence on their own identity as against others’ — is in the Israeli Jews “racism”! But, comrades, then you, with your two states formula, partake of the Israeli Jews’ “racism”! The answer to what you call “racism” is a struggle within Israel for equal right for all who live there — not the destruction of the Jewish nation, or quibbling such as yours that confuses the issue.
Why opponents of two states define it as racism is clear: to rule it out of court, to brand it and bracket it as amongst the most evil things they know. Why do you, two-staters, do it? I suggest you are here incoherent and confused.
So also with the “right of return” for Palestinians. A Jewish state, under the will of its majority, by definition “forecloses the Palestinian right of return”. How could it not? Either the Israeli Jews have a right to a state or they don’t. “Right of return” has been understood by its advocates and opponents as a “demand” for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state. That is what it means now, and it could not mean anything else.
Now, if such an unprecedented thing were to happen as the Jewish nation agreeing to Palestinian “return” — in real terms, to the organised resettlement of millions of descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1948 — and the Jews and the Palestinians could merge into a common peaceful citizenship of a common state, it would be wonderful. It would not be for socialists or consistent democrats to object. We are not the guardians of Jewish or of any other nationality.
But it is as inconceivable that the existing Israeli Jewish nation will ever agree to that as that they will dismantle their state and put themselves at the mercy of people and states with which they have been in conflict for not too far off a century.
The insistent demand that it should do so comes from peoples and states no less nationalistic, no less (at least!) religious-sectarian, and no less (if you insist on using that word) racist than the Israelis. It is a weapon of one side. Should we support such a demand or not? Logically, advocates of two states cannot.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that we support Israel’s right to exist, but oh — one detail! — we also want the right of “return” to the territory of the Israeli state for up to six million Palestinians. That is the demand for the abolition of Israel — the self-abolition, or, since that will not happen, for the conquest of Israel. It has never been anything else.
For sure, this stuff and two states are horses galloping in opposite directions. Of course, “non-Jews” — the six million Palestinians — “would never have full equal rights”, any more than citizens of Germany have “full equal rights” in the Russian Federation, or vice versa. Not so long as national barriers have not come down. We, as socialists, want them to come down: but voluntarily, not against the will of any nation participating in the union of the formerly distinct states.
Initially and for the foreseeable future, citizens of the Jewish state will not have full equal rights in the Palestinian state, and vice versa — though minority citizens in both states could and should have equal rights. The Palestinians in Israel already have a substantial part of the rights of equal citizenship — though they are entitled to more, and we should support them in fighting for it.
There was talk during negotiations a while back of some right of “return” for a token, emblematic number of Palestinians, combined with compensation for others. All such things would be for us to welcome. What supporters of two states should not do is turn themselves into advocates of an unqualified right of “return” for up to six million people, very few of whom now were born in the territory of pre-1967 Israel.
There is another issue here too. You say rightly that Palestinian self-determination is the precondition for progress on any level, and I agree wholeheartedly. “An authentic peace agreement, and above all as a choice made freely and with the nation’s dignity intact” (italics yours). Who would disagree? You then say that “Palestinian recognition of Israel and renunciation of violence would be altogether positive”.
“But such ‘recognition’ has no progressive meaning at all if imposed on imperialist terms, as an act of Palestinian defeat and ultimate humiliation. Not only wouldn’t it bring peace, but it couldn’t be considered morally or politically binding on a future movement. The delusion of ‘peace’ imposed by overwhelming fire-power is no peace at all”.
The sentiments are good, and the feeling in what you write is good too. But I don’t quite know what all this can possibly mean in relation to Israel-Palestine. What do you think are the chances of all or most Palestinians seeing an agreement, even one that gives them a genuinely independent state, as an absolutely voluntary agreement, free of defeat and “imperialist” and “Zionist” diktat?
A non-triumphalist style in which an agreement is “processed”, face-saving elements, are of course possible and desirable. But the issue here is more than pious hopes and wishful thinking and “nice-mindedness” in your letter. What you define as essential is, however tactful Israel or the USA might be, impossible — except to self-deluding or simply stupid Palestinians and their supporters.
Nothing is more certain than that there will be dissidents, irreconcilables, Islamists, who will denounce any agreement that leaves Israel in being as a sell-out, a humiliation, a degradation, etc. The long experience of Irish republicanism and its irreconcilables has a lot to say to the prospects in the Middle East.
Some of the irreconcilables will use terrorism, or support those who do. Even token recognition of the “right of return” will encourage such people to fight to give it their own meaning. Socialists should not make ourselves ideological outriders for the future irreconcilables.
It may well be that, just as our emphases are shaped by our circumstances in Britain, so also yours are determined by your circumstances in the USA — with the Christian Zionists, and the broad sanctification of Israel. But that can in the medium and long term be fought only on the basis of realism and of working-class political independent towards all nationalisms, including Palestinian nationalism and the much broader Arab-Islamist nationalism and chauvinism of which it is indissolubly a part. Future “population transfers” by Israel cannot be fought by rendering your advocacy of two states incoherent and oxymoronic, as you here.
Yours fraternally, Sean Matgamna
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Sean Matgamma - and Palestine
Sean Matgamma's article - in response to the sound 'Against the Current' editorial on Palestine/Israel - is nothing short of an apologia for the state of Israel.
While making some mealy-mouthed comments about "siding with the oppressed", it accepts a Zionist narrative at every important turn. (It is instructive here that the article is also completely devoid of any acknowledgement of the historic and continuing injustices visited on the Palestinians – an incredible achievement given the length the article). Thus, the article uncritically accepts:
i) The image of the ‘beleaguered’ Jews fighting a heroic war of independence in 1948.
ii) The Zionist dismissal of the right (recognised in international law) of the Palestinian refugees' right to return to their historic homeland from which they were ethnically cleansed. The article, at the same time, perversely supports the right of every Jew in the world to settle on stolen Palestinian land (!)
iii) The claim that Zionism is not racism and Israel is/can be both a ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’ state.
The article is also long on rhetoric and bereft of any discussion of contemporary empirical realities of occupation i.e. checkpoints, land seizures; settlements and the Israeli ‘security wall’. That these empirical realities are not discussed – the wall is not mentioned once - is a stunning but entirely necessary omission for someone who insists the two-state solution is “practicable” and “realistic”. More alarmingly, this omission seems wilful, given the author insists that Zionism is not racism and that no form of apartheid exists in Israel/the Occupied Territories.
Apologies to AWL supporters, and other visitors to this site, for the length of this post. However, as a Palestinian solidarity activist I want to discuss these points in some detail. They are, of course, of pivotal importance in the struggle for a just and lasting resolution of the Israel/Palestine question. I also want to make some connected points on the bankruptcy of the two-state solution as advocated by the author in the article and elsewhere.
Distortions of history and the denial of 1948.
