Jerry Haber, in a mostly sensible comment on Peter Beinart, writes that
Tony Kushner was, in my view, imprecise when he referred to the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by the Zionists at Israel’s founding. The phrase conjures up mass murder and genocide along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. What we have had in Israel for over sixty years is not so much ethnic “cleansing,” with its implication of blood and destruction, but rather ethnic “dry-cleaning”, ridding the homeland of most of its Palestinian population through legal stratagems that ensure that the natives of Palestine will be effectively barred from full participation in their homeland.
I don’t know what Haber is talking about. It's pretty clear that Israel is a state founded on ethnic cleansing, and I’m sure Haber is aware of that too. Palestinians know that very well, and many Israeli Jews will obliquely acknowledge it, even if they do their best to feign ignorance. We’ve all read our Ilan Pappé. But it’d be good to understand what happened as a result of that process of ethnic-cleansing, and so move from condemnation to consciousness-raising.
The Ashkenazi over-class is the richest class in Israel precisely because of its proximity to the land and resources-theft that occurred in the context of that process of ethnic-cleansing, not "dry-cleaning,” as Haber puts it.
The nexus of ethnicity, wealth, and proximity to the original dispossession has been systematically erased from Zionist historiography. Furthermore, Zionist ideology distracts lower-class Israeli attention from the fact that Mizrahis were not the beneficiaries of ethnic cleansing. They were the human material with which Zionists stocked their newly-formed nation-state, complete with a Jewish working-class, a Jewish bourgeoisie, and a Jewish peasantry. Mizrahi did not get to become bourgeoisie.
Instead, in Zionist-induced flight from their homelands, they staffed the lower ranks of the socio-economic ladder and were settled in “development towns” near the borders or in moshavim. Badly treated by the immigration absorption system and the MAPAI governments, the Mizrahim formed the social base for the Likud party in the post-1967 era and, later, the Shas movement, both in rejection of labor Zionism’s ideological hegemony over Israeli society and because the occupation became a means for socio-economic advancement denied to them within pre-1967 Israeli society. As a group of Moroccan Jews explained to Amos Oz,
I'll tell you what shame is: they gave us houses, they gave us the dirty work; they gave us education, and they took away our self-respect. What did they bring our parents to Israel for? ... Wasn't it to do your dirty work? You didn't have Arabs then, so you needed my parents to do your cleaning and be your servants and your laborers. And policemen, too. You brought our parents to be your Arabs. But now I'm a supervisor. And he's a contractor, self-employed. And that guy has a transport business. Also self-employed. Small-scale—lives off the crumbs Solel Boneh leaves—but so what? If they give back the territories, the Arabs will stop coming to work, and then you'll put us back into the dead-end jobs, like before. If for no other reason, we won't let you give back those territories. Not to mention the rights we have from the Bible. Look at my daughter: she works in a bank now, and every evening an Arab comes to clean the building. All you want is to dump her from the bank into some textile factory, or have her wash the floors instead of the Arab. The way my mother used to clean for you. That's why we hate you here. As long as Begin's in power, my daughter's secure at the bank. If you guys [i.e., Labor] come back, you'll pull her down first thing.
Is it any wonder the occupation continues, with Palestinians and then migrant workers pushed into the lowest jobs previously staffed by Mizrahi Jews? Is it any wonder nationalism becomes an integument binding together Israeli society against the external enemy, the Arab? Is it any wonder Israeli elites far prefer a focus on nationalism to a focus on resources? This should not be taken to mean that the hands of the under-class are not bloodied. But there are levels of responsibility. The highest is inhabited by those who profusely profit off torturing another people.
Zionism plays a somewhat similar binding role in the American context, distracting American Jewish attention from the fact that most American Jews are not wealthy and so do not benefit from their association with the Israeli state. Instead, it is wealthy Jews, like wealthy people in general, who benefit from the American-Israeli Special Relationship, which is why it continues, and why it should be opposed.
Changing it will require both change abroad and change at home. De-Zioning the Israeli state is not just about scouring legal discrimination out of the state structure, although that matters. It is about radical redistribution of resources, and it is exactly that distribution or future re-distribution of resources that forms the foundation of a coherent call for a one state solution, rather than basing that call on the notion that the settlements are "too entrenched" for a two-state "solution" to succeed. That seems like a recipe for severe disappointment when suddenly Israeli elites, under immense international pressure, suddenly find that, yup, Ariel and Ma’ale Adunim are negotiable, after all.
Nazi Germany was also founded on ethnic cleansing or should I say ethnic dry cleaning!
While I was reading that, I’m thinking of the claims of so many Zionist apologists on how Israel “bought” the land.
I agree completely with the required changes – good article…
Perhaps what was done in 1948 doesn’t qualify as genocide, but I don’t see how it wasn’t mass murder.
Jerry Haber comes across as though he’s mocking the entire history that tells the story of the destruction inflicted by Israel.
Imagine if you were a Palestinian who’s been living in a refugee camp for more than 50 years now, and along came Haber and claimed that it wasn’t Ethnic Cleansing, but more accurately “Dry-Cleaning”; would you spit in his face, or turn around and walk away in disgust?
