I.
Avir harim kalul ba’yayin, ve reach oranim…
The opening lines of Naomi Shemer’s legendary Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold) can still bring goosebumps to my flesh, even decades after I deconstructed and relinquished the mythology connoted by the old Basque lullaby she repurposed as an ode to Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in June of 1967. I first heard the song at age 8 in a documentary film shown at my afternoon Hebrew class (ugh!), all gorgeous evening sunshine glowing pink off the old city, as it related the “miracle” of Israel’s “six-day” triumph over its Arab neighbors in that year. And it made me feel good, in an epic kind of way. Already the song had become a kind of anthem, an emotional seduction into the notion of the conquest of East Jerusalem somehow signifying Jewish salvation. Steven Spielberg even planned to include it in the grossly misleading postcard he tacked on to the end of Schindler’s List, in which Holocaust survivors are shown in Jerusalem as if this was somehow a triumph over Nazism, although he dropped the idea after Israeli test audiences found the connection discordant. But rarely has there been a more powerful song in the Israeli imagination, precisely because of the giddily messianic atmosphere that prevailed in Israel in the wake of the war — an atmosphere that blinded Israelis to the calamitous implications of their conquest. But hey, even at age 6, I bought into that atmosphere.
There was no such thing as television in South Africa in 1967, so it was through grainy black-and-white photographs in the evening newspaper that I learned that Mirage jet fighters — the same delta-winged plane flown over my house with great, and occasionally sound barrier-breaking regularity by the South African Air Force to and from nearby Ysterplaat air base, although the ones in the paper bore the Star of David on their wing tips — had destroyed Egypt’s MiG squadrons on the ground. And with those images, and later ones of paratroopers in webbed helmets at the Wailing Wall, that I learned of the “miracle” — Israel, the tiny Jewish state whose map I knew from the blue and white money tin into which we would put a coin every Friday night after Shabbos dinner, had faced down the combined armies of its Arab neighbors, and had dispatched them within six days. 
And they had “liberated” our “holiest” site, an old stone wall in East Jerusalem pocked with pubic clumps of weeds, into whose cracks and crannies I was told that Jews could insert notes to be read by God — like a hotel message cubby. (Let’s just say that by the time I got there, at age 17, this bubbemeis about holy stones and a celestial post office only fueled my atheism.) Not only that, they’d made Israel “safe” by “liberating” the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In six days! A miracle, like the creation story in Genesis! (Of course, many years later, I would learn that it hadn’t even taken that long; Israel had attacked first and effectively won the war in the opening hours by destroying its enemy’s air forces on the ground — Six Days just sounded like a good name for a war given the creation story.)
Even at the age of six, my first year in big school, Israel’s victory had a profound effect on me. The previous year, I had heard my older step-brothers describe a Phys-Ed class being turned into a kind of playful pogrom, in some sort of fighting game that had pitched the Jewish boys against the rest. Being Jewish jocks, they had, according to my brothers’ account over dinner, given as good as they’d gotten, and it was a genuinely playful thing, besides — the sort of playful contest I recall from my older years that often saw a class divide on lines of “Boer against Brit,” i.e. Afrikaans kids against English-speakers, recalling the Boer War. But at six years old, the idea of a small group of Jewish boys being surrounded and set upon by their gentile classmates was absolutely terrifying.
But the news out of Israel in those mid-year months in 1967 was infinitely reassuring. Israel’s dramatic victory had proved that we, the prickly little state or the Jewish boys in their white Phys-ed (we called it PT) vests and shorts, were not to be fucked with. (I remember a similar effect a decade later, after the audacious raid on Entebbe had freed a group of passengers held on a hijacked Air France plane in Uganda — by then, my friends and I were literally accepting congratulations on Israel’s behalf.) And, I know anecdotally as much as anything else, that anyone ever called a “Jewboy” anywhere in the world walked a lot taller after the first week of June in 1967.
We were certainly granted the recognition on the playground that the epic victory demanded. The idea of Jews as being weaklings or afraid to fight was buried; white South Africa with its own narrative pitting it as an embattled minority in a sea of hostile neighbors embraced the Israeli victory as an inspiration. 
The word “Arab” became synonymous, on the playground and in the classroom, with incompetence and idiocy. “Don’t be an Arab!” I heard a teacher exclaim, more than once in response to a student’s failure to properly carry out his instructions. And, three years after the 1967 war, when the apartheid regime celebrated the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s formal independence from Britain, the ceremony in my school playground saw my Jewish friends and I, in our blue Habonim shirts and scarves and kakhi shorts, line up alongside the boy scouts and the Voortrekkers (the fascist Afrikaner youth movement) to salute the flag and proclaim our loyalty to the Republic (even though the whole point of Habonim was to persuade us to emigrate!). A regime rooted in vicious anti-Semitism and explicit admiration for the Nazis had now come to recognize Israel and its local supporters as a fighting ally in their epic struggle, couched in Cold War language, between white peoples and peoples of color.
Die Vaderland (The Fatherland), a newspaper of the apartheid regime, editorialized in 1969, on the occasion of a visit to South Africa by Ben Gurion, “When we, from our side, look realistically at the world situation, we know that Israel’s continued existence in the Middle East is also an essential element in our own security… If our Jewish citizens were to rally to the call of our distinguished visitor — to help build up Israel — their contribution would in essence be a contribution to South Africa’s security.”
South Africa and Israel became intimate allies in the years that followed the ’67 war, with unrepentant former Nazis such as Prime Minister B.J. Vorster welcomed to Israel to seal military deals that resulted in collaboration in the development of weapons ranging from aircraft and assault rifles to, allegedly, nuclear weapons. I remember well how some products of South Africa’s Jewish day-school system, where Hebrew was taught as well as the mandatory Afrikaans, finding themselvse with cushy posting during their compulsory military services — as Hebrew-Afrikaans translators for Israeli personnel working with the SADF. And that alliance raised the comfort level of the South African Jewish community in apartheid South Africa — while a handful of Jewish revolutionaries had made up a dominant share of the white ranks of the national liberation movement, they were largely disowned by the mainstream organized Jewish community, which had chosen the path of quiescence and collaboration with the regime. Their posture, and Israel’s, were now in perfect alignment.
Fruitful collaboration: The Israeli
military called it the Galil, the SADF
called it the R-4, but it was the same gun
Even as I came to recognize and react to the horrors of apartheid, Israel seemed to me to represent a shining alternative. I remember shocking the grownups at a Pesach seder in 1974, my Bar Mitzvah year, by telling them that I would never do my compulsory military service in South Africa. But they smiled and murmured approvingly when I declared that, instead, I would go to Israel and serve in the army there, because that way “I could fight for something I believe in.” (I had, of course, in my cheesy adolescent way, stolen that line from a Jewish character in James A. Michener’s “The Drifters,” who uses it in relation to Vietnam; but the image in my mind when I read it, as when I said it, was of those paratroopers at the Wailing Wall.)
I could not conceive of Israel as in any way complicit in the crimes of apartheid, much less as engaged in its own forms of apartheid. After all, my connection to Israel, by the time I was 14, came largely through Habonim, a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose Zionism was infused with just the sort of left-wing universalism for which my own anti-apartheid subversive instincts yearned. My Habonim madrichim, bearded radicals from the University of Cape Town opened by mind to Marx and Marcuse, Bob Dylan and Yevtushenko, Woodie Guthrie and Erich Fromm. I was already a Jewish atheist, and considered myself a socialist, but in my mind, Israel and Kibbutz were the absolute negation of all that was wrong with South Africa; as a stepping stone to universal brotherhood and equality as expressed in the idealism of early left-wing Zionist thinkers like Ber Borochov, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber. It became clear to me soon enough (by the time I was 18, to be specific) that their Zionist idealism — and mine — had no connection to the reality of Israel, largely because it ignored the elephant in the room: the Arab population of Palestine.
II.
The war of 1967 was a continuation of the war of 1948, a battle over sovereignty, ownership and possession of the land in what had been British-Mandate Palestine. 
Sensing the escalating conflict between the Arab population and the European Jewish settlers who had been allowed by the British, since their conquest of Palestine in 1917, to settle there and establish the infrastructure of statehood — and moved by the impulse to create a sanctuary for the survivors of the Holocaust while avoiding giving most of them the choice of moving to the U.S. or other Western countries — the U.N. recommended in 1947 that Palestine be partitioned, to create separate Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists were disappointed by the plan, because they had hoped to have all of Palestine become a Jewish state. And the fact that it left Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews lived, within the territory of the Arab zone, albeit run as an international city, was particularly irksome. But the Zionist leadership also knew that the plan was as good as they were going to get via diplomacy, and accepted the plan. (The rest, of course, they would acquire in battle, in 1948 and 1967, in wars that they could blame on their enemies — after all, 40 years after the 1967 war, during which time Israel has been at peace with the enemy it faced on that flank, the West Bank remains very much in Israeli hands, with close to half a million Israelis settled there.)
