On Palestine (3 page)

The new movement, which is supported by activists all around the world and inside Israel and Palestine, is modeled on the anti-apartheid solidarity movement. This has become clear by the prominence of BDS as the main tactic on campuses during Israel Apartheid Week—
apartheid
now an acceptable and common term used by student activists on behalf of the Palestine cause. This has been followed recently by a scholarly attempt to widen the comparative research on the two case studies, apartheid South Africa and Israel/Palestine, within the paradigm of settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine. In the Americas, in the southern tip of Africa, and in Australia and New Zealand white settlers destroyed the local population by various means, foremost among them genocide, to re-create themselves as the owners of the country and reinvent themselves as its native population. The application of this definition—settler colonialism—to the case of Zionism is now quite common in the academic world and has politically enabled activists to see more clearly the resemblance of the case of Israel and Palestine to South Africa and to equate the fate of the Palestinians with that of the Native Americans.

This new model highlights the significant points of difference between the peace orthodoxy and the new movement. The new movement relates to the whole of historical Palestine as the land that needs support and change. In this view, the whole of Palestine is an area that was and is colonized and occupied in one way or another by Israel, and in that area Palestinians are subject to various legal and oppressive regimes emanating from the same ideological source: Zionism. It stresses particularly the link between the ideology and Israel's current positions on demography and race as the major obstacle for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine.

Today it is an easier task to illustrate this fresh point of view. Since 2010, the Israeli legislation in the Knesset—demanding loyalty to a Jewish state from the Palestinian citizens, codifying (thus-far) informal discrimination in welfare benefits, land rights, and job hiring policies against the Palestinian minority—clearly has exposed Israel as an overtly racist and apartheid state. The Green Line that created different classes of Palestinians (those inside Israel and those in the occupied territories) is slowly disappearing because the same policies of ethnic cleansing are enacted on both sides of the line. In fact, the more sophisticated oppression of the Palestinian citizens inside Israel looks at times worse than the oppression of residents living under direct or indirect military rule in the West Bank.

Finally, the new movement does not shy away from pushing forward a solution that is not the preferred one in the eyes of either the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority (PA), or the political elites of the West: the one-state solution. The activist and the scholarly depiction of Zionism as a settler-colonialist movement and the state of Israel as an apartheid state also determine the mechanism of change. For the orthodoxy that mechanism is the peace process, as if Israel and Palestine were once two independent states and Israel invaded part of Palestine, from which it has to withdraw for the sake of peace.

The new approach proposes the decolonization of Israel/Palestine and the substitution of the present Israeli regime with democracy for all. It thus targets not only the policies of the state but also its ideology. From this perspective the Israeli refusal to allow the 1948 refugees to return home is seen as a racist rather than pragmatic position. The new activists voice their unconditional support for the Palestinian refugees' right of return, and they voice it more clearly it seems than some Palestinian leaders.

In other words, the new approach proposes a paradigm shift for the solidarity movement, which hopefully will gain credence among those in power and in particular those who are engaged with the question of Palestine and peace. This new paradigm offers a new analysis for the present situation and proposes a different vision for the future. Many elements in this new paradigm are old ideas that can be found in the PLO 1968 charter and in the platforms of activist groups such as Abna al-Balad, Matzpen, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These positions have been updated and adapted to the current reality. The issues brought up in the past by these groups were totally ignored by the orthodox peace movement when it supported at least initially the Oslo Accords in the name of realpolitik. Even at the time that the Oslo process seemed to produce some sort of change on the ground, it was in essence a settlement that ignored the fate of the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian minority in Israel and did not relate to either the racist nature of the Jewish state or its role in the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The new movement has created a new dictionary that if used extensively can help shift public opinion on the subject. Below are some of the most illustrative and significant entries in this new language used to analyze the situation today in Israel and Palestine and describe a vision for the future. By adopting a new discourse, the activists can strengthen their commitment toward struggling against the ideology behind the current Israeli abuses and violations of human and civil rights, whether they take place inside Israel or in the Occupied Territories.

I have divided the entries into three different temporal zones. One zone relates to the way the alternative activist perspective views the past in general with its particular focus on how to define Zionism and Israel's actions in the past. The second zone relates to the new definition of Israel today, mainly as an apartheid state, and the implications for activism, in particular outside of Israel and Palestine, of such a definition. This sparks a very relevant conversation about the importance and role of the BDS movement and the various Israel Apartheid Weeks held on campuses around the world. The third zone relates to the future—what are the alternatives to the dismal and ineffective attempts to move the peace process forward on the basis of a two-state solution. This alternative view toward the future substitutes terms such as the
peace process
with
decolonization
and
regime change
and envisages some sort of a one-state solution instead of the two-state solution.

These three different perspectives on the past, the present, and the future were each the focus of the conversations Frank Barat and I had with Noam Chomsky. We did not choose him as our interlocutor because we think he necessarily represents the “peace orthodoxy” (although he still subscribes to some of its basic assumptions) but because we feel that his views on these issues are crucial for pushing forward the discussion on Palestine.

