On Palestine (7 page)

You go back a bit further, my father, his generation, they were Zionists, but they were Ahad Ha'Amists. They wanted a cultural center as a place where the diaspora could find a way to live together with the Palestinians. That ended in 1948. From then on, it essentially became a state religion. One that shifted, in terms of policies. It's interesting to remember this. In the mid-1970s, it was clear that the Arabs were perfectly willing to make a political settlement. Syria, Egypt, and Jordan proposed a two-state settlement at the Security Council; the USA had to veto it. Egypt had already offered a full peace treaty with Israel. It was necessary to raise barriers to block negotiations. So the concept of Zionism changed. Everyone had to accept the “right to exist” of Israel. States do not have a right to exist. Mexico does not accept the right of the USA to exist sitting on half of Mexico. States recognize each other but not their right to exist. There is no such thing. But Israel raised that barrier to require that Palestinians accept that their oppression and expulsion is justified. Not just that it happened, but that it is justified. Of course they are not going to accept that. So it was a nice barrier to stop negotiations. Now it's harder. The support for a settlement is now so overwhelming that Israel has been forced to raise the barrier still higher. The Palestinians now have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That's the core element of most of the speeches that Netanyahu gives. Why that? Because that's understood to be impossible. Nobody should recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Just as we do not recognize the USA as a Christian state. Say Pakistan calls itself an Islamic state, but the USA does not recognize it as one. Zionism in the policy of the state of Israel has had to shift to impose still higher barriers to any kind of political settlement. If something more is needed in the future, they will invent something new. Zionism as state policy is a shifting concept depending on what the state needs.

IP:
For me there is one constant dimension of Zionism that does not easily shift with time, one can call it mainstream Zionism, sometimes referred to as Labor Zionism. It's the colonialist, or settler-colonialist, dimension of Zionism. From the moment the more vague ideas of Zionism as the revival of Judaism as nationalism became the concrete project of settling in Palestine, Zionism became a settler-colonialist project and still is one today. Maybe the means of colonizing Palestine are changing according to circumstances and the balance of power, but not the vision itself. Within that act of colonizing also come perceptions of the native, or the indigenous, population as being an obstacle for the success of the project. I think that this part of Zionism stays at the heart of the ideology even before the state was founded. The state just enhances the ability to colonize but does not change the vision of colonizing Palestine.

Palestinian perspectives on it, however, did change with time. Noteworthy is the position of Palestinian intellectuals and leaders such as Azmi Bishara, who argues that the settlers today have a certain right and presence in Palestine. When the first wave of settlers came as Zionists, it happened at a historical moment when quite often in the history of nineteenth-century colonialism, the local population could opt for resistance and successfully, usually in an armed struggle, push the colonizers back to their home countries. When the colonizers are already a third generation and even succeeded in founding their own state, the native population has to strategize differently and find ways of coexisting with this generation of colonizers.

The reason the colonialist impulse of the Zionist movement did not end at a certain historical moment lies in the territorial appetite and greediness of these settlers. When they were offered part of Palestine in 1937 they regarded it as insufficient space for implementing their aspirations. But they had a wise leader, David Ben-Gurion, who understood that it was tactfully beneficial not to spell out clearly these annexationist dreams. So he told the Royal Peel Commission the Zionist movement was content with a small part of the country.

He continued this tactical and successful policy in 1947 and led his community to accept a larger part of Palestine than that offered in 1937, but one that he still deemed as insufficient. He told his colleagues he was very unhappy with the map offered by the UN Partition Plan in November 1947 and promised them, as indeed happened, that they would have the means, the opportunity, and the plan to change these borders later on. His successors still hope to re-create his winning formulae today after Israel completed the takeover of the whole of Palestine in 1967. But unlike Ben-Gurion in 1937 and 1947, they so far failed in obtaining the international legitimacy for the last territorial expansion (and unlike him at least some of them were even seeking, again unsuccessfully, Palestinian legitimacy for this act).

NC:
I think that's a correct characterization of what you'd call hard-core Zionism or more generally political Zionism, which of course Ben-Gurion was a leading figure of. But Zionism generally was broader. Like Ahad Ha'Am was a Zionist, but not a political Zionist. The groups that I was involved in admittedly were marginal. Like Kalvarisky's League for Arab-Jewish Rapprochement. They were Zionists, but anti-state. They were class based and in favor of Jewish-Arab working-class cooperation. It might sound strange today, but it did not in the context of the thirties and the forties.

IP:
The Jews were a minority then. Is it possible when the Jews are a majority and in power to develop such ideas?

NC:
Well this is later. A majority and a state. In fact they were strongly opposed to it at the time. So the concept changed. What you are describing is a correct characterization of the mainstream of political Zionism. Technically the Zionist movement did not formally accept the notion of a state until 1942, but it was always in the background of political Zionism. You just could not say it. I think it's worth thinking through what the options were because that may be some kind of a guide to what the future could be.

FB: Nowadays a lot of people describe Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. Do you both agree with this definition?

NC:
The Jewish settlement in Israel was certainly a settler-colonial movement. When you talk about what Zionism was, it depends on how wide you want to spread it. The movement that developed, yes, is a settler-colonial society. Like the USA, Australia, the Anglosphere. Israel is one of them. It's not a small point. If you take a look at the international support for Israeli policies, it's of course primarily the USA, but secondarily it's the Anglosphere. Australia, Canada. . . . I suspect that there is a kind of intuitive feeling on the part of the population. Look, we did it, it must be right. So they are doing it, so it must be right. The settler-colonial societies have a different kind of mentality. We did exterminate or expel the indigenous population so there has to be something justified about it—superior civilization or other ideas.