And, of course, war would likely have looked inevitable, because the Arabs were unlikely to accept a deal in which they were, by definition, the losers. Today, Israel insists that the demographic “facts on the ground” must be taken into account in any peace settlement, and demands that it be allowed to maintain the large settlement blocs built on the best land in the West Bank since 1967. And the Bush Administration has formally endorsed this claim. But look at the “facts on the ground” of 1947/8: The Partition Plan awarded 55% of the land to the Jewish state, including more than 80% of land under cultivation. At the time, Jews made up a little over one third of the total population, and owned some 7% of the land. Moreover, given the demographic demands of the Zionist movement for a Jewish majority, the plan was an invitation to tragedy: The population within the boundaries of the Jewish state envisaged in the 1947 partition consisted of around 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs.
Hardly surprising, then, that the Arabs of Palestine and beyond rejected the partition plan.
For the Arab regimes, the creation of a separate Jewish sovereign state in the Holy Land over which the Crusades had been fought was a challenge to their authority; it was perceived by their citizenry as a test of their ability to protect their land and interests from foreign invasion. And so they went to war believing they could reverse what the U.N. had ordered on the battlefield. For the Jews of Palestine in 1948, a number of them having narrowly survived extermination in Europe, the war was a matter of physical survival. Although in the mythology, the war pitted a half million Jews against 20 million Arabs, in truth Israel was by far the stronger and better-organized and better-armed military power. And so what Israel called the War of Independence saw the Jewish state acquire 50% more territory than had been envisaged in the partition plan. The maps below describe the difference between the Israel envisaged by the UN in 1947 and the one that came into being in the war of 1948.
But maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its “demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation by passed the new Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his property on May 8, 1948, and forbad the refugees from returning.
The revised partition effected by the war left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians destitute in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, a drama that continues to play out today in northern Lebanon.
And for the next generation of Arab leaders, pan-Arabists and nationalists who overthrew the feeble Western-allied monarchies, the fundamental challenge of their nationalist vision became “redeeming” Arab honor by reversing their defeat of 1948. They tried twice, in 1967 and again in 1973, and failed. But even today, as political Islam supplants nationalism and pan-Arabism as the dominant ideologies of the Arab world, reversing the defeats of 1973, 1967 and 1948 remains a singular obsession.
III.
For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered. And when Yitzhak Rabin, more famous as a signatory on the Oslo Agreement, ordered the Israeli military to systematically break the arms of young Palestinians in the hope of suppressing an entirely legitimate revolt, thuggery had become a matter of national policy. It was only when some of those same young men began blowing themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses that many Israel supporters were once again able to construe the Israelis as the victim in the situation; during the intifada of the 1980s they could not question who was David and who was Goliath. Even for those of us who had grown up in the idealism of the left-Zionist youth movements, Israel had become a grotesque parody of everything we stood for.
Even those within the Zionist establishment who came through the same tradition were horrified: Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg wrote in 2003:
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it’s hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism’s superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing…
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below – from the wells of hatred and anger, from the “infrastructures” of injustice and moral corruption…
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state – not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Many pro-Israel commentators today lament what they see as a shift in the Palestinian political mindset from the secular nationalism of Fatah to a more implacable Islamist worldview, supposedly infinitely less reasonable because it couches its opposition to Israel in religious terms. Yet, what is often overlooked is how the Israeli victory in 1967 effected a similar shift
in Zionist ideology away from the secular nationalism of Ben Gurion’s generation to a far more dangerous religious nationalism. Tom Segev, my favorite Israeli historian, writes that the 1967 war resulted in many Israelis coming to see the army as an instrument of messianic theology. The knitted yarmulke of the settlers moving to colonize the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 victory came to replace the cloth cap of the socialist kibbutznik as the symbol of Zionist pioneering. Segev quotes from Rav Kook, the founder of the settlement movement: “There is one principal thing: the state. It is entirely holy, and there is no flaw in it… the state is holy in any and every case.”
The settlement of Maale Adumim, on the West Bank.
Its permanence signifies that whatever their intentions,
the Zionists created a single (apartheid) state for Jews
and Palestinians after 1967
The religious Zionists saw the West Bank and holy land to be “redeemed,” or “liberated” by settlement, and with the tacit support of all Israeli governments since then (and the more active support of some) they rushed to build permanent structures and settle a civilian population there, in defiance of international law, in order to preclude the possibility of returning that land to the Palestians as a basis for peace.
As David Remnick notes in a review of some of the literature on 1967, many Israelis quickly realized that the “Six Day War” had brought about a potential disaster for the Zionist project, because Israel now found itself not only in control of all of the territory of British-Mandate Palestine, but also all of its current inhabitants. He quotes Amos Oz’s dark warning
“For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history. And we must remember: as occupiers, because there is no alternative. And as a pressure tactic to hasten peace. Not as saviors or liberators. Only in the twilight of myths can one speak of the liberation of a land struggling under a foreign yoke. Land is not enslaved and there is no such thing as a liberation of lands. There are enslaved people, and the word “liberation” applies only to human beings. We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured. “
But the religious-nationalists and Likudniks, who had always imagined a “Greater Israel” [EM] the Betar kids I knew in Cape Town used to wear a silver pendant on their chests, depicting a state of Israel running from the Nile to the Euphrates, and they used to sing a song called “Shte Gadot La Yarden” (“Both Sides of the Jordan” [EM] had something else in mind. As I’ve noted previously, it was my South African Habonim elders on Kibbutz Yizreel, in 1978, who first warned my generation that the settlement policies of the new Likud government would turn Israel into an apartheid state — Israel, they said, could not afford to give the Palestinians on the West Bank the vote, but the objective of the settlements was to ensure that Israel did not withdraw from the land it had conquered. The result would be that Israel would rule over its Palestinian residents without giving them the rights of citizens — the very essence of the apartheid regime back home.
And that is, indeed, what had transpired. Today, the West Bank is carved up by hundreds of Israeli settlements, and roads and land reserved for settlers. And they have no intention of leaving, while no Israeli government for the foreseeable future will muster the political strength to be able to remove them (even if that was their intent).
The black and blue areas are Israeli settlements, and the white parts are the roads and land under Israeli control
For an enlarged version of this map, click here.
Today, talk of a two-state solution to the conflict must reckon with the facts on the ground. The 1947 Partition plan left the Palestinians with 45 percent of the territory of Palestine; the 1948 war left them holding onto 22 percent, which fell into Israeli hands in 1967. Even when it talks about a two-state solution, Israel still demands to keep some of the best lands and the key water sources within that 22 percent. A simple glance at the map above should be enough to raise serious questions about the viability of a separate, sovereign Palestinian nation-state. It’s hard to imagine such an entity, blessed with few natural resources and with hardly any independent economic base, maintaining an independent economic existence, even as it is forced to accomodate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees returning from refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere (as most versions of the two-state plan envisage). Indeed, such an entity may well have the feel of an enlarged refugee camp, whose survival is largely dependent on handouts.
When it conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel put the Palestinian population of those territories under the rule of the Israeli state. For forty years, now, the entire population of British-Mandate Palestine has been governed by a single state. The difference, of course, is that those who live within Israel’s 1967 borders have democratic rights, while those outside are governed by an Israeli colonial and military administration. The extent of Palestinian “authority” in those territories — even Gaza — remains entirely circumscribed by Israeli power.
Suddenly panicked by the demographic implications of the apartheid order its 1967 conquests have created, Israeli leaders talk of “separating” from the Palestinians, as if they can dispense with the problem by drawing political boundaries and building a wall around self-governing Palestinian enclaves (Ariel Sharon himself used the analogy with South Africa’s apartheid Bantustan policy to describe the idea.) But the Gaza experience has made clear the limits of that option.
For the Palestinian population, and their Arab neighbors, the crisis of 1948 has never been resolved. And the Israelis, for the last 40 years, by colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have squandered whatever opportunities their victory of 1967 presented for changing the dynamic — instead, they have sought to cling to elements of the “Greater Israel” they created in that year, and in the vain hope that the Palestinians will some day surrender in exchange for whatever Israel chooses to offer them.
