Saturday morning I went to Bethlehem. Took the mini-bus from just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. It trundles you south along a route which slowly gives you broad vistas of hilltop after hilltop covered with some of the newer Israeli settlements like Gilo, which is vast, and Har Homa. Then the bus deposits you unceremoniously outside a very forbidding section of the Wall, which really is 30 feet tall, forbidding, and brutal. brutal, even if the Israelis, in an excess of irony, have decided to paint a vast feel-good mural on the Wall right there near the entrance to Bethlehem emblazoned with the words “Peace and Love.”
No kidding.
I think I’ll have to write a special essay sometime about the sick esthetics of the entire people-control system the Israelis run in the OPTs.
So the bus drops you, and you have to wind your way through the cattle-shed “terminus” they have here for foot traffic. No vehicles are allowed through anywhere near here, I think. The three Palestinian guys in front of me, who had the special “magnetic cards” that graciously allow them to visit Jerusalem from Bethlehem, all took quite some time to go through as they had to fit their whole hands into a new– to me– kind of scanner machine, which didn’t seem to work very well. The bored-looking Israeli teenage border-guard girls gave peremptory instructions to the men from inside their booth. Me, with my US passport, they waved right through. (Remember that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of this country. I am a visitor; and the Israeli girls may well be recent immigrants.)
Once on the other side I called my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran nonviolence activist, son of Bethlehem, and current member of the elected city council, and then started walking along to where he said he’d pick me up. The wall loops in and out in a complicated way here, as everywhere. It comes very close to many houses, and in one portion it goes right down the middle of a street. It is always 30 feet high; dark grey in color; and punctuated very frequently by looming, cylindrical watch-towers.
Hullo? Israelis? Do these towers not remind you of something in the Jewish people’s recent past??
Zoughbi drove me up to Manger Square and we then spent a fascinating 90 minutes or so sitting in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Three or four other city council members came by and participated for longer or shorter periods of time in the general political discussion. Two were from Hamas. There was a lot of good-natured political discussion and joshing amongst all those present. Neither Zoghbi nor Victor are members of Hamas. But least among these city council members, everyone seemed to get along fine. They also expressed the deep wish that the ongoing national reconciliation effort in Cairo should succeed as fast and durably as possible.
Zoughbi then took me to the neighboring town of Beit Jala. That’s the one that’s lost most of its arable and grazing lands to Gilo. Up on a hilltop near there there’s a small settlement called Har Gilo, and just beneath it is a resort-style hotel called the Everest Hotel, where by chance we found another fascinating set of people meeting. Probably shouldn’t tell you more about it without getting permission. Anyway, Zoughbi knows about half the population of the West Bank, it seems, so the organizers of this peace-oriented gathering invited us to join them for lunch. The lunch was good and warm, and the discussion very interesting. However, with bitter winds whipping around outside the hotel was, um, certainly living up to its name.
After that, Zoughbi dropped me back at the center of Beit Jala, where there’s a mini-bus service that takes you directly from there back to downtown Jerusalem. But the catch is the bus has to pass through a big vehicle terminus somewhere south of town that controls access to the “settler road” that snakes almost directly to Jerusalem from the Hebron/Kiryat Arba area in the south of the West Bank.
So going through this terminus, all the passengers have to disbark and wait until the border guards have given the vehicle and all the bags in it a very thorough check. It was now colder than ever, with a horrendous, biting wind. Old people, kids, and everyone were left to stand at the side of the road for a good 15 minutes while the border guards took their time getting around to doing what turned out to be about three minutes’ worth of checking on the bus. Then they checked all our IDs and our hand baggage as we got back on the bus. Most of my fellow-passengers seemed to be East Jerusalem residents– that is, they carried the little blue-jacketed ID cards given only to EJ people, as opposed to the “magnetic cards” that are given to a very small proportion of West Bank residents, that allow them to enter East Jerusalem.
(Yesterday I spent the day in Hebron, the nearby village of Doura, and the Israeli town of Sderot… Last Friday I had an intriguing visit to a portion of northern Jerusalem called Dahiyet al-Barid. Today I did an interview with Um Kamel, my neighbor here in Sheikh Jarrah who’s been living in a tent all winter after the Israeli police threw her and her husband out of her house last November, so a group of settlers could take it over… Her husband died of heart failure soon after. Um Kamel is not, it turns out, from the same family I briefly visited when I was here in 2002. But the problem of settler and takeovers, the demolition of Palestinian houses, and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes is one that is certainly gathering some speed right here in East Jerusalem these days, and needs to be written about a lot more…. Anyway, more of my travelogue accounts will come when I have time… tomorrow, I leave Jerusalem and continue my travels… Better get to bed…)
26 thoughts on “Bantustan Days, Part 2”
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I’m having a hard time reading you these days, Helena, since you came out as a non negotiable “two-state” person. That was a terrible sore day for me, and it goes on.
