[R-G] Toward a Single State Solution - Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine

[Tim Murphy]

June 17, 2004
Counter Punch
http://www.counterpunch.org/

--

Toward a Single State Solution

Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine

By

NOEL IGNATIEV

Zionism as a political movement developed in the late 19th century. Its
founder, Theodore Herzl, was influenced by two phenomena: the extent of
French anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Trial, and nationalist ideals
then popular in Europe. Herzl held that Jews cannot be assimilated by the
nations in which they live, and that the only solution to the "Jewish
question" was the formation of a "Jewish state" in which all the Jews would
come together. The early Zionists contemplated as the site of the future
state Argentina or Uganda, among other locales. Herzl favored Palestine,
because, although an agnostic, he wanted to make use of the custom,
widespread among Jewish mystics, of going on pilgrimages to the "holy land"
and establishing religious communities there.

In 1868, there were 13,000 Jews in Palestine, out of an estimated population
of 400,000. The majority were religious pilgrims supported by charity from
overseas. They encountered no opposition from the Muslims, and their
presence led to no clashes with the Arab population, whether Muslim or
Christian.

In 1882, Baron Rothschild, combining philanthropy and investment, began to
bring Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe to build a plantation system along
the model the French used in Algeria. They spoke Yiddish, Arabic, Persian,
and Georgian. Significantly, Hebrew was not among the languages spoken. The
outcome of Rothschild's experiment was predictable: Jews managed the land,
while Arabs worked it. This was not the result the Zionists had in mind; a
Jewish society could not be based on Arab labor. Consequently, they began to
encourage the immigration of Jews to work in agriculture, industry, and
transport.

In 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, seeking support for Britain's
efforts in World War I, issued his famous declaration expressing sympathy
with efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionists
immediately seized upon this statement, which they interpreted to mean
support for a Jewish state. At the time of Balfour's declaration, Jews
comprised less than 10% of the population and owned 2.5% of the land of
Palestine.

The problem of building a Jewish society among an overwhelming Arab majority
came to be known as the "conquest of land and labor." Land, once acquired,
had to remain in Jewish hands. The other half of this project, known as
Labor Zionism, called for the exclusive use of Jewish labor on the land
acquired by the Jews in Palestine. The Labor Zionists maintained this dual
exclusionism (or apartheid, as we would now call it) in order to build up
purely Jewish institutions.

To achieve the conquest of the land, the Zionists set up an arrangement
whereby land was acquired not by individuals, but by a corporation, known as
the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF acquired land and leased it only to
Jews, who were not allowed to sublet it. Thus land was acquired in the name
of "the Jewish people," held for their use, and not subject to market
conditions. The idea was for the JNF to gradually acquire as much land as
possible as the basis for the expected Jewish state.

Naturally, in order for the land to serve this function, Arab labor had to
be excluded. Leases from the JNF specifically prohibited the use of
non-Jewish labor on JNF plots. One way to achieve this goal was to lease
land only to those Jews who intended to work it themselves. In some cases,
when land was bought from Arab absentee landlords, the peasants who resided
on and worked the land were expelled. Jewish landholders who refused to
exclude Arab labor could lose their leases or be faced with a boycott.

The conquest of labor pertained not only to agriculture but also to
industry. The Labor Zionists formed an institution to organize Jewish labor
and exclude Arabs: the Histadrut. The Histadrut was (and largely is) an
all-Jewish combination trade union and cooperative society providing its
members with a number of services. From the beginning it was a means of
segregating Arab and Jewish labor and bringing into existence a strictly
Jewish economic sector. Even when Arab and Jewish laborers performed
precisely the same job, Jewish workers were paid significantly higher
salaries. These policies were the death knell for any attempt to organize
labor on a non-racial basis. The "laborism" of Labor Zionism killed and
continues to kill efforts at building a unified labor movement.