In discussing the origins of the state of Israel, the article repeatedly refers to the “vicious historical myth(s)” of the “kitsch-left ”(whatever that ludicrous term means). It also attacks the idea that “Israel is an illegitimate historical formation” and, incredibly, implies that Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan of 1948: ““the Jewish community accepted the UN resolution (partition)” (The use of the word ‘community’ is interesting here and I would argue deliberately vague, letting the architects of the Israeli state off the hook).
Well, where do we start?..
First of all, which ‘myths’ is he objecting to? From the comments above, apparently the ‘claim’ that Zionist leaders had a deliberate, pre-planned programme to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants to create an ethnically pure Jewish state.
If he doesn’t trust the ‘kitsch left” on this crucial point, I suggest he familiarise himself with the explicitly declared goals of Zionist leaders who devised the project he now supports. A few quotes of Ben-Gurion, 1st Israeli PM, which are relatively widely known, will be sufficient. (A host of others can be found in the ‘Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought’, by Nur Masalha, based almost entirely on declassified Israeli archival materials – and IIlan Pappe’s recent ‘Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, similarly based on first hand Israeli sources)
Gurion in June, 1938, to the Jewish Agency Executive: "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it."
In 1944: "Zionism is a transfer of the Jews. Regarding the transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs this is much easier than any other Transfer. There are Arab states in the vicinity . . . . and it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are removed [to these states] this will improve their condition and not the contrary."
Gurion on the UN partition plan: The borders of the future Israeli state will "be determined by force and not by (the) partition resolution."
The article accepts the official Israeli view that many Palestinians (no figures are given) simply ‘fled’ in the ‘confusion’ of war between Israel and the Arab states. Doubtless some did. He won’t admit, however, that the policy of ethnic cleansing was already well on the way to execution before the intervention of the ill-equipped Arab armies. The Arab League finally decided on April 30 to intervene militarily but only after the British Mandate ended on May 15, 1948, the day the Jewish Agency declared the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine. By that time Zionist forces had already attacked and occupied major Palestinian urban and rural centres, such that by the end of April about 250,000 Palestinians had already been uprooted, displaced or killed in massacres - the most notorious (but not the biggest) at Deir Yassin.
That the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was a deliberate and systematic policy of Zionism has been painstakingly established beyond doubt by a new generation of Israeli historians – such as Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris and others - using first hand Israeli military sources. (The latter historian is interesting not least because he is now an avowed Zionist and believes the state of Israel did not go far enough by expelling the entire Palestinian population. Morris now believes Israel committed a fatal error in leaving behind a demographic threat to an exclusively Jewish state by not de-populating every Arab town and village of every last Arab. This view must be credited with internal consistency if not humanity, as failure to ‘finish the job’ is precisely what lies behind Israel’s contemporary demographic obsessions).
The genesis of the programme of ethnic cleansing begins with a Jewish National Fund Arab village inventory that was completed by the late 1930s – and ends with the formation of Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), a military operation conceived by Ben Gurion. The JNF inventory gave a topographic location of each village which was a living obstacle to the creation of the Jewish state. It contained detailed information on husbandry, cultivated land, number of trees, quality of fruit, average amount of land per family, number of cars, shop owners, Palestinian clans and their political affiliation, descriptions of village mosques, names of their imams, civil servants and more – an inventory of what had to be removed by force. The final inventory update was finished in 1947 with lists of "wanted" persons in each village targeted in 1948 for search-and-arrest operations with those seized summarily shot on the spot.
The ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the destruction of Palestinian civil society has been deliberately concealed from the Israeli public and the world in the myth of Israel’s ‘heroic’ War of Independence – the article is a risible if small addition to this process of denial. On the Really Big Lie of Israel’s birth it is worth quoting Israel’s military hero of 1967, Moshe Dayan, who has no qualms on the subject. He had this to say when addressing the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa (quoted in Ha'aretz, 4 April 1969):
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Contemporary realities:Israel/Zionism is not racist.
Given the complete failure of the article to admit the crime and original sin of 1948, it is hardly surprising that the article insists – against all evidence to the contrary and common sense – that Zionism is “not racism” and that there is nothing incompatible with Israel’s ‘right’ to be a Jewish state and the aspirations of Palestinians.
Here, the article largely accepts Israel’s view of itself as ‘the only democratic state in Middle East’. It makes some very weak qualifications about (unspecified) forms of discrimination that Israeli Palestinians face (i.e. those not residing in the occupied territories but ‘Israel proper’), but suggests these are not inherent, institutional and can be ironed out. In fact, it goes as far as to insist that “in practical terms” Israel cannot be called a “Jewish-supremacist state” because the only significant form of discrimination is in “giving its national majority rights above the claims of other people outside its borders”. In other words, the Jewish Law of ‘Return’ (sic) is the only thing which ‘contaminates’ Israeli democracy. (To add insult to injury and confound logic the author supports the discriminatory Jewish Law of Return in any case!!)
The claim that Zionism is not racism is simply untenable. Anyone with a modest knowledge of Israeli society (discounting the West Bank and Gaza for the time being) can testify to the many forms of inherent racism and discrimination that exist against Palestinians. Matgamma cannot recognise this as he regards the Palestinians as a 'disadvantaged minority' (and moreover, a minority who deserve "help"(!)). However, their status is much more problematic than this. This is because they are regarded by Israel as an entirely illegitimate potential ‘fifth column’ whose very presence undermines the Jewish character of the state.
This is what explains the fact that: Palestinian rights to own land are severely curtailed in law; Palestinians must relinquish residency rights to live with spouses who reside in the West Bank or Gaza; Palestinians routinely suffer house demolitions as the state and the courts deny them permits to build houses while granting these to Jews; Palestinian communities inside Israel receive only a fraction of the social services given to Jews; Israeli ‘citizens’ are classified on their ID cards on the basis of race/ethnicity; Arab members of the Knesset are routinely arrested, imprisoned and harassed simply for verbally opposing Israeli policies (see the present case of Azmi Bishara) and have been blocked constitutionally from moving a bill to turn Israel into a “state of all its citizens” and change from an ethnocracy to a real democracy, and so on, and so on, and so forth.
That many Israeli politicians and a majority of the population – as polls consistently show – support the voluntary or even forcible transfer of Israeli Palestinians to the West Bank or Jordan, underscores the fact that they are viewed as ‘the enemy within’ and will never enjoy equal rights. The Israeli Deputy PM recently suggested that some 30% of Israeli Palestinians should have their ‘citizenship’ revoked to buttress the demographic balance of power in favour of Jews and that ‘disloyal’ Arab members of the Knesset should be “executed”. A recent poll also found that two-thirds of Israeli’s would refuse to live next to an Arab and that a majority believed Palestinians should have no political representation at all in the Israeli Knesset. (There’s clearly some heroic work to do there by his comrades in appealing to the Israeli working class).
The end of the two-state solution.
The two state solution was always a non-solution for two principal reasons i) It did not consider the obvious implications of allowing Israel’s ‘right’ to exist as a Zionist (i.e. by definition exclusivist/racist) state ii) it gave Israel a veto on the internationally recognised right of Palestinian refugees to return - two thirds of the Palestinian world population. However, even if these ‘objections’ are set aside, the present reality is that the territorial contiguity of the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been so thoroughly broken up by the 450,000 settlers that have colonised it – along with the myriad of checkpoints, settler-only roads, road blocks and military outposts that sustain them, and Israel’s security/apartheid wall, that any prospect of a viable Palestinian state has gone forever.
