On Palestine (9 page)

The second dimension is the implication of the Israeli position on the very nature of the state and the Zionist project. The Israeli rejection of the right of return stems from a racist ideology; hence for me as an activist, struggle over, or engaging with, the issue of the right of return relates directly to the question of the moral validity of Zionism and the nature of the Jewish state today.

NC:
Yes.

IP:
The reason they do not accept the return has nothing to do with practicalities. It has to do with Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity.

NC:
Yes.

IP:
So you struggle against it from an Israeli Jewish perspective not so much on the level of acknowledgment and apology, which I think are important for the peace process to progress, but on this whole other level.

The third dimension concerns the Palestinians alone. It concerns the question of how to live an ordinary life under the shadow of the “right of return” slogan. How does one navigate between perceiving the right as sacred with the knowledge it is not around the corner? This translates into concrete questions: Do you really condemn Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon for improving a little bit their homes, without immediately accusing them of naturalization (
tawtin
)? Or that they have betrayed the right of return because they have slightly improved their standard of living? It's up to the Palestinians to strategize, I am not going to do it for them. But they will have to strategize and differentiate between for instance refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the internal refugees inside Israel, and also the refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

These three dimensions are very important for developing a novel approach toward this painful issue. For me, the basic point is: What is a Jewish state? Can it really exist as such? What would be a solution that is not based on a continued violation of basic human and civil rights and one that has to include the right of people to come back to their homeland, their right to visit their homeland? I think that's where we sometimes do not differentiate between what is right, what we believe is justified, and what should be the issues we discuss inside Israel, inside the Palestinian community, and among the community of negotiators and mediators. We should be beyond that argument of supporting or not the right of return. We should talk about what it means. This is what Israeli society has to do. Have a serious internal discussion about its own racist nature.

NC:
In support of the observations that it is really a racist issue is the fact that Israel has been trying to block by law or by force commemorating the Nakba or recognizing it.

IP:
Exactly.

NC:
This has nothing to do with refugees, this is pure racism. Justifying your own repression and violence. I was in refugee camps not that long ago. The people live in horrible conditions. It's very moving. I visited a family who lived in a small room. As usual, Middle Eastern–style, they offered coffee and so on, but when they start showing you the keys of their villages, their houses, pictures of their land, when they start telling you idealized stories about what life was like in the Galilee . . . you're right, Ilan, it has to be dealt with realistically, but it's hard to tell people like that, “You are never going to see your village again.”

IP:
No, you should not say that. What I meant is that we should tell them that until they see their villages, they should make their lives better. You are not undermining your chance of seeing your village by creating some comfort in your life now.

NC:
That's right.

IP:
You are not undermining your life as a Palestinian citizen of Israel by pushing aside accusations of practicing normalization because you have a Palestinian theater in Haifa. Such a theater was accused of
tabi'
(normalization) for accepting a budget from the Israeli Ministry of Culture. In Israel you can open a theater in Haifa without taking money from the ministry. These issues, living life under slogans [having moral or political purity], have a lot to do with the fact that if you are struggling for a different moral infrastructure for a future state, it would be far more important to provide a different ethical base for this future state to which the refugees would return. Whether it is one state, a federal state, a binational state, if you fight for a different ethical infrastructure for the state, the whole issue of people wanting to change their lives, either by coming back or by visiting, becomes a different issue.

The conversation here is different and we do not condemn people for persisting in the last sixty-five years to dream about their return home. They have this right. But what do we do until that right is implemented? To my mind this is no less important than protecting the right.

NC:
At a human level, some steps should be taken. Like the Israeli women who bring Palestinian women to the beach. It's very important. I mean, imagine those people that can see the sea but cannot touch it—the fact that there are some efforts to overcome that. That's the way things could begin.

FB: I remember, Professor Chomsky, that you told me in a previous interview that Israeli policies will lead Israel to self-destruction. The issue, for example, of bringing as many Jews to Israel as possible, regardless of their “real” Jewishness. Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews . . . the internal racism it creates, between Haredi Jews, Ashkenazis, Mizrahis . . . is becoming very worrying and problematic. Can you reflect on that?

NC:
That's one kind of problem, internal. But what I had in mind was a different one. In 1971 Israel made a decision, which in my view was its most fateful decision in its history. There was an offer from Egypt for a full peace treaty. The Israeli government, led by Golda Meir, considered it and rejected it because they wanted to colonize the Sinai. Basically their choice at the time was between security and expansion. A peace treaty with Egypt, whatever one might think about that outcome, would have meant security, in fact, permanent security as Egypt was the only powerful Arab military force. They understood that, but they preferred to expand into the Sinai. This was a fateful decision and it's been followed ever since. Ever since then Israel prefers expansion over security. To say they prefer expansion to security means that they are going to follow the path of apartheid South Africa because that follows automatically. Step by step they are going to become isolated, a pariah state, delegitimized, very much like South Africa, they are going to be able to survive only as long as the US supports them. It's very interesting to look at the history of South Africa. You could pretty much replace the word
South Africa
with
Israel
all through the history.

