[R-G] An Interview with Jonathan Cook - The Future of Palestine

[Tim Murphy]

July 21 / 22, 2007
CounterPunch
Weekend Edition
www.counterpunch.org


An Interview with Jonathan Cook

The Future of Palestine

By 

SAKER


This Q&A email exchange with Jonathan Cook, a British journalist and
CounterPunch contributor who lives in Nazareth, was first published on the
Vineyard of the Saker website on 15 July 2007. 
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/

Cook's recent book, entitled "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State", was published by Pluto Press.

--

Saker:
First, I would like to turn to the "Israel-Palestine: One Country, One
State" conference you just attended organized by the Universidad Complutense
de Madrid on the future of Palestine. What was its purpose, its importance,
and what impact do you expect it to have?

Jonathan Cook:
I have no authority to speak for the group and so what I have to say should
be read only as my personal impressions of the proceedings. In the coming
weeks, I believe, we will issue something along the lines of a declaration
of principles that will give the group a collective voice for the first
time.

In early July, some 16 academics, journalists and activists met at a place
called El Escorial, just outside Madrid, to think about ways to raise the
profile of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis. None of us is
naïve about how likely we are to get a fair hearing for such a proposition
at the moment. Israel, the US and the most of the international community
have too much at stake to abandon paying lip service to the official
solution: two states for two people. But nonetheless, we are all aware that
someone has to point out that the cadaver of the two-state solution has long
been cold, and that trying to breathe life into it is only wasting valuable
time, time in which Palestinians are being killed and systematically
cleansed from what little is left of their homeland.

The importance of the meeting, to the best of my knowledge, is that it was
the first time, in modern times at least, that Israeli Jews and Palestinians
have met in a public forum to discuss ways to share the land of historic
Palestine. They were exploring together a new landscape of political
possibilities, which was an exciting moment to witness. The timing was
important too. It is clear that decades of US and Israeli machinations, and
the failure of Palestinians to see anything tangible emerge after their long
wait for a state, have started to undermine Palestinian unity. The fighting
in Gaza is a clear indication of the loss of political direction among the
leadership. The Palestinians need a new vision to replace the compromised
and corrupted one offered by Fatah, and the limited and limiting one offered
by Hamas. The argument for a single secular democratic state may offer
Palestinians just such a unifying vision of their future, and in the longer
term may persuade a growing number of Israelis that this is where their own
future in the region lies too.

None of this is going to happen overnight, and the El Escorial meeting is
intended as only the first of many to expand our understanding of the issues
and widen our base of support. Like all movements, it will need time to
articulate the core concerns in ways that will appeal to a larger audience.
The hope must be that Palestinians will soon see that one state offers them
a way out of the political dead-end into which they have been led by the
international community, and that activists too will understand that it
offers a just solution. In time, hopefully, more forward-thinking Israelis
will see that one state is the only way to secure a fair and peaceful
solution for both peoples. Then it becomes a matter of integrating the
one-state debate into a larger campaign, possibly of boycotts and sanctions,
to bring pressure on Israel.

Saker:
What was the mood of the conference participants? What did they foresee as
the likely future developments in Palestine?

Jonathan Cook:
I think the word would be sober -- though excited too to be moving the
debate forward. We all appreciated the huge task ahead of us and the urgency
with which progress needs to be made for the sake of both Palestinians and
Israelis.

We were not there to make collective predictions about developments in
Palestine beyond our own personal diagnoses. What was more significant, I
think, was a recognition from the group that the main hurdle to finding a
workable solution is Israel's continuing definition of itself as a Jewish
state. This fact is overlooked or misunderstood in most discussions of the
conflict. Observers tend to assume Israel's Jewishness is a good thing that
needs to be protected. That's a very strange approach not seen in the
treatment of other recent ethnic states: can one imagine Germany being
encouraged to foster an Aryan view of itself, or South Africa an Afrikaner
one? And similarly can one imagine an Aryan Germany or a white South Africa
being treated as a reasonable or fair negotiating partner for those it was
seeking to exploit or eradicate? That, in essence, is the problem faced by
the Palestinians.

