No successor of Rabin

Yesterday, I received Adam Keller’s translation of an op ed piece in last Thursday’s Israel HaYom ‘Israel today’. Moriah Shlomot, former Secretary General of Peace Now, writes,

Year after year, I return to the Rabin Square with devotion and determination. On years of near-despair as on better years, I feel obliged to share in the collective memory. This is the annual moment when the Peace Camp stands up to be counted, and in my view those who dig into details miss the main point.

That would doubtless be the peace camp as manifest in Peace Now, the organisation that spawned Amir Peretz, who served as Defense Minister during last year’s merciless bombing of Lebanon. The very Peace Now whose incumbent Secretary General, Yariv Oppenheimer, was recently observed harassing Palestinians at a Jordan Valley checkpoint and explained that among his three reasons for participating in the very occupation he purports to oppose,

The second reason derives from the will to maintain the democratic character of this country. As a citizen, it is my right to protest and act against decisions made on political and military levels. As a soldier, I must fulfill my duty and cannot pick and choose operations I wish to undertake. (Except for obviously illegal acts, for example the killing of innocents, undue violent behavior, humiliation, torture).

Not to mention ‘obviously illegal acts’ like occupying territory acquired by force of arms and restricting the movement of the occupied population.

This year, Shlomot hesitates, because

…Defence Minister Ehud Barak is due to speak at this year’s Rabin Memorial Rally. This is good enough a reason to doubt and hesitate, to think twice about attending. Barak is the worst of the leaders staffing the government ministries and taking charge of the people’s hopes.

Barak is no successor of Rabin - because Oslo, with all its faults and deficiencies, was based on mutual confidence. Barak has severely damaged the confidence between us and the Palestinians, as well as between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.

The beatification of Rabin as some kind of peacemaker is naïve in the extreme. Oslo had nothing to do with confidence. It was always a transparent stratagem to enlist a Palestinian elite in sharing the responsibility for social control and other administrative tasks in the occupied territories. I appreciate that honeyed phraseology confected with ‘peace’, ‘negotiations’, and ‘diplomacy’ can win the heart of any liberal, even while the confectioner’s boot is planted squarely on the neck of some untermensch.

The confidence she writes of exists only in the imagination of people who believe that dividing a Palestinian state, comprising 22% of historical Palestine in two separate enclaves, from a Jewish state in the other 78%, is the best approach to reconciling the two peoples. The principal difference between Rabin’s approach and Barak’s is the proportion of land they wanted to keep for themselves and the number of enclaves to divide the Palestinian state into.

What interested me about this paragraph was Shlomot’s apparent wish to distinguish ‘the Palestinians’ and ‘Arabs inside Israel’. As Jonathan Cook has pointed out, there is a long tradition of dividing people who identify as Palestinians into three groups: the refugees, ‘the Israeli Arabs’, and ‘the Palestinians’, that is, the subjects of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. The division is real. Under the Oslo regime, only ‘the Palestinians’, as defined, are to be represented in any interaction with the Israeli state. With the dissolution of the PLO into the PA, the refugees lost any semblance of representation. And the Israeli Arabs are of course amply represented by their state – the Jewish state. They are no less occupied than their relatives in the territories, but it usually impacts less dramatically on their quotidian existence. So the only Palestinians Israel would have to negotiate with were the ones they could reduce to desperation by checkpoints, house demolitions, extrajudicial executions, etc.

At the same time, the distinction aims to deprive Palestinians of ‘peoplehood’ or ‘nationhood’. One of the populations achieved some recognition as a separate people precisely when Oslo saddled them with the PA. As Golda Meir famously quipped,

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Sunday Times, 1969-06-15; The Washington Post, 1969-06-16

Presumably, had there been no ‘Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people’, it would be ok to take their land. It’s another one of those bizarre arguments that the Hasbara establishment has cultivated for decades and has gained the status of common sense. Like the argument that the refugees have no right to return because they are alleged to have left of their own accord. As if that deprived them of their right. What gives the refugees the right to return to their homes in ‘Israel proper’ is not that they were forced and stampeded out at gunpoint, although they were, it’s that they come from there. The reason I oppose the appropriation of any part of Palestine is not that the Palestinians did or did not conceive of themselves as a national group or a people at some point in time. Nor is it that their ancestors have been living in Palestine for hundreds, if not thousands of years, although they have. It’s that they were living there when the Zionist movement decided that it wanted their land to colonise with European Jews. The displacement of people from their homes is a very severe attack. All the more so when it is permanent, and especially when the motivation is the convenience of a settler population intent on ethnic cleansing.

It’s not for nothing that ‘The International Community’ has belatedly recognised ethnic cleansing as a crime against humanity. Ilan Pappe has demonstrated conclusively that the Jewish majority in part of Palestine that made the formation of the state of Israel a possibility was achieved through a quite deliberate and orchestrated campaign of precisely what is today known as ethnic cleansing.

Neither Israel, constituted as an ethnocracy, nor The International Community, with its well earned Holocaust guilt, is ever likely to take on the ramifications of the historic crime that gave rise to Israel. But I harbour some hope that at least the peace camp can someday jettison these downright puerile arguments that the Palestinians somehow deserved their dispossession.

