“Forty years ago today was the last day the citizens of Israel were a free people in their own land,” wrote Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar on June 4. “It was the last day we lived here without living other peoples’ lives.”
This sums up the cherished mythology of what is still called the Israeli left and much of the international peace process industry — that prior to the 1967 war, Israel was pure and on the right path. Had it not “become an occupier” the region would have had a happier history and Israel would be an accepted member of the international community rather than a pariah wearing the “apartheid” label.
The exclusive focus on the occupation serves increasingly to obscure that the conflict in Palestine is at its core a colonial struggle whose boundaries do not conveniently coincide with the lines of June 4, 1967.
I do not often agree with leaders of the settler movement, but they speak a truth Israeli and American liberals prefer to ignore when they point out that the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank built after 1967 are not morally different from towns and kibbutzim inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The Israel that was created in 1948 was established on land violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians. Israel has been maintained as a “Jewish state” only by the imposition of numerous laws that maintain the inferior status of its Palestinian citizens and forcibly exclude Palestinian refugees.
Even Israelis who condemn the occupation support these racist laws. There is an Israeli consensus that it is legitimate to defend the Jewish state against the so-called “demographic threat” from Palestinians who will be again, as they were prior to 1948, the majority population group in Palestine-Israel despite six decades of Israeli efforts to reduce their numbers with expulsions, massacres and administrative ethnic cleansing. It is the imperative to gerrymander an enclave with a Jewish majority rather than any recognition of Palestinian equality that underpins whatever limited rhetorical Israeli support exists for a Palestinian state.
I would add that’s it’s also not just about the Palestinians, but about the fundamentally destabilizing role of an uneven regional balance of power that US-Israeli regional hegemony has created over the last half-century.
I don’t see what’s so insightful about it – this is just the standard Arab nationalist line. The idea of a two-state solution may have been radical in Israel in the 1980’s, but today is widely accepted for a variety of reasons. The notion of a coordinated ethnic cleansing in 1948 also doesn’t have much going for it, though there were expulsions, especially in central Israel. For reasons I go into http://bjulrich.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html#5776377943418882408“ rel=”nofollow”>here, I think the population relocation issue serves more to obscure solutions than clarify anything.
I also don’t buy the “all land was violently expropriated” canard. It’s true that during the early 20th century some lands were bought from absentee landlords and the Arab tenants forced out, but that turns out to be something like 38% of all land settled by Jews before 1948. Much of the rest was acquired locally, though I don’t have data handy. In fact, the first violence was by Arabs worried that poor Jews would take their jobs. I don’t think this matters for how we judge the situation today except insofar as it shows that the simplest explanations are really national mythologies.
I’d actually grant three broad categories of land in terms of the means of acquisition and settlement: Jewish land acquired before and during the British Mandate, other lands found within Israel’s 1948 borders, and then the areas conquered in 1967. Each has unique features.
Purchasing land does not mean you can declare your own state on it. I don’t see what difference there is between pied noirs settlers in Algeria who purchased land there but were eventually forced out.
I’m not quite as familiar with modern Algeria, so can’t answer that effectively. The problem is that Zionism and Arab nationalism really got going at about the same time – Herzl and Urabi were contemporaries. While I find the notion the land is inherently Jewish downright silly, the idea that it is inherently Arab also seems flawed.
But how about that the land, administratively speaking, was Ottoman/Muslim and that the Jewish population of what is today Israel consists mostly of European settlers and their descendants?
Look, obviously for the conflict to end there has to be compromise on the Arab side (unless you want to enter a cycle of total war), but there are limits.
As I pointed out in the link above, the majority of Israeli Jews were immigrants from Muslim countries, at least before the 1990’s. I’m not arguing for Israel from a strictly Zionist perspective, I’m just saying that ugly things happened on both sides, and that examining the entire history of the conflict through a good vs. evil lens is inadequate.
Do Jewish Arabs have a right of return to their homes? [honest question, not meant to be snarky]
I’d say arguably they do, but the fact that’s socially difficult to imagine and most don’t want to underlines why I think trying to undo 1948 is trying to put too much spilled milk back into the bottle.
I also want to emphasize that all Arab countries are different. Jews of North African origin do maintain contact with the remnants of Jewish communities there, and there are still pilgrimage festivals to holy sites in the area.
