A Somber Anniversary

The Nation: The Long Conflict With The Palestinians Casts A Pall On Israel's 60th Birthday

(The Nation)  This column was written by Avi Shlaim.

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Israelis approach the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of their state in a subdued and somber mood. Israeli society is deeply divided, and there is no consensus on how to mark the milestone. On the one hand, Israel can boast some stunning successes: a democratic polity with universal suffrage; a highly developed, some might say overdeveloped, multiparty system; an independent judiciary; a vibrant cultural scene; progressive educational and health services; a high standard of living; and a per capita GDP almost the size of Britain's.

The ingathering of the exiles has worked. Israel's population has reached 7,241,000, nearly ten times what it was in 1948. Forty-one percent of the world's Jews live in the Jewish state, speaking the Hebrew language that was confined to liturgy when Zionism was born at the end of the nineteenth century. In its central aim of providing the scattered Jews with a haven, instilling in them a sense of nationhood and forging a modern nation-state, Zionism has been a brilliant success. And these achievements are all the more remarkable against the background of appalling tragedy: the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

On the other hand, some failures can be noted. The most pronounced one has been the failure to resolve the conflict with the Arabs, which has accompanied the Zionist enterprise from the very beginning. That conflict involved neighboring Arab states, but in origin and in essence it was a clash between two movements for national liberation: the Jewish one and the Palestinian one. In 1948 the Zionist movement realized its aim of Jewish national self-determination in Palestine. Israel's War of Independence was the Palestinians' catastrophe, al-Nakba in Arabic.

The moral case for the establishment of an independent Jewish state was strong, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The case for a Jewish state was also bolstered by the international norm of self-determination for national groups. Based on this norm, the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947, provided a charter of international legitimacy for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, there is no denying that the establishment of the State of Israel involved a massive injustice to the Palestinians. Sixty years on, Israel still has not arrived at a reckoning of its sins against the Palestinians, a recognition that it owes the Palestinians a debt that must at some point be repaid.

The conflict with the Palestinians, and with the Arab world at large, has cast a very long shadow over Israel's life. For the first forty-five years of the state's existence, Israel's leaders were unwilling to discuss the right of the Palestinians to national self-determination. In 1969 Prime Minister Golda Meir adopted an extreme position--hardly an uncommon one at the time--in denying that a Palestinian people existed at all. But the dilemma had been there all along, and the early Zionists were well aware of it, even if they seldom talked about it. The dilemma, in a nutshell, was that the Jewish aspiration to sovereignty in Palestine could not be reconciled with the Palestinian people's natural right to sovereignty over the same country. This was the "hidden question" that Zionist teacher Yitzhak Epstein addressed in an article in 1907. It was not long before the hidden question was transformed into an open and deeply contentious issue.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement and spiritual father of the Likud Party, was the first major Zionist leader to acknowledge that the Palestinians were a nation and that they could not be expected to renounce voluntarily their right to hold on to their patrimony. It was, he argued in two seminal articles in 1923, therefore pointless at that early stage in the Zionist enterprise to hold a dialogue with the Palestinians; the Zionist program could only be executed unilaterally and by force. Jabotinsky's prescription was to build the Zionist enterprise behind an "iron wall" that the local Arab population would not be able to break. Yet Jabotinsky was not opposed to talking with the Palestinians at a later stage. On the contrary, he believed that after knocking their heads in vain against the ramparts, the Palestinians would eventually recognize that they were in a position of permanent weakness; that would be the time to enter into negotiations with them about their status and national rights in Palestine.

In a way, this is what happened. The history of the State of Israel is a vindication of Jabotinsky's strategy of the iron wall. The Arabs--first the Egyptians, then the Palestinians and then the Jordanians--recognized Israel's invincibility and were compelled to negotiate with it from a position of palpable weakness. The real danger posed by the strategy of the iron wall was that Israeli leaders less sophisticated than Jabotinsky would fall in love with a particular phase of it and refuse to negotiate even when there was someone to talk to on the other side.

Paradoxically, the politicians of the right, the heirs to Jabotinsky, were prone to fall in love with the iron wall and to adopt it as a permanent way of life. Jabotinsky's iron wall encompassed a theory of change in Jewish-Palestinian relations leading to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, by contrast, conceived of the iron wall as a bulwark against change and an instrument for keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience to Israel.

The first serious attempt to transcend the iron wall was made by Yitzhak Rabin following the Labor Party's victory at the polls in June 1992. On the face of it, Rabin was an unlikely candidate for overturning Israel's traditional policy toward the Arab world. He had spent a lifetime as a soldier, building up the iron wall for the dual purpose of deterring and withstanding Arab attacks. As chief of staff in June 1967, he was associated with Israel's most decisive victory over its enemies and the extension of the wall to enclose more of their territories. After the war, he sided with the majority in the Labor Party in preferring a settlement with Jordan's King Hussein to a settlement with the Palestinians. During his first term as prime minister, in the 1970s, Rabin remained implacably opposed to any negotiations with the PLO.

But during his second term, after exhausting all alternatives, Rabin grasped the nettle, which meant negotiating with the PLO. The upshot was the Oslo Accord and the historic handshake with PLO chairman Yasir Arafat at the White House in September 1993. What the accord amounted to was PLO recognition of Israel's right to exist, Israeli recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and an understanding between the two sides that the remaining differences between them would be settled by peaceful means.

