A Beacon of Hope
Apartheid Israel
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley12052006.html
Johannesburg, South Africa
On November 27, Ehud Olmert responded to frantic international pressure
and US hand signals by delivering what was billed as a "landmark"
policy speech. The BBC has raised a faint cheer for the "new mood" it
seems to signal. But the occasion, an annual memorial for Ben Gurion,
was appropriate: in silky language, Mr. Olmert baldly reiterated the
same terms and conditions that have blocked all progress toward Middle
East peace for years.
Talks with the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Olmert declared, will begin
only after a newly elected Palestinian government "renounces violence",
recognizes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, abandons the
right of return on behalf of the entire Palestinian people, and agrees
that the large urban Israeli settlements that now dismember the West
Bank will be permanently annexed to Israel.
After this abject betrayal of all Palestinian national aspirations and
social needs, Mr. Olmert said, Israel will then open "negotiations"
with the new government (unless Israel doesn't like that government),
"significantly diminish the number of roadblocks" (how many does Israel
consider "significant"?), "improve the operation of the border
crossings to the Gaza Strip" (what does "improve" mean?), and release
Palestinian VAT funds that Israel is illegally withholding.
In this dubious context, what about progress toward a regional peace
agreement? Of the Arab states' 2002 peace initiative, which offered
Israel a full peace upon its withdrawal from the West Bank, Mr. Olmert
says that "some parts" are "positive" but responds only with
diplomatese: "I intend to invest efforts in order to advance the
connection with those States". Well then, how about talks with the
Palestinians? He hopes the Arab states will "strengthen their sup****t
of direct bilateral negotiations between us and the Palestinians." But
the Palestinian Authority and Fatah have been scraping their knees
asking for bilateral talks with Israel, so this is meaningless - unless
it means that the Arab states should pressure the Palestinians to
capitulate to the model he is proposing, which even Arab quisling
governments cannot successfully do.
Israel will also "assist" the new Palestinian government "in
formulating a plan for the economic rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip
and areas in Judea and Samaria," which might sound promising until we
consider that "assist in formulating a plan" does not mean Israel will
assist in implementing any plan. But "areas in Judea and Samaria" is
especially ominous wording. First, "Judea and Samaria" are biblical-era
terms for the West Bank used by Israelis to conceptualize the West Bank
as an intrinsic part of Israel. Using them in diplomatic language
regarding peace negotiations signals that Mr. Olmert is now so secure
in this notion that he is willing to deploy it casually as a political
given. Second, Israel will evacuate only "areas" (plural) of the West
Bank. Later, Mr Olmert again uses the plural form when he says that
Israel "will agree to the evacuation of many territories and
communities which were established therein". To everyone else, the West
Bank is one territory. Now carved up by Israeli settlements, it is
several territories only if those settlements remain.
In other words, we are back to Olmert's old Convergence Plan, already
combusted on the altar of Lebanon. The entire speech was a stale
reiteration of the same old hogwash.
Israel-Palestine sits at the eye of the Middle East blood-bath that now
rightly obsesses world security debates. No serious analyst of Middle
East politics believes that regional stability, and therefore world
stability, is remotely obtainable without resolving this conflict. Yet
the best Israel can offer are talks for which no legitimate Palestinian
government can conceivably qualify, which cannot achieve anything, and
that, given the prerequisites, cannot even be launched in the first
place. Instead of the serious emergency summit we so urgently need, we
have a tableau of foolery: Mr. Olmert scraping to save his hollow
leader****p; a compliant media bleating again about "hope"; Mr. Abbas
shuffling and grinning.
The bankruptcy of Mr. Olmert's speech did accomplish one useful task:
it highlighted and capped the current state of world paralysis. In
fact, no one knows what to do. Daily in the West Bank, land is taken,
people are confined, jobs are ruined or lost, families are divided,
hopes are crushed. Daily in Gaza, conditions are far worse, as close to
a million people face starvation while mortars, bulldozers, and tanks
grind up people's lives. Anguished cries from Beit Hanoun ¬ "why?
why?" - receive no answer from Israel or anyone else. As one
commentator noted, no one notices Gaza as long as the Palestinians'
daily death toll remains in the single digits. We leave the
Palestinians only the job of dying more dramatically to get any
attention at all.
Flailing for direction, some eyes still turn mechanically to the US
hegemon: e.g., Zahi Khouri (San Diego Union-Tribute), who insists that
"America alone has the influence" to do something. But the
"do-something" mantra cannot be sensibly directed toward the Bush
administration now that it has openly urged Israel to smash Lebanon and
Gaza both. The spotlight turns to the Democrats, but what hope is there
for a party that takes every chance to pronounce on Israel's outrages
by ritually enthusing over Israel's "right to defend itself"? Kathleen
and Bill Christison have put it flatly: "The Democrats don't care".
Indeed, the Bush administration's only response to meltdown in
Palestine and Iraq is to argue for bombing Iran, on the idiot notion
that this trauma will trigger regime change and solve the Palestinian
problem by cutting off its regional sup****t networks. Hence the whole
world remains hostage to the absurd neocon and Zionist fantasy that
Hizbullah and Hamas oppose Israel only because they are paid to do it.
