AS Israel, going by the Hebrew calendar, marked its independence day last week, there were instances of its national flag being set alight by malcontents for whom the occasion offered cause for indignation rather than celebration. They were not, as one might expect, Arabs bemoaning the transformation of their homeland into an unwanted country six decades ago. Rather, they were ultra-orthodox Jews who consider Zionism incompatible with Judaism. Their protest highlighted one strand in what is a veritable bundle of contradictions.
Most of these contradictions were already manifest when, 60 years ago on Wednesday (according to the Gregorian calendar), David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of Israel. This was the same Ben-Gurion who had noted 11 years earlier: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” Hostile Arab neighbours obliged him in 1948, as a consequence of which Israel gained substantially more territory than the United Nations had envisaged in its partition plan the previous year.
The hostilities also facilitated the Zionist aim of ethnic cleansing: Plan Dalet, put into motion in March 1948, was intended to ensure that Jews did not constitute a minority in the new state. This strategy was implemented through tactics that ranged from threats and intimidation to massacres and the destruction of entire villages. One such drive by Israeli soldiers bore the name Mivtza Nikayon, or Operation Cleaning. The events of 1948 have been meticulously documented by Israeli historians, yet in the official Israeli narrative there is no explicit acknowledgement of atrocities sanctioned by the nascent state.
This implausible deniability, too, can be traced back to Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister. In a letter to Charles de Gaulle after the Six-Day War in 1967, he wrote: “Israel … bears no responsibility for the Arab mass flight … Not one Arab was expelled.” The pattern hasn’t changed. Last year, there were demands for the resignation of the education minister after the phrase al-Nakba (the Catastrophe, which is how Palestinians refer to what befell them in May 1948) was included in a textbook for Arab Israeli children. Needless to say, the question of exposing Jewish children to even a vaguely nuanced version of the past.
Blockmindedness of this nature coexists, however, with a tradition of greater intellectual honesty. And in this connection it is once again possible to cite Ben-Gurion, who once acknowledged to Zionist official Nahum Goldmann that he empathized with the Palestinian mindset: “Sure, God promised [this land] to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing – we have come here and stolen their country.”
The extent to which the foundation of Israel was a faith-based initiative is, of course, open to contention: devout Jews are not necessarily dogged Zionists, and vice versa. In fact, a secular outlook and even agnosticism are not uncommon traits among Israeli political leaders, which would suggest that they look upon historical justifications for Israel – such as God’s promise and the purported exodus from Egypt 2,000 years ago – as no more than convenient myths. Nor are there convincing grounds for the notion that Jews have always constituted a single race or a readymade nation.
It was hardly surprising that the non-Jewish inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine looked upon Israel as yet another instance of European imperialism – and many among the Zionist leadership perceived their project as a means of extending Western civilization to the barbaric East. In retrospect, it is not hard to see how different attitudes on both sides would have entailed a remarkably different Middle East during the latter half of the 20th century. Of course, Palestinians could not possibly have known at the time that losing 55 percent of their homeland would before long come to be seen as the lesser evil.
For the past 40 years, the debate has essentially been about the 22 percent of Palestine that was annexed by Jordan and Egypt in 1948 and occupied by Israel in 1967. It is this 22 percent – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – that Israel has been so reluctant to cede as the basis for an independent Palestinian state, notwithstanding its awareness that by the late 1970s, a significant section of the Palestinian leadership – which included Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas – was willing to pursue a negotiated settlement entailing coexistence with Israel.
Had the Israeli establishment been willing to reciprocate – instead of concentrating its energies on preserving an untenable status quo and facilitating the emergence of reactionary alternatives to Fatah – a great deal of bloodshed could have been avoided, and it would have become that much harder for offshoots of the Islamic Brotherhood to sprout roots and branches in the occupied territories.
Although there can be little question that the Arab side – including the Palestine Liberation Organization – also has a great deal to answer for, and that the actions and utterances of the various dictatorships in Israel’s neighbourhood have frequently been determined by domestic considerations rather than concern for Palestinian rights, no one can reasonably argue that Israel has lived up to its promise of being “a light unto the nations”. It is often lionized by acolytes as the only democracy in the Middle East, and the corruption charges against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tend to reinforce that impression.
Let’s not forget, however, that it is a democracy where Arabs are treated as second-class citizens. A democracy that stands out in a turbulent region as an extraordinary perpetrator of violence; a democracy that routinely slays innocent civilians, including children. A democracy whose prosperity is based on handouts from the United States. A democracy that echoes in various ways the racism and fascism that characterized the tormentors of European Jewry 70 years ago. A democracy where parliamentary representatives often do not reflect the popular will. Opinion polls, for instance, suggest that nearly two thirds of Israelis are open to negotiations with Hamas. The Knesset disagrees, and former US president Jimmy Carter has been pilloried for seeking a cessation of violence through discussions with Hamas officials.
In the West, and particularly in the US, even the mildest criticism of Israeli policies invariably invites absurd charges of anti-Semitism from the Israel lobby. Trenchant critiques of official excesses are more likely to be found in the Israeli press than in American media. Current efforts towards a settlement intended to bolster the Bush administration’s appalling foreign affairs legacy are unlikely to bear fruit. In fact, as things stand, it’ll be something of a miracle if a sustainable two-state solution can be thrashed out in the next 60 years.
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