June 28, 2008
Zionism's Dead End
Separation or ethnic cleansing? Israel's encaging of Gaza aims to achieve
both
by Jonathan Cook
The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the
Right of Return and the
Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary that
he did not favor
sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit
the penniless
[Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in
our own country …
Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be
carried out discreetly
and cir***spectly."
He was proposing a program of Palestinian emigration enforced through a
policy of strict
separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In
simple terms, he hoped
that, once Zionist organizations had bought up large areas of Palestine
and owned the main
sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying
them rights to work the
land or labor in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer,
or ethnic cleansing,
through ethnic separation.
Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of
a Palestinian
majority living in Palestine – separation and transfer – were not
necessarily alternatives but
rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they
were used together,
the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the
choice of the victims.
It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major
innovation to settler
colonialism.
In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule about
to reach parity with
the Jewish population, the threat of a Palestinian majority has loomed
large again for the
Zionists. Not surprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist
solutions to pursue,
separation or transfer, have resurfaced.
Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps
loosely associated with
Israel's center-left (Labor and Kadima) and right (Likud and Yisrael
Beiteinu). The modern
political arguments between them turn on differing visions of the nature
of a Jewish state
originally put forward by Labor and Revisionist Zionists.
To make sense of the current political debates, and the events taking
place inside Israel and
in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first examine the history of these two
principles in Zionist
thinking.
During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the dominant
Labor Zionist movement
and its leader David Ben Gurion advanced policies much in line with
Herzl's goal. In
particular, they promoted the twin principles of "Redemption of the Land"
and "Hebrew Labor",
which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed to separate
themselves from the native
population in working the land and employing only other Jews. By being
entirely self-reliant in
Palestine, Jews could both "cure" themselves of their tainted Dias****a
natures and deprive the
Palestinians of the op****tunity to subsist in their own homeland.
At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation, the
Histadrut, which
denied member****p to Palestinians – and, for many years after the
establishment of the Jewish
state, even to the remnants of the Palestinian population who became
Israeli citizens.
But if separation was the official policy of Labor Zionism, behind the
scenes Ben Gurion and
his officials increasingly appreciated that it would not be enough in
itself to achieve their
goal of a pure ethnic state. Land sales remained low, at about 6 per cent
of the territory, and
the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian labor
Instead, the Labor Zionists secretly began working on a program of ethnic
cleansing. After 1937
and Britain's Peel Re****t proposing partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion was
more open about
transfer, recognizing that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most
of the indigenous
population was cleared from within its borders.
Israel's new historians have acknowledged Ben Gurion's commitment to
transfer. As Benny Morris
notes, for example, Ben Gurion "understood that there could be no Jewish
state with a large and
hostile Arab minority in its midst." The Israeli leader****p therefore
developed a plan for
ethnic cleansing under cover of war, compiling detailed dossiers on the
communities that needed
to be driven out and then passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to
commanders in the field.
During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied of at least 80 per
cent of its
indigenous population.
In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion responded
to the political
op****tunities of the day and recalibrated the Labor Zionism of Herzl. In
particular he achieved
the goal of displacement desired by Herzl while also largely persuading
the world through a
campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was mostly
voluntary. In one of the most
enduring Zionist myths, convincingly rebutted by modern historians, we are
still told that the
refugees left because they were told to do so by the Arab leader****p.
The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude to
the native Palestinian
population. Paradoxically, given their uncompromising claim to a Greater
Israel embracing both
banks of the Jordan River (thereby including not only Palestine but also
the modern state of
Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labor Zionists to allow the
natives to remain where
they were.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 –
possibly in a rebuff to Ben
Gurion's espousal of transfer – that "it must be hateful for any Jew to
think that the rebirth
of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as
the removal of
non-Jewish citizens". The Revisionists, it seems, were resigned to the
fact that the enlarged
territory they desired would inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They
were therefore less
concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make them accept
Jewish rule.
In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly included
the notion of
separation but not necessarily transfer: an "iron wall" of unremitting
force to cow the natives
into submission. In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their
subjugation could be
reached only "through the iron wall, that is to say, the establishment in
Palestine of a force
that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure".
An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the future
Jewish state in simple
colonial terms, as a European elite ruling over the native population.
Inside Revisionism, however, there was a ****ft from the idea of separation
to transfer that
mirrored developments inside Labor Zionism. This change was perhaps more
op****tunistic than
ideological, and was particularly apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben
Gurion's success in
forging a Jewish state through transfer.
One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become a
Likud prime minister, was
leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that committed one of the worst
atrocities of the war. He
led his fighters into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they
massacred over 100
inhabitants, including women and children.
Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers
consciously inflated the death
toll to more than 250 through the pages of the New York Times. Their goal
was to spread terror
among the wider Palestinian population and encourage them to flee. He
later happily noted:
"Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of 'Irgun
butchery', were seized
with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight
soon developed into
a maddened, uncontrollable stampede."
Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused ethnic
cleansing, including
the late General Rehavam Ze'evi, whose Moledet party campaigned in
elections under the symbol
of the Hebrew character "tet", for transfer. His successor, Benny Elon, a
settler leader and
rabbi, adopted a similar platform: "Only population transfer can bring
peace".
The intensity of the separation vs transfer debate subsided after 1948 and
the ethnic cleansing
campaign that removed most of the native Palestinian population from the
Jewish state. The
Palestinian minority left behind – a fifth of the population but a group,
it was widely
assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration – was seen as an
irritation but not
yet as a threat. It was placed under a military government for nearly two
decades, a system
designed to enforce separation between Palestinians and Jews inside
Israel. Such separation –
in education, employment and residence – exists to this day, even if in a
less extreme form.
The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel's conquest of
the West Bank and
Gaza in 1967. With Israel's erasure of the Green Line, and the effective
erosion of the
distinction between Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories,
the problem of a
Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.
Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government.
Almost alone, Moshe Dayan
favored annexation of both the newly captured territories and the
Palestinian population there.
Others believed that such a move would be seen as transparently
colonialist and rapidly
degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and Palestinian
non-citizens. In their
minds, Jabotinsky's solution of an iron wall was no longer viable.
But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid
lip-service to human rights,
the government could see no way to expel the Palestinian population on a
large scale and annex
the land, as Ben Gurion had done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no
way of persuading
the world that such expulsions should be characterized as voluntary.
Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction, neither
fully carrying out a
transfer program nor enforcing strict separation. Instead it opted for an
apartheid model that
accommodated Dayan's suggestion of a "creeping annexation" of the occupied
territories that he
rightly believed would go largely unnoticed by the West.
The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from Herzl's
notion of separation
in one im****tant respect: in apartheid, the "other" population was a
necessary, even if much
abused, component of the political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian
thinker Azmi Bishara
has noted, in South Africa "racial segregation was not absolute. It took
place within a
framework of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the
system, an ingredient
of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity."
In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in Herzl's
concept of separation
was ignored for many years of Israel's occupation. The Palestinian labor
force was exploited by
Israel just as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the
Palestinians was formalized
in the Oslo accords, which were predicated on the kind of separation
needed to create a captive
labor force.
However, Yitzhak Rabin's version of apartheid embodied by the Oslo
process, and Binyamin
Netanyahu's opposition in upholding Jabotinsky's vision of Greater Israel,
both deviated from
Herzl's model of transfer through separation. This is largely why each
political current has
been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend towards
"unilateral separation".
Not surprisingly, the policy of "unilateral separation" emerged from among
the Labor Zionists,
advocated primarily by Ehud Barak. However, it was soon adopted by many
members of Likud too.
Ultimately its success derived from the conversion to its cause of Greater
Israel's
arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realized the chief manifestations of
unilateral separation, the
West Bank wall and the Gaza disengagement, as well breaking up Israel's
right-wing to create a
new consensus party, Kadima.
In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved
through imposed and
absolute separation – just as Herzl had once hoped. After the Gaza
disengagement, the next
stage was promoted by Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for
convergence, limited
withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain in
place, has been dropped,
but its infrastructure – the separation wall – continues to be built.
How will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer? How
will Herzl's original
vision of ethnic cleansing enforced through strict ethnic separation be
realized in today's world?
The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement, Israel
has been able to cut
off at will Gazans' access to aid, food, fuel and humanitarian services.
Normality has been
further eroded by sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated
small-scale invasions
that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly among
civilians.
Gaza's imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily
reality. In fact, Gaza's
condition is far worse than imprisonment: prisoners, even of war, expect
to have their humanity
respected, and be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed. Gazans
can no longer rely on
these staples of life.
The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently clear:
transfer. By depriving
Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal life, it is assumed that
they will eventually
choose to leave – in what can once again be sold to the world as a
voluntary exodus. And if
Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist thinking
they have forfeited
their right to it – just as earlier generations of Zionists believed the
Palestinian refugees
had done by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.
Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of a
modern policy of
"transfer through separation" faces severe limitations.
First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind sup****t for
Israel. Such sup****t
is likely to be undermined by the current American misadventures in the
Middle East, and a
gradual ****ft in the balance of power to China, Russia and India.
Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only from
international law
but also from the values upheld by most societies and ideologies. The
nature of Zionist
ambitions is likely to be ever harder to conceal, as is evident from the
tide of opinion polls
showing that Western publics, if not their governments, believe Israel to
be one of the biggest
threats to world order.
And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during
their slow eradication.
The historical evidence most certainly shows that they will not.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=13058
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