I find this “Bantustan Days” titling particularly hypocritical and sick-making.
Our central all-embracing South African liberation slogan “One Person One Vote in a Unitary State” was precisely coined to deal with the Bantustans: the real Bantustans. A Unitary State, we said. No bantustans, and no colony, either.
I don’t much care any more if you understand this, or not. I don’t think you want to. You couldn’t care less.
Your grabby, greedy, snatchy appropriation of the word Bantustan to further your two-state schemes is vomitous.
It is this kind of erosion of meaning, betraying the dead who fell fighting bantustans, that makes one rise up and rise up again with a will to smash the lousy colonialism that you condone, called Israel. It must go down with all the other colonies. No right to exist! No right to be a colony!
And for you, a journalist, who should be dedicated to the truth of words, to steal words in that way and turn them around till the dead cry out to have their meaning back. I can hardly believe it. Shame on you.
Dominic, I am not a non-negotiable two-state person. Primarily because it’s not up to me to decided. But if pressed I would (and do) say that principles of human equality could be adequately met in two viable states living side by side or within one state. Sorry if my use of the term Bantustan offends you. I think it helps to capture the sick ghastliness of the present situation.
One way or another the important thing is that the occupation must end.
Helena, I disagree totally with Dominic; your use of the term Bantustan honours their historical significance, and doesn’t demean them in any way.
Let us not forget that the term was invented by outsiders anyway, and that no black Africans had to enter through checkpoint sheds, flanked by 30ft walls with watchtowers.
Your descriptions of travelling around the West Bank are fascinating; I just wish you had more time to give more details. That would make the observations even more telling.
I last went to Bethlehem 35 years ago, which was easy, in a hired car, but my experience crossing the Allenby Bridge only 5 years later through Israeli checkpoints was similar to yours; I was whisked through, and Arab entrants were humiliated. We were held in our transit bus on the bridge itself for half an hour. Israeli soldiers confiscated an orange from my 9 year old son.
There may be something to defend Israeli ‘defencive’ attitudes but nothing excuses their racialism towards their subject Arabs.
Helena, on Jan 28 you wrote: It would be the height of folly and recklessness for President Obama to even risk going anywhere near that road [South-Africa type one-state solution]. Using the opportunity that’s presently offered to work with the world community to win a viable two-state outcome may look difficult. But it is by far the wiser course. And with a substantial portion of both the world and the US citizenry urging him on, he can start to spell out visions of an Arab-Israeli theater at peace that have been literally unimagineable for most of the past 60 years.
Now you merely say “It is not up to me to decide”, and that when pressed you would say: Principles of human equality could adequately me met in two viable states living side by side, or in one state. blah blah blah
So it sounds as if you have abandoned the “height of recklessness and folly” argument.
Which would be a good sign, if it meant you would be supporting sanctions, but unfortunately it is as Dominic says…
To qualify the situation in the PO and particularly in Gaza, some use the word “ghetto”. To me this is an interesting word to use in this confront, because the Israeli have long been victimes of ghettoization, so it tells something about what the Israeli are now doing to the Palestinians quite well.
Political appropriation of words bearing an important emotional charge due to past attrocities is quite frequent and has to be used with care. Those who were/are near of these tragedies are rarely agreeing with that use. In certain case these analogies are chosen in relationship to the audience one want to convince. So while using the word “bantoustan” may be interesting when addressing to an American audience, it is apparently shocking for South Africans, who knew the situation better. But sometimes, those who remained externals to the tragedy can draw interesting parallels. Even if two situations aren’t identical it may be usefull to see the second situation in the light of what succeeded in the first. For instance, it may be interesting to use the word “Bantustan” with an American audience who remembers well the long fight of the black people in the Civil Rights Movements. To an European audience (and an Israelian one ?) the word ghetto may be more telling.
Badger, I think you should give people more of the context for the quote you plucked out from that january 28 post, the title of which was “If there is a viable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine…”, casting doubt on the idea that there still is one. (But concluding that getting to one-state outcome would also be extremely difficult.)
Right now I’m in an information-gathering mode; not yet prepared to make any firm judgment on whether the 2SS is ‘possible’ or not. The brutal size and enormity of the facts on the ground in the West Bank– the settlements, the effects of the movement-control system, etc– are quite shocking for me.
