In a small hotel in East Jerusalem last week, I met a Norwegian aid worker with many years of experience working in occupied Palestine, who told me the following story:
She and some colleagues went to visit a project their organization was running in one of the West Bank villages hard hit by the many land grabs Israel has undertaken since the 1993 conclusion of the “Oslo” agreement between Israel and the PLO. They met with a gathering of canny village elders, one of whom greeted them by saying this: “Welcome! Well, as you know we are simple people, and not all of us are good at reading your way of writing. But when we look at the word ‘Oslo’ the way you write it, it is clear to us that it begins with a zero and ends with a zero… ”
That is indeed a great reading of the meaning of “Oslo” (the agreement) from the Palestinian point of view.
Remember that Oslo was only ever planned to be an interim arrangement, with a fixed term of five years starting from the 1994 “return” of the PLO’s leaders to occupied Palestine from the previous exile in distant lands; at the end of that five-year period, the intention stated in the Oslo agreement was that implementation would thereafter begin of the final-status peace between the two peoples that would meanwhile have been fully negotiated.
Instead of which, ten years after that 1999 deadline and nearly 16 years after “Oslo” itself, the Palestinian people are still trapped in the deliberate indeterminacy and ambiguity of Oslo, with no final agreement anywhere in sight.
And meantime, throughout those 15.5 years, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank has more than doubled; an entire parallel road system has been installed in the West Bank for the benefit of (and the nearly exclusive use of) the settlers; the lengthy and brutal barrier has been erected, often snaking deep within the West Bank; East Jerusalem has been sealed off from its natural West Bank hinterland and surrounded not only with the Wall but also with thick rings of new Israeli settlements; Gaza has been first strangled and then pounded physically into misery and despair; and the Israeli government continues to announce plans for vast numbers of new settlements and new demolitions of Palestinian homes.
Successive Israeli governments since 1993 have tried to justify these steps in the name of “security”. But they have not built the security of Israel’s people in either the short or the long term. Jewish people continue to be more insecure in Israel than anywhere else in the world. And by continuing to sow despair, destitution, and misery among the Palestinians, while also taking gigantic chunks out of the territorial basis for any future Palestinian state, these Israeli governments have made it much, much harder to get their people’s relationship with the Palestinians who will continue to be their closest neighbors for the entire foreseeable future back onto a track of sustainable coexistence.
If indeed Israel’s actions have been motivated mainly by a desire for “security”– and there is considerable evidence that other motivations, including land-hunger, have also been at play– then they have failed miserably. Indeed, they are a classic example of what strategic specialists call the “security dilemma”: That is, the phenomenon whereby if one actor takes unilateral steps to enhance its own security, those steps may well end up by building the insecurity of others who are therefore more strongly motivated than hitherto to take counter-steps that end up increasing the insecurity of the first actor.
As the most recent war in Gaza demonstrated yet again, no amount of military head-bashing of the Palestinians can assure Israel’s security. (I was in Sderot a few days ago, on a day when a few primitive rockets once again fell on southern Israel from Gaza.) Only a well-structured final-peace agreement can achieve that. And Israel and the Palestinians seem further away from reaching that point than they have been at any point since 1993.
* * *
One good way to look at Oslo is to consider it as a fragile safe-deposit box in which all the thorny issues of the Palestinian-Israeli final status agreement– final borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the claims of the Palestinian refugees– were temporarily locked up.
During the intended five-year interim period, those issues were all to be negotiated, but not acted upon by either of the parties.
As we know, however, Israel continued after 1993 to take numerous actions that considerably jeopardized the possibility of reaching a sustainable final-status agreement– particularly in the areas of borders/settlements, and Jerusalem. And while its negotiators on occasion seemed to engage seriously in trying to conclude an agreement on final borders (on very expansionist terms), Israeli governments and many their non-governmental supporters tried to maintain a strong prohibition on any serious discussion of the two issues of Jerusalem and the claims of those 6-8 million Palestinians who lost their ancestral homes in Israel in 1948.
But now Oslo, and the lock-box into which it had placed those ‘hot-button’ issues, is coming unglued. And the two “final-status” issues of Jerusalem and the claims of the 1948 refugees are regaining importance in public life in Israel/Palestine in new ways.