But precisely because they have continued to expand Israel since 1967, they have dimmed the prospects for a new partition creating a viable Palestinian state separate from Israel. Today, more than ever, the fate of the Israelis is inextricably, and intimately linked to the fate of the Palestinians — and vice versa. The lasting legacy of the 1967 war is the bi-national state it created in the old territory of British-Mandate Palestine.
Great post, great pictures (I love the Mirage model kit!)
A few random observations of questionable relevance:
1. The 1947 Partition Plan — Both India and Pakistan voted against it. Funny that both countries got partitioned… 3 months earlier. (Which gave them a good taste of how sour such things can turn.) The legitimacy of the process itself is an interesting proposition: can 33 countries, including not a single one in the region, decide to partition a colony without consulting its inhabitants?
2. The six-day war should be renamed the 15,000-day war (and counting).
3. The Creation metaphor is quite lame. To create a universe in 6 days is no big deal. Wars take longer. Much longer. Even Moshe Dayan knew that.
4. Re. the religious shift, this recently caught my eye. The former sephardi chief rabbi of Israel says that there is “absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza.” And his wise son, the chief rabbi of Safed, knows what to do: “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”
Tony’s last sentence echoes the other Tony (Judt). Have we reached the point of no return at which a two-state solution is simply no longer in the cards? If so, then Israel will have proved to be a failed experiment.
The hysterical shrieks from the ADL and the New Republic suggest that, indeed, the two Tonys might be on to something.
You have explained why the 2-state solution is highly problematic.
You also, in case someone hasn’t been alive for the past several decades, give a one-sided account of a list of wrongdoings and grievances.
You do not explain how on earth a single state solution might work, or why it will be in Israeli Jews’ best interest to be ruled by an Arab majority. If it is the settlements in the West Bank that are obstructing the 2-state solution, think how much more is obstructing the single-state solution!
I hope you do realize that Israeli Jews are real people and that Israel is more than about stroking the ego or about posing ethical dilemmas for well-to-do diaspora Jews. The infrastructure for a workable single-state is nonexistent; it can only mean a third dispersal of the Jews from what they
call their homeland.
I believe that the issues of 1948 should be addressed, but within the confines of the 2-state solution. I believe that there are ways of doing this.
It’s “Avir harim tsalul kayayin”, BTW.
Bernard,
About India and Pakistan – Don’t be preposterous. If Pakistan thought partition was a mistake it could reunited in India. It’s been 60 years and there is no constituency for this in Pakistan. There is no such enthusiasm in India either. That is because it is nearly always better to be ruled by one’s own. And that is true in Israel/Palestine as well.
Danny: you’re reading things in my India/Pak comments that aren’t there. I was only pointing out an ironic twist of history.
You write “You do not explain how on earth a single state solution might work, or why it will be in Israeli Jews’ best interest to be ruled by an Arab majority.”
It might not work, and it might not be in Israeli Jews’ best interest. But that’s irrelevant. Plenty of things in history happen that are in no one’s interest. The question is not what “should” happen but what “will” happen.
Tony says that a 2-state solution is becoming politically unfeasible. Then the options left will be either a democracy with a Palestinian majority in the not-so distant future or an apartheid state. Of the 2, the latter is the more likely.
This is obviously the worst possible outcome, since it is clearly in no one’s interest (and it will almost certainly lead to war) but since when has history been known to unfold in a manner that always serves people’s interests.
An apartheid type situation in the West Bank already exists. But the Israeli occupation is unrecognized internationally and Israel has no intentions of annexing the West Bank. I am an Israeli citizen and have not ventured as a civilian to the West Bank (excl. East Jerusalem) for over 20 years. The territorial distinction between Israel and the West Bank is not going away and is as clear-cut as it ever was. As long as this is the case, the 2-state solution is always going to remain on the table.
Whether the Arabs can overpower the Israelis and impose a single-state solution remains to be seen. I imagine that if one’s patience runs to decades, they might win. Of course, we might all be dead by then and all the suffering will be for naught.
This whole 1-state talk is good in a sense if it can scare Israelis to negotiating table. It’s bad if it makes Palestinians think they can eventually win the whole thing. In any case it’s a pipe dream.
Danny, I’m not seeing how your travel history tells us much about the plans of the Israeli government. Failing to travel personally to the West Bank doesn’t absolve you of what the IDF and settlers are doing there in the name of your country.
I hope you are doing your part to convince your fellow citizens that your government needs to start down the path of emptying settlements on the West Bank as quickly as possible (not to mention stopping their expansion). Because from the point of view of Palestinians there, it comes more and more to look like and feel like a permanent annexation, and a permanent occupation.
Tony, thanks for this post. I heard Phyllis Bennis give the nickel version of it on LinkTV this weekend, an impressive feat.
OT but related: have you seen the documentary ‘Amandla’, about the songs of the anti-apartheid and liberation struggle? I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you have.
What struck me was the absence of songs from the transition from war to aftermath — truth & reconciliation. And yet that period, so emotional, must have had its own songs.
Because they’re such powerful images and songs, the ones from the film that stay with the viewer (and are the ones used in the promos) are those that characterized the period at the height of the violence — toyi-toyi chants and ‘Shona Malanga’ being sung by a _massive_ demo. I wish the filmmakers had provided a tiny bit more context (dates, locations) for more of the public events shown.
The U.S. public has literally no conception of the reality that is so vivid in this map — what the anti-occupation activists in the 1990s called “the pieces process”.
Danny: Since Oslo, the settlement population has more than doubled. More than a quarter million Israelis now live in the West Bank. On top of that, you have a separation barrier that compromises the viability of the West Bank.
Walls come down only when both sides want them to come down. Which is why that wall will not come down in generations if ever. Now who but the most irrational optimist can believe that a future government of Israel will ever be strong enough to take down the wall and force a quarter million settlers out of their houses?
So yes the two-state solution will be always on the table — and sadly that table will be its perpetual resting place.
This comprehensive, thoughtful and informed article, is one of the best written.
It is even more cogent because the author openly ackowledges his Jewish identity/history and the metamorphis process that has taken place in his growing up.
His analogy with aparthied ,which many of us fought globally, is also one of the best articulated. The paralllels between the modern Zionist state of Israel and that of the former ugly and oppressive South Africa apartheid regime, are spooky in their accuracy.
I shall see that this is widely distributed in my country,NZ.
Great post. I agree that a two state solution is unlikely. Israel almost certainly won’t be willing to give up E Jerusalem until it’s too late. But a single state wouldn’t be a solution. It would just be the next violent chapter in this tragedy. Some day there will be peace; but without two states, it won’t be soon.
There is one key difference between Israel and Apartheid SA; South Africa could only dream of the international legitimacy that Israel now enjoys. I’m afraid Palestinians have been dehumanized to the point where sometime, in the not too distant future, the Sderot Rabbi’s solution wont seem too far fetched. It could happen in full view of the entire world and none will utter a peep. Europe will pretend not to notice and America will actually praise it.
After seeing the attack on Nahr el Bared, I doubt even the Arabs will say much.
Sorry to seem so dreary,
Z
Well, Ziad might be right: that exact event has already happened to another Semitic people not too long ago. (My apologies if this seems too offensive for some…but that is very much the intended effect.)
