On Palestine (14 page)

NC:
We may have a slightly different expectation of what might happen, I don't think anybody can know, but I think we ought to be able to agree on this. The standard discourse is highly misleading; there is no choice between two states and one state, that is not a choice and again this standard discourse is on all sides, you hear it from the Israeli leadership and the Palestinian leadership. I was surprised by what Ian Lustick wrote,
*
but this is almost universal, there is no one-state option. What's left is two possibilities, either the one option of Greater Israel or some other version of it which will be called two states or maybe something like the international consensus. The question is what are the probabilities that the international consensus or something like it can be realized, not just the Israeli version of it?

About that, I don't think we know. My feeling is, you might be right, maybe it's water under the bridge, but it is also possible that this still remains a live option, exactly what it would be like, maybe something like the Geneva proposals, which were not wonderful, but they are not the Greater Israel version. If this could be possible, it would be different from Greater Israel. For one thing, the Jordan Valley would not be included, same for most of Area C, and it would include some kind of shrinking division of Jerusalem, with Palestinian institutions there and it would not be land swaps with Wadi Ara but maybe with fertile land near Gaza which could give Gaza some opportunities. Those are not huge differences, but I think they are differences and how realistic that is I don't know . . . my own feeling is that if US policies shifted it would be realistic.

Again, I don't think we can push the South Africa analogy too far because at this point there are too many differences like the huge internal Black activism inside South Africa, no possible counterpart to that in Israel, the military defeat of South Africa by Cuba, there is nothing like that . . . but some things are similar like US policy. Europe can also take a position here too. Europe is pretty timid, it doesn't want to bother or interfere with the bosses' priorities, but they don't have to be like that. Part of the Third World is also becoming more independent, the US is still overwhelmingly powerful, but in the whole world the power is being diffused and it might make a difference. These countries are not enormously powerful, but still things could happen in the Arab world. I don't think the Arab Spring is finished, there are other things that are going to break open and at least such developments might lead to possible realizations of a bad but preferable two-state option. I think this is a matter that we cannot predict.

IP:
There are other things we can do. There are two ways of looking at the one-state/two-state dichotomy. One is to say that this is an argument about what is the best solution in the future; the other way of looking at it is a way of describing the reality today. For instance if Palestinians inside Israel support the two-state solution, it means they still accept Arafat's contention during the days of Oslo that they are not part of the equation or the solution. And moreover, that they prefer to participate in the present Israeli system and not follow the agenda of the other Palestinian groups. But if they adopt Haidar Eid's position, that means that even they do not have the political power to change the reality now on the ground they still have the right, as Edward Said put it in 1982, “to narrate” their own version of the past and future.

But of course I have to concede that it is not easy to get a clear picture of the Palestinian attitudes, especially those who live in historical Palestine, on this question. Palestinians living in Israel may want the PLO to represent them but declaring it will be suicidal for them; at the same time they are fully aware of the limitation of their representatives in the Israeli Knesset to cater for their needs.

In between these predicaments, they nonetheless begin to adapt to the new realities. The intensifying cultural, political, social, and economic connections between Palestinians living on both sides of the Green Line, and even with the exilic communities abroad, shows that on a small scale and without broadcasting it, they refer to the reality as one state and also seem to share a vision of it.

From a different angle a similar development is taking place on the Jewish side. The veteran settlers of the West Bank have been there as long as most of the Jews inside Israel. They are either redeemers of an ancient land in their own eyes who want to continue the dispossession of the Palestinians or they are settlers wherever they are who have to come to terms with the local people. What matters is not how many Israelis support the two-state solution—many of them do—but how they regard Greater Jerusalem, Qiryat Arba, and Ariel and the Jordan Valley. The vast majority regards this is a part of a Jewish state in a two-state solution. And in such a scenario nothing is left for the other state and what they mean is a support for a one-state version in which Zionism continues to prevail as a racist ideology or if convinced they would eventually accept a different democratic basis for such a state.

From my perspective, thus, a support of a one-state solution is activism that promotes the whole space as one land and the people as one people. What we should not succumb to is the Zionist version of the two states that limits the idea of a Jewish Palestine with few Palestinians in it to “just” 80 percent of Palestine. I still think the principal motive behind Israelis' support for the two-state solution is not reconciliation with the Palestinians but a wish to control as much of the land with as few Palestinians in it as possible.

NC:
It is a different scenario and perspective. Let me go back to your distinction between what can be done in the inside and what can be done on the outside. What I think about the issue, concentrating on the work that can be done on the outside, I can't do anything about what Palestinians will decide and you, quite properly, are asking what can be done from the inside. I think these are kind of complementary. I don't think they have to be conflicting, but from the outside, my perspective, I think the task here and in Europe is to delegitimize the occupation, which is possible, delegitimize Israel insofar as it is involved in the occupation, press forward as much as possible to get the US to drop its unilateral opposition to diplomatic settlement along the lines that were laid out thirty-five years ago and see what the options are to create some alternatives to this Greater Israel picture which we see developing.

IP:
But also delegitimize Israel when it mistreats the Palestinians inside Israel.

NC:
Yes, we should of course be opposed to internal oppression in every country.

