Israel and Zionism

PANIM No.6 July 1998(Hebrew)

More than ten years ago I was approached by an Israeli academic and asked if I would be ready to give a series of lectures to a group of Israeli foreign ministry officials on the Arab Israel Conflict. He explained that I was "free to say anything I wanted". What was required of me was to give a "Palestinian viewpoint" of the problem. I declined the offer explaining that I could only present what I believed to be a scientific/scholarly analysis, not a Palestinian one. I relate this story deliberately to underline that what follows does not represent a Palestinian view, whatever that may consist of, but ten years older, and perhaps a little bit wiser and less certain of absolute truths, I feel I should begin by affirming that as an Arab who has been more or less living, even when physically outside the narrow confines of Israel/Palestine, under the shadow of Israel's unbearably heavy weight, both in the immediate sense and in the hegemony it exercises on its immediate surroundings since its victory in the war of June 1967, anything I write here is of necessity coloured by this fact.

This has not always been so. Prior to the June 1967 war, Israel and things Israeli did not overly pre-occupy my thoughts. The issues seemed clear and simple. The Arab inhabitants of Palestine had been expelled from their homeland by a combination of British and Jewish power, and were replaced by European colonisers, who to my mind were no different from the white settler communities in Rhodesia and South Africa. It was important to correct the injustice which had befallen the Palestinians, but this was a detail which would somehow be resolved once the Arabs had put their house in order. The social and political transformation of the Arab world appeared to be a more immediate task. From that perspective, it seemed that the Partition decision, while patently unjust, appeared to be an acceptable format to temporarily resolve the issue. By 1947 the Jews in Palestine were an autonomous and fully-fledged community, much like other settler societies , with the difference that they were not attached to a mother country , in the same way that the pieds-noirs in Algeria were linked to France. Given the violence and hostility which enveloped Arabs and Jews, and irrespective of the fact that the responsibility lay with those who had come or were brought from the outside, and given the fact that the Arabs were not prepared to accept the presence of Jews in their midst and talked in terms of establishing an Arab Palestine, while at the same time the Jews wanted to establish an exclusively Jewish state, Partition appeared to be the least worst solution.

Although the presence of an "actually existing Zionist state" was literally on my doorstep, this was not a subject which aroused my intellectual curiosity; the Jewish problem in Europe on the other hand held a certain fascination , which grew naturally as part of my interest in things European in the post world war one period. The Bolshevik Revolution appeared as a spectacle peopled by fascinating characters many of whom were of Jewish background; there was also the Spanish Civil War and the role played by the International Brigades ; and in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, an issue which after the massacre at Sharpville was attracting widespread popular attention, South African Jews were in the forefront of the struggle for freedom and justice.

In 1963 I visited East Berlin as a tourist, and under the guidance of an aunt who was a political refugee in East Germany, I received my first lessons in twentieth century German history. At that time, cities like East Berlin and Dresden looked as if they had just emerged from the war. My aunt was adamant that the Germans had not changed. They entertained an intense hostility towards non Germans. Even in the East, people had not abandoned their hostility towards Jews. I found this perplexing. I could not understand how a country which boasted the most vibrant and also the largest communist party in the world in the Twenties, could at the same time be capable of such intense nationalist and racist prejudices. That this should continue to be the case eighteen years after the destruction of Nazism and the installation of a communist regime was beyond my powers of comprehension. But one thing became clear, and has remained with me ever since. Nationalism is the modern form of tribalism in the age of capitalism, and taken to its logical conclusion, will necessarily lead to barbarism.