I wish all JWN readers could accompany me on this trip and am trying to do what I can to make my experiences vivid for you. I don’t really appreciate having all this criticism heaped on me at this time– especially by people whose acquaintance with the situation ere might be much more theoretical and abstract than mine is at this point.
Anyway, my commitments to being a member of the reality-based community and to broad public discussion of the issues involved here in Palestine/Israel mean that I will continue with my info-gathering, with sharing what impressions and reports I can here on JWN as I go along (and after the trip ends, too), and to making room for public discussion of these issues on the blog.
Re use of the Bantustan analogy, I know plenty of South Africans who have either been to Palestine or have studied the situation closely, who feel it’s a very helpful analogy– though less than perfect, as all analogies are. Dominic doesn’t speak for all South Africans.
Fwiw, strongly pro-Israeli ideologues and hasbaristas absolutely hate the use either of the apartheid/Bantustan analogy or of the ghetto analogy.
I’ve only come back to this now. I’m grateful for the support.
Helena, you may be equivocal about your own “information-gathering”, and you should be. Most outsiders do get it wrong, whether they visit, or not. Being there does not mean you are going to get it right. You know that you have to work hard at it, and you won’t get, and should never get, any free pass for the fact that you have been there at this time, no matter how brave you may have been to do it.
But if you are equivocal about the meaning of Bantustans, then you give offense. Being equivocal about one-state and two-state, while at the same time invoking the idea of Bantustan amounts to being equivocal about Bantustans.
Bantustans were constructed to divide the national territory into two parts, in a manner that made the one part grossly subordinate and deprived in relation to the other, and at the same time removed rights from the black people who still had to inhabit the “white” part, where they worked for the whites. There is no optional way of looking at this. You may not take our struggle and make of it something else, for your own journalistic purposes.
The Bantustan comparison can be made with Israel/Palestine, of course, but only in a clear context of opposition to what we call “colonialism of a special type” where the coloniser and the colonised inhabit the same overall territory. Doing that kind of precise comparison respects our struggle and uses a proper understanding of it to illuminate the Palestine situation. But you are explicitly refusing that kind of clarity. So then rather leave us out of your speculations, please, because it gives offense.
Dominic, you appear to be particularly cranky these last few weeks. What is going on?
For the record, I do not find the tone of your attack on Helena over this issue at all appropriate. If you object to the use of the term Bantustan in this context, you need to take it up with virtually the entire Israeli peace camp, along with a number of your fellow South African companions-in-struggle who have used the term in this context, and might even have been the ones to to introduce it. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others, have explicitly likened the Palestinian situation to apartheid, and may have applied the term bantustan as well.
I have had my disagreements with Helena, but I have never felt the kind of disrespect that comes through in your comments here. Further, her on-the-ground experience of the situation is worth orders of magnitude more than our sitting-at-a-monitor theorizing about it.
Shirin, do please read my last post again, slowly. Please read the last paragraph of it in particular.
I’m grateful to Badger for pasting the quote from Helena’s notorious Lady Bracknell-type diatribe back in January. I’m afraid that Helena’s current gloss on that outburst is less than satisfactory, but an open mind is better than a closed two-state one, for sure.
If you think that I may be at odds with some of my “companions-in-struggle” about this, then you are quite correct. Our former Minister Ronnie Kasrils, for example, is a consistent two-stater. Two-state is South African government policy on Palestine, and it is even included in the ANC manifesto for the coming election. I support the ANC but I do not agree with the two-state policy in relation to Palestine. I regard it as a betrayal of our struggle principles.
Some South Africans, including Kasrils, have said that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is “worse than apartheid”. It is true that the Israeli brutalities are worse, but this statement is a sloppy one. Apartheid is not a matter of degree, but a deliberate and qualitatively distinct kind of agression. It is this kind of degradation of language that I am complaining about.
Good luck to Helena, anyway. I wish her safe home.
All these walls, gates, and fences would be unnecessary if Palestinians didnt have a religious commandment to blow up Jews in cafes, restaurants, buses, etc. The tone of your comments indicates that you have some Jewish issues, perhaps the replacement theology that advises the American Friends Service Committee. Tell me, if a Hamas member blew up your friends in West Jerusalem (the bombs dont distinguish between right and left wing Israelis), would you be upset?
Ohhhhhh! It’s our good friend N. Friedman aka Michael Furry aka Constantine Gbao with the same tuneless, meaningless song!
What part of no one here is ever going to buy what you’re selling is not yet clear yet, N./Michael/Constantine?