To some degree it has been developments inside Israel itself that have forced these issues back onto the agenda. In Jerusalem, extremist settler activists have been escalating their projects to build large settler outposts deep within overwhelmingly Palestinian-peopled areas of East Jerusalem, including Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. These activists and their backers in the Jerusalem municipality seem to have taken advantage of the political turmoil and lengthy transition in the national government to announce new, extremely provocative projects to Judaize these areas of Jerusalem while expelling large numbers of indigenous Palestinians from them.
Regarding the claims of the 1948 refugees (and their descendants) to their homes, properties, and right of residence within the area of Israel itself, a new generation of Israelis is slowly now emerging to whom the whole idea that the Palestinians have such claims is no longer the same strong taboo that it was for an older generation of Israelis.
I remember in the early 1990s, during a number of the “track two” meetings between Israelis, Palestinians, and others that I helped organize, how whenever Palestinians would mention the claims they had in connection with 1948, several Israelis could not even bear to talk about that issue. At one such meeting the late Ze’ev Schiff gave voice to what, I think, a lot of his Israeli compatriots thought about this issue when he said, “No, we cannot even think of having our government saying anything that might imply it did something less than honorable to anyone during the war of 1948. For us, the war of our independence was such a glorious moment that its memory cannot be sullied in any way.”
That outburst came in response to a wholehearted plea from one of the Palestinian participants that even if Israel would not allow any large-scale return of Palestinian refugees to their homes such as has been called for in dozens of UN resolutions since 1948, at least it could issue some form public acknowledgment of the harm it had caused to so many Palestinians that year, by expelling them… But Schiff was adamant, on both counts: No ‘return’ of refugees on any scale beyond perhaps a few thousand; and no symbolic perlocutionary act such as issuing an official statement of acknowledgment of the harm done to Palestinians– let alone an apology for it.
* * *
For many Israelis of Schiff’s generation the Israelis’ “sacred memory” of 1948 could not be sullied in any way. But Schiff, who had been active participant in the war of 1948, died last year. And I’ve been intrigued to learn about the emergence among a new generation of Israelis of a new organization that is dedicated to re-opening the file of what the Israeli and pre-state Israeli forces did to the Palestinians that year. This is Zochrot, an organization of Israelis– primarily, Jewish Israelis– whose mission is to conduct effective “Nakba Education” among their fellow Jewish Israelis.
What a great idea.
On Zochrot’s English-language website they describe their goal and their political commitments in these terms:
- Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948.
The Zionist collective memory exists in both our cultural and physical landscape, yet the heavy price paid by the Palestinians — in lives, in the destruction of hundreds of villages, and in the continuing plight of the Palestinian refugees — receives little public recognition.
Zochrot works to make the history of the Nakba accessible to the Israeli public so as to engage Jews and Palestinians in an open recounting of our painful common history. We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes.
I had a really good meeting with Zochrot’s Executive Director, Eitan Bronstein, in the organization’s “learning center” in Tel Aviv last week; and I hope to write a lot more about him and the organization, as soon as I have time.
One of the things that really fascinated me about Zochrot is the innovative, highly interactive way they seek to increase awareness of the Nakba– and the whole associated issue of Palestinian refugee rights– among Jewish Israelis. They have worked to present the history of what happened (to the Palestinians) during the Nakba, to Jewish Israeli audiences, in a very geographically specific, well documented, and even physical way. After all, the history of the Nakba is still inscribed on many parts of the landscape of Israel/Palestine in way that is discernible to people who know how to discern it.
(For example, one chief indicator of the remains of one of the hundreds of Palestinians villages destroyed during the Nakba is a profusion of prickly-pear hedges clustered together. These used to be used as hedges– or just for the provision of fruits– by Palestinian villagers; and their hardiness is so legendary that the Arabic name for the plant is “subr”, meaning “patience.”)
So one of Zochrot’s projects has involved organizing regular field-trips for supporters and interested visitors to go and visit a ruined town or village– and to post “information signs” or street signs around it to indicate what used to stand where, and what happened to it during or after 1948. These field trips, Bronstein told me, are usually accompanied by the publication of commemorative maps or booklets. (You can see some of the booklets here.)