But indeed, few still ask or expect the US to act on Israel-Palestine.
Getting the imperium's shredded talons out of Iraq will be hard enough.
As for Europe, its moral bankruptcy is emblemized by the UK official
who admitted that Israel's blasting a sleeping eighteen-member
Palestinian family into fragments was "hard to defend." (One wonders
what she might have said if a Palestinian rocket barrage had smashed
eighteen Israeli Jewish citizens to bloody fragments in their beds.
"Hard to defend" seems unlikely.)
Still, some things are happening. The Palestinians are slowly winning
the propaganda war, at terrible cost. Israel's stunning crimes in
Lebanon and Gaza have turned the tide: Israel has never been such an
international pariah in all its years. The Arab states finally ended
the financial boycott of the Hamas government that they should be
ashamed before their families and clans that they ever deployed in the
first place. The heroic new international boycott movement, finally
standing up to shrieking Zionist slander and charges of anti-Semitism,
expands rapidly through cyber-space and into serious and principled
activism. Hopeful eyes turn to Ireland's victories and bold statements
from Canada.
But direction is lacking, and that lack is dangerous. "End the
occupation" is an empty call as Israeli city-settlements drape ever
more broadly over the West Bank. Solidarity movements focus mainly on
negative goals - trying to stop Israel from bombing helpless
Palestinian civilians or bulldozing their houses. Lacking positive
goals, activists remain in reaction mode and exhaust themselves
battling Israel's defenders in the "letters" columns of newspapers.
Worn-out editors eventually close their forums to these wars, leaving
activists fuming to each other in cyberspace.
We know the agents of this debacle: the complicit US government and the
brilliant Zionist lobbying machine; dithering Europeans; legless Arab
states; a rhetorically heated but intimidated and divided global South.
But to sort out what to do, we need to consider how we got here.
First, let's finally face it: The two-state carrot, dangled before the
diplomatic donkey for the past fifteen years, has led us straight to
this debacle.
The Oslo and Road Map processes were not only fruitless. They were
deceptions. Preying on collective hopes for a Palestinian state, Israel
never actually agreed to one. The Oslo Accords, which Israel signed,
never mentioned a Palestinian state. The Road Map explicitly called for
one, but Israel signed onto it only with fourteen "reservations", the
first of which precluded any Palestinian state. Before it would lift a
finger toward its own obligations, Israel required the PA to ensure
complete cessation of all Palestinian resistance, collect and turn over
all "illegal" weapons, stop all smuggling of arms (how?), "dismantle"
Hamas and the other militant groups "and their infrastructure" (how?),
submit all Palestinian resistance fighters to arrest, detention, and
interrogation, sup****t a system of laws that ensures their continuing
arrest, detention, and interrogation, cease "incitement" (what is
that?) and "educate for peace" (again vague - instil an ethos of
surrender in Palestinian youth?). Complete success in all these
measures was required to proceed even within the Road Map's three
stages. Moreover, the Palestinians must give up the right of return and
any claim on Jerusalem.
Since no rational observer can consider these conditions workable, they
clearly signified Israel's intention not to comply with the Road Map.
That a wilfully gullible world has pretended that this sham was
meaningful, and therefore placed a moral and legal onus on the
Palestinians to fulfil their obligations to the Road Map, is only more
shame.
No wonder Israel bombed Lebanon to smithereens. Its leader****p was
fatuous with victory.
Second, Israel's sovereignty in Mandate Palestine has moved into a new
stage. Israel has long controlled the airspace, sea, ****ts and border
controls, economy, land, water, infrastructure, and the social
management of the entire territory's population. But Israel has also
become sovereign in Max Weber's famous sense: "a state is a human
community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use
of physical force within a given territory." Of course, Israel's claim
to a monopoly on violence is not "successful" as long as the
Palestinians continue to resist it. And certainly Israel's brutal
methods are not considered "legitimate" by the Palestinians or by
anyone with moral sensibilities the world over. But consider: the
international community has endorsed Israel's insistence that Hamas and
all Palestinians are required to "abandon terror" and "recognize
Israel". These conditions signal that continuing Palestinian resistance
to Israeli occupation is now considered illegitimate.
This ****ft is immensely im****tant. The right of a population to resist
occupation is enshrined in the UN Charter. Resistance to occupation
becomes illegitimate only if and when the occupier is recognized as the
legitimate sovereign. Of course, the international community has not
admitted openly that Israel is sovereign in all of Mandate Palestine,
because that would wreck the already-shaky collective pretence that the
West Bank and Gaza Strip are territories from which Israel can be
expected to withdraw someday. But denying Palestinians the right to
resist occupation demonstrates that Israel's occupation itself has been
tacitly redefined.
Israel's own model is not occupation. The word "occupation" rarely
appears in Israeli government parlance. (Ariel Sharon used it once or
twice, but it caused an enormous stir, and it appears now only in the
formula "Israel ended its occupation of Gaza", patently untrue in any
case.) Israel's model regarding the West Bank is openly one of
sovereignty. Jewish-Israeli settlers potter about peacefully in their
gardens in the West Bank because they know it is "Israel". The big
settlements around Jerusalem, which divide the West Bank in half, are
called "neighbourhoods". Israeli government maps of the country still
do not show the green line. The West Bank, as we know it, is not there
for Israel.