Although this is off-topic I note that our trolling friend ‘Elvis’/’N’/etc is trying out on us this term ‘Palestinian Replacement Theology’ as a way of discrediting the use by Naim Ateeq and others of the concepts of ‘Palestinian Liberation Theology.’ by using the ‘replacement’ misnomer they are quite clearly projecting onto PLT supporters a position of support for what is in fact, pari passu, both the ideology and the practice of the hard right in Israel including members of all governments since the dawn of Zionism. But what these Zionists call for and do is much more extreme than PLT. Neither Naim nor anyone in the PLT camp that I know calls for the expulsion of all the Jews from Israel/Palestine.
Off what topic, Helena? From my point of view the sight of Shirin and yourself taking off on a wild-troll-chase is very much illustrative of the current topic of wool-gathering and woolly-mindedness.
Do you really think that you can have a successful polemic with a trolling spin-doctor? You have to be very good to do that. You have to be clear-minded and well-read. You can’t succeed by busking, afterthoughts, and dropping a name or two.
Why have you not positively and frequently articulated Liberation Theology as a matter of course on JWN? Do you know anything of its history? Or is it something that you just wear as an accessory from time to time?
The half-baked, defensive and gratuitous way that you introduce Liberation Theology in this case even looks as if you are trying to put it in harm’s way. Since when did Liberation Theology need to be defined by odious comparisons as you have done here?
Shirin thinks that the person on the beat can trump anybody sitting at a monitor, as she puts it. But here you are illustrating very well, Helena, that the reflection “at a monitor” is crucial. You are shooting from the hip. You are degrading ideas and language and wasting them.
I’m not going to apologise for criticising. I’m quite sure I’m doing you a favour by criticising.
Here, below, is a paragraph from an article on the “Apartheid Week” that is supposed to be going on at the moment.
You will see that the author, David Mandelzys, does achieve, after stumbling, a fairly clear definition of apartheid, and a clear opposition to it. But then, a bit like Helena, he somehow manages to fumble the two-state apartheid project back on to the agenda, lauding the well-known two-stater Ronnie Kasrils in the very same paragraph.
You can’t be opposed to apartheid and at the same time in favour of a “two-state” solution in Palestine, unless you are just playing with words, and people’s emotions. Perhaps you don’t know, so let me tell you that the grotesque question of “independent” Bantustans was a large part if not the main part of the political struggle against these monstrosities. There is no good Bantustan. There is no rehabilitated Bantustan. The only remedy is one person on vote in a unitary state.
Here is the paragraph:
“Israeli Apartheid is of course not identical to South African Apartheid. As recognized by former American president Jimmy Carter, Israel Apartheid is in some ways worse, and no one is trying to claim that there are no differences in details. Israel Apartheid week highlights Israel’s particular system of ‘apartness,’ and shows how it manifests a constant state of oppression for the Palestinian people in a way the civilized world already said was unacceptable. Holding Israeli policy in Palestine under the magnify glass makes it clear that the settlements, Jewish only roads, checkpoints, military zones, walls, and border controls, have no doubt become a permanent system of separation. Israel is not benevolently trying to protect its citizens, but purposefully setting into action a system to control large portions of Palestinian lands while subjecting the Palestinian people to a form of citizenship devoid of rights or security, in others words, Apartheid. Making the comparison between Israel and South Africa is becoming less and less controversial with not only President Carter speaking out but South African anti-Apartheid leaders Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Karils, Israeli academics Illan Pappe and Uri Davis, UN General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, and other leaders and human rights advocates joining the chorus as well. Thanks in part to campaigns like Israel Apartheid Week this information is finally reaching the public.”
Find the whole article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mandelzys03042009.html
While you were all away, the debate continued:
Why not a NO STATE solution? I mean, taking the argument that a two state solution is old-style apartheid-like partition, let’s recognize that the wh9ole Middle East is riddled with partitions and imperialist imposed state borders.
Berend
The debate continued:
It’s a question of the character, constitution and structure of the state(s), and their relations
to actual/potential residents and citizens, rather than their number. Under current conditions,
both 1- and 2-state solutions would amount to the same thing: entrenching Israeli control.
The sterile number issue is a dead-end debate.
Ran
The debate continued:
The colonialism of a special type issue and the National Question may be like kryptonite to some people but they are not sterile questions in South Africa.
Some people need to bear in mind that people deal with their own situation first and then deal with the world in terms of that situation.
We cannot afford to allow any sort of comeback for colonialism of a special type, anywhere, and that is our primary interest.