Well, not wanting to base my opinion on a sentence that may or may not have been taken out of context, I visited Haber’s website and although I found the term to be offensive — as it makes light of a tragedy — I can see how he might have meant it sardonically, somehow. Although, that is giving someone with whom I’m not familiar the benefit of doubt.
I think Jerry Haber would have had more impact had he stuck to describing events instead of labeling them with such terminology.
In fact, what Haber describes is a product, a consequence of the original sin, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-1949.
“Ethnic dry cleaning” – a euphemistic whitewash that attempts to relieve the perps of burdensome guilt. In other words, bullsh*t.
Let’s not simplify. The Ashkenazi elite enjoyed many things not available to the wave of Mizrahi Jews that came to Israel between 1948 and the 1960s. A list might include:
Being first on the scene in large numbers and creating the Yishuv structures
Access to donations from abroad
First dibs on stolen Palestinian land for (mostly Ashkanazi) kibbutzim and urban areas
More education on average than Mizrahi immigrants (though this can be overstated – Mizrahi immigrants included many professionals, etc.)
Social capital accumulation in the pre-state era
Direct payments to Holocaust survivors
Smaller families
That said, many moshavim of Mizrahim were created on Palestinian land. They were often settled in neighborhoods like Katamon as close as possible to the border region pre-’67. After the occupation began, Mizrahim contractors were among the first to exploit Palestinian labor, as they had a shared language. A large number of the economic settlers (distinct from the ideological settlers) were Mizrahim looking for a shortcut to a middle class lifestyle.
None of this negates what Max is saying – but I think he overstates it. Mizrahim shouldn’t be let off the hook so wholeheartedly. A detailed analysis shows incredible diversity of experience, that includes the Moroccan immigrant background that led to the Black Panthers, but also to fantastically wealthy Syrian banking family, the Safra’s. It includes the utter degradation of many Holocaust survivors (Ashkanazi, mostly) alongside the hoarding of class and ethnic privilege.
A useful addendum might be current public opinion in Israel today. How do Israelis view this ethnic divide right now? Ever since ‘Mizrahim for Peace’ to the ‘Mizrahi Keshet’ and other efforts, there has been fascination with a Mizrahi self-discovery that they to are an exploited ‘other’ to the Zionist project. But…. this message just doesn’t carry very far, and is most advanced among those with graduate degrees who live in the major cities. Not that many. The only pro-peace radical Mizrahi ever elected to Knesset was Charlie Biton, and he was elected largely with Palestinian votes.
Well, it is a mistake to throw all the blame for the mistreatment of Palestinians on the Ashkenazi group while exonerating other groups within Jewish Israel, namely Mizrahim.
Did Max’s essay give readers that impression?
It did to me. That said, this is ‘unclear’ territory, not ‘how dare you’ territory.
Don’t worry Clenchner, just keep clenching hard and comfort yourself with the thought that the Ashkenazi Jews can, for many reasons, make a nice graceful escape when things are looking down, and leave the Mizrahi there to deal with the consequences. So everything should turn out just hunky-dory for you.
Keep it classy Mooser! If only you could see what I look like so you could poke fun at something more tangible than my name….
Max,
I agree with the underlying premise of your essay, but I find the last paragraph — which seems to be the conclusion — to be problematic. You write about the distribution of resources, but don’t take into account that land is a resource, as well. More importantly, the geological and geographic value of some of the colonies is of great economic significance, not to mention natural resources like water.
I’m not sure I understand your point here. Are you saying that preventing “severe disappointment” for Israeli elites should be the guiding principle instead of justice or international law, for example?
If that is in fact what you contend, then how is that different from Jerry Slater’s claim that a one-state solution is neither reasonable nor viable as it has the potential of triggering violence and/or civil war?
Avi:
To start with, for me there are no guiding principles for resolving the conflict. Perfect justice requires a time machine. Political and economic arrangements must be made by the people who will deal with their consequences, and who will die fighting for the kind of change that they demand. If anything, that is my guiding principle. I don’t think justice is remotely achievable, however, without wide-ranging resource redistribution. I realize that sounds vague. That is because I don’t understand much of movement discourse which is very line-in-the-sand about this object called “one-state” and very vacuous about what will be in that container. Both matter, in fact they can be linked, but my concern about “severe disappointment” is on the part of the movement.
That said, you are probably familiar with a line of thinking that goes like this: the settlement project is so far advanced that a two-state solution is impossible, America will never put pressure on Israel, so let’s just focus on one-state etcetera.
This has never made sense to me. For one thing, why bother targeting the lobby is America will “never” put pressure on Israel?
Second, as you note, the settlements would still be there in a one-state solution, with their grabs of water, prime land, and so on. Does the focus on the institutional container, “one state,” detract from those issues?
Third, what I meant when I wrote of “severe disappointment” is that it seems wrong-headed to mobilize a movement around the idea that the settlement project is too far advanced for a two-state resolution to work, because if the elites are under enough pressure, why would they not then just withdraw the settlements? No has one ever put them under the requisite pressure, in any case. What has been made under certain conditions can be unmade under others.
