On Palestine (4 page)

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state that resembles South Africa during its worst moment has produced another prognosis that is diametrically opposed to the raison d'être of the “peace process.” Most of the whites in South Africa were still quite racist when their regime of oppression collapsed, which means that change did not come because they were transformed from within the country. They were forced to change by the African National Congress (ANC) struggle and international pressure. While activists still struggle in and outside of Palestine to emulate the unity and power of representation the ANC enjoyed, they can more easily see how to manage a campaign of pressure from the outside inspired by the anti-apartheid movement with South Africa. The new basis for such activity is a realization that the change will not come from within Israel.

This is how the BDS campaign was born—out of a call from Palestinian civil society to pressure Israel through these means until it respects the human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are. The campaign, which in many ways became a movement, has its problems. The absence of clear representative and effective Palestinian institutions has forced the activists to act within a leadership vacuum. Hence at times strategic decisions have seemed to overstep the boundaries of what is tactical. The campaign's relationship with boycott initiatives on the ground (such as the boycott of settlement goods in the West Bank or the rejection of any normalization with Israelis) is not always clear. But these flaws pale in comparison to the campaign's success in bringing to the world's attention a crisis that is at times overshadowed by the dramas that have engulfed the region since 2011. Major companies have rethought their investments in Israel, trade unions have ceded their connections with Israeli counterparts as have various academic associations, including leading ones in the United States, and an impressive number of artists, authors, and world-renowned figures, including Stephen Hawking, have cancelled their trips to Israel.

One component of the campaign—the academic boycott—is still contentious as is clearly evident in the conversation Frank and I had with Chomsky (Norman Finkelstein also publicly condemns this tactic). But it seems that it is accepted by many others as part of the new dictionary of activism and recently led to the creation in Israel of a “committee of boycott from within,” made up of Israeli Jewish academics with impressive membership numbers.

The Present: Ethnic Cleansing and Reparations

Insisting on describing what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since as a crime and not just as a tragedy or even a catastrophe is essential if past evils are to be rectified. The ethnic cleansing paradigm points clearly to a victim and offender and more importantly to a mechanism of reconciliation.

It clarifies the connection between Zionist ideology and the movement's polices in the past and Israeli policies in the present: both aim to establish a Jewish state by taking over as much of historical Palestine as possible and leaving in it as few Palestinians as possible. The desire to turn the mixed ethnic Palestine into a pure ethnic space was and is at the heart of the conflict that has raged since 1882. This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region's population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and the demolition of a dozen towns in 1948.

The international silence in the face of this crime against humanity (which is how ethnic cleansing is defined in the dictionary of international law) transformed the ethnic cleansing into the ideological infrastructure on which the Jewish state was built. Ethnic cleansing became the DNA of Israeli Jewish society—and remains a daily preoccupation for those in power and those who were engaged in one way or another with the various Palestinian communities controlled by Israel. It became the means for implementing a not yet fulfilled dream—if Israel wanted not only to survive but also to thrive, whatever the shape of the state, the fewer Arabs in it, the better.

Ethnic cleansing motivated not only the Israeli policy throughout the years against the Palestinians but also toward the millions of Jews who were brought from Islamic and Arab counties. If they were to partake in the Zionist dream, they had to be de-Arabized (losing any connection to their mother tongue and proactively showing how un-Arab they were by daily expressing their self-hate, as Ella Habib Shohat has put it, for everything that is Arab). The Arab Jews who could have been the bridge to reconciliation turned out to be one of the highest obstacles to it.

Ethnic cleansing's most preferred method is expulsion and dislocation, but in the case of Israel this was not always possible. This limitation forced the Israelis to be quite inventive in finding other means to continue with the vision of an Israel that has an absolute Jewish majority in it. They found that if you cannot expel someone, the second-best option is not to allow him or her to move. Enclaving people in villages and towns and disallowing any spatial expansion of human habitats became the hallmark of Israel's ethnic cleansing after 1948, and it is still used today very effectively. When asked to explain why one new Palestinian village or town was not allowed to be built between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean (a prohibition benefiting the other ethnic group that today constitutes half of Palestine's population), the official Israeli line is that Palestinians do not need the same space as Jews do and are quite happy to be stuck in their homes without free access to green spaces around them. In the past, any short aerial tour over the West Bank would have shown you how Palestinian villages used to look—comfortably spread over the hills of eastern Palestine, beautifully mingling with the natural landscape. But they have been gradually strangulated, especially if they lie in the vicinity of Jewish settlements or are locked between them, as is the case in the Galilee. At the same time the Jewish settlements, on both sides of the Green Line, form a very spacious suburbia.

So the refusal to allow the repatriation of refugees, the military rule on the Palestinians who were left inside Israel (1948–1966), the occupation and treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the erection of the apartheid wall, the silent transfer of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the siege on Gaza, and the oppression of the Bedouins in the al-Naqab are all either stages or components in an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation.

Using the term
ethnic cleansing
is also about justice. At every given moment in the history of the conflict, justice was ridiculed when it was even suggested as a principle in the attempts to solve the conflict.
Ethnic cleansing
however ensures that the basic right of return for those who were expelled is not forgotten, even if it is constantly violated by Israel. It seems that no real reconciliation will be possible without at least recognizing this right.

