Bernard Avishai
Bernard Avishai has an important piece in Harper’s in which he shifts his view from the two state solution toward the awareness that the two state solution may be “fatally flawed” and that the answer is “confederation”—a Palestinian state and Jewish state that are interdependent. In the piece, he struggles to grant the Palestinian right of return the same status as the Jewish “right” to a “Hebrew haven in a heartless world.”
Avishai is showing remarkable respect for the right of return. He understands that it is central for Palestinians and based on international law. And he exhibits a sense of personal crisis in that 90 percent of Palestinians now seem to have given up on two states and he respects their right of self-determination, though he wants them to respect Jewish sovereignty. Read the piece for yourself but I can’t help raising a few respectful questions (with some overlap to Joseph Dana’s critique of Avishai’s piece):
1. When will Avishai stop moving? A few months back in the New York Times Magazine (boy these liberal Zionists get platforms!) Avishai argued for resuscitating the two state solution along the lines of the Olmert-Abbas negotiations of 2008. I mocked the piece because it envisioned a 25-mile long tunnel between the West Bank and Gaza, a special form of hell for Palestinians in the desert, and an environmental atrocity of concrete-pouring and air conditioning. Now Avishai is moving. He says it is because the right of return has “resurfaced with a vengeance” in recent months. Huh? The right of return has always been an essential question for Palestinians. The change is when Jews (like me and Bernie) awaken to the idea.
I think the real source of Avishai’s shift is his gradual awakening, for which he should be lauded, and the changing terrain. At the beginning of the piece he speaks of the delegitimization of Israel with fright. Banks will stop giving us money, software companies will stop working with us, the brain drain will continue. Israel will become a pariah state. And at the end of the piece he refers to another fear: the real possibility that Israel will launch a second Nakba to get rid of the Palestinians. He sees the international community going left and his society going right. He is trying to save us from all that. But the question remains, What evidence is there that his society will accept an end to settlements, or even a neighboring Palestinian state? It sure seems like the cake has been cooked, Israel is a colonial-privileged society, indulged by the U.S.. That’s why there’s an international campaign against it. That’s why 1 million of the best brains have left town.
2. What will happen when Avishai talks to more Palestinians? The beauty of this piece is that Avishai has opened himself to the Palestinian perspective. Unlike Gershom Gorenberg, he is genuinely curious about the Palestinian point of view. And he is a little shocked. They want their rights. They were deprived of their rights arbitrarily. The most effective speakers in this piece are Sam Bahour, who just wants to build a multicultural society; and Muhammad Totah, a Hamas legislator who explains that Palestinians won’t yield their right to return to their homes; and Adam Shatz, the American journalist who has talked to Palestinians and explained to Avishai that it is about a spiritual injury more than a physical one. From these exchanges, Avishai says that Israel must first acknowledge the Nakba, a wise statement. Still, I wonder what will happen when Avishai talks to even more Palestinians. He will see that they are human beings who have been subject to incredible affliction and dispossession for 63 years. I wonder if he would move past the confederative idea to an open call for democracy. When someone is moving on this issue, they’re moving, as Cecilie Surasky likes to say. What about when he talks to Palestinans in the Diaspora? Avishai knows plenty of Diaspora Jews—what about when he hears from Diaspora Palestinians? He’ll be stunned by their degree of belief in Palestinian nationality and return.
3. Bernie, where are you coming from? I would like to know.
Avishai says that the Palestinians are wrong not to understand the Jewish need for sovereignty inside a place to which they have a historic connection. Repeatedly he speaks of anti-semitism and the need for a “refuge” from it. That heartless world that we need a haven in. And a tenet of the Jewish state is that it will provide a place for people fleeing anti-Semitism. As I have written here, Israel, whatever happens, must and will be a place for Jewish culture. I love the way West Jerusalem shuts down on the Sabbath, I appreciate the press and academic freedoms that Israelis brought to Palestine.
How much does Avishai himself need Israel? He was raised in Canada. Wikipedia says he has homes in Jerusalem and New Hampshire too. How heartless has the world been to Avishai? He has been incredibly privileged in life. And he has taken possession of some birthright in Israel on the basis of a controversial Law of Return that grants him greater rights than someone who was born in Jerusalem and not allowed to return to his home.
As an American reader, I wonder how fair it is that all the voices I read in the mainstream on these issue lately –Gorenberg, Goldberg, Avishai—are western Jews who have exercised the Law of Return to judge a competing national’s Right of Return? As Joseph Dana points out in his commentary on Avishai, shouldn’t American publications like Harper’s grant a platform to a Palestinian who supports the right of return? I believe 99 percent of Palestinians do (as did Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon). Shouldn’t American publications hear from them now?