Shortly after in 1964, I came across a picture book published by Penguin and produced by Erwin Leiser (a German Jewish journalist who fled Berlin to Sweden in 1938) entitled "A Pictorial History of Nazi Germany". These were probably the first pictures I had ever seen of the concentration camps; I saw pictures of people wearing yellow stars, pictures of naked women clutching babies standing in line to enter the gas chambers, and pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto; a picture that particularly stuck me was a sketch entitled "buttock formation" which was supposed to illustrate distinctive racial features; the buttocks of the upper races and the lower races were apparently not the same, or so the propagators of racially inspired pseudo science wanted everybody to believe. I was amazed that people could behave this way towards fellow human beings. The fact that the victims were Jewish did not strike me as relevant. In later years when I read about how the British put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857, with harrowing scenes of Indian soldiers being tied to the mouths of cannons and then shredded to a thousand little pieces with British colonial officials and their wives watching the spectacle, it only confirmed my belief that it was specific social systems that made people behave in such barbaric ways. The twentieth century singled out European Jewry for slaughter and destruction, yet past history was replete with all kinds of brutality, massacres, and violent deaths. The Jews, unlike other victims, had successfully developed a powerful narrative and a collective memory which would keep the story of their death and suffering alive. But none of this in my mind was linked to Palestine, Zionism, or to Israel . This Holocaust was very much a European phenomenon which was totally unconnected to what had taken place in Palestine during the years of the British mandate. And without having read Lenin at the time, it seemed evident to me that the chains had to be broken at exactly the spot where they had been forged, and at their strongest link. I could not understand why people would want to run away instead of staying put and fighting back. It was only later that I came to understand that Zionism really had nothing to do with the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, or with the destruction that befell East European Jewry, except in a cold-hearted and instrumental way.

It was the June 1967 war that awakened my interest in Zionism. For some reason I had assumed that its own discourse would be openly racist and colonialist.Of course I was constrained by my lack of knowledge of Hebrew and had to rely on English texts, and it took me a long time to realise that the issue of language is one of paramount importance. In its own secret language, the tribe can uncover everything. The self image it tries to create for itself in the languages of others is strictly tailored. The text that still clings to my mind today is not Herzel, or Pinsker or Mendelsohn or Borochov, but a propagandistic piece by the writer Amos Kenan written in the Sixties, and if memory serves me right entitled " an open letter to Fidel Castro, Che guevara, and all the revolutionaries of the world " or words to that effect. His argument was basically that it was the Israelis who were the real revolutionaries in the Middle East, and he might even have equated them with the Vietcong who at the time had captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of young people in Europe, and whose name was a rallying cry in the emancipatory outbreak which took place in Paris in 1968, and which carried the (as it turned out unfulfilled) promise of a new dawn. For those who still remember these events William Wordsworth's words on an earlier French revolution "It was a joy to be alive.." epitomised the spirit of the times. That Amos Kenan should attempt to identify this with what Zionism stood for and had accomplished: the destruction and dispossession of a people, whose remnants had not been annihilated like the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines, but were still alive carefully preserving the title deeds to their homes and lands, keeping within reach the keys to their homes, and instilling in their children and grand children the memory of belonging to a land they were forbidden to enter, amazed and angered me and appeared as a monumental piece of historical and intellectual falsehood.

When I later read Pinsker's "Auto Emancipation", I was equally appalled by his belief that anti semitism which he terms "a psychic aberration" was an irreducible disease, not only because I dont believe that there are irradicable diseases, but because I could not understand how he could treat humanity in such an undifferentiated way and of his readiness to surrender the use of his reason. If natural phenomenon can be explained then surely so can social, political and economic events. To believe that it is incurable, is to make ludicrous and widesweeping judgments not only regarding non Jews, but also Jews themselves. In my mind I could not see the difference between Pinsker's attitude and that of the Nazi propagandists.

But what of Zionism itself ? And what of its successes ? Stripped of its attachment to things biblical it appears as part of an ongoing European nationalist resurgence, an organic nationalism having much in common with the then prevailing notions of exclusivity and separatism. The nation state appeared then to be the much sought after end of history. To be sure, it remained a minority strand. The Jews of Western Europe did not abandon their head-on rush to assimilation, while those of Eastern Europe, traditionalist, observant and untouched by modernity showed no interest in converting to the new secular religion of nationalism, which is what Zionism aspired to be. For that part of East European Jewry which had broken through the intellectual and religious fetters which kept it confined within the walls of the Ghetto, social democracy rather than nationalist rebirth appeared much more attractive. It was the Bund and not the small circles of Zionists which represented the avant garde of east European Jewry. For those who wanted to break out of the repressive confines of Czarist Russia and the surrounding states, the United States , not Palestine was the promised land. Millions of Europeans made the journey across the Atlantic and the Jews were no exception. The fact that the minority of Jews who were Zionists and who had embarked on their nation building project in Palestine came from Eastern Europe and not from the more advanced societies of the West, was indicative of the kind of society and the values that the Yishuv was going to assume.