In another Zochrot project, they got a French photographer working in Lebanon to go and take photographs of older refugees in Ain al-Helweh refugee camp; and then they blew the photos up to life-size, or even larger, and placed them near the ruins of the individual’s original home…
Anyway, do go and explore Zochrot’s website some. They have some truly great resources there, including this page about some notable Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem. (For the latter project, they accompanied the Palestinian owners of many of these homes back to their family properties and wrote about those encounters.
* * *
If Zochrot is a relatively young organization that’s doing great work among Jewish Israelis on Nakba issues, an organization that’s doing some good work among, primarily, Jewish Israelis on Jerusalem-related issues is Ir Amim.
Ir Amim is a somewhat older organization– I remember interviewing its executive director, Danny Seidmann, when Ir Amim was still called Ir Shalem, back in 1995. I did not, alas, have time to catch up with him on this last visit.
Ir Amim’s political position is less clearcut than Zochrot’s. It seems to take as a given, for example, just about all the physical developments the Israelis have put in place in and around East Jerusalem; and I don’t see any call on its website at all for the evacuation of any Jewish settlements from the occupied half of the city, or for the return to the city of the many hundreds of thousands of its former Palestinian residents who are now exiled from it.
On its website, it describes its mission in these terms:
- … Ir Amim seeks to render Jerusalem a more viable and equitable city, while generating and promoting a more politically sustainable future.
Bearing in mind the symbolic and actual status of Jerusalem as a city of two peoples and three religions, as well as the city’s pivotal role in reaching a political agreement, Ir Amim aspires to a stable Jerusalem, equitably shared by the two peoples; a city that ensures the dignity and welfare of all its residents and that safeguards their holy places, as well as their historical and cultural heritages.
… Ir Amim has ongoing working relations with the Palestinian community in Jerusalem, as well as with key players in the international community active in Jerusalem issues.
Ir Amim operates a range of complementary activities:
* Monitoring and exposing critical developments in Jerusalem, and informing / alerting target audiences in Israel and in the world.
* Legal advocacy aimed at halting or mitigating unilateral actions that harm the fabric of life in Jerusalem, and create obstacles to reaching an agreed-upon future for the city and the region.
* Policy advocacy with decision makers, both local and international.
* Public outreach and media work aimed at raising awareness of developments in the city and understanding of their local and global significance. Activities include study tours of East Jerusalem, professional seminars and public events.
* Strengthening, and working with, civil society organizations in East Jerusalem to advance a more equitable Jerusalem.
Anyway, even though Ir Amim is not as clearly based on an international-law perspective as Zochrot seems to be, it seems to be doing some useful work. Its website is also well worth exploring. See, for example, this page about the developing situation in Silwan.
… Anyway, I have to run now. The above are just some preliminary reflections on my trip that I wanted to share as soon as possible. Many more to come– along with more interviews, field-notes, etc…
Good for this group. It is always good to inquire and take critical looks at oneself and one’s country.
But this is nothing really new, at least as regards to Israel. What Helena should acknowledge is that this type of Israeli inquiry has been going on for the last couple of decades. With the signing of the Oslo accords, Israeli society DID in fact begin to take an honest an open inquiry into its history. Academics, journalists, activists all began to take an honest look at things.
The problem is that open and honest Israeli inquiry was met by the opponents of Israel with dishonest and racist propaganda. As such, the questions about the “nakba,” which painted a complicated and tragic picture of the war of independence, were manipulated to present propaganda themes of “ethnic cleansing” and the like. It is, of course true that many Palestinians lost their homes and property in their failed war against Israel. But the picture was by no honest means one of deliberate ethnic cleansing.
As an example, the late historian Edward Said, like many Palestinian propagandists, often waved around a quote from Herzl’s diary about “spiriting the population” across borders to claim that the founder of modern Zionism planned to ethnically cleanse Palestine. In fact, the full quotation by Herzl is quite different. He talked about procuring employment in adjacent lands for “the penniless population” which he believed would not want to partake in the nation building project. The very next paragraph also discussed using the strongest means of coercion to protect minority rights in the new state. Although Herzl’s diary entry is not without controversy and challenging, it is nowhere the malicious plan to ethnically cleanse a land. For that matter, Herzl was not even talking about Palestine, he was talking about what he had seen in Argentina.
