Eloquent, moving, brilliant: the best words for Tony Karon’s reminiscence/analysis of the ’67 war in Israel/Palestine, and its lasting effects…
Three excerpts follow: 1, Karon’s unflinching description of ethnic cleansing in ’48 (dispensing with the "They were told to flee" canard); 2, Karon’s acceptance, as a native South African, of the apartheid analogy; 3, A small portion of Karon’s analysis of why the only future is a binational state (you gotta read the whole thing).
Oh, yes, forgot to say: Karon’s Jewish. (If that makes any difference to you.)
[1] maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in
1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its
“demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found
themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at
gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the
one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to
the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation by passed the new
Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his
property on May 8, 1948, and forbad the refugees from returning.[2] For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid
struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was
doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was
doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against
apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians
facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with
nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light
weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to
cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered.[3] But precisely because they [Israel’s leaders] have continued to expand Israel since 1967,
they have dimmed the prospects for a new partition creating a viable
Palestinian state separate from Israel. Today, more than ever, the fate
of the Israelis is inextricably, and intimately linked to the fate of
the Palestinians — and vice versa. The lasting legacy of the 1967 war
is the bi-national state it created in the old territory of
British-Mandate Palestine.
