Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by Pancho
On April 15 of this year I was returning to Israel on an
Alitalia flight from Rome. About forty minutes before landing in Tel
Aviv, the captain informed us that Israel had announced extraordinary
security measures, constricting its air space in response to an unusual
threat, and that from that moment on—we were still high above the
Mediterranean—until we would be allowed to leave the terminal, all
photography was strictly forbidden; beyond that, we were to follow the
instructions of Israeli security personnel on the ground.
My first
thought was that Benjamin Netanyahu had decided to attack Iran,
despite, or maybe actually because of, the seeming movement in the
preceding days toward an effective and acceptable peaceful solution to
the problem of the Iranian nuclear project. On second thought I decided
that such an attack was still somewhat unlikely. So what was going on?
Upon
landing we were diverted to the old, by now outmoded Terminal 1, then,
after passport control, taken by buses to the new Terminal 3. There were
police and border police everywhere, in large numbers, and we soon saw
them arresting a demonstrator and forcing him into a police van. At this
point it dawned on me that the extraordinary menace from the skies had
to do with the arrival in Israel of a few dozen peace activists from
Europe. They were, we later learned, trying to reach Bethlehem in the
Palestinian territories in order to protest against human rights abuses
by Israel.
These protesters clearly provided reason enough to call
out the armed forces, as if a violent invasion were taking place. Some
fifty or so were arrested; two managed to slip through the cordon and
reach Bethlehem. Government spokesmen that evening proudly spoke of
having warded off a threat of almost existential proportions. Their
satisfaction was marred only by the fact that the TV news that day was full of one of those incidents that reveal in a flash the violent reality of the occupation.
Shalom Eisner, deputy commander of the army brigade stationed in the
Jordan Valley and a settler himself, was filmed while brutally, and
without provocation, smashing a Danish peace activist in the face with
his rifle. The ugly, indeed horrifying, scene was broadcast dozens of
times. I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen the likes of it rather often in
demonstrations in East Jerusalem (Sheikh Jarrah, Ras al-Amud, Silwan)
and in peace actions in the territories. Eisner has since been
temporarily relieved of his command; if earlier cases are any
indication, he will probably be reinstated after some two years in
another post. Interviewed after the incident, he gave an honest
statement of his moral stature: “Maybe it was a professional mistake to
use the gun when there were cameras around.”1
Why
should a handful of harmless demonstrators elicit so severe a reaction?
Netanyahu, in his official announcement, said that if these people were
so concerned with human rights, they should check out the situation in
Syria, Gaza, or Iran—as if such sites of egregious abuse relieved Israel
of any responsibility for what is going on day by day in the occupied
territories. The same logic—that of the endless war between the Sons of
Light and the Sons of Darkness—underlies Netanyahu’s constant dwelling
on the Holocaust in relation to Iran. Like many Israelis, he inhabits a
world where evil forces are always just about to annihilate the Jews,
who must strike back in daring and heroic ways in order to snatch life
from the jaws of death. I think that, like many other Israelis, he is in
love with such a world and would reinvent it even if there were no
serious threat from outside.
Buried somewhere
inside all this is a bad Israeli conscience about the treatment of
Palestinians since 1948—a conscience repressed but still somehow alive
(not, perhaps, in Netanyahu). The rationalizing vision pasted over that
bad conscience, a vision simple-minded, self-righteous, dangerous, and
immoral, underlies the dilemma that Peter Beinart has eloquently and
bravely stated in The Crisis of Zionism. He articulates it as a
conflict, very familiar by now, between liberal, democratic values and a
proto-racist, atavistic nationalism. This conflict has created two
Jewish states in the Middle East. As Beinart says, “To the west [of the
Green Line, the pre-1967 border], Israel is a flawed but genuine
democracy. To the east, it is an ethnocracy.”
By “ethnocracy” he
means “a place where Jews enjoy citizenship and Palestinians do not”; it
is a mini-state run by settlers, some of them violent and fanatical,
that disenfranchises a huge Palestinian population and continually
appropriates Palestinian land in the interests of expanding and further
entrenching the colonial project of the settlements. Inevitably, the
ethos of the occupation, now in its forty-fifth year, spills westward
over the Green Line: “Illiberal Zionism beyond the green line destroys
the possibility of liberal Zionism inside it.”
