A year or two after he was censored by a Washington-area bookstore (later uncensored) for supporting one state, Saree Makdisi is on Huffington Post today saying that the two-state solution, which he does not rule out as a goal, has nonetheless been destroyed because of Israel's intransigent expansionism. Too bad that the American mainstream press is not echoing these points:
There's hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said
two years ago that some 40 percent of the West Bank is already taken up
by Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 percent
that remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and
isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been
circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of
Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry
routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be
funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 percent,
Israel retains security control (that's according to Oslo; today its
army conducts raids wherever it likes–and it does so virtually every
day).
What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to
accept his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their
archipelago of little impoverished islands of territory and call it a
state, they can go right ahead.
Then Makdisi speaks of the racism inherent in Netanyahu's vision, and urges Americans to reject it:
Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The
big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part)
embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be
Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes
around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its
national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity:
not its military insecurity–the only serious military threat Israel
faces on its own territory is imaginary–but rather its anxious
awareness of its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete,
settler-colonial enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many
aboriginals left standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of
Palestine in 1948. And to this day the Palestinians have refused to
simply give up, go away or somehow annul themselves…
The key moment in the speech came when he said that "the truth is that
in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish Homeland, now
lives a large population of Palestinians." This attitude comes straight
out of the primitive racialism and imaginary civilizational hierarchies
of the nineteenth century. The Jews are a people with a homeland and
hence they have a right to a state; the Palestinians are not a people
at all, or certainly not one of the same order. They are merely a
collection of vagabonds and trespassers intruding on the Jewish
Homeland. They have no rights, let alone a centuries-old competing
narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of
recognition by Israel.
I think Bradley Burston said something like this in Haaretz a few days ago. Obama makes us look very 19th century.