Despite these policies and even with the encouragement of the British
government, in the thirty years following the Balfour Declaration, the
Zionists were able to increase the Jewish-owned portion of the land of
Palestine to only 7%. Moreover, the majority of the world's Jews showed no
interest in settling there. In the years between 1920 and 1932, only 118,000
Jews moved to Palestine, less than 1% of world Jewry. Even after the rise of
Hitler, Jews in Europe did not choose Israel: out of 2.5 million Jewish
victims of Nazism who fled abroad between 1935 and 1943, scarcely 8.5% went
to Palestine. 182,000 went to the U.S., 67,000 to Britain, and almost 2
million to the Soviet Union. After the war, the U.S. began to encourage
Jewish settlement in Palestine. Aneurin Bevin, postwar British Foreign
Minister, publicly blurted out that American policy mainly arose from the
fact that "they did not want too many of them in New York." The Pakistani
delegate to the UN was to make the same point sarcastically:

Australia, an overpopulated small country with congested areas, says no, no,
no; Canada, equally congested and overpopulated, says no; the United States,
a great humanitarian country, a small area, with small resources, says no.
This is their contribution to the humanitarian principle. But they state,
let them go into Palestine, where there are vast areas, a large economy and
no trouble; they can easily be taken in there (Weinstock, 226).

The U.S. limitation on the number of Jews allowed into the country coincided
with Zionist policy, as enunciated by David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister
of Israel: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in
Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second
alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also
the history of the People of Israel." (Yoav Gelber, "Zionist Policy and the
Fate of European Jewry (1932-1945)" Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, 199.)

This policy of attaching more importance to the establishment of Israel than
to the survival of the Jews led the Zionists to collaborate with Nazism and
even be decorated by Hitler's government. The best known case was that of
Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated the emigration to Palestine of some of
Hungary's most prominent Jews in return for his help in arranging the
orderly deportation of the remainder of Hungary's Jews to the camps. For his
efforts, Kastner was praised as an "idealist" by no less an authority than
Adolf Eichmann. (The best study of Zionist-Nazi relations is Lenni Brenner,
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.)

The Zionists knew they had to rid themselves of the Arab majority in order
to have a specifically Jewish state. Although 75,000 Jews moved to Israel
between 1945 and 1948, Jews still constituted a minority in Palestine. The
1948 war afforded the Zionists an excellent opportunity to rectify this; as
a result of the war, more than three-quarters of a million Arabs fled their
homes. The case of Deir Yasin, in which Israeli paramilitary forces, under
the command of future prime minister Menachem Begin, massacred over 250
civilians, sending a message to Palestinians that they should depart, is the
most well known example of how this flight was brought about. In his book,
The Revolt, Begin boasted that without Deir Yasin there would have been no
Israel, and adds, "The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting 'Deir Yasin'"
(quoted in Menuhin, 120). Recent writings by Israeli revisionist historians
have refuted the longtime insistence of Israeli officials that the
departures were voluntary. Some of the refugees went to neighboring Arab
countries; others became refugees in their own country. Those 750,000
expelled from their homes and their descendants, who together total 2.2
million people, make up the so-called refugee problem. Although the United
Nation has repeatedly demanded they be allowed to return, the Israeli
government has refused to agree. The war ended with the Zionists in control
of 80% of Palestine. In the next year, nearly 400 Arab villages were
completely destroyed. This was no accident but the result of deliberate
policy, as shown is the following statement by one of the most authoritative
officials of the Zionist state:

Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in our country for
both peoples together The only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least the
western half of Eretz Israel, without Arabs, and there is no other way but
to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, transfer all
of them, not one village or tribe should remain
Joseph Weitz, Deputy Chairman of the Board of directors of the Jewish
National Fund (JNF) from 1951 to 1973, former Chairman of the Israel Land
Authority (Davis, 5).

Moshe Dayan, former Defense Minister, stated in a famous speech before
students at the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1969:

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even
know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab
villages are not there either. Nahial arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz
Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and
Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place
built in this country that did not have a former Arab population (Ha'aretz,
April 4, 1969, quoted in Davis, 21).

