On Palestine (5 page)

What was particularly annoying and unhelpful was the paradigm of parity on which the peace process was based: it divided the blame between the two parties and treated them as equally responsible for the conflict while offering, allegedly, an equitable solution. The blatant misbalance of power should have discredited this solution a long time ago as a realistic approach to peace. It was based on the wish to appease Israel without irritating it too much. The end result was that the Palestinians were to receive whatever Israel was willing to give them. This had nothing to do with peace; it was a search after a comfortable capitulation by the native people of Palestine who lost it to the Zionists who invaded the region in the nineteenth century.

But the new dictionary is not made of entries based on romantic or utopian notions. Past injustices cannot all be undone; this is very clear to the people who have been branded as “unrealistic” even by their friends. Not all past evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop. And this is where the entry
regime change
becomes so appropriate.

According to the new movement it is not unthinkable to aspire to a regime change in Israel, nor is it naïve to envision a state where everyone is equal. And it is not unrealistic to work for the unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes. The principle of regime change was abused by the United States and Britain in their attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan but won a new international legitimacy in the popular revolutions in Tunis and Egypt.

Regimes can change dramatically and drastically, but they can also change gradually and in a bloodless manner. Although the upheavals in ex-Yugoslavia and Syria serve as warnings of how badly regime change can go, most of the historical examples in recent times are of nonviolent, or nearly nonviolent, regime changes. Therefore, the last entry in the new dictionary, a
one-state solution
, is based on the hope that a clear vision of how the future relationship between victims and victimizers is framed will indicate also the nature of the change needed and the way to achieve it.

For many activists the two-state solution was dead long before the desperate admission of that fact by US secretary of state John Kerry in April 2014. The strengthening of voices about the demise of the settlement does not mean that a clear alternative immediately has emerged. A long process in search of the alternatives has just begun. Some people, activists, and new political organizations have already articulated a clearer program and idea of what such a state would be. Their views are based both on old ideas that were developed in the past and their own new inputs. Others are still groping in the dark. But the journey has commenced.

Preliminary milestones of this journey have been achieved. The first milestone was the reconceptualization of Israel and Palestine as one country—not two present or future states. Palestine became once more a country called Palestine and not just a geopolitical reality called Israel and the Occupied Territories. And it is in this space that the new dictionary needs additional entries to clarify how people who live in Palestine, and those who were expelled from it, could live as equals and even live in ways better than in other parts of the Middle East, maybe even better than in some parts of Europe.

A second milestone, which was particularly crucial (as again can be gleaned from the conversation with Chomsky in the second part of this book), was the refutation of the allegation that the one-state vision denies Israel's right to exist. The new movement of activists does not possess the power to eliminate states nor are they interested in doing so. Israel has the power to eliminate states; the peace movement does not. But it does have the moral power to question the ideology and ethical validity of the state and the destructive impact it had through the expulsion of half the country's population.

The third milestone was the head-on challenge of one of the most basic assumptions of the peace orthodoxy: that partition of a country is an act of peace and reconciliation. Partition in the history of Palestine is an act of destruction committed within a framework of a UN “peace plan” that drew no international reaction or condemnation whatsoever. Thus the terms in the international dictionary from that formative period that signify positive peaceful values such as partition are a newspeak, to borrow George Orwell's famous term for such deceptive realities. Partition signifies international complicity in the crime of destruction, not a peace offer.

Consequently, anyone opposing partition became the enemy of peace. The more sinister and pro-Israeli elements of the peace orthodoxy used to blame the Palestinians for being irresponsible, warmongering, and intransigent—beginning with the Palestinian rejection of the partition plan in 1947. In hindsight, we know partition was also an ill-conceived idea from a realpolitik point of view. This may not have been known at the time. But to offer partition now as a solution on the same premise that informed the 1947 resolution—which was that Zionism was a benevolent movement wishing Israelis to coexist as equals with the Palestinian native majority—is an absurdity and a travesty.

The continued adherence to the interpretation Zionism gave to partition, and liberal Zionism very recently gave to the Oslo process, corrupts every human and humane value cherished in the West. Partition, in both 1947 and 1993, means a license to have a racist Jewish state in more than 56 percent of Palestine in 1947 and more than 80 percent, if not more, in 1993.

This is where the senior Israeli and pro-Israel Western political and social scientists are exposed in their utter immorality and indecency. They claim, and teach, that a Jewish state reigning over much of Palestine, provided there is a Palestinian entity next to it, is a democratic reality. It is a democracy that is maintained by all means possible to ensure an everlasting Jewish majority in the land. These means could and have included genocidal policies and other brutal strategies to safeguard that the state embodies the ethnic identity of one group alone.

Israelis do not find it therefore at all bizarre or unacceptable that determining the results of a democratic process by first determining by force who makes up the electorate gets the desired result: a purely Jewish state in a binational country. This charade is still marketed successfully in the West: Israel is a democracy because the majority decides what it wants, even if the majority is determined by means of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and, recently, by ghettoizing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, enclaving them in Areas A and B in the West Bank and in isolated villages in the Greater Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley, and the Bedouin reservations in the Naqab.

Israeli Jews need to safeguard the existence of the Palestinians, threatened daily by their government and army, before nourishing the project of coexistence. If they want to help, they can join the international solidarity movement and those within the land who wish to transform Israel and Palestine into a geopolitical entity in which everyone can live as equal persons and citizens.