Back in 1960 roughly, the apartheid regime recognized that it was becoming an international pariah. We now know from declassified documents that the foreign minister called the American ambassador and told him that he knew everyone was voting against them, but that as long as the US was backing them, they did not care. That's pretty much what happened. By 1988 and a few years beyond, the US was still supporting South Africa, strongly. Thatcher too, but it was mainly Reagan and the US. South Africa was okay. When US policy shifted, apartheid ended. Israel is moving in exactly the same direction. By now, their sole support, virtually, is the US. They are becoming delegitimized. They are worried about it, but it is going to continue. It's inherent with a policy of expansion, disregard of international opinion, violations of international law, you can get away with it as long as you have the biggest thug on the block protecting you. But that's a weak support because it is going to erode in the US too, just like it did with South Africa. You can already see it happening. The US anti-apartheid movement really started in the eighties, twenty years later than it did in England. But it did develop and it was significant and it changed policy.

IP:
I think that what you are saying is correct. To a certain extent there is one big difference between South Africa and Israel. Usually people that do the comparison say that unfortunately it will be much more difficult to dismantle Israeli apartheid than the South African one.

NC:
It's not apartheid, I think the state is going to collapse.

IP:
It is a demand for a regime change.

NC:
It's very different from apartheid. It's really an issue of delegitimization and isolation.

IP:
What I am saying is that the white community in South Africa was, from a socio-economic point of view, quite homogenous. Whereas the white supremacist group in Israel is polarized economically and socially. If you add to this what Noam was talking about, the international delegitimization of Israel, you have two powerful processes. One from the inside and one from the outside that really questions the viability of the state. If you belong to the master race, but within the master race you have such a polarization in how the economic cake is being shared, you are in trouble.

The Israelis now have to brand two commodities. They have to market to the world the legitimacy of the state in a world that finds it very difficult to accept it. But then they have also a domestic branding to do. They have to explain to the poor and marginalized Jews why belonging to the master race has not improved their socio-economic standards of living. Why do they still live in impoverished development towns? Why is their culture not represented in the European-dominated and hegemonic culture? Israeli strategists will tell you that they have dealt with this by having a common enemy, a security issue, by having a war on Islam. The explanations and excuses have changed with time, but the polarized socio-economic reality remained the same. That's where the Israelis will find it difficult. There is a limit to how much you can justify a socio-economic marginalization and polarization. This became a more acute problem because since 2008, the middle class in Israel is being pushed down to being the lower middle class, which means that a larger number of people is prevented from getting its share of the national cake despite their belonging to the “right” ethnic group.

In the past and until recently, the ability to keep enough people convinced that their ethnic association also benefits them economically depended largely on the huge amounts of American financial aid to Israel. It is not very clear how much longer such massive aid will be continued. The tendency to review critically how much America is spending abroad does not come only from anti-imperialist critiques in the United States, and the people who would demand a reduction in the aid to Israel are not necessarily pro-Palestinians. The question would be whether the Jewish state is still a strategic asset or financial liability.

These processes will work to weaken the Zionist state in the long run. But my great fear is about the near future. As I heard and learned from veteran ANC leaders and activists, the apartheid regime became particularly fierce and vicious in its last years. It is the prospective fall of Zionism that brings us to a very dangerous period in the history of Palestine. We all have to be very alert and on guard about what is going to happen in the next few years rather than in the long term. You can be a bit more optimistic about the long term in terms of justice and changes in the reality.

NC:
I would not push the South African analogy too far because there are striking differences. One difference that cannot be acknowledged in the USA for obvious reasons is that it was the Cubans that destroyed the South African regime. It was they who drove South African aggressors out of Angola, Namibia, broke the mythology of the white superman. It was Black troops that were driving them out. It had an enormous effect. It is going to take a long time before this enters the US consciousness. The other thing is what you talked about. The homogenous white community. Which meant that there was a crucial class issue. It was possible to reach a settlement in South Africa the kind of which is impossible in Israel. The final settlement was, let's keep the socio-economic system and have some Black faces in the limousines. You cannot do that in Israel.

IP:
Making the parallel between South Africa and Palestine has advantages and disadvantages. You already have a Palestinian bourgeoisie inside Israel. You did not have African heads of medical departments in South Africa. Take the Galilee for example. There the intertwined communities are slowly becoming a fact of life. It already has a reality that reflects the future. The nature of the state is still ethnic and segregationist, but the transition to a state that recognizes the reality that already exists on the ground does not have to be as dramatic or drastic as it was in South Africa. In other parts of the country, especially in the West Bank and Greater Jerusalem area, dismantling the present reality and replacing it by a more just one would be very similar to the process occurring in the transition in South Africa from apartheid to a post-apartheid state. So there is no harm is studying closely the South African case so as not to repeat the mistakes made there and also be aware of the differences that would require original thinking for the case of Israel and Palestine.

NC:
South Africa was different because the white population needed its Black counterpart. It was its workforce. Israel does not want the Palestinians. South Africa actually supported the bantustans. They wanted them to develop because they had to reproduce the workforce and to be internationally recognized. In details it's not going to be a similar process even though there are some similarities. What I mentioned before—Israel determined that they will be a pariah state, but that it did not matter as long as the US backed them. That's very much the South African position. That is why I have often written, since the 1970s, that the people who call themselves supporters of Israel are in fact supporters of its moral degeneration and probably ultimate destruction.