I recall seeing a book by an Israeli rabbi, written some years ago, calling for a single state as the only possible democratic solution, but he emphasized that it should be a federal system, along the lines of Switzerland. That way, the Arab areas such as Gaza could have control over most aspec ts of their lives, while Jews in Tel Aviv would not be subject to ‘domination’ by Arabs. Federalism works well in many countries, including Canada. And before you say, ‘Yes, but Israel is not Canada!’, look at other examples, such as Northern Ireland and Bosnia. If a federal system can be made to work in those places, then it can work anywhere. As for the demographic question of who would be the largest group overall, Jews or Arabs, that would be driven by the power of the crib…and could turn the struggle into one taking place in the streets into one in the bedroom. Lends new meaning to the phrase ‘Make Love, Not War’…
post aparthied south africa /cape town
jewish community overwhelmed by malay indian muslim
support for palestine
might say something
Israel was established as an outpost of Western colonialism and imperialism by force of superior organization, superior arms, and superior allies in a war of conquest. The solid Jewish majority in Israel (about 80% Jewish (overwhemingly colonialist immigrant) , 20% Palestinian) was achieved by brutal, armed “ethnic cleansing,” which drove about 700,000 Palestinians from 1948 Israel. Zionism has always been an ally and tool of the then strongest imperialist power in the region, briefly the Ottomans, then the British, now the US. (The brief period when conflict with the British was dominant over collusion with them against the “natives,” ie, the Palestinians, does not change this fact. This “birth pang” associated with the maturation of Zionism, the breakup of the British Empire, and the ascendancy of US imperialism as the dominant regional and world power, was minor compared to the long term alliance of Zionism and British imperialism against the nascent and weak Palestinian national movement.) The colonialist and imperialist nature of Zionist Israel is further confirmed by the fact that as its alliance with British imperialism ruptured, its alliance with US imperialism was being cemented, as well as its eventual alliance with racist, apartheid, and fascist South Africa. The US-Israeli alliance reached its zenieth with the alliance between the most reactionary elements of the ruling classes in both countries, Sharon in Israel and Bush and the neocons in the US, who have attempted to merge and carry out the “Clean Break” strategy of Israeli aggression adopted by Netanyahu combined with “Project for a new American Century” vision of the US as the unchallenged world hegemon. Both have suffered serious defeats, the Israelis in Lebanon in the July 2006 war and the US in Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan. However, the issue is by no means settled. A rise to power in Israel of a Netanyahu-Lieberman government during the last lame duck year of the Bush administration—-or during the term of ANY likely successor, Democrat or Republican (all of whom are committed to aggression in Iraq, Iran, and Palestine) will set the stage for a renewed radical escalation of the MidEast war, with Israel waging war from Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon and Syria and the US from Iraq thru Iran to Afghanistan. In these circumstances, the Zionists will attempt to complete the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine and however much of the rest of the “Land of Israel” (Netanyahu) or ‘Eretz Yisroel” (Lieberman) they are able to militarily conquer. This is the joint Israeli-US plan for the region, along with permanent US occupation of Iraq (the recent “South Korean” model pipedream, the permanent bases, including the stupendous US “Embassy,” and the (pipedream of ) regime change thru military conquest in Iran. Wake up and smell the coffee. This is reality of US-Israeli policy and action. All the talk of achieving “stability” in Iraq, a “diplomatic solution” of the “Iran nuclear problem” and a “peaceful resolution of the Palestinian question thru a two-state solution” are mere subterfuges. These platitudinous absurdities (and they are absurd in light of the facts on the ground) are themselves part of the US-Israeli war preparations, designed on the one hand to isolate and outmanuver their opponents, and on the other to distract from, to provide smokescreens for, the real war preparations escalating daily. (The increasing Israeli settlement of the West Bank and Jerusalem area with armed paramilitary colonial settlements, the relentless building of the illegal Eclosure (Entombment) Wall, the Israeli only “by pass roads,” which dice up the West Bank into easily isolated and invaded cantons, the economic strangulation of Gaza and the West Bank, the bombing and strafing of Gaza, the assassination or imprisonment of much of the democratically elected Hamas Palestinian leadership, the open collusion of Israel and the US with the most collaborationist elements of Fateh, the US “surge” and bases in Iraq, the presence of three US aircraft carrier groups within striking distance of Iran—two in the Persian Gulf—the talk of preparing for “total war” in Israel, and “carpet bombing of Gaza”, the movement in the UN fomented by the US to pass Chapter 7 resolutions against Iran over its nuclear program and Lebanon over the assassination of Harari, both of which, if passed could be enforced by military means, the plans to build a US air base in Lebanon, the specious, patently ridiculous comparisons of third world minor power oil export dependant Iran to mighty Nazi Germany (the greatest military and industrial power of all the capitalist countries in Europe before WWII) and the Iranian nationalist Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and the equally ridiculous comparison of Israel—with the fourth most powerful armed forces in the world including between 200 and 600 nuclear weapons and overall weaponry unmatched in quality by any country but the USA and an as yet unconditional alliance with the world’s only superpower, the US— with the Jews of pre-WWII Europe., etc. LIES OF THIS MAGNITUDE IN SUCH STUNNING AND TOTAL CONTRADICTION TO THE FACTS ON THE GROUND DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH PREPARING FOR PEACE.
The ‘two state solution’ isn’t out of the womb yet, and it’s already still born. The argument of the two staters seems to be that all Israel needs to do is kindly patronise the Palestinians with 22% or less of their former lands without any economic base (or no doubt a lot less – due to ‘facts on the ground’), then they will happily settle down in their bantustans and refugee camps (okay, maybe with running water generously provided) so the fantastical, exclusivist concept of ‘Israel’ can continue dwelling happily ever after – with a few smug pats on its own shoulder. It baffles me as to how intelligent people like Hass, Avnery, Levy and others (Chomsky etc) still doggedly subscribe to it.
The Jewish and Arab identities are not monoliths. From each tree there are syntheses that entwine with ‘the other’ and dissenting strands that branch out in all directions. And at heart the two state solution is perhaps like a pair of Cinderella’s ugly sisters, each seeking to force their feet to fit the one shoe, and thus feeding the conflict. Like Islam, Judaism is first a religion, and the key Zionist idea that it has a ‘racial’ quality is a historical perversity that, ironies of ironies, springs from the same nonsensical fount as anti-Semitism itself (read your Koestler). There’s really no rational reason as to why a unitary state should boil down to some utterly absurd and depressing zero sum game of ‘demographics’.
So a one state solution is better than two, though as Emma Goldmann night have concurred, no state would be even better.
Israel is an entity created by the Western powers to absolve Europe from its genocidal responsibilities toward the Jews. It also served as an advanced post for the Wester interests in the Middle-East. Most of those living in Israel share no common intimacy nor they share the same memories which link man to his/her land. Diaspora will continue to produce diaspora even in a place called Israel. So,treating Israel as a State is an insult to human intelligance.When history is coersed to interpret realities differently from what they actually are, a chain of violant reactions is perpituated to indicate the wrongdoing that took place.Current Palestinian/Israeli srife is a way of expressing this wrong doing.
Politics may cave in to pressures and forced to accept what it may appear to be a solution to the problem, but this will never satisfy the grievances suffered by the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs for the last decades. A two State solution based on the 4th of June 67 proposal, may appear attractive, but hardly applicable considering current Israeli dicourse.The only option left for Israel is to continue its present course to the end.History will have to rectify its course soon.
A fair claim can be made that Israel is not interested in any solution to the Palestinian question save one that exiles all remnant Palestinians to Jordan or into the red sea. The prospect for a future Palestinian state is, given Israel’s fear and hatred for the Palestinian underclass, completely unreal.
The Jews of South Africa are part of the rootless cosmopolitan folk who will serve any master who tickles their tummy. feroze above has a point.The “Malay” settlers who were brought to the Cape in chains settled in the their new environment so much so that one of attractions of life of Cape Town is the “Bo-Kaap area and the cuisine that they brought with them.What can the Jews show for all their affluence but scores of derelict shuls and community centres and most of the alumni of the Jewish school in Cape Town have now settled in Israel most probably in Cis-Jordant the United States, Canada and Australia When sooner or later the majority Africans have no further use for them the rest of will depart without any trace of their presence.The same fate willawait them as occurred in Argentina but since 11/9/2001 and its Iraqi sequel their fate is moot.
read martin cadwells comment above
respect fo sho
Sir, Thanks for a great article and an honest, though perhaps for yourself, a summation of the situation. However, there is a another demon yet to be released…a darker and more evil foe lurking in the wings of History.
I am an American whose family has been here in the US since at least the early 1700’s. As a boy, seven years old in l948, and until I was a soldier in the US army in 1968, I was happy for Israel, though admittedly, I had not considered, nor was I aware of the plight of the Palestinians. That all changed after 1968. From that date onward, I began to take and interest in the “Jewish” problem in the Middle East. More and more, I understood the horror inflicted on the Palestinians. Horror far worse than that ever inflicted on the Germans, or the Japanese. Horror approaching that inflicted on the Jews in Europe. Horror that wil soon surpassed that odious time, since forty years of oppression easily trumps 5 or 10 years of terror, no matter what the nature of the terror.
Still, that is not the ultimate decider for me. The ultimate cause of my present distain, dislike, and disgust with Israel, is the lying, manipulating, and thieving ploys used by the Israeli-american, (small “a” intentional), community of quasi-traitors that have all but ruined this Republic of the United States of America. Now, except for the befuddled, and lied to “born agains”, Israel and Israeli-americans are as disliked and mistrusted by thinking Americans and Europeans to an extent not seen since 1900’s France, and Germany of the Thirties.