The first thing to do in seeking a just solution is to factor in Israel's
bad faith in the negotiating process, a bad faith that derives from its need
to protect its ethnic basis. That means in any possible division of the land
promoted by Israel, whether negotiated or more likely imposed unilaterally,
the chief criterion will be demographic: how to keep a maximum number of
Jews inside the Jewish state, and keep a maximum number of non-Jews
excluded. In theory at least that could entail a meaningful division of the
land into two states (even if not a fair division for the Palestinians), but
in practice that won't happen for two reasons that are related to Israel's
need to protect its Jewishness.

First, in any division of the land, Israel will be faced with the very
serious problem of what to do with the fifth of its population who are
Palestinian, a community that is growing much faster than the Jewish one.
Palestinians inside Israel have a very deprived form of Israeli citizenship
(as opposed to those in the occupied territories who, of course, have no
citizenship), but more significantly they lack a meaningful nationality in
Israel. It is a little known fact that Israeli nationality -- which,
unusually, Israel has separated from the idea of Israeli citizenship -- does
not exist in a legal sense. Instead Israelis are classified according to
more than 130 different nationalities, including "Jew" and "Arab". This
makes sense when one understands that Israel considers itself the state of
the Jews, not Israelis. The only nationality that counts in Israel is Jewish
nationality. In this way, all Jews wherever they live -- even non-citizens
outside Israel -- are Israeli nationals by default because they are
considered Jewish nationals, whereas Palestinian citizens lack meaningful
nationality because they are not Jewish nationals.

These strange legal sleights of hand may seem abstract but they have very
real consequences. They currently sanction state-sponsored racism but, in a
two-state solution, they would pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of
Israel's Palestinian citizens. When the West encourages Israel in its ethnic
project, it effectively gives its blessing to the dark side of the Jewish
state.

And second, in any negotiation over dividing the land a powerful ethnic
state confronts a weak Palestinian national liberation movement across the
table. Israel holds all the cards but one: the morality of its cause. And
for this reason alone it must act in bad faith.

Let us imagine a scenario in which Israel genuinely agreed to the creation
of a viable Palestinian state. The result would be that a legitimate kind of
state (a Palestinian one where nationality is based on citizenship and
territory) would be living alongside an illegitimate kind of state (a Jewish
one where nationality is extra-territorial and based on ethnic belonging).
In Palestine, all those living inside the borders would be entitled to
become citizens and nationals. In theory at least, those Jews who are
currently settlers living in the occupied territories could become
Palestinian nationals (if they wanted to), as could Jews who married or
marry someone who is a Palestinian national. Depending on the terms of
Palestine's immigration policy, you or I could seek to immigrate there and
after a period of time apply for Palestinian nationality. In other words,
independent of the question of how well it is run, Palestine would be like
most other states.

None of this would be true of Israel under a two-state solution, as long as
it remained a Jewish state. It would continue seeking ways to exclude its
non-Jewish citizens from inclusion in the state, it would continue playing
legal tricks to make Israeli nationality indistinguishable from Jewish
nationality, and it would bar all non-Jews from immigrating. It would also
be opposed to its nationals intermarrying with non-Jews, as it is now, and
on these grounds alone it would not want relations between its own people
and those in a neighbouring Palestine.

In other words, in a peaceful solution in which a real Palestine was
established alongside Israel as a Jewish state, it would quickly become
clear that a Jewish state is not a normal or legitimate kind of state. Peace
would shatter the myth of Israeli normalcy and democracy. Which is a good
reason in itself why Israel has no interest in peace, or in developing a
viable Palestinian state. In fact, it has every incentive to sabotage the
secular Palestinian national movement and encourage Islamic extremism, as it
has long been doing. If Palestine becomes an Islamic ghetto-state, it will
mirror some of the "abnormalities" of the Jewish state. There can be no
change in Israel's position until its ethnic project is ended, and the only
way to bring that about it is to campaign AGAINST Israel as a Jewish state
and FOR a new single secular political entity that embraces Jews and
Palestinians as equal citizens. In other words, the question of what to do
about creating a Palestinian state is inextricably bound up with what to do
about ending the Jewish state. There cannot be a Palestinian state as long
as there is an ethnic Jewish state desiring the same territory.