But these are kind of separate things. Like when people talk about apartheid, it is a little bit misleading. I mean, inside Israel, there is repression, but it is not apartheid. In the Occupied Territories, it's much worse than apartheid; Black South Africa was not like the Occupied Territories.

IP:
But that is separation. Even the Israelis cannot keep the separation for too long. You can see that the same units that have been used to disperse demonstrations in the West Bank are now used to disperse demonstrations in the Negev. The same laws or rather emergency regulations that were applied only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are now sort of seeping through into Israel because the nature of the relationship is changing.

NC:
It is correct, but if Greater Israel does get established, they won't care about what's happening outside it; they may occasionally send the IDF there to smash up Nablus, but it is irrelevant, it is your business, you rot over there, we are going to take care of the things that happen inside with not many Palestinians. I think a thrust of activism is trying to expose that, expose it, not suppress it and it is being suppressed by the one-state/two-state discourse. So, not suppress it, expose it and struggle against it.

IP:
On this, I agree.

FB: South Africa got rid of institutionalized or legal apartheid in the nineties, but when you look at South African society today and I think Professor Chomsky, you mentioned that yesterday, it is putting a few Black faces in power and keeping the same system in place. So looking at, let's say, a common state or one state, if it was ever to happen, how do you make sure you do not reproduce the South African experience?

NC:
You see, that presupposes that Israel would ever want to take in the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza and I don't think they will. That is the crucial difference from South Africa. South Africa had to incorporate the Black population, they had no choice. First of all, it was the vast majority of the population and secondly, it was their workforce. They could not say, okay we will let you go rot somewhere and then they would disappear, but Israel can, that is the Greater Israel option. There are some people even on the right that would say let's take them all over. But I think what they are going to do is what we've been describing: create this Greater Israel, which won't have a lot of Palestinians and repress them inside [the country], but then the South Africa option doesn't arise. What happened in South Africa, let me say, was a kind of recognition around 1990 by international capital by South African businessmen that were privileged South Africans, by the United States that this cannot go on for reasons that don't exist in the Israel case as we mentioned and therefore they made an agreement which Mandela authorized when he became a freed leader, that they would end formal apartheid and keep the socio-economic structure, which for most Africans did not change a lot. Maybe it's actually worse for them, but that is not going to happen in Israel/Palestine because they do not want the population.

IP:
I think, in a bizarre way it is, maybe I am going too far with this, kind of a silver lining and I'll explain what I mean. It is very clear that the South African post-apartheid model cannot work in Israel, in other words, you cannot buy the Israelis by persuading them to give up their racist ideology in return for maintaining their economic privileges. This is not going to work. In a very bizarre way, Israeli apartheid, if we can call it that, or racist ideology, is far more religious and dogmatic than the white supremacist one in South Africa. Although it had its churches and its own version of theocratic and religious justifications, basically it was a matter of keeping the privileges [intact] and once they were secured in the post-apartheid system you win over quite a lot of people among the white population, which is not going to work in Israel. You will not convince the high-tech sector in Israel that they can be as rich as they are now but they have to live in a more democratic system. Why can I say? It is a bit of a silver lining, unless I am totally pessimistic about the ability of the younger generations to come to aspire for a better world; this would be a striking example in the twenty-first century of something deplorable, unacceptable, because it means you have a segregationist society that is only interested in this core racist ideology and that it is easy to see in such a situation and I think that is why these differences are so important.

NC:
I don't know if I am saying something different, but I would stress again that one crucial difference between Israel and South Africa is that Israel is separationist and South Africa was not. South Africa had to incorporate the Black population; Israel wants to get rid of them. They can do this by drawing the lines around this Greater Israel—expelling Palestinians in it. What they are in fact doing and slowly, is step by step constructing this monstrous thing—Greater Israel—that will not have a lot of Palestinians. The compromise you mentioned in South Africa won't be possible.

IP:
No, it won't work in Israel.

 

 

This conversation between Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and Frank Barat
was recorded on January 17, 2014, and has been condensed and edited.

*
See Ian S. Lustick, “Two-State Illusion,” op-ed,
New York Times
, Septem
ber 14, 2013.

Chapter Five

Inside Israel

 

FB: Ilan, you are a historian, you've published numerous books, among them the famous and controversial for some people
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
in 2006. In 2007 you moved to England where you are currently teaching history at Exeter University. You are part of what is called by some people “the new historians” who give a new analysis and narrative of the history of Zionism and the history of the creation of Israel. You've taken some radical positions against the state of Israel. Why and when did you decide to stand on the Palestinians' side? And what were the consequences for you, being Israeli?

IP:
Changing one's point of view on such a crucial issue is a long journey, it doesn't happen in one day and it doesn't happen because of one event. I've tried in one of my books called
Out of the Frame
to describe this journey out of Zionism to a critical position against Zionism. If I had to choose a formative event that really changed my point of view in a dramatic way, it would be the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982. For us who grew up in Israel, it was the first non-consensus war, the first war that obviously was a war of choice: Israel was not attacked, Israel attacked. Then the first Intifada happened. These events were eye-openers in many ways for people like myself who already had some doubts about Zionism, about the historical version we learned at school.