The evidence for
this observation is overwhelming; Beinart discusses recent research that
shows a dangerous erosion in the commitment by ordinary Israelis to
basic democratic values and the concomitant rise of hypernationalist,
racist, and totalitarian tendencies, some of them well represented in
the ultra-right parties in the Knesset and in the current Israeli
cabinet. In the last year or so, we’ve seen a spate of antidemocratic,
“ethnocratic” legislation all too reminiscent of dark precedents in the
history of the last century.
We could also describe what is
happening, more simply, as a takeover by the settler mini-state of the
central institutions of the Israeli state system as a whole. By now,
Israeli policy is almost entirely mortgaged to the settler enterprise;
almost every day brings some new, inventive scheme to legalize existing
“illegal outposts” in the territories and to facilitate the
appropriation of more and more Palestinian land.2
The inevitable result of such policies is the imminent demise of the
so-called “two-state solution,” which would put a Palestinian state by
the side of pre-1967 Israel (with whatever minor revisions of the old
boundary the two sides would agree upon in negotiations). By now, a huge
portion of the West Bank has, in effect, been annexed, perhaps
irreversibly, to Israel. No state can be constituted on the little that
remains. I will return to this question.
Even apart from the
disastrous political consequences of current Israeli policy, it is
critical to recognize that what goes on in the territories is not a
matter of episodic abuse of basic human rights, something that could be
corrected by relatively minor, ad hoc actions of protest and redress.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The occupation is systemic in
every sense of the word. The various agencies involved—government
bureaucrats and their ministries and budgets, the army, the
blue-uniformed civilian police, the border police, the civil
administration (that is, the official Occupation Authority), the courts
(in particular, the military courts in the territories, but also Israeli
civil courts inside the Green Line), the host of media commentators who
toe the government line and perpetuate its regnant mythologies, and so
on—are all inextricably woven into a system whose logic is apparent to
anyone with firsthand experience of it. That logic is one of protecting
the settlement project and taking the land. The security aspect of the
occupation is, in my view, close to trivial; were it a primary goal, the
situation on the ground would look very different.
Take
a few routine, typical examples, drawn at random from an endless
series. In mid-January the civil administration sent its bulldozers,
accompanied, of course, by soldiers, to demolish the ramshackle hut of
Halima Ahmad al-Hadhalin, a Palestinian widow with nine orphaned
children living in the deeply impoverished site of Umm al-Kheir,
adjacent to the large and constantly expanding settlement of Carmel in
the south Hebron hills. The bureaucrats claimed that the shack was built
without a permit, which is no doubt true; Palestinians living in the
West Bank “Area C,” i.e., under full Israeli control, only very rarely
receive a permit to build from the committee, largely composed of
settlers, that oversees such requests.
I saw Halima on January 28,
a freezing, rainy day; she was standing barefoot, still shocked and
traumatized, in a neighbor’s tent. Such demolitions happen regularly at
Umm al-Kheir and have nothing whatever to do with the rule of law; they
are part of a malevolent campaign to make life as miserable as possible
for the Palestinians there (who, incidentally, claim credibly to own the
land on which Carmel sits today) in the hope that they will go away.
Precisely
the same line of reasoning applies to a wave of demolition orders
issued in February of this year against the project of electrification
and the building of energy infrastructures in a set of some sixteen tiny
Palestinian khirbehs spread over the south Hebron hills. The
shepherds and small-scale farmers in this region live in caves, tents,
or shacks, in abject poverty. Volunteers and peace activists with
technical know-how such as Noam Dotan and El’ad Orian, from the
organization known as Comet-Me, have painstakingly built wind turbines
and basic electric grids in many of these villages to serve a population
of some 1,500 people.
The immediate change in the quality of life
in this harsh region was dramatic; my friend Ali Awwad from Tuba,
proudly turning on a light bulb in the cave he inhabits, said to me,
“For the first time in my life, I feel like a complete human being.”3
Can these minimal infrastructures, entirely benevolent in intention and
effect, funded mainly by European donors at the level of hundreds of
thousands of euros,4 constitute a threat of any sort to Israel?