Saker:
Turning to Palestine now, could you describe the situation in the West Bank?
What is the influence of Hamas and Fatah there? How much support is there,
in your opinion, for Abbas?

Jonathan Cook:
In a word, disastrous. Israel has spent decades trying to engineer the
outcome we are now seeing in the occupied territories, which should give us
a sense of how dire these latest developments are. As I have already
mentioned, Israel has always wanted to achieve two goals in the occupied
territories: to encourage divisions within the Palestinian national movement
to weaken it; and to encourage the rise of Islamic extremism so that the
conflict can be recharacterised from what it is -- a colonial conflict in
which the native people, the Palestinians, are fighting for the return of
their land -- to a manifestation of a wider "clash of civilisations" in
which Israel is on the side of civilisation and the Palestinians / Muslims
on the side of barbarism.

Among many ordinary Palestinians, there is a quite sophisticated
understanding of how things have gone wrong. Most are fully aware that the
Fatah leadership essentially became co-opted by Israel during the Oslo
process, and that it has now abandoned the task of resistance to occupation.
It is trying instead to negotiate over whatever scraps Israel and the US are
willing to offer. Which explains the large swing in support for Hamas at the
last election, in both Gaza and the West Bank. The international community
has been surprised by Hamas' tenacity since the economic blockade was
imposed, but that is partly a reflection of how firm its support has
remained among Palestinians. Many understand that resistance is more
important than ever, and that Hamas is still a party of resistance and that
Fatah no longer is.

The trap for Hamas is that its only available route to domestic legitimacy
was through elections to lead the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is a
creation of the Oslo process, and was designed to instrumentalise the
Palestinian leadership's collaboration with Israel and the US. The PA is the
institutionalisation under the Oslo process of the Palestinian leadership's
new status as Israel's security contractor. So when Palestinians voted for
Hamas to lead the resistance, ironically they also placed it at the head of
an institution, the PA, designed to impede its ability to resist. This is
not only a contradiction for Hamas but for the Palestinian public who
elected it. The immediate question facing both Hamas and its supporters is
whether it can continue to live with the tension of both being a resistance
movement and claiming its right to lead the PA. That issue has been settled
by force in Gaza, but it is yet to play out fully in the West Bank.

Abbas is damaged goods in the view of many Palestinians, but he can benefit
from several specific advantages he has in the West Bank:

1. He continues to have more support there than Gaza because things are
still far easier in the West Bank than in Gaza. Some Palestinians in the
West Bank, particularly those in the cities, may be persuaded that the Fatah
route of collaboration is better for them -- at least in the short term. The
full horrors of Gaza's imprisonment have yet to be felt in cities like
Ramallah, and some West Bankers may believe that the need for all-out
resistance can be postponed a little longer. In addition, some West Bankers,
again particularly in some of the cities, are concerned about the overtly
Islamic programme of Hamas.

2. The much larger area of the West Bank is harder to unify under a single
Palestinian resistance. Compared to the single ghetto of Gaza, the West Bank
is being turned into half a dozen ghettoes. Fatah's grassroots support is
more developed than Hamas' in the West Bank and it has more privileges to
organise across the length of the territory because of its proven
willingness to collaborate with Israel. Remember, it is mostly Hamas' MPs
who are being arrested by Israel, not Fatah's.

3. Israel will assist Abbas in any way it can to prevent Hamas taking over
the West Bank as well as Gaza. That would unify the resistance under Hamas
both ideologically and geographically, an outcome that cannot be allowed. An
amnesty has been announced for Fatah militants, so that they can be co-opted
along with Abbas and so Israeli hit squads can concentrate on killing Hamas
militants; official Fatah security forces will be trained and armed to take
on Hamas; and exiled militias like the Badr Brigade may be allowed into the
West Bank. In addition, Israel will make Abbas' collaboration look
productive, with prisoner releases and so on.

4. Life will be made hell in Gaza to warn West Bankers not to follow the
same path.

How effective these policies will be in winning over West Bankers will not
be clear for some time.

Saker:
What have you observed is going on in the Israeli public opinion? Putting
aside the settlers and their supporters, why is it that the Israeli public
is not demanding a change in policies? Don't they see that the "beat the
Arabs - they only understand force" theory has totally discredited itself?

