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The End of Israel and the Beginning of Democracy in the Middle East?
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
electronic Intifada - Dec 19, 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9169.shtml
The end of Israel?
by Hannah Mermelstein
am feeling optimistic about Palestine.
I know it sounds crazy. How can I use "optimistic" and "Palestine" in
the same sentence when conditions on the ground only seem to get worse?
Israeli settlements continue to expand on a daily basis, the
checkpoints and segregated road system are becoming more and more
institutionalized, more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are
being held in Israeli jails, Gaza is under heavy attack and the borders
are entirely controlled by Israel, preventing people from getting their
most basic human needs met.
We can never forget these things and the daily suffering of the people,
and yet I dare to say that I am optimistic. Why? Ehud Olmert. Let me
clarify. Better yet, let's let him clarify:
"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a
South African-style struggle for equal voting rights. As soon as that
happens, the state of Israel is finished."
That's right, the Prime Minister of Israel is currently trying to
negotiate a "two-state solution" specifically because he realizes that
if he doesn't, Palestinians might begin to demand, en masse, equal
rights to Israelis. Furthermore, he worries, the world might begin to
see Israel as an apartheid state. In actuality, most of the world
already sees Israel this way, but Olmert is worried that even Israel's
most ardent sup****ters will begin to catch up with the rest of the
world.
"The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will
be the first to come out against us," he told Haaretz, "because they
will say they cannot sup****t a state that does not sup****t democracy
and equal voting rights for all its residents."
Perhaps Olmert is giving American Jews too much credit here, but he
does expose a basic contradiction in the minds of most American people,
Jewish and not: most of us -- at least in theory -- sup****t equal
rights for all residents of a country. Most of us do not sup****t rights
given on the basis of ethnicity and religion, especially when the
ethnicity/religion being prioritized is one that excludes the vast
majority of the country's indigenous population. We cannot, of course,
forget the history of ethnic cleansing of indigenous people on the
American continent. But we must not use the existence of past
atrocities to justify present ones.
I am optimistic not because I think the process of ethnic cleansing and
apartheid in Israel/Palestine is going to end tomorrow, but because I
can feel the ideology behind these policies beginning to collapse. For
years the true meaning of political Zionism has been as ignored as its
effects on Palestinian daily life. And suddenly it is beginning to
break open. Olmert's comments last week are reminiscent of those of
early Zionist leaders who talked openly of transfer and ethnic
cleansing in order to create an artificial Jewish majority in historic
Palestine.
We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use
force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places -- then we
have force at our disposal. - David Ben-Gurion, Israel's "founding
father" and first prime minister, 1937
So this idea of a "two-state solution" a la Olmert -- which I would
argue provides neither a "state" nor a "solution" for the Palestinian
people -- is the new transfer. It is no longer popular in the world to
openly discuss expulsion (though there are political parties in Israel
that advocate this), but Olmert hopes that by creating a Palestinian
"state" on a tiny ****tion of historic Palestine, he can accomplish the
same goal: maintaining an ethno-religious state exclusively for the
Jewish people in most of historic Palestine. His plan, as all other
plans Israeli leaders have tried to "negotiate," ignores the basic
rights of the two-thirds of the Palestinian population who are
refugees. They, like all other refugees in the world, have the
internationally recognized right to return to their lands and receive
compensation for loss and damages. This should not be up for
negotiation.
So why am I optimistic? Why do I think Olmert will fail, if not in the
short term, at least in the long term? There are many signs.
The first and most im****tant is that Palestinian people are holding on.
Sometimes by a thread, but holding on nonetheless. Despite the hope of
many in Israel, Palestinians will not disappear. They engage in daily
acts of nonviolent resistance, from demonstrations against the wall and
land confiscation, to simply remaining in their homes against all odds.
Young people are joining organizations designed to preserve their
culture and identity. Older Palestinians have said to me, "We lived
through the Ottoman Empire, we lived through the British Mandate, we
lived through Jordanian rule, and we will live through Israeli
occupation." This too shall pass.
In Israel, it seems that within the traditional "Zionist left," Jewish
Israelis are beginning to have open conversations about the exclusivity
of Zionism as a political ideology, and are questioning it more and
more.
In the US, I have been traveling around speaking to groups about
Palestine, and they get it. Even those whose prior information has come
only from US mainstream media, when they hear what is actually
happening, they get it. When we explain the difference between being
Jewish (a religion or ethnicity), Israeli (a citizen****p), and Zionist
(an ideology), people understand.
"Does Israel have a right to exist?" people ask. What does that mean?
Do countries really have rights, or do people have rights? The Jewish
people have a right to exist, the Israeli people have a right to exist,
but what does "Israel" mean? Israel defines itself as the state of the
Jewish people. It is not a state of its citizens. It is a state of many
people who are not its citizens, like myself, and is not the state of
many people who are its citizens, like the 20 percent of its population
that is Palestinian. So if we ask a Palestinian person, "Do you
recognize the right for there to be a country on your historic homeland
that explicitly excludes you?" what kind of response should we expect?
So when Olmert warns that we will "face a South African-style struggle
for equal voting rights" and that "the state of Israel [will be]
finished," I get a little flutter of excitement. I think of the 171
Palestinian organizations who have called on the international
community to begin campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions
against Israel until Israel complies with international law. This is
already a South African-style struggle, and we outside of Palestine
need to do our part. Especially those of us who live in the US, the
country that gives Israel more than $10 million every single day, must
take responsibility for the atrocities committed in our name and with
our money.
Ultimately, this is our role as Americans. It is to begin campaigns in
our churches, synagogues, mosques, universities, cities, unions, etc.
It is not to broker false negotiations between occupier and occupied,
and it is not to muse over solutions the way I have above. But one can
dream. And as a Jewish-American, I know that while it might be scary to
some, while it will require a lot of imagination, the end of Israel as
a Jewish state could mean the beginning of democracy, human rights, and
some semblance of justice in a land that has almost forgotten what that
means.
[Hannah Mermelstein is co-founder and co-director of Birthright
Unplugged, which takes mostly Jewish North American people into the
West Bank to meet with Palestinian people and to equip them to return
to their own communities and work for justice; and takes Palestinian
children from refugee camps to Jerusalem, the sea, and the villages
their grandparents fled in 1948, and sup****ts them to do***ent their
experiences and create photography exhibits to share with their
communities and with the world. See http://www.birthrightunplugged.org/
Anna Baltzer helped contribute to this article. ]
*
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