Apparently,
they can. The civil administration is keen on destroying them, once
again on the flimsy excuse that they were put in place without
permits—as if a request for a permit would have been forthcoming.5
Several electric pylons have already been destroyed and electric wires,
undoubtedly worthy targets for the Israeli army, have been cut in some
six villages. Pressure from European governments, especially Germany,
has stayed the new demolition orders for the moment, but the danger that
the bulldozers will turn up when opportunity arises remains very real.
Could
the courts stand as a bulwark against such arbitrary acts by the
authorities or the more severe instances of outright theft or violent
attack by settlers? Occasionally, they do. In general, however, no
Palestinian has the slightest chance of finding justice in an Israeli
military court, and very few indeed have been justly treated in the
civil courts over the last forty years. Any case having to do with an
attempt to establish or maintain Palestinian ownership over lands taken
for settlement is, ipso facto, unlikely to end in a decision that goes
against the settlers or the government, although there have been some
exceptions to this gloomy conclusion. Palestinians who protest against
the occupation and the loss of village lands are treated harshly,
sometimes imprisoned for long periods, sometimes killed in the course of
the demonstrations.6
It
is such matters that make Beinart’s deliberately understated
description of the occupation seem, from a local perspective in
Israel-Palestine, far too mild. His book is clearly addressed in the
first instance to an American audience, one perhaps not fully aware of
the real situation inside the Palestinian territories. The tone is
polemical, as one might expect; inevitably, Beinart has been bitterly
attacked as naive—the worst, also the cheapest insult in the lexicon of
those who defend Israeli policies—and as oblivious to the complexities
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.7
He is, in fact, all too aware of those complexities, far more so than
many who claim to speak to or for American Jews (most of whom, as
Beinart points out, have probably never met a living Palestinian). He
mainly focuses on the situation as it is today, under this particular
American president and this particular Israeli government. Possibly the
most revealing part of the book is the detailed and persuasive
description of the political maneuvers that allowed Netanyahu to
humiliate Obama repeatedly, first over the issue of a freeze on
settlements, and later in Congress, in 2010–2011.
The settlement
freeze, in which the Obama administration had invested considerable
effort, pressure, and prestige, was never more than a sham; according to
the reliable count by Peace Now, construction of new housing units in
the territories in 2010, the year of the “freeze,” was only slightly
lower than in 2009 (1,712 units as opposed to 1,920). In March 2010, on
the day that Vice President Biden arrived in Jerusalem, the Israeli
government announced that it was nearly doubling construction in the
East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo—an obvious and probably
calculated insult to the administration.
Even more outrageous was
Netanyahu’s arrogant response to a key speech of Obama’s on May 19,
2011, in which the president stated clearly that “the dream of a Jewish
and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.”
Netanyahu announced that he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from
President Obama of US commitments made to Israel in 2004”—including
acceptance by America of the annexation by Israel of huge chunks of
Palestinian land in the so-called “settlement blocs.” Note the word
“expects,” as if Netanyahu were dictating to a submissive president what
the latter should or should not say. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on
May 24, 2011, a pastiche of myth and demagogic rhetoric of the extreme
right, remained faithful to this tone, which Congress shamefully
applauded.
Sadly, Beinart shows how Obama has consistently given in to pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
lobby and other American Jewish establishment voices. He gives a
withering critique of the leadership of central American Jewish
institutions, by now blindly and rather crudely identified with the
Israeli right and the Netanyahu line; he quotes Keith Weissman, formerly
on the AIPAC staff, as saying that already in the
mid-1990s dominant figures there “were sucking at the teat of Likud.”
Beinart shows that this orientation, with its visceral aversion to the
very idea of a free Palestinian state and its enthusiasm for the
occupation, now largely dominates the Anti-Defamation League, the
Zionist Organization of America, the Presidents’ Conference, and a large
part of the Orthodox rabbinical establishment as well.