It is a mistake to draw a moral line between Israel and the Occupied
Territories; it is all occupied territory. The 1967 war, as a result of
which Israel conquered and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the
Jordan River, and the Sinai Peninsula, was a continuation of the process
that began in 1948. It will be drearily familiar to any who know the history
of the displacement of the Indians from the lands they occupied in North
America. Today it would be called "ethnic cleansing."

The first census of the state of Israel, conducted in 1949, counted a total
of 650,000 Jews and 150,000 Arabs. The legal foundation for the racial state
was laid down in two laws passed in 1950. The first, the Law of Return,
permitted any Jew, anywhere in the world, the right to "return" to Israel.
This right did not apply to non-Jews, including the Palestinian Arabs who
had recently become refugees. In addition, the Absentee Property Law
confiscated the property of Arab "absentees," and turned it over to the
Custodian of Absentee Property. Arab refugees within their own country were
termed "present absentees" (what a phrase!), and not allowed to return to
their property. A number of refugees who attempted to do so were termed
"infiltrators," and some were shot in the attempt. Confiscated property
accounted for the vast majority of new settlements. These confiscated lands,
in accordance with the procedures that were established in the Mandate
period by the JNF, have become Israel Lands, with their own administration.
This administration, controlling 92.6% of all of the lands in Israel, only
leases these lands to Jews.

Unlike many countries, including the United States, the Israeli state does
not belong, even in principle, to those who reside within its borders, but
is defined as the state of the Jewish people, wherever they may be. That
peculiar definition is one reason why the state has to this day failed to
produce a written constitution, define its borders, or even declare the
existence of an Israeli nationality. Moreover, in this "outpost of
democracy," no party that opposes the existence of the Jewish state is
permitted to take part in elections. It is as if the United States were to
declare itself a Christian state, define "Christian" not by religious belief
but by descent, and then pass a "gag law" prohibiting public discussion of
the issue.

If one part of the Zionist project is the expulsion of the indigenous
population, the other part is expanding the so-called Jewish population. But
here arises the problem, which has tormented Israeli legal officials for
fifty years, what is a Jew? (For a century-and-a-half U.S. courts faced
similar problems determining who is white.) The Zionists set forth two
criteria for determining who is a Jew. The first is race, which is a myth
generally and is particularly a myth in the case of the Jews. The "Jewish"
population of Israel includes people from fifty countries, of different
physical types, speaking different languages and practicing different
religions (or no religion at all), defined as a single people based on the
fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham.
It is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it
seriously. In fact, given Jewish intermingling with others for two thousand
years, it is likely that the Palestinians-themselves the result of the
mixture of the various peoples of Canaan plus later waves of Greeks and
Arabs-are more directly descended from the ancient inhabitants of the Holy
Land than the Europeans displacing them. The claim that the Jews have a
special right to Palestine has no more validity than would an Irish claim of
a divine right to establish a Celtic state all across Germany, France, and
Spain on the basis that Celtic tribes once lived there. Nevertheless, on the
basis of ascribed descent, the Zionist officials assign those they have
selected a privileged place within the state. If that is not racism, then
the term has no meaning.

The Zionist commitment to racial purity has led to expressions of bigotry at
the highest levels of Israeli society that would inspire outrage in
respectable circles in the U.S. An Israeli company has required thousands of
Chinese workers to sign a contract promising not to have sex with Israelis.
A company spokesman said there was nothing illegal about the requirement.
Israeli law forbids the marriage of a Jew with a non-Jew. (Associated Press,
December 23, 2003)

Prejudice breeds arrogance: this past January the Israeli ambassador to
Sweden destroyed an art installation in a Stockholm museum which he found
offensive. The work commemorated a young Palestinian woman who killed
herself and nineteen others in an attack in Haifa. (It does not become
Americans, who learn as schoolchildren to recite the last words of Nathan
Hale, "My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country,"
to denounce Palestinian patriots as "suicide bombers.") The museum director
pointed out that if the Ambassador did not like the exhibit he was free to
leave. (Agence France Press, 17 January 2004)

The Zionists are so desperate to increase the loyal population of the state
that they are willing to admit hundreds of thousands of people, mainly from
the former Soviet Union, who do not meet the official definition of a Jew
because they have only a male grandparent or are merely married to a Jew.
Since there is no such thing as Israeli nationality in Israel (there being
only Jewish nationality and "undetermined"), these people, who do not
qualify as Jews, are therefore registered as "under consideration."

