Dear Mooser, you’re utterly wrong. A ‘Benjamin’ is for obvious reasons a $100-dollar bill. Omar was referring to the Puff Daddy 1997 rap song ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c58ppLPJcQ – not to the Goldie Hawn movie.
She was saying that the Israel lobby (not necessarily AIPAC directly) spends a lot of money in order to, duh, get politicians to support Israel. That’s all. Take it easy.

Aida Touma was indeed one of the 38 intellectuals, all Palestinians in Israel, who wrote the 2006 ‘Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel’. 99% of that influential document addresses only the status and role of the Palestinians in Israel (at most 15% of all Palestinians). It does contain a vague call for right of return as well as the desire of “reaching peace through the declaration of an independent Palestinian state.”But since this “Palestinian state” could claim sovereignty, now or eventually, over all of historic Palestine (as in the pre-1988 vision of the PLO and PNC), even this ambiguous passage cannot be seen – contrary to Nathan’s opinion – as support for any two-state solution.
Later as well, the document calls the two-state post-Oslo period the “stage of setback” marked by “Arab Palestinian lack of sense of unity”. Further support for the ‘One’ in One Democratic State comes when the document identifies “Historic Palestine” as the Palestinian “homeland and unifying element between all even though this homeland is occupied.” That is, all of Palestine is occupied, not just the areas occupied in 1967, and Palestine is not just the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Nathan is correct that the Future Vision document and Aida Touma-Sliman today as an MK are in effect advocating the end of the Jewish state. (No need to use the loaded term “demise”, Nathan.) Her vision of an Israel where all citizens are absolutely equal is indeed that of a state of its citizens, not of Jews, or any other ethno-religious group for that matter, as most clearly articulated by the National Democratic Assembly, a rival of Touma’s Hadash party within the Joint List. So yes, she supports a starkly revised two-state solution where one state is “Palestinian” and the other is simply democratic, with no privileges for Jews or Arabs.
I too am worried by Touma’s reliance on the idea of “the right of self-determination we believe in.” First, there are many different Palestinian visions of their self-determination, so Touma can only speak for herself or at most her Party. Second, she seems to have a vision of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with no Jews at all! This contradicts the vision of One Democratic State, where all citizens of Palestine could live anywhere in historic Palestine. It is also ironic that even the Future Vision, when it comes down to it, is against the Partition of Palestine.

Reply to Echi: I am one of the authors along with Samir Abed Rabbo of the ‘Which One Democratic State’ article. Our article is easily found at: https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/which-democratic-state/ But your paraphrase of what we wrote on this topic of Jewish Israelis’ remaining, or not, in the single state, is correct.
As this thread shows, the topic is a hot potato. Ahmed Abu Artema indeed writes that “anyone born in Palestine” can stay, but I don’t know if he means that ONLY those born there can stay – not those who immigrated there – or whether immigrants could apply for remaining as citizens, but it wouldn’t be automatic. I mean, consider a Jewish Israeli who immigrated there at age 15 30 years ago and has long been an anti-Zionist activist fighting for ODS. It would be cruel to send such a person packing. This is unclear and I would like to hear Ahmed’s thoughts.
Is restricting automatic citizenship to those born there ethically acceptable? I don’t know. It is for sure, however, far more generous than what I hear from some Palestinians, namely ‘I don’t want to live with those conquerors.’ The Munich Declaration proposes that all Israeli citizens could stay (whether immigrants or not), and yes, this really is a tough ask for Palestinians, requiring them to accept as fellow citizens several million people who by voting the way they do have shown that they have zero respect for Palestinians. That is why Ahmed’s position is generous. Mercifully, this is an issue that I as a non-Palestinian don’t have a vote on. I gladly chicken out. I want to hear more Palestinians’ views on this. Unfortunately, as a whole group (all 12-13 million) they are never systematically asked for their opinion.
Ahmed in his article clearly answers Nathan’s harping on what a majority of Jewish Israelis WANT. Nathan might want to read the article. The more Jewish Israelis supporting ODS the better, of course. But a whole century of trying to talk Zionists out of their bloody, racist, unjust project has shown that convincing Israeli Jews likely does not bring the highest returns. Still, the many Israeli Jews supporting ODS are having some success in raising the percentage of supporters from perhaps 5% to 10%. And you know, political things change unpredicatably.
But to my mind the point is, as annie says, the Israeli state and its citizens will have to be forced, by BDS including international economic and political SANCTIONS, to agree – to surrender their apartheid state. In this sense it is not relevant whether ‘Israel’ accepts ODS or not. Nathan’s idea that majority-Jewish-Israeli support is a PRECONDITION for arguing for the idea is in any case simply absurd.
Thanks to Ahmed, great and moving article.

