Like other Mondo contributors, I find Beinart’s new book to be brave, important, and blinkered all at once. The biggest problem is Beinart’s false, idealized image of pre-1967 Israel as a “flawed, but genuine democracy.” This doesn’t work because even within the green line Israel has always been a non-democratic apartheid state.
Reference the international law definition of the crime of apartheid:
inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Israel’s willful, orchestrated ethnic cleansing of Palestine –– and denial of the right of refugees to return who wish to live peaceably with their neighbors –– negates any legitimate claim Israel had or has to being a “flawed, but genuine democracy.” By any civil rights standard, these refugees and their descendants should have been on Israel’s voter rolls for the past 64 years.
Martin Buber and Judah Magnes insisted on equality as
the basis for Zionism. Peter Beinart’s book,
The Crisis of Zionism, ignores this important history.
Think of it this way… In the 1960s, if Alabama had driven 80% of its black residents out of the state in a pre-planned campaign of violent terror, would Alabama then have had the right to claim to be a “flawed, but genuine democracy” because it granted the remaining 20% the right to vote? Everyone in the free world would have called such a claim precisely what it would have been: white supremacist propaganda.
Israel has from day one been a Pretend Democracy. It’s a brilliant slight of hand to deny the vote to people who aren’t present on election day because they’ve been expelled. But the facade’s cracks become more visible every day.
The Crisis of Zionism is not a result of the conquest, slow-drip ethnic cleansing, and colonization of the West Bank, which is simply a continuation of what Ben-Gurion and colleagues started in 1948. The Crisis of Zionism is that there is no way to reconcile liberal values with ethnic cleansing, and there is no way to maintain the charade indefinitely in the internet age.
Gideon Levy calls out the spades in his latest column, Nothing Has Changed in Israel Since 1948:
In 1948, new immigrants were brought straight from the ships into abandoned Palestinian homes with pots of food still simmering in the kitchen, and no one asked too many questions. In 2012, the Israeli government is trying to whitewash the theft of Palestinian lands, all the while scorning the law. A single straight line – a single, perpetual mode of conduct – runs from 1948 to 2012: Palestinian property is ownerless, always abandoned property, even when this is demonstrably not the case, and Israeli Jews are free to do whatever they want with it. It was catch-as-catch-can with regard to Palestinian property in 1948, and it’s catch-as-catch-can in 2012, in a never-ending game… Now, as then, a crime is a crime.
Beinart elided Martin Buber and Judah Magnes almost entirely from his book. For shame! Buber and Magnes advocated a Zionism based on Equality, which could have worked out just fine. Someday we shall overcome the ethnic cleansing versions of Zionism — both “liberal” and revisionist — and rediscover Buber and Magnes’ prophetic, just vision.
When the struggle for Equality — from the River to the Sea — breaks out, where will Beinart and the “liberal” Zionists stand?
“The biggest problem is Beinart’s false, idealized image of pre-1967 Israel as a ‘flawed, but genuine democracy.’ This doesn’t work because even within the green line Israel has always been a non-democratic apartheid state.”
Not only that, but it fails to even recognize that for a generation, the Jews controlling the state officially oppressed Palestinians who were citizens of the Israeli state and imposed martial law against them for no reason other than their religion/ethnicity.
Has there ever been a moment, a single second, in the whole dirty history of Israel when Arabs weren’t officially oppressed by the vile bigotry of that filthy state?
Beinart wants to offer something to himself (first) and to other LZs (his anticipated readers) that they can stomach based on their dreams, their “received truths”, their self-identification as Zionists, etc. They don’t want all those earlier Israelis to be villains.
For them, it is ‘received truth” that Israel is fundamentally OK” and is a “democracy”. Somehow they missed the lesson that expelling and refusing to re-admit the 750,000 Palestinian refugees of 1947-50 (who are now, properly, “exiles” as well as far more numerous) was a deliberate re-arrangement of the Israeli electorate which, inter alia, wrecked any claim to being a democracy.
But — for all that — Beinart seems to be opposed to Greater Israel, opposed to settlements (except those he thinks of as warm and fuzzy around the old city of Jerusalem), against continued occupation.
He is, thus, a sort of ally of Palestinians. He even espouses OPT-BDS. Small, insufficient, unlikely to be very useful at best, hard to put into useful practice, but not nothing, not nothing. Something.
