Henry Siegman is angry. He’s still attached to the idea of a "democratic Jewish" state but he blames the legitimacy problem on Israel; and he understands the reality on the ground. From overseas, of course; the Financial Times:
The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.
At first, the collapse of the assumptions on which hopes for a fair and just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict rested triggered much despair. But that despair has begun to turn to anger, and options for resolving the conflict, previously dismissed by the international community as unrealistic, are being looked at anew. [one state solution]That anger is also spawning a new global challenge to Israel’s legitimacy.
Anti-Semitic opponents of Israel will undoubtedly celebrate this emerging challenge to Israel’s incipient apartheid regime. But Israel will have only its own misguided policies to blame for its empowerment of this racist fringe. Such participation will no more detract from the inherent legitimacy of that challenge than Israel’s collaboration (on the development of atomic nuclear weapons) with a racist South African regime in the 1970s and 1980s provided democratic sanction for South Africa’s apartheid.
Mr Netanyahu’s government has hardly been indifferent to the seriousness of this challenge. A study by one of Israel’s leading policy institutes warning of this looming global threat to the country’s legitimacy was taken up by Israel’s cabinet, and described by its members as constituting as grave a danger to the country’s existence as the nuclear threat from Iran. Unfortunately – if predictably – the government’s response has been to mount a campaign to discredit critics as anti-Semitic enemies of Israel, rather than abandoning the policies that are transforming it into an apartheid state.
No country is as obsessed with the issue of its own legitimacy as Israel; ironically, that obsession may yet be its salvation. An international community angered and frustrated by Israel’s disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people, and determined to prevent their relegation to an apartheid existence, may well decide to have the United Nations General Assembly accept a Palestinian declaration of statehood within the pre-1967 borders, without the mutually agreed border changes that a peace accord might have produced. Nothing would challenge Israel’s legitimacy more than its defiance of such an international decision.
I wish well-meaning but desperate Zionists like Siegman could explain to me which part of Israel does not exist as a direct result of the Nakba. Because pretty much the whole of Israel — the “Hebrewcized” names, the desolate Bauhaus makeover, Jews-only citizenship and privileged access to roads and property, the flagrant violation of international law — none of it can be divorced from the explusion and occupation of Palestinians. None of it. There is nothing that is Israeli that is not also part and parcel to oppression or even outright race hatred of Palestinians.
Here’s a thought experiment. Say Israel managed to completely destroy the Palestinian national movement, sap all Palestinian will to resistance, physically disbursed them into small, resource-poor enclaves and addled them with alcohol and gambling. Say Israel, through sheer force of its arms, managed to sustain this total domination for 200 years. Would this, in your mind, make Israel any more legitimate as a state than you currently understand it to be?
I ask because this is essentially the story of the United States. The entire country is founded on a genocide considerably more horrific than the Nakba (which was horrific in its own right), perpetrated by racist European colonizers. In order to maintain some kind of logical and moral consistency, you’d have to argue that the U.S. is equally illegitimate. If you are seriously willing to adopt that position, then I applaud you and have nothing more to say.
Siegman, however, would probably argue that Israel, within its internationally recognized minimum boundaries (1967)–recognized at this point in history by the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people–is a legal and practical fait accompli. It exists as a state, it provides (more than) the minimally acceptable degree of security for its citizens. Yes, there are civil rights infractions that approximate the Jim Crow South, and church-state-ethnic legal complexes that approximate those in Iran and Pakistan. But such flaws do not strip a country of its legitimacy under international law (which, as I understand it, is rooted in international recognition). Siegman would probably argue that one can recognize the historical injustice, but that has no legal bearing, and if you take the case of the U.S. to heart, perhaps no moral bearing on the question of a state’s legitimacy (unless, again, you’ll argue that the U.S. has no moral legitimacy as a state–in which case, what can I say? That would be laudable moral consistency).
Of course the US is morally illegitimate for exactly the reasons you outline, and if there were 200 million or so Native Americans confined to 18 percent of the land area of the US with the rest owned by (mostly) white people the parallel would be exact. I can’t understand why truisms that Chomsky and Finkelstein were writing decades ago are suddenly being raised now in defense of Israel’s legitimacy. As it happens, the analogy breaks down because Native Americans now have the right of return.
The rest of what you say is correct–we don’t try to address all great historical wrongs going back to the Paleolithic, but usually settle for something less, in this case a two state solution supported by international law. But as it happens, it is Israel that has made the two state solution seemingly as distant as a one state solution. Also, other than the sheer irrational hatred that no doubt exists in many on both sides, the one state solution is the logical and fair solution. I don’t push it strongly myself–it’s not possible to force Israel to become a truly secular democracy if they don’t want to be so. But they don’t seem to want a fair two state solution either.
Was the United States founded on that ethnic cleansing? You might want to read up on William Penn and Benjamin Franklin before you make assumptions about that. Certainly, that’s what the United States became but is that what it was?
And what stripped Palestine of its legitimacy to be a whole contiguous state? What privileges 20th century colonial European Jews that they can act as barbaric as 18th century colonial European Christians?