Resolution 194 says clearly, for what it’s worth, that the ‘governments responsible’ must pay the compensation. That means Israel, then Britain, the U.S. etc.
I think your 1st and 4th points can be consolidated: return of stolen land now used exclusively by Jews, by definition and Israeli law. Also the 3rd and 5th points. And in point 7 do you mean compensation for all PAST use?
But the tough question: What about the people now living and working on the reclaimed property? Homes, businesses, livelihoods? This presents a huge humanitarian problem because one cannot just say ‘They are colonialists and have no individual rights.’ Maybe on humanitarian grounds they do have claims, at least to a generous relocation or compensation if the rightful owners really want to start using the property again. This question is full of dynamite and we should think about it and learn about precedence cases, say in Europe with the restoration of stolen Jewish property. I understand a fairly hard-nosed approach was taken there, but that is not necessarily a good guide. I don’t know. But what is the right thing to do, assuming always that one indeed does not accept a COLLECTIVE right of the colonists? Very difficult. Maybe this question should be decided once the citizenry of the new single state is established, by normal voting either in a parliament or in referenda. There would be a Palestinian majority, but no tyranny of that majority. Thanks.

This is an incredibly sad event. I just wanted to warn against any hope that Merkel will do anything. From my experience in German-speaking countries, they will be the last ones to abandon the Israel party line. The guilt about the Holocaust goes so deep that Palestinians register there even less than, say, in the US. But those children in making the appeal are immortalising themselves. All honor to them and all the villagers.

Thanks, I didn’t know this about the FLN.
I also like ecinococcus’s subtle point that having collective ethno-religious rights mentioned doesn’t necessarily provide the a ‘guarantee’ Hapler is looking for. In fact, to my mind this shows that it might be an illusion for any of us to speak of guarantees at all. I mean, what a constitution does is try to ‘protect’ by means of a constitutional court, checks and balances and proportional representation in legislatures, and if a significant majority agrees then it works.
But a constitution is only as good as the majority supporting it. Not only can Power stage a coup and take over, but look at what has happened in the country where I live, Turkey, where about half the people seem to have voted for doing away with constitution protection of freedoms.
So constitutions are a sine qua non, but the bigger job is for individuals as individuals and also as members of minority ethnic, religious, sexual-orientation or language groups to seek daily to keep majority support for human-rights constitutions. In the longer run this means behaving as an individual or member of such a group in a way that respects others’ rights. Of course even this is no guarantee. I’m just saying that there is no technical solution to be written into constitutions that solves rights problems once and for all. But there are certainly pitfalls to be avoided – and one of them, in my book, is to give political weight to ethnicity and religion by writing such groups into the text. This is necessarily sloppy because some individuals or even groups must fall through the cracks, and it is not smart to emphasise from the get-go what divides, rather than what unites, us – which is citizenship and humanity.

