26 September 2011. A World to Win News Service. At the UN Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for accepting UN recognition of Palestine. But the concept and practice of Israel as a Jewish state is at the heart of the problem.
First of all, what kind of state is that? He says that Israel is the state not only of the Jewish people that live there but the whole world's Jews. No other state in the world is based on an ethnicity.
This idea of a state as representing a people and not a territory is rooted in feudalism, when the point was the personal fealty that bound subjects to their monarch. The most notorious example in recent history of a state based on a "people" (ethnicity) rather than a defined territory was Germany, which under Nazi rule annexed Austria and Alsace-Lorrain on the basis of the "Germanness" of their inhabitants. West Germany clung to the concept of defining Germans by their "blood" for most of the post WW2 period.
Netanyahu's argument is that Israel should be recognized as Jewish because Palestine was where the Jewish people first came into existence and established a community four thousand years ago. Actually, most of Palestine's Jewish inhabitants left there about two thousand years ago, although a few stayed behind. But even more importantly, arguing that a place "belongs" to any people is totally unscientific. According to the same Old Testament Bible that Netanyau cites, Abraham, the founder of Judaism, originally came from Ur, in what is now Iraq. Also, various peoples had been living in Palestine for many thousands of years before that. And finally, the people called Palestinians today are no less descendants of the land's inhabitants during Biblical times, and in fact many may be descendants of Jews who converted to Islam or Christianity.
The point here is not to try and untangle which people these lands really "belong" to, but to demonstrate that this whole method of determining this by inheritance is untenable and ridiculous. As the saying goes, "Everyone comes from somewhere else." Modern humanity was made by constant intertwined migrations, starting from Africa.
The Zionists' real argument is that according to their religion, god promised them this land. In fact, the whole Zionist ideology is founded on similar mystical assertions, not only because they are founded in the unprovable (religion), but because as a political project Zionism draws its legitimacy from reactionary romanticism. Any attempt to apply reason to it is labelled anti-Semitism.
The insanity of this idea is even more flagrant when Israel attempts to put it into practice. If Israel is the state of all Jews, then how to define a Jew? Traditionally Judaism defines a Jew by inheritance, too, through the mother. At its founding, Israel deliberately adopted the Nazi definition, an individual with at least one Jewish parent regardless of their religious beliefs. This conveniently enabled Israel to expand its pool of potential immigrants, including for example, about a million Soviet Jews that the US paid the USSR to send to Israel. Many of them were not observant and had few or none of the cultural attributes that once distinguished Jewish communities in Russia (such as speaking Yiddish). In fact, many came to Israel because that was the only place they were allowed to immigrate to under the terms of the US-Soviet agreement. Quite a few almost immediately went on to the US or Europe.
Ironically, the Orthodox Jewish authorities who regulate much of Israeli life (even though Orthodoxy is a minority trend among the world's Jews) do not recognize many immigrants as Jews, so that there are two categories: people considered Jewish for purposes of immigration and people considered non-Jews by the Jewish establishment (and thus, for instance, not allowed to marry a Jew or be buried in a Jewish cemetery). This disagreement about who is a Jew has made it difficult for the authorities to fill in the box marked “religion” on Israeli ID cards, although Arab names suffice to tell the difference.
Again, our intention here is not to try and make sense of the contending claims as to who is a Jew, but to demonstrate the insanity of the whole project.
What makes this even more complicated is that Israeli Jews have a privileged status. Not only do they have rights to Palestinian land, and other rights that even Palestinians who are Israeli citizens do not enjoy, they have access to a standard of living and life style based not on their own hard work but funds from Western governments and donors and the benefits of an economy that is almost completely an extension of Western capital. (Why do Israeli computer geeks get rewarded for their cleverness while Gaza computer-savy boys and girls are likely to get nothing but frustrated, if not punished?) In effect, Israelis are receiving the perks that go along with living on the imperialist side of the division of the world into oppressed and oppressor countries and the great wealth this situation allows the imperialists to extract. This funding is meant not only to make the tiny Zionist state a major military power but to ensure that Israel remains an attractive place to live for people used to American and European living standards and willing to fight to keep them.
