Most Israelis and Palestinians Support 1967 Borders

yosi wrote:

From Dissent Magazine:

Two Peoples, Two States

RACHEL LEVER thinks that it is very offensive for me to suggest that the “single state” she favors, a state with an Arab and Muslim majority in the heart of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, will inevitably be Arab and Muslim, rather than binational. This she takes to imply that, in my view, “lack of democracy” is “an ethnic thing” for “the Arabs.” But, of course, this is not what I said. An Arab state can in principle be democratic, as we all hope that the Egyptian Arab Republic will now become. It cannot, by definition, be binational.

Arab Palestine might, conceivably, be a democracy, treating its Jewish minority decently—with Jewish members of the Palestinian Parliament as free to criticize their government as Arab members of the Knesset now are, the Palestinian Supreme Court as willing to overrule the government in defense of minority rights as the Israeli Supreme Court is, and a Jewish judge at the head of a panel trying a Palestinian ex-president. This would be a radical change for the better compared to regional practices with regard to democracy and the treatment of minorities (not to speak of Jews) in past decades. To say that this scenario is wholly impossible would indeed be offensive—just as ignoring the danger that a very different scenario will emerge is silly and irresponsible.

But there is nothing remotely offensive to Arabs in assuming that an Arab-majority state will be Arab. Oppressing minorities is not an Arab consensus; the “Arabness” of every Arab-majority state is. As a supporter of the Jewish state, and of the right to national self-determination, I can find nothing wrong with an Arab state as such. Arab peoples, including Palestinian Arabs, have a right to national independence; a state that realizes this right is Arab—just as the state that does so for the Jewish people is Jewish. This is how all the Arab-majority states in the region (including those with large non-Arab minorities) are officially defined; some, including Egypt and Syria, have “Arab” in their name. This is not caused by the prevalence of undemocratic regimes in the region—the “Arabness” of all Arab states, and their being part of the Arab world (“the Arab nation”), is a view shared by all significant sectors of Arab public opinion. The Arab secular Left has traditionally put greater emphasis on this than “reactionary” regimes. While pan-Arab nationalism has weakened a lot since its heyday under Nasser, no significant group can afford to renounce the fundamental notions of Arab affinity and solidarity.

In the British Mandatory Palestine, the tiny Communist party split in the 1940s, when the Jewish Communists adopted the idea of a binational Jewish-Arab state. The Arab Communists insisted on Palestine being an Arab state, “part of the Arab homeland,” with Jews recognized as a national minority. That was the most non-nationalist stance that any Arab group in Palestine took. Today, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (Algiers, 1988), the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law, and the draft constitution of the future Palestinian state contain all the usual definitions: Palestine is an Arab state, part of the Arab homeland; the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation. Moreover, “Islam is the official religion”; “the principles of Islamic Sharia are a major source for legislation.” These statements (alongside provisions on religious freedom and civic equality) do not come from Hamas, but from Fatah and its “leftist” nationalist allies. Such formulations are typical of the relatively secular constitutions in the Arab world. In Egypt (with its indigenous Christian minority numbering in the millions), the constitution now says that Islam is the state religion, and Sharia is the main source of legislation. We shall see whether the new democratic Egyptian constitution, to be worked out with the Muslim Brothers’ participation, will change that.

In the draft Palestinian constitution, the Palestinian people are defined not just as part of the Arab nation but as part of the “Islamic nation” as well. This is considered “kosher” by the more secular Palestinian factions—not a “denial of the other” in regards to Palestinian Christians. The Palestinian national movements’ Western supporters are, naturally, too busy denouncing that great offender against secularism in the Middle East, Israel, to notice such things. Is there then anything offensive in assuming that the “single state” will be Muslim as well as Arab? Of course, being officially “Muslim” doesn’t necessarily mean that a state is oppressive to non-Muslims—though in practice it often does mean that; constitutional definitions are far from being the main problem for Christians in the Palestinian Authority, in Egypt, and elsewhere. There are West European countries with an official Church. The official status of the Orthodox Church in Greece goes well beyond the symbolic field. In Israel, the ties between Judaism and the state are unproblematic in some fields, but problematic in others (chiefly with regard to the personal status).