As one of the authors of ‘Aljamal & Co’, but replying for myself only, I want to deflect a few of Jeff Halper’s misinterpretations. He implies that we disagree that “the time has come to MOVE” whereas it is a matter of record that all of us have been trying to move ODS for years. What is the point of claiming a monopoly on a desire to MOVE?
He also claims that we find it “objectionable” that “communities” or “groups” wish constitutional “protection” against discrimination – a claim so improbable that I can only go back to what we actually wrote, namely that such protection should be codified in constitutional individual rights of free speech, press, political activity and freedom of association, the latter rigorously implying freedom for such associations.
Speaking of the dozen conferences, half-dozen books and several groups exclusively devoted to ODS, Halper says these “previous attempts … failed to take off and become an influential public movement.” Failed to take off, yes, but ODS certainly has achieved the status of an influential goal, solution, or set of ideas. Yet instead of offering a serious critique of why an organised “movement” hasn’t yet emerged – i.e. large membership-NGOs, or political parties, which precisely inside Israel have dismally failed to “take off” despite the courageous efforts of many within Tajamoa (the ‘Balad’ Party) – Halper denigrates all these “previous attempts” (in his mind associated with the Munich Declaration), polemically implying in language not helpful in bridge-building that they are burdered with ideas that are “non-starters” and have “no currency in the political world”.
But Halper’s Answer as to what went wrong – assuming more was even possible – seems to be that we don’t want ethno-religiously-defined collective rights built into the constitution, and he does. Yet instead of polemically re-stating our positions, let’s go deeper. I’ve read through about two dozen democratic constitutions and find only two which explicitly mention the ethnic or religious communities Halper has in mind when speaking of “Jewish Israelis” – those of Lebanon and Kosovo. Far more in terms of language than ethnicity or religion, and almost exclusively in terms of rights adhering not to the language communities themselves but of the individuals in or “members of” those communities, the Canadian, Macedonian and Belgian constitutions do list various groups specifically. From them, and especially from the the Macedonian constitution’s Articles 19 and 20, we can learn. The constitutions of India, South Africa, the U.S., France, Switzerland, Colombia, and many others, on the other hand, do entirely without ‘collective rights’ language. As well as theorising we should look empirically at the results of various historical examples.
Halper also misreads us in insinuating, again improbably, that we think we “live in a society composed solely of individuals” – clearly a straw man with no basis in our text. He moreover then adds the sweeping generalisation that the “Middle East … has no concept of the individual in a Western sense”. Is this a serious, if Orientalist, claim that ‘Middle Eastern’ people don’t have any idea of the CITIZEN, of individual property, of voting by individuals, or that the Koran does not deal with the individual’s proper behavior and relation to God, before whom all individual Moslems are equal? I believe this claim is transparently false. I would in any case ask Halper if this means his proposed constitution would therefore necessarily discriminate against the individual in favour of the collective.
As for our criticism that he falls into the ‘parity trap’ of treating his “two groups” in Palestine as ethically equal, he denies that he is assuming “symmetry between them”. But it is hard to read the granting of collective political rights to the colonising, oppressing group in any other way. At least it is legitimate to ask Halper if there is room in either his program or plan, as we suggest, for explicitly identifying the ethical asymmetries.
Finally we did not, as Halper claims, take “objection to a common civil society”. How could anyone be against such a thing? We only warned against seeing “reconciliation” as a precondition for a political solution, which it is not if we are right that at this stage ‘hate me, don’t hurt me’ is good enough. Such a civil society must emerge bottom-up, not top-down as part of a plan.
I hope my co-authors will correct any false impressions I’ve given, and that others involved in the ODS Campaign will Comment, giving their thoughts on the issue of collective ethnic rights, seemingly the only issue dividing (some of) us.