I get what you’re saying, but there is a limit to the ethnic cleansing comparison between Israel and the US.
1. Timing does matter. Ethnic cleansing was internationally acceptable centuries ago, as was slavery, or hanging people for stealing a loaf of bread. Today they’re rejected as barbaric. The US did its ethnic cleansing centuries ago, Israel still does it as we speak. It might not be different in theoretical, moral terms, but in practical terms it is.
2. You say what if Israel wiped out all resistance, as the US did. But Israel didn’t, and won’t, because the demographic reality is different. White settlers to the US outnumbered native Americans 20-to-1 and had an almost inexhaustible flow of immigrants entering the US. Israel on the other hand has never been able to get the majority of the world’s Jews to immigrate, and even if it somehow did it still has a relatively small pool of 14 million world Jews to draw immigrants from. Even after expelling seven-eighths of the Palestinians in “Jewish Palestine” between 1947 and 1953 to temporarily dissipate the “demographic threat”, Israel is again today facing an Arab majority, because of its determination to expand into those areas with an overwhelming Arab majority. So the US belongs to that group of settler states that through sheer force of numbers overwhelmed the indigenous population in the initial phase of settlement and went on to become a liberal democracy with full citizen for settler and indigenous (like Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Israel on the other hand belongs to the group of settler states that never had the numbers to reduce the native population to irrelevance, and which managed to initially secure a state through military means but spent their entire existence in an increasing violent but ultimately futile war to turn back the tide (like white South Africa, Rhodesia, French Algeria).
3. I’m not sure how much Israel’s 1967 borders are a fait accompli any more. I think we’re moving on from that, and it’s entirely Israel’s doing. Those borders might have become a fait accompli if Israel had been willing to settle for a two state solution on the 1967 which as you say has international consensus, but Israel’s determination to erase the 1967 lines and settle the West Bank is having the effect turning the I-P debate back from 1967 to 1948. Not in the US, but certainly in Europe, and it will come here too. And beyond Europe and the US – certainly in the Muslim world and in the large part of the world that was colonized and knows what its like to have foreigners with guns draw your borders and claim sovereignty – I think to some extent the issue has always been 1948 and not 1967. Everything Israel does beyond the 1967 borders undermines its acceptance within those borders. So there’s a limited value in saying the world recognizes Israel in the 1967 borders, if those borders remain virtual and the party that needs to accept them is intent on not doing so and in fact might actually already have made them defunct. The 1967 borders lose their importance if they can no longer be practically enforced.
Well said, Chaos and Diane. I just wish to add that Hitler was a great fan of
German novels depicting the American Indian wars. He justified his lebensraum movement on how the white Americans pushed eastern natives to the west, and how USA Wild West was won. As we all know, many Israelis justify Israel by pointing to America; too bad for them, they didn’t come to Palestine carrying diseases like smallpox. Blankets are pretty cheap. Let’s remember, as Diane eloquently stressed: timing does matter. Israel became a state AFTER the Nuremberg Trials. A new minimum moral and ethical standard was set for the whole world to follow in regard to state action. And the Germans are still paying compensation reparations to Israel and to Jewish holocaust survivors around the world. A reckoning will come. And/or WW3.
“Henry Siegman is angry. He’s still attached to the idea of a “democratic Jewish” state…”
Still has a long way to go. He needs to lose the “Jewish” bit.
The issues that plague will not ever come to be realized by the international as a whole, when laws are passed banning the prosecution by being held to a different standard to block them. None the less the true public brainwashing campaigns reign supreme which are even relavent in childrens cartoons today. I looked at the idf photos provided and one show a little blonde hair girl writting on a bomb to be sent to gaza by plane, “for the children of gaza” or something to the effect. Eighther way there seems to be no hope while bias, control of the media among the others (abbbass & company), that the settlement problem which created a much more dangerous element in a nuclear age with regards to fanatic religous people believeing in an almighty real estate agent, or even the tetonic plates upheavel creating a spot deemed holy, the very fact all the non sense we created has spun so very far out of the realm of reality by the onslaught and robbing of our system while the world sits oblivious. All the duel citizenships with no loyalty to the country except there own, (that has been illegally obtained) by all accounts in history. The president powers are nothing in comparison to the ALL the others which when combined create an altimate predjudice either sustained by idiology and religon, the ultimate end to civilization will be made by man, and will probably happen in israel by their own doing from one of their own, who just believes in that almighty real estate agent on a different tax bracket enough to do the rest of the world in.
The person that created these weapons had stated after the fact some thing to the effect that, “dammed man who uses this..for bad intentions…” I really was blown away at the fact he sold and let known how to build it in the first place or not even explain himself as part of the very people whom ultimately did the obvious…by using it. Even one is more so understandible than hundreds…not like after one anyone would be able to do much. All these efforts & military funds should be put
to use in deprograming the masses and solving world hunger, cancer, etc..Not in some fairy tales of thousands of years ago. The aparthied is actually world wide and people can not see the road blocks and players cause they are all aorund, like in palestine where someone will sell out his race and family for some set up by massaud
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