A Land With People, For a People with a Plan

Israel's Dilemma in Palestine
A Land With People, For a People with a Plan
LUDWIG WATZAL

Two rabbis, visiting Palestine in 1897, observed that the land was
like a bride, "beautiful, but married to another man". By which they
meant that, if a place was to be found for a Jewish "homeland" in
Palestine, the indigenous inhabitants had to leave. Where should the
people of Palestine go? Squaring that circle has been the essence of
Israel´s dilemma ever since its establishment and the cause of the
Palestinian tragedy that it led to. It has remained insoluble. Ghada
Karmi's new book, Married To Another Man, Israel´s Dilemma in
Palestine, (published by Pluto Press, London-Ann Arbor) shows that the
major reason for this failure was the original and unresolved Zionist
quandary of how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land
inhabited by another people. Zionism was never able to resolve the
problem of "the other man".

There are only two ways: Either the "other man" had to be eradicated,
or the Jewish state project had to be given up. Israel did not do
either. It succeeded in 1948 in expelling and keeping out a large
number of Palestinians, but Israel was never able to "cleanse" the
land of Palestine entirely. The fundamental mistake of the Zionists
was their belief that "the entire land of Palestine was Jewish and the
Arab presence in it a resented foreign intrusion". All in all, the
Zionists were "relatively" successful, but for the indigenous owners
of the land it was a catastrophe which has been going on until today.
"If Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not
survive. In the end the region will be stronger than Israel, in the
end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel, " as Akiva
Eldar quoted the former Mazpen member Haim Hangebi in the Israeli
Daily Haaretz on August 8, 2003. The author concludes: "Zionism´s
ethos was not about peaceful co-existence but about colonialism and an
exclusivist ideology to be imposed and maintained by force."

Ghada Karmi is a renowned commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and a well-known figure on British radio and TV. She was born
in Jerusalem, and forced to leave as a child in 1948. She grew up in
Britain where she became a physician, academic and writer. Currently,
Karmi is a research fellow and lecturer at the Insitute of Arab and
Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several
books, including In Search of Fatima, which was widely praised.

The Zionist dilemma was perfectly and bluntly expressed by the so-
called "post-Zionist" representative and professor, Benny Morris,
which led not only to an uproar in the scientific community, but also
to a deep disappiontment, because Morris was considered to belong to
the "new historians". In this interview with the daily Haaretz and in
his article in The Guardian he presented himself as an ardent Zionist.
He encapsulates all Zionism´s major elements, its inherent
implausibility as a practical enterprise, its arrogance, racism and
self-righteousness, and the insurmountable obstacle to it of Palestine
´s original population, which refuses to go away. For his colonialist
and racist view he was severely critiziced by Baruch Kimmerling and
many others who could not understand his attitude.

Morris said incredible things: "A Jewish state would not have come
into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it
was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that
population." According to him the Zionists made a mistake to have
allowed any Palestinans to remain. "If the end of the story turns out
to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will because Ben-Gurion did not
complete the transfer of 1948. (...) In other circumstances,
apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten
years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves (...) in a situation
of warfare (...) acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They
may even be essential (...) If the threat to Israel is existential,
expulsion will be justified." Morris concludes, Zionism is faced with
two options: perpetual cruelty and repression of others, or the end of
the enterprise. These alternatives give the whole enterprise an
apocalyptic touch. For the time being, the Israeli security
establishment has chosen the "iron wall"-concept which refers to a
wall of bayonets.

Ghada Karmi shows in one of her chapters,"The Cost of Israel to the
Arabs", that the price they had to pay was horrendous. She holds not
only Israel but also the West, especially the United States of
America, is responsible for the rejectionist attitude of the Israeli
political class. They just did never consider any compromise. In this
chapter the author describes the damage that Israel´s creation
inflicted on the Arabs, how it has retarded their development and
provoked a reactive and dangerous radicalization. The Arabs are always
asked to be realistic and recognise the facts on the ground. "The
Arabs were expected to make peace with Israel - and to love it as
well." Under the surface Israel has made much progress towards
normalisation with the Arab world. The Arab leaders have to conceal
that truth from their own populations. Karmi views Western policy in
Israel´s case rather strategic than ideological. The installation of
the Jewish state as the local agent of Western regional self-interest
was an effective way of dividing the Arabs, so as to ensure that they
remained dependent and subjugated." Egypt and Jordan are the best
examples.

