Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua is upset by the battle developing over Zionism world-wide, and he is trying to turn down the heat with a piece in Haaretz. I don’t think he succeeds. First an excerpt, in which he portrays ethnic discrimination as all in a day’s work for nation-states:
After the Jewish state, namely the State of Israel, was actually established, the only way in which the meaning of Zionism was expressed was through the principle of the Law of Return…. it is still open to any Jew who wants to become a citizen.
Such a law of return exists today in several other countries, including Hungary and Germany. Hopefully a similar law of return will also soon be instituted in the Palestinian state to be established alongside us. And just as that will not be a racist law in the Palestinian state, by the same token the law is not racist in Israel either. When the nations of the world decided in 1947 on the establishment of a Jewish state, they did not tear off part of Palestine for only the 600,000 Jews living there at the time, they did so with the assumption that this state had to provide refuge for any Jew who so desired.
This is pabulum. Yes, the world partitioned Palestine in 1947 so as to establish a Jewish state and an Arab one; and that decision– which the entire Arab neighborhood rejected– was also a legal one. I acknowledge that.
But because Jewish numbers in mandate Palestine were low, the world gerrymandered a state that was Jewish, by about 600,000 to 500,000 non Jews; and before and after that “state” became a state, the Jews expelled almost all those non-Jews and greatly increased their boundaries from the ones the U.N. had granted. So if you really want to talk about “tearing off part of Palestine,” well Israel did that to the Palestinians; it leapfrogged the U.N. boundaries and tossed out a lot of Arabs.
The Israelis have never acknowledged the expulsion, apologize for it, or made reparations (even as their own state was built with the help of German reparations soon after the war).
And as for Yehoshua’s wonderful returning, well, many of those Palestinians have sought to return to their homes, a right granted them under international law. The U.N. has stood by that right. Yehoshua seems to imagine them exercising that right some time in the future (as if 60 years is mere preamble) and not to their original lands; but it is dishonest not to acknowledge that the frustration of the exercise of this right has caused seething resentment for decades– even as 1 million Russians, many of them non-Jews, showed up under Yehoshua’s hunky-dory Law of Return. The failure to relate this skewed history is what makes me crazy about Zionism. Back to the video:
An Israeli, a Jew, a Palestinian or anyone else who defines himself as a-Zionist is a citizen who is opposed to the Law of Return. This opposition, like any other political viewpoint, is legitimate. An anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is someone who wants to overturn the State of Israel after the fact – and with the exception of extremist sects among the ultra-Orthodox or among radical Jewish circles in the Diaspora, not many Jews hold this view.
All of the important and fundamental debates taking place in Israel – annexation or non-annexation of the territories; the relationship between the country’s Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority; the relationship between religion and the state; the nature and values of economic policy and the social welfare system; and even the interpretation of historical events – are the sort of debates and controversies that existed and still exist in many countries.
Here the taxonomical Yehoshua makes out that the debate that’s going on in Israel is a war of foundational ideas like the one in many other countries. I don’t think it’s the same. Israel is a young country; and it is facing an existential crisis for a very simple reason: it is governing a population of 4-5 million Palestinians who have no rights and by and large do not accept their governance. Yehoshua calls these people a “minority.” In fact they may outnumber the Jews (as JPost now reports).
The reason that some radicals want to revolutionize the state of Israel, and why even conservative-liberals like myself seek dramatic reform of Israel, is because of this unfairness, which has gone on for many decades. Henry Siegman and Noam Sheizaf have both explained these conditions to us recently.
Siegman: “Israel’s… denial of all rights to millions of Palestinians for nearly half a century…”
Sheizaf: “Palestinians are real people, people older than the age of almost everyone in this room, almost, who have never been one day in their life free.”
That’s the issue, in a region inflamed by imperial occupation; and why this injustice has gained global attention.
