Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 5: Menachem Klein

Okay, I’m changing my own rules a bit here since I originally intended to use this “Israelis, mainly peaceniks” rubric to collect the highlights from the interviews I conducted with people in that category during my recent trip to Israel. But I never got around to seeing Menachem Klein when I was there; I just went to a talk here he give here in DC at lunch-time today. So I thought I’d insert him into the series here while my memory is still fresh.
He started off with the important observation that all the talk about Israel “possibly becoming” a single state, from the Jordan to the sea, is misleading because it already is one state: “We already live in a de-facto one state. De facto, Israel already rules over all of Mandate Palestine.”
Well that was useful, and I think analytically powerful. As was, too, his description of the fact that within this “de facto one state” Israel rules over five distinct groups of Palestinians, subjecting each group to different rules and limitations.
The five groups he identified were:

1. Israeli Palestinians, who have civil and political rights though not full equality.
2. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who have no political rights but have rights of “residency” (that is, in East Jerusalem, and thereby also the right to travel within 1948 Israel; he did not spell out sufficiently that the civil rights of the EJ Palstinians are also unacceptably curtailed in that they are not allowed to hold any public political gatherings at all.)
3. The Palestinians of the West Bank who live on the Israeli side of the Wall/barrier.
4. The Palestinians of the rest of the West Bank; and
5. The Palestinians of Gaza.

Klein’s talk was also bracingly honest because he spelled out a number of times that the Mahmoud Abbas regime in the West Bank acts “as a proxy” for the Israelis. He did not provide the kinds of details about how this proxy-hood is exercised in practice that, for example, Mustafa Barghouthi did in the interview I did with him back in February. But too often, people on “the left” in Israel tend to participate in the charade that “the PA” is on some kind of equal footing with the State of Israel, so I found it refreshing that Klein cut through that nonsense.
On another occasion he said,

The Abbas regime is a protectroate, supported by Israel and funded by the western donor countries, primarily the Europeans.

Interesting that Klein had such a clear-eyed view of the nature of the PA regime, since he was one of the Israeli members of the group that produced the non-governmental 2003 “Geneva Accord”, in which PA cabinet member Yasser Abed Rabboo headed the Palestinian team at Arafat’s request. A great fuss was made of that whole effort as if it was virtually a quasi-governmental agreement. It never was.
I thought Klein made a lot of sense, too, when he said that the situation has changed so radically since 2000, that the two parties can’t simply “pick up the negotiations from where they left off, at Camp David 2 and Taba; that is no longer an option.”
… Thus, nearly all of Klein’s diagnosis of the situation was very accurate. His main inaccuracy in diagnosis came, imho, when he vociferously denied there is any valid comparison to be made between the “de facto one state” that Israel is currently running and the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
His first argument on the apartheid question was to note that the differentiations that Israel made among the five groups of Palestinians he had identified made the situation different from apartheid. In the Q&A period, I noted that apartheid’s securocrats had also introduced, finetuned, and endlessly manipulated many forms of differentiation among their basically disfranchised non-“White” subjects, so the differentiation Israel makes among various groups of Palestinians didn’t prove his point.
He then shifted to an argument that apartheid was based on race (that is, I think, skin color), whereas the current Israeli system is based on “ethnonationalism.” He never did satisfactorily explain why that distinction is important, either.
Look, I know that many Jewish Israelis and their friends in the west just hate to have “the A word” applied to their state. So if it’s the word that’s getting in the way of continuing this rational discussion, my modest proposal is that we find a different word for this. I was thinking about the term “Zipartheid.” Or perhaps just “Z-partheid” (US-style: “zee”; then we could say that concept covers the whole gamut from A to Z…)
Well, those were my own first modest suggestions. But then I was, um, scrolling around on the internet and I came across another suggestion, too: “Spartheid”. Yes, a wonderful idea for the neologism I have in mind, and it also nicely captures the “Spartan”/securocratic culture of this state.
I see the term was coined– in a 2003 article about the nature of Israel’s rule over Jerusalem— by a certain Dr. Menachem Klein…
So maybe we should stick with Spartheid as our new word of choice. (Menachem: what happened to you between 2003 and now?)
Well, moving right along here, though most of Klein’s diagnosis of the situation was excellent– I’ll come back to the apartheid question later– I thought his policy prescription for how to deal with it was really pathetic.
He started and ended his talk by underlining that he is still a strong supporter of the two-state solution. So how, he said, could we think of getting from the present de-facto one state situation to one of two states?
He argued that to do this, it was important to understand why it was that the Israeli government– and so many Israelis– had come to support the present situation. This was, he said, because of the acuteness of their continuing security fears. And so it was those fears that had to be in some way either allayed or reframed… And Israelis had to come to understand that if they wanted to end up with the longterm good security that, in his view, only a two-state outcome could provide, then in the meantime they might have to be prepared to put up with the small risk of decreased “immediate security” that could be associated with withdrawing from the 1967-occupied lands.
Look, this section of his arguments never really made complete sense to me, despite several of us in the audience having pressed him repeatedly on “how to get from here to there”. So maybe I’m misrepresenting the arguments some here, since I did not understand them too well. On the hand, I don’t think I’m misrepresenting them. I think they just are extremely muddled.
My view, fwiw, is that Israelis and others who support a two-state solution should just simply focus on getting a speedy and total withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and not even get drawn into the whole game of pandering to the fearfulness of Jewish Israelis about what would ensue thereafter. That fearfulness is to some extent genuine and heartfelt; but it has also, let’s face it, been manufactured and hyped to a large degree by successive securocratic Israeli governments with considerable help and aid from their cheering sections in the US pro-Israel community and the US arms industry.
Klein mentioned– these people all mention, sometimes with the frisson of a sharp intake of breath– the concern about “What would happen to Ben Gurion airport if we withdrew from all the West Bnk?”
You know what? If a government of Israel announced tomorrow that by June 30, three months from now, they intended to have withdrawn all their forces and settlers from the West Bank but they would need to have cast-iron guarantees of the security of the original Israeli state after that withdrawal, then I can guarantee you that the international community, the Palestinians, and everyone else would all be falling over themselves to construct and sign up to the intrusively monitored demilitarization regimes and other measures that would be necessary to provide those guarantees.
And Israel would still have the awesome deterrent power of its army, to hit back extremely hard at anyone who violated the guarantees!
Ben Gurion would be safer than it’s ever been.
What more do they want?
That’s why the whole “security” argument that Menachem was trying, so agonizedly, to make this afternoon was such an unnecessary diversion.
Just end the occupation! Just withdraw! And the successor regime in the West bank will form itself!
Well, he seemed to be edging towards this; but he affiliated it with so many complex arguments about “security netto” and “security bruto”– and about the need to engage with Israelis’ security arguments deeply, rather than just cutting through all the nonsense and hyperventilation that they involve– that it was a little hard to see what he was arguing, exactly.
Also, he never challenged the proposition that of the parties involved, it is only the Israelis who have any valid security concerns at all.
Excuse me??? Starting to see security as a factor of deep interdependence between Israelis and Palestinians is surely the very fount of the wisdom and transformed self-understanding that Jewish Israelis will need if they are ever to start thinking outside the ugly and self-defeating box the securocrats have shut them up into.
Israel is currently a total poster child for the phenomenon known as the “security dilemma”– that is, that one state or party will take actions that so undermine the security of another party that the second party then takes actions against the first party, making it less rather than more secure…
Bottom line: you can’t base a longterm vision of Israel’s security on a policy of perpetuating the insecurity of its neighbors.
… As I understand it, Klein’s argument for withdrawal was based on three kinds of reason (rather than on the one truly principled reason that it has no right to the territories occupied in 1967.) The first was the extremely convoluted argument he used about “security bruto and security netto”. The second was a demographic argument– that “the de facto one state we have is not democratic and it’s not even really Jewish since in a few years Jews will be a minority in the area of Mandate Palestine”. The third was somewhere between an esthetic and a moral argument, expressed in such terms as “I just don’t like the kind of state that we have become.”
For myself, I really don’t like the demographic argument. If you have the total disfranchisement of all the Palestinians of the occupied territories– and all the diaspora Palestinians– then what does it matter if there are more ethnic Palestinians west of the river than “ethnic” Jews, or fewer?
Surely, it’s the disfranchisement that counts, not the relative numbers in the area west of the river.
Because if you buy too deeply into the “demographic” argument, then the Zionist “solution” to it is, surely, simply to reduce the number of Palestinians west of the river.
But the demographic argument seemed to make a big impression on Klein. Maybe it partly underlay the fervency with which he proclaimed his continued adherence to the two-state solution?
For my part, having heard the very lucid description he laid out of the “five categories of Palestinians” over whom Israel currently rules, and of the increasingly close– one might even say organic– ties he described between the settler movement and Israel’s securocracy, I would say that by far the most logical course would seem to be to go directly from the “de facto one state” that currently exists to thinking about a real, transformative, and fully democratic one-state outcome.
Pull out all the half-million settlers to make the two-state solution work? A crazy idea! Pulling out even 20% of them, as Taba and Geneva envisaged, looks increasingly infeasible, if not, by now, totally un-doable. Going back to the old idea of a unitary binational state, as espoused in the past by great thinkers inside both national communities, is looking like a more and more compelling way forward.
(I see that an interesting group of Israelis and Palestinians had a whole conference about the one-state idea, in Boston over the weekend. I’m going to meet some of them at the Georgetown conference over the next couple of days.)
And that brings be back to why, I suspect, these days Menachem Klein really dislikes the apartheid analogy… Because the “answer” to apartheid in South Africa was the unitary and gloriously multinational state.
And the best answer to Spartheid or Z-partheid, in Israel/Palestine will be– ??