Newsletter:
Vol. 14, Iss. 3
December 2015
The Two State Illusion
Dr. Mark Braverman
On October 16 The Christian Century
published my review of Rashid Khalidi’s Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S.
Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. The fact that the Century
reviewed Khalidi’s book is an indication of the media’s increasing willingness
to present viewpoints that challenge the very basis of Israel as a Jewish
ethnic nationalist entity. This shift reflects the reality that once you address
present-day violations of Palestinian rights, you see that the 1967 occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza was the continuation of the program of ethnic cleansing
that began in 1948 and continues to this day with the annexation and carving
up of the West Bank and the inhuman siege of Gaza. You begin to understand
that the dispossession of the Palestinians was the inevitable outcome of the
project to set up a state for the benefit of one people. It is also becoming
frighteningly clear that oppression and frankly racist policies on the part
of Israel are not limited to occupied areas, but to the territory within the
de facto borders of the State of Israel prior to the 1967 war.
A recently released documentary demonstrates this with horrifying vividness.
Ali Abunimah, Palestinian writer, activist and publisher of the Electronic
Intifada, has reported on a video entitled Israel’s New Racism: The
Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land, produced by Max Blumenthal
and David Sheen, a piece solicited — and then rejected — by the New York
Times. According to Blumenthal, it has since gone viral on YouTube, with
close to one million views. The ten minute piece documents vicious, racist
attacks on African residents of Israel incited by prominent demagogues and
several members of the Israeli Parliament. The piece presents voices, not
only shrieking in public demonstrations but speaking calmly in office interviews,
proclaiming that Israel is the land of the Jews and that non-Jews (especially
those with black skin) are not welcome. The video is shocking — but it is
not surprising. From our twentieth-century perspective, we understand all
too well that ethnic nationalism breeds racism – that it is racism – and that
oppression and violence – the bloody as well as the structural, state-sponsored
kind – is the inevitable result. In his recently published Goliath: Life
and Loathing in Greater Israel, Blumenthal documents Israel’s escalating
move to the political right, into what many would described as fascism. The
problem, as I pointed out in my 2011 blog post about Peter Beinart and his
brand of “progressive Zionism,” (a piece accepted and then rejected by The
Nation), is not the occupation, nor is it the religiously-based racism
of fundamentalist Jewish settler-colonists — the problem is a state founded
on an ethnic nationalist ideology. “The late and deeply mourned Tony Judt,”
I wrote then, “got it exactly right in his NYRB piece back in 2003: ‘The problem
with Israel [is that]…it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century
separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights,
open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a
state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from
which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and
place.’”
For over half a century, much of the world, with the U.S. in the lead, has accepted and supported this anachronistic and, by Judt’s definition, illegitimate political entity. A central point of Khalidi’s book is how language has been used to deny the reality of a State of Israel that, by virtue of its founding principle of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine has never been willing to share the territory. Khalidi describes the history of U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “a carefully constructed realm of obscurity, a realm in which the misuse of language has thoroughly corrupted both political thought and action.” He documents how U.S. policy since the 1970s has embraced that denial by sponsoring a “peace process” that has advanced Israel’s expansionism, demonstrating how, I wrote, “language functions to obscure the reality of a colonial settler project that has resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians…language used to maintain the destructive illusion of a process of negotiation between equal parties, rather than the reality of a powerless, stateless, occupied people at the mercy of a highly militarized state supported by the world’s only superpower.” Despite the futility of this approach to peacemaking, Khalidi points out, our government has pursued it doggedly, bowing to domestic political pressures and to Israeli stubbornness and persistence.
But things are changing. For an increasing number of Americans, the realization
is dawning that the story they have been told is a distortion and that our
government’s policies are bad, not only for the Palestinians, but for the
citizens of Israel. Mainstream journalism, which, like politics, responds
to the wind of public opinion, is reflecting this shift. Ian Lustick’s September
14 New York Times opinion piece Two State Illusion represents a sea
change in New York Times editorial policy with respect to Israel. Lustick’s
piece was followed closely by Yousef Munayyer’s Thinking Outside the Two
State Box in the New Yorker’s online edition. “The reality now,”
wrote Munayyer, “is that there is a single state. The problem is that it takes
an apartheid form.” Rather than solving the problem that it was intended
to solve, which is security and freedom from fear for Jews, Israeli policy
has condemned the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel to continuing conflict.