I would ask the author – has he ever been to the West Bank? Does he even know the sheer size of ‘settlement blocs’ such as Ma’ale Adumin – which has its own municipality and is bigger in population and size to Tel Aviv? Does he seriously think these massive developments can be packed up and put away – or that ANY Israeli government will contemplate their removal? Every single Israeli PM since the creation of the state of Israel has presided over settlement construction – the biggest expansion coming under Barak and the years of the so-called Oslo ‘peace process’. The master plan for expanding Ma’ale Adumim alone envisions a sprawling city from the border of Jerusalem to almost the Jordan River; this development alone will sever the West Bank in two. As Jeff Halper has noted these projects are integral to a “matrix of control” over Palestinians which “consolidates control over roadways, hilltops, junctions and effectively paralyze(s) transportation throughout the country.” The present reality is that the combined effects of settlements, the wall, checkpoints and road blocs today confine Palestinians to 227 [non-contiguous] islands. When the wall is completed it will have annexed at least 40% of the West Bank for Israel.
This brings me to the question of Israeli apartheid – and the author’s bizarre protestations this word is a slur with no basis in fact. How on earth can anyone with a modicum of intelligence and information at their disposal, insist that Israel has NOT introduced a racist system of apartheid in the West Bank? It’s not just the ‘kitsch left’ that use this term – it is used by Desmond Tutu (who knows a thing or two about apartheid) and Jimmy Carter – for the very good reason it explains the lived reality of Palestinians. Moreover, this system has an explicitly racist dynamic. It is driven by a racist determination to manipulate demography and ensure a Jewish majority in the territory controlled by Israel. While Israeli politicians are apt to use the ‘security’ justification when talking to the western media – they are far more open about the real motives in the Israeli press as any observer who cares to look can attest. They understand that for the first time since the state was founded, Israeli Jews no longer form an absolute majority in the territory they control. Today there are roughly 5 million Jews and 5 million Palestinians living in historic Palestine. Within a few years, Palestinians will form a clear majority – and only apartheid or population transfer (favoured by the Israeli Deputy PM) will be able to address this.
Just how WOULD the author describe a system of military occupation in which the majority population cannot move freely, with movement between town and village entirely dependent on a racist permit system and the whims of the IDF? How would he describe a situation when Palestinian villagers in Beit Sahour or Tulkarem lack water and resources when these are freely available to settlers from New York or Eastern Europe? What term does he have for a society that holds people and humiliates them at checkpoints on the basis of their religion and ethnicity? What words does he suggest are best to describe a state that builds ‘Jewish only roads’ – or prevents one ethnic/religious group from visiting their places of worship because they have the wrong ID? Is there a better word than apartheid to describe a situation when an indigenous people are being walled in to separate them from colonists who want their land – but don’t want the people?
Towards a one-state solution.
So what about the future if the two state vision is dead? Paradoxically, the colonisation of the West Bank – while involving a process of ghettoisation and subjugation – has in no way solved the ‘Palestinian demographic problem’ for Israel. As Israel has acquired more land, they have obviously acquired more Palestinians – hence the ever more desperate and elaborate measures to police them and the snaking course of the separation wall which weaves its way this way and that, trying to annex as many settlements and land as possible for Israel, while leaving Palestinians on the other side. The problem for the Israelis is that the dispersal of the settlements is now so wide it is fantasy to assume they can entirely separate the two populations in this way – however oppressive the system of apartheid they operate.
Whether this apartheid solution will work depends in large part on how far the Palestinians are willing to accept the impoverished version of a non-contiguous non-state that the corrupt US sponsored Palestinian National Authority is desperately clinging to. If they don’t – and they take up the growing demand for full civic, political and economic rights across a united single state - this will spell the death-knell for Zionism. Ironically, Israel would be undone by its own aggressive expansionism. As anyone aware of developments in the Palestinian political and intellectual community will attest, more and more Palestinians are indeed giving up the two-state chimera and embracing the demand for ‘one man, one vote’. With it, the Zionist colonial project will collapse.
The increasing popularity of the one-state solution has been furthered by the failure of the morally bankrupt PNA to deliver anything tangible for the people it is supposed to lead. Caught between being a national liberation movement and a government in waiting, the PNA has proved to be neither in the face of the Israeli expansionist juggernaut and US complicity, and is widely seen as a US stooge who will sell the Palestinians historic right to full self-determination in exchange for the flattery of the world’s only superpower.
We should not mourn the end of the PNA’s fantastical belief in two states, or even the PNA itself which will have to dissolve as part of the transformation of Palestinian national aspirations. The very slogan of two-states is now an impediment to justice and part of the problem. It sows illusions that a new ‘peace process’ is possible; that a progressive Zionism is possible, and that Israel is willing or even able to turn back entrenched realities. A shared Holy Land - affording dignity, human rights and security to all - is the only credible and just settlement worth fighting for.
Where to start?
There are so many things wrong with your post Steve, so I'll reduce it down to one question.
How will Israeli Jews be convinced to give up their statehood?
A misguided assumption - and unanswered arguements
Jews will not of course be asked to 'give up their statehood' under a one-state solution. They WILL continue to have a state – but so will the Palestinians. However, they will have genuine citizenship status, bounded by internationally recognised borders, and guaranteeing equal rights before the law. In other words, they will belong to a state in precisely the same way as any member of a mature secular liberal-democracy does. This is in contrast to the present system which institutionalises ethnic-religious discrimination and oppression.
Objection to Zionism - contrary to the officially Israeli view (and one implied by many who advocate the two-state solution) - does not therefore mean dispossessing the existing Jewish population but convincing them that their desire for peace, security and prosperity can only be realised by sharing the land with the indigenous inhabitants. This will not of course be easy. There are a great many major stumbling blocks. However, I would argue these are more psychological than practical.
Top of the list would be convincing Jews to abandon the (extremely tenuous and problematic) sense of security that exclusivist religious-ethnic statehood affords them. This would require a major cultural shift in the way Israelis see themselves. However, it would pave the way for the Jews of Israel to become a fully integrated and organic part of the Middle East. This touches on a core paradox of the present situation: existential anxiety underscores support for Zionism – yet the very basis of Zionism is an impediment to the normalisation of Arab-Israeli relations and peace and security for Jews.
Next to this obstacle would be convincing the Jewish community that they would not find themselves moving from the position of oppressor to the status of the oppressed. There is clearly a major responsibility on the part of Palestinian political parties with respect to this. The tragedy here is that secular Palestinian nationalism has been systematically eroded by Israel's humiliation of the PNA and Fatah corruption. This has left a space for radical Islam and a competing religious solution which seeks to supplant one form of religious exclusivity with another.