Oh, I don’t expect a holocaust. After all, Hitlers are not all that common. However, it is only a matter of time before Jews in different countries are scorned as always in the long history of their zealot-ridden People. What a shame.
It could all have been so different. The Jews could have been a Light to their fellow Semites….indeed, to the Egyptians and Turks, perhaps, as well. However they were wedded to a power not their own. A Power, first England, then the US, that their Diasporic citizens in these coundtries
conned into spending several fortunes in wealth, much world political capital, and now, much blood for the sake of “Israel”. And a brilliant, evil con job it has been.
However, Israel is, as usual in her long history, the victim of its successes having now morphed into excesses.
Time passes. People learn. Now only ten or twenty million in the US and Europe loathe Israel, and, by default,
Jew… Soon, it will be dozens of millions, then, a majority.
Then, Israel will wither, despite her stolen Nuclear capabilities. Hated by her Semitic put-upon brethren, scorned by the other Muslims who for so many centuries have given Jews refuge from Christians, and despised by those Christians, and nations so cynically manipulated by “dual” citizens, it will have reduced itself to a self-sustaining parody, bickering among its (Jewish) citizens, ignored by everyone else.
Israel has forgotten many lessons, but the two most important ones are: 1st, Joseph was in Egypt long, long before Moses, and was a Power in the land, as were his brethren…..until they soured their welcome….and secondly, and far more important…Israel has forgotten Outremer, and it’s long-delayed fate.
For that little bit of the youth in me that still remembers his dreams for Israel in the late ’40’s and 50’s, I hope, I truly hope that somehow, sometime, Israel will wake up, pay the Palestinians for their stolen properties, make peace with her neighbors, and re-join the family of nations, which even an ancient “messiah” of Israel tried to help….Cyrus the Persian. ……But I doubt it. She, Israel, is too much ruled by the dead hand of Lord Acton and his dictum of Awful Truth.
Still, I pray for Her leaders to wise up….but I have little hope.
Max Cadenhead
Sir, Thanks for a great article and an honest, though perhaps for yourself, a summation of the situation. However, there is a another demon yet to be released…a darker and more evil foe lurking in the wings of History.
I am an American whose family has been here in the US since at least the early 1700’s. As a boy, seven years old in l948, and until I was a soldier in the US army in 1968, I was happy for Israel, though admittedly, I had not considered, nor was I aware of the plight of the Palestinians. That all changed after 1968. From that date onward, I began to take and interest in the “Jewish” problem in the Middle East. More and more, I understood the horror inflicted on the Palestinians. Horror far worse than that ever inflicted on the Germans, or the Japanese. Horror approaching that inflicted on the Jews in Europe. Horror that wil soon surpassed that odious time, since forty years of oppression easily trumps 5 or 10 years of terror, no matter what the nature of the terror.
Still, that is not the ultimate decider for me. The ultimate cause of my present distain, dislike, and disgust with Israel, is the lying, manipulating, and thieving ploys used by the Israeli-american, (small “a” intentional), community of quasi-traitors that have all but ruined this Republic of the United States of America. Now, except for the befuddled, and lied to “born agains”, Israel and Israeli-americans are as disliked and mistrusted by thinking Americans and Europeans to an extent not seen since 1900’s France, and Germany of the Thirties.
Oh, I don’t expect a holocaust. After all, Hitlers are not all that common. However, it is only a matter of time before Jews in different countries are scorned as always in the long history of their zealot-ridden People. What a shame.
It could all have been so different. The Jews could have been a Light to their fellow Semites….indeed, to the Egyptians and Turks, perhaps, as well. However they were wedded to a power not their own. A Power, first England, then the US, that their Diasporic citizens in these coundtries
conned into spending several fortunes in wealth, much world political capital, and now, much blood for the sake of “Israel”. And a brilliant, evil con job it has been.
However, Israel is, as usual in her long history, the victim of its successes having now morphed into excesses.
Time passes. People learn. Now only ten or twenty million in the US and Europe loathe Israel, and, by default,
Jew… Soon, it will be dozens of millions, then, a majority.
Then, Israel will wither, despite her stolen Nuclear capabilities. Hated by her Semitic put-upon brethren, scorned by the other Muslims who for so many centuries have given Jews refuge from Christians, and despised by those Christians, and nations so cynically manipulated by “dual” citizens, it will have reduced itself to a self-sustaining parody, bickering among its (Jewish) citizens, ignored by everyone else.
Israel has forgotten many lessons, but the two most important ones are: 1st, Joseph was in Egypt long, long before Moses, and was a Power in the land, as were his brethren…..until they soured their welcome….and secondly, and far more important…Israel has forgotten Outremer, and it’s long-delayed fate.
For that little bit of the youth in me that still remembers his dreams for Israel in the late ’40’s and 50’s, I hope, I truly hope that somehow, sometime, Israel will wake up, pay the Palestinians for their stolen properties, make peace with her neighbors, and re-join the family of nations, which even an ancient “messiah” of Israel tried to help….Cyrus the Persian. ……But I doubt it. She, Israel, is too much ruled by the dead hand of Lord Acton and his dictum of Awful Truth.
Still, I pray for Her leaders to wise up….but I have little hope.
Max Cadenhead
But can Israel survive without a two-state solution? I can think of a number of scenarios in which Israel will simply fail to exist under the present arrangements. One is simple demographics. The Arab population is growing rapidly while the Jewish population is not and many European Jews are emigrating. As hostilities intensify, emigration is likely to increase.
This means Israel can ill-afford another war. In the 56, 67, and 73 wars, Isreal was largely unscathed. In the Gulf War she was hit with a few scuds. The Lebanon War saw hundreds of katuyshas and some longer-range missiles. Another war against Hezbollah will likely see Tel Aviv hit multiple times. A war against Iran would likely be much worse. Israel might “win” such a war, but how many more Jews would begin to emigrate. I’m betting that it would be substantial.
What would happen if the dollar collapsed? Israel is highly dependent on US aid. Even if the aid continued, it would buy far less. Israel is already hard-pressed to maintain the costs of the IDF. Military occupations are expensive. Could Israel then face financial collapse? And a weaker US would be in less of a position to counter anti-Israeli moves other world powers like Russia and China.
What about a shift of opinion in the US? There are already as many Arabs living in the US as Jews, but the number of Arabs is growing rapidly. They’re not financially well-off, but if they follow the example of Arabs in Brazil, the next generations will be much more powerful and influential. Public opinion about Israel could also shift for a number of reasons including Israeli efforts to suppress civilians in the occupied territories.
Are the Israelis stupid enough to try another Liberty incident?
I think the hard-liners are just waiting for some kind of incident that will allow them to expel the remaining Palestinians in the West Bank. That’s why chaos in the Middle East is not necessarily a terrible prospect to some of them. But I think it’s a vain hope. Chaos in the Middle East would just as likely destroy Israel as empower her.
Finally, there’s the possibility of a breakdown of Israel herself. The tension between the Israeli majority and hard-liners could produce irresolvable internal conflicts which could bring the government down.
Frankly, I think the future for Israel looks pretty bleak. Will there be a 100th anniversary? I wouldn’t bet on it.
The whole solution to the Palestine problem could be solved if America simply annexes it all as the 51th state since hell we taxpayers already fork out more loot to this virtual 51th welfare state anyway.
Once America takes over this nation as its 51th state and it becomes “christian” to eliminate any jew or muslim religion the problem will be solved although christians know that this place will be christian for eternity anyway so why should jew or arab have it in the first place?
All this bogus fighting in Iraq is asinine to say the least. America needs to go ahead and make plans to seize and occupy Palestine-Israel from north to south and east to west and assume full control of the Diamona nuclear facility and all present military bases for future control.
America needs to assume control of the economy and all other branches of government and immediately tear down the idiot wal erected.
By doing this and forcing Palestine-Israel to become the 51th state of the USA this would bring a median articulation to the region to neutralize the jew-muslim problems since neither are christian or America.
By doing this and creating an American democracy only this will serve as a beacon for the other muslim states in the region and give America an insider scoop to the fossil fuel for economical prices for the other 50 states.
We must act now.
