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In this respect there is no difference between an Israeli position that rejects the refugees’ right of return and the other Israeli projects of ethnic cleansing, be it proposing to annex Wadi Ara to the West Bank, uprooting the Bedouins in the Naqab, or depopulating East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.
Peace cannot be on the agenda of a state that exercises such policies against its own citizens.
So the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people.
“Well let’s forget about the crimes that were committed, the invasion of Iraq, let’s just go on.” In others words, let’s continue the same way we’ve been proceeding. That’s the weapon of the powerful.
The Palestinians now have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That’s the core element of most of the speeches that Netanyahu gives. Why that? Because that’s understood to be impossible. Nobody should recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Just as we do not recognize the USA as a Christian state. Say Pakistan calls itself an Islamic state, but the USA does not recognize it as one.
Our chance to change international perspective and perceptions even in settler-colonialist societies has to do with the past. Even if you go to the USA and Australia nowadays, maybe because the policies were genocidal and happened many years ago,
Or even a more progressive act of reconciliation in the permit given by the government of New Zealand to the Maoris to return to their lands that were stolen from them. All these acts are taken from what one can call the comfort zone of those settlers’ societies that have diminished the native population to such an extent, at the early stage of colonization, that they have no fear the symbolic acts will change the socio-economic or even political realities of today.
they failed in the early stage of the 1948 ethnic cleansing to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. And thus every symbolic act of reconciliation would have a profound and tangible impact on the socio-economic and political realities on the ground.
If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem. If a group is a victim of a crime and is looking for a safe haven, it cannot obtain this by expelling someone else, another group, from this space that you want as your safe haven.
The idea of a Jewish state is an anomaly. It’s not something that’s happened somewhere in the world. The question is based on the wrong presupposition. Take France: It took a long time for France to become a state. A lot of violence and repression took place. In fact all state formation is a process of extreme violence. That’s why Europe was the most violent place in the world for centuries. Once a state is established, any citizen is a citizen of the state. No matter who you are, if you are a French citizen, you’re French. If you live in Israel, and you are an Israeli citizen, you are not a
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If you chastise Israel, you assault the Jewish state and by association you attack Judaism. That’s a very interesting line of argumentation and defense.
Hebrew title is “Good Human Material.”
In 1924 there was an immigration law in the USA that was aimed at Jews and Italians. Let’s keep them out of the country. They did not say it that way, they said Eastern and Southeastern and Southern Europeans.
Antisemetism US
As I’ve said before, states have no inherent legitimacy. They have all been imposed by violence, they are causing violence all over the world. It’s an inhuman social structure. It should erode every time. In that context I think you could imagine an authentic return. Not just recognition of an historical wrong, but in fact interactions among people that are not based on states or religious or ethnic lines. There are other grounds for people to interact with one another.
The reason they do not accept the return has nothing to do with practicalities. It has to do with Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity.
They have to explain to the poor and marginalized Jews why belonging to the master race has not improved their socio-economic standards of living. Why do they still live in impoverished development towns? Why is their culture not represented in the European-dominated and hegemonic culture? Israeli strategists will tell you that they have dealt with this by having a common enemy, a security issue, by having a war on Islam.
This became a more acute problem because since 2008, the middle class in Israel is being pushed down to being the lower middle class, which means that a larger number of people is prevented from getting its share of the national cake despite their belonging to the “right” ethnic group.
In a new developing case regarding the attempt of the Israeli government to cleanse the Palestinians from the old city of Akka (Acre), the only effective means will be a strong international campaign spearheaded by a cultural boycott. Here the connection between the racist ideology of Zionism and the actual policies on the ground is part of the tasks of a concrete BDS campaign.
You have not yet won the argument that Israel, as a political entity, is problematic.
I think there is a problem with the state of Israel as it is, not just with what it is doing in the West Bank but also what it is doing in Haifa, in the Naqab, and in Acre. This is not yet clear to many people in the West. I think that people there are not aware that they are facing a bigger injustice than just the Israeli policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
It’s the crucial support for Israeli actions. Very much like in the South African case, where it was the US that maintained apartheid until the end.
Negotiations which are organized by the USA, which is a participant in the conflict. That makes about as much sense as if Iran was called upon to mediate the Shia/Sunni conflict in Iraq.
“The world hates us because they are all anti-Semitic so we will do what we want.” Nothing is their fault; everything is somebody else’s fault, a lot of brutality.
The scenes for example during Cast Lead, the brutal attack on Gaza with Israelis sitting on beach chairs on the hills, applauding every time a bomb fell. This is beyond obscenity. But unfortunately, it is a large part of the population.
is true that Israeli society has been shifting from what used to be a kind of more or less Scandinavian-style social democracy to a kind of an extreme version of neoliberal, kind of a caricature of neo-liberalism, pretty much like the US, with sharp inequalities, wealth, and privileges.
There are slight changes, how significant they will be I don’t know, in the repression of the Palestinian population. For example the most extreme racist laws in Israel are those concerning the land. About 92 percent of the land was in the hands of Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National Fund, which is an organization that had contracts with the state of Israel that required them to work only for the benefit of “people of Jewish race/religion and origin”
two disappearances. One is the disappearance of liberal Zionism as a significant actor on the Israeli political stage. There seems to be no room in Israel for those who try to square a universalist point of view, be it liberal or socialist, with the racist definition of Zionism.
Maale Adumim,
There will be a standard neocolonial structure in which there is a center for the elite. So you go to Ramallah, nice houses, theaters, bars where Westerners can come and see how lovely Palestine is, which you find in every Third World country, the poorest country you want in Central Africa and you can find these sectors there that are for the elite which look like Paris or London. In fact, if you go back to the 1990s, Israeli industrialists openly and literally urged the government to shift from what they called a colonial program to a neocolonial program, which means establish this Third
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Greater Israel
the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982. For us who grew up in Israel, it was the first non-consensus war, the first war that obviously was a war of choice: Israel was not attacked, Israel attacked.
Most nation-states are very good propagandists,
Nurit Peled-Elhanan,
Even the first Zionist settlers when they came and realized that what they thought was an empty land, or at least their own land, was full of Arab people,
Palestinian political elite lived in cities of Palestine, but the main victims of Zionism up to the 1930s were in the countryside. That’s why the revolt started there, but there were sections of the urban elite that joined them. Like you said, I pointed out in one of my books that the British killed or imprisoned most of those who belong to the Palestinian political elite and military or potentially military elite.
They created a Palestinian society that was quite defenseless in 1947 when the first Zionist actions, with the knowledge that the British mandate came to an end, had commenced. I think it had an impact on the inability of the Palestinians to resist a year later in 1948 the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Theodor Herzl, who is known as one of the founders of Zionism, was not religious at all, and did not speak even speak Yiddish?
Zionism had one element that is usually forgotten by historians. This was a wish to secularize Jewish life.
movement made by people who do not believe in God but God nonetheless promised them Palestine.”
One important group of people that did not allow them to do this were Christian Zionists that already existed in those days who believed that the return of the Jews to Palestine was part of a divine scheme. They wanted the Jews to return to Palestine because they could precipitate the second coming of the Messiah; they were also anti-Semites. A “two for one” deal as they could also get rid of the Jews in Europe at the same time. I think it is an important period to go back to to understand how British imperialism, Christian Zionism, and of course Jewish nationalism played together as a
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The language is concession, Israelis will make concessions to Palestinians and then, there is a chance for peace. If this is the departure point, there will never be any reconciliation. “I invaded your house, but I am generous enough to let you come back and take the sofa with you to the new place.” That is hardly a dialogue that wants to settle a conflict; it is almost more humiliating than the act of invasion itself.
stop the nonsense of saying that Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948.
If you compare Israel today with the Israel I left, or the Israel I grew up in, the trend is to become more chauvinistic, ethnocentric, intransigent, which makes us all feel that peace and reconciliation are very far away if we only rely on our hope that Jewish society will change from within.
Like all countries today, when leaders are manipulating the population
Usually when someone says something like “You cannot advocate one state if you’re not Palestinian or Israeli,” it’s usually to stifle a debate.
The second reason is that the two-state solution has a logical ring to it. It’s a very Western idea. A colonialist invention that was applied in India and Africa, this idea of partition, while the non-Western world is a far more holistic world.
So you just need to think about how to change this regime. You do not need to think about a two-state solution. You need to think about how to change the relations between the communities, how to affect the power structure in place.
This whole idea that this is a very reasonable approach is of course reasonable to a point. But it’s totally insane because it has nothing to do with the conflict. It has to do with the way Israel wants the world to accept this idea, constructed in 1967, that it needs most of the territory that it occupied then, but that it is willing to allow some autonomy to the Palestinians in that territory.
And they do have support—external support—enough so that the Palestinian elite can live a fairly decent, often lavish, lifestyle, while the society around them collapses.
Marwan Barghouti
fact, go back to the beginning of the Oslo agreements, now twenty years old. There were negotiations under way, the Madrid negotiations, at which the Palestinian delegation was led by Haider Abdel-Shafi, a highly respected, left-nationalist figure in Palestine. He was refusing to agree to the US-Israel terms, which required crucially that settlement expansion be allowed to continue. He refused, and therefore the negotiations stalled and got nowhere.