[Hat tip to Sol Salbe.]

Large scale

The Jerusalem Post reported the other day

If moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority don't get stronger, the IDF must prepare for a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip, said Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday.

What we have been witnessing since June, and before, in Gaza, must therefore be something other than a large scale military operation, presumably a small scale military operation, so watch out.

Gideon Levy points out what is apparently too obvious for anyone else to notice,

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought… anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can't claim he didn't mean to kill innocent inhabitants.

In an article on CounterPunch, Norman Finkelstein quotes some ‘key statements’ from Jimmy Carter’s new book on Palestine, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, among them,

The United States has used its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block resolutions critical of Israel. Some of these vetoes have brought international discredit on the United States, and there is little doubt that the lack of a persistent effort to resolve the Palestinian issue is a major source of anti-American sentiment and terrorist activity throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. (pp. 209-10)

I suppose it must be to Carter’s credit that there was only one such Security Council veto exercised during his administration, against draft resolution S/13911 on 30 April 1980. That draft, moved by Tunisia, basically reaffirmed previous UN resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since 1967 and so forth.

US Ambassador McHenry concluded his statement explaining the Carter regime’s objection to the draft resolution,

I know that in many quarters there is skepticism that negotiations in this [Camp David] framework can succeed. The road ahead will be difficult. But together with Israel and Egypt, we ask only that we be judged on the results we obtain.

…It is to the end - the attainment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East - that my government has committed itself. We solemnly reaffirm that commitment here today.

The United States will oppose the resolution before us. [emphasis added]

Thanks in large measure to the cynicism of Carter, his predecessors and successors, twenty-six years down the track, the results he obtained in this way are no peace and certainly no justice. But it seems he no longer wishes to be judged on that basis. At the risk of repeating myself, as the old saying goes, ‘Embarrassing a politician with accusations of hypocrisy is like embarrassing a dog with accusations that he licks his own balls.’

Israeli author David Grossman gave a speech at the Rabin memorial event on 5 November that has received a lot of comment. It was purportedly a masterpiece of Hebrew rhetorical prose, composed by a literary master. I won’t take issue with this assessment, because it is unsurprising in any case that the literary qualities are not evident in the translation.

Gilad Atzmon has already pointed out the contradiction inherent in Grossman’s ‘secular miracle’,

I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle.

Gilad also mentions his problem with Grossman’s ‘Jewish and universal values’. One of the thins that struck me about the speech was his description of Israel as

a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens

Even if there weren’t a contradiction inherent between a state with a ‘Jewish identity’ and a ‘Jewish ethos’ somehow observing ‘full respect’ for non Jews, who do not comprise part of the state’s ‘identity’ and whose ‘ethos’ is excluded, it takes a very blinkered approach to the history of the Zionist project to miss one of its central aspects - ethnic cleansing of the non Jewish population and marginalization of those who managed to remain. Benny Morris was quite clear a couple of years ago when he characterized Ben Gurion’s failure to ‘cleanse the whole country’ as a ‘fatal mistake’. Ilan Pappe’s new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is now out and on its way from Amazon. I understand it fleshes out this story in considerable detail, amply documented.

Gilad also makes this cogent observation about Grossman’s quite blatant racism,

The critical reader may ask oneself what really Grossman refers to when he says “people with our powers of creativity and regeneration”? It is rather simple. Grossman truly believes in the uniqueness of the chosen people. In other words, Grossman is not more than a biological determinist…I find it hard to believe that the Guardian would give a voice to a German philosopher who praises Aryan people’s ‘powers of creativity and regeneration’.

Some comments that I’ve come across let Grossman get away with,

Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders.

It’s true that the Nobel committee awarded Rabin its coveted Peace Prize, and I’ve written elsewhere what that indicates. The point is that Grossman accepts at face value and promulgates as fact that the Oslo Accords had something to do with achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians, when it was never anything other than a stalling tactic that created the bloated and ineffectual quisling Palestine Authority while doubling the Jewish population colonizing the West Bank with a view to its ultimate annexation.

One, however, published on the Electronic Intifada on the 9^th, by Raymond Deane, certainly hasn’t missed this crucial point, or many others.

With Lieberman you know where you stand, and self-styled democrats and peaceniks can polish their humanistic credentials by flinging mud at him. With David Grossman, however, the same premises lead to a discourse in which everything has become muddied and inverted, the occupier has become the victim, the victim has become a twisted fanatic, and only the humanistic man of letters has retained any kind of wistful integrity. This discourse is understandably popular with those who, sometimes with honourable if misguided motivation, wish to believe that Zionism can be a liberal, humanistic ideology rather than one that is supremacist and racist to the core.

His ‘Anatomy of a Beautiful Soul’ pulls no punches and I recommend it highly.

On a lighter note, I recently reminded myself to check out David Pope’s website, which I have to recommend visiting more conscientiously than I seem to manage. I reckon he is consistently the most incisive political cartoonist I know of, although some of his material will be obscure to those who do not recognize Australian politicians or keep track of developments in Australian politics. An example (which will not display in this blog)

For more laughs, I found a link to the Dilbert site not long ago from Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning blog, of all places!