From the beginning the aim of Zionism was to normalise the situation of the Jews. In other words to build a stratified Jewish society with a peasantry, a working class, a bourgeoisie etc separate and distinct from other peoples and states. Zionism wanted not only its own Jewish bankers and craftsmen, but also its very own Jewish thieves and prostitutes. This could only take place by uprooting the Jews from their erstwhile countries and transporting them to an empty one where they would not be shunted into specific professions and trades. At the same time, its choice of Palestine as the national homeland kept it wedded to a pre nationalist discourse, which helps explain the current transformations taking place in Israeli society today, with the growing power and influence of fundamentalist religious groups, and the never ending debate about Jewishness and Israeliness. Zionisms other, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had and could have had no place in the Zionist design. Fifty years after its establishment the Jewish state sees the slogan raised by some of the State's Arab citizens, " a state of all its citizens" as an anti Zionist threat. Despite the failure of Zionism to ingather the exiles, despite the fact that most Jews refused to come to Palestine and made their way to the New World or stayed put and perished in the Holocaust, despite the fact that the overwhelming number of Jews who did make Palestine their home arrived as unwilling refugees unable to pry open the doors of other states, and despite the fact that nearly half the country's Jewish population is made up of Arab Jews who had not been touched by the Haskala and were never acquainted with the theory of "the inverted pyramid" , despite all this, Israel still maintains that it is the state of the Jewish people and their ultimate place of refuge. Zionism also failed in saving East Europe's Jewry from extinction, and I am not her referring to Tom Segev's arguments in his book "The Seventh Million", but to the fact Zionism's primary aim was not to save Jews but to create a State, in the rather simplistic belief that the existence of a state would somehow guarantee their safety and existence. The fact that the Jews in Palestine were saved from the fate that befell other Jews in countries occupied by the Nazis, was the outcome of the failure of the Germans to occupy Palestine. It was the allied armies at the battles of Al Alamein and Stalingrad which stopped the Nazi war machine, and there is no reason to suppose that had the Whermacht arrived on Palestine's soil , the Nazi authorities would have treated the Jews in Palestine any differently from the way they treated them in other areas under their control. If there has been one consistent feature of the state since its inception, this has been the feeling of insecurity and threat which the overwhelming majority of its Jewish inhabitants evince. Today even after the signing of peace treaties with a number of Arab states, and enlisting the PLO as a security force to facilitate the tasks of the Border Police,the Jews in Israel are the only Jewish community in the world which lives in a state of constant fear and anxiety, both on the collective and personal level. The arrival of the state, the normalistion of the Jewish people etc, has not created a safe haven.

The victory of Zionism so eloquently eulogized by Prof Amnon Rubinshtein in his recent writings spelled out total disaster for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Indeed things could not have been otherwise. The very logic of the ingathering and nation building necessitated the existence of an empty land. The land was of course empty in the same sense that other settler colonialists, with less exalted protestations of virtue, also regarded the absence of a European presence as signifying the emptiness of a territory. It was empty in the same sense that perhaps America was discovered, and the "secrets" of deepest Africa uncovered. The fate of the Arabs was sealed not in 1948 however but in the aftermath of the defeat of their three year old revolt in 1939 by the British army. In 1948 they were unable to mount a credible defense to the centrally organised Jewish forces which started to extend their hold over parts of Palestine well before the British withdrawal from the country in May 1948. Notwithstanding the respect one has for the work done by the " new historians" in unearthing documents and trying to construct a real life scenario of what happened during and in the aftermath of hostilities in 1948/9, the fact of the matter is that the Partition resolution approved by the United Nations and seemingly accepted by the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine contradicted one of the main tenets of Zionism, the establishment of a Jewish state. If one looks at the population figures for the two states, one discovers that what the partition resolution sought to establish in the area of mandated Palestine in 1948 was two states, one Arab and one binational joined together in Economic union. Viewed from this perspective, the successful implementation of partition would have entailed the failure of zionism and not its success. The Palestinians legitimate rejection of partition (what individual or collective group would consent to surrendering what it believes to be its rightful rights for a share in those rights ?) has since been portrayed

as the mark of original sin. Because they committed this sin, they became undeserving, as if only the deserving are entitled to self government, freedom and the security of their lives and property. Yet as the historical record makes abundantly clear, neither the leadership of the Zionist movement nor the British colonial power took Palestinian considerations into account when deciding the fate of Palestine and its Arab inhabitants. Referred to in the Balfour Declaration as " the non Jewish inhabitants of the country", an undifferentiated mass lacking clear identity, their fate was decided not as a result of their rejection of Partition but as a result of Zionist Collusion with Prince Abdullah of Trans Jordan, himself on a short British leash . The establishment of an independent Arab Palestinian state was not on anybody's agenda. Had the leadership of the Palestinian Arab national movement acquiesced in the partition decision, the chances are that Abdullah and Bengurion, with British backing would still have carved up the territories allocated to the Arab state. The expulsion of the Arab inhabitants from within the borders of the nascent Israeli state was an essential and necessary part of the successful implementation of the nation state project. Arguments over whether the Arabs fled or were expelled from their villages, whether plan Dalet existed or not, whether Bengurion gave written orders or gesticulated with his hand, whether Allon behaved differently from other military commanders, or whether "friendly" villages met a different fate from "unfriendly" ones is ridiculous and superfluous. "Ethnic cleansing" to use a currently popular term, was the outcome of the war waged by the newly established Israeli army against a largely defenseless peasant population, which to be sure defended itself with whatever primitive means it had at its disposal and tried to ensure its survival in time-honored ways. At times this involved staying put, at others surrendering, and at others moving away from the battlefield to nearby locations until the dust of battle settles in order to return and resume normal life. The Palestinian refugee problem was created as a result of the Israeli governments refusal to allow the refugees to return to their homes. The more than three hundred and fifty Arab villages that were destroyed in the aftermath of 1948 were destroyed deliberately in order to forestall the possibility of the return of their former inhabitants. No miracles at work here, only the machinations of power.

It is not only the Arab inhabitants of Palestine whose lives have been transformed by the practical application of Zionism. All the peoples of the surrounding Arab states, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon have in one way or the other been adversely affected by the war state planted in their midst. Living next to a bullying neighbour, which after having inserted itself in the neighborhood despite the protestations of the current inhabitants decided that it does not like the neighborhood and proceeded to act accordingly, they have paid a heavy price. This is to be understood not only in terms of the loss of human lives and the physical destruction which has been visited upon their countries, a process which continues to take place on a daily basis in Lebanon, but also and more importantly in the wasted energies and resources which have had to be diverted merely in order to try and ward off Israeli wrath and the retaliation visited at will upon those who in its eyes appear to be deserving of warning or punishment. Additionally Israel's birth and establishment have provided the rationale for the ascendancy of military regimes, for the stifling of personal liberties, for the muzzling of the press, and for the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews from their homes, all under the pretext of combating Zionism. At the fulfillment of this process which started with Sadat at Camp David and culminated in the Oslo Accord and the peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan , and in its hour of victory Zionism turns out to have been a mere interlude, a secular moment in an otherwise messianic religious quest. Zionism created the state and in the process was taken over by the non Zionist religious parties who appear to be firmly wedded to theocratic conceptions and formulations. Post Zionism is a manifestation of the end of the heroic age and of the inability of the myths on which the state had been built to sustain themselves in the face of reality. At the same time it signifies recognition that an Israeli secular identity cannot make sense if it continues to remain based on tribal and religious foundations. This however is an internal Israeli/Jewish debate which has no room within it for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. As Benny Morris, the bete noire of the old faithful, never tires of repeating in trying to justify what has taken place and squaring it with the historical evidence which is there to see for all who have eyes to see with, things happen in war as in all wars. As for those who go further than Morris they fall into the category of "they weep but they shoot". But the Zionist banner in any case is no longer in their hands. It has been taken over by the religious fundamentalists and this perhaps is where the real failure of Zionism has taken place. Israel has not become a nation like all the nations. The barbaric destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis "solved" the Jewish problem. The success of Zionism in creating a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world, and its inability to destroy the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, who fifty years after their "dissolution" are celebrating fifty years of "nakba (catastrophe) and mukkawama (resistance)" has merely relocated the Jewish problem from Europe to West Asia. Zionism it appears, in its secular or in its religious form, can only have meaning in a garrison state constantly at war with its neighbours, and with the indigenous population, which has to remain subservient, and to acquiesce in living in an apartheid type regime.