On Palestine (6 page)

Whoever follows the index of racism and democracy in Israel recognizes this is a creeping reality—a slide toward an age of more racist legislation, expanded projects of Judaization, and an alarming increase in attacks on Palestinians under the slogan
Tag Mehir
(Price Tag) that consists of the daily destruction of Palestinian property and holy places. In the new Greater Israel, impotent local Palestinian councils and uninterested police forces watch helplessly as organized crime takes over the more deprived Palestinian neighborhoods and villages between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, fed by the poverty and unemployment that has reached unprecedented levels.

This is a tough reality that could be and should be challenged, but it is left intact partly because of the energy wasted in the futile peace process, as well as in power struggles among its victims over insignificant fiefdoms.

Today, in three areas a new conversation has to commence that addresses, rather than ignores, the reality. The first area is the overall Israeli policy that has obscured the Green Line, already in existence for many years, and which basically treats all the Palestinians in the same way. There are still advantages for Palestinians who are citizens of the state of Israel, but these seem to disappear as the years go by. As mentioned before, this is happening not only because Israel is less interested in providing these advantages but also due to the growing recognition that a hidden apartheid system, such as the one in Israel itself, is no less oppressive than a direct occupation (in the West Bank) or prolonged siege (in the Gaza Strip).

When different forms of oppression emanate from the same source, the struggle against it has to be focused. I have no illusions that in the near future we will all be guided by a clear and unified Palestinian strategy, but whoever subscribes to the importance of the Jewish-Palestinian joint struggle has to recognize a worldview that confronts the ethnic cleansing throughout all of Palestine and not just in part of it. A genuine and clear conversation about the new options instead of a dead formula is imperative at this moment in history. The reframing of the Arab-Jewish relationship over the whole land of historical Palestine is a crucial project that has to commence. Whatever one proposes in terms of the future political entity, it has to be based on full equality for whoever lives in or was expelled from the country. Each such entity or ideal future model hopefully could be developed through the existing representative bodies and new ones that might emerge. But for the sake of some sort of progress beyond the conceptual paralysis imposed on us in the name of the two-state solution, anyone who can and wants to—on every possible stage—should offer a political, ideological, constitutional, and socio-economic structure for whoever lives in the country of Palestine—and not just in the state of Israel.

The second area is the future of the Palestinian refugees. As long as this question is discussed within the framework of the old peace orthodoxy and the two-state solution discourse, it remains marginal and its solution deemed possible only as a return of refugees to the future Palestinian state. A totally different conversation about the refugee issue focuses on two subjects: the first, an analysis of the Israeli refusal to allow the return of refugees as yet another manifestation of how racist this state has become; the second, the need to consider the fate of the refugees in the light of the new refugee problem in Syria (which includes large numbers of Palestinian refugees).

Within the framework of the diplomatic effort that was based on the two-state solution, Israel's determined rejection of any return was legitimized, as was the Israeli argument that return would not allow Israel to maintain a Jewish majority in the state. This international legitimacy indirectly licenses Israel to employ any means it deems necessary to maintain a significant Jewish majority in the state. In this respect there is no difference between an Israeli position that rejects the refugees' right of return and the other Israeli projects of ethnic cleansing, be it proposing to annex Wadi Ara to the West Bank, uprooting the Bedouins in the Naqab, or depopulating East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Peace cannot be on the agenda of a state that exercises such policies against its own citizens. A subject associated with the refugee question is the immediate fate of the Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Jordan who fled the civil war in Syria. Israel boasts of its humanitarianism by telling the world that it admitted dozens of wounded Syrian fighters to its hospitals. But Syria's four neighbors, who have no less complicated relationships with Syria, absorbed
hundreds of thousands
of refugees. Even if Israel does not show any humanitarian interest in these refugees, many of whom are Palestinians, anyone who is part of the peace camp inside and outside Palestine has to highlight the linkage between the Syrian tragedy and the Palestine issue: the need to offer the old-new Palestinian refugees a return to their original homeland has to be endorsed as both a humanitarian gesture and as a political act that can contribute to the end of the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

The right of return in general should be placed at the heart of much of the activity inside Israel (and there are early encouraging signs that the local agenda of activists there is moving in this direction). The Nakba took place where Israel is today, not in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Any conversation about reconciliation with both communities should take this fact as a starting point. A preliminary step is probably recognizing at least the right of internal Palestinian refugees (about 250,000 today by conservative estimates) to return to their homes or nearby. The right of internally displaced persons to return is the issue on which the widest consensus can build inside Israel in the struggle against the ongoing ethnic cleansing. The internal refugeehood presents a testimony from the past for what, and against what, the struggle is all about. The refugees are already part of the demographic balance. How these people will return and how other refugees will return is a question that has to be at the center and not on the margins of the public debate about Palestine in this century.

The third and last area is the absence of any socialist discourse from the conversation about Palestine. This absence is one of the main reasons the so-called peace camp in Israel (and the same is true regarding the lobbyists on J Street in the United States) has no issue with neo-liberalism. This worldview is not opposed to Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories but has no position on the harsh economic and social oppression that does not distinguish between a West Bank inhabitant and an Israeli citizen. It is true that, unfortunately, some of the Jewish oppressed classes in Israel, in particular the Arab Jews, who see themselves as Jews first, subscribe to extreme racist views, but their plight is another good reason not to give up on a worldview that challenges the present economic, not just political, regime between the River Jordan and the sea.