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Recently the Israeli
press reported on a group of Indians from Peru who had converted to Judaism
and moved to Israel, where they were relocated on what was once Palestinian
land. Nachson Ben-Haim (formerly Pedro Mendosa) said he had no problem with
that. "You cannot conquer what has in any case belonged to you since the
time of the patriarch, Abraham." Ben-Haim said he was looking forward to
joining the Israeli army to defend the country. Ben-Haim and his
coreligionists had moved to Israel with the agreement of the Jewish
community in Peru, which did not want them because of the Indians' low
socioeconomic status." (Ha'aretz, 18 July 2002.)

The Peruvian case points to the second criterion for being recognized as
Jewish: conversion by an approved religious official, which means Orthodox
rabbis only. In Israel today, Conservative and Reform rabbis are prohibited
from leading their congregations, there is no civil marriage for Jews,
and-in a measure reminiscent of medieval Spain-all residents support the
established church, in this case the Orthodox rabbinate. The stranglehold of
organized religion in a state where the majority of the Jewish population is
secular and even atheistic is the price paid to maintain the Biblical
justification for Zionist occupation. "God does not exist," runs the popular
quip, "and he gave us this land."

Israel is a racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed
descent or the approval of the superior race. In this respect it resembles
the American South prior to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting
Rights acts, Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and, yes, Hitlerite
Germany. But in its basic structures it most closely resembles the old South
Africa. It is therefore not surprising that Israel should have developed a
close alliance with South Africa when that country was still under
apartheid. After the first talks held in 1970 between Shimon Peres and South
Africa's defense minister, Botha, cultural, commercial, and military
cooperation between the two racial regimes developed. These relations were
publicly celebrated during the visit of South African Prime Minister Vorster
to Israel in 1976-the same Vorster who held during the Second World War the
rank of general in the pro-Nazi organisation Ossewabrandwag

Of course Israel's greatest support comes from the United States, $3 to $5
billion a year, more than what the U.S. gives to any other country and
exceeding the total of U.S. grants to the whole of Africa south of the
Sahara. Every shell fired into a Palestinian village, every tank used to
bulldoze a home, every helicopter gunship is paid for by U.S. dollars.

Is one permitted to say above the level of a whisper that U.S. policy toward
Israel has something to do with Jewish influence in the U.S.? Perhaps Nobel
Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa can get away with it:
"The Israel government," he observed, "is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.]
People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish
lobby is powerful-very powerful" (Guardian 29 April 2002).

Not only does Zionism shape U.S. policy, it stifles discussion of
alternatives. To cite a personal example: Two years ago a PBS reporter
interviewed me on the eve of the UN-sponsored conference on racism about to
be held in S. Africa. I made some remarks about Israel, and afterwards I
asked her if she would use what I said. "Of course not," she replied. "I
agree with you, and so do all the journalists I know, but we can't run any
criticism of Israel without following it by at least ten refutations."
Harvard Professor Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum
have begun a website, Campus Watch," to denounce academics deemed to have
shown "hatred of Israel." Students are to inform on professors.