Secular currents have also been undermined by the aggressive nature of Israeli expansionism and the daily humiliations of occupation. This has engendered a hardened ‘us or them’ attitude amongst many Palestinians who see their land being expropriated and their livelihoods destroyed. Depressingly, I encountered this view routinely on a recent visit to the West Bank. [Tellingly, I met only ONE Palestinian amongst a great many NGOs, activists, grassroots members of Fatah and Hamas and 'ordinary' people who continued to believe an accomodation with Israel was possible. And this was the Fatah Chief of Staff of the Palestinian National Authority, who could hardly say otherwise given Abbas has staked everything on resurrecting such an accomodation]. Contrary to what the media would have us believe, this hardening of attitudes is of course precisely what Israeli leaders want. It allows them to complete the colonisation of the West Bank while claiming they have ‘no partner for peace’.
Yet, despite a hardening of Palestinian attitudes towards the possible accommodation with their oppressor, Palestinians above all else want a solution to their lived predicament - and this desire comes before any party or religion. It is for this reason that a one-state solution is gaining ground and will continue to gain ground as the idea of a separate, viable Palestinian state is seen to be one whose time has passed. Thus, I would argue the difficulty in affecting a transition in thinking lies much more with Israelis who must relinquish long-standing though misguided beliefs.
If such a transformation sounds incredible, the example of South Africa shows just how far democratic state transformation is possible under the most unfavourable conditions if it can be shown there is no other way out for two supposedly irreconcilable foes. And with so many facts on the ground, there simply IS no other way out. The appeal of the two-state solution lies in its apparant 'realism' and 'simplicity'. But take a long hard look at a map of the West Bank; at the course of the wall; at the scale of settlements; at the sheer size of land confiscation and ask yourself - just where IS the basis of a Palestinian state here? If you can't find it, you have two options. Either deny reality, or re-think the issue - as many are now doing.
PS:
You state 'there are so many things wrong' with my article. Yet, you fail to state any of those things, outside of your question. If you, or any other AWL member/supporter does not mind, just what specific things in the article are 'wrong'? 1) The empirically grounded observation that Zionism is racist? 2) The well established truth of systematic Israeli ethnic-cleansing in 1948? 3) The well supported claim that a Palestinian state has been rendered impossible by facts on the ground?
Oy veh. This again. And with all the tsures I've got already...
Steve -
On the issue of the Israeli-Jews and statehood, Paul's point is that as a national group (which the AWL considers them to be), they are entitled to self-determination up to and including the creation a seperate national entity. The Palestinian Arabs are obviously entitled to the same right. This is ABC socialism (or at least the socialism of our - that is, Bolshevik - tradition).
The suggestion that the demographic intertwining of the two populations and various other factors (such as the settlements and the increasing number of migrant Palestinian workers in Israel) will make the existence of two seperate national entities an impossibility is perfectly legitimate but we in the AWL do not assess that things have reached that point yet. We continue to believe that a programme based on the full national rights of both peoples is still the best platform around which to unite Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish workers in a common struggle. If, during the course of such a struggle, national demands were superceded then that'd be great. But the first question is how we get to that united struggle. And if your starting point is that any (ANY) suggestion that Israeli-Jews have a right to an independent, seperate national entity is necessarily racist then I don't think you've got much chance of engaging Israeli-Jewish workers. No national group in history has magically developed some kind of post-national, Luxemburgist consciousness overnight and sadly I don't think the Israeli-Jews are rushing to be the first.
Briefly on the question of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948, I don't think anyone in the AWL would deny that the fledgling Israeli state had a brutal project for ethnic cleansing or something close to it. Whatever name you want to slap on it, the reality is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled and many more were indirectly expelled due to their feeling that they were safer elsewhere. No-one denies this. What we do say, however, is that it's important to tell all of the truth about the period - including mentioning things like the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Arab countries which took place around the same time. This is not to excuse, explain or in some way apologise for what the Israeli bourgeoisie did. It is merely to uphold some pretty decent "rules" of our tradition and "be true in little things as in big ones," no matter how "bitter" that truth may be for people who want their history to fit neatly into a Hollywood movie-style "imperialists/baddies" and "anti-imperialists/goodies" paradigm.
Finally on the issue of Zionism, I think this time it is you who is buying into an over-simplified version of history. The idea that Zionism can be straightforwardly dismissed as an unambiguously and consistently racist or ethno-supremacist movement (or set of ideas) is "empirically"...bollocks. I'm not a Zionist and in some circumstances (if I was politically active in Israel, for example) I'd describe myself as positively anti-Zionist. But if we accept your blinkered "Zionism as apartheid/racism/ethnic cleansing" then how do we explain things like the extensive tradition of social-democratic labour Zionism that existed in Eastern European Jewish communities and played a role in events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? How do you explain the even more radical tradition of socialist Zionism and the Zionist detachment in the Bolshevik Red Army? How do you explain the great many refuseniks who see themselves as acting out of commitment to a tradition of progressive, social justice Zionism?
I think all of these traditions and ideas are fatally flawed dead-ends whose adherents were fundamentally confused and politically wrong-headed. But you can't just write them out of history. They prove that Zionism - like almost all ideas and movements stemming from the oppression of a national, ethnic or cultural group - was (and in fact remains, albeit to a much lesser degree) incredibly contradictory. Your "Zionism=racism/apartheid" schema would make you fundamentally incapable of relating to, for example, the Courage To Refuse people. Maybe you're prepared to write those people off as racists, fascists, and supporters of apartheid whose decision to risk imprisonment rather than serve Israel's sub-imperialist project in Palestine means nothing at all. But I'm not, and neither is the AWL.
Jews and statehood
Daniel,
My point was that there are only two possible ways that Israel will cease to exist. Either through Arab armies invading, or by Israeli Jews volunteering to give up their state.
Steve has no real answer to this "problem".
still more obfuscations and evasions
Paul:
“My point was that there are only two possible ways that Israel will cease to exist. Either through Arab armies invading, or by Israeli Jews volunteering to give up their state. Steve has no real answer to this "problem"”.
Err..please read post number two again. I think you’ll find I did address this. It’s the bit when I talk about how Israeli Jews might be convinced that a one-state solution is in their interests, and when I recognise there are profound, but not insurmountable, difficulties in this. Thanks for taking the trouble to read my posts closely and to to respond to my specific points in detail.
Daniel:
Thanks for responding directly to some of my points. I will try to do the same – but in the process I want to (re)raise other points which I do not think you have adequately addressed from my posts.
1) "I don't think anyone in the AWL would deny that the fledgling Israeli state had a brutal project for ethnic cleansing.. No-one denies this".
Really? Just look again at what Matgamma actually has written here. Just what IS he implying when he bangs on about the “vicious myths” of the genuinely pro-Palestinian left? Why does he insist on trotting out the Israeli line that “the Arabs fled” – while singularly FAILING to mention the systematic massacres that occurred in dozens of Arab villages? Why is his language and starting point that of ‘Israel’s heroic war of independence’ rather than the Palestinian Nakba? Is this term, so central to Palestinian history and identity, one the AWL would even USE?
