I went to an interesting discussion today. It was led by the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel, who was talking about his recent book Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.
I asked him about the state of the Israeli peace movement these days, wondering aloud if it is really in such chaos and disarray as it seems to be.
His answer was interesting. He said that the essential issue that Israelis and all others need to focus on is the need to end the occupation, rather than “peace” as such. And he recalled how, growing up in France in the 1950s, those on the French left for long time had a main slogan regarding Algeria that was “peace in Algeria,” and didn’t make too much impact with that. But then, he said, in around 1959, they switched their slogan to “Withdraw from Algeria”, and that was when the political system inside France really started to shift on the issue.
So I thought about that quite a bit afterwards. It is true, isn’t it, that everyone right across the political claims that their goal is “peace” between Israel and its neighbors. Including those who specifically negate the idea that this peace needs a robust territorial basis, such as for example, those who argue that what’s needed is a “peace for peace” deal, rather than a “land for peace” deal.
Cypel argued that what is required, first and foremost, is a clear Israeli statement that it will withdraw from the lands occupied in 1967, and then on the basis of that the modalities of the withdrawal, including the possibility of balanced adjustments in the final border, and the nature of the post-withdrawal relationship can all be effectively negotiated. But, he stressed, they should be negotiated in the context of a clear prior Israeli commitment to withdraw. Which is what international law requires of Israel, anyway.
(By the way, this is a principle that needs to be applied in the case of the US’s current occupation of Iraq, as well.)
On a broadly related note, when I went to the panel discussion with the Anglo-Israeli peace activist Daniel Levy yesterday, one of the most striking things he said was that it is quite unreasonable to ask the occupied people to provide assurances for the security of the occupiers and even for the settlers from the occupying country.
He also said that making “absolute security” for Israel a firm precondition for the conduct or completion of any final-peace talks– as the Annapolis process currently does, with its references to the really damaging “Road Map”– is a recipe for sure failure. “How can the Palestinians assure the security of Israelis? They don’t have a state, they don’t have anything!”
Parenthetically, I’d add that the PA is quite unable to assure the security of Palestinians, so how can anyone demand that they assure the security of Israelis, as well?
Levy’s bottom line was that completion and implementation of the final-status Palestinian-Israeli agreement simply cannot be held hostage to conditions placed on either side in the arena of interim measures.
This is what I’ve been arguing for the past 14 years. Since Oslo. It’s a crazy idea, and one that gratuitously gives the whole peace negotiation over as a hostage to hardliners on either side who, when they want to torpedo it, have merely to launch yet another escalation or provocation.
Today, by the way, Cypel reminded us that the first terrorist event after Oslo was that undertaken by the American-Israeli settler extremist Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshipers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, and wounded 150 more, during his February 1994 rampage there.
3 thoughts on “Israeli precedent in France/Algeria?”
Comments are closed.
It was a poet,I do not remember who, that said “…either a wave of generosity or else a wave of death.” Things are getting so confused and turbulent ,like the change of the tide, that I have the uneasy feeling it will be the latter,and it is coming up the beach right now.
damn but this makes me feel old. is there something odd in the air that’s making warmedover rhetoric seem suddenly compelling or new?
cypel’s point about the worthlessness of the “peace” rhetoric and framing of a goal for justice in palestine is great – for 1994. it’s the core of the basic critique of oslo (of which annapolis is a rather decomposed renevant) which has been common to pretty much everyone doing any kind of palestine solidarity organizing since the current intifada began seven years ago.
since then, the “peace” camp has faded into practical irrelevance (peace now’s ‘we support his war but think it’s a bad idea’ statement on the israeli government’s carpetbombing and invasion of lebanon is pretty typical). every group engaged in actual action – from gush shalom to ta’ayush to ICADH to the international solidarity movement to my own home base, jews against the occupation/nyc – has based most of its approach on the “anti-Occupation” framing.
and we’ve had seven years of experience working with that model, from which i feel fairly comfortable saying that it’s a somewhat ineffectual half step at best. it doesn’t defuse or forestall any of the attacks or arguments that rightwingers and other opponents of justice for palestinians throw our way. and it doesn’t allow us to talk about the major issues which have to be dealt with for there to be any kind of effective, much less just, end to the israeli war on palestinians.
which is to say: just talking about the Occupation – i.e. the ‘1967 first’ approach – cuts out the refugee majority of palestinians; it sidesteps the status of the 1/5 of the israeli population which consists of palestinian fourth-class citizens (after ashkenazim, mizrakhim/sefardim and druze); it endorses the legitimacy of a racially and religiously exclusivist state; and it makes the discussion of israel’s role as a u.s. client much more tangled than it in fact is…
so if we’re looking for old slogans from other anticolonial movements to apply, i’d suggest these, rather than the contributions from the algeria solidarity movement:
amandla awetu (power to the people)
mayibuye i filastin (come back, palestine)
zemlya i volya (land & freedom)*
* yes, i’d call the rural movements in 19th century russia anti-colonial in many senses, just as current uyghur and tibetan movements in china can be usefully seen in that light.
The first post-Oslo “terrorist event” was the murder of Yigal Vaknin on 24/9/1993 (by Hamas).
All in all, according to this list (which I know to be incomplete) 27 Israelis were killed in 21 attacks (not counting attacks which caused no fatalities) between the signing of Oslo and Goldstein’s rampage.