In sum, Israel has used the Road Map only to mask its own one-state
program: retain sovereignty over all the land and exclude the native
people. Israel is even being treated like a sovereign power. But here
is the trick: Israel is getting away with its astoundingly brutal
treatment of the Palestinians ¬ and Israeli Jewish citizens sustain
their impressive immunity from caring about it - only through the
collective fiction that Israel is not sovereign.
Israel evades any open claim to sovereignty over all Palestine because
its hands would then be tied. No government that styles itself a
democracy could get away with slaughtering and terrorizing its own
citizens this way or, alternatively, refusing to enfranchise parts of
its territory's permanent population this way. Israel excuses its
treatment of the Palestinians on grounds that they are, in fact,
aliens. The world has accepted this formula, viewing the territory's
native people as citizens of some other country that exists only in the
future, in territory that no one can find. Israel is understood to be
"at war" with this nonexistent country, represented by these aliens.
(That the native people have no weapons worthy of the term "war" is an
inconvenient fact very poorly veiled by nuclear Israel's thumping
accusations that the impoverished Palestinians, with their automatic
rifles and hand-painted homemade rockets, still stubbornly want to
"destroy Israel".)
Political power often lies in defining the situation. Right now
Palestinians are in the grip of Israel's definition. Israel does not
claim openly to have consolidated sovereignty over all Palestine
because it would then face the logical consequence: the moral and legal
onus of abandoning racial exclusion and making the native people
citizens. In Israel's dual model, the Palestinians remain aliens in
their own country, who have no rights. Their politicians are legitimate
only when they collaborate. Their fighters, lacking uniforms, are
"illegal enemy combatants" to whom Israel owes only bullets and
torture.
The way out? Change the definition to suit the facts. Right now, one
state power is sovereign in Palestine and that state is Israel. It is
an apartheid state because it excludes the territory's indigenous
people from citizen****p solely on the basis of ethnicity. For let us
remember: The Palestinians' original sin - the "failing" has consigned
them collectively to expulsion, dispossession, exile, and a cruel and
humiliating occupation - is not bad leader****p, missed op****tunities,
stubborn insistence on their demands, Arafat, or any of the usual
****bboleths. It is that they are not Jewish.
And, just as apartheid did in southern Africa, Israel's fearful and
zealous commitment to racial exclusion of the indigenous people is
tearing the entire region apart.
What do we get from recognizing this fact? We may take clues from
public indications that Ariel Sharon before his stroke and Mr. Olmert
after him have been terribly anxious that we not do so. For what can
Israel do if it is truly held accountable for denying its territorial
population the right to vote? How can it exclude its native people from
equal citizen****p if they ask for it? The common defence, the need to
preserve Jewish statehood, will instantly ring hollow. For Israel
styles itself a western-style democracy. Yet no western democracy is
presently attacking its own territory's population with mortar barrages
and helicopter gun****ps solely because of their ethnic identity. No
western democracy is blasting whole families to bits with mortars
solely because their ethnicity is unwelcome. No western democracy is
now encircling millions of people within walled cantons solely on the
basis of their religion or ethnicity.
Like "White Australia" and apartheid South Africa before it, Israel is
attempting to be racial state and a democratic state at the same time.
No western democracy has survived the obvious contradictions of this
formula: they all had to give it up. And apartheid Israel will not
survive it if we call the shots as they are. Like the US, South Africa,
New Zealand, and "White Australia" before it, Israel must admit its
Muslim and Christian population as citizens and then grapple with the
ensuing tough work of pluralist democracy like the rest of us.
This was the hard-won South African solution, where the state now
represents everybody. Seventeen languages and differing historical
narratives are recognized and dignified. Whites have retained their
property and wealth, while black Africans are rising rapidly to join
the middle and upper cl*****. After some early economic missteps, the
government has launched new social policies and steered booming trade
with the African continent that are channelling wealth and rapid growth
throughout the country. The press is free and vibrant. Is South Africa
still struggling for racial equality and economic justice? Sure. Is it
plagued by the racial legacy of settler colonialism? Sure. But ongoing
struggles for equality and mutual respect are the human condition and
the noble burden of democracy. South Africa is a vigorous, growing,
vital society. And there is peace.
John Dugard, the eminent South African legal scholar and UN Special
Rap****teur on the Question of Palestine, wrote frankly in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution that racial oppression in Israel is worse than it
was in South Africa. But his *****sment also offers hope. Identifying
that we presently have a one-state solution - Israel's apartheid
version - allows us to affirm a different one: a unified
secular-democratic state, in which everyone is equal in dignity and
rights, and where the Jewish and Palestinian national homes can share
the land as they should. With that shared goal, disparate activist
struggles around the world can find, at last, true direction.
------------------------------------------------------------
Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen
working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A
Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University
of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be
reached at tilley@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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