It is of course entirely necessary for the AWL to frame the birth of the state of Israel in this way and minimise the historic crimes committed by the founders of this state. For you, the right of Brooklyn Jews to settle on Palestinian land - based on the tenuous claims of a 2,000 year old book - counts for more than the right of recent inhabitants of that land to leave the squalor of their refugee camps and return home. So why on earth SHOULD you highlight these crimes and educate your members/supporters with respect to the full realities of Palestinian dispossession?
2) My Zionism=racism=apartheid ‘simplification’.
You are right to point out the ‘progressive’ and socialist currents that fed into Zionism when it was forged in the early 20th century. I am not ignorant of this, and I take it as a given that: many Zionist pioneers were socialists; many were marxists; many went over to Zionist socialist utopian ideals in the context of 19th century anti-semitism and Nazism. In fact, I would even go further. You strangely refer to the ‘crimes of the Israeli bourgeoisie’ (doubtless to keep intact the fantastical hope that the Israeli working class can be won over to the Palestinian cause and to minimise the complicity of Israeli workers in Palestinian oppression). In fact, I would point out that the social basis of Zionism was disprortionately working class. Interestingly, Illan Pappe’s recent book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ begins with a discussion of Ben Gurion, the first (Labour) PM of Israel, meeting with members of the Hagana in a Tel Aviv trade union building, called the Red House in 1947 – under portraits of Marx and Lenin – to finalise the plans for forced Palestinian dispossession.
That Zionism had socialist roots and progressive ideals in no way negates its central dynamic. As Golda Meyer said, “the essence of Zionism is settlement”. In other words, it was and it remains a colonial movement of land seizure. This is why the Israeli Labour Party has been just as ‘messianic’ in its attempts to ‘redeem’ the land from Arabs as Likud and the religious zealots of Hebron. It was Labour Minister of defence Rabin who urged the IDF to “break the bones” of Palestinians during the first Intifada. It was ‘man of peace’ Barark who doubled the number of West Bank settlements during the Oslo years in a bid to pre-empt any final status agreement and prevent genuine Palestinian statehood.
If we move outside the Labour Party we find the so-called Israeli ‘peace camp’ is also severely compromised by its Zionism as it is simply unable to acknowledge that preserving the Jewish character of Israel conflicts with the aspirations of Israeli Palestinians for full equality. Thus it is not surprising to find Peace Now largely supporting the Sharon-Olmert ‘disengagement’ plan which is unilaterally imposing a final ‘settlement’ on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. The rhetoric of 'two states for two people' which accompanies this plan – endorsed by Bush and Blair – has turned Gaza in to an open air prison and has legitimated construction of the illegal ‘separation’ barrier which is devastating Palestinian towns and villages.
Now I have dealth with the 'contradictory' character of Zionism, I would be very grateful if you could clarify how YOU understand the realities of Zionism as embodied in the state of Isreal. You insist that Zionism is not inherently racist and discriminatory. With respect to Palestinians living inside ‘Israel proper’ can you respond to the following:
1) Just how WOULD you describe their status vis a vis Jews?
2) What forms of discrimination DO you acknowledge exist?
3) Are these in fact ‘racist’?
4) Are the Palestinians of Israel ‘oppressed’?
5) To preseve the Jewish character of the state it is illegal for the majority of land in Israel to be sold to Arabs. Is this acceptable? If not why not - given it is the logical upshot of allowing a state to privilege one ethnci-religious groups over all others? It is, as you say, 'their right'?
With respect to the Palestinians of the West Bank, you/the AWL objects to the term ‘apartheid’ to describe the lived experience of Palestinians. Can you please respond to my initial question:
1) What IS a more approproiate term for the system of roadblocks, checkpoints, Jewish only roads and permits designed to separate settlers from Palestinians and to prevent Arabs moving freely?
2) Just why ARE Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, the House of Commons Select Committee on the Middle East, Christian Aid and the International Court of Justice in the Hague and – importantly – every single Palestinian NGO - wrong in using this term? Can you please offer them some guidance based on your superior reading of the Palestinian experience?..
The end of two states.
“The suggestion that..factors (such as the settlements)..will make the existence of two seperate national entities an impossibility is perfectly legitimate but we in the AWL do not assess that things have reached that point yet”.
Well, that’s ok then. Hardly. Given the question of viability gets to the core of the issue of two states I think you owe it to your supporters to give them more than one sentence and blind faith. Just how has this ‘assessment’ been carried out? What organisations and NGO’s have furnished you with detailed empirical evidence of Palestinian state viability? Call me picky, but from reading Matgamma’s article I suggest your ‘assessment’ lacks a little rigour – given that he wildly under-estimates the number of West Bank settlers at 300,000 - and not the figure of 450,000 accepted by just about everyone. (Just why DOES he insist on minimising Israeli war crimes?..)
To help you respond here, let me sharpen the concept of viability by breaking it down to three elements i. Territorial contiguity ii. Economic independence and sustainability iii. Political sovereignty. With this concept now defined, perhaps you could directly respond to the following points mentioned in my first post..
i) No electable Israeli politician would ever consider sharing their so-called “eternal and undivided” capital. The Israeli press and the overwhelming majority of Israeli society (even those in the ‘peace camp’) do not even CONSIDER East Jerusalem settlements (population 200,000) in any equation of a peace process as they are seen as a residential extension of the city. Yet these massive concentric constructions, along with the wall, have now annexed the would-be Palestinian capital from the West Bank. This has devastated the Palestinian economy and the fabric of towns and villages. Just how do the AWL propose to deal with this? In what way IS a Palestinian state still economically viable and sustainable?
ii) Given that the West Bank as a whole is now like a piece of Swiss cheese (and a shrinking one at that that) given the myriad of checkpoints, roadblocks, settlements and the wall (the latter is not even mentioned by Magamma in his sophisticated 'assesment' of the present juncture!!!) just how IS Palestinian political sovereignty and territorial contiguity still possible?
Over to you..
Moralism and apartheid
Many peoples, minorities and indeed nations have suffered terrible repression that we wouldn't call apartheid. To not understand the structural, social and political differences between the two situations leaves you sounding like a middle-class moraliser. At best.
The "Brooklyn Jew" replies...
Steve –
I find your talk of “obfuscations” a little hypocritical, when you have firstly obviously chosen to ignore large amounts of what I’ve actually written and secondly dodged the issue yourself when it comes to the questions that both Paul and I raised. In the hope that some of its sinks in this time I while reiterate what I’ve already said in responding to both your direct questions and some of your more outlandish distortions.
On Sean’s article, I have no particular brief to defend Sean’s idiosyncratic tone and emphasis on this issue which I am on record as opposing (see here; http://www.workersliberty.org/node/1220). What I am interested in defending, however, is the legitimacy of the two-states formula as a democratic programmatic launch-pad for Arab-Jewish workers’ unity, a belief in the legitimacy of Israeli-Jews as a national group with accordant rights ands ideas such as faith in the revolutionary potential of the Israeli-Jewish working-class. These are all things which you throw out of the window in a flurry of cuss-words like “racist”, “colonial” and “apartheid” without, as Paul says, giving any particular consideration to what these terms actually mean in context.