The greatest ideological weapon in the Zionist arsenal is the charge of
anti-semitism. Students and faculty members at Harvard begin a campaign to
make the university sell off its stock in companies that sell weapons to
Israel (modeled on past campaigns seeking divestment from South Africa), and
the president of Harvard denounces the organizers of the campaign as
"antisemitic in effect, if not in intent." A faculty committee at the
Massachusetts College of Art invites eminent poet Amiri Baraka to deliver a
lecture, and members of the Critical Studies faculty circulate a petition
calling upon the college president to denounce Baraka as an antisemite,
citing as its main evidence a poem he wrote about the historic oppression of
black people in which he refers to reported actions by the Israeli
government prior to the World Trade center attack. As the Israeli
commentator Ran HaCohen points out:

When Palestinians attack soldiers of Israel's occupation army in their own
village, it's anti-semitism. When the UN general assembly votes 133 to 4 to
condemn Israel's decision to murder the elected Palestinian leader, it means
that every country on the planet except the U.S., Micronesia, and the
Marshall Islands is antisemitic.

This is ironic, he says, given present reality:

With one revealing exception (Israel, where non-orthodox religious Jews are
discriminated against), Jews enjoy full religious freedom wherever they are.
They have full citizenship wherever they live, with full political, civic
and human rights like every other citizen..

Nowadays, an Orthodox Jew can run for the most powerful office on earth, the
president of the United States. A Jew can be mayor of Amsterdam in
"anti-semitic" Holland, a minister in "anti-semitic" Britain, a leading
intellectual in "anti-semitic" France, a president of "anti-semitic"
Switzerland, editor-in-chief of a major daily in "anti-semitic" Denmark, or
an industrial tycoon in "anti-semitic" Russia. [A]nti-semitic Germany gives
Israel three military submarines, anti-semitic France has proliferated to
Israel the nuclear technology for its weapons of mass destruction, and
anti-semitic Europe welcomes Israel as the single non-European country to
everything from football and basketball leagues to the Eurovision Song
contest, and has granted Israeli universities a special status for
scientific fund-raising.

"The use of alleged anti-semitism is morally despicable," says HaCohen.

. People abusing this taboo in order to support Israel's racist and
genocidal policy towards the Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate the
memory of those Jewish victims, whose death is meaningful only inasmuch as
it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind against all kinds of
discrimination, racism, and genocide ("Abusing 'anti-semitism'", Sept. 29,
2003; some of Ran HaCohen's writings can be found at www.antiwar.com).

If I accomplish nothing else in this talk, I hope to create space for some
who are repelled by Israeli actions but are held back from condemning
Zionism by a desire not to be antisemitic.

Does what I have just said mean that I dismiss the possibility of a revival
of anti-semitism? No, it does not. History shows that anti-semitism ebbs and
flows, and that it may return. Time prevents me from exploring that history
in any depth; let me instead recommend two books: The Jewish Question by
Abram Leon and The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (in
particular the first part, "anti-semitism"). For now I will say only that
anti-semitism (or more accurately anti-Jewish sentiment) is rooted neither
in human nature or Christian theology; it is the product of social
relations, including the historic concentration of Jews as representatives
of commerce in non-commercial societies. The peculiar occupational
distribution of European Jews led members of the dispossessed classes among
the non-Jewish population to direct their animosity toward the Jews as the
visible agents of oppression. "anti-semitism," as the 19th-century German
Socialist August Bebel put it, "is the socialism of fools." It is not beyond
historical explanation (as is implied by a term like "The Holocaust," which
takes anti-semitism out of history and relocates it the realm of natural
phenomena).

But of course the Jews by themselves could not determine U.S. Middle East
policy, any more than the Florida Cubans by themselves could determine U.S.
Caribbean policy. By no means does all the organized support for Israel
inside of U.S. politics comes from Jews. Aside from imperialist
interests-and it is not clear whether Israel is an asset or a liability in
this regard-Israel has gained support from a surprising quarter. From the
Guardian, Feb. 28, 2002:

At first sight, the scene is very familiar: one that happens in Washington
DC and other major American cities all the time. On the platform, an Israeli
student is telling thousands of supporters how the horrors of the year have
only reinforced his people's determination. "Despite the terror attacks,
they'll never drive us away out of our God-given land," he says.

This is greeted with whoops and hollers and the waving of Israeli flags and
the blowing of the shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram's horn. Then comes the
mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, who is received even more rapturously. "God
is with us. You are with us." And there are more whoops and hollers and
flag-waves and shofar-blows.