In the Chapter "Why do Jews support Israel?" the author asks "Why did
a project, which was, on the face of it, implausible in the first
place and inevitably destructive of others, succeed so well? Just as
importantly, why did it continue to receive support, despite a clear
record of aggression and multiple breaches of international law
against its neighbours that ensured its survival - not just as a state
but as a disruptive force?" A number of disparate factors account for
the unconditional support for Israel: the Holocaust and its associated
trauma and guilts, the exigencies of Western regional policy,
religious mythology, so-called common values, and Israel as the "only
democracy in the Middle East" et cetera. It is difficult to find a
similar phenomenon for a state in the 21st Century that gets away with
vast human rights violations, colonial subjugation of another people
and a disdain of international law. Not only for the American Jewish
community but also for many liberal Jews "Israel had taken on a mythic
quality, part-identity, part-religion, and its dissolution, as a
Jewish state, became psychologically and emotionally unthinkable. The
obverse of this coin was of course a paranoid suspicion and hatred of
anyone who threatened Israel in the slightest way." Karmi describes
the Zionist desperate attempt to prove an unbroken chain between the
Jews of Palestine and those of Europe. "Put like this, the absurditiy
of the idea is obvious, but that in fact was the proposition Zionists
wanted people to believe in order to justify the Jewish `return` to
the ´homeland`." Because the Zionist claim rested on such shaky
grounds, Jewish researchers "tried to use genetics as a way of
demonstrating a link between European (Ashkenazi) Jews and their
supposed Middle Eastern origins by way of finding a common ancestry
with Middle Eastern Jews".

The author discusses the relationship between the US and Israel and
the dominant influence of the "Israel lobby", especially AIPAC which
adopted an right-wing posture, both in its support for the Likud party
in Israel and the political right in the US, including the Christian
Zionists whose belief system goes like follows: They adhere literally
to the Old Testament. Fundamental was the return of the Jews to the
land of Israel, which was given them by God through the covenant with
Abraham. According to this legacy all the land between the Nile and
the Euphrates was granted to the Jews. The Jewish return to Palestine
(Israel) was essential as a prelude to Christ´s Second Coming; in that
sense, Jews were the instrument by which divine prophecy would be
fulfilled. However, they were obliged to convert to Christianity and
rebuild the Jewish Temple. Seven years of tribulation would follow,
culminating in a holocaust or Armageddon, during which the converted
Jews and other godless people would be destroyed. Only then would the
Messiah return to redeem mankind and establish the Kingdom of God on
earth where he would reign for a thousand years. The converted Jews,
restored as God´s Chosen People, would enjoy a privileged status in
the world. At the end of all this, they and all the rightous would
ascend to heaven in the final `Rapture`. The Jewish role in all this
meant: "Jews restored to Israel and converted, leading to the Second
Advent, leading to mankind´s redemption."

In chapter four, five and six the author critizices the so-called
peace process, Arafat´s destructive final role and Israel´s attempt to
revive the Jordanian option. In signing the Oslo agreement, "Arafat
legitimized Zionism, the very ideology that hat created and still
perpetuates the Palestinian tragedy". The Israeli aim to destroy the
Palestinans could not have been better described as in the words of
the Israeli sociologist professor Baruch Kimmerling who wrote in his
book Politicide that the process of gradual military, political and
psychological attrition whose aim was to destroy the Palestinians as
an independent people with a coherent political and social existence
would make them vanish by their fragmentation and irrelevance. "Forty
years of Israeli politicide had done its work on the Palestine
question as a national cause. The Palestinians, already in an
unenviable position of physical fragmentation after 1948, became
politically fragmented with the Israeli occupation." In her chapter
"Solving the problem Karmi argues that a two-state solution is out of
reach. Consequently, she calls in chapter seven for a one-state
solution. "In a single state, no Jewish settler would have to move and
no Palestinian would be under occupation." The author thinks that
creating a Jewish state was "crazy" at Herzl´s time and even now
therefore "creating a unitary state of Israel/Palestine, far less
implausible than the Zionist project ever was, should be no less
successful".

Refering to Hangebi´s statement that Israel as a "colonial state"
cannot survive, Karmi proposes an unthinkable idea: "The best solution
to this intractable problem is to turn back the clock before there was
any Jewish state and return history as from there." But at the end,
she turns back to realism: "The clock will not go back and, although
the Jewish state cannot be uncreated, it might be, so to speak,
unmade. The reunification of Palestine´s shattered remains in a
unitary state for all its inhabitants, old and new, is the only
realistic, humane and durable route out of the morass. It is also the
only way for the Israeli Jewish community (as opposed to the Israeli
state) to survive in the Middle East."

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as an editor and a journalist in Bonn,
Germany. He has written several books on Israel and Palestine.

http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m37894&hd=&size=1&l=e

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