At one point, you say: “For you, the right of Brooklyn Jews to settle on Palestinian land - based on the tenuous claims of a 2,000 year old book - counts for more than the right of recent inhabitants of that land to leave the squalor of their refugee camps and return home.”
This is a farcical slander with nothing in any AWL literature to substantiate it. What “Brooklyn Jews” are you talking about, Steve? The settlers? A very quick search of the AWL website will take you to this article - http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8647 - which I think is quite clear about the role the settlers play. Where exactly have you got the ridiculous idea that we support their “right” to do what they’re doing from? Certainly not anything we’ve actually said.
Rather, I think you’ve raised this nonsensical straw-man to dodge the real issue. We do, and have always, said that the great many Jewish people who fled to Palestine from Nazism (mostly because they had nowhere else to go) and who represented the foundations of a millions-strong Jewish population in the area had every right to do so. These people have no place in your schema because you insist on seeing the creation of the state of Israel as nothing more than an artificially imposed project of colonial-imperialism rather than a complex phenomenon made up of diverse and contradictory dynamics. Because of this, you are forced to substitute actual engagment with the issues for this utterly meaningless reference to “Brooklyn Jews”. For the record I think our attitude to Israel’s Law of Return is pretty clear in the context of our overall politics on such questions; the law, like all immigration controls, is fundamentally discriminatory and racist and should (again, like all immigration controls) be abolished. I’m not, however, prepared to make the abolition of immigration controls a condition for supporting the right of a national group (the Israeli-Jews) to self-determination.
On Zionism, you claim that two paragraphs that launch some (incredibly sweeping and rather vague) broadsides at “the Israeli peace movement” (although you actually only mention one organisation) “deal with” the contradictory character of Zionism. Your robust belief in your own abilities as a writer is admirable, Steve, but it will take more than a few paragraphs to “deal with” that one.
You chuck out quotes from Golda Meir as if to say “see, I told you; Zionism is reactionary!”, apparently ignoring altogether my quite clear statement that “I'm not a Zionist and in some circumstances (if I was politically active in Israel, for example) I'd describe myself as positively anti-Zionist... I think all of these traditions and ideas [of socialist and labour Zionism] are fatally flawed dead-ends whose adherents were fundamentally confused and politically wrong-headed.”
But Golda Meir – as you half-acknowledge yourself – represents only one tendency within the history of Zionism as a movement. A hegemonic one, yes, but still only one. If you accept the existence of elements within Zionism characterised by a predominantly working-class desire for freedom from racism and oppression (which, like it or not, was what pulled a lot of Jews towards ethno-cultural nationalism in the first place) then it’s not quite good enough to click your fingers and say “it’s all about colonial land-grabbing.” Were the Jews who fled to Palestine during and after WW2 all scheming colonialists? Or oppressed refugees with nowhere else to go who believed that the only way for them to escape oppression forever was to find a state of their own? Acknowledging these things doesn’t mean we have to cede any ground to Zionism; it just means that (as I said before) we’re upholding our duty to tell the truth about the world.
On the Israeli working-class, you make a passing reference to its “complicity in Palestinian oppression” which, judging by your pompous claims about having “dealt with” the issue of Zionism, probably means you think you’ve totally knocked the issue of the revolutionary potential of Israeli workers out of the park. But believe it or not, it’s a little more complex than you seem to have time for. Does the historic complicity of various groups of workers in the imperialist adventures of "their" state (there are examples from British history, French history, American history - you name it...) diminish in any way their revolutionary potential or their fundamental position as part of an exploited working-class?
Moving on, your pithy little list of questions is unhelpful; it introduces nothing new to the debate and is presumably designed to “expose” the fact that
I really am a colonially-minded Brooklyn Jew out to defend, or at the very least ignore, the oppression of Israeli Arabs. But I’ll answer them anyway.
1) Just how WOULD you describe their [Israeli Arabs, or “Palestinians living in Israel proper”] status vis a vis Jews?
An oppressed ethnic minority, discriminated against by the state. I’m not into broad analogies but there are parallels with (for various different reasons) indigenous South American peoples, Aborigines in Australia and Eastern European migrant workers in Britain today.
2) What forms of discrimination DO you acknowledge exist?
This question is ridiculous; am I supposed to answer “none at all! Israel is perfect!”? I acknowledge the existence of all the forms of discrimination that do actually exist. Probably all the same ones that you do, to be honest. Upon what exactly are you basing the implication that I deny the oppression of Israeli Arabs?
3) Are these in fact ‘racist’?
Another stupid question. Of course they are. What have I said that would suggest I think otherwise?
4) Are the Palestinians of Israel ‘oppressed’?
See above.
5) To preseve the Jewish character of the state it is illegal for the majority of land in Israel to be sold to Arabs. Is this acceptable? If not why not - given it is the logical upshot of allowing a state to privilege one ethnci-religious groups over all others? It is, as you say, 'their right'?
Again, a straw-man set up to get me to “expose” myself as a Israeli-Jewish chauvinist. What you don’t seem to understand, Steve, is that preserving Jewish ethno-cultural supremacy is not my starting point. My starting point is; there is an oppressed national group (the Palestinians) and another national group (the Israeli-Jews) whose state is currently engaged in a colonial subjugation of the oppressed group. The question for me and the AWL is “which programmes, slogans and demands will best help us unite the working-classes of both nations in struggle?” At the moment we believe that the demand for full national rights for both peoples – up to and including separate national entities – fits the bill. What is it about any of this that leads you to believe I or anyone in the AWL would defend the way the Israeli state relates to the Arab minority within the population of Israel? Seriously. What?
On “apartheid”, you can reel out your Jimmy Carter reference as much as you like but all it’s doing is making you look a bit silly for having to rely on ex-US presidents to back up your arguments. Apartheid was a specific and particular system of social organisation based on the exploitation of a working-class black majority by a tiny white settler minority. In what sense does Israel resemble this model? Firstly, labour relations between Arabs and Jews were historically based on the exact reverse of this (“Jewish only” labour policies etc.). Secondly, characterising Israel as an “apartheid state” relies on characterising the Israeli-Jews as a colonial-settler caste rather than a legitimate national group. They do not simply represent a tiny elite that has swooped into Palestine and parasitically attached itself onto the top of the Arab population in order to exploit its labour power. With explicitly colonial-settler projects in the past (France in Algeria, say) you could tell the French to go back to France. But what do you say to the Israeli-Jews, Steve? “Go back to Brooklyn?” Get real. “Go back to Poland, circa the early 1940s” is more accurate. Characterising Israel as an “apartheid state” is completely misleading when it comes to how it came into being and the origins of its Jewish population.
As I’ve been trying to stress throughout, we have a duty to tell the truth about things. We can’t be sloppy with political terms and “apartheid” can’t just be used as shorthand or a synonym for “very bad racism/oppression/discrimination”. Not even if Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter say it can.