A new dictionary of activism is based on applying the universal concepts advanced by reparations to the case of the Palestinian refugees. The international community has long ago established the mechanism for treating the victims of ethnic cleansing, and reparations is often used as the remedy and solution. Reparations here exist in a spectrum of possibilities to allow the victims and the victimizers to build a new life. These possibilities include the physical return of those who survived ethnic cleansing or financial compensation to those survivors who wish to build a new life elsewhere. It also includes mechanisms for reintroducing the victims in the country's historical accounts and retrieving their cultural assets. The major point of all these mechanisms is that it is up to the victims of the ethnic cleansing to decide individually which reparation they would prefer.

But there is more at stake here than just defining and properly conceptualizing the reparation paradigm as part of the new recommended dictionary. The idea of reparations, and in particular the right of the refugees to return, is rarely questioned in any other conflict in the world, apart from Palestine. The European Union and the US State Department have a principled position on refugees that accepts without any hesitations or qualifications the right of people to return to their homes after fighting has subsided. The United Nations has a similar universal position and made a concrete decision on the right of the Palestinian refugees to return unconditionally to their homes when it adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948 (it was adopted by the same UN General Assembly that decided on the partition plan and the creation of the Jewish state).

So putting the right of return at the very heart of any future solution is not a revolutionary idea that asks the Western world to betray its principles or adopt a unique exceptional attitude. On the contrary, it requires the Western world to be loyal to its principles and not exclude the Palestinians from the application of those principles. Yet the old peace orthodoxy abandoned these basic human principles and did not even think of fighting for them. Well, the new movement does and will put them at the center of its struggle as long as the last refugee wishes to return. The Al Jazeera “Palestine Papers” leak exposed how far the Palestine Authority was willing to go in order to appease the Israelis. It showed the PA's readiness to give up this right of return. The new realities described at the end of this section reveal the emergence of a new political elite in Palestine that may have a different view on the issue.

Finally, this ideology of ethnic cleansing also explains the dehumanization of the Palestinians—a dehumanization that can bring about the kind of atrocities we witnessed in Gaza in January 2009. This dehumanization is the bitter fruit of the moral corruption that the militarization of the Jewish society bore in Israel. The Palestinians are a military target, a security risk, and a demographic bomb. This is one of the main reasons why ethnic cleansing is an ideology that is regarded by the international community, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as a hideous crime and moreover one that can lead to genocide—since with both crimes you have to dehumanize your victim in order to implement your vision of ethnic purity. Whether you expel or massacre people, including children, they have to be objectified as military targets, not as human beings.

Anyone who has been in Israel long enough, as I have, knows that the worst corruption of young Israelis is the indoctrination they receive that totally dehumanizes the Palestinians. When an Israeli soldier sees a Palestinian baby he does not see an infant—he sees the enemy. This is why all the military documents, whether those ordering the occupation of villages in 1948, those instructing the air force in 2009 to resort to the Dahiyah Doctrine (the strategy that was meant to defeat Hezbollah in the 2006 assault on Lebanon with the carpet bombing of the eponymous southern suburb of Beirut, which is the Shiites' stronghold), or when bombarding Gaza, depict the civilian areas as military bases. In Israel, since 1948, ethnic cleansing is not just a policy—it is a way of life, and its constant practice criminalizes the state, not just its policies.

More important, when one has such a term in the activist's dictionary, he or she realizes that ethnic cleansing does not end because it peters out. It ends either when the job is completed or is stopped by a more powerful force.

This realization turns on its head the logic of the peace process that has been attempted so far. The process was meant to limit the implementation of Israel's policies onto the pre-1967 borders. It has not of course succeed in doing that, as the basic Zionist quest is for control, direct or indirect, over the whole of Palestine. Any tactical concessions on this space have been only due to demographic considerations, not a desire for peace and reconciliation. For this reason, the direct control over the Gaza Strip has been abandoned and the Zionist Left supports the two-state solution. But this course of action is not working and as the recent, more direct ethnic cleansing operations of Israel in the Negev, the Jordan Valley, and the Greater Jerusalem area have shown, the old plan A—of direct expulsion—is still used in order to complete the work that was begun in 1948.

Thus, the peace process forces Israel to be more inventive in its ethnic cleansing strategy but does not require it to stop that strategy. The new dictionary regards the end of the ethnic cleansing as a precondition for peace.

The depiction of Zionism as colonialism, the analysis of Israel as an apartheid state, and the recognition of how deeply imbedded the notion of ethnic cleansing is in Jewish society in Israel is the source of thee key entries in our new dictionary shaping our view of the future:
decolonization
,
regime change
, and a
one-state solution
.

The Future: Decolonization and Regime Change

The invalidity of the term
peace process
in regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict became clear when people started to have access to what was really happening on the ground. Through the work of the ISM, as well as communication via the Internet, satellite TV, and other means, people in the West could see the discrepancy between the various attempts to solve the conflict (such as Geneva 1977, Madrid 1991, Oslo 1993, and Camp David 2000) and what was really taking place on the ground. In this respect Chomsky was the first to observe that the process was never meant to reach a destination but only to perpetuate a situation of no solution. Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution.

The entry of
decolonization
in the dictionary would hopefully put an end to the “coexistence” industry, which fueled a false dialogue financed mainly by the Americans and the leaders of the European Union. Most Palestinians have pulled out of this post–Oslo Accords project and wasted millions of dollars.