Israel: The World's Greatest Gerrymanderer

Israel gets creative to counter its demographic disadvantage (thenational.ae.com, 31/8/17) is a must-read from Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook:

"Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a crushing rebuke to the perennial optimists roused to hopes of imminent peace by the visit to the Middle East last week of Donald Trump's adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At an event on Monday in the West Bank celebrating the half centenary of Israeli occupation, Mr Netanyahu effectively admitted that US efforts to revive the peace process would prove another charade. There would be no dismantling of the settlements or eviction of their 600,000 inhabitants - the minimum requirement for a barely feasible Palestinian state. 'We are here to stay forever,' Mr Netanyahu reassured his settler audience. 'We will deepen our roots, build, strength and settle.'

"So where is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heading if the two state solution is dead? The answer: back to its origins. That will entail another desperate numbers battle against the Palestinians - with Israel preparing to create new categories of 'Jews' so they can be recruited to the fray. Demography was always at the heart of Israeli policy.

"During the 1948 war that founded a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, 750, 000 Palestinians were expelled in a campaign that today would be termed ethnic cleansing. By the end, a large native Palestinian majority had been reduced to less than a fifth of the new state's population. David Ben Gurion, the country's founding father, was unperturbed. He expected to swamp this rump group with Jews from Europe and the Arab world.

"But the project foundered on two miscalculations.

"First, Ben Gurion had not factored in the Palestinian minority's far higher birth rate. Despite waves of Jewish immigrants, Palestinians have held fast, at 20% of Israel's citizenry. Israel has fought a rear guard battle against them ever since. Studies suggest that the only Israeli affirmative action program for Palestinian citizens is in family planning.

"Israeli demographic scheming was on show again last week.

"An investigation by the Haaretz newspaper found that in recent years, Israel has stripped of citizenship potentially thousands of Bedouin, the country's fastest growing population...

"Meanwhile, another Rubicon was crossed this month when an Israeli court approved revoking the citizenship of a Palestinian convicted of a lethal attack on soldiers. Human rights groups fear that, by rendering him stateless, the Israeli right has established a precedent for conditioning citizenship on 'loyalty.' Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked underlined that very point this week when she warned the country's judges that they must prioritise demography and the state's Jewishness over human rights.

"The second miscalculation arrived in 1967. In seizing the last fragments of historic Palestine but failing to expel most of its inhabitants, Israel made itself responsible for many hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinians, including refugees from the earlier war. The 'demographic demon' as it is often referred to in Israel, was held at bay only by bogus claims for many decades that the occupation would soon end. In 2005, Israel bought a little more breathing space by 'disengaging' from the tiny Gaza enclave and its 1.5 million inhabitants.

"Now, in killing hopes of Palestinian statehood, Mr Netanyahu has made public his intention to realise the one settler state solution. Naftali Bennett, Mr Netanyahu's chief rival in the government, is itching to ignore international sentiment and begin annexing large parts of the West Bank. There is a problem, however. At least half the population in Netanyahu's Greater Israel are Palestinian. And with current birth rates, Jews will soon be an indisputable minority - one ruling over a Palestinian majority.

"That is the context for understanding the report of a government panel - leaked last weekend - that proposes a revolutionary reimagining of who counts as a Jew and therefore qualifies to live in Israel (and the occupied territories).

"Israel's 1950 Law of Return already casts the net wide, revising the traditional rabbinical injunction that a Jew must be born to a Jewish mother. Instead, the law entitles anyone with one Jewish grandparent to instant citizenship. That worked fine as long as Jews were fleeing persecution or economic distress. But since the arrival of one million immigrants following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the pool of new Jews has dried up.

"The United States, even in the Trump era, has proved the bigger magnet. The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported last month that up to one million Israelis may be living there. Worse for Mr Netanyahu, it seems, that at least some are included in Israeli figures to bolster its demographic claims against the Palestinians. Recent trends show that the exodus of Israelis to the US is twice as large as the arrival of American Jews to Israel...

"With a pressing shortage of Jews to defeat the Palestinians demographically, the Netanyahu government is considering a desperate solution. The leaked report suggests opening the doors to a new category of "Jewish" non-Jews. According to Haaretz, potentially millions of people worldwide could qualify. The new status would apply to 'crypto Jews' whose ancestors converted from Judaism; 'emerging Jewish' communities that have adopted Jewish practices; and those claiming to be descended from Jewish 'lost tribes'... "

Blown Away by Labor's Advance on Palestine/Israel?

Before anyone gets too carried away by the latest glacial advance in the ALP's Palestine policy, please remember that Israel's illegal post-67 West Bank settlement project, which Bob Carr in particular opposes as standing in the way of a two-state solution to the Palestine/Israel project, is, in all its essentials, no different to Israel's pre-67 settlement project.

Every square inch of historic Palestine from the river to the sea is occupied and colonised Arab land.

It matters not whether the occupation and colonisation took place before 1967, or after.

Whether it takes the form of a Balfour Declaration or a United Nations partition plan, no imperial power, or collection thereof, had, or has, the right to dispose of one square centimetre of Arab Palestinian land.