As for threats of even worse, if colonialism is not to be allowed in Palestine, those threats should be treated with the contempt that they deserve, if I may borrow a phrase that is beloved of our Young Communist League.
As for the no-state solution, you know very well that communism is the only no-state solution that has ever been invented, but also that the Communist Manifesto says that each proletariat must deal with its own bourgeoisie, Berend.
I quote these as shorthand. I am quite prepared to argue the case, if you insist.
Likewise, you must know that the question of borders has been debated in Africa since before the founding of the OAU, i.e for half a century or so, and the decision is a dual one: That we use the existing borders until at the earliest possible time we can unite in the manner prescribed by Kwame Nkrumah, who was correct to point out that we will always be victims of the Imperialists until we can act in concert at the continental level.
Our business is to defend these principles. We do not have to approach everything ex novo. We must not do so. Our struggle must be defended and furthered, and just as with the Great French Revolution, this means it must be carried beyond our borders.
Aux armes, citoyens!
Domza “Pere Du Chesne” VC
The debate continues:
Below is part of Uri Avnery’s latest in Counterpunch. Avnery supports the two state solution. I can’t see much difference between him and the others he denounces, other than that he is more likeable, and probably writes better, than any of them. I wish he would come round, or come out of the closet. Whichever.
Domza.
IN HIS poem “If”, Rudyard Kipling asked whether “you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.” This is now a test for all those who stood at the cradle of the “Two State” idea some 60 years ago.
This vision was – and remains – the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The sole realistic alternative is the continuation of the present situation – occupation, oppression, Apartheid, war. But the enemies of this vision have smartened up and pretend to support it on every occasion.
Avigdor Liberman is in favor of “Two States”. Absolutely. He spells it out: several Palestinian enclaves, each of them surrounded by the Israeli military and by settlers like himself. These Bantustans will be called “a Palestinian state”. An ideal solution, indeed: the State of Israel will be cleansed of Arabs, but will continue to rule over all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Binyamin Netanyahu has a similar vision, but differently worded: the Arabs will “govern themselves”. They will govern their towns and villages, but not the territory, neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip. They will have no army, of course, and no control of the airspace over their heads, neither will they have any physical contact with neighboring countries. Menachem Begin used to call this “autonomy”.
But there will be “economic peace”. The Palestinian economy will “flourish”. Even Hillary Clinton ridiculed this idea publicly before meeting with Netanyahu.
Tzipi Livni wants “Two Nation-States”. Yes’ Ma’m. When? Well… First of all there have to be negotiations, unlimited in time. They did not come to fruition during the years she has been conducting them, nor have they got anywhere at all. Ehud Olmert speaks about the “Political Process” – why did he not bring it to a successful conclusion during the years of his stewardship? How long must the “Process” go on? Five years? Fifty? Five hundred?
So Hillary speaks about “Two States”. Speaks with great vigor. Is ready to speak about it with any Israeli government that will be set up, even if inspired by the ideas of Meir Kahane. The main thing is that they talk with Mahmoud Abbas, and that Abbas in the meantime receives money, a lot of money.
Full text at http://www.counterpunch.org avnery03062009.html
The debate continued:
I mean, Berend, that a state is less a question of borders than it is of a relationship between a proletariat and a bourgeoisie.
You can remove the borders, or add extra ones, but the bourgeoisie will still have to have state power.
Only under the dictatorship of the proletariat can you start dismantling state power, and then only to the extent that the bourgeoisie is withering away.
In I/P, is there one bourgeoisie, or two? Is there one proletariat, or two?
A man as well-read as Avnery must know about all this. He knows that there are never going to be two equal bourgeoisies in this little area called Palestine. So then who does he think he is kidding about two states?
Domza, VC
The debate continued:
Dominic,
If a state is non-territorial, or let me put it this way – if there are no borders then the bourgeois exercise of power internally (police, justice system, protection of private property, etc; external – an army and/or regional alliances) becomes impossible. The bourgeoisie or whatever ruling block becomes amorphous. Just like we often speak of the network society and its implications for expressing working class interests, so too the ruling elite of the bourgeoisie become a network type social formation as well. Power becomes amorphous. It then depends not so much on holding a monopoly of power within its own territorial borders, but work its power logistics through the fictions of the “invisible hand” (the market) bolstered by things like the WTO, IMF, UN, ICC etc.
On another aspect of this debate: you seemed to suggest that we tend to see our own situation in South Africa as a lesson learnt to prefigure our solidarity with the Palestinian situation. Like having “defeated” colonialism of a special type in South Africa we will project this as the One State solution for P/I. I wonder whether this is not rather loose from a dialectical approach? Is this colonialism of a special type an absolute; or is it merely a point in a spectrum of settler colonial situations ranging from those where the settler component is virtually absent (India, Indonesia), to where it is totally present with the indigenous populations wiped out (the US for example)?
