Opinion

Time is not on Israel’s side

The timer is now ticking on Israel. While Israel historically put Palestinians on the slow burner, gnawing at their lands and livelihoods, time was in Israel’s favor was the world turned a blind eye. Those days are over.

Israelis must now choose, allow the state of Palestine to emerge, or have it imposed upon them. The traditional options of two-states vs. one state of Israel without equality for all its citizens have passed long ago. Israelis can accept Palestine in all the occupied territory of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, or ultimately be forced to accept Palestine from the river to the sea.

For us Palestinians, like any normal human beings on this earth, it is natural for us to expect to be viewed as a people worthy of our rights, freedom, and independence. The days when this can be ignored are over too.

Today, all has been exposed to the naked eye. Thanks to: decades of denial by Jewish Israeli citizens and the Jewish diaspora, US President Trump and his messianic entourage of Jared Kushner and David M. Friedman, Israel’s state-sanctioned settlement enterprise, financier Sheldon Adelson’s fanaticism, Christian Evangelicals bent on personally witnessing the Armageddon, and none other than Israel’s own extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexation frenzy, a frenzy on steroids attempting to divert his path to jail on three corruption charges.

To force the timer to tick even faster, outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, in an interview with Stephen Sackur of the BBC Hardtalk program, proudly proclaimed, “I represent not only the people of Israel, I represented [sic] the Jewish people in the U.N.” He went on, “We [Jews] do have biblical rights to the land. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or Jew — you read the Bible, you read the stories of the Bible — it’s all there.” It got worse. He went on to say, “This is our deed to the land. That’s biblical.” This from Israel’s top international diplomat! Regardless of how one views the Bible, it’s a religious text, not a document that can be submitted in a case of international law.

The further back Israel goes in time, the faster today’s timer is ticking. Below I will touch on three momentous developments lubricating the timer.

Peter Beinart, Zionism, and the ‘Jewish State’

Enter Peter Beinart. A prominent and outspoken religiously-observant Jewish American columnist, journalist, political commentator, and professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He is a self-defined Zionist, albeit from the flavor that most Israeli Jews would dismiss.

Earlier this month, Beinart penned a long-read essay titled, Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine, and then followed it up with a New York Times opinion piece titled, I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State. He makes a monumental shift from supporting a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine side by side, to arguing that Zionism does not require a ‘Jewish State’ at all and calls for his fellow Jews to come to this understanding.

It is interesting to note that Palestinians have always made the point that they have nothing against Judaism, rather they view Zionism as having hijacked this noble religion to the detriment of Israelis and Palestinians alike. To be clear, the only version of Zionism Palestinians have experienced is the one that is a political ideology based on supremacy. This Zionism has held conferences starting in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, and has left behind an incriminating and bloody paper trail.

Peter is my friend. We have interlocked as editor and writer, spoke on the same panel at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and he has attended many of the talks I have given to Jewish American audiences when they visited Bethlehem. He has universal values and does not discriminate when applying them. He knows how to actively listen, ask probing questions, and analyze in relation to reality rather than blindly forcing reality to fit a set of Israeli state talking points. Most importantly, he has opened the Pandora’s box of the debate over Israel inside global Jewry and questioning Zionism’s core in public. For this, he will go down in history next to notable early Zionist thinkers such as Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes, among others.

There is much too discuss about Peter’s new revelation, but that’s for another day. For now, he will have his hands full within his Jewish communal circles. It’s a shame that Israeli Jews are, for the most part, missing out on this conversation. Israeli media has largely chosen to pretend that the call for equal rights in one state does not exist.

Yesh Din, Israel, and Apartheid

At the same time that Peter took to the global stage, another storm was brewing closer to Jerusalem. The renowned Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din (There is a Law), released a landmark legal opinion titled, The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion. This was written by Adv. Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading legal minds specializing in international human rights law and the laws of war. The opinion is damning for Israel.

“The conclusion of this legal opinion is that the crime against humanity of apartheid is being  committed in the West Bank. The perpetrators are Israelis, and the victims are Palestinians.” The report further states that this is the case with or without another round of Israeli annexation, or as Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz, and Ambassador Danon like to call it, “applying sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria.” Call it what you may because it is all illegal.

But that’s not all. Annexation does play a role; the opinion notes that “Continued creeping legal annexation, let alone official annexation of a particular part of the West Bank through legislation that would apply Israeli law and administration there, is an amalgamation of the regimes. This could mean strengthening the argument, which already is being heard, that the crime of Apartheid is not committed only in the West Bank. That the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state. ”

You read that correctly. Israel has gone from attacking former US President Jimmy Carter for using the “A” word in the title of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to having to deal with an Israeli organization making the legal case that the entire state may be an Apartheid state.