Anyone who thinks deeply about why the West has done that will understand why the state of Israel exists in the first place. Britain decided to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine during World War 1, as a counter-weight to the emerging Arab nationalist movements. The UK hoped to establish a settler state similar to those that were key to British domination of Southern Africa, Australia and other areas. But it was the US that played the central role in bringing the state of Israel into existence, snatching it away from the British. Eventually Washington became Israel's official godfather as part of American efforts to establish its own hegemony in the Middle East against both Arabs and European rivals. No one who knows British and American history in the early and mid-twentieth century could seriously argue that there was much of a "Jewish lobby" in either country when Israel came into existence, a time when anti-Semitism was particularly rampant in both countries.
In fact, during World War 2 the governments of both the US and UK were at best indifferent to the fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. For instance, they refused to carry out bombing raids to interdict the rail lines carrying Jews to Nazi death camps and in general tried to keep the slaughter of the Jews a secret from the public. The US authorities notoriously refused entry to Jewish refugees, who were sent back to die in occupied Europe. The UK and later the US did not favour the establishment of Israel because of any special liking for Jews.
Considerations of justice had nothing to do with it either. Take the modern example of Serbia. Why is it that when Serbia put forward a claim to parts of Bosnia on the basis of the existence of Serbian communities there and annexed Kosovo because it was historically the Serbian national heartland, and tried to expel non-Serbs from what it considered Serbian territories, the US led Nato in bombing Serbia into submission and bringing its government leaders to trial on charges of ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity, while when Israel does the same thing, the US provides it with bombers and offers it the ultimate protection of American atomic bombs?
This cannot be explained by either a "Jewish lobby" or a misplaced pursuit of justice. It can only be explained by what the US perceives as its imperial interests in the Middle East. Because Israel is dependent on US and European financing and military protection, and because of the privileged status of its people that comes with that, unlike, for instance, Egyptians, to whom Western domination has brought great suffering and national humiliation, it is the most fully reliable bastion of American interests in the region. It is the keystone to the whole system of reactionary, imperialist-dependent states that imprison the Arab peoples.
There is nothing normal about Israel and still less the "Jewish state" as the Zionists define it. After all, what state has no defined territory or borders? And what other state is exempt from international law?
It is true that at the time of Israel's founding, the United Nations (led by the US, with unfortunate complicity from the then socialist USSR) envisioned two states, a Jewish and Palestinian one, both as UN members. But today Israel has taken over 78 percent of the former Palestine. It seized East Jerusalem by war and now claims that it has the right to run all of it and "Judaize" it by expelling its Palestinian inhabitants. More than half a million Israelis are living in government-subsidized colonies in the West Bank, occupying the militarily strategic and water-rich highlands and dividing the rest of the West Bank into a labyrinth of often isolated Palestinian communities cut off from one another by Israeli army checkpoints and roads that only Israelis are allowed to drive on.
When Netanyahu complains that Israel cannot accept "a return to the 1967 borders with land swaps" because those borders are "indefensible", what he means is that Israel wants to keep all of Jerusalem (a right that even the US has not recognized so far) and most of the settlements, and the Golan Heights it stole from Syria, and the right to maintain an Israeli army presence on the West Bank across from the Jordanian border, encircling the Palestinians on all sides.
Actually, the terms Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is putting forward as the basis for peace with Israel are identical to what the US has put forward for decades, a stand reiterated by US President Barack Obama only a year ago. If negotiations between Israel and Abbas have gotten nowhere, it is because instead of freezing the construction of new settlements as the US requested and as Abbas demanded as a precondition for talks, Israel has sped them up. In fact, the number of West Bank settlers has tripled since the current "peace process" was launched in Madrid two decades ago. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have explicitly said that as far as they are concerned negotiations can go on for decades, while they keep expanding the settlements.
More than one observer of Israel has pointed out that the country has gone from being self-defined by its kibbutzim (the now-largely defunct agrarian communities in which Israeli immigrants were to build egalitarian communities on stolen land) to being defined in practice by its settler movement and the fascistic and intolerant "national religious" current associated with it. The settlers swallow up much of the budget (hence the unhappiness of secular Jews in Tel Aviv), increasingly dominate the armed forces' officer corps and set the terms for political debate. Many of these settlers are well-to-do religious fanatics from New York and elsewhere playing out a fantasy of "living on the land" (ultimately with the benevolence and financial support of the US). They are highly armed and often indulge in gratuitous violence against their ordinary Palestinian neighbours. Even Jews deemed insufficiently pious are sometimes attacked by Jewish fundamentalists. It is not much of an exaggeration when secular Jews say they fear the "Iranianization" of Israel. Is this the "Jewish state" Palestinians are supposed to recognize?
