On Palestine (8 page)

IP:
Paradoxically it is used by Israel in an attempt to stifle any criticism of the state and its ideology. If you chastise Israel, you assault the Jewish state and by association you attack Judaism. That's a very interesting line of argumentation and defense.

This prohibition would not work in any case. If you look at the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, it is as if in the heyday of the struggle against apartheid, you were only allowed to criticize certain policies of South African society but not the very nature of the regime. That's a great success for Israel that it obtained immunity from such a protest movement so far. They defined the parameters of the game: you are allowed to demonstrate against Israeli policies, but if you demonstrate against Israel, you demonstrate against the Jewish state and therefore you demonstrate against Judaism. That is why it is very important to bring this to the fore of the discussion.

NC:
It's interesting that it is now the Israeli leadership itself that is bringing it to the fore.

IP:
Exactly.

NC:
When Netanyahu says, “You have to recognize us as a Jewish state,” he is saying: “You have to recognize us as something that does not exist in the modern world.” There is no such thing. Again, if you are French, a citizen of France, you are French. If you are a citizen of Israel, you are not Jewish. It's crucial.

FB: Could Israel have formed without the Holocaust?

NC:
It's hard to debate such a question, but I think it would have. What Ilan was describing before, the national institutions that had been created—they were strong, there was a military force, an ideology, support for it in the powerful countries, for all kind of reasons. Like in Britain and in the US, a lot of the support for it was religious. Christian Zionism is a very significant force. It goes back way before Jewish Zionism. It was an elite phenomenon. Lord Balfour, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman read the Bible every morning. It says there, “God promised the land to the Jews.” That's in the powerful states. There was already plenty of support. In fact, Britain as the mandatory authority facilitated the development of the Jewish national institutions. So my guess is that it would have happened without the Holocaust.

Also it's worth remembering that the Holocaust was not a big issue in the 1940s. On the contrary; it became a big issue after 1967. If you take a look at the Holocaust museums, the Holocaust studies programs, it's post-'67. It's very striking in the USA. So ask yourself a very simple question. After the war, there were many survivors of the Holocaust, many of them living in concentration camps. They were in camps that were essentially no different from the Nazi extermination camps except that there were no crematoria. There were US government presidential studies that investigated and said that the people were living under the conditions of Nazi occupation. Simple question. How many of them came to the United States? Virtually none. If you had asked them where they wanted to go, I think you can make a sane guess that they would have wanted to come to the United States. Half of Europe wanted to come, especially Holocaust survivors. They did not. The American government did not want them, the American Jewish community did not want them. Zionist emissaries took over the camps. They had a principle that able-bodied men and women between seventeen and thirty-five had to be shipped off to Palestine. The first book on this, which has been a suppressed topic, appeared a couple of years ago, a Yosef Grodzinsky book.

IP:
Only in Hebrew, right?

NC:
It's in English too. But it's been so suppressed that nobody knows about it. It's deeply hidden but it does exist. The translation of the Hebrew title is “Good Human Material.” The idea was that the good human material was going to be cannon fodder. Nobody studied it, but you can be pretty sure that coming to the US was what they would have chosen. That's what the Holocaust meant. You can see it in propaganda. Truman is very much honored because he was trying to force the British to send Jews to Palestine. Nobody asks why Truman did not say, “Okay, let's take a hundred thousand Jews here.” This is the place where it would have been easiest to absorb them. It can absorb anybody. It's a country that is not densely settled, the richest country in history. . . . They did not because the Holocaust was considered a way to damn the enemy, but it was not a meaningful concept. When the first scholarly study of the Holocaust came out, by Raul Hilberg, it was condemned. “Let's not bring out all that stuff; we do not want that.”

IP:
I do agree, though I have a slightly different take on this. It has a lot to do with historical timing. It is absolutely true that without the Holocaust there were vested religious and strategic Western interests to have a Jewish presence instead of a Palestinian one, or they would have called it at the time an Islamic one. You particularly see it when you read the correspondence surrounding both the Balfour declaration and its aftermath in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. A few British public figures were trying to protect the interests of the indigenous Palestinians, but already then they were saying that it was almost impossible to bring the other point of view to the public's attention. You were immediately stifled and rebutted and so on. It was not just Christian Zionism alone that won the day for Zionism long before the Holocaust. The impulse to allow, indeed to push, Jews to settle in Palestine was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamophobia.

NC:
True.

IP:
It was anti-Arab, anti-Muslim. If you take a place where Christian Zionists or secular British imperialists want to see Jewish presence, serving their empires or theologies, and do not wish to see there an Arab or Muslim presence, it becomes a powerful international coalition that defeats a priori the indigenous people. This was the powerful coalition the Palestinians had to face when they first attempted to create a national movement and struggle for their right of self-determination and independence.

The Holocaust had an effect on the historical timing. But I think that the historical timing is important. After the Holocaust there is the beginning of historical processes by which the power of Islamophobia or Arabophobia, or Christian Zionism, wanes. Call it the Left, call it progressiveness—these forces eventually decolonized the Arab world and even Africa. So Zionism without the Holocaust could have found it a bit more difficult to establish what it did establish in the same place it did.

NC:
I totally agree with this.