Conclusions: Palestine and Israel, 2014–2020

In order to move out of the paradoxes mentioned above, the ideas of the old peace camp have to be abandoned. The international community interested in helping Palestine needs to stand behind the attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state as long as Israel continues to pursue its policies of apartheid, dispossession, and occupation.

The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is a medical miracle: it died several times, was resuscitated for a while, then collapsed again. It holds on not because there is the slight chance it will succeed but because of the dividends its very existence brings to many involved. The Israeli government understands that without this “peace process” Israel would become a pariah state and would be exposed to international boycott and even sanctions. As long as the process is alive, Israel can continue to expand its settlement project in the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians there (including in the Greater Jerusalem area) and establish facts on the ground that would render any future settlement unfeasible and impossible. Because of the dishonest brokering of the United States and Europe's impotence in international affairs, Israel continues to enjoy immunity in this process.

The Palestinian leadership is divided on the question of how desirable the continuation of the process is. Senior members in the Palestinian Authority assert that the establishment of the PA was a very important national achievement and therefore should be maintained. Others, and it seems this includes President Mahmoud Abbas himself, have begun to doubt the validity of the PA and the chances of reaching peace. It is true that hollow threats to “hand over the keys to the Israelis” were voiced in the past by Abu Mazen, in order to exert pressure on Israel; but it seems that the threat from Israel in spring 2014 was more genuine and the sense of despair more real. And therefore the attempts to establish a unity government with Hamas, which were resumed in earnest that April, may have a better chance of succeeding.

The new efforts at unity were just one indication that quite a few of those who supported the process in the past, and those who have been observers, have prepared themselves for the eventuality that the medical miracle would not repeat itself and the dead would not be resurrected. Most of those who try and understand as well as predict what will take place, if indeed the process cannot be revived, see any other alternative as disastrous. The Zionist Left as well as liberal pro-Zionist bodies in the West talk about the “nightmarish” scenario of a binational state, not only because it would mean the end of Zionism but also would produce a far worse reality for both peoples (as if things can get worse for the Palestinians).

The Israeli Zionist Left has a bizarre explanation for its fear of a binational state, or for that matter of a single democratic state. The Palestinians will become “tree hewers and drawers of water,” as the biblical phrase has it, proponents warn us (a warning made several times by Uri Avnery). Others describe scenes of a never-ending civil war. Among the Palestinians the support for the two-state solution comes from a different angle. It is perceived as the only settlement that has global support, even inside Israel, and therefore should still be maintained. Quite a few of Palestine's genuine friends continue to subscribe to this point of view for similar reasons.

Although the way the center and right wings in Israel imagine a two-state solution differs from that imagined among members of the Zionist Left, or within parties such as Hadash and Tajamu' in Israel, and differs again among PA members and supporters of Palestinians in the enlightened world, there is generally a consensual depiction of it that dominates the political conversation on Palestine in the world.

But will the consensus be there in 2015? More and more voices among various Palestinian communities and among non-Zionist Jewish activists are replacing their unwavering support for the two-state solution with a search for new alternatives.

It is on the ground that one can see clearly how irrelevant this hegemonic and orthodox discourse of peace is and how futile any future attempts to revive it will be. The Zionist Left has disappeared from the political scene in Israel for all intents and purposes, and thus the only viable political alternatives are either a coalition between the Right and a secular Center or a coalition between the Right and ultra-orthodox Jews. The emergence of a new and left-leaning political force in Israel does not seem likely at this time. Anyone who is still hopeful of such an eventuality underrates the mental process Jewish society in Israel underwent following the creation of the state in 1948. It was put under an indoctrinating steamroller that pressed together old Jewish phobias about hostile Gentiles in Europe with typical colonialist anxieties about the natives into a frightening local version of racism. Deep racist layers like this are not removed easily and definitely do not disappear by themselves as the case of post-apartheid South Africa has so clearly shown us.

Counter-educational projects in the long run, active resistance, and huge pressure from the outside can transform a society like that in Israel. However, counter-education is a very long process, and the immediate dangers emanating from the collapse of the diplomatic effort have such destructive potential that they would render these educational efforts useless. As for the resistance movement, it is still fragmented (it has produced five different Palestinian groups that developed discretely since 1948, each with its own national agenda) and has to navigate in an almost impossible historical reality. Forging unity is another long-term process, probably taking as long as it would take to immunize Jewish society against the racist virus that affects it. The BDS movement with all its incredible achievements—and there are many—has still not affected the political elites in the West who are still providing Israel with immunity for its actions and policies.

In spite of positive developments—a few brave Israelis seek to confront their society's racism in all its political manifestations (a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing in the Negev, Jaffa, Acre, Nazareth, East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and south of the Hebron mountains) and its constitutional manifestations (a racist wave of legislation in the Knesset); the BDS movement becomes stronger by the day; and we may be witnessing genuine efforts at Palestinian unification—on the ground a new state, the Greater Israeli state, has been born. This state has nearly completed the annexation of Area C in the West Bank and offers the Palestinians in Areas A and B incarceration in cages if they do not resist the new state or the threat that they will be treated like the population in Gaza if they do resist. This model is offered to the Palestinian people throughout the new state. In cages there is no room for spatial expansion, no resources for development and progress, and an absolute prohibition on resisting this new vision of a greater Israeli state.