It's Hebron today - but before that it was Haifa. It's Jerusalem today - but before that it was Jaffa.

After 1967, the Zionist land thieves were called settlers - before that kibbutzniks. Same colonial smell, same...

The Zionist settler-colonial, apartheid project called Israel has no right, God-given or otherwise, to one square centimetre of Arab Palestine.

Please keep this in mind before you get too excited about NSW Labor's 'secure and recognised borders,' or anything else to do with Palestine.

And take this ice cold shower:

"Israel fears 'delegitimization' more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance and a lone UN Security Council veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be known as the 'least safe place for Jews in the world.'

"Strip away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn't even have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn't have borders. After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later, and it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians from walking home.

"Israel is a failed experiment. It is on life-support - pull those three plugs and it is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who thought they could pull off the heist of the century.

"The most important thing we can do as we hover over the horizon of One State is to shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway - it was just the parlance of that particular 'game'. Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities - the new state will be the dawn of humanity's great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.

"Naysayers can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels that Palestinian refugees have called 'home' for three generations in their purgatory camps.

"These universally exploited refugees are entitled to nice apartments - the ones that have pools and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because the kind of compensation owed for this failed Western experiment will never be enough.

"And no, nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears - the one 'firewall' remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don't even care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don't hate Jews. It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If Jews who didn't live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany - and good luck to you.

"For anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade elsewhere - you are part of the reason this problem exists.

"Israelis who don't want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous Palestinian population - the ones who don't want to relinquish that which they demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago - can take their second passports and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude - Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors - without proportional response - shows remarkable restraint and faith.

"This is less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage - we will get through it just fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all, universally Palestinian - undoing this wrong is a test of our collective humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.

"Israel has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: 'Israel has no right to exist.' Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your Facebook status update - do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here - have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was." (Excuse me, but Israel has no right to exist, Sharmine Narwani, english.al-akhbar.com, 17/5/12)

The Three NOs of Bernie Sanders

Interview with US Senator (and erstwhile Hillary Clinton rival) Bernie Sanders by Dena Takruri of AJ+:

Last week you joined every single US senator in signing a letter to the UN secretary general saying that the institution is biased against Israel and effectively trying to shield it from criticism...

- No, no, no. I don't accept that. Look, I didn't write that letter, I signed on to the letter. It's not a letter I would've written. There are many problems with Israel.. I have been critical and will be critical of a lot of what Israel does. On the other hand, to see Israel attacked over and over again for 'human rights violations,' which may be true, when you have countries like Saudi Arabia or Syria. Saudi Arabia - I'm not quite sure if women can even drive a car, OK? So I think that the thrust of that letter is not to say that Israel does not have human rights issues. It does. But to say, how come it's only Israel when you have other countries where women are treated as third-class citizens. Where is Egypt, I don't know how many thousands of people are lingering in jail. So that the point of that [is] not to defend Israel, but to say, why only Israel? You wanna talk about human rights. Let's talk about human rights.

Should the UN shield Israel from criticism?

- No, of course not.

This letter also denounces the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement, known as BDS. You are a longtime proponent of nonviolent protests. This, in the eyes of many Palestinians is the effective way to get Israel to comply with international law and respect Palestinian human rights. Do you accept that?

- No, I don't. I mean, look, I respect people who do what they want to do. But I think our job as a nation is to do everything humanly possible to bring Israel and the Palestinians and the entire Middle East - to the degree that we can - together. But no, I'm not a supporter of that.

Palestinians will say they've resisted violently, they get punished. They resist nonviolently with BDS, they're also punished. We're entering the 50th year of the occupation. We know the occupation has no end in sight. We know that this is a government that doesn't plan on ending it and talks have failed for a quarter of a century. What, if not BDS, is left for the Palestinians to do?

- What must be done is that the United States of America must have a Middle East policy which is even-handed. Which does not simply supply endless amounts of money, of military supplies, to Israel, but which treats both sides with respect and dignity and does our best to bring them to the table.

It's increasingly evident that hopes for a two-state solution are almost dead. At the same time, polls among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are showing that they're increasingly in favor of a one-state solution, with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike and equal citizenship. Is that something you believe could happen, or is that something you support?

- No, I don't. I mean, I think if that happens, then that would be the end of the state of Israel. And I support Israel's right to exist.

Do you think, a two-state solution is still viable?

- Yes, I think if there is the political will to make it happen and if there is good faith on both sides, I do think it's possible. And I think there has not been good faith certainly on [the part of] this Israeli government, and I have my doubts about parts of the Palestinian leadership as well.

Phillip Adams: And the Answer Is?