IP:
What Noam said about the DPs (displaced persons) is very interesting because when both the Anglo-American commission in 1946 and we can see it from Richard Crossman's memoirs and both UNSCOPs (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) afterward in 1947, when they tried to be sort of neutral, and said let's see both sides' points of view on Palestine, many members of both committees claimed that visiting the DPs, of course with good Zionist propaganda, made them associate the fate of the Jews of Europe—demographically, arithmetically—with the fate of the Jews in Palestine. Which put the Palestinian point of view in a very weak position. Who are you to be against our wish to solve the problem of the Jews in Europe as a whole? You could not visit Vienna in 1900 and ask the Jews to come to Palestine. It would not have worked then.

NC:
You're right, but I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let's save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.”

IP:
Exactly.

NC:
This tells you something about the West, the deeply rooted imperial mentality that affects the West like a plague. Yes, there are these people living in misery. We are the ones able to help them, but we are not going to even raise that possibility. Somebody else, who does not have the capacity, they have to suffer for it.

FB: Was it only due to imperialist policies or also due to Western anti-Semitism?

NC:
Zionists or not, they would have reacted exactly the same.

IP:
I agree.

NC:
Take say the USA, which is the clearest case. After the Second World War, they were in an absolutely unique position. There was some Zionist pressure, but it did not mean anything. They just did not want them, and the American Jewish community did not want them either.

FB: Was it anti-Semitic?

NC:
Anti-Semitism partly, but mostly, “Why should we take the burden?”

IP:
Not them and not anyone else. It did not have to be Jews.

NC:
In 1924 there was an immigration law in the USA that was aimed at Jews and Italians. Let's keep them out of the country. They did not say it that way, they said Eastern and Southeastern and Southern Europeans.

IP:
The pathology of Zionism is crucial. When you are a historian you always have to remember that people did not know what was going to happen. So when you look at Zionist discussions in the 1930s about Nazism and fascism. You have to realize that these people are talking about Nazism without knowing what will be the “final solution.” They are not appalled. They say that they should talk to these people. “We have a uniformity of interest here.” They want the Jews out of Germany, we want the Jews out of Germany. On this basis they even go into negotiations. You do not correlate Zionism with Nazism when you say that. You show that you are in the company of people, and they had to understand which interests they were serving apart from theirs. This comes to the fore very strongly.

NC:
It's very striking. It's important to stress that in the 1930s you could not see what was going to happen. It was even true of German Jews. There is a book in 1935 (by Joachim Prinz,
Wir Juden
). This is a humanist Zionist who said that Jews should recognize that they should be sympathetic to the Nazis because they have the same kind of ideology we do. Blood and land and so on. We agree with that, if we can only explain to them that we are really on the same side, they will stop persecuting us. This was in 1935. In fact you can go to 1941, the USA had a consul in Berlin, prior to Pearl Harbor, and he was writing fairly sympathetic commentaries on the Nazis. His name was George Kennan. One of the framers of the postwar world.

IP:
Yes, Kennan, the strategist who thought that America should control 50 percent of the world's natural resources to have the standard of living they desired.

FB: The refugee question is key for any Palestinian—inside or outside Palestine. Don't you think that the first step the Israeli government should take is to accept its responsibility in creating the problem in the first place, and then, as Kevin Rudd did in Australia, issue a public apology? Also, should we, as activists, clearly state that regardless of the possibility or not of the refugees and their descendants going back to their original homes, they do have this right?

NC:
I think that not only they should do it, but it's come close to that. There has been among the various informal negotiations like Geneva, a move to say okay, let's admit that they have the right of return, while recognizing that they will not return. To use an analogy, I gave a talk in Arizona recently and I simply referred to it as occupied Mexico, which it is. It should be referred to that way. It's occupied Mexico. We conquered it in a violent brutal war of aggression. We should do something about it. That's why they have names like San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and so on. Recognize it, recognize what we did. On the other hand we know we are not going to give it back to Mexico. There are terrible historical injustices, some of them you can try to do something about, but just to unwind history is very difficult. Maybe in the longer term this could happen in Israel. In fact in my view the only way there would be a realistic solution to the return problem is if the whole state system erodes in the region. If you travel in the northern Galilee you can see that there is no basis for a line there.

I'll tell you an anecdote. In 1953, my wife and I were living in a kibbutz in Israel, we were students, hiking around, backpacking in the northern Galilee. On a road behind us a jeep came by, a guy came out and started yelling at us: “You have to go back, you are in the wrong country!” We crossed into Lebanon. These days it's probably bristling with machine guns. There should not be any line there. Over time I think there is a chance that these borders may erode. The whole Sykes-Picot imperial arrangement is beginning to erode. And it could go further, in the longer term. When they talk about a two-state solution, I do not think that this should be regarded as the end. As I've said before, states have no inherent legitimacy. They have all been imposed by violence, they are causing violence all over the world. It's an inhuman social structure. It should erode every time. In that context I think you could imagine an authentic return. Not just recognition of an historical wrong, but in fact interactions among people that are not based on states or religious or ethnic lines. There are other grounds for people to interact with one another.

IP:
Well, I do agree with most of it but I think that there are three dimensions to this question. One is tackling it as key issue in the peace negotiations. The right has symbolic and practical aspects. There is a Palestinian demand for an Israeli recognition of the right itself through a combination of acknowledgment and apology. This, maybe in the form of an apology, can open the ground for discussions over practicalities.