Israelis should take note. Yesh Din is not a newcomer to this issue. Neither are the many other Israeli human rights organizations that have been exposing reality for what it is for years. Organizations such as B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked (Center for the Defence of the Individual), Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), Rabbis for Human Rights, Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), Who Profits?, and Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit), among many others.

The timer ticks faster and faster.

The above-broken taboos have awakened many Jews around the world. But anyone who missed out on the last three decades of facts being made on the ground, by gunships and bulldozers displaying the “Star of David,” would have found a summary of what was to come in a report released at the end of last year. Read on.

UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)

One of the most important organs of the UN is The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This entity is comprised of a body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by its State parties. In short, this body gives the pulse of today’s rules-based world order, country by country.

Israel, being a “State party,” is obliged to submit reports to this Committee and they comply. Also, ever since November 29, 2012, when Palestine became a “non-member observer State,” Palestine also submits reports to this Committee.

In its December 2019 Concluding Observations on Israel, the Committee determined that Israeli policies and practices comprise of racial segregation and apartheid over the Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line. This was earthshaking. Palestinian, regional, and international human rights organizations worked hard to bring the facts of the matter to the deliberations. Interestingly, even while Israel’s premiership bad-mouths the UN at every opportunity possible, Israel engaged the committee, but to no avail.

However, the Committee’s Concluding Observations report did make an interesting catch. It noted that “While acknowledging the willingness of the State [Israel] party delegation to discuss questions relating to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Committee regrets that the report did not contain any information concerning the population living in these territories.”

So while the Israeli, and now the American, leaderships claim there is no military occupation to speak of, in the chambers of international law that matter for Israel to remain a member of the community of nations, Israel is actively engaging on issues related to the “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” even if they do so blind to the Palestinians they oppress.

Tick, tick, tick. One can hear the timer racing forward in their sleep.

Israel still has a choice

This is not about Peter Beinart, Yesh Din, or the UN. It is about Israel finally having to look in the mirror and reckon with itself.

For us Palestinians, our case is crystal clear. We demand our rights, freedom, and independence.

It took US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Senator from Vermont who, in November 2019 drew sustained applause from the crowd at the MSNBC/Washington Post Democratic primary debate in Atlanta, to declare, “It is no longer good enough for us to be pro-Israel, I am pro-Israel, but we must treat the Palestinians with the dignity they deserve.” The audience’s applause was rightly due because Sanders inserted the issue of Palestinians being human into the debate. That is an extremely low bar.

Sanders doubled down at the next Democratic debate in South Carolina in February of this year when he “labeled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “reactionary racist” and said he’d consider reversing President Donald Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

The Israeli Foreign Minister at the time, Israel Katz, slammed Sanders in what he said was a ‘Horrifying Comment’ while proclaiming that Israel does not “intervene in the internal American electoral process…” The latter comment, for anyone even faintly familiar with the pro-Israel lobby in the US, would be hilarious if the situation were not so dire.

Remember in 2015 when Netanyahu barged into Congress without White House approval, a move that was met by objections from many supporters of Israel including prominent American Jewish leaders? This Bibi blunder sparked a letter from the Washington-based lobby group J Street where they noted, “Our Congress should not be used as a prop in another nation’s election. One of the central elements that underpins the alliance between our two nations is our common commitment to democracy and elections. That means that both nations stay out of the other’s democratic process.” So much for not intervening in US politics.

Nevertheless, many Jewish Americans and Israelis remain blind to the clear shifts that have already taken place in the Democratic party.

But Palestinians do not need anyone’s affirmation that they are human. If what drives you is solely your love of Israel, even if it is blind love, then common sense is making a clarion call—now is the time to act to save Israel from itself.

Israel can end its 53-year-old military occupation and allow a real Palestinian state to emerge or end up with all the land it wants from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, along with a citizenry of 7 million Palestinians and 7 million Jewish Israelis. Either way, 5 million Palestinian refugees will still be demanding to return home.

Otherwise, Israel, and Jews everywhere, must forever hold their peace (and hasbara) because history is about to be made, again, based on the facts that successive Israeli governments have imposed on the reality between the river and the sea with their ‘might is right’ policies over 73 years.

Soon, the choice will no longer be Israel’s to make. Tick, tick, tick.

This post first appeared on Medium.

Sam Bahour (@SamBahour) is a Youngstown, Ohio-born and raised Palestinian-American business consultant and a frequent commentator on Palestinian affairs from Ramallah/Al-Bireh in Occupied Palestine. He is a policy adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and co-editor of “Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994).https://bit.ly/Medium-Times-Up-Israel or https://medium.com/@sbahour/times-up-israel-d88b4dd575e9?source=friends_link&sk=d24d7521014cdac5d8b31b64991d9586

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 “Zionism does not require a ‘Jewish State’ at all and calls for his fellow Jews to come to this understanding.”