The absence of this angle also weakens our ability to understand the Oslo Accords, the creation of the PA, projects such as People to People, and the maintenance of the occupation by EU and USAID money as neoliberal projects. Economic elites supported the “peace process” because it was perceived to lead to an economic bonanza.

The importance of insisting on a socialist worldview can be gleaned from the example of post-apartheid South Africa, which has proven so disappointing as it maintains an economic structure that still discriminates against the African community there. Those who represent institutionally, collectively, or individually this worldview have a responsibility to make sure the conversation about it will not stop at the Green Line but will relate to Palestine as a whole; and who knows, it may kick off a serious conversation about the future of the Middle East in its entirety.

Heading toward 2020, we will all most probably face a racist, ultra-capitalist, and more expanded Israel still busy ethnically cleansing Palestine. There is however a good chance that such a state will become a global pariah and the people around the world will ask their “leaders” to act and end any relations they have with it. What they should not hear are the past slogans, which are no longer relevant in the struggle for a more just and democratic Palestine.

Part One

Dialogues

Chapter Two

The Past

 

Frank Barat: How important is the role of the past in understanding the present? More and more, people are asking the Palestinians to move on—to forget about the past, the Nakba of 1948, the refugees. How would you respond to that?

Noam Chomsky:
Well, it's not just on this issue. It's quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: “Forget about everything that happened and let's just go on from here.” In other words, “I've got what I want, and you forget what your concerns are. I'll just take what I want.” That's what it translates as—in this case too. To forget about the past means forgetting about the future because the past involves aspirations, hopes, many of them entirely justified, that will be dealt with in the future if you pay attention to them. It's essentially saying, “Let's dismiss just hopes and aspirations because we've got what we want.”

Ilan Pappé:
I definitely agree with this. I would say that in the case of Palestine, and why we continue to receive requests to speak and give our views, the clock of destruction continues at every historical juncture at a much faster pace than our clock of ideas on how to get out of this. This stalemate continues however because the perception of those who manage the so-called peace process—those who interpret the reality in Palestine and Israel and claim that they know what is the right solution—is rigid and has not changed for years.

At its base is a formula for peace that insists on taking the past out of the equation of peace. These peace brokers claim that the relevant past for any peace process is the moment the process begins. Anything that happened before is irrelevant for that process. So if you already have huge Jewish settlement blocks all over the West Bank, you cannot think about dismantling them. You may think about the exchange of territories but not about dismantling these settlements. So the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people.

NC:
I might add to that it's universal. President Obama says: “Well let's forget about the crimes that were committed, the invasion of Iraq, let's just go on.” In others words, let's continue the same way we've been proceeding. That's the weapon of the powerful.

IP:
Absolutely.

FB: Zionism has become a word that has many definitions and interpretations. Some people don't know what it means anymore. Could you give us an overview of what this word has meant historically?

IP:
As you're saying, Zionism has many interpretations. Its more neutral definition would be ideology I suppose. Zionism is a set of ideas that inspires people to do certain things and act in accordance to them. What is important in my mind is how people in power interpret this ideology. I'm less interested in how it is interpreted by neutral scholars. I'm interested in Zionism as an ideology that has an impact on people's lives on the ground. As such, it is an ideology, and has been, since almost the beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine, that meant, in very simple terms, that Judaism as a national movement has the right and the aspirations to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. Such a reality was determined as a precondition for creating new Jewish life. I think that throughout the years, when you have an institution like a state, which accepts this ideology as its ethical infrastructure, that ideology becomes even more powerful in the life of people.

As such it is not that different from other national or cultural ideologies. Its uniqueness lies elsewhere. Zionism today is an ideology of power that is quite peculiar in history as it is directed against one particular group of people. Usually ideologies have wider implications for people. Zionism is very focused.

[Whether it can] be substituted by a more progressive ideology is a very good question. The best way forward seems is for its victims and opponents to see how far they can progress, motivated by a set of universal values of human rights and civil rights. Because most of what is interpreted today as Zionism violates, and contradicts, basic human rights and civil rights for anyone who is not a Jew in Israel. Rather than finding the alternative ideology as such, the goal is to create positions that claim the right of people to elementary human and civil rights.

FB: Is there a clear definition of Zionism today? What is a Zionist today?

NC:
First of all I think that here again the past is relevant. Zionism meant something different in the pre-state and post-state period. From 1948 on, Zionism meant the ideology of the state. A state religion. Like Americanism, or the magnificence of France. In fact even in this period the notion has changed. I remember for example in 1964, I happened to spend some time in Israel, and among leftish intellectuals, Zionism was regarded as a joke. A thing that was used for propaganda for children. Three years later, most of these people were raving nationalists. That changed in 1967, which was a sea change in the way many Israelis saw themselves and what the state was like. Fundamentally in the pre-state period it was not a state religion. For example, in the mid-1940s, I was a Zionist youth leader, but strongly opposed to a Jewish state. I was in favor of Jewish-Arab working-class cooperation to build a socialist Palestine, but the idea of a Jewish state was anathema. I was a Zionist youth leader, because it was not a state religion.