[bluestardad]

STOP SENDING PALESTINIAN AID THRU ISRAELI BANKS!

QUIT GIVING BOTH SIDES WEAPONS!

START WAR CRIMES TRIALS NOW ON THE IRAQ WAR!

GET THE DUEL PASSPORT HOLDING ISRAELIS NEOCONS OUT OF AMERICAN POLITICS!


AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!

[egee33]

This is a load of nonsense written by a self-hating Israeli. The truth is that the Arabs have always--and still do--intend to eradicate Israel. As is obvious from the rise of Hamas, they have no intention of letting Israel live in peace. To claim that Israel''s hard line is impeding the cause of peace is a sham. There can be no peace as long as the Arabs are only interested in terror. Until then, Israel must think of its own preservation first and foremost.

[sharncedar]

Palestinian "statehood" is and has always been a gerrymandering trick. They take the Arabs and Christinas,who outnumber the bigot Jews 2 to 1, and separate out 60% of them into their own "nation" which coincidentally has no national offices doesn''t control its own borders or even electricity but surprise surprise surprise they don''t get to vote (they are in a separate "state" wink wink) leaving the bigot Jews as 66% majority in the voting area. Then the bigot Jews install 100% bigoted Jewish government which leaves Christians or Arabs no rights at all. That''s how an outnumbered group of lawyers manage to create a dictatorship while pretending its a democracy.

That''s the only purpose of a Palestinian "state" its a pure sham while the bigot racists who rule the fake Jewish state try to figure out how to genocide the Christiansa nd Arabs in the region.

[hk94]

I see the anti-semites have shown up in force. The truth is that the Palestinians never followed through on the peace deal signed by Arafat (or any of their promises) and have no intention to.

If the Arabs were to give up their arms there would be no more war in the middle east. If the Isrealis gave up their arms there would be no more jews in the middle east.

[johnshaft4]

Lets nuke the little pricks and be done with them. Nothing more then a collection of whiney, greedy, back stabbers.

[irliberal]

I just don''t understand what the USA is doing funding and supporting a theocracy. No wonder the arabs are mad. They know how dangerous theocracies are, especially considering most of them are in theocracies themselves.

[bluestardad]

SO LETS GET THIS STRAIGHT???

WE ARE FIGHTING THE SUNNIS IN IRAQ? OR WHO EVER THREATENS OUR OIL...

WE ARE FUNDING THE SUNNIS IN LEBANON TO DESTABLIZE THAT COUNTRY???

BUSH IS SENDING AID TO ISRAEL IN THE BILLIONS...

BUSH IS SENDING AID TO THE PALESTINIANS IN THE MILLIONS THRU ISRAELI BANKS???

16 OF THE 19 HIJACKERS WERE FROM SAUDI...

CHENEY AND HALIBURTON ARE TIGHT WITH THE SAUDIS...

RUMFELD BROKERED CHEMICAL WEAPONS TO SADDAM IN THE 80S...TO FIGHT IRAN

WE ATTACHED IRAQ TO GET RID OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS...

RICHARD PEARL A DUEL PASSPORT HOLDING ISRAELI AMERICAN NEOCON IS BROKERING AN OIL DEAL WITH THE KURDS...

TURKEY IS FIGHTING THE KURDS...

BILLIONS OF AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING TO THE MIDDLE EAST!

4000 PLUS AMERICANS HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FIGHTING A CHANGING ENEMY WHO ONE DAY CHANGES FROM ONE SIDE TO THE NEXT...AND WHOS POLITICIANS ARE ON THE TAKE AS BAD AS AMERICAN POLITICIANS ARE?

MISS NO ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE CONDI RICE IS RUNNING THE STATE DEPARTMENT!

WHO IS RUNNING THIS MIDDLE EAST TRAIN?

START WAR CRIMES NOW!

AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!

[sharncedar]

You would think for the purposes of public relations the Jews would cut America a break, it being a country that took them in, treated them with equality and opportunity and understanding that no other country ever has. And yet they are destroying us, turning the whole world against us, causing 9/11 and possibly a future nuclear attack, dragging down our culture and our currency. If the US doesn''t deserve a break, I wonder who does. Perhaps they imagine after they have particpated in the ruin of this country they will all go to magical Bible playland "Israel" and laugh at us from there. I wonder how long Bible playland "Israel" will survive without trillions in US support and our countless dead sacrificed to AIPAC - about as long as the historical crusader kingdoms in that area, I''m thinking.

[bluestardad]

SPOT ON! GREAT POST!


You would think for the purposes of public relations the Jews would cut America a break, it being a country that took them in, treated them with equality and opportunity and understanding that no other country ever has. And yet they are destroying us, turning the whole world against us, causing 9/11 and possibly a future nuclear attack, dragging down our culture and our currency. If the US doesn''''t deserve a break, I wonder who does. Perhaps they imagine after they have particpated in the ruin of this country they will all go to magical Bible playland "Israel" and laugh at us from there. I wonder how long Bible playland "Israel" will survive without trillions in US support and our countless dead sacrificed to AIPAC - about as long as the historical crusader kingdoms in that area, I''''m thinking.


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Posted by SharnCedar

[pugster]

Let''s see, Jews kicked the Arabs out. Treated the Arabs like 2nd class citizens by excluding them in the government. Set an embargo so that these Arabs have to resort to black market to get things like cigarettes? It is time for Israel to treat Arabs as equals otherwise they will have another 60 years of violence.