I’m a non-Jew who is sympathetic to Israel and who used to simply believe the standard Zionist account of Israeli history, putting most of the blame on the Arabs. Lately, I have come to realize that the situation is far more ambiguous. I have just one simple (or simplistic) idea to offer: the idea that no one is really to blame and that the situation is a tragedy, like so much of life. Would not liberalizing the treatment of Palestinians – e.g. allowing them to drive on the highways of their choice – endanger Israelis? Freeing Gaza has led to rocket attacks. Etc. As for settlers, I point out the truism that we Americans ‘took’ America from the Indians, and we didn’t even have a prior historical presence. At the same time, I do not feel guilty about it and do not wish to give the country back, and I especially don’t want to give up my home. Perhaps simple survival condemns us to conflict. I am inclined to think that the ‘solution’ for Israel is a unilateral two-state system implemented by a wall along the pre-1967 border, but would that really guarantee Israel’s security?
Raphael Lemkin is the Polish-Jewish jurist who, having fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for refuge in the U.S., coined the word “genocide” in 1943. He defined genocide as:
“A coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
Exactly what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, in broad daylight. Jews committing genocide. That’s how badly they want all of Palestine.
How do Israelis get away with this? This is the question that needs to be asked. And answered.
Immediately after the June ’67 Campaign, D. Ben-Gurion recommended to return most of the land won from the Arabs (Egypt, Syria, Jordan incl. Arab. Pal.) except Jerusalem and the Etzion Bloq, however, P.M. L. Eshkol and the political and military establishment did not want to listen to the old man. Today, the peace camp can count only on approx. 45 members of Knesset out of a total of 120. There are many reasons for this. 1. B. Netanyahu did not implement the Wye agreement, although signed in the presence of the US-Admin. 2. Gen. E. Barak missed a peace agreement with the PA-Admin. bowing to pressure from Gen. A. Sharon, 3. Labour joined the extreme right wing Likud-Governm. of Gen. A. Sharon, 4. former P.M. Sh. Peres left Labour to join Kadima (an ultra nationalist party) in order to become the next President. – I can’t see anyone of the political establishment in Medinat Israel who can be described as an advocate for peace.
Thanks for this insightful article. I couldn’t agree more, especially with Martin and Max above. Sadly, I have slowly come to believe a two-state solution is a myth. It HAS to be a one-state, one-man-one-vote, federal republic…with religion kept way out of it. A wall, apartheid, terror, ethnic cleansing, injustice, war, etc. just isn’t making it.
Benjamin—
No Israeli government will “unilaterally impose a two-state system implemented by a wall along the pre-1967 border.” Israel is in the process of attempting to colonize, carve up, and annex most of the West Bank. Already living in the WB and around Jerusalem are about 500,000 rabidly fanantical annexationist Zionionist settlers who believe that the Palestinians are the usurpers and that the God has decreed that the entire West Bank including all of Jerusalem belongs to Israel and the Jewish people. They are living in the WB (including the Jerusalem area and east of the Enclosure Wall commanding the Jordan River Valley), armed and organized as paramilitary outposts. And these settlements are being expanded now, as we write. The WB is commanded by major and minor Israeli army bases and outposts from north to south down the middle and criss-crossed and dissected by a massive system of Zionist only roads connecting the settlements with each other, with Israel proper, and with the military bases on the WB. Israel commands all of the water of the WB and usurps about 80% of it for the WB settlers, who are about 20% of the WB population, so the settlers can have running water in every home, thick lawns, swimming pools, and wastefully over-irrigated farms managed in a semi-desert in the style of the Salinas Valley in California, while the Palestinians and their remaining agricultural lands go thirsty. And the Enclosure Wall is being built in the WB, gobbling up and attaching about 40% of the WB to Israel while isolating the shriveled, central core of the WB from Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and Israel. Google Gush-Shalom and maps for a map of all of this. Israel might PROPOSE a two state system along the Green Line of 1967 AFTER suffering a strategic military defeat. This would not solve the problem of over 4 and a half million Palestinian refugees living mainly stateless and in squalor within 100 miles of Israel, forbidden to return to their former homes (or those of their parents or grandparents), while Israel proclaims a “right of return” to every Jew in the world, including over a million from Russia who never set foot in the place till recruited as subsidized colonists, or persons like myself, born in the USA with no connection whatsoever to Palestine or organized Jewish religion. Some of these Palestinian refugees in Lebanon living in two room cinder block homes without running water for for families of 8, 10, or 12 can even see lush, irrigated mainly Russian settlements (subsidized by US tax dollars and guarded by US supplied weaponry) in the very places their families once lived. Such a crying injustice (which also happens to violate international law) cannot edure forever.
As for comparisons between the conquest of North American and Palestine, and the Palestinian issue and the issue of the Native Americans, there are profound differences. (Although as idigenous, non-white, non-European, mainly non-Christian populations of victims of colonialism, the Palestinians do stand in relation to the Zionists as the Native Americans stood in relation to the European colonists). The differences are decisive however. North America was conquered mainly in 18th and 19th centuries, before the rise of modern nationalism and the anti-colonial movements among the world’s oppressed and indigenous peoples. North America was colonized and conquered by the bulk of the surplus population of the entire European continent, not one relatively small religious sect seeking to forge itself into a modern nation in a populated foreign land. And, decisively, the Native Americans were divided into scores of tribes (some now extinct victims of genocide) which the flood of European immigrants conquered seriatim as they moved west and south accross the continent. The Palestinians are not a tribe, much less a collection of distinct and even warring tribes. They are a modern nation of over eight million people, most of whom live within the borders of Mandate Palestine, or as refugees within 100 miles of it. And they (and the Israelis) are surrounded on three sides by other nations which too are victims of Western colonialism and imperialism, ruled mainly by increasingly isolated dictators and monarchs whose survival depends on traitorous alliances with foreign imperialists). This Palestinian nation arose too late to achieve political independence in the struggle against Ottoman, British, Zionist, and now US-Israeli imperialism, before the establishment of the Jewish state. But the Jewish state arose too late (and drew from too narrow a stream of people) to consolidate a conquest and erradication of the Palestinian nation, as the European colonists and immigrants achieved (in the main) over the indigenous Native American tribes. Thus, the Palestinian issue is at the center of the regional and world wide conflict between Israeli and US colonialism and imperialism and the national independance movements of the Middle East and the world (raging now most fiercely in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, but also growing hotter in Venezuela, Bolivia, and the rest of South America), while the Native American issues are largely a matter of major import only in a few localities such as the Navaho southwest and the Lakota (Sioux) regions of the Dakotas,
This article is very well written. History from biblical to modern times is abound with the rise and fall of nations and their civilizations. Most prominent in ancient pages are the flights of the Jews.
At one page,they were children of Prophet Abraham like the Arabs.In another page,they were in Egypt as respected guest because of Prophet Joseph then as lowly and helpless people after him.Then Prophet Moses brought them out of slavery to freedom then as a rebellious followers of the same liberator.King David and Solomon briefly reestablished the honor of the Jews but it too crumbled because of internal factors among them.Afterwards, many nations and people came to enslave them including the European Romans where the diaspora really begun.
Indeed,they deserve a homeland like the rest of humanity, like arabs and the rest of us.The UN action in 1947 must be too hard and painful on the Arabs especially the Palestinians,but things may have been different if the Arabs were consulted or if it was done through a just and democratic way, a process which may be long but it could have averted today’s problems.And Israel would have been more stable and secure unlike today where they seemed bent on annihilating the entire Palestinian people to really feel strong and safe.So the homeland that the people of diaspora was longing for generations was created on a shaky, unstable and weak foundation.
Even then,the people of the world,especially those who follow the pages of Jewish history highly expected Israel to mirror themselves in the flight of the Palestinians. No people in the whole world and in all history has more credibility, experience and power to uplift the life of the victims of occupation,injustice,genocide, slavery and humiliation more than the Jews.
Let us all appeal to the good ones among them and pray for their success.Unless this happens,there surely will be another chapter in their history which will not be favorable on them.
Once upon a time, I followed the doings in Israel first with applause, then with concern, now disgust. The shooting of children and sun-bathing families is too much.
What I see is Nazism transplanted to the Middle East . the question is
The Israeli and American godfathers are preparing to make the Palestinians a “peace” offer they can’t refuse—-an unjust peace offer which none but national traitors would accept. The purpose is to divide the Palestinian political leadership and provide political and diplomatic cover for the military offensive which is imminent. No matter how much the Abbas-Dahlan collaborators and quislings may lust for the privileges which would flow from becoming Israel’s annointed policmen of the Gaza and shriveled West Bank, the Palestinian people will not accept an unjust peace which denies the over 4 million Palestinian refugees their rights of return, accepts an enclosure and entombment wall around the core of the West Bank, accepts Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem, and accepts the growing presence of 500,000 colonialist Zionist settlers in the WB and Jerusalem, and the accompanying Israeli only roads and military bases and control of the Jordan Valley and its waters this necessarily implies.