The call for UN recognition of a Palestinian state is essentially based on an acceptance of the status quo. It would mean a de facto recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and implies the dropping of the right of return of the millions of Palestinians who still have the keys or deeds to the homes in Israel from which they were driven out. There is no reason to believe that such a Palestinian “mini” state would be anything but under the heel of Israel economically, politically and militarily. Even if it were funded to some extent by the US and Europe, that would simply chain it even more tightly to an acceptance of Israeli domination.
Since there is nothing in Abbas's demand that the US has not itself put forward and that would in any way endanger Israel, why won't the Israeli leadership accept it? Here we can infer three hypotheses. Part of the reason is that Israel is not done gobbling up Palestinian lands. Another factor is that Israel wants to be recognized as entitled and able to do whatever it wants, and to not only deny Palestinian initiative but also further humiliate and crush them as a people. Probably the most important reason is that obliging Israel and the US to accept an accord based on a Palestinian initiative might encourage the Palestinian movement and spur the new generation to more activism. The very fact that a two-state solution would change little for the daily lives of Palestinians might discredit American-dependent leaders like Abbas and further radicalize some people.
That said, it must be added that Israeli agreement to some sort of Palestinian mini-state is still not impossible.
Israeli intransigence has created a serious problem for the US and for all the region's US-dependent regimes, from Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Egypt (whose military junta may claim to represent a break from Hosni Mubarak's subservience to Israel but still uses its guns to protect Israeli interests from the Egyptian people). Many people throughout the Middle East perceive Israel as not just the enemy of the Palestinian people but also as a key part of the whole regional set-up imprisoning all the Arab peoples. As has been the case at other critical junctures in the twentieth century Arab history, many Arabs in various countries are once again intolerant of governments perceived as Israeli boot lickers, perhaps because these regimes have never seemed so fragile. The US is not anxious to be too closely identified with Israel, which would undermine the minimally revamped regimes the US is trying to consolidate in some form or another amid the upheaval in the Arab world, like in Egypt. At the same time, this upheaval has made it clearer than ever that Israel is the country that the US can most fully count on and whose government is the least likely to be toppled by its people in a way that threatens American interests.
Abbas, whom the US first made promises to and then betrayed, and whom Israel has treated as an annoying insect, may think he is clever – or at least that he has no other option – to use Obama's own previous stance in favour of the two-state solution against him. This is meant to put the US in a position in which it must either accept Abbas's proposal for Palestinian UN membership (which it will not do) or veto it, which would further the reality of the US/Israeli relationship and hinder US efforts to recover its political losses in the "Arab spring". But this strategy is based on an ultimate acceptance of the US as the final arbiter, and whatever happens, the Palestinian cause will not be advanced through this.
Palestinians are coming out to demonstrate and take other actions in new numbers and forms (like the mass protests by Palestinian refugees on the Lebanese and other borders with Israel that so freaked out the Israeli establishment). Recently the Israeli diplomatic staff fled its embassy in Amman, Jordan, because of a rumour that crowds might assault it as happened in Egypt.
Yet it is also true that nowadays many Palestinians find it hard to believe they do can anything to really defeat Israel, which has all of Palestine under unprecedented military lockdown. That may be right, at the moment. Both the armed struggle of the 1960s and '70s and the unarmed Intifada movements ran into serious obstacles. But the dynamic between the Palestinian cause and the struggle of the other Arab peoples has long played a central role in the region and its potential should not be underestimated. It has already posed serious problems for the US's efforts to keep post-Mubarak Egypt under its control. It is a major factor in exposing the hypocrisy and US-dependence of most of the region's regimes, even Saudi Arabia, whose Islamic fundamentalist credentials are matched by its ultimate subservience to American and thus Israeli interests.
Logical inconsistency is common in politics. The US has led the bombing of Libya to bring about the regime change it wants in the name of "protecting civilian lives" while supporting the Bahrain royal family (and its Saudi protectors) in the mass murder of civilian protesters. It can also probably get away with supporting Israel even while trying to find a role for its unruly puppet Abbas. But people in the Arab world are watching, and these crimes will have political consequences in the thinking and actions of many Arab people.
The Middle East and the American-established order is more volatile than ever. And the Palestinian cause is, potentially, both a driver and a beneficiary of that instability. These are not times when nothing can be done by people seeking radical change. They are times that must be seized and whose potential can only be fully realized if people with a sufficient understanding and vision come to the fore.
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