The New Dictionary: The Past

The reassertion of the “Zionism as colonialism” equation is critical not only because it best explains the Israeli policies of Judaization inside Israel and settlement in the West Bank, but also because it is consistent with the way the early Zionists perceived their project and talked about it.

The Hebrew verb
le-hitnahel
or
le-hityashev
and the Hebrew nouns
hitanchalut
and
hitayasvut
were used ever since 1882 by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel to describe the takeover of land in Palestine. Their accurate translation into English is “to settle,” “to colonize,” “settlement,” and “colonization,” respectively. Early Zionists used the terms proudly since colonialism was very positively received by the public at the time (and continued to until the end of the First World War). When colonialism's fortunes changed in the aftermath of the Second World War and
colonialism
connoted negative European policies and practices, the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel looked for ways of dissociating the Hebrew terminology from the colonialist one and started to use more universal and positive language to describe their policies. Despite this energetic attempt to claim that Zionism was not part and parcel of the universal colonialist movement, there was no escape from understanding these Hebrew terms linked to the act of colonization. “To settle” is deemed as an act of colonization in the scholarly and political dictionary of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. So there is no way out of it: even if the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel did not regard the expropriation of Palestine's land, quite often accompanied by dispossession of the natives, as an act of colonizing, everyone else did.

The analysis through the colonialist perspective also challenges the Israeli claim of “complexity” now desperately used by Israeli scholars to fend off the inevitable comparison between the situations in Palestine and in South Africa. The historical timeline is indeed unusual: it involves a nineteenth-century colonialist project extended into the twenty-first century. But the features and solutions for this project are not unique—it is a simple rather than complex narrative. Although its unique timing would undoubtedly require a complex settlement, the analysis is clear even if the prognosis will demand some ingenuity, since decolonization in the twenty-first century is indeed a complex project.

An important task in this respect is introducing to Western schools' curricula and textbooks this understanding of colonialism and strengthening the research on it in universities. If this were to succeed, the media would follow suit. The task is not easy, but if this message were conveyed effectively, we could then hope that every decent person in the West, as in the time of colonialism, would not stand on the side of the oppressive ideology and instead would identify with its victims and deem their struggle as anticolonialist.

This particular new discourse is likely to be branded by the Israelis as anti-Semitic. But nowadays any criticism, even a soft one, of Israel is regarded by the state as akin to anti-Semitism, so it seems this potential accusation should not dissuade us from using the terminology of colonization. Anyone who does not subscribe to the Israeli version of a two-state solution is suspected of being an anti-Semite. Official Israel demands an absolute support of its version so when powerful secretaries of state do not reflect this version exactly they are condemned as anti-Semites. The Israeli version is a Jewish state next to two bantustans, divided into twelve enclaves in the West Bank, and contained in a huge ghetto in the Gaza Strip, with no connection between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and run by a small municipality in Ramallah operating as the seat of government. Official Israel insists that in the interest of national security a Palestinian state, if at all allowed, would be modeled along these lines.

The Present: The Apartheid State of Israel

The scholarly literature comparing the apartheid in South Africa to that of Israel is only now beginning to emerge. Brave scholars such as Uri Davis used the term quite early on. His analysis in the 1980s was the first to expose Israel's land regime and legal practices within the Green Line as another form of apartheid. Further research has highlighted both the similarities and dissimilarities. It was the first visitors from post-apartheid South Africa, who together with former US president Jimmy Carter, frequently used the term. Although it seems from very early on that they realized the regime imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was in many respects far worse than that of the apartheid in South Africa.

The most recent research has noted how uniform Israeli legal, economic, and cultural policies have become on both sides of the Green Line. The de facto and more invisible apartheid has been replaced by racist legislation in the Knesset and open policies of discrimination. It may be a different version of apartheid, but the Israel of 2014 is a state that segregates, separates, and discriminates openly on the basis of ethnicity (which in American parlance would be race), religion, and nationality.

Since the reference to apartheid has become common in the corridors of power as well as among activists, one can see why the inventive group of activists in Canada who initiated Israel Apartheid Week on their own university campus inspired so many others in the world to follow suit. The phenomenon has become so widespread (now also in Israel and Palestine) because it resonates with what people knew is happening on the ground due to the growth of the ISM (the international solidarity movement). It has provided an alternative source of information to the distorted reports of the mainstream media in the West, in particular grabbing public attention in the United States when Rachel Corrie, a young activist in the ISM, was brutally killed by the Israeli army.

The Apartheid Weeks are the main focal point of annual activity for the cause in Palestine and they have won over the campuses that were previously dominated by Zionist lobbying and academia. Because of the kind of harassment Steven Salaita, Norman Finkelstein, and others endured as university appointees suspected of harboring pro-Palestinian views, college professors and staff are still concerned in the United States that they too may be subjected either to a prolonged process of promotion or be disqualified and refused tenure. But the trend in the other direction is growing and campus communities as a space of debate have become more hostile toward those who support Zionism and more friendly to those who wish to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This has not transformed yet into support from university administrations, but the tide is definitely moving in the right direction.