On Palestine (13 page)

IP:
No, not really.

FB: Let's come to Palestinian society and Palestinian politics. Haidar Eid, a professor in Gaza, recently wrote for
Al-Shabaka
that “the only way forward may be to dis-participate in the current Palestinian political system, there is no space for radical change in the current system and that Palestinians should rebuild from the bottom up, organically a real political alternative.”

Do you agree with this idea of dis-participation and then should not we apply this idea to Europe and the West too? Our governments being Democrats, Republicans, the Left, the Right do not represent us and this idea of dis-participating from the current system might be a way forward to rebuild something much better?

NC:
Saying this for someone who is actually living in Gaza, like a cry of desperation, is pretty understandable. As I said, I was there recently, the situation is very harsh, but what does it mean? I mean what do you dis-participate from?

In the West, I don't think it means much either, it is true our governments do not represent us, but there is plenty that can be done about that—we don't live in fascist states. There are lots of opportunities. State power is there, but its capacity to repress is not really great. It is a pretty fragile structure and it can be influenced and affected. Separating yourself from it, I don't know what that means . . . does that mean going to Montana, getting a plot of land, and raising your own food? There are interpretations of that notion which make some sense like localism in agriculture, developing local production, urban agriculture, a lot of things that can be done that kind of extricate people from the dominant social economic forces, but there are plenty of opportunities within the existing framework, within institutions, for major changes that do not exist in Gaza. I don't really think these are comparable notions.

IP:
It is important in this context to pay attention to the sentiment on the ground and mainly the wish to rely less on existing political structures as they have highly disappointed the Palestinians wherever they are.

If we want to respond to this sentiment, we can cautiously at least say we are looking for new thinking on how to reframe the relationship between Jews and Arabs between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. But this should not be done against the existing structures but in conversation with them. Engaging as many people as possible in new thinking can be very helpful whether they are from the Fatah, Hamas, or Israeli political parties—a good departure point to agree on how to analyze or depict the present reality. If these structures are not relevant to that new reality, they will disappear anyway, I do not have to declare the need to dismantle them.

I will give a few examples: Israelis can either deny the fact that they live with the West Bank longer than they lived without it and therefore territorially this is the space (Israel and the West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip) in which they have to find a solution—not just in the West Bank. Palestinians can deny that there is already a third generation of Zionist settlers on the ground, but they will have to accept that they missed the historical opportunity, if ever there was one, to get rid of the first wave of invaders.

There are also two different tasks ahead: the Israeli wish to keep the status quo and the Palestinian crave to change it. The former have a lot to lose in terms of privileges and power, the latter everything to gain. Thus the need to pressure the former is the key for peace or reconciliation.

Maybe another way forward is the one Noam hinted at. Somehow finding a way of convincing the Israelis they are heading on a suicidal track. And add to this showing their own responsibility for that state of affairs. They are building walls, arming themselves to death, and yet their insecurity is growing. This is where one should look for a way of not giving up the utopian ideal of a non-state future and the need to find a political structure that as soon as possible would bring an ending to the suffering on the ground.

NC:
I suspect that there is a not-too-hidden sense among the Israelis of the fragility of their future. One indication is that there are a number of people who are trying to get a double passport.

IP:
Absolutely.

NC:
I don't know what the proportion is, but it is large.

IP:
True, it is a lot.

NC:
Worse come to worst they will come to New York . . .

IP:
Not the Arab Jews . . . they've got nowhere to go!

NC:
I read somewhere that the most rapidly growing Jewish community in the World is in Berlin . . .

IP:
Yes, it is absolutely true. It is a bit ironic!

NC:
I think we have to ask ourselves what Israel is planning and will be able to implement as long as the US supports it and ask ourselves how do we react to that not-too-distant future. What you said about Area C and Wadi Ara I think is right to the point here. It seems that what they are clearly planning is Greater Israel, which will of course include the Golan Heights, and will separate Gaza from the West Bank, which is a crucial violation of Oslo and everything else, but they don't care about laws. As far as the West Bank is concerned, they have certainly planned to take over everything within what is called the “Separation Wall,” the annexation wall. Greater Jerusalem is maybe five times greater than what it ever was in history and systematically kicks Palestinians out—there are practically no Palestinians institutions left. Then come these corridors, to the east of Greater Jerusalem one goes through the town of Maale Adumim, which was built primarily in the 1990s, just as a way of bisecting the West Bank. The lands of Maale Adumim go way beyond the settlement; they practically reach Jericho, which bisects the West Bank. They haven't yet succeeded in filling in one area that is called E1.