Orthodox
hypernationalism and its sometimes violently antidemocratic, even racist
voices partly account for Beinart’s pessimistic prognosis for
mainstream American Judaism and its relation to Israel.8
“American Zionism,” he fears, “will become the province of people
indifferent to liberal democratic ideals, and the American Jews most
committed to those ideals will become indifferent, at best, to the
Jewish state.”9
He cites studies showing that younger non-Orthodox American Jews,
conspicuously liberal in their values and politics, are less and less
attached to Israel. Here is the American Jewish version of the conflict I
have described in Israel between democratic ideals and tribal
nationalism. Both my grandfathers, like most American Jews of their
generation, at once Rooseveltian Democrats committed to strong notions
of social justice and ardent Zionists, would have been horrified by what
has happened in Israel and by the consequent need for American Jews to
make such a choice.
Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
Palestinian children walking past Israeli
border policemen standing guard near a Palestinian house taken over by
Jewish settlers in the center of Hebron, April 3, 2012
The book has a welcome pragmatic thrust to it,
reflecting the urgency—and the immense difficulty—of generating change,
but here again Beinart’s recommendations seem to me rather limited.10
He wants to strengthen liberal Jewish education in the US and to expand
its funding basis; no one could take exception to this plea, though its
potential effects on Israeli policy may be decades away. More
immediately, he recommends a boycott by American Jews of products coming
from Israeli settlements in the territories. This may seem a bold step
in New York or Philadelphia, given the current climate in American
synagogues and other Jewish institutions, though many of us have been
doing it for years, publicly or silently, to no great effect. I once
threw a fit in a well-known Jerusalem restaurant when it turned out that
they had in stock only wine produced by settlers or in wineries located
in the territories. The owner eventually appeared and apologized
profusely, promising that in future he’d have a wider selection. That’s
about as far as we’ve got, although there is at least one case—that of
the Barkan wineries—where pressure from outside, probably mostly from
Europe, apparently led to the closure of the main production unit on the
West Bank, near Banu Hassan. Lest this example inspire inflated hopes, I
should add that, according to recent studies, many if not most Israeli
wineries process grapes grown in settlements.
By now, targeting
settlers’ produce has a slightly anachronistic feel to it. Does it make
sense to focus on wine from Hebron or milk products from the Susya dairy
when the entire Israeli political system sustains the colonial project
in the territories? I should make it clear that I oppose the call for an
across-the-board boycott of Israel, and in particular for an
academic-cultural boycott, which, in my view, can only be
counterproductive, strengthening the prevalent paranoid mythology and
its strident spokesmen on the right. Although I spend a portion of my
time in often quixotic gestures in the south Hebron hills, in general
I’m not fond of the ineffectual.
What is needed is something far
more effective—perhaps something that a second-term Democratic president
could achieve if he had the courage to confront the stranglehold of AIPAC
on American politics, partly described by Beinart. In the meantime, we
could use the kind of idealistic and hardheaded volunteers whom Arnold
Wolf, the charismatic liberal rabbi who was one of Obama’s mentors in
Chicago, took to Selma, Alabama, during the civil rights struggle. We
need volunteers on the West Bank, to protect innocent Palestinian
civilians from marauding settlers and the soldiers who invariably back
the settlers up. Even a few hundred people would make a real difference.
But
it may already be too late. Analysts like Meron Benvenisti, the former
deputy mayor of Jerusalem, have been saying for years that the idea of
the two-state solution is no more than a fig leaf, to which both the
Israeli and Palestinian leaderships pay lip service, hiding the
recalcitrant reality of what is already a single state between the
Jordan River and the sea. At the moment, this single state, seen as a
whole, fits Beinart’s term—a coercive “ethnocracy.” Those who recoil at
the term “apartheid” are invited to offer a better one; but note that
one of the main architects of this system, Ariel Sharon, himself
reportedly adopted South African terminology, referring to the
noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves he envisaged for the West Bank as
“Bantustans.”
These Palestinian Bantustans now exist, and no one
should pretend that they’re anything remotely like a “solution” to
Israel’s Palestinian problem. Someday, as happened in South Africa, this
system will inevitably break down. In an optimistic version of the
future, we may be left with some sort of confederated model that is more
than one state but somehow less than two—and in which the Jews will
soon become a minority. I do not see how that can happen without a
struggle, hopefully nonviolent at least to some degree, in which
Palestinians claim for themselves the rights that other peoples have
achieved.