But something very strange is going on here. There are thousands of people
cheering for Israel in the huge Washington Convention Centre. But not one of
them appears to be Jewish, at least not in the conventional sense. For this
is the annual gathering of a very non-Jewish Organization indeed: the
Christian Coalition of America.

[T]here is little doubt that, last spring, when President Bush dithered and
dallied over his Middle East policy before finally coming down on Israel's
side, he was influenced not by the overrated Jewish vote, but by the opinion
of Christian "religious conservatives"-the self-description of between 15
and 18% of the electorate. When the president demanded that Israel withdraw
its tanks from the West Bank in April, the White House allegedly received
100,000 angry emails from Christian conservatives.

What's changed? Not the Book of Genesis

What has really changed is the emergence of the doctrine known as
"dispensationalism", popularized in the novels of the Rev. Tim LaHaye and
Jerry Jenkins.

Central to the theory is the Rapture, the second coming of Christ, which
will presage the end of the world. A happy ending depends on the conversion
of the Jews. And that, to cut a long story very short, can only happen if
the Jews are in possession of all the lands given to them by God. In other
words, these Christians are supporting the Jews in order to abolish them.

Oh yes, agreed Madon Pollard, a charming lady from Dallas who was selling
hand-painted Jerusalem crystal in the exhibition hall at the conference.
"God is the sovereign. He'll do what he pleases. But based on the scripture,
those are the guidelines." She calls herself a fervent supporter of Israel

This conference began with a videotaped benediction straight from the Oval
office. Some of the most influential Republicans in Congress addressed the
gathering including-not once, but twice-Tom DeLay [majority leader of the
House of Representatives, arguably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill].

"Are you tired of all this, are you?" he yelled to the audience.

"Nooooooo!" they roared back. "Not when you're standing up for Jews and
Jesus, that's for sure," he replied.

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, [was] reportedly greeted "like a
rock star" by Christian evangelicals in Jerusalem last month.

DeLay was followed by Pat Robertson, the coalition's founder, sometime
presidential candidate and the very personification of the successful
American TV evangelist. Robertson cites the stories of Joshua and David to
prove Israel's ownership of Jerusalem "long before anyone had heard of
Mohammed".

These are the people my grandfather warned me about-the people who want to
ban Darwin from the schools, who want to send to camps people who have sex
with members of their own sex-and antisemeets (as he used to say),
Jew-haters to the backbone of their souls.

Osama Bin-Laden was telling no more than the truth when he said that the
Muslim world is facing an alliance of Zionists and Crusaders.

Before I get around to proposing solutions, I want to address the present
state of the Israeli peace movement. As everyone knows, there are forces
inside of Israel who oppose the government now in office. Some of these
people, particularly the soldiers who refuse service in what they call the
occupied territories or who refuse to carry out atrocities such as bombing
civilians, and those who encourage them, are people of exemplary courage.
Yet all of them, with one notable exception (to which I shall return), are
handicapped and in the long run rendered ineffective by their acceptance of
the fundamental premise of Zionism, the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
"Land for peace" implies the permanent partition of Palestine. It was under
the leadership of the Labour Party, with which much of the opposition is
affiliated, that the initial dispossession and exclusion of the Palestinian
people from their homeland took place and the expansion into the West Bank,
the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights was carried out.

History has shown, in Ireland, India, and everyplace else it has been tried,
that partition of a territory along lines of descentæwhether called "racial"
or "religious"æis a guarantee of permanent war. It is understandable that
some Palestinians, having been subjected to torture for over two
generations, have reluctantly agreed to accept as a substitute for justice a
Palestinian State built on less than a fourth of their original land. But
they are making a mistake. Such a State, if it is ever established, will be
a Bantustan, a reservation where the only attributes of a free nation will
be a flag and a national anthem. I am no more a Palestinian Zionist than I
am a Jewish Zionist.

