A year or two after he was censored by a Washington-area bookstore (later uncensored) for supporting one state, Saree Makdisi is on Huffington Post today saying that the two-state solution, which he does not rule out as a goal, has nonetheless been destroyed because of Israel's intransigent expansionism. Too bad that the American mainstream press is not echoing these points:
There's hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said
two years ago that some 40 percent of the West Bank is already taken up
by Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 percent
that remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and
isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been
circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of
Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry
routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be
funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 percent,
Israel retains security control (that's according to Oslo; today its
army conducts raids wherever it likes–and it does so virtually every
day).
What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to
accept his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their
archipelago of little impoverished islands of territory and call it a
state, they can go right ahead.
Then Makdisi speaks of the racism inherent in Netanyahu's vision, and urges Americans to reject it:
Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The
big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part)
embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be
Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes
around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its
national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity:
not its military insecurity–the only serious military threat Israel
faces on its own territory is imaginary–but rather its anxious
awareness of its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete,
settler-colonial enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many
aboriginals left standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of
Palestine in 1948. And to this day the Palestinians have refused to
simply give up, go away or somehow annul themselves…
The key moment in the speech came when he said that "the truth is that
in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish Homeland, now
lives a large population of Palestinians." This attitude comes straight
out of the primitive racialism and imaginary civilizational hierarchies
of the nineteenth century. The Jews are a people with a homeland and
hence they have a right to a state; the Palestinians are not a people
at all, or certainly not one of the same order. They are merely a
collection of vagabonds and trespassers intruding on the Jewish
Homeland. They have no rights, let alone a centuries-old competing
narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of
recognition by Israel.
I think Bradley Burston said something like this in Haaretz a few days ago. Obama makes us look very 19th century.
The Zionist dream means giving Israelis rights without responsibility, and giving Palestinians responsibility without rights.
What a brilliant editorial by Makdisi. He dissects with such precision the Zionist mind-state of entitlement and racial superiority, buttressing it with examples of everyday reality in the occupied territories inflicted on the Palestinians. There's so much in this piece I'm not even sure what to pick out — Makdisi does so well in examining how the Israelis seek to, and succeed in controlling every aspect of Palestinian political life (in addition to controlling their daily lives, as we all know). I suppose I found the passage on Israel picking Palestine's weakest possible leaders for it after assassinating or imprisoning all promising candidates one of the most astute in the editorial — Israel's "anti-Darwinian process of unnatural selection", as Makdisi calls it. This part was also particularly on point: "First the Palestinians had to renounce terrorism; then they had to recognize Israel; then they had to rewrite their national charter; then they had to tear the charter up; then they had to say–again, louder–that they recognize Israel's right to exist; then they had to end all resistance to four decades of brutal military occupation. Tzipi Livni … even said that the Palestinians had to learn to purge the word "nakba" … from their vocabulary if they wanted to have a state. The one thing that Palestinians have not formally been asked to do is to say that they are terribly sorry for having dared to resist the occupation in the first place–and no doubt that demand is on the way as well."
Perfect summation.
Yes, it was, and Phil's article is really good too!
Makdisi is very perceptive; thanks Phil for allowing his perspective so generously!
Damn, thanks Nth Republic–Makdisi is really smart! I will have to google him, starting with the HuffPo slice you give us.
"I think Bradley Burston said something like this in Haaretz a few days ago. Obama makes us look very 19th century. " What does this mean?
Israel is Jewish in the same way that France is French.
>> Tzipi Livni … even said that the Palestinians had to learn to purge the word "nakba" … from their vocabulary Hey! I like that! Is there any way we can purge "shoah" and "holocaust" from the vocabulary of gentile primary and secondary school curriculum in the USA? An eternal guilt trip isn't good for any nation. Alternatively, can we offset the race guilt by demanding equal time for "nakba" education in our gentile American schools? A little time with both Jewish and Arab guilt trips would leave us Americans with a healthy "plague-on-both-your-houses" attitude, I expect.
Geez, can't we get some new hasbara lines? These are worn out and well past their "sell by" date. The correct analogy would be "Israel is ISRAELI in the same way that France is French." Notice that the term "Israeli" includes all citizens of Israel regardless of their religion or ethnicity, just as the term "French" includes all citizens of France regardless of their religion or ethnicity. "Israel is Jewish in the same way that France is Catholic" doesn't really work either, because France does not consider its raison d'etre to be privileging Catholics over other religious adherents. It used to privilege Catholics, in its distant path, but that path led to massive violence and religious strife (Quelle surprise!) and so France wised up. Israel should do the same.
As far as I recall, St Bradley of Burston is a resident of the East Jerusalem settlement of "Gilo". Makdisi was on the ball with the botched settler colonial enterprise. It doesn't matter how much progress the Zionists made with what they seized in 1948. They picked the wrong territory for their state. They compounded the error in 1967. Which genius decided to occupy Gaza and bring all of its refugees back into demographic play ? Why didn't they just leave it to Egypt?
The difference is that anyone can be a Catholic at the drop of a holy water hat; e.g., there's no requirement you know the history of France and celebrate its ethnic wars and tribulations as part of the Catholic religion, as given to you by the selectors. Nor do pious Catholics give allegiance to any earthly people or power. Try if you can to separate Judaism from historically political analysis. It cannot be done. Celebration of Jesus and his stance is apolitical, divorced from any group of people. Compare the celebrations of the Jews.
"Israel is Jewish in the same way that France is French." Correction. Israel is more Jewish than it woudl have been had it not ethnically cleansed the land of Arabs, and continue to do so.
No this isn't correct. Israel is the Jewish State! The point is that it shouldn't be flooded by Arabs while at the same time ethnically cleansing Jews from Judea and Samaria.
Also it's very silly as many states define themselves by religion and nationhood examples include Japan, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Islamic republic of Iran
Makdisi highlights this key sentence from Netanyahu's speech: "The truth is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish Homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians." In the next sentence he says. "We do not want to rule over them." Now which Palestinians is Netanyahu referring to? Is it those in Israel who are Israeli citizens, or those living in the West Bank, or perhaps it's all of them? In the first instance, he is identifying Israel's Palestinian citizens, 20% or the population, as persona non grata in their own country. If he's referring to the West Bank Palestinians, then he's saying that the Palestinian Territories lie within the heart of the Jewish homeland, with all that this implies.
Israel is not a Jewish state, becasue 20% of 's population is not Jewish. It was never meant to be a Jewish sate and would never have achieved a Jewish majority had 800,000 Arabs not been drivn off their land in 1948.
Huffington Post is a piece of work. It still deletes many comments on Israel, and the wall it erects to protect celebrity bloggers reminds me of the apartheid wall in the west bank. When someone wrote about 'Islamic Nazis' I tested them with 'Jewish Nazis'. Guess which one was deleted?
Any truth to Franklin Lamb's statement on Press TV that the CIA authored a report saying Israel would be a failed state in 20 years time?