How did we reach this point? Why do
Israelis cling to a policy so evidently irrational, indeed suicidal? The
simple—too simple—answer is: we’re afraid. We’ve been so traumatized,
first by our whole history and then by the history of this conflict,
that we want at least an illusion of security, like the kind that comes
from holding on to a few more rocky hills. Never mind that every inch of
Israel is within range of tens of thousands of missiles currently
stationed in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, not to mention Iran, and that a
few more square kilometers make no difference to that threat. We’ll
still take over those West Bank hills, and we’ll even put a few rickety
caravans on them for anyone crazy enough to want to live there, and
we’ll station a few dozen bored soldiers on top of each of them and all
around them, and we’ll connect them to the Israeli electricity grid and
the water system, and we’ll build a big perimeter fence to enclose the
new settlement and to provide land for it to grow on (usually many times
the size of the settlement itself). The land happens to belong to
Palestinians, but that, clearly, is a consideration of no relevance
here.
The fears of Israelis are no doubt real enough, and a
generous interpretation of Israeli policy over the last four decades
would give them due emphasis. As Ali Abu Awwad, one of the leaders of
the new generation of Palestinian nonviolent resisters, often says: “The
Jews are not my enemy; their fear is my enemy. We must help them to
stop being so afraid—their whole history has terrified them—but I refuse
to be a victim of Jewish fear anymore.” He’s right to refuse. But I
think the reality we inhabit and have largely created by our own actions
has more to do with the story we Israelis tell ourselves about who we
are—a powerfully dramatic story that, like many such mythic stories, has
a way of perpetuating itself, at continually escalating cost to those
who tell it. This story more and more coincides with the primitive
Netanyahu narrative I mentioned earlier.
To get away from it, we
need to recognize certain primary facts, however uncomfortable they may
be for some of us. As has been the case in the past, there are always
easily available diversions and distractions that mask the true basis of
the ongoing struggle; in Israel today, the main such diversion is
called “Iran.” Along with such distractions we have the Israeli refusal
to see the present Palestinian leadership in Ramallah for what it is, a
more than adequate partner for Israel. Those who don’t agree should be
thinking about men such as Marwan Barghouti, still biding his time in an
Israeli jail. He’s no saint, to be sure, but he enjoys enormous
authority among Palestinians, and he knows very well what is required to
strike a deal. There is good reason to believe that he wants such a
deal, along the lines that are by now recognized as reasonable by a
majority on both sides of the conflict and, indeed, by most other
nations. He has recently published a strong statement calling for mass
nonviolent resistance in the territories and an end to the farce of a
negotiating “process” that has allowed Israel to stall endlessly—and to
hide its deeply rooted hostility to the very idea of coming to some form
of agreement with the Palestinian national movement.
This
profound antipathy to making a meaningful peace will undoubtedly
continue to dominate the present Israeli government, now expanded by the
entry of the Kadima party into the coalition; Kadima presents itself as
“centrist” but is, in fact, hardly distinguishable from the Likud, from
which it seceded under Sharon’s leadership, when it comes to
Palestinian matters. The new cabinet will continue to entrench the
occupation and to legalize the massive theft of Palestinian lands while
loudly complaining that the Palestinians are responsible for the
collapse of negotiations.
So again, it is worth stating the
self-evident truths: at the core of this conflict there are two peoples
with symmetrical claims to the land. Neither of the two has any monopoly
on being “right,” and each has committed atrocities against the other.
One of these two sides is, however, much stronger than the other. Until
the national aspirations of the weaker, Palestinian side are addressed
and some sort of workable compromise between the two parties is
achieved—until the occupation as we know it today comes to an end—there
will be no peace. It is impossible to keep millions of human beings
disenfranchised for long and to systematically rob them of their dignity
and their land.
To prolong the occupation is to ensure the
emergence of a single polity west of the Jordan; every passing day makes
a South African trajectory more likely, including the eventual,
necessary progression to a system of one person, one vote. Thus the
likelihood must be faced that unless the Occupation ends, there will
also, in the not so distant future, be no Jewish state.
—May 9, 2012