What solution, therefore, do I propose? A simple and moderate one: within
historic Palestine, the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan
River, live ten million people. I propose that there be established there a
single state, in which every person who declares his intention to live there
and adopt citizenship be recognized as a citizen and have one vote. I
propose further that the special advantages given to Jews be terminated,
that the Palestinians who were forced into exile after 1948, and their
descendants, be granted the right to live there, and that the state
undertake practical measures to make it possible for them to do so by
building housing and extending to them to right to rent or buy, if necessary
providing funds to help them. I propose further that both Hebrew and Arabic
be declared official state languages to be taught in the schools, that all
residents be granted the right to publish newspapers and maintain cultural
institutions in any language they choose, that the special position of
Orthodox Judaism be ended and that the state declare freedom of worship and
make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.

It is a simple and, I repeat, a moderate program. It does not entail driving
anybody into the sea, and it recognizes the elementary right of people to
live where they choose.

Some might object that such a thing is impossible, that after all the blood
that has been shed and the bitterness that has accumulated, it will not be
possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together. To that argument I
have three responses: the first is the experience of South Africa, a place
whose history of bitterness is no less than Palestine's; there the
establishment of majority rule did not cause the gods to weep or the earth
to open and swallow the people. My second response comes from Sherlock
Holmes: after you have eliminated all the impossible solutions, Watson, the
one remaining, no matter how improbable, must be the right one. My third
response is to cite recent indications that the idea of the single
democratic secular state-once the official goal of the PLO and then
abandoned under U.S. pressure-is once again emerging as a pole of
discussion. Its reemergence is in part a response to Israel's gobbling up so
much territory that nothing is left for a Palestinian state. The new reality
is acknowledged by no less than columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who quotes a
prominent Israeli Arab:

If Palestinians lose their dream to have an independent state, then the only
thing that might guarantee for them a dignified life will be asking to live
in one state with the Israelis. When this struggle starts, it will find
allies among the one million Palestinian Arabs inside Israel We will say,
'Don't evacuate even a single West Bank settlement. Just give us the vote
and let us be part of one community.'

Friedman reports a poll showing that 25 to 30 percent of Palestinians now
support the idea of one state-"a stunning figure, considering it's never
been proposed by any Palestinian or Israeli party." He calls it "the law of
unintended consequences." (New York Times, Sept. 14, 2003)

The one exception to my earlier generalization about the Israeli opposition
is a fraction of Orthodox Jews in Israel, who reject the State of Israel on
religious grounds; according to them, the exile from the holy land was
divinely ordained, and therefore the Jews are to live among the nations in
every corner of the earth and not attempt to establish a State before the
coming of the Messiah. Allow me to read from a statement by one of them,
Rabbi Mordechi Weberman:

It is precisely because we are Jews that we march with the Palestinians and
raise their flag! It is precisely because we are Jews that we demand that
the Palestinian peoples be returned to their homes and properties! Yes, in
our Torah we are commanded to be fair.
We are called upon to pursue justice. And, what could be more unjust then
the century-old attempt of the Zionist movement to invade another people's
land, to drive them out and steal their property?

We have no doubt that would Jewish refugees have come to Palestine not with
the intention of dominating, not with the intention of making a Jewish
state, not with the intention of dispossessing, not with the intention of
depriving the Palestinians of their basic rights, that they would have been
welcomed by the Palestinians, with the same hospitality that Islamic peoples
have shown Jews throughout history. And we would have lived together as Jews
and Muslims lived before in Palestine in peace and harmony.

To our Islamic and Palestinian friends around the world, please hear our
messageThere are Jews around the world who support your cause. And when we
support your cause we do not mean some partition scheme proposed in 1947 by
a UN that had no right to offer it.

When we say support your cause we do not mean the cut off and cut up pieces
of the West Bank offered by Barak at Camp David together with justice for
less than 10% of the refugees.

We do not mean anything other than returning the entire land, including
Jerusalem, to Palestinian sovereignty!

At that point justice demands that the Palestinian people should decide if
and how many Jews should remain in the Land.