Finally, on the issue of the “viability” of two states; I’m reluctant to get drawn into an argument about this because I think it distracts from more fundamental differences between us. If it was clear to me that we both accepted some bottom lines (i.e. that two clear national groups exist, that both have working-classes with revolutionary potential and that uniting the two working-classes in common struggle is the primary aim) then a tactical argument about precisely which geographical settlement socialists would advocate in order to foster that unity might be worthwhile. I'm certainly not wedded to the two-states formula and consider demands for, for example, a bi-national federation perfectly legitimate (albeit currently tactical misguided). But things you’ve said about the origins of the state of Israel and bizarre comments about “Brooklyn Jews” suggest that the differences are deeper than a tactical disagreement about a bi-national federation versus two states or whatever. If I’ve misinterpreted those differences and you actually agree with my starting points maybe we can re-address the issue.
I will however say that citing, as you did, the intransigence of the Israeli press about an issue like East Jerusalem is a bit of a non-sequitur. I’m sure the press in the southern US was intransigent about ending segregation but so fucking what? It doesn’t stop us from fighting for it.
As for Israeli construction projects (the settlements, the wall etc.) the demands for me are clear; tear down the wall, disestablish the settlements as colonial outposts. When it comes to the economic viability of a Palestinian state the demands are similarly obvious; Israel should pay massive reparations to any newly established Palestinian state and the EU and the USA should give financial aid to it equivalent to its historic payments to Israel.
I’m sure your response to this will be to say something like “these are pipe-dreams, it’ll never happen etc. etc.”, but if so, in what way does this make you different from the Luxemburgists who opposed national self-determination on the basis that the big imperialist powers simply wouldn’t tolerate oppressed national minorities seceding? If we based our demands on what’s likely to happen in the immediate circumstances we’d end up never saying anything about anything.
I’ll end by taking a tip from you and leaving you some direct questions which I think hit on some of the issues you’ve been dodging or fudging.
1) Do the Israeli-Jews represent a national group? If they are a national group, what rights does that entail?
2) Does an Israeli working-class exist? Is it exploited by a capitalist class? Does it resist this exploitation? Does it have revolutionary potential? Can it be won to a programme of common struggle with Palestinian Arab workers? If not, why not?
3) Was the creation of the Israeli state a colonial-settler project? If so, were Jewish refugees from Nazism unthinking pawns of Zionists machinations or were they in fact colonial-settlers themselves, similar in character to South African Boers (hence the “apartheid” comparison)?
Looking forward to your reply...
My final word
In this, my final reply (these things take time as Morrissey said), I will not attempt any more to draw you into a discussion of the viability of the two-state solution.
Despite the fact this has been a central part of my initial and subsequent posts you have refused to discuss this. In one post you gave me a single sentence on this, assuring me that the AWL had “made an assessment” of the situation and still believed two-states were in fact viable while failing to spell out anything more on just what assessment had been made. In your last post you explicitly refused to comment on the issue of viability because you thought it was not worth arguing with me on this as we had so many fundament differences. (I’m not entirely sure why you then went on to discuss other parts of my post, but still..).
What I want to address are some of the specific points you raised in your last post: 1) Your question regarding ‘Israeli-Jewish’ national identity 2) My supposed slanderous insistence that you are blind to the many forms of discrimination faced by Palestinians.
1) Are the Israeli-Jews a nation?
Firstly, I would begin by stating the question as posed is a misleading one, whether you intended it to be or not. In the sense that Jews living inside Israel DO obviously have a state and DO have a national consciousness - as expressed in their sense of belonged-ness to the geographically and politically defined state of Israel - the answer is obviously ‘yes’. Moreover, contrary to what you might assume, I would assert the national consciousness of Israeli Jews contains within it entirely legitimate and noble aspirations and values - such as the desire for security, freedom from discrimination, and a longing for cultural and religious recognition (aspirations and values which are however entirely consistent with a liberal-democratic secular state).
However, your formulation ‘Israeli-Jew’ is a misnomer in the context of this debate. Israel does NOT and never expressed national identity in the formulation of ‘Israeli Jew’. Instead, Israel declares itself the state of ANY Jew ANYWHERE in the world, regardless of whether they were born in Israel or whether they choose to live in Israel. Therefore your question ‘do I think Israeli-Jews are a nation’ does not in any way correspond with Israel’s ACTUAL self-defined status as a “Jewish and democratic state” belonging to World-Jewry.
I would not accept this fantastical Zionist construction of a ‘world Jewish nation’ - a nation which is pan-cultural and which perversely unites every ‘Jew’ regardless of their place of birth; religious affiliation [yes, even that too as Jewishness is employed by Israel in both racial and religious terms, as I’ll discuss]; political affiliation, and even expressed hostility to the state which claims ‘them’ as their own.
This explains why on Israeli identity cards there is NO SUCH THING as ‘Israeli-Jewish’ national status. ‘Nationality’ on Israeli identity cards is defined for its Jewish citizens only as ‘Jewish’, never ‘Israeli’ (i.e. denoting membership of the world-wide nation of Jews). Nationality for Israeli Palestinians is conversely defined as ‘Arab’. This obviously gives the Palestinians an anomalous, de facto illegitimate and inferior status in their own country – which does not ‘belong’ to them. For how can they ever be full and equal citizens of a country which is not “theirs”?
At best they can have the status of ‘residents’ in the country of their birth; in practice they regarded by a large swathe of the population as an illegitimate ‘fifth column’ whose very presence is a threat to the Jewish character of the state. Every single attempt by Palestinians and (Israelis) to re-define Israel as a “state for all its citizens” (i.e. one belonging to EVERONE within it, Jews and Arabs) has been resisted by the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli Supreme Court and deemed unconstitutional. Moreover, recent changes to the law have rendered it ILLEGAL for a politically registered party to stand for election on a platform which rejects the status of Israel as a “Jewish and (sic) democratic state” (a point I will make again later).
The way in which Israel defines ‘Jewishness’ is even more problematic than has been thus far stated. Israeli law defines ‘Jewishness’ simultaneously as a genetic-racial attribute of ancestry AND/OR religious identity. For a Jew to become an Israeli s/he needs to prove either that 1) He or she is a practicing Jew as determined by a state recognised rabbi or 2) That he or she has inherited Jewish genes. This is the legal basis of the 1950 Law of Return, for determining who is admitted to Israel.
This genetic-religious classification of Jewishness has been subject to major controversy and debate within Israel itself. Haim Cohen, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, has noted “...the bitter irony of fate which has led the same biological and racist laws propagated by the Nazis and which inspired the infamous Nuremberg laws, to serve as a basis for the definition of Judaism within the State of Israel”.
Yet, however unfortunate this may be for some Israelis it is undoubtedly the case that this genetic-religious conflation allows Israel to encourage as much settlement in historic Palestine as possible, in a bid to manipulate the demographic balance of the state in favour of ‘Jews’ (however defined). It underpins the quite desperate attempts of successive Israeli governments to track down ‘lost tribes of Israel’ in all corners of the globe and offer a range of economic inducements to settle in the Palestinian territories.