Yet Israel will agree to nothing less, unless and until it has been strategically defeated on the battlefield. Abbas, Dahlan, and their cronies may serve as Israel’s and the US’s stooges for a period of months or even years, but they should (and no doubt will) put most of their pieces of silver in Swiss accounts and have a well prepared exit strategy. If they ever do get to lord it over a spurious, pseudo-independent Palestinian state totally dominated by Israel (with unconditional US support), it won’t be for long. They will wind up as isolated and dependent upon foreign support as Chalabi, Allawi, and Maliki in Iraq, Karzai in Afghanistan, and the host of other collaborators, kings, and princes desparely clinging to power with US and Israeli assistance throughout the Middle East. Their chances of consolidating rule over a Palestinian Bantustan mini-state are about as good as the present Iraqi puppet government’s in Iraq which the US is demanding sign its own death warrant by passing an “Iraqi” Oil Law which would hand over 80% of Iraq’s future oil wealth to transnational (mainly US) corporations. The era of colonialist and imperialist domination of the Middle East is ending. However bloodily and violently, it will end. (Sooner rather than later if the US and Israel overreach themselves even more grievously by attacking Iran). And the Israeli Zionist conquest and subjegation of the Palestininans will end with it.
The difference between South Africa and Israel is that at the end of the Boer War the British victors gave justice to the Boer refugees by resettling them back on their land. The British were desperate to placate the Boers so as to induce them “to draw a line under the past,” as the Germans put it. They wanted the Boers to become useful citizens in the new Union of South Africa and were willing to put the toothpaste back into the tube to do it.–thus creating a bi-national state. Of course there was still the small matter of the non-whites in South Africa, but they didn’t have guns and could be ignored. They’d jump off that bridge when they came to it.
In 1967 I sent a memo to McGeorge Bundy suggesting that the way was open now for Israel to achieve peace, because after the six day war, the Jordanians were out of the picture and the Israeli’s and Palestinians, the real parties in interest, were free to deal directly with each other to solve the problem. As the British journalist Alan Hart has documented, the Israeli’s had no intention of solving the problem, that is, achieving peace, It was intead, then, as at all other time, that of achieving the whole of Palestine. Thanks to the likes of Walt Rostow, and LBJ they were and have been able to get away with their desire, to the point where a two state solution as a permanent solution would appear to be no longer possible. It might work if a return to ’67 borders is agreed to and a commitment to non-violence on the part of the Palestinians is coupled with the understanding of all that the Palestinians remain free to act politically and argue by all peaceful means for the establishment of a single, truly democratic, non-religious, pluralistic state in all of Palestine as the ultimate solution. The name of such a state no doubt could be neither Israel or Palestine. Such is the price to pay. If so, it is a small one. I agree it (the single state) will happen inevitably, just not soon. If, as it seems, nearly sixty years of abject misery is not enough to force the issue, then maybe 200 years will do it. Then again, the time between the obvious foolishness of the Spahish Inquisition to the time of Luther was surprisingly short.
Great post, Tony. I always appreciate your thoughtful and historically based articles on the topic of Israel. They fascinate me. And you write so well. Your experience growing up in apartheid South Africa. in particular, with the subsequent years on a kibbutz, lends a unique view to the situation in Israel. Again, I deeply appreciate the thought you give to, and the time you spend, writing your articles. I value them highly, and send them to as many people as I can.
That said, I agree with Max and Martin above. Max’s 10:06 AM post echoes my feelings about Israel. I’ve lost patience with it. I have no sympathy for its cause. I’ve even lost the horror I held for decades about anti-semitism: now I cynically call it a self-fulfilling prophecy and ‘so what?’ I was raised by a father who taught me that Ben Gurion was one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived; my father marveled at what he did. I was raised in wonder at the miracle of Israel, and I held that view above my head like Charles Atlas’ world from the age of four. It was inculcated in me.
Now I have nothing but contempt.
When I hear protestations from the ADL or JDL, the taste of disgust sits at the back of my throat. When I read of one more arm-twisting or hasbara activity against a U.S. Congressman or Senator by AIPAC, or its minions, for not placing Israeli foreign policy before that of the USA, a ten-second rage flashes from one side of my temple to the other. Every American death in Iraq reminds me of Philip Zelikow’s stunning late 2003 admission at a war college in Virginia, while still working for Condi, that the administration’s real purpose in going to war was for Israel’s security.
Norman Podhoretz wrote a rambling and historically biased 5,000-word commentary in the Wall Street Journal on May 30, 2007 ** urging Bush to bomb Iran for Israel. His tag line was “As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.” My father taught me from a young age that Jews were above all, and more than any other religion, keepers of a moral standard that they managed to preserve throughout the ages. Not one peep from the American Jewish (religious) community so far decrying this call for what, should it happen, will become a global nuclear war. That says it all.
** http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010139
So many well-informed writers. One could almost derive reason for optimism from the knowledge that the facts of the middle-east are known to so many. But , sadly, the majority of Americans and Israelis go stubbornly forward in their ignorance or arrogance, and the U.S. continues to blindly support the only colonialist regime in the world. One is left wishing for justice as the ultimate outcome.
Thank you so much for putting this article together. I’ve followed all sides in this argument for many years, but rarely have I read an account as touching and honest as this one.
There will be peace in the Middle East – the question is when. I hope and pray the younger generations learn to forget the hate at the surface and see each other as the human beings we are underneath and move on from there.
It may not be obvious to most people, and to ardent Zionists it is not even a realistic thought, but the fact is that Israel is doomed.
It will never be able to get rid of its “Palestinian problem”. What Zionists would like is for the Arabs to just give in and walk away to let the Jews have Palestine. This is wholly unrealistic. It will not happen. The only alternative, then, is outright ethnic cleansing, and not this slow motion genocide that has been taking place over the past 60 years. Israel will have to drop all pretenses, ignore international law (and the ensuing international outrage) and eradicate every last Palestinian from the borders of what Israel wants to call its own. Since this won’t happen (at least I hope not, but I’m afraid we haven’t seen the limits of Israel’s barbarism) then Israel is, in fact, stuck with the Palestinians in its midst.
The main problem is the creation of the state of Israel in a previously inhabited area. Israel should have never been created. The British Mandate was an illegal and immoral act committed by a confluence of colonial powers that had no right to aritrarily declare a Jewish homeland where an indigenous population had existed for thousands of years. It was and remains a brazen land grab by European settlers.
However, too much time has passed, and I don’t believe it is entirely realistic to effect the only fair settlement, which is to eject all the immigrants post 1948 and re-settle them elsewhere, preferably in Western countries (which is what should’ve happened post Holocaust, and would’ve happened if Europe and the US weren’t so anti-Jewish and of such a colonialist mindset).
That being said, the only logical conclusion is a one state solution, with equal rights for all inhabitants under a true democracy (not this sham that Israel insists on calling a “liberal democracy”) and with no preference for any one ethnicity or religion. All Palestinians in the diaspora will have to be allowed to return, and to take back their homes and lands that were wrested from them since 1948. Overall, the Israelis will be the losers, but they’ll lose more if they don’t act to resolve this in a just and equitable manner now. The current situation is untenable.
Right now, Israel has all the power. However, it is lacking control of one crucial element: time. Time is the one weapon that the Palestinians control. If Israel does not enter into sincere negotiations to create a one state solution now, it will be forced into one in the future, and it won’t like the terms.
So that’s it, in a nutshell. I don’t care what anyone else is saying to the contrary. They’re lying, both to their audience and to themselves. Israel is a fiction, and as with any fiction, there will come a time when people must leave their heightened state of fantasy and return to reality. The sooner this happens, the better off we’ll all be.
Abraham,
I enjoyed your post, but have one small quibble. You wrote “[r]e-settle them elsewhere, preferably in Western countries (which is what should’ve happened post Holocaust, and would’ve happened if Europe and the US weren’t so anti-Jewish and of such a colonialist mindset).”
Actually, Abraham, what happened is that the Zionists setting up Israel as a country convinced the US and Brits through their Zionist brethren here not to let Jewish immigrants in. Ditto Canada. This was because they wanted bodies in Palestine and by refusing the WWII survivors a place anywhere, it would force them to go to Palestine. This is discussed exhaustively in the 1984 MacMillan version of “The Transfer Agreement” by Edwin Black, and heavily footnoted. I can’t attest to the subsequent edited versions of this book. I know the JDL had a contract out on Black’s head for writing the first version of the book, and the subsequent versions have another editor added.
