Earlier today we ran Scott McConnell’s piece arguing that the South-Africa-one-state struggle can’t be reprised in Israel/Palestine. Ali Abunimah, author of this piece on the same subject, responds:
Scott McConnell puts forward familiar arguments, but they are rather weak. No serious person has ever argued that South Africa and Israel are identical, so that is not the starting point. The question is what are the similarities, and are the differences such that the lessons do not apply. No one disputes that South Africa did not have an "Israel lobby," but that does not mean it didn’t have a lot of support — from the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, from business groups, and especially in the UK with people who sympathized with the "predicament" of the whites. And since Scott admits the validity and relevance of BDS, his list of reasons why Afrikaners had less influence in the US seems irrelevant.
I would also argue that it doesn’t really matter how many divisions the Israel Lobby has once the positions it takes start to be seen as illegitimate. Inertia may keep change from happening for some time, but ultimately political brute force is not enough; you must have legitimacy and Israel is losing it. The Israel lobby knows this and they are scrambling to retool their message (see J Street) and I would argue failing. If J Street makes a difference it will be because J Street ditches its AIPAC-lite positions (something it has not done yet), not because it softens them and dresses them up. Anyone still remember the China Lobby?
As I’ve pointed out, Israel’s vulnerabilities may be different from South Africa’s but that doesn’t make it invulnerable to pressure — as we are already seeing from the hysterical reaction in Israel to BDS and the Goldstone Report. Also, you would need to tell the families of those people killed in numerous ANC bombings of civilian targets that the ANC never attacked "soft targets." It will be news to them. The ANC did not emphasize that as their main tactic, but they did it. I dealt with this all in my book. Also there is a whole wealth of literature on South Africa, that no one seems to bother to read and they should read before making ad hoc arguments. So Mandela went to a missionary school. Did that really impress the apartheid ideologues of the Dutch Reformed Church? Did the "shared" Christian religion of people in Northern Ireland bring them closer to peace? On the contrary, it was one of the key dividing lines. In hindsight we forget how easy it was to construct "irreconcilable" differences that seemed insurmountable at the time.
I would agree that the fall of the Berlin Wall had an effect, but not the one McConnell suggests. The fall of the Berlin Wall made South Africa less important to US Cold War strategy, which meant that the US was ready to let the apartheid regime go, which it was not ready to go as long as it served as a "bulwark" against "communism" in the cone of southern Africa. This abandonment by the US did not make whites feel more secure; if anything it made them feel less secure as their base of support in western capitals eroded even further.
There is a similar phenomenon with Israel. After 1967, Israel was a Cold War "ally." After the Berlin Wall fell, this rationale for US support for Israel disappeared and we began to see some pressure for a "peace process" as well as intensification of internal conflict in Israel between "left" and "right" and between secular and religious. As Netanyahu, I think pointed out, Israel was the biggest beneficiary of 9/11 because it allowed Israel to rebrand itself as the West’s ally in the War of Civilizations against "extremist Islam." But the world is getting tired of that war (although Obama is still fighting it in fact). Nevertheless I don’t think it’s a message convincing, profound or real enough to sustain US support for Israel in the long-run, or conceal the fact that Israel is not and has never been an asset to the US. And in fact it runs against liberal US values that are ostensibly about tolerance, cooperation and universalism. The fact is that no matter how powerful the lobby is in the medium term, Israel needs the US to survive, but the US does not need Israel and there’s just no message that hasn’t been tried that can make the case for the kind of unconditional support that will be needed to maintain the Israeli settler-colony.
Finally, Scott makes all the familiar arguments that there is an "international consensus" backing repartition of historic Palestine and that Israel has the "option" of withdrawing to the 1967 border. At some point the facts and history need to be taken into account when we keep repeating this mantra. What does this "consensus" actually amount to on the day Israel announces another 900 housing units in the West Bank, and after two decades of "peace process" in which the number of settlers tripled? I would argue — and I have developed this argument in an academic paper that I can’t unfortunately put on the web yet — that the attempt to repartition Palestine is more likely to result in renewed bouts of ethnic cleansing (possibly worse than 1948), than in the neat little fantasy of "two states living side by side in peace."