Lever speaks of a state where “ethnicity” won’t matter. But the Jews and the Arabs don’t regard themselves as two ethnic communities belonging to the same nation; they see themselves as two distinct peoples, with two national identities. Needles to say, there is no “objective” way to distinguish between ethnic and national identity: what matters, ultimately (though not to Lever), is how the people in question regard themselves. The Jewish-Israeli national identity, incidentally, must be one of the most multiethnic in the world. A notion of peoplehood that regards immigrants from Poland and Yemen as belonging to the same people is nothing if not multiethnic. To Lever, the story of Jews from Arab countries in Israel is just another occasion for Israel-bashing. In fact, this is surely the most successful case of integration between people of European and Middle Eastern origin, in roughly equal numbers, in recorded history. Israel received, in the first several years of its independence, a huge wave of immigrants—Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries—that tripled its population, making them citizens on arrival. The process of integration was, unsurprisingly, accompanied by many difficulties; cultural gaps and, indeed, cultural and ethnic prejudice certainly played their part. But anybody who knows anything about Israeli society knows that Jews from Arab countries are not just unquestionably loyal to Israel—their support for the notion of a Jewish state is even more adamant and overwhelming than that of Jews from Europe (which is overwhelming enough).

A Jewish state and an Arab state are terms signifying, in principle, the national independence of a people, rather than the domination of a certain ethnic community. Of course, any nation state is also obliged to ensure the equal rights of national minorities, if they exist within its borders—those citizens who aver a national identity (not merely “ethnicity”) different from that of the majority. Under conditions of bitter national conflict, this is not an easy task—though it is doubly vital precisely because of this. While Arab Knesset members (and many Jewish ones) criticize the flaws of the Israeli democracy in this respect, no parallel criticism is possible regarding the Arab world, for the simple reason that no Jewish community has been able to survive there. Lever holds that these Jews “migrated peacefully,” having been tempted, or “panicked” by Israel—a serious explanation indeed for the emptying of the Arab Middle East of its Jews, reflecting great moral earnestness and genuine concern for human rights. But many of those Jews ended up in the West, not in Israel; Mossad was evidently unable to brainwash or kidnap them all, and not everybody was a Zionist. It is just that their life in the Arab countries was made impossible—even for those who regarded themselves as Arab nationalists and tried to play the part. The undeniable fact is that it is Arab nationalism, rather than Zionism, that has up to now proved, in practice, incompatible with Jewish-Arab coexistence. In fairness, one should note that there have been voices among Arab intellectuals in recent years, notably in Iraq, exposing and decrying the shameful way in which Jews of Arab countries have been treated by Arab governments (“progressive” and reactionary alike) and societies. Among other things, they recall the infamous “Farhud”—the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Baghdad (in 1941, long before Israel’s war of independence). Rachel Lever would do well to listen to those brave voices. It is not an “ethnic thing” for Arabs to be incapable of subjecting Arab society to serious and honest criticism—merely a “cultural thing” for the useful dupes of Arab nationalism in the West.

Certainly, what happened to the Arab countries’ Jews was influenced by the Arab-Israeli conflict (though not just by it—witness what is happening to Arab Christians). But what happened to Arabs in this country, including the tragedy of refugees and the occupation, was also influenced by the conflict. The conflict, after all, raged, and still continues, here. Its impact, however, has been such that Jews cannot live under Arab rule thousands of miles away, while Arabs do live, in great numbers, under Israeli rule. Arab citizens of Israel, for all their criticisms (some more justified, some less), are horrified by suggestions that they should be liberated from this rule—not, God forbid, that they should move to the future Palestinian Arab state, but that this state should come to them, as part of territorial swaps. They adamantly insist that in any future two-state peace deal, their towns and villages should still be under Israeli rather Palestinian sovereignty. Has any nation state ever received such a vote of confidence from a national minority in the midst of a national conflict? I wonder how I would have felt, as an Israeli, if a Jewish community in a neighboring Arab state had faced a suggestion that the border be moved to enable its inclusion in Israel, and reacted in a similar way.

In fact, in polls that ask directly about their attitude to Israel, Israeli Arab citizens are, despite ups and downs, consistently more positive than what one usually hears from their leaders. In a January 2009 poll, conducted five days after the ceasefire in Gaza (not exactly the most favorable moment), 45 percent of them said they were “proud to be Israeli”; in 2008 the figure had been 53 percent. In a later poll, 60.8 percent of Israeli Arabs agreed that “the Jews in Israel are a people with a right to a state”, 51.6 percent accepted that “Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.” Obviously, the official formula (“Jewish and democratic”) is disliked by many, but the substantive point about the legitimacy of a Jewish state is reflected in the first question as well. And 50.5 percent (far fewer than in the past, but still a majority) agreed that “the regime of the state of Israel, despite its flaws, is democratic also as regards its Arab citizens.”

What Lever proposes is to do to all the Israeli Arabs what Avigdor Lieberman wants to do to the inhabitants of Um-el-Fahm, to their consternation: to make them part of Palestine rather than part of Israel. As for Israeli Jews, she proposes to deprive them, under the best—not necessarily the likeliest—scenario of how Arab Palestine would look, of their people’s right to national independence.

For the “single state” to be truly binational, it is not enough to get rid of the Jewish state; the Palestinians must accept that there won’t be an Arab Palestinian state either. They must agree to be the only one of the Arab peoples whose country will not be defined as Arab and part of the Arab world. This concession they must make not in favor of Berbers or Kurds, but of Zionist Jews, whose coming to the country has been regarded as a foreign invasion aimed at depriving Arab Palestine of its proper Arab character. Such a concession would be considered humiliating and illegitimate. Even if undertaken in good faith, it could not survive the disappearance of Israel as a sovereign state and the emergence of a new state, with an Arab majority, naturally regarding itself as part of the Arab world and the Arab consensus. It is one thing to speak, vaguely, about “one state” now, when this formula is a recipe for doing away with Israel, and quite another to tolerate the intolerable—that such a state, once established, would not be Arab and part of the surrounding Arab world. Under such conditions, it is silly to think that anything written in some constitutional document will allow the minority to prevent the majority from giving expression to what is not merely its worldview but its core identity.

South Africa is sometimes adduced as an example of a successful “one-state solution” that confounded pessimistic predictions. But, apart from all the other differences, the ANC (unlike some more radical groups) never espoused the idea of “black nationalism,” which would have paralleled the Arab nationalism espoused by the Palestinian national movement. It waged its whole struggle under the banner of an idea of nationhood including all the communities of South Africa—to be governed democratically. In a land with dozens of ethnic groups and languages, the notion of a national identity comprising all of them is—apart from any other consideration—the best way to avert the danger of the country being smashed to smithereens. The new South Africa is multiethnic but “mono-national”; it is based on the principle that all the country’s groups share the same national identity. The Palestinian parallel for this would have been to define the Palestinian people as including the millions of Israeli Jews but not as Arab or linked to the Arab world. It is sheer fantasy to imagine that such a notion can somehow be imposed on the Arab majority in a post-Israeli state of Palestine. Of course, the notion of Palestinian national identity, which is Arab and part of the Arab world, is perfectly legitimate and natural; it is hard to see what other notion of peoplehood the Palestinians could have developed, given their history and culture. Neither of the two peoples needs to apologize for its identity; both these identities make the analogy with South Africa irrelevant.

On the other hand, the option, dismissed by Lever, of allowing settlers to remain as a Jewish minority in the Arab Palestinian state, fully subject to its sovereignty, is publicly accepted by prominent Palestinian figures and, as recent leaks have shown, was actually raised by Palestinian representatives at talks with Israel. The claim, made by some, that a viable Palestinian state as part of a genuine two-state solution is no longer feasible, is wholly predicated on the assumption that Jews could not live in such a state—and have become, in the West Bank, too numerous to be removed in order to make room for it. That the settlement drive has been aimed at creating precisely this situation is undeniable; but why should we go along with this aim?

Here is the best way to display optimism regarding the chances of democracy and pluralism in the Arab world and to show that Arab-Jewish coexistence will henceforward be possible not only under the Zionist rule: promote a peace treaty providing for two nation states, guaranteeing national independence to both peoples, with national minorities on both sides of a peaceful border. If anything goes wrong, the gates of the Jewish state will be open.

Alexander Yakobson teaches ancient history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an op-ed writer for Haaretz.

yosi wrote:

What do your constant ideological attacks against Zionism, against the right of Israel to exist at all, even within the '67 borders, have to do with the occupation?!

If you want to claim that the occupation is the issue, fine, then argue the occupation. Leave all the crap about the illegitimacy of Israel out of it. It has no bearing on the occupation, except insofar as you're looking for any excuse to attack Israel.

yosi wrote:

That is a distinction without a difference.

yosi wrote:

So you're ok with Israel, just so long as it isn't a Jewish state? Cause that is just another way of saying that you're not ok with Israel.

yosi wrote:

Fine, but then your statement that you are ok with Israel is purely a semantic obfuscation. Israel isn't Israel in any meaningful way if it isn't Jewish. It's simply Palestine by another name.