jrg, you have put your finger on perhaps the most difficult question facing ODS, namely what property restitution really means for those now living or working on property that would revert to Palestinian ownership, either private or public. Thanks for that. As one of the authors, but speaking only for myself, I can only offer a few words on framing the question and possible answers.
But first, I think that realising how difficult this problem is should not lead to just throwing the ODS idea into the bin. That would be a blanket denial of all Palestinian claims to their previous property – surely too one-sided to be anywhere near fair.
On the traditional, individualist-liberal concept of property, the owner has the non-abrogable right to say what happens on and who lives or works on that property, whether it is individually owned or owned by a waqf or municipality or central government. In my own life I have been evicted twice by owners who wanted to use the property in some way other than renting to me. In Eastern Europe much property was returned to Jews who had been dispossessed with the understanding that it was now their private say whether anybody would be evicted. Eviction is simply contained in this concept of property.
While you are asking the question from the point of view of the person (mostly Israeli Jews, but also some Palestinians) living on the property that would in the ODS revert at least on paper legally to Palestinian ownership. But please put yourself in the shoes of the Palestinian individual, family or group. How would you feel if you were told, ‘Yes, the property is yours again, but you can’t return to it or live on it.’? Financial compensation, or ownership of property elsewhere, might not be good enough for you.
Amongst ODS supporters I have encountered all thinkable variations on a solution, from ‘No evictions in any case’ to ‘Evictions with several years notice.’ Don’t forget, ODS holds that all present Israeli citizens can remain citizens in the new state, so it is not a question of being ‘evicted’ from Palestine!
The renowned researcher Salman Abu Sitta has reckoned that perhaps as few as a half a million people are actually living on property from which they could, on the conventional understanding of property rights, be evicted if the returning Palestinian owners want to actually use the property. But what matters is the principle, and these half-million cases are also important in and of themselves. I personally think it would apply to more people, considering, as you say, that 94% of Palestine was in Palestinian (non-Zionist or non-Jewish) ownership. But I am not an expert like Salman so accept his figures until they are possibly corrected.
Maybe experience would show – we don’t know yet, do we? – that many Palestinians would feel that being re-patriated as a citizen and obtaining property at least near their old property is good enough. But what about others who ‘want their house back’?
Others see that some sort of ‘political’ solution solving large numbers of cases is the only realistic possibility. This places the individual and the family or firm in the back seat, in the interests of a solution which is only on average fair.
So while it is hard and maybe unfair to kick anybody off property that he, she or their family has been on for several decades, it is likewise hard and maybe unfair to deny a Palestinian actual access to and use of land or buildings that had belonged to them possibly for centuries.
As soon as we state your question from BOTH sides, then, we have to WEIGH and compare the claims, rights and feelings involved. I admit that, as an outsider not personally affected, my sympathies are with those whose property was stolen. I think at least official titles should be transferred back. But I suppose some compromise is likely, so it is not a win-win situation.
My only solace is that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel, as this question has arisen many times in history. Look only at the USA, where I would personally argue for a much more pro-Indian regulation of property restitution. But I just don’t know anywhere near enough about this history. It needs research, starting now.
A really tough one, to my mind, but I agree it should be asked now. We shouldn’t just ‘cross that bridge when we get to it.’ What do you think?

Nathan (2 or 3 Comments up) is calling us anti-semitic (anti-Jewish) without using the word. That’s slander. He says we have ‘animosity’ towards Israel (true) and the Jews who live there (false). The Israeli Jews, in most ODS visions, would be citizens of the state, first, and second, we have no general animosity towards Israeli Jews. They must be looked at as individuals; some are upright people, some are Zionists. Nathan’s fallacy is that it is as Jews that we have animosity towards the colonists and oppressors and ethnic cleansers and murderers who took Palestine away from the Palestinians. It’s not. It’s as colonists and oppressors and ethnic cleansers and murderers. Get it? We’d have the same feelings, and sense of justice, had the invaders been Christians (remember the Crusades, and the British Mandate?) or Hindus or Martians. Slander without proof, that’s Nathan’s game.
Also, when will people stop thinking of Palestine in terms of Israel and Jews and start thinking of it in terms of Palestinians???

Nathan, you are starting from the wrong premise. Although Jeff Halper did indeed write in terms of ‘convincing’ Jewish Israelis of ODS, nobody I know in the ODS movement thinks such arguing or convincing will in the mid-term reach more than a small minority of Jewish Israelis (after all, Palestinians and democrats have been trying to argue Zionism out of Zionists for 100 years!), and they all endorse forcing the majority of Jewish Israelis to honour the Palestinians’ right of return and peacefully accept the replacement of their ethnocracy with a democracy. The obvious place to start such forcing is BDS, upgraded to include Sanctions by other states against Israel. Nothing against convincing and arguing, but without such pressure ODS will not happen.
So read some ODS literature. You’ll see that all of us are working hard on the ‘how to get there’ problem. There are other ideas than just BDS, like starting with a fully equal democracy for all now between the river and the sea, then legislating right of return. Besides, only for anti-intellectuals does failure in the beginning to already present a complete roadmap to success disqualify a vision: think anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-SA Apartheid, anti-French colonisation of Algeria and Vietnam, and even think Zionism if you want. They all succeeded, Zionism albeit only for the time being.