So far, every American president has blocked that pre-Obama. He has said nothing about it except that it wasn't helpful, so they may be able to fill out that encirclement of Greater Jerusalem. These corridors are to the north, one going to Ariel which we talked about, one to Kedumin that would cut through much of the rest of the area. It looks as if they were planning to take over Area C and they deny it, but there have been large parts later that have been taken over. The Jordan Valley, which Israel claims it occupies only because of security, is now in fact inaccessible to most Palestinians since Israel has used the “security” issue to build more and more settlements. Looking at the plans that are being implemented, there are definite intentions to take over the Jordan Valley. It will mean that this Greater Israel, if it looks something like this, will have a very few Palestinians in it. They won't have what is called the demographic problem, too many non-Jews in the Jewish state, a horrible concept . . . but they won't really have it and in fact if it becomes integrated into Israel, as I am sure they've planned, it will actually decrease the proportion of Palestinians. Now, they have got to do some hand-wringing about land swap and I suspect it will be just like you said where this is happening in the northern Galilee [with] a very heavily Arab population. The population apparently doesn't want it, not because they love Israel, but because they don't want to go from being forced out of a wealthy, first-world developed society into what one of them recently called a “punching bag” in an article on
Haaretz
, which is what Palestine is turning out to be. A racist society will force them out even if they don't want to leave. It will be presented to the West as a very gracious act of letting the Palestinian state have a piece of Israel, the piece that we don't want because there are too many Arabs there and maybe, you know, giving them a little bit of land in the Negev. That looks like the picture on the ground, and if so, that is the picture we have to face.

FB: Following up on this and talking about a new reality, for you Professor Pappé, the new reality is already one regime, one political system governing both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, a common state reality, you are urging us to advocate and fight to change the nature of the system, the rules, the internal laws, et cetera. Professor Chomsky, you've been an advocate and you've written about a common state, one state, a binational state for decades, do we need to go through two states because of the consensus to eventually get to one state?

NC:
Yes, that is because the way I see it, Israel and the United States do not want one state and will never accept it. They have a preferable alternative from their point of view to take over what I've just described, this Greater Israel which is not going to have many Palestinians in it—in fact, a smaller percentage than in Israel today. The big Palestinian concentrations are going to be outside, population concentrations will be outside. The plan for them is I think they can mostly rot, or maybe flee. There will be a standard neocolonial structure in which there is a center for the elite. So you go to Ramallah, nice houses, theaters, bars where Westerners can come and see how lovely Palestine is, which you find in every Third World country, the poorest country you want in Central Africa and you can find these sectors there that are for the elite which look like Paris or London. In fact, if you go back to the 1990s, Israeli industrialists openly and literally urged the government to shift from what they called a colonial program to a neocolonial program, which means establish this Third World–style entity with most of them rotting but with some kind of a center for rich Palestinians, the privileged ones, the elite, and so on. If that is correct, then there are really two options. One is, either this, which will have very few Palestinians, they will be somewhere else and the other one is two states. Two states is a rotten solution, but at least it has the merit of having overwhelming international support that has been blocked by the United States for thirty-five years now but has overwhelming international support. I don't feel myself that the settlements are irreversible.

I'd be interested in Ilan's opinion, but my feeling is that Israel could do what it could have done if they wanted to in Gaza. They did not have to force the people out of Gaza and that was a game that they played to impress the West. They could have said, on August 1, “The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) is going to leave Gaza, you climb into the lorries we are giving you, we will take you from your subsidized homes in Gaza to nicer subsidized homes in the West Bank.” Then they could do the same thing for the West Bank. Say the IDF is pulling out, there you can go and a lot of people in the West Bank reckon that it is a nice place to live and they have subsidized towns, pleasant suburbs, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They've got superhighways taking them right into Tel Aviv without seeing any Arabs and so on. If some people want to hang on to every rock I don't see why they should not be allowed to do it, they can be in a Palestinian state. That is a conceivable possibility. I think the chances are not very high—in fact, pretty low—but that seems to me the only realistic alternative to this Greater Israel picture.

Now, if some kind of two-state settlement, no matter how rotten it is, is established, my guess is that the borders are going to erode, because if you know the country at all, there is no way to draw a line, it would not make sense whatsoever. In fact, when there have been relaxations of tension in the past, there has been some erosion of the sharp boundaries, and commercial, cultural, and other kinds of interchange began to take place. We don't know where it could lead, but it could lead to closer integration, you know a kind of longer term that we are all talking about, thinking about some sort of a federal integrated society. As I said earlier, I don't worship the imperial borders, I don't think they have to be maintained either, but I just don't see any other alternatives to those two alternatives.

Talking about one state is kind of interesting to keep at the back of your mind, but it is just not one of the options. I think, these are the two options and I think it is misleading from people on every side, the Shin Bet, Palestinian leaders, international commentators to talk as if the choices are either two states or one state. Those are simply not the choices. The choices are Greater Israel or two states and Greater Israel doesn't have Palestinians or a few Palestinians.

IP:
I see it a bit differently. I think that the balance of power on the ground and the kind of relationship Israel has with the United States and the international community ensures that the alternative of two states will always be implemented more or less the way Israel understands the two-state solution.

This version actually means the creation of a Greater Israel. Despite the international support for allegedly two distinct states the end result will not be two very different models. They would be different in the sense of international legitimacy and in the two-state solution the Palestinians will enjoy some symbolic independence and could display some insignia, but the basic relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians would not change.

I do not see much logic in supporting something that would actually legitimize the Greater Israel option. The two-state solution in 2014 can only go one way—toward the international legitimization of the two-state solution. The international community is looking for someone like Abu Mazen to accept an Israeli notion of a two-state solution that it purports and this, if successful, can perpetuate a Greater Israel through international legitimacy.

Against the already existing Greater Israel one has to conduct a campaign of regime change based on human and civil rights equality and hope the regional and international developments would help it to mature. What the international community is doing right now reminds us once more of the famous Jewish joke of someone looking for a key he lost where there was light but not where he lost the key.