I may be on Avishai’s side in the end– on compromise, on confederation, on reparations for the right of return–but I sense that my posture is largely immaterial to the course of history. In a word, the world has heard from tons of Jews on this question, sorting out their Jewish/Zionist identity around it; I would much rather hear what Palestinians have to say, empowered at last by our media.
I am happy Avishai seems to be “moving”. Spiritual growth is not easy for people. People who live in a family dominated by a psychotic or border-line personality will know that it is not even possible for many people. Even people who live with such badly injured people are regularly themselves injured from such contact.
To become aware of the “other” whom you (or your family or country or group) have hurt is very difficult indeed, and made even more difficult when your group has woven a thick defensive tapestry of justification for the infliction of that hurt — “You say I hurt you? But what I did was necessary, so I didn’t hurt you at all, I just did what was necessary.”
Avishai seems to be advancing away from that sort of thing, and his PUBLICATION of such advance is an advance for us all.
Isn’t that the hypocrisy of alleged anti- semitism,that discriminated Jews are the most wealthy,educated(alleged)and powerful minority in America today?I wonder how pro-semitism would have worked out?It couldn’t have had better results.
Phil, get an editor. There’s no reason why you have to prove MP right.
I agree when you write: (“I may be on Avishai’s side in the end– on compromise, on confederation”)
This reminds me of a conversation I had. The other person basically asked, “If things are so bad for Palestinians under occupation, why don’t they just sign a peace treaty, even if it’s on bad terms?”
Indeed, some supporters of the occupation feel that it’s good to make things worse for Palestinians to make them agree to the Israeli conditions. One person told me he didn’t care about the settlements, except that they are good because they make things worse for the Palestinian population. Their thinking is that the worse they are treated, the more they will agree to.
My response was basically: “Look what happened to the Indians, they kept signing tougher and tougher treaties and they just got pushed into worse and worse reservations. A peace treaty is good and that’s what is needed, but it isn’t the only thing that matters. If one side is in control of the situation, the other side is in a tougher situation to push for its own rights then. And I’m not sure a simple peace treaty will prevent things from being made worse or stopping the current expansion of settlements and land-taking. They’ve had tons of of negotiations, official and unofficial agreements for the last 30 years and things have gotten tougher and tougher for the occupied people nevertheless.”
His response was that the Palestinians did receive something important fromt he Oslo Accords- Autonomy. In other words, within limited sectors, the Palestinians were allowed to have autonomous control over their territory. The point is that a peace treaty, even an unfair one, could bring improvements.
Still, I am not sure about the Israeli claim that signing a treaty giving up the 1967 borders (Jerusalem, portions of the West Bank, and large swathes on the Jordanian border), and other things, would really stem the tide of settlement growth- just as the Indians signing peace treaties didn’t stop them from being pushed further from the land they had agreed to in those treaties. The PLO claims that the Oslo Accords are supposed to stop settlement growth, but the Israeli side says that they don’t, and that more treaties are needed.
So my point was that a peace treaty is good and what is needed, but I am not sure that an unfair one will really protect the Palestinians, even if it gives them a state on paper, one of the examples being that in an unfair treaty, the Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to stop violations of the treaty. For example, Netanyahu said that the Israeli army would still have to control the territory of the new “state” for “security reasons”. (You could respond that the security reasons can be overcome with NATO troops and the fact that peace will be more beneficial than having a standing army constantly on guard there.)
What do you think? Were the Oslo Accords a “win” for the Palestinian side (and maybe the Israeli side too), such that an unfair peace treaty will still be practical because it would stop further encroachments on Palestinian territory, remove many of the tough occupation checkpoints, etc? If direct, brutal occupation and settlement expansion is so bad for Palestinians, wouldn’t it be better to accept an unfair peace treaty?
” Avishai says that the Palestinians are wrong not to understand the Jewish need for sovereignty inside a place to which they have a historic connection. Repeatedly he speaks of anti-semitism and the need for a “refuge” from it.”
And that is where the brain of even non psychopath zionist still short circuit every time.
Say I am a Palestine, the Jews come into my land and take my farm, my home, water, everything and “I” am wrong not to understand the Jewish ‘need’ to do this? I am the one that is wrong?
The whole world sees the Jewish state, supported in general at least by Jews, doing what they are doing in Palestine and finds it criminal and Avishai worries about anti semitism in the world? He doesn’t see the slightest connection between anti semitic attitudes and what the Jewish state is doing for and in the name of Jews?
This where I lose patience…..this firewall in the minds of what would be called the better zionist. There isn’t enough time left to wait for them to cure themselves even if they could or wanted to. This is why the abyss is always staring back at them.