We have attended hundreds of pro-Palestinian rallies over the years and
everywhere we go the leaders and audience greet us with the warmth of Middle
Eastern hospitality. What a lie it is to say that Palestinians in particular
or Muslims in general hate Jews. You hate injustice. Not Jews.

Fear not my friends. Evil cannot long triumph. The Zionist nightmare is at
its end. It is exhausted. Its latest brutalities are the death rattle of the
terminally ill.

We will yet both live to see the day when Jew and Palestinian will embrace
in peace under the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem. And ultimately when
mankind's Redeemer will come the sufferings of the present will long be
forgotten in the blessings of the future.
(http:www.marchforjustice.com/becausewearejews.php)

I am not a believer, but I find Rabbi Weberman's words moving.

One last point: I spoke earlier about the possibility of a resurgence of
anti-semitism in the United States. In 1991 George H.W. Bush, the father of
the man who sits in the White House and the only member of his family ever
to have been elected president, demanded that the Israelis stop building new
settlements in Palestinian territory. Unlike previous presidents, Bush
sounded serious, threatening to block billions in loan guarantees if Israel
disobeyed. As might have been predicted, the dominant voices among American
Jews were outraged, and Bush responded by complaining at a press conference
that "Jews work insidiously behind the scenes." On another occasion he
reminded critics that the U.S. gives "Israel the equivalent of $1,000 for
every Israeli citizen," a remark that detractors took as antisemitic. Later
on Bush's Secretary of State James Baker made his famous "fuck the Jews"
remark in private conversation, noting that Jews "didn't vote for us
anyway." And it was true: when he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush got
smallest percentage of the Jewish vote of any Republican since 1964.

The present occupant of the White House seems for the time being to have
recouped much of his party's loss of favor among Jews, in part due to his
appointment of so many to positions of power and influence in his
administration. But I will go out on a limb and make a prediction (something
I rarely do because I hate to be wrong): one-sided support for Israel, while
it may win votes among American Jews and some fundamentalist Christians, is
not necessarily wise from the standpoint of U.S. oil interests, and may even
cost votes among that increasing number of Americans who can pick up the
newspaper almost any day and see another story about Israeli tanks
surrounding the residence of the Palestinian president, or massacring
children, or assassinating a crippled half-blind cleric. I predict that if
Dubya manages to extend his control of the White House in 2004, he will
present the bill to whoever is in power in Israel, and that bill will
include withdrawal from some of the territories occupied after 1967. If the
Israelis respond negatively to this demand, which there is every reason to
believe they will, and are supported by American Jews, which there is every
reason to believe they will be, the younger Bush, already born-again, will
be reborn yet one more time and will start making remarks about special
minorities with divided loyalties and so forth. In other words, he will
stoke up anti-semitism, carefully of course, as befits the leader of the
free world. And he will find a tremendous response, more than anyone
anticipates, from many ordinary people who are tired of picking up the tab
for the number one outlaw state in the Middle East, the state that has
defied scores of United Nations resolutions, been condemned by the UN more
than any other member or non-member, the only state in the Middle East that
possesses actual weapons of mass destruction.

Cynthia McKinney, Afro-American Congresswoman from Atlanta, was the most
outspoken critic in Congress of U.S. Middle East policy, including
unconditional support for Israel. As a result, Jewish groups around the
country targeted her and, by channeling money to her opponent, succeeded in
defeating her bid for reelection in 2002. Were they within their legal
rights to do so? Of course they were; there is no law barring people in one
district from contributing to a campaign in another. But do they think their
intervention went unnoticed by black voters in Atlanta and around the
country?

If American Jews insist on identifying themselves with Israel, equating
anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, should they be surprised if others make the
same mistake?

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Noel Ignatiev is author of How the Irish Became White, cofounder and
coeditor of Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism, and a teacher at
the Massachusetts College of Art. This essay is based on a talk he delivered
this past March at the Massachusetts College of Art

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http://www.counterpunch.org/ignatiev06172004.html

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