The formulation of the national question in the Middle East seemed to tackle the fragmentation through imposition of artificial borders first and foremost, thus look at ridding the Arab world of the colonial “nation states”. This was the driving force behind the Baath movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. (Of course this did not work out that well. After all the imperialist strategy was to set up not simply artificial nation states, but grow separate bourgeois administrations to share in the spoils of their land). Remember, these “nation states” were imposed after centuries Muslim hegemony extending over the entire Middle East and at one time right into Europe, ending with the Ottoman Empire.
This Middle East approach looks very different from the formulation of our own national question during the struggle years. The Pan Arab state idea was a partial reality with the United Arab Republic of Nasser’s time. In our case we simply accepted the imposed colonial borders and the state constructed on these. Even to the extent of being blind-spotted that within our current borders we still have two de facto “bantustans, namely Swaziland and Lesotho.
In summary, you cannot remove territorial borders without fundamentally altering the range and nature of ruling power blocks.
Berend
The debate continued. This was the last post to date:
Surprise: I don’t much agree with you, Berend.
It is the relationship with a working proletariat that requires, and defines, a bourgeois state, not its territory. That’s what I was saying before and I’m still saying it.
I also say that we South Africans have been on a mission and that we can still lose our mission unless we expand it outside our borders.
As for degrees of colonialism, the late Jack Woddis used to have a theory of inverse time towards independence, related to the number of settlers in a country. It was his little joke, rough and ready and not very useful.
Obviously a colony in the ancient sense of the word is a plantation of people. I think that this is the sense that remains a threat to us here in South Africa. It has to be made illegal and abolished worldwide, like slavery, say, or foot-binding.
Swaziland is also a threat to South Africa, but more as a reservoir of feudalism, which has not completely been eradicated from SA.
It used to be that the “export of revolution” was a no-no. But I say, it’s always been done, and for good reasons. These reasons apply to us. To make our revolution stick, it must stick outside the country too, and solidarity is not charity, it’s a common cause.
A common cause in which we have our own interest.
This is the real internationalism.
Domza, VC
The debate still continues. Ran just now posted a long thing from somebody called Moshe Machover. I have redacted it further for JWN, and put the URL to the full text at the bottom:
One can imagine Palestine divided into two states: Israel and a Palestinian Arab state. Or one can envisage a single state in the whole of Palestine. And one can think of other setups, which I will mention later. But clearly the crucial point is not the number of states, but whether the essential principles of genuine resolution are satisfied. For a two-state setup to satisfy them, Israel would have to be de-Zionized: transformed from an ethnocratic settler state into a democratic state of all its inhabitants. Also, resources – including land and water – would have to be divided justly and shared equitably by the two states. And neither of them should be allowed to dominate the other.
On the other hand, a single state would have to be not merely democratic (and hence secular) but have a constitutional structure that recognizes the two national groups and gives them equal national rights and status.
But in fact none of this is feasible at present. Indeed, no genuine resolution is possible in the short or medium term, because of the enormous disparity in the balance of power. The Palestinians, economically shattered, lightly armed and enjoying little effective international support, are facing a dominant modern capitalist Israel, a regional hegemonic nuclear superpower, a local hatchet man and junior partner of the global hyper-power. So long as such gross imbalance of power persists, any settlement will inevitably impose harsh oppressive conditions on the weaker side. To expect anything else would be wildly unrealistic.
In these circumstances any `two-state settlement´ is bound to be a travesty: not two real sovereign states (let alone two equal ones) but one powerful Israeli state dominating a disjointed set of Palestinian enclaves similar to Indian Reservations, policed by corrupt elites acting as Israel´s proxies. This was the real prospect even under the Oslo Accords of 1993; and since then the situation has deteriorated much further, with the virulent malignant metastasis of Israeli colonization, and the weakening of the Palestinian Authority under Israeli pounding and international strangulation.
Faced with the evident present infeasibility of an equitable two-state setup, many people of genuine goodwill have reverted to the `one-state´ formula.
This is, abstractly speaking, an attractive proposition. The trouble with it, however, is that a truly equal one-state setup is no more feasible in the short or medium term than an equal two-state one – and for exactly the same reason. Given the actual imbalance of power, a single state embracing the whole of Palestine will be no better than an extension of direct Israeli military occupation and subjugation.
A flaw common to both `two-state´ and `one-state´ formulas is that they are confined to the `box´ of Palestine – the territory of the British Mandate from 1923 to 1948. They differ in that the former proposes to re-partition it, while the latter proposes to resurrect it as a single distinct political entity. Ironically, as I pointed out in Section 1.5, this box was purpose-made for Zionist colonization, the root cause of the conflict. Can it serve as an insulated container for the conflict´s resolution?
Full text at:
http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/articles/moshe%20machover%20%202006lecture_b.pdf
Moshe Machover’s logical hiatus comes about because of his undeveloped sense of the relation between race and class. South Africans ought to be able to assist. This is our speciality, not so? And our solution is what we call “transformation”, of which I think that Machover has no idea at all.
Also, the Palestine “box” is not the point. The point is the territorial footprint of the Israeli bourgeoisie, whether it precisely corresponds to that box or not. That is what defines them as a national bourgeoisie, and that is what defines the boundaries of their proletariat, too.
This is not fiction. The Israeli bourgeoisie is no doubt acutely aware of its boundaries, as are the bourgeoisies of the neighbouring countries. I always think of the bombing of the harmless Lebanese dairy factory in this connection. Pure vindictive dog-in-the-manger bourgeois destructiveness.
The wider picture is not only one of a patchwork of competing bourgeois nationalisms, but also, as in Africa, of the encroachment of the interests of Imperialism. In South Africa, both the pre- and post-liberation state have been embroiled in this question, both as ostensible anti-Imperialists and also willy-nilly as sub-Imperialist mediators for global Imperialism. This would equally be the case for a united Palestine. That struggle will continue in a different form.
Each proletariat must deal with its own bourgeoisie in the first place. Machover thinks that the Palestinian, not conceived of in class terms, would be as badly off in a one-state as in a two-state. But as soon as the class question is factored in, it can be seen that the Palestinian proletariat would be in the vastly better and historically-familiar position of normal class struggle.
Whereas the Palestinian bourgeois nationalists would be losers or gainers, depending upon how they play the “transformation” (BEE in SA) game. And that is what explains the phenomenon of Abu Mazen/Abbas: not that he is a Quisling, but that he is a bourgeois.
Then Ran wrote:
What bourgeoisie, which proletariat? What do they actually do, what do they produce, who is working for whom and in which way? Whoever and wherever they are, how are they related to these one-two-states debates? How can the ‘class question’ be factored in under conditions in which Israeli employers have no need for Palestinian workers, and the state seeks to drive them away rather than facilitate their exploitation? These tired concepts bear no relevance to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, as most people who can locate the area on the map would know, but Marxist theory seems to reign supreme even if it is not based on any empirical evidence or knowledge of concrete conditions. Those who are interested in the actual relations between nation and class in Israel-Palestine, beyond such hollow slogans, can look up the classical “The class nature of Israeli society”, by Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr, New Left Review, 65, January-February 1971, pp. 3-26.
So I wrote:
Fine, Ran, but would you like to enlarge on the “Israeli employers have no need for Palestinian workers” bit?
I did read Moshe Machover’s full PDF, including the part where he “invokes” Marx on this subject, in the very section called “Is it apartheid?”
I also happen to be reading another book at present called Mozambique: the Revolution and its Origins, by Barry Munslow, where there is a very good short survey of the labour question in relation to the South African mines. The South African Randlords neither wanted to, nor could they easily or quickly enough, convert the South African peasantry into a proletariat. At one point, in 1904 I believe, they even imported 60,000 Chinese workers for a year. At any time from at least the 1880s, and perhaps even today, you might have been able to get a quote from a South African capitalist, or lots of them, to the effect that “South African employers have no need for South African workers”.
But this does not finish the class question, nor the National Question, at all. Not in South Africa, nor, in my opinion, in Palestine.
It begs the question, in my opinion. The supply of labour is always an open and burning question to real capitalists. Under stress the supply situation can change very quickly, but capital must always have labour, and capitalists emplying labour cannot help themselves, try as they will, and they do, from creating a proletariat.
I think there is too much of “Zionist” subjective exceptionalism in Machover’s argument, and in yours, too. Machover boldly states that “South Africa under apartheid and Israel belong to the same genus: colonial settler state.” But then he says:
“South Africa… with the development of capitalist industry and mining… evolved into a system in which black Africans were the main source of surplus value. Apartheid was a system designed to keep the non-whites at hand, as an essential resource of the economy – but without civil rights.”
This slides over the whole problem. Can the South African migrant labour system, which drew the majority of its labour from outside the country and from as far north as Tanganyika, with a huge bureaucratic and transport apparatus for the purpose, be truly described as one that kept the non-whites “at hand”? On the contrary, South Africa was always trying to do what you say Israel is now trying to do, namely to avoid the establishment of a self-conscious secular national proletariat.
South Africa failed to prevent the growth of such a proletariat. That well-organised proletariat is the political core of the country today, and it is the guarantee of the solution of South Africa’s National Question.
Machover thinks that it is conclusive to say that: “Zionism deliberately, consciously and explicitly chose the other model: use of indigenous labour power was to be avoided.” But this was not another model. It is the same model. Israeli capitalists are on the same historic hook as the South African capitalists were, and the logic of it will have to work out in the same way, in my opinion. That is to say, there will come a time, as happened in South Africa, when Israeli capital will no longer be able to afford to refrain from employing the “indigenous labour power” (if in fact it does so refrain, and I would like further and better particulars on that at some point).
I’m sorry that you call things “hollow”. One tries to be brief and some things get put aside for that reason. There are many ways in which one could elaborate and fill up with detail but it is not appropriate here to try to be exhaustive. One can try to make obvious where that detail lies, and I hope I have done so to some extent. But then one must, in such a place, in a single post as opposed to a series of them, draw a fairly stark contradiction.
The contradiction drawn here, in this particular post, is between the inexorable workings of class formation, and on the other hand the entirely subjective, counter-natural construct and project of the self-defined Zionists.
With best wishes,
Domza
Let Ran have the last word:
OK, let me respond with a hollow argument of my own, for lack of time: the politically dominant force among Israeli Jews in pre-1948 Palestine was the Zionist labour movement, which focused its efforts on the creation of a local Jewish working class that would settle the country and replace Palestinian-Arabs as a source of labour, produce and market. The reason for such focus was that the Zionist movement had a constituency, outside the country, which was supposed to move to Palestine and become a majority there: the Eastern and Central European Jewish masses. While individual Jewish farmers (to a large extent) and industrialists (to a limited extent) used local Arab labour, the Zionist movement and especially its labour wing regarded such practices as a betrayal of the national interests. In their view, the country was the destination for large-scale Jewish immigration and, to become viable, such immigration had to rely on availability of jobs in the Jewish-owned economic sector. Hence, the separatist drive expressed in slogans such as ‘conquest of land’, ‘conquest of labour’, ‘Hebrew (=Jewish) labour’ and ‘buy local (=Jewish) produce’.
Although the majority of potential Jewish immigrants were exterminated in the 2nd world war
holocaust, these policies persisted, and when the 1947-48 war created an opportunity, the task of removing Palestinian-Arabs as competititors was accomplished through massive expulsions of people from their homes and villages located in the areas allocated to the Jewish state by the UN in 1947, to complete the flight of people from conditions of war and social and political disruption.
The outcome was a new state and society, in which the working class was composed of Jews predominantly, whose ranks were beefed up by massive immigration of hundreds of thousands of people from Arab countries, who became known as Oriental Jews in Israel, Mizrahim in Hebrew. Within a decade or so, the remaining Palestinians (20% of the original population of the territories that became Israel) joined the ranks of workers though remaining a minority of the overall working class. Meanwhile Palestinians elsewhere, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in the diaspora (mostly Jordan and Lebanon) developed their own class structures. Some of them were incorporated indeed into the Israeli labour market after the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation, but their role in the Israeli economy shrank consistently following the first intifada (1987-90), the first Gulf war (1991) and the Oslo agreements of 1993. With the second intifada, starting in 2000, their numbers dropped drastically: no more than few percentages of the working population in the occupied territories work in Israel or for Israelis, and occupied Palestinians count for very small percentage of the total Israeli working force. Israeli employers do not need them because they have sufficient supply of Jewish workers (mostly Mizrahim and recent Russian immigrants) and Israeli Palestinians (those who remained behind in 1948), supplemented by massive numbers of foreign workers (Turkish, Romanians, Chinese, Thai, Ghanaians and so on). Post-2000, most occupied Palestinians play very limited role as workers and Diaspora palestinians never played any role, nor are they going to in the short to medium future. As a result, they have not had, are not having, and are very unlikely to have the strategic leverage of SA black workers vis-a-vis their ‘own’ bourgeoisie.
In addition to the reference to “the class nature of Israeli society”, published in NLR long ago, a recent article by Ehud Ein-Gil and Moshe Machover addresses the question of the Mizrahim: “Zionism and Oriental Jews: a dialectic of exploitation and co-optation”, Race and Class, January 2009.