IP:
Our chance to change international perspective and perceptions even in settler-colonialist societies has to do with the past. Even if you go to the USA and Australia nowadays, maybe because the policies were genocidal and happened many years ago, I do not think these societies will resort easily today to settler-colonialist practices. They may deal well, or not so well, from our perspective, with crimes of the past. They may find different ways of engaging with them. As the Australians did when they initiated the Sorry Day. Or even a more progressive act of reconciliation in the permit given by the government of New Zealand to the Maoris to return to their lands that were stolen from them. All these acts are taken from what one can call the comfort zone of those settlers' societies that have diminished the native population to such an extent, at the early stage of colonization, that they have no fear the symbolic acts will change the socio-economic or even political realities of today. For the Israelis, of course the task is far more formidable. They are still dispossessing because they failed in the early stage of the 1948 ethnic cleansing to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. And thus every symbolic act of reconciliation would have a profound and tangible impact on the socio-economic and political realities on the ground. Most Israeli Jews do all they can to prevent this from happening. Where they are not sure about their success is in winning international and regional legitimacy for their acts.

NC:
It's true. Israel has had the problem that it's a twentieth-century version of a seventeenth- through nineteenth-century colonialism. That's a problem. But my point was a little bit different. There is a kind of an underlying mentality in the Anglosphere, in settler-colonial societies, which is simply some kind of deep-seated part of the way in which people look at the world and that slips through. However, speaking about the future, this is changing in the Anglosphere. Since the 1960s, mainly the effect of sixties-era activism, there has been a considerable revival, a significant one, of concern for what actually happened in the past. A lot of it was suppressed until then, literally. You go back to the 1960s when leading anthropologists were claiming that there were maybe only a million Indians [Native Americans] around the country. That's collapsed. Now attitudes are very different. I think this is part of the background for the increasing criticism of the settler-colonial character of Israel. These things are connected in sort of subtle ways.

IP:
I agree and I think that this shift in perceptions in the settler-colonial societies is something we are still struggling with as activists. I remember how I struggled to explain to my students in England that what they see in Israel and Palestine today is a daily implementation of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology and discourse.

NC:
Yes.

IP:
Where the Israelis find it difficult is actually in escaping the description of the reality as colonialist when trying to do this in Hebrew. Any translation into another language of the Israeli terminology of settlement is bound to expose the colonialist nature of the project. Even those progressive Jews who support Israel feel uncomfortable when this act of translation is taking place.

This Israeli predicament is also our predicament as activists. We are dealing with a nineteenth-century fossil that is very alive and kicking in the twenty-first century. That's why I think the power of connecting the past to the future comes through the paradigm of settler colonialism. Because settler colonialism is not only about the act of settling and colonizing but what happens afterwards.

NC:
Driving out the indigenous population.

IP:
Exactly.

FB: I want to go back to the question of a Jewish state. If the Jews are a people, what is the problem of them having a state? And why shouldn't we recognize Israel as a Jewish state?

IP:
I think that no one I know has ever objected or questioned the right of people to redefine themselves on a national, ethnic, or cultural ground. There is no ground for objecting from the perspective of international law or international morality. Neither is the historical moment in which they decide to do it questionable, however this particular group had defined itself in the past (in our case, as a religious group).

The problem lies elsewhere. What is the price paid by this transformation and who pays the price? If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem. If a group is a victim of a crime and is looking for a safe haven, it cannot obtain this by expelling someone else, another group, from this space that you want as your safe haven. This is the difference between what you want as a group and what means you use to achieve it. The problem is not the right of the Jews to have a state of their own or not. That's an internal Jewish problem. Orthodox Jews might have a problem with this. Palestinians have no qualms about the Jews forming a state in Uganda, as some people proposed in 1902 to 1903. Not one Palestinian in the world would be interested in this scenario. That's the main issue. How do you implement your right to self-determination?

NC:
The idea of a Jewish state is an anomaly. It's not something that's happened somewhere in the world. The question is based on the wrong presupposition. Take France: It took a long time for France to become a state. A lot of violence and repression took place. In fact all state formation is a process of extreme violence. That's why Europe was the most violent place in the world for centuries. Once a state is established, any citizen is a citizen of the state. No matter who you are, if you are a French citizen, you're French. If you live in Israel, and you are an Israeli citizen, you are not a Jew. So the Jewish state concept is a complete anomaly. It has no analogs in the modern world. Therefore it's obvious why we should not accept it. Why should we accept this unique anomaly?

Every state, if you look at its history, is created by extreme violence. There is no other way to impose a uniform structure on people of varying interests, backgrounds, languages, and so on. So it's done by violence. But once it's there, at least in the modern state system, anybody who is part of a state is theoretically an equal member of the state. Of course it might not work in practice, but that's the concept. In Israel it is totally different. There is a distinction between citizenship and nationality. There is no Israeli nationality. You cannot be an Israeli national. This came up in the courts back in the sixties and came back up again recently. A group of Israelis wanted to have their papers identify them as Israelis, not as Jews. It went all the way to the high court, which rejected it. It reflects this anomalous concept of a Jewish state, which has no counterpart in the contemporary international political system.