Jonathan Cook:
The question assumes that there is room for a plurality of opinions in
Israel, a marketplace of ideas in which the most plausible triumph. But that
is not how public opinion works in Israel. As in other highly ideological
societies, Israelis are educated to regard only a narrow range of views as
acceptable. Also, as in other ethnic states, Israeli Jews are raised to
believe both that they are a chosen people (even if for many of them that is
interpreted in a secular sense) and that non-Jews will always want their
destruction. There are examples of other ethnic groups thinking in these
kinds of self-absorbed and destructive ways in modern times: the Japanese,
the Germans, and the Afrikaners. But possibly uniquely, the ethnic
chauvinism dominant in Israel and ideas of eternal Jewish victimhood are
given sanction and encouraged by many other nations, particularly in the
West's obsession with exposing anti-Semitism at the expense of all other
forms of racism and in its collaboration with Israel in placing it at the
epicentre of a clash of civilisations.

In this claustrophobic ideological atmosphere, Israelis are not ready to
listen to a counter-reality, to anything that shakes the foundations of
their worldview or their sense of entitlement. Israeli politicians are
well-used to fostering and exploiting such prejudices.

In addition, as in other societies, fear sells. Just as Americans are
presented with the image of the black mugger, the black rapist and the black
killer to keep mostly white politicians in power and the gun lobby rich, so
Israelis are presented with the image of the genocidal Arab, filled with
loathing of Jews, to secure the profits of the huge local defence industry
and the mutually beneficial ties with American Jewry. It is difficult to see
how Israelis can be dragged out of this world of illusion.

Saker:
To what degree can Israeli actions be explained by Judaism and its
teachings? Is racism towards the Arabs a determining factor here or not?

Jonathan Cook:
I am not sure how comfortable I am with the idea that there is something
inherent in Judaism that explains the development of modern Israel. I know
that some dissident Israeli intellectuals claim that ideas of separation and
chosenness in Judaism are at the root of Israeli policy -- a way of
reinventing ghetto living for the industrialised era. But I prefer to seek
explanations of Israeli political dogmas in the ethnic, rather than the
religious, qualities of the Jewish state. In fact, I would argue that Israel
is behaving in a fairly typical fashion for an ethnic state. Nazi Germany
had its obsession with the "Volk" and "Lebensraum", and the Afrikaners
developed the idea of the Bantustan to deal with the demographic threat of
the Other. Israel's racism, its land thefts and its disengagements and
wall-building can all be explained in these terms.

Saker:
What do Israelis think about the US neocons, do they see them as true
friends of Israel or not?

Jonathan Cook:
In a way, the neocons are driven by a very Israeli vision of the future.
They apply Israel's regional security paradigm to the global stage. Thus
they seek world domination for the US, just as Israel's strategists seek
regional domination. Both have a casual disdain for the Arab and Muslim
"mentality", believing that it is essentially irrational and different from
the enlightened Western mind. Both believe in "endless war". And both
believe that by creating chaos and instability around them they can
manipulate and control their enemies. Given these similarities of thought,
it may not be surprising that Israelis generally approve of neocon policy,
and that neocons are by and large besotted with Israel. Certainly Israelis
were enthusiastic about attacking Iraq, and have been keen to see the US
repeat that disastrous policy with Iran. I have written extensively about
the links between Israel and the neocons in my forthcoming book "Israel and
the Clash of Civilisations".

Saker:
Lebanon: many in the region say that the war last summer was only a first
round, and that this war will resume in the near future. Do you agree? If
yes, what do you think the Israelis could reasonably hope to achieve by
resuming this war? Do they seriously hope to "disarm Hezbollah"?

Jonathan Cook:
Almost certainly there will be another war. Israel has no interest in
regional peace, which would damage its interests, so it must wage war. The
problem is that peace would bring Israel simple anonymity: it would be just
another small state in the Middle East, but without the oil of the Persian
Gulf. Why would the US continue paying Israel billions of dollars in aid
each year if Israel were a state at peace?

