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The End Of
Israel?
By Hannah Mermelstein
12/22/07 "Electronic
Intifada" -- - -
I am feeling optimistic about Palestine.
I know it sounds crazy. How can I use "optimistic" and
"Palestine" in the same sentence when conditions on the ground
only seem to get worse? Israeli settlements continue to expand
on a daily basis, the checkpoints and segregated road system are
becoming more and more institutionalized, more than 10,000
Palestinian political prisoners are being held in Israeli jails,
Gaza is under heavy attack and the borders are entirely
controlled by Israel, preventing people from getting their most
basic human needs met.
We can never forget these things and the daily suffering of the
people, and yet I dare to say that I am optimistic. Why? Ehud
Olmert. Let me clarify. Better yet, let's let him clarify:
"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we
face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights. As
soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."
That's right, the Prime Minister of Israel is currently trying
to negotiate a "two-state solution" specifically because he
realizes that if he doesn't, Palestinians might begin to demand,
en masse, equal rights to Israelis. Furthermore, he worries, the
world might begin to see Israel as an apartheid state. In
actuality, most of the world already sees Israel this way, but
Olmert is worried that even Israel's most ardent supporters will
begin to catch up with the rest of the world.
"The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America,
will be the first to come out against us," he told Haaretz,
"because they will say they cannot support a state that does not
support democracy and equal voting rights for all its
residents."
Perhaps Olmert is giving American Jews too much credit here, but
he does expose a basic contradiction in the minds of most
American people, Jewish and not: most of us -- at least in
theory -- support equal rights for all residents of a country.
Most of us do not support rights given on the basis of ethnicity
and religion, especially when the ethnicity/religion being
prioritized is one that excludes the vast majority of the
country's indigenous population. We cannot, of course, forget
the history of ethnic cleansing of indigenous people on the
American continent. But we must not use the existence of past
atrocities to justify present ones.
I am optimistic not because I think the process of ethnic
cleansing and apartheid in Israel/Palestine is going to end
tomorrow, but because I can feel the ideology behind these
policies beginning to collapse. For years the true meaning of
political Zionism has been as ignored as its effects on
Palestinian daily life. And suddenly it is beginning to break
open. Olmert's comments last week are reminiscent of those of
early Zionist leaders who talked openly of transfer and ethnic
cleansing in order to create an artificial Jewish majority in
historic Palestine.
We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to
use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places
-- then we have force at our disposal. - David Ben-Gurion,
Israel's "founding father" and first prime minister, 1937
So this idea of a "two-state solution" a la Olmert -- which I
would argue provides neither a "state" nor a "solution" for the
Palestinian people -- is the new transfer. It is no longer
popular in the world to openly discuss expulsion (though there
are political parties in Israel that advocate this), but Olmert
hopes that by creating a Palestinian "state" on a tiny portion
of historic Palestine, he can accomplish the same goal:
maintaining an ethno-religious state exclusively for the Jewish
people in most of historic Palestine. His plan, as all other
plans Israeli leaders have tried to "negotiate," ignores the
basic rights of the two-thirds of the Palestinian population who
are refugees. They, like all other refugees in the world, have
the internationally recognized right to return to their lands
and receive compensation for loss and damages. This should not
be up for negotiation.
So why am I optimistic? Why do I think Olmert will fail, if not
in the short term, at least in the long term? There are many
signs.
The first and most important is that Palestinian people are
holding on. Sometimes by a thread, but holding on nonetheless.
Despite the hope of many in Israel, Palestinians will not
disappear. They engage in daily acts of nonviolent resistance,
from demonstrations against the wall and land confiscation, to
simply remaining in their homes against all odds. Young people
are joining organizations designed to preserve their culture and
identity. Older Palestinians have said to me, "We lived through
the Ottoman Empire, we lived through the British Mandate, we
lived through Jordanian rule, and we will live through Israeli
occupation." This too shall pass.
In Israel, it seems that within the traditional "Zionist left,"
Jewish Israelis are beginning to have open conversations about
the exclusivity of Zionism as a political ideology, and are
questioning it more and more.
In the US, I have been traveling around speaking to groups about
Palestine, and they get it. Even those whose prior information
has come only from US mainstream media, when they hear what is
actually happening, they get it. When we explain the difference
between being Jewish (a religion or ethnicity), Israeli (a
citizenship), and Zionist (an ideology), people understand.
"Does Israel have a right to exist?" people ask. What does that
mean? Do countries really have rights, or do people have rights?
The Jewish people have a right to exist, the Israeli people have
a right to exist, but what does "Israel" mean? Israel defines
itself as the state of the Jewish people. It is not a state of
its citizens. It is a state of many people who are not its
citizens, like myself, and is not the state of many people who
are its citizens, like the 20 percent of its population that is
Palestinian. So if we ask a Palestinian person, "Do you
recognize the right for there to be a country on your historic
homeland that explicitly excludes you?" what kind of response
should we expect?
So when Olmert warns that we will "face a South African-style
struggle for equal voting rights" and that "the state of Israel
[will be] finished," I get a little flutter of excitement. I
think of the 171 Palestinian organizations who have called on
the international community to begin campaigns of boycott,
divestment, and sanctions against Israel until Israel complies
with international law. This is already a South African-style
struggle, and we outside of Palestine need to do our part.
Especially those of us who live in the US, the country that
gives Israel more than $10 million every single day, must take
responsibility for the atrocities committed in our name and with
our money.
Ultimately, this is our role as Americans. It is to begin
campaigns in our churches, synagogues, mosques, universities,
cities, unions, etc. It is not to broker false negotiations
between occupier and occupied, and it is not to muse over
solutions the way I have above. But one can dream. And as a
Jewish-American, I know that while it might be scary to some,
while it will require a lot of imagination, the end of Israel as
a Jewish state could mean the beginning of democracy, human
rights, and some semblance of justice in a land that has almost
forgotten what that means.
Hannah Mermelstein is
co-founder and co-director of
Birthright Unplugged,
which takes mostly Jewish North American people into the West
Bank to meet with Palestinian people and to equip them to return
to their own communities and work for justice; and takes
Palestinian children from refugee camps to Jerusalem, the sea,
and the villages their grandparents fled in 1948, and supports
them to document their experiences and create photography
exhibits to share with their communities and with the world.
Anna Baltzer helped contribute to this article.
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