Indeed, and that in fact is a very old view.

It was Einstein’s view, going back the best part of a century.

He called himself a Zionist, but he did not think Israel should become an armed state.

He thought Jews settling in the region should live in harmony with their neighbors.

Einstein feared what an armed, Jews-only state would become, and he was absolutely right.

Early acceptance of such a view could have saved an immense amount of killing and human misery.

And when I see spectacles like Israeli soldiers ambushing from behind a fence unarmed protesters in Gaza, killing hundreds, including women and children, wounding thousands, all I can say is that it represents the very foulest place in the human soul. Just grotesque horror.

So few in the world even objected, fearful of being labelled “anti-Semitic.”.

The Nazis showed us, there are no limits to how low humans can go, to the horrors they are capable of committing

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/thousands-demand-netanyahu-quit-coronavirus-handling-200802000808674.html

“Israel’s Netanyahu rails against protesters asking him to resign”

Al Jazeera, August 2/20
“Demonstrators want the long-serving Israeli PM to resign over handling of coronavirus crisis and corruption charges.”

EXCERPTS:
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has railed at swelling protests against his rule, saying they are being egged on by a biased media.

“Netanyahu has faced a wave of protests in recent weeks, with demonstrators calling for the long-serving leader to resign, panning his handling of the coronavirus crisis, and saying he should not remain in office while on trial for corruption charges.

“In a nearly six-minute rant at a meeting of his cabinet, Netanyahu slammed the media for ‘inflaming’ the protests – devoting disproportionate air time to them – and for distorting incidents of violence against the protesters.

“‘In the name of democracy, I see an attempt to trample on democracy,’ Netanyahu said.

“Netanyahu’s statements came after thousands of demonstrators gathered outside his official residence in central Jerusalem, while smaller antigovernment gatherings were also held in Tel Aviv, near his beach house in central Israel and at dozens of busy intersections nationwide.

“An Israeli court on Sunday also ordered Netanyahu’s son to delete a tweet in which he published the personal details of antigovernment protest leaders and ordered him to stop ‘harassing’ petitioners.

“Yair Netanyahu, 29, wrote on Twitter on Thursday: ‘I invite everyone to come to protest, day and night (the Supreme Court says it’s allowed), at the homes of these people that are organizing for us all the anarchy in the country in recent weeks.'”

Its certainly not just Israeli media who have largely chosen to pretend the call for equal rights in a secular state doesn’t exist. Why let NPR, BBC and the others off that hook.

Trump, at his first meeting with Netanyahu as President, put the secular state decision for Israel on the table. One state or two, he said. I also reason he called off annexation by Netanyahu. Sadly Abbas didn’t know how to play Trump with his counter-proposal. Did he expect Trump to publicize it for him? Few are familiar with it.

Bahour has written a powerful piece. Time is not only not on Israel’s side, its on no one’s side. As of now Israel is still building its regional hegemonic power indicating compromise is not planned. Palestinian demands will likely be stronger as a non-violent demands. By criticizing all forms of violence would cause Israel to be even more afraid of not being counted among the community of nations.

I’m wondering the reasons for calling one state “Palestine” as opposed to “Israel-Palestine”.

Citing a leftist Jew who has no support in Israel, a couple of leftist Israeli organiations and another biased UN subcommittee might be impressive if they actually represented the viewpoint of anyone in power. They don’t. In Israel the left is minuscule. The UN cannot even stop real horrible countries like North Korea and Iran.

A secular state is beyond the ability of the Palestinians. They can’t even remove the Islamic state in Gaza.

Einstein was a genius in some things but stupid in others. Many Jews though a state was not needed before the Holocaust. Many of them were murdered and others like Einstein fled. They were all proven wrong.

Palestinians are Muslims (with a decreasing Christian component). It’s hilarious to hear a Muslim say he has nothing against Judaism despite centuries of persecution. I can tell you with certainly even West Bank Arabs are treated better on the whole than Jews were in the Muslim world. And how many Jews are even left in the Muslim world now?

Time is on the Israelis side. The “deals” get worse and worse for the Palestinians, their leadership does not get any better, and despite all sorts of talk and whining the Arab world is increasingly uninterested in taking any concrete actions to advance a Palestinian nationalistic claim. Egypt could cede some land to Gaza right now and create a large enough Palestinian state to accommodate the Arabs there and in the West Bank. It’s not like it needs that land, which is mostly a hassle to deal with due to ISIS in Sinai. But it doesn’t.

Jordan could regrant citizenship to Palestinians and invite them in, but it doesn’t.

Lebanon and Syria routinely mistreat the local Palestinian Arabs.

If fellow Arab Muslims don’t want a Palestinian state to be created, why should Israel?