As long as there is war, or impending war, Israel is sitting pretty. It
fulfils its primary function on behalf of the US, which is to keep the
region's other states nervous and unsure of what is coming next. This is a
traditional policy of divide and rule: Israel decides who will be punished
with attack, who will be isolated, who will be rewarded with a peace
agreement and US munificence. Israel can also protect the US from the
fallout when it attacks neighbouring states in line with larger US strategic
goals. Those millions of cluster bombs dropped on south Lebanon, for
example, were American-made and supplied, but the outrage is largely
directed at Israel, not the US.

There are other benefits too. War is great for Israel's massive defence
industry. As Naomi Klein recently noted, business has been booming during
the intifada as Israel develops new technologies for urban warfare, for
crowd control and for imprisoning civilian populations. That is only
possible as long as Israel is able to use the occupied territories as a
giant open-air laboratory for performing human experiments. Were there
peace, that laboratory would no longer exist and, with it, the Israeli
defence industry's profits would shrivel.

Those are the wider reasons why war is always pending for Israel. But there
are three more specific reasons why Israel needs to wage another war against
Lebanon and probably Syria too. The first is that the White House needed
Hizbullah defanged, and Syria at the very least intimidated, before it could
contemplate an attack on Iran. Israel's failure last summer has left both
Tel Aviv and Washington at a loss for how to move forward to achieve their
goals. The second is a fear widely felt in Israel that in failing to crush
Hizbullah the Israeli army has lost what is called here its "deterrence"
value: that is, the Arabs have realised it is not invincible. Israelis are
afraid that groups like Hamas and states like Syria will learn from this
episode that the Israeli army can be beaten. And third, there is a widely
expressed sense in Israel that, if the country's army does not destroy
Hizbullah, the US may one day start asking what value it is getting from
subsidising one of the most powerful armies in the world if it cannot take
on a militia of a few thousands part-time recruits. For all these reasons,
Israel needs another chance to prove itself against either Hizbullah or
Syria.

Saker:
In your experience, what does the Jewish "street" say about a possible war
between the US and Iran? Is a US attack on Iran seen as a real possibility
and what do you expect the Palestinian response to such a situation would
be?

Jonathan Cook:
The Israeli Jewish response is fairly predictable. Opinion polls show
Israelis are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about a US attack on Iran, as
they were about the invasion of Iraq. They are evenly split on the wisdom of
Israel going it alone to attack Iran. That may in part reflect a sense of
vulnerability after the humiliation in Lebanon last summer and in part a
fear of breaking with their US patron. In addition, I think Israelis may
fear that the moment for an attack on Iran has passed. Certainly there is
lot of grumbling and tantrums from Israel's rightwing pundits about Bush
abandoning Israel by failing to strike Tehran, and Olmert is sounding ever
more conciliatory. But it is always unwise to make firm predictions in this
part of the world. Current Israeli indecision regarding Iran may be a sign
of the army's need to buy time as it rethinks its strategy following its
failures in Lebanon. Certainly, as I've already argued, Israel is keen for
more war in the future, and an attack on Lebanon or Syria always has the
threat that it will expand to include other countries, particularly Iran.

By the Palestinian response, I take it that you mean the leadership. I think
that makes the improbable assumption in the current circumstances that some
kind of decipherable and unified Palestinian response is possible. Iran is a
player, even if still a minor one, in the occupied territories. Iran, it can
be reasonably assumed, is trying to finance and assist Hamas (just as it has
done with Hizbullah) despite the sectarian differences between the two.
Hamas needs all the help it can get to avert the combined opposition of
Israel, the US and the Fatah leadership to its rule, so an alliance is a
necessary move on its part. It has also been influenced by Hizbullah's
successes against Israel and will be learning the lessons, as are many other
groups in the Middle East. One is the use of rockets to weaken Israeli
resolve. Given the hostilities between Hamas and Fatah, one can probably
guess that whatever is good for Hamas (a strong Iran) is bad for the Fatah
leadership around Abbas.

Saker:
Much is made of Hezbollah's popularity in Palestine. How popular are Iran
and Khamenei or Hezbollah and Nasrallah in Palestine?

