The End of the Peace Process, page 37
Prior to 1993, one major problem in all discussions of this terrible conflict has been the irreconcilability between the Zionist/Israeli official narrative and the Palestinian one. Israelis say they waged a war of liberation and so achieved independence; Palestinians say their society was destroyed, most of the population evicted. A careful contemporary reading, however, shows that this irreconcilability was already quite obvious to several generations of early Zionist leaders and thinkers, as of course it was to all the Palestinians. “Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” writes the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in his recent book, The Founding Myths of Israel. “Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. . . . If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking” (p. 43). Ben Gurion, for instance, was always clear: “there is no example in history,” he said in 1944, “of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” Another Zionist leader, Berl Katznelson, also had no illusions that the opposition between Zionist and Palestinian aims could ever be surmounted. And certainly binationalists like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Hannah Arendt were fully aware of what the clash would be like, if it ever came to fruition, as of course it did.
Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate always refused anything that would compromise their dominance. It’s hard to gainsay that attitude now by berating the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947. Until 1948, Zionists held only about 7 percent of the land. Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews who were a minority in Palestine? To make things worse, neither the Balfour Declaration nor the Mandate ever conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start. We now have enough evidence from Zionist sources (through archival work done by the Israeli New Historians) that most of the claims put forward in the official narrative of the state of Israel’s birth were largely untrue and disproved over time. No, the Palestinians did not flee because they were told to by their leaders, but because one of the war aims was to rid Palestine of as many Arabs as possible; no, Britain did not oppose Zionism, it carefully encouraged it; no, the Arab armies did not all try to destroy Israel in 1948, since Jordan in particular, which wanted and got the West Bank, acted in collusion with Israel; and no, the Arabs were not opposed to peace after 1948, since every major leader sued for formal peace treaties but was rejected by Ben Gurion.
In short, then, the conflict is intractable only to the extent that it was always a contest over the same land by two peoples who believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away. One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever. I know this is true for us Palestinians. Why, we say, should a Jew born in Warsaw or New York have the right to come and settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, do not have the same right? The Israeli line used to be: Go and live in some other Arab state, let the Jews have this one. After 1967, the issue between us was exacerbated. Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation, and implacable hostility. To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation, since Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were perceived as enforcers of Israeli security while Palestinians were forced to endure the humiliation of dreadful and noncontiguous little Bantustans that are only about 9 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss and dispossession by the very people who have taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus, ironically, we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.
Israel’s raison d’être as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated. Yet the entire history of the past fifty years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, has been in fact to involve Jews more and more dramatically with those of non-Jews. The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land; this policy of land aquisition in turn has meant acquiring more and more Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 percent of the population. Between Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, which is where the settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2.5 million more Palestinians. Israel has built an entire system of “by-passing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs. But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?
Clearly, a system of privileging Israeli Jews will satisfy neither those who want an entirely homogeneous Jewish state nor those who live there but are not Jewish. For the former, Palestinians are an obstacle to be disposed of somehow; for the latter, being Palestinians in a Jewish polity means forever chafing at inferior status. Israeli Palestinians also feel that they are already in their country, and refuse any talk of moving to a separate Palestinian state, should one come into being. It is also clear that the impoverishing conditions imposed on Arafat will not subdue, much less satisfy, his highly politicized people of Gaza and the West Bank, people whose political aspirations for self-determination have remained steadily constant and, contrary to Israeli calculations, show no sign of withering away. It is also evident that as an Arab people—and, given the despondently cold peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, this fact is important—Palestinians want at all costs to preserve their Arab identity as part of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world. The problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable, just as unworkable as the principle of separation between a demo-graphically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab and Jewish population in Israel and the occupied territories. The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together fairly and peacefully.
What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Israelis and Zionists elsewhere will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances the idea of a state for “ourselves” simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or mass transfer, as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t. The more that current patterns of Israeli settlement and Palestinian confinement and resistance persist, the less likely it is that there will be real security for either side. It was always patently absurd for Netanyahu’s obsession with security to be couched only in terms of Palestinian compliance with his demands. On the one hand, he and Ariel Sharon crowded Palestinians more and more with their shrill urgings to the settlers to grab what they could. On the other hand, Netanyahu expected such methods to bludgeon Palestinians into accepting everything Israel did, with no reciprocal Israeli measures. Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime to incite not only violence, racial or religious strife, but also to criticize the peace process: Palestinians, Israelis, one or several Americans will implement the decree, going through radio broadcasts, pamphlets, schoolbooks, for examples of “incitement.” There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law. Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?