There is also an interesting article (June 2, 2007) by Gabriel Kolko called “Israel: Mythologizing a 20th Century Accident” here:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/kolko.php?articleid=11058
The oppression of the Palestinian people cries out to heaven for vengeance. As a west European, I cannot understand how the EU is complicit in this travesty. When the people of Palestine freely elect their representatives, we join a US boycott of them? It is Israel that we should be boycotting. For myself, I make a point of ensuring that no Israeli products come into my household. My county, Ireland, is after all, the land where the term boycott was formed. It is clear to me that Israel has no desire for peace that would require it to obey the Geneva Convention, recognise the right of return of refugees, and accept UNSCR 242.
That such inhumanity towards fellow human being could be perpetrated by so called civilised people, themselves the victims of Nazism, is almost incredible. I say almost, because the only possible explanation for it seems to me that they have been so psychically damaged by their treatment at the hands of the Nazis, that they have lost all capacity for empathy. Of course I know there are many Jews seeking justice. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough of them.
T,
Did you read the piece about this in the Economist two weeks ago? They even used that very same photo for the cover, and came to the exact same conclusions you did about the victory being completely wasted and in fact making Israel worse off today. Did you ghost-write it or something? 😉
I see the anti-Semites have reliably shown up in another PA/Israel thread 🙁
I’m always amazed to watch this process – disgust with Israeli colonial policies somehow becomes a cudgel with which to assault all Jews everywhere. Somehow, some people find ways to actually justify anti-Semitism.
Israelis and Jews are human beings – capable of all good and all evil any other humans anywhere are capable of. Until we allow Jews and Israelis to be judged by that standard, we’ll never be rid of hatred. Why can’t we judge people as individuals? Is a crime committed by a Jew or Israeli somehow worse because of the nationality/ethnic/religious background of the perpetrator – it’s so illogical.
On topic: the only realistic solution is a 2 state solution. I heard all the arguments against it, but sorry, it’s the only game in town. So as Sherlock Holmes might say: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
The question is, how much pain will the Israeli public have to go through to mature toward that solution? 1967 borders? Because only Israel can implement such a solution.
My fear is that it will take a long time and a huge amount of pain. And time is not on Israel’s side.
The challenge facing humanity throughout history remains: How do you go about demythologizing religion?!
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A few responses and final comments:
Alexandria
Actually, Abraham, what happened is that the Zionists setting up Israel as a country convinced the US and Brits through their Zionist brethren here not to let Jewish immigrants in. Ditto Canada. This was because they wanted bodies in Palestine and by refusing the WWII survivors a place anywhere, it would force them to go to Palestine.
Yes, I’m aware of these facts. I was perhaps remiss to leave out such a crucial aspect of the immigration of Jews to Palestine, but it didn’t really go with the “flow” of my response. At any rate, thanks very much for adding these details to the discussion.
I am also familiar with the article by Gabriel Kolko on Antiwar.com that you referenced. It is an equally compelling read and a good companion to Tony’s current piece.
Alex Morgan:
I see the anti-Semites have reliably shown up in another PA/Israel thread
Oh, bother. What a hideous troll. Alex, please point to ONE PLACE in the entirety of the responses that contains anti-Jewish (what you call “anti-Semitic”, which is a misnomer since Arabs are Semites, and most of the citizens of Israel are European, not Semitic) rhetoric. I, myself, have not read one thing that can be construed as anti-Jewish.
What you are probably referring to is the Zionist bashing. Last I checked, Zionism is a political ideology, and a particularly abhorent one at that. Every anti-Zionist comment made here is not only jusitifed, but righteous. I’m sorry you’re too dense to understand the difference.
I expect you to apologize to everyone here for making such an asinine accusation, and for making an ass of yourself in the course of causing an un-welcomed uproar in an otherwise civil discussion.
Great piece! Tony really weaves together an interesting personal portrait and some terrific quotes with a very concise history of the slippery slope of occupation. I do have a problem with its conclusion. Or I think I do. It’s somewhat ambiguous but seems to support a one-state solution. And the reasoning seems to be that Israeli’s will find it impossible to return to the pre-67 war borders and will hold so much of the occupied areas as to preclude a viable state. So the only other solution is one state. But I would think what Tony ahs described is that the choice is retuning to those borders or a one state dominated by theocratic voting, shariah enamored Muslims. Given those two choice I find it rather unlikely that Israel will ultimately be more resistant to a difficult land compromise than a one state solution.
If Jewish Israeli’s would have any doubts about the desirability of becoming a minority again they need look no further than some of the posts right here from people who undoubtedly consider themselves devoted to human rights.
If only the world were a little different secular Jews and Palestinians could have become allies in 1967…
I would very much be interested if Mr. Karon has written about one state elsewhere. Or is that is even the intentional conclusion of this piece.
Danny: I’ll let Tony K answer your question to him, but you make an interesting point I’d like to comment on.
First, a minor quibble: you know as well as I do that, despite Hamas’s “Islamist” bend, Palestinians are not natural Sharia devotees, and so a Palestinian-dominated Israel is unlikely to be what you fear. But, regardless of what it is (and I cannot rule out that you might be right), why would Israelis agree to a binational solution? Good question.
If the choice came down to a one or two state solution, why would they opt for the former? It’s very unlikely they would. I agree with you.
But I don’t think this will be the choice on offer. Israel is already de facto (if not de jure) a binational state. To go the the 2-state route requires hard work but to stay with the 1-state solution is just keeping the status quo. Inertia, division, fear all lead to one-state. Not necessarily a democratic one (which would no longer be Jewish),
but a binational state nevertheless.
My point here is that to be binational and democratic are two distinct, independent issues.
I think Israel will try to hold on to the status quo as long as possible, and continue to hope, against all hope, that Palestinians will leave. I don’t see many Palestinians leaving, but every time I go to Israel I feel the sense of frustration increasing, the desire of many Israelis to pack their bags, and the growing sense that this is not going to end well.
The people I talk to form a biased sample, no doubt, but to me anyway the change of mood and the loss of confidence over the last 10 years has been stunning.
Sadly, too, the harshness of tone. I’ve stopped counting my Peace Now friends who’ve moved over to Likud.
Very depressing.
The skeptics here are right about the practical difficulties of a one-state solution: integrating all parties to abide by the same set of rules will not be easy. I’ve seen somewhere a Swiss-type federal solution as a possibility (was it here among the comments?)–but that needs guarantees that probably can’t be delivered. If I understand correctly, each Swiss canton has a dominant group that enjoys certain advantages (e.g. language rights) over others… just that each group has separate cantons where its members enjoy primacy where others do not interfere. Of course, it’s not quite life and death matters–just inconvenience, really, I guess. If a two-state solution does come about, Israel would have to accept Palestine as its equal–and such Israelis/Jews who fall under Palestinian jurisdiction will have to accept the status of either non-citizens or not-quite-full citizens subject to various limitations. Unlike Switzerland (but rather like the French colonists in Algeria in 1960s), they are likely to be subject to physical threats to their life, limb, and property.
If the equality of the two states is to be more than just theoretical, Israel would have to accept the status its citizens/people are subject to on the Palestinian soil and more or less respect the latter’s sovereignty. I doubt it ever would–all the more so because, even under Oslo, Palestinians were to be given only highly truncated sovereignty subject to various constraints imposed by Israel. More likely, Israel would seek to brush aside Palestinian “sovereignty” by fiat whenever convenient (much like what has taken place in the last decade, in fact). This is not a two-state solution–since one of the two would not be an actual state, but an appendage of the former. Yet, I don’t see how any Israeli politician worth his or her salt could leave hundreds of thousands of Jews in a state of real physical danger….
So, this brings the problem back to the beginning: WB settlements and their populations are unsustainable; the border between Israel and Palestine has to be something neither side can unilaterally dictate today–something like 1967 border would work; the line along which the current security barrier runs, whose course is dictated by Israel’s needs and conveniences, cannot. Even then, there’d still be terrorist attacks for years, perhaps many years–although, hopefully, they’d fall off eventually. (Of course, one-state solution doesn’t preclude continued terrorist attacks either). This will be immensely complicated and politically costly undertaking–something that I doubt can be done by any self-preserving Israeli government especially given the present political environment.
No…I don’t suppose I’m necessarily saying one-state solution would be better or easier than a two-state soluiton, just that a lasting two-state solution will be just impractical as a one-state solution.