Jonathan Cook:
This is usually presented in the West in simplistic terms of Palestinians
cheering on terrorists. That makes sense to many Westerners because they
have been presented by the Western media and politicians with an image of
Iran and Hizbullah as terrorists who yearn for Israel's destruction. That
view is not really credible outside the West because it simply does not fit
the facts. If Hizbullah is a terrorist group, it is a very strange one: even
the US Congress has struggled to identify the terrorist acts it is
supposedly responsible for. Even the few terrorist acts that may have been
committed by Hizbullah, though there is a lack of proof, date back nearly
two decades.

Hizbullah was established as a Shia resistance movement to oust Israel from
its illegal occupation of Lebanon, not to destroy it. That task it carried
out with single-minded determination. Since then it has created a network of
concealed bases across south Lebanon, built up a basic armoury with the help
of Iran, and developed its own intelligence service that has penetrated
Israel's military secrets while largely preventing Israel from penetrating
its own military structures -- all in the justified belief that Israel wants
to meddle in Lebanon in ways that damage that country's security and its
interests and that Israel must therefore be repelled.

All of these achievements are reason enough why Hizbullah has earnt the
enmity of Zionists everywhere. It is also why the powerful Israel lobby has
been able to fashion the image of Hizbullah portrayed in the West. (Though
it should be noted that senior US officials have quietly expressed their
admiration of Nasrallah, including the former US Deputy Secretary of State,
Richard Armitage, who called him "the smartest guy in the Middle East".)
Palestinians, like most Arabs in the Middle East, do not read the Western
media, so they have no reason to buy into these fictions. They understand
that Nasrallah has proved himself a master tactician and strategist, both
political and military, who has used his few thousand fighters to repeatedly
humiliate the Israeli army, one of the most powerful in the world and one
backed by the US. That is an achievement that has earnt him great respect
among Palestinians, and which some of them hope to emulate in their own
resistance to Israeli occupation.

But it runs even deeper than that, I think. It is particularly obvious among
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who faced Hizbullah's rocket attacks just
like Israeli Jews -- in fact, they were killed in greater numbers
proportionally by those attacks than Jewish citizens because their towns
were not protected with bomb shelters and they were not given proper
warnings of attacks. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel, including
Christians, hold Nasrallah in almost unparalleled regard, despite their
suffering at his hands. This is not some preverse form of masochism. They
appreciate the clear distinctions he draws in his speeches between Israelis
and Jews (not all Israelis are Jews, after all) and between Jews and
Zionists (not all Jews are Zionists). He and his group, Hizbullah, are
opposed to Zionism because they believe a self-declared ethnic state is a
menace to itself, to the Palestinians and to its neighbours for many of the
reasons I have given above. Palestinian citizens appreciate that he shares,
even at a distance, their understanding of Israel's ethnic nature and its
bad faith, something that many Arab leaders -- often including the
Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories -- have failed to grasp.
If someone has proved that the Arab world does not have to be permanently
mired in fear of Israel, and manipulated by its divide and rule policies, it
is Nasrallah. He gives Palestinians, and other Arabs, back some of their
self-respect.

Feelings among Palestinians towards Iran, I suspect, are a little more
complex. Certainly no one here believes the myths being spoonfed to
Westerners about Iran planning to "wipe Israel off the map" (I am afraid I
cannot bring myself to explain yet again the translation error that has been
so readily abused by Israel, but there are plenty of Farsi experts who have
done so and their articles can be easily found on the internet). Again, it
is easy to mischaracterise Iran in the West as a terror state when the media
acts as little more than a propaganda tool for the US and Israeli
governments, and then misrepresent Palestinian support for Iran as support
for terrorism. But nonetheless, feelings towards Iran are a little more
mixed. Where Nasrallah appears devout and spiritual, the Iranian clerics
seem purist and pious. Where Nasrallah is popular, Iran's secular leader
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely populist. And whereas Hizbullah's Shia are
drawn from the Arab world, Iran's Shia are Persian. But of course, Iran is
the benefactor: Nasrallah's talents are only on display because of Iranian
money and support, so for Palestinians there is some reflected glory. And
Hamas, of course, is equally in need of a patron in Iran, if it is to follow
Hizbullah's lead.

--

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
He is the author of the forthcoming 
"Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State"
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the
University of Michigan Press. 
His website is www.jkcook.net

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