Violence, hatred, and intolerance are bred out of injustice, poverty, and a thwarted sense of political fulfillment. Last fall hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were expropriated by the Israeli army from the village of Um el Fahm, which isn’t in the West Bank but inside Israel. This drove home the fact that, even as Israeli citizens, Palestinians are treated as inferior, as basically a sort of underclass existing in a condition of apartheid. At the same time, because Israel does not have a constitution either, and because the ultra-Orthodox parties are acquiring more and more political power, there are Israeli Jewish groups and individuals who have begun to organize around the notion of a full secular democracy for all Israeli citizens. The charismatic Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, has also been speaking about enlarging the concept of citizenship as a way of getting beyond ethnic and religious criteria that now make Israel in effect an undemocratic state for 20 percent of its population.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) can and are able to live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights denied to that resident Palestinians (e.g., West Bankers cannot go to Jerusalem, and in 70 percent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation). Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. One doesn’t need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict. Here the truth must be faced, not avoided or denied.
There are Israeli Jews today who speak candidly about “post-Zionism, ” insofar as, after fifty years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has provided no solution to the Palestinian presence. I therefore see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for all citizens. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such. This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or surrendering Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence; on the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples. But it does mean being willing to soften, lessen, and finally give up special status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be reduced in scale and exclusivity.
Interestingly, the millennia-long history of Palestine provides at least two precedents for thinking in such secular and more modest terms. First, Palestine is and always has been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally, or exclusively, Jewish or Arab, since although there has been a long-standing Jewish presence there, it is by no means the main one. Not only the Arabs, but Canaanites, Moabites, Jebusites, and Philistines in ancient times, and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines, and Crusaders in the modern ages were tenants of the place which in effect is multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious. In fact, then, there is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today. Palestine is an irreducibly mixed place. Second, during the inter-war period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt, and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals who, frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present, require a new or revived binational vision. The essence of that vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the Other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but attractive.
The initial step, however, is a very difficult one to take. In their culture and ideas of history, Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them. I remember the first time I drove from Ramallah into Israel, thinking it was like going straight from Bangladesh into southern California. Yet it is crucial not to forget that reality is far less than neat. My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people. I see no way of evading the fact that in 1948 one people displaced another, thereby committing a grave injustice. The great virtue of reading Palestinian and Jewish history together not only gives the tragedy of the Holocaust and of what subsequently happened to the Palestinians their full force, but also reveals how in the course of interrelated Israeli and Palestinian life since 1948, one people, the Palestinians, has borne a disproportional share of the pain and loss.
Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian field (its owner helplessly watching) in order to expand a by-pass road. But they are not the only Israelis. For others, who want peace as a result of reconciliation, there is dissatisfaction both with the religious parties’ increasing hold on Israeli life and with Oslo’s unfairness and frustrations. Many such Israelis demonstrate energetically against their government’s Palestinian land expropriations and house demolitions. So one senses a healthy willingness to look elsewhere for peace than in land grabbing and suicide bombs. For some Palestinians, because they are the weaker party, the losers, giving up on a full restoration of Arab Palestine is giving up on their own history. Most others, however, especially my children’s generation, are skeptical of their elders and look more unconventionally toward the future, beyond conflict and unending loss. Obviously, the establishments in both communities are too tied to present “pragmatic” currents of thought and political formations to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo. They refuse to accept the limitations of Oslo, what one Israeli scholar has called “peace with Palestinians,” while others—in particular an impressive Palestinian couple from Nazareth and Haifa—tell me that the real struggle is over equal rights for Arabs and Jews, not a separate, necessarily dependent and weak, Palestinian entity.
The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond square one of the conflict, since each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land, and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.
Yet so massive is the weight of the past and the decades of a more and more intense sense of persecution, suffering, and victimhood that is nearly impossible to think around it, to launch political initiatives that hold Jews and Arabs to the same general principles of civil equality while avoiding the pitfalls of us-versus-them formulae that continue the waste and insecurity. I believe Palestinian intellectuals need to express their case directly to Israelis in public forums, universities, and the media. The challenge is both to and within civil society, which long has been subordinate to a nationalism that has now developed into an obstacle to reconciliation, certainly not its enabler. Moreover the degradation of discourse—symbolized by Arafat and Netanyahu trading charges while Palestinian rights are compromised by exaggerated “security” concerns—impedes any wider, more generous perpective from emerging. The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues (along with the onerous cost of the current peace process) or a way out, based on peace and equality (as in South Africa after apartheid) is actively sought, despite the many obstacles. Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation. Real self-determination. Unfortunately injustice and belligerence don’t diminish by themselves: they have to be attacked by all concerned. Now is the time.
New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1999
Al-Ahram Weekly, January 14, 1999
Al-Hayat, February 1, 1999
1 Quoted in Tikva Honig-Parnass, News from Within, April 1997.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These essays originally appeared under the following titles in the following publications:
