After Zionism

One State for Israel and Palestine

Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor, Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780863567391
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After Zionism brings together some of the world's leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution. Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land. Although deep mistrust exists on both sides of the conflict, growing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Arabs are working together to forge a different, unified future. Progressive and realist ideas are at last gaining a foothold in the discourse, while those influenced by the colonial era have been discredited or abandoned. Whatever the political solution may be, Palestinian and Israeli lives are intertwined, enmeshed, irrevocably. This daring and timely collection includes essays by Omar Barghouti, Diana Buttu, Jonathan Cook, Joseph Dana, Jeremiah Haber, Jeff Halper, Ghada Karmi, Saree Makdisi, John Mearsheimer, Ilan Pappe, Sara Roy and Phil Weiss. 'Nothing will change until we are capable of imagining a radically different future. By bringing together many of the clearest and most ethical thinkers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book gives us the intellectual tools we need to do just that. Courageous and exciting.' Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

ONE

Presence, Memory and Denial

Ahmed Moor

I remember the fall of 2003 clearly. I’d just commenced my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania and like many seventeen-year-olds, I was glad at being newly independent.

The school had undertaken a programme to socialise incoming students. It consisted mostly of ice-cream parties, which did a lot to create a low-stress, adjustment-mode environment. It was after one of these events that I met another freshman in my class. Our conversation carried on normally until the young woman I was speaking with asked: “Where are you from?”

“Palestine,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment before replying, “There’s no such thing.”

The politics of denial is the politics of occlusion and erasure, of negative spaces and dark holes. It is a manic, hysterical and angry politics. It is sometimes the politics of atrocity.

For several weeks in early 2012, members of the Republican presidential line-up tripped, lurched, and tumbled over one another in the frenzied competition to announce their deep love for Israel. Governor Rick Perry of Texas promised that the small Mediterranean state would be the first country he visited as president. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney insisted that he would confront Iran head on – to spare the Israelis the burden of doing so themselves. And as comedian Jon Stewart humorously pointed out, only Israel could cause Congresswoman Michelle Bachman to boast proudly of her time spent as a labourer on a socialist commune – a kibbutz.

The grim slide from comedy to anguished absurdity accelerated when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sought to mark himself apart. In an interview with a small Jewish cable television network, he made the blandly genocidal statement that the Palestinians were an “invented people”.¹ It was an assertion he felt comfortable repeating days later when he evoked Ronald Reagan – a mythical, folklorish figure among Republicans – to underline his “historical” claim. Gingrich’s mendacious statement was not a historical or an anthropological one. It was politics – one with a long history in Palestine.

Zionism, the nineteenth-century European movement to colonise Palestine, has always struggled with an inconveniently inhabited Holy Land. In the minds of Theodor Herzl and David Ben Gurion, the indigenous people – the Palestinians – were a direct obstacle to the redemption of an allegedly effete, bookish European Jew. Labour Zionism – the unlikely admixture of Marxist labour principles and ethnic nationalism – emphasised the role of the land in the Jewish man’s “redemption”. In a practical sense, this meant that the new Jewish immigrants to Palestine would be charged with tilling the fields, picking the fruit, drawing the water – becoming native.

This preoccupation with sunburned brows and rugged silhouettes marked Zionism apart from other nineteenth-century colonialisms. In Palestine, the idealised Jewish man would learn that he had no use for indigenous labour, only the land upon which it toiled. Zionism’s horizontal latticework – the Yishuv or early Jewish settler community – sought to project a positive vision of a natural world forced to yield to Jewish brawn. The invention of the New Jewish man, the Israeli, required the negation of the Palestinian. That was partly to entice European Jews into emigrating from their countries; indigenous resistance to immigration would have diminished the allure of the Holy Land.

But the erasure of the indigenous Arabs was also ideological. The foundational mythology told by Jewish storytellers about their heroes took form in a wild, untamed and unconquered landscape; an unpeopled landscape. It was written in long, flowery script that bloomed on clean, unspotted parchment. Harangued across the ages, the time had come for the Jewish people to forge their destiny in their spiritual foundry. The uncomplicated story of return and exile was successfully distilled into the facile language of mass politics. Today, most of us are familiar with Zionism’s most hackneyed rhetorical lozenge – that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land”.

Of course, the land was peopled. And it was peopled by the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. They were the ones who built the port cities of Haifa and Jaffa and cultivated the citrus and olive groves. They were the ones who, with undeniably real minds and bodies, issued the most forceful moral rejoinder to a vision of a Jewish-only society in Palestine. “We are here,” they said.

But not for ever, as it turned out. The early Zionists had adeptly accumulated arms and political support in western capitals in preparation for the moment they knew would arrive. Plan Dalet was carried out with more success than could have been predicted: by the end of the war in 1948 most of Palestine had been successfully emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants. More than five hundred villages, where roughly 700,000 people had lived, were summarily razed; the erasure climaxed in an epic act of ethnic cleansing.

They were forgotten. Or rather, the founders of the state of Israel tried to forget them. In their minds and books, the state of Israel was heroic – God’s manifest will and his people’s benedictory return. The opportunistic Arabs who had arrived for material gain with the first Aliya had been vanquished. They fled at their leaders’ behests, or otherwise ceased to be. Israel was a trial-borne miracle.

The Palestinians did not forget, however. Their families learned to inhabit the dark peripheral spaces – the preserve of refugees. But they did not grow comfortable there. In their hearts they nurtured the memory of a place that they owned, fields that they tilled, weddings and births and funerals. Their thoughts burned with the late knowledge of their history; they had been exiled. Zionism had destroyed their towns and villages, but it hadn’t destroyed them.

Their young people collected themselves and began to fight. They fought for a life worth living, for home, for recognition. They fought in the alleyways of their refugee camps and in the streets of their conquered places. They fought with their words, their songs and their literature.

The memory of them – who they were, where they are from and who they are today – gradually began to shake the scales from the eyes of peoples around the world. In the East, they recognised the Palestinians’ worn faces and calloused soles; they were alike. In the West too, they were recognisable. Their fierceness was unfriendly and their righteousness threatening. They were the indigenous people clamouring for a reckoning – the barbarians at the gate.

That was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Golda Meir felt comfortable denying their existence entirely. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people … It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist,” she said.²

The intervening decades saw the world change. The East grew, asserting itself and its own historical experience. The West grew too. Contrition over a past blackened by imperialism and colonialism became widespread, and recognition of indigenous peoples’ right to independent life and self-determination developed similarly. But the Palestinians stayed the same – and so did their Zionist adversaries.

Today, just as one hundred years ago, the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people is widespread amongst Zionists. Its superficial form has changed – instead of the Palestinians, it is Palestine that does not exist (the “Palestinians” can call themselves whatever they like). But the thrust is the same. The idea and the words used to produce the denial carry an emotional charge, a pugilistic readiness to fight over the “right of the Jewish people” to colonise and occupy all of Palestine. All the while, the denial wraps Israel in a plastic, impermeable sheath. The Palestinians did not exist – there was no one to dispossess. Palestine does not exist – wrongdoing cannot be perpetrated in a void.

Nor could the great historical extirpation of the Palestinians be consigned to 1948 or 1967. The cleansing of Zionist memories has been a high-maintenance and a continuous undertaking which has required diligence and an entire society’s energies. The cost of a single crack in the facade is too high. To stop denying the existence of the Palestinians would signify a readiness to confront the state’s original sin – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel would be de-sanctified and the cries, pleas, muffled shouts, and roars of a million refugee voices would burst forth in a deluge: “We are coming home!”

Zionism cannot withstand the decibel level. That has been true all along.

Israeli inculcators weaved their mythologies so tightly that the Palestinians ceased to exist, not only in history, but in the present as well. It is this manufactured non-existence of the Palestinians that has enabled generations of Jewish Israelis to steal and settle land in the Occupied Territories. It is that same dehumanisation that has enabled their larcenous governments to encourage their often violent activities. Today, the cataracts have grown so thick that when young Israelis move to colonise the West Bank, they do not see fellow humans. Standing in their way are the dehumanised, unchosen Arabs with inferior rights, or none at all. These are the memories they have been taught.

The process of purging memory has a strangely prophetic quality. The forgotten, erased, obviated, occluded, denied, clouded, wiped, blanked and stricken reaches its tentacular form into our present. Palestine existed, but it’s been colonised out of existence.

The transition from memory and imagination to reality can be an abrupt one. The unacknowledged truth is that Palestine/Israel is already one country. A visitor from another country will struggle to isolate one from the other. Artificial-looking Israeli settlements penetrate deeply and violently into the West Bank, cantonising the territory. Jewish-only roads snake heavily there; the sieve that strains Palestinian lives. All the while, Israeli pipes swiftly draw water from Palestinian aquifers beneath Gaza and the West Bank. The country is a unified one, but Apartheid’s ugly scrawl mars its surface.

This is a basic truth that Rick Santorum – another Republican politician – inadvertently bungled into when he said that: “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian. This is Israeli land.”³ Santorum sought to deny the existence of the Palestinians – to erase them. But he mangled the lie and unintentionally claimed Israeli citizenship for the two-and-a-half million Palestinians who reside in the West Bank. In essence, his words were a tidy summation of the spiral history of Zionism: there are no Palestinians, and Israel is an Apartheid state which disenfranchises half its citizens. The Palestinians have been unremembered, yet there they remain.

Memory and Reality

My family lived in the West Bank at the height of the Oslo process in the mid- to late 1990s. Even at that time, I remember thinking that the settlements around us were immovable; they were fortresses that rested heavily on a now spoiled landscape.

My father wanted to show us as much of the country as he could, so we took weekend trips to different sites in the West Bank. Jerusalem and Israel were closed to us. I remember winding drives from one valley to the next and the oppressive sense that we were being locked in. Even at that time. the road system in the West Bank was segregated. For me, that was an early hint of how things were supposed to develop.

It was around that time that I began to think that the discussions and handshakes being broadcast into every occupied home were a sham. Our lives were getting more difficult almost on a daily basis. Yet the news anchors insisted that Jericho was now free, Ramallah was nearly there, and that Jerusalem would come next.

The second intifada started in the summer of 2000 and my family left Palestine. It was probably in 2002 or 2003 that I realised that there would never be a viable Palestinian state. That awareness didn’t bother me very much because the knowledge that anything Palestinian would be truncated and crippled by an immensely more powerful Israel had developed by that time. So it didn’t make sense to mourn a non-state where non-self-determination would take place.

That was also around when Tony Judt published his essay “Israel: The Alternative” in the New York Review of Books.⁴ The essay had a tremendous impact on me. I wasn’t aware that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and others had called for a binational state decades earlier. All I saw was an alternative, one that could provide justice for the refugees and everyone else. The Palestinians had a way out, a path to freedom. The years that followed saw the violence in the Occupied Territories and Israel explode. When the intifada was stamped underfoot and snuffed out, Palestinians were left with nothing to do but count the dead. It was a very dark period, morally and spiritually, for many of us. We had resisted the erasure, the deliberate forgetting, and we had forced the Israelis to acknowledge our existence. But at what cost?

I travelled back to Palestine for the first time in a decade in December 2010. Everything I remembered was still there – kind of. The world had changed; mobile phones were ubiquitous, USAID money had transformed Ramallah into something that looked relatively prosperous, and some of the cars were newer. There was even a Mövenpick. But the starkest changes were most obvious and irreversible. The settlements had taken over and much of the bucolic landscape had simply stopped existing. I’d known it had happened, but I was still deeply saddened to see it.

I also knew about the Wall. But confronting it turned out to be more difficult that I had imagined. My old neighbourhood of Al-Ram had been ruined and partially de-peopled by the Wall which was built through the heart of the town. It weighed heavily on Palestinians; tons of vertical concrete can do that. In Bethlehem, too, I was stricken, both by its size and by the brazen offence it offered to anyone who chose to visit the holy sites there. I once believed that the world’s Christians would speak up in the face of desecration, but I was wrong.

That trip was an important one for me. I saw at first hand for the first time in a decade that Palestine was gone – there was nothing left. The two-state outcome was dead. I had borne witness to the fact.

The Presence of Morality

The second intifada succeeded in reasserting the existence of the Palestinians but it failed in almost every other way. For many Palestinians the exclamatory statement was a costly one to make. Thousands of them were killed by Israel, which also lost more than a thousand civilians to Palestinian violence. By the end of 2004 the Palestinians were worn, tired and dispirited. But the basic dilemma remained: how to resist oppression and Apartheid, and how to do it in a way that did not diminish their moral claims?

The answer came through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Palestinian civil society united in 2005 to issue a near-unanimous call for non-violent resistance to Israel. The movement recaptured and highlighted the moral core of the Palestinian claim and broadcast it widely to the world.

Modelled on the South African call, which helped to bring about an end to Apartheid in that country, the BDS movement has seen an increase in effectiveness with every passing year. That has been particularly true on the cultural boycott front, which is the most important for effecting change. Some Israelis have begun to acknowledge the offensiveness of their Apartheid regime, but only after popular musicians like Coldplay began to refuse to play in Tel Aviv. The key here is that the Israeli occupation will continue to be maintained so long as the majority of people in that country can continue to ignore it. The BDS movement makes it harder to ignore Apartheid.

It is important to remember that BDS is not an outlook, an article of faith or a panacea. Nor will it likely be a tool for economically undermining the occupation; moneyed interests run too deep. Besides helping awaken the Israelis to the suffering they cause, BDS is a tool with which the Palestinians can highlight their moral cl...