ABC Radio National personality, Phillip Adams, never ceases to amaze. Here he is introducing a segment on his Late Night Live program called World's largest refugee camp (27/2/17):

"My excuse for retelling the story that I was radicalised at the age of 12 by reading The Grapes of Wrath is simply this - the book we're about to discuss [City of Thorns] begins with 3 sentences from that book. Let me read them. 'There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolise. There is a failure here that topples all our success.' John Steinbeck. And I hope the book we're about to discuss will radicalise another generation. If you look at the collection of Palestinian refugee camps in the world, in Jordan, Lebanon, in the West Bank, Gaza, and formerly in Syria, the numbers are shocking, they're beyond shocking, they're numbing, and the world's sensibility seems to be appropriately numbed. An estimated 5 million Palestinians are living throughout the region, but the world's largest refugee camp, called Dadaab is situated in the desert of Kenya, and has over half a million inhabitants, just like the camps housing generations of Palestinians... "

Let me sum that up for you. Adams is professedly NUMBED by the existence of permanent Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, that is, camps that date back to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 when the ancestors of these refugees were driven out of their Palestinian homeland by Zionist terror gangs.

My reaction: WOW!

To my knowledge this is an Adams first. Here he is, 77 years old; a veteran commentator on, and explorer of, the issues of today, yesterday and tomorrow; a public intellectual; almost, if not already, an Australian icon; and, importantly, an avowed man of the Left; and he's only now discovered something of the significance of the daddy-of-all contemporary refugee problems, the Palestinian refugee problem.

The standout instance of his failure on this issue for me was a 2009 LNL interview with the American-Palestinian writer Saree Makdisi. When Makdisi called for an end to Israel as a Jewish state and the creation of one state for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including, by implication, those in refugee exile, Adams worriedly asked how long it would take before Jewish Israelis were a minority in Israel. Makdisi, puzzled, replied, "I don't know. I don't even know that that question matters." At which Adams snapped: "It sure as hell matters to them." (For the all important context, see my 19/9/09 post He Just Doesn't Get It.)

If anyone out there is in a position to raise the issue with Adams, the obvious question to put to him now would be this: you recently indicated that you were numbed by the scale and time of Palestinian refugeedom. But are you sufficiently numbed to support the return of today's Palestinian refugees - from Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the Palestinian diaspora - to their former homes and lands in Israel, along with all that that entails by way of equal rights for all, regardless of sectarian affiliation, between the the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?

IsrAid Points the Way

A heartwarming letter from Diane Armstrong of Vaucluse:

"Jock Keene (Letters, April 19) is hoping that the United States, Great Britain and Israel do their share to help Syrian refugees, so he'll be relieved to know that for months a team of Israeli doctors and nurses - Jewish and Arab - from the Israeli humanitarian organisation IsrAid, have waited on the coast of the Greek island of Lesbos to rescue and care for the thousands of Syrian refugees who reach these shores." (Sydney Morning Herald, 20/4/16)

How wonderful, Diane!

Who could possibly have imagined Israeli Jews and Arabs working together. Thank you so much for drawing our attention to this proven fact.

Now that, at long last, it has been established that Israeli Jews and Arabs can work together, I wonder: is there any need for an exclusively Jewish state, catering only for that rubbery Zionist construct 'the Jewish people'?

Diane, is this not a sign of what is possible?

Surely, IsrAid's fine example of Israeli Jews and Arabs working together points the way to Israeli Jews and indigenous Palestinian Arabs, including those currently under the Israeli boot, and those given the boot by Israeli forces in 1948 and 1967, working together in one, binational state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

I mean, if they can work together in IsrAid, why not in a future binational state?

What do you say, Diane? Or are you just trying to score a cheap propaganda point for Israel?

The Twilight Zone

The next time you hear any pious chatter about a two-state solution from the usual suspects consider this:

"Under current circumstances, advancing down the road of a virtual Palestinian state may actually end up benefitting Israeli policies. It suits Israelis to have a Palestinian Authority able to effectively manage (and international community willing to pay for) the occupation on its behalf. But most of all, obtaining purely symbolic acknowledgments of Palestinian statehood aspirations keeps alive the idea of a two-state solution without actually bringing it closer to fruition, thereby helping reinforce a reality that is beneficial to Israel. Israel's silent annexation of large swathes of Palestinian territory can only be sustained so long as the vision of two states remains alive. Maintaining even a wafer thin belief in such an outcome (based on a non-peace process) is a holding strategy that allows Israel to deflect the bulk of international pressure even as it prolongs and deepens a largely cost-free occupation. This legal 'twilight zone' between temporary occupation and full-blown annexation allows Israel to control those parts of the West Bank on which the bulk of Israeli settlers are located, without having to shoulder any financial, legal or moral responsibilities. Removing this illusion would reveal the current one-state reality that already exists. Namely, a system that has created two distinct legal regimes for those living under Israeli jurisdiction in the occupied territories and effectively disenfranchises millions of non-Jewish residents from having a say in a government that is the ultimate arbiter of their fate." (Excerpt from The Ramallah paradox, Hugh Lovatt, middleeasteye.net, 26/1/16)

Hugh Lovatt is the Israel/Palestine Project Coordinator for the Middle East & North Africa Programme of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)

Richard Di Natale Reclassified

In my May 7 post on Richard Di Natale, The Green's New Limp Lettuce Leader, I jestingly classified him as being at the iceberg lettuce end of the greens spectrum.

Having just read Di Natale in his own words in The Australian Jewish News of May 