Situations that seem to me analogous abound. As horrible as the Armenian Genocide was, should we get behind those Armenian nationalists who want to reclaim “historic western Armenia,” aka much of eastern Turkey? Meanwhile, 1 in 8 Turks is from a family that suffered ethnic cleansing sometime during the 20th century, usually in the Balkans.
While I support negotiation on the right of return (with a real solution to the refugee problem, which as well as being a humanitarian problem has caused many political nightmares as we see yet again in Lebanon), my basic point is that a) the Israelis have for now no intention to really do a genuine peace deal and b) they won’t have any real intention until they understand the argument Abunimah makes — that their colonial settler state, which is here to stay now, has at its origin ethnic cleansing and a racist ideology. I would like to see Zionism dismantled, not the Israeli people. Where I am a lot more ambivalent is about Abunimah’s one-state idea, I don’t think it’s very realistic. But then again at this point we may have reached a point of no-return on the two-state solution. Israelis and Palestinians (and their respective allies) may very well fight it out until there is only one state (ethnically cleansed or mixed, with the former being more likely).
I personally support the return of Arab Jews to their original countries if they wish to. The restoration of their property is a more difficult question, particularly with the many other types of property confiscations that took place in the post-colonial era (against the wealthy, foreigners, nationalizations, etc.)
Brian,
Regardless of how Jewish land in Palestine before 1948 was acquired (there was a controversy sometime in the 1980’s in the Journal of Palestine Studies between Kenneth Stein & Rashid Khalidi on this point), the vast majority of land in Palestine was not Jewish at tha ttime. According to UN http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/maps/hist_owners.html“ rel=”nofollow”>estimates at the time, Jews owned only 7% of land in Palestine; the lage majority of the rest was either owned by Palestinian Arabs individually or collectively owned & used by Palestinian villages. So I don’t think Ali Abunimah is off when he says that Israel was “established on land violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians”.
Rememeber that Palestinian refugees include not only those forced out of Israel but also a substantial number of Palestinians within Israel. Something like 25% of Palestinians are “present absentees”. They have absolutely not budged on their right of return.
I also have to take issue with your comparison of Palestinians to Jews from Arab lands. It’s undeniable that Jews in Arab nations faced terrible persecution after the 1940’s, and most of them were forced to flee. How does that negate the rights of the Palestinians? The right response is to give Arab Jews the same right to choose between return or compensation that Palestinians have under Resolution 194 & the UNDHR.
Also, what Israel did to Palestinians was qualitatively different from what the Arab nations did to Jews. The exodus of Arab Jews was demographically meaningless; these states were already predominantly Arab & Muslim. In contrast, the expulsion of Palestinians was an instrumental event in creating Israel. Israel could have not created with a state with a solid Jewish majority & control over land ownership without getting rid of a substantial number of Arabs. To put it bluntly, Israel owes its existence to ethnic cleansing. Any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must take that fact into account.
Issandr,
Are you familiar with the group http://www.ap-agenda.org/initiative.htm“ rel=”nofollow”>Alternative Palestinian Agenda. They’ve offered ideas for reconciling the right of return with a Jewish state, although it would be in the context of a territorial reconfiguration & federal union:
http://www.ap-agenda.org/initiative.htm
Issandr,
Are you familiar with the group http://www.ap-agenda.org/initiative.htm“ rel=”nofollow”>Alternative Palestinian Agenda? They’ve offered ideas for reconciling the right of return with a Jewish state, although it would be in the context of a territorial reconfiguration & federal union:
http://www.ap-agenda.org/initiative.htm
Sorry to keep posting, by the way.
“The right response is to give Arab Jews the same right to choose between return or compensation that Palestinians have under Resolution 194 & the UNDHR.”
Do you at least acknowledge that this will never happen? Do you have another “right response” that stands a chance to be implemented?
Since a 2-state solution is the only option that’s on the table right now, yeah, I agree that there’s no chance there will be a return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to what’s now Israel.
I think a distinction can be drawn between the need for recognizing the rights of the Palestinian refugees, on the one hand, and the implementation of those rights, on the other hand. You can recognize the principle of the right of return while placing limitations on that return in practice. The Arab League Peace Initiative calls for a “just and agreed solution to the refugee problem”, which means taking Israel demographic concerns into account.
I’m guessing you’re referring to compensation but no return?
The Israel that was created in 1948 was established on land violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
http://solomon2.blogspot.com/2005/11/response-to-hareega.html“ rel=”nofollow”>Bull!