The anti-Israel diatribes are replete with misrepresentations such as the above. On top of that, every fleeting thought in the diary of Herzl or Ben-Gurion is treated as if it is some sort of official policy. The result is that the honest inquiry has been manipulated by propagandists and racists for a political agenda.
Nevertheless, Israel did the right thing in opening up its archives and records. I disagree with those Israeli commentators who believe such inquiries should be avoided because it gives dishonest enemies rhetoric. In the end it is important to be true to oneself.
Notably absent from this blog entry is an effort to highlight any effort of the Palestinians to come to term with their history and long litany of misdeeds. I have seen very few Palestinian academics, or politicians, who have even dared ask the questions like….
– Why did the Mufti of Jerusalem support the Nazis, and why should we be treated differently than any other nation who sided with such evil in World War II?
– Can we acknowledge that we made a fatal mistake by rejecting the partition plan and trying to conduct our own war of genocide? What responsibility do we bear for such a terrible decision?
– Why have we refused any efforts to have Palestinian refugees treated like all other refugees, and instead opposed any efforts to resettle at the expense of raising generation after generation in refugee camps, with the only intent to create a rejectionist demand of “return” to land that is no longer ours?
– Why did our Arab leaders, after being decisively defeated in 1967, instead take a position of “No, No, No” rather than attempt to negotiate with Israel.
– When offered independence in 2000, why did we instead launch a new and deadlier intifada, which included the horrific and unjustifiable practice of sending Palestinians with bombs strapped to their chests to kill as many Israelis as possible, even when they were just enjoying a day shopping in Jerusalem, socializing at a night club, or sitting down for a Passover Seder?
– When every single settlement was evacuated in Gaza, why did we elect a political party that quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter to lead us? Why could we have not instead demonstrated that we were, in fact, ready for peace.
Each of these issues can, of course, be debated. The problem is that there is no debate of significance in the Palestinian community. Now, even Mustafa Barghouti parrots Palestinian talking points in a dreary monotone.
So, yes, Helena, by all means, open up inquiry! Just make sure everyone does so. And at least try to make sure that such open inquiry is used to truly reconcile, rather than to be used dishonestly as talking points to score political points.
Helena,
You write: “And while its negotiators on occasion seemed to engage seriously in trying to conclude an agreement on final borders (on very expansionist terms), Israeli governments and many their non-governmental supporters tried to maintain a strong prohibition on any serious discussion of the two issues of Jerusalem and the claims of those 6-8 million Palestinians who lost their ancestral homes in Israel in 1948.”
In December of 2000, the Israeli government agreed to a peace proposal from President Clinton that included 30 Billion Dollars to be paid to those displaced during Israel’s war of independence. That sounds pretty serious to me.
Further, 6-8 million Palestinian Arabs were not displaced in that war. Estimates vary but it is difficult to think that more than 700,000 people lost their homes – and that is assuming that the available census data is entirely wrong.
As for Jerusalem, Jews in very large numbers lost their homes in what was the Jewish quarter in East Jerusalem during Israel’s war of independence. Arab, frankly, have no better claim to the city than Jews. Perhaps, in a final accord, it might be allowed status of an International religious sanctuary.
But, returning the city to Arab rule, given that Arabs desecrated Jewish centers during Arab rule and forbid entirely Jews – and not just Israelis – to visit Jewish cites in the city – with Arafat during negotiations in 2000 even denying that the city lacks any connection with Jewish history – is no invitation to a return of Arab rule.
Excellent points Noah. What I find most troubling about Helena’s writing is not her repeated one-sided skewing of the facts, but her repeated need to demean and attack attempts at actual peacemaking. I understand Helena used to actually work for a group that promoted actual reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. She claims she left it because it was too focused, in her mind, on accommodating Israeli concerns. I guess those concerns just aren’t important for her.
So I guess, as an ex-peace activist, she feels a need to demean peacemaking efforts of others.
I was correct, first look at the author – than read the contribution! Hasbaristas are back in force to waste people’s time, just like Oslo…- lets call it the “Oslo gambit” in the discussion
“Anyway, must rush!!!”
What an absolute cringe.
This rambling post of Helena’s is actually a confession. Helena Cobban was involved in the “Oslo” schlenter. That’s what she is trying to tell us. She does it in the US way, that cops an absolution while still allowing the perpertrator to preserve the ghastly results of the crime – “hiding it in the open”, as they say.
The dead Ze’ev Schiff, real as he might have once been, is here only used as a kind of literary golem. Helena has become fully naturalised to the USA. She can do the Clinton trick like a natural-born Clinton. A Clinton can be a war-monger, then get a free ride on the back of a bogus “peace candidate”, and then pop up again as the chief war-monger in the “peace” government.
The Hasbaras do Helena a favour. They are part of the act. They pile in after Helena to provide cover for her “limited hangouts”, by reacting to them as if they were the real thing. As in Hollywood, the baddies are there to make the mediocrities look good.
Helena does the Israeli colonists a favour. By occupying the middle ground with half-baked and never-quite-effective mumblings, she helps to shut out the real critique, and to make shift to buy more time for the colonists. Time bought like is all they can ever get, in any case. It is the entire Israeli shtick. It is what they survive on. Because a colony has no right to exist. Helena knows that but she can’t say it. She “cannot even think” of it. She is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
So, it’s Noah, is it? Good to know you guys are on a first-name basis.
Russell Tribunal on Palestine
PulseMedia informs :
In the tradition of Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s citizens tribunals, the Russel Tribunal has been reconstituted to investigate war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. (thanks Frank Barat) (you can read the whole press release under the above link)
Here is the direct link to the Bertrand Russel foundation.
Here the special site dedicated to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
Here is an interview of Stephane Hessel (Stephane Hessel, who launched the idea of a Vietnam like Russel Tribunal on Palestine, is a half Jewish/half Evangelist and a former French Resistance Fighter who was deported and imprisonned by the Nazi during the WWII.(French text)
Dominic, a few deep breaths please after all that unbelievably hostile and ad-feminam ranting. Look, I’m sure you’ve been upset by the recent Gaza war and its grisly aftermath. Or by something. But your fanciful accusations and rantings over recent weeks seem to indicate you’ve become substantially unhinged by something.
… Maybe I should close the comments boards down for a while since the light:heat ratio of what they generate seems so low these days.
Nah. it is still possible to scan quickly down them and pick out the worthwhile parts.
Joshua, your first comment there was 779 words. The requested limit is 300. As I said in the guidelines, if you want to say something at a length longer than 300 words, publish it elsewhere on th’Intertubes and send us a link.
Hi Helena, thanks for your response. Two-state is apartheid. It’s enough already.
Shirin,
My name is not Noah.
Dominic,
Notwithstanding my view that Helena’s position is naive and likely to lead to more people getting killed – in the name, ironically, of peace -, she is genuine in her views although sometimes mistaken in what she states, a good example being her assertions about the number of Arab displaced at the time that Israel was founded – her numbers overstating the number of Arabs displaced by a factor of at least 8.
Moreover, pointing out people’s factual errors or misconceptions occasionally leads people to rethink their assumptions and positions. That is as true for the author of an article as it may be to the occasional reader. Hence, knowing that, in fact, there were large numbers of people displaced on both sides – i.e. on both the Arab and the Jewish side – is an important correction to the propaganda view that only Arabs suffered.
Joshua seems to think it is.
Friedman, I think that what you have written here has to be called Nakba denialism.
Shirin,
I do not know who Joshua is (other than his being a poster here) and, so far as I know, he does not know who I am. Again, my name is not Noah and if he thinks it is, he is mistaken.
Dominic,
I do not deny that the Arab loss of the 1948 war was a catastrophe. However, the view that only Arabs suffered is contrary to fact. It ignores the 1% of Israel’s Jewish population which was killed in that war – an extremely high casualty rate, by the way – and it ignores the extremely large numbers of Jews who were displaced before, during and in the aftermath of that war.
So, there is no denial of any facts here. There is, however, the sense that there is complete denial by some here of the suffering which occurred on the Jewish side.
Well, then, N. Friedman, you should correct Joshua in regard to your name, not me.
As for the 1% of Israel’s population lost in its 1948 ethnic cleansing project, if you want to expand your territory by force of violence while cleansing it of an undesirable indigenous population, you have to be prepared to pay a price.
Shirin,
Joshua did not address any comment to me. So, I saw no reason to correct him. You, on the other hand, did make a comment to me. And, I said you were mistaken.
Your assertions about the dispute are factually untrue. Not only did the Arab side start shooting but openly asserted that the Arabs were proud to have started the fighting. The Jewish side was in no position to start a fight and, in the early months of the fight, lost territory to Arab militias.
The Arab side publicly rejected partition – on the floor of the UN, among other places. The Jewish side celebrated partition, in the UN and elsewhere. The Arab side, in order to prevent partition, started the fighting and proudly proclaimed at the time that it had started the fighting. The Arab side was bested in the fighting. But, the Jewish side suffered unusually high causalities and large numbers of Jews were displaced by the Arab side. And, for the Arab side, it was a catastrophe, having lost territory and suffered large numbers of causalities and having large numbers of people displaced.
“Joshua did not address any comment to me.”
Really? Then whom, pray tell, was he addressing when he followed your comment directly with “Excellent points Noah”? Was he talking, perhaps, to his invisible friend?
Shirin,
If you say so.
I don’t say so, N. I merely asked whom he was addressing when he commented “excellent points, Noah” if, as you assert, he did not address any comments to you. You have to admit it is quite a mystery given that you were the only other person to have posted a comment, and you give your first initial as N.
Shirin,
Perhaps it might occur to you that I did not recognize Joshua’s comment as being directed towards me. Perhaps that was a mistake by me. Either way, it is an irrelevancy.
Friedman, are you a specialist anti-Zochrot Hasbara, with a permanent search alert on “Zochrot” and “Nakba”? In that case maybe you are not Noah. Maybe you are Canute.
I am not Canute. I am not Noah. I am N. That is my name.
N., I see you are well schooled in the old standby Israeli stories on 1948. Unfortunately, it has been completely out of date since the mid-’70’s, and no one serious uses it anymore. May I recommend that if you wish to be taken seriously recommend you should update your material as soon as possible?
Shirin,
What I wrote appears in the most recent book by Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. The book was written in 2008!!!
The same view appears in the scholarship of Ephraim Karsh. His scholarship is also recent. Moreover, he has extensively examined the documents used to support other theories, including the theory you seem to espouse, and shows it to be based on a misreading of what the documents say.
In any event, Arab scholars have also said that the Arab side attacked first, wanted to prevent partition, etc., etc. In fact, nothing I have written is even controversial.
Ephraim Karsh? Come on!
As for Benny Morris, I have read most of what he has written, and have had some personal communication with him. He has been quite honest for the most part in presenting the evidence he uncovered, but has been quite intellectually dishonest in much of his analysis.
You need an update, N. The old stories don’t work anymore.
Shirin,
If Morris is factually accurate – which you have now admitted -, then you are mistaken. And, this is not a question of interpretation. It is a question of black and white facts. Again, what I stated was the following:
The Arab side publicly rejected partition – on the floor of the UN, among other places. The Jewish side celebrated partition, in the UN and elsewhere. The Arab side, in order to prevent partition, started the fighting and proudly proclaimed at the time that it had started the fighting. The Arab side was bested in the fighting. But, the Jewish side suffered unusually high causalities and large numbers of Jews were displaced by the Arab side. And, for the Arab side, it was a catastrophe, having lost territory and suffered large numbers of causalities and having large numbers of people displaced.
Nothing stated in the above quote is remotely controversial or wrong.
I am obsessed with this blog, and spend all of my time fighting Joshua,N. Friedman, Elvis Baldwell, Gboa, and other demons. When I run out of responses, I claim they are all the same people to give my some breathing time. I do wish for Helena to expound on supercessionism, a belief that the Jews were Divinely rejected when they rejected Christ. Fortunately, the AFSI has not been forced by Zionists to have a “Vatican II” and reject their core beliefs. I believe that a further exploration of supercessionism can be a way of uniting Christianity and Islam against Judiasm
The Arab side was morally justified in rejecting partition. The UN in its arrogance gave 55 percent of the land to be a Jewish state, when they were only one third of the population, and even the portion that was to be the Jewish state was nearly half Arab. This made very little sense.
