Last week’s debate over Israel at Columbia University included two statements I’ve been meaning to quote from the two-staters on the panel, liberal Zionist writer Peter Beinart and Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force for Palestine.
Beinart said that his motivation for much of what he writes is that he fears Palestinians under occupation getting the vote. (I mentioned this last week.) Here’s the quote, in response to a questioner:
You cannot permanently hold people without a passport, without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives, and the right to live under the same legal system as their neighbors who are of a different religion or ethnic group. Israel either solves that problem, by giving Palestinians a state of their own which you and I both want or– or– Israel will ultimately have to give citizenship and voting rights to Palestinians on the West Bank in the state of Israel, which will mean the end of the Jewish state of Israel.
And it is because of my fear of that that I write much of what I do on this very subject.
The evening also included an inspired statement by Hussein Ibish, describing the political conditions of Israeli rule as a unique form of ethnic discrimination globally and challenging Americans to consider what they would do if their lives were controlled to the same extent:
The de facto state of Israel, which involves all of the areas that have come under Israel’s control since 1967, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza strip, operates a settlement project that is in total violation of black-letter international law and that is strenuously objected to by the international community. It already has more Arabs than Jews in it, and therefore the de facto state of Israel is not Jewish in any meaningful sense…
It is highly undemocratic in that it completely disenfranchises at least 4.5 million people living under its jurisdiction, the Palestinians in the occupied territories… millions of people who live under intolerable conditions of disenfranchisement and discrimination. There is nothing like Israel’s occupation, particularly in terms of the discrimination it imposes on Palestinians in the West Bank, that I can think of anywhere else in the world today. It’s quite unique.
Everything you can do in the occupied territories depends on whether the Israeli government classifies you as a Jewish settler or an occupied Palestinian. Every single aspect of daily life is determined by this inevitably ethnic distinction. Where you may live, what roads you can drive on, whether you can be armed for self defense or not, how much water and other basic necessities you get per capita, what type of education your children will have, whether you can travel freely around your own country or leave it with the normal confidence of being allowed to return, or whether you need the permission of foreign soldiers, many of them just out of high school, to go from one village to another, whether you may be subjected to midnight house raids, what laws you live under, etc.
I could go on till midnight, I really could.
Does this arrangement sound like the basis for a reasonable security policy to you? I mean, really? Because that’s how it’s conceptualized– as forward bases in enemy territory. “This is Israel’s strategic depth.” We hear that all the time from people, except Israeli security professionals, who don’t see it that way.
The bottom line is that in the occupied territories, Palestinians, who are citizens of no state, live under one set of laws and conditions, and… Israeli settlers even standing next to each other live under another. Settlers are Israeli citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities that come with that. The Palestinians have neither.
Millions of people have been living like this for almost 50 years, the vast majority of the history of the modern Israeli state. Now I want to put it to you, There’s not a single person in this room, not one of you– not one of you– who would accept to live like that, generation after generation, decade after decade, with no end in sight. You would resist, in an intelligent manner hopefully. And you would not put up with it. And if you think you would put up with it, you’re lying to yourselves.
Protip. Don’t put anybody else in that situation either.
frequently the Zionist dingdongs point to Native Americans as justification for the Apartheid and Racist and Fascist tendency of Israel…
in actual FACT…if one lives in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California one is confronted by millions, no, make that 10s of millions, maybe it will approach 100 million Native Americans each day…I see them constantly and eat their food…they are the cops, the judges, the lawyers, the nurses, the plumbers and just about everything else in my society…
Hernan Cortez y Malinche yo soy MexicoAmericano
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmgfLI1NBe8
I’m not always a fan of Hussein Ibish, but that is one brilliant speech he gave. However, as a proponent of the two state solution, there is a huge problem that he fails to address. If a miracle occurs and the 2ss becomes a reality, Palestinian citizens of the Jewish State will continue to be relegated to a second-class status and citizenship. Take Ibish’s key sentence, highlighted by Phil:
There’s not a single person in this room, not one of you– not one of you– who would accept to live like that, generation after generation, decade after decade, with no end in sight.
That sentence is equally applicable to Israeli citizens who are not Jewish. Not a single person in Ibish’s audience would agree to live as a second-class citizen in the land of his/her birth. True, the list of woes that the Palestinians under occupation must endure, as eloquently articulated by Ibish, are much worse; but second-class citizenship based upon ethnic/religious/ancestral “deficiencies” is not something that should be tolerated anywhere in the world, and it is an essential and undeniable component of the Jewish State.
I’m reading Shira Robinson’s brilliant book, ironically entitled “Israel’s liberal settler state”.
She gives an enormous amount of detail for the period after the establishment of the state and ’67, thereby crushing the “liberal” Zionist myths about “how Israel democracy collapsed in the 67 occupation”.
And Beinart’s right out of her book. And it’s not only Jewish colonialists. She writes at length about gentile European “liberal” imperialists who viewed the non-white masses through the lens of paternalistic racism. They didn’t hate them, per se, but viewed them as inferior and dangerous to democracy. Thus they needed to be given “time to prepare” for democracy, under the firm white hand that ruled them, of course. Beinart’s no different.
We sometimes portray these old colonialists in a cartoonish way, with the same broad brush. But the fact was that there were moderates, people who believd themselves to be liberals, who worked within a colonial system.
Of course, the end results were the same for the people being ruled over, but in their own minds, they were humanitarians.
Beinart’s fear are common to all Zionists, and by extention, colonialists: demographics. And demographics because they fear the outcome, a loss of racial supremacy.
He doesn’t talk about his fundamentally racist views in an honest way, but rather, like Mill disguises them in humanitarian garbs, as a pretense for a paternalistic expression of concern for the hapless non-white masses who need a firm white hand to guide them(and not to the ballot box!).
Avigail has this great comment on her site:
“I also write for a very selfish reason. When one day, Israelis stand trial for the occupation and the war crimes against the Palestinian people, I would like to be counted as someone who spoke up. I was brought up on stories of the Holocaust. I was told that perhaps even more despicable than the Nazis themselves were all those who knew what was happening and allowed it to happen. Jews have always felt abandoned by a world full of bystanders. Being a bystander doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means collaborating. And I don’t want to be a collaborator.” http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/
Left out of this conversation are the 2 million plus Palestinians living in stateless exile in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Almost a million of these are still living in squalid refugee camps that date back to 1948. It is inconceivable to me that these unfortunates are left out of “solution” discussions.
So where do they go? Israel won’t take them and there’s certainly no room in Gaza where maybe half a million Palestinian refugees will eventually want to relocate to the West Bank. Can the West Bank handle up to 2.5 million more Palestinians?
Would Israel even allow them to return to the West Bank? Will Israel and its vast army of rich diaspora supporters provide relocation compensation? Perhaps the US could redirect its $3.5 billion a year from Israel to the Palestinian refugee problem?
These folks can’t be an afterthought. They have to be at the forefront of any solution discussion. The problem started with them in 1948, the solution has to end with them.