Fourth, this means that we should try to understand what principles guide Israeli elites. “Zionism” is insufficient. What they want more than anything, like all elites, is to try to hold on to their privilege.
Fifth, I see this was just one more mental contortion induced by the need to erase class — meaning control over resources, or who gets what — from our analyses. This creates bits of thinking like “the settlement project is too far advanced” etcetera. No, it is not.
Sixth, I see the argument for one-state that ignores resources issues as not unlike an argument for ending apartheid that guarantees for racial disparities in income — or like arguing for ending slavery in America with the guarantee that it would be virtually re-instituted by 1925 in some sections of the American South. That is, we concede defeat even in our victory terms.
Seven, as you know, class is very relevant to the Israeli context, and it is Zionist historiography and Zionist ideology that wishes to dissolve the notion of class in the organic bath of a “nation” or a “people.” At this point I would say with respect that if class, as a short-hand for control over resources, explains and clarifies much in the Israeli context, why is it another line-in-the-sand that we cannot seek to see what it does or does not explain about the constitution of the lobby and the constitution of the Special Relationship? If follow-the-money works within Israel, as you know it does, why not between Israel and America?
And so eight, although for any number of reasons I think a bi-national solution is a useful medium-run utopia to orient our efforts, we need to make it on the basis of the right arguments. The right arguments are ones rooted in (1) control over the land/water/infrastructural resources within cis-Jordan; (2) de-Zioning the state of Israel; (3) reparations; and (4) in the context of regional de-militarization and the overthrow of Western-backed dictators and the reconstitution of the regional economic system. But those are my arguments, and also the traditional arguments of a lot of the Palestinian and Israeli left (although other arguments, too, have been made, by Emil Touma, for example, and I would not rule them out).
de-Zioning? Or de-Zionizing? I’ve generally seen it referred to as the latter.
Can we please do away with this idea that the Nakba was somehow not a bloody process? Massacres, rapes, and death marches were an indispensable tool in encouraging the flight of those Palestinians whom Jewish forces did not expel directly. It was not a campaign of extermination. But it was, precisely, an ethnic cleansing, with all the attendant ugliness and barbarity that the term rightly implies.
What I don’t understand is the “legal stratagems” referred to that Israel allegedly uses. What is “legal” in any strategy Israel has used or uses other than what it considers the rule of law.
ridding the homeland of most of its Palestinian population is exactly what ethnic cleansing is, it is not called dry cleaning. if haber thinks the terms conjers or implies something that’s his problem. yes genocide is ethnic cleansing but that doesn’t mean ethnic cleansing is necessarily genocide.
It’s quite true that ethnic cleansing covers compulsory transfer as well as sheer physical destruction. Also true that compulsory transfer of a mass of people is almost inconceivably horrendous and will not happen unless the people concerned are put en masse in fear of their lives, which probably means that at least some of them must actually be killed.
Haber seems to be saying that there is a process supplementary to cleansing which involves weaving a skein of laws, or (to meet Marlene’s point) brutal instructions called laws, that render a section of the population politically ineffectual even if they are not formally disfranchised. He calls that ‘dry cleaning’ and he may have a good point. I think he means to use the term as a savage metaphor for what appears to be civilised normality but is really as hostile and abusive as plain ‘cleansing’ is.
Beinart, as linked by Haber, seems to be as oracular and ambivalent as ever.
Sorry, folks, but you really misread my post. And that goes for Max.
Where did I say that the Zionists didn’t engage in ethnic cleansing in 1948? I didn’t deny that. I simply claimed that the major crime is found in what I called the ethnic dry-cleaning of over sixty years — and by that I meant the system of laws that bar the refugees from returning and keeps Palestinian Israelis them at a level of around 20%.
“But the major crime was the laws and directives barring the return of the 750,000 refugees to their homes on the basis of their ethnicity. This is not so much ethnic “cleansing,” with its implication of blood and destruction, but rather ethnic “dry-cleaning”, ridding the country of most of its Palestinian population through legal stratagems that ensure that the natives of Palestine will be effectively barred from full participation in their homeland. Unlike ethnic cleansing, the legal structures behind ethnic dry cleaning have allowed Palestinians to be around 20% of the population and to be given the vote, but to be deprived of political power. This way Israel can say to itself and to the world that it is a democracy. This ethnic dry-cleaning is foundational to the Jewish state and all who support the 1948 state are complicit in it. In fact the liberal Zionists are arguably more complicit, since they require that Israel be a democracy.”
I was not denying the forced deportations, the violence, the rape, the massacres in 1948 — massacres engaged in by both sides, and condemned universally. I think it is a mistake to focus on them because it plays into the hands of the hasbara folks who start counting who was forced to leave and who left “voluntarily” (as if anybody left voluntarily.)
What I am claiming is the great crime was not so much in forcing/inducing/encouraging the Palestinians to leave as in barring their return. That is what I called “ethnic dry cleaning.” And if by that term people thought I was being cute or minimalizing, I can only ask you, “On what moral planet do you reside?” For in my moral universe, the laws passed barring the return of Palestinians after the war are much worse than the military operations that forced them to leave — because those “laws” undermine the whole moral grounding of the legislature, and society that passes them.