Not surprisingly, the Israeli state’s construction of Jewishness as a genetic-racial construct also has the most appalling consequences for Israeli political discourse and anti-Arab racism. Thus, it is routine for Israeli politicians and the Israeli media to speak of need to ‘preserve Israel’s Jewish blood’, and to hear in Israel fears that the higher birth-rate of a ‘the backward and uncivilised Arabs’ is resulting in the ‘dilution’ of Israel’s ‘Jewishness’. (If you dispute this, I suggest you read Jonathon Cook’s ‘Blood and Religion: Unmasking the Jewish and Democratic State” for some choice examples of how ‘the Arabs’ are casually referred to by Israeli politicians, or Israel Shahak’s ‘Jewish History: Jewish Religion’).
To conclude on the question of Jewish national identity my position can be summarised thus:
Israeli Jews clearly do have a shared national consciousness and identity which has been forged post 1948. Yet, this consciousness, while expressing legitimate aspirations for a secure homeland free from anti-semitism, is also deeply contaminated by the systematic denial of circumstances surrounding the birth of the Israeli state. In particular:
a) The myth that Zionist settlers heroically developed a barren wilderness and built up a state out of the desert – the ‘people without a land, for a land without a people’
b) The related denial that systematic ethnic cleansing took place against Palestinians in 1948 – and moreover that this was a PRE-PLANNED and NECESSARY act to establish the state of Israel
c) The related myth of the myth of the ‘heroic war of Jewish independence’ against the invading Arab hoards.
The centrality of these foundational myths cannot be over-stated as they continue to pervade Israel’s sense of itself in the world, its attitude towards the Arab states and the Palestinians. (See Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arabs on this). Moreover, I would argue these foundational myths bind the Israeli working class to the Israeli state in a way which renders them incapable of 1) being a revolutionary class 2) forging any meaningful alliance with Palestinian workers.
Finally, I would re-iterate that is entirely misleading to question the one-state solution on the basis of the existence of an ‘Israeli-Jewish’ national consciousness, when the Israeli state does not confine citizenship to ‘Israeli-Jews’. Israel is not founded on a modern concept of Israeli citizenship. As a ‘Jewish state’ for ‘world-Jewry’ it is inherently discriminatory and constitutionally racist (see below). Moreover, even on its own terms, Israel has no stable and consistent concept of Jewish identity as it conflates both genetic and religious definitions – has racist implications for Palestinians seen as belonging to a different ‘race’.
I would further reject the idea of a ‘world-Jewish nation’ on the grounds that a single Jewish national consciousness and identity, uniting every Jew across the planet regardless of their place of birth, culture, whether one practices as a Jew or not; their political affiliation and particular cultural background is a meaningless abstraction. With respect to ‘Israeli-Jewish’ national consciousness as you call it, I believe this national consciousness and identity is in no way threatened by the creation of a single secular liberal-democratic state in the across the land of Israel-Palestine, which affords equality to all its citizens and respects and celebrates the cultural traditions of the inhabitants.
2. The AWL’s inability to comprehend the true nature of Israeli discrimination against Israeli Palestinians.
In your last post you objected to my ‘straw-man’ questioning with respect to the forms of discrimination faced by the Palestinians. How outrageous that I should imply you don’t see the Palestinians of Israel as discriminated against!! How disgraceful of me to imply the AWL denies the existence of racism directed towards the Palestinians!!
Yet, my questioning here was quite deliberate. It was not designed simply to infuriate you and distort your (doubtless genuine) commitment to the Palestinian cause. It WAS designed to get a more precise assessment from you on how you/the AWL conceives the status of Palestinians vis-a-vis Israeli Jews and the Israeli state. I am extremely grateful for you in doing this. It has convinced me further that the AWL is simply incapable of acknowledging the deep, structural roots of Palestinian oppression and discrimination and your organisation is wholly unable to grapple with the underlying and continuous dynamic of the Zionist project since Israel’s inception.
Alarm bells first start to ring on reading you think an appropriate “parallel” exists between the status of the Palestinians and “the treatment of Eastern European migrant workers in Britain today”. I shan’t explore this further but I think it is immediately instructive of the AWL’s gross failure/inability to educate its members on the real nature Palestinian predicament. Where things really become clear though is in your comments regarding the Israeli Law of Return. For you the Israeli Law of Return is just another immigration control which you are opposed to on the grounds that “all immigration controls” are “discriminatory and racist”. Moreover, you are “not prepared to make the abolition of immigration controls a condition of supporting for supporting the right of a national group (the Israeli-Jews) to self-determination”.
This gets to the heart of the AWL’s stance over Israel which insists 1) support for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is entirely compatible with supporting the rights of Palestinians 2) support for Israel in no way implies support for specific discriminatory and racist laws 3) while Palestinians face many forms of discrimination – there is no essential reason why these forms of discrimination cannot be significantly reduced/eradicated within the Jewish state.
To take the Law of Return as a starting point. The Law of Return cannot simply be ‘opposed’ in isolation from the Israeli state itself and the entire Zionist project. It is absolutely foundational. It is also the flip-side of Israel’s illegal denial of the Palestinian right of Return - which the AWL SHAMEFULLY supports. Both were introduced to consolidate and make permanent the Palestinian dispossession of 1948. They were and remain legal instruments to manipulate demography; to ensure a permanent Jewish majority presence in Israel, and to ensure Jewish control over historic Palestine. For the AWL, this manipulation of demography is a perfectly legitimate aim. Don’t believe me? Think I am being unfair? Misrepresenting? This is what Matgamma says: He is opposed to the right of Palestinian right of return because “it is code for the destruction of the state of Israel”. In other words, ‘the Arabs’ must be kept out of their historic homeland to ensure the Jewish character of the state is preserved.
The Law of Return and denial of the Palestinian right of return are in fact only central parts of a WHOLE EDIFICE of state laws aimed at consolidating the ‘gains’ of ethnic cleansing and Palestinian dispossession. I would ask readers to forgive me here – but I feel it is necessary to spell out some more. At the risk of patronising the informed, I think this is necessary to reveal just how systematic and inherent Israel’s racism is, and how its structural manifestation is built into its character as a ‘Jewish state’. Thus we have:
1) The Absentee Property Law [1950] which expropriated the personal property of Palestinians who fled during the Zionist terror campaign of 1947/48, classifying it as "absentee property" and placing it within the power of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property. Under this law the even the property of Palestinians who were still present within the newly created state of Israel - but not physically present on their property ("internal refugees") – became "absentee property." This has created the on-going Orwellian legal category of Israeli Palestinians who are "present absentees" whose land is available for Jewish development.
2) The Land Acquisition Law (1953) which confiscated the land of more than 400 Palestinian villages; and which continues to "validate" retroactively their use for military purposes and for Jewish settlements.
3) Development Authority (Transfer of Property Law) (1950). This transferred confiscated Palestinian villages and priva