Of course, he bases his story on falsehoods, as mentioned by Matthew Taylor above. But his work is intended (I think) to create and increase disquiet among LZs gently and slowly and at a rate they can accommodate.
For all I seem almost to defend Beinart and MJR on their (to me weird) refusal to praise total-BDS, I really would like Phil to invite them each to write a short essay on what good they think OPT-BDS can do, how it can be put into operation as a practical matter, etc. Contemplating OPT-BDS, I am reminded of the attempted exculpation of the magicians asnwering to the King’s impatience in “The 500 Hundred Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins”:
“brave” So tired of this “brave” label. Decade after decade of human rights crimes being committed and Beinart is “brave” for finally taking a stand. Will go along with better late than never. But “brave” Beinart is not. The spin here having to do with individuals who have been fully aware of the crimes that Israel has been committing for decades and then finally take a stand as “brave” is a weak and obvious public relations effort. Beinart and others who have stood silent for decades are not “brave” now that they are FINALLY taking a stand
Matthew Taylor wrote:
“I find Beinart’s new book to be brave, important, and blinkered….”
But I suspect you’re wrong here Matt if you think that Beinart is “blinkered” about the reality that you further discuss. He’s too smart and too knowledgeable. So yes, that is, he knows that despite that hypothetical Alabama situation came up with precisely describing Israel’s situation, he’s still okay with it, eyes wide open.
One of the more amazing things that strike me in the discussions that involve folks like Beinart and etc. who can be called part of Phil’s “Jewish Establishment” is the strange, chronic lack of asking them about this same precise kind of double standard. And that goes not only for the discussions in the mainstream and other media, but here too and in other blogs.
There is, it can seem, somewhat of an unconscious acceptance of the idea that yes, to a very considerable if not absolute degree one simply cannot hold Israel to the standards held to everyone else, and this seems to me a huge thing. (Not just in general, but also because there’s never any talk of the *degree* to which Israel is holdable to at least some of the same standards.)
What, that is, do we *know* would be the reaction from Beinart and the rest of that Jewish Establishment to any American or Westerner who came forward and, say, advocated a Constitutional amendment perfectly legally declaring their country to be a “Christian” nation? And accompanied it with talk about how this might be needed in the future to legalize some actions to keep it so?
Well of course I think we know what the reaction of Beinart and his Establishment would be: Any such advocate or movement would be instantly denounced as fascist. Filth. Forget just being called “anti-democratic.”
Beinart knows this. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some similar behavior on his part already in his writings on, perhaps, Pat Buchanan. Maybe even Buchanan opposing more immigration into the U.S.
So it’s not a matter of being “blinkered.” Instead I think the inevitable response is that the history of the jews allegedly justifies a double standard, which of course even if accepted still leaves Beinart, et. al. with the problem of the *degree* to which jewry/Israel is entitled to same.
And that’s not a small problem, which is why I think you never see even the most open, Holocaust-centered jewish partisan talking about it. The Beinarts of the world of course don’t want to have to admit to any double standard at all and that they believe Israel unlike every other country has this double standard), but even when they are forced to openly acknowledge that they still aren’t blinkered: They know that that’s what they want, *and* they also know they can’t articulate just how far it goes. Because *they* know it may have to go very far indeed in which case they’d still support it.
It’s a brilliant slight of hand to deny the vote to people who aren’t present on election day because they’ve been expelled.
Another good one is to deny people the rights of natural-born citizens because you expelled them and changed the name of the country – granting the new kind of citizenship only to those physically present in the country on a given day. Except for – and here’s the real kicker – all Jews and their relatives, Palestinian citizens or not, previously resident in Palestine or not, born Jewish or converted, who could mosey on down and collect their “Israeli” citizenship any time they liked (and still can).
But pre-67 Israel (at least after martial law for Palestinian Israelis was lifted on 8 November 1966) did treat all those whom it allowed to become citizens equally (except when it didn’t). After all (and liberal Zionists seem to like this bit), it says so in Israel’s [non-binding and never-respected] Declaration of Independence.
When it comes to democratic sleight of hand, Israel is second to none – not like those amateurs who thought that they could fool people by simply calling themselves “democratic republics”.