“It’s time” Munayyer writes, “to start thinking outside the Zionist box and
look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved,
not just the political demands of the stronger party.”
On a recent panel, which they shared with Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street Lustick and Munayyer spell out the political danger of clinging to the possibility that negotiations can bring about a fair and sustainable two state solution. The addresses by Lustick and Munayyer are riveting — and an excellent adjunct to Khalidi’s book. A key point made by both of them is that the implausibility of a fair partition at this point not only makes the negotiations pointless, but worse, perpetuates the conditions that make two states impossible, playing into Israel’s hands even more effectively than handing them the entire territory on a silver platter. In contrast, Ben Ami’s words give us a good look at the arguments that must be mustered to hold on to the “two-state illusion.” It is pretty much the brand of “progressive Zionism” that Peter Beinart has been offering up to preserve the Zionist dream: nothing is impossible if we wish for it hard enough and believe in it deeply enough. Commitment to the idea of Jewish nationalist homeland trumps reality, and certainly any commitment to equality for Palestinians, despite the language to the contrary — duly served up by those committed to saving Zionism — about full commitment to a state of their own for Palestinians.
Recently, Beinart, in his blog Open Zion, has adopted a strategy similar
to that demonstrated by J Street in its recent annual conferences: broaden
the tent to competing points of view, in particular to those advocating some
version of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). In her recent piece in
Open Zion, If You Want Two States, Support BDS, Kathleen Peratis freely
admits that her commitment to two states has her standing “on very narrow
ground…that the current peace process is at best a Hail Mary.” “Sad Zionists,”
is how she describes herself and those who cling to “our liberal Zionist dreams.”
My question to Peratis is this: how sad are you willing to be? Are you willing
to tolerate the sadness of letting go of the concept that an ethnic nationalist
entity, a concept carried over from the late nineteenth century, is the answer
to anti-Semitism? Are you willing to mourn the understandable mistake of
political Zionism as the solution to our historic suffering, a forgivable
(if and when we acknowledge the mistake) but all the same catastrophic wrong
turn? Are we willing to be sad enough? And having tolerated that sadness,
are we then able to contemplate, as I wrote in my critique of Beinart, that
“the end of Zionism will not be the disaster that so many Jews – and some
Christians — fear. Rather, it will open the Jewish people to a future where
the Other is embraced, rather than back to a past in which armies are mustered,
walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined, are vilified and attacked.
‘Saving’ Zionism by trying to make it into something it is not takes us in
precisely the wrong direction.”
Like other progressive Zionists, Peratis sees commitment to political Zionism
as integral to Jewish identity. What I find most unsettling, however, is not
Peratis’ sentimental clinging to the “liberal Zionist dream” or the even more
dangerous notion that “Fortress Israel,” as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has
characterized the state, keeps Jews safe (indeed, it makes not only Jews,
but the entire world less safe). As the title of her piece makes very clear,
Peratis wants to say yes to (what she calls) BDS because it will help the
two state solution. Here is what Peratis does not get: BDS is a Palestinian
project. It is a call from Palestinian civil society, endorsed at the
time of its inauguration in 2005 by 108 Palestinian political parties, unions,
associations, coalitions and organizations representing Palestinian refugees,
Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The goal
of BDS is Palestinian human rights, not the preservation of the Zionist project.
If we, as Jews, choose to support BDS, it has to be as world citizens (and
if we are Americans, then in particular U.S. citizens) joining a global, universal
human rights movement, a movement to say “No” to apartheid in our time. What
hubris — what chutzpah — to attempt to co-opt the Palestinian call for BDS
into supporting the failing, fundamentally flawed and, in the present scenario
— it must be said — racist and anti-human rights cause that is the two state
solution today. Holding on to two states is holding on to the Jewish state.
And holding on to the Jewish state means suffering the consequences of such
a project, consequences on such horrific display in the Sheen-Blumenthal video.
Is that sad enough for you?.
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