As for who started the fighting in late 1947, my impression when I last looked at this subject was that it’s actually hard to tell, because it starts out with small scale violence which then escalates. The intervention by the Arab armies is much later, in May 1948.
Hoping that our hostess is not completely fed up with me, and bearing in mind the way the previous post, for example, is taking this discussion, I would like to go back to Helena’s original post and question one of its assumptions, or assertions.
Experience of decades of debates has convinced me that people make up their arguments to suit the occasion and the present circumstances, and not because of a residual mind-set. In other words they construct history backwards. They extract from whatever memories and facts they possess a reconstructed version to suit each new challenging argument.
Helena paints a different picture, which I am sure is wrong, as follows:
“a new generation of Israelis is slowly now emerging to whom the whole idea… is no longer the same strong taboo that it was for an older generation of Israelis.
“…in the early 1990s several Israelis could not even bear to talk about that issue”
Similarly, the argument going on in the immediately preceding posts to this one is not about the facts as they were in 1947 or 1948, but about which facts are potent trumps for the purposes of overcoming today’s arguments.
When possessed of his trump, the possessor expects not to have to argue any more. This becomes neither history nor argument, but something more like totemism.
In the 1940s and 1950s I think that Israelis in general could actually “bear” to talk about the dispossession of the Palestinians upon whose lands they were living and raising their families, if one is to judge by the quotations of such talks that have been frequently, and recently, quoted.
So I think that, as in South Africa, it is not the first wave of conquerors or ethnic cleansers that pushes its deeds out of mind, but subsequent apologists. In other words the late Schiff was precisely not being like the older generation, but was actually adopting a negotiating stance for the 1990s, which Helena should not then have taken, and should not now be presenting, at its face value.
Likewise, we should not go overboard about Zochrot and the like. For some, and probably the majority of Israelis, the recognition of the crimes of the founding settlers, even when expressed in the tenderest and most sympathetic terms, will have zero effect on their political will and their determination to use military brutality to defend their horrid “facts on the ground”.
I mean, the substantive change only arrives when no-one is able to escape from the realisation that colonialism is always a present-moment act, and not a past expired or negligible act.
Dominic,
With the exception of a vocal but tiny minority, very few Israeli Jews see the issues remotely the way you see them and, I suspect, very few will ever see the issue that way even if it were, in fact, an accurate interpretation of Israel’s founding, which it is not.
There are three important and related reasons: (1) Antisemitism, which is always major factor in the thinking of the vast majority of Jews, (2) the rise of renewed Antisemitism in the last number of years and (3) the view that groups like Hamas really do mean what the Hamas covenant states. That all leads the vast majority of Jews to think that your idea of “justice” for Palestinian Arabs would not help solve the problems faced by Jews.
As for the thinking behind your theory, a recent article by Ishmael Khaldi, Israel’s counsel for the Pacific Northwest and who is himself a Bedouin Arab, clearly undermines the South African analogy. On his view, “[y]our radicalism is undermining the forces for peace in Israel and in the Palestinian territories.” That is my view, as well.
The fact that someone is Israel’s counsel (?) for the Pacific Northwest is more significant than his ethnic origin, I think. And what sort of weird Arab would speak for a government that just killed 400 Arab children?
Anyway, the apartheid analogy is based on the fact that Israel runs the West Bank on two systems of laws for two groups of people–Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. It doesn’t matter what some bought and paid for spokesman for the Israeli government says.
Donald,
The WB cannot be run with the same law for Israelis and Arabs. That would violate International law. Israel is required to maintain local law for those under occupation.
Your first comment is a non-sequitur. The fact that there are Arab Israelis who play a role in the governance of the country – and, with a post in the US, that is a serious role – belies your theory. In fact, he addressed your exact view, noting that it entirely misinterprets the circumstances. The issue, in my view, is to find a way to achieve two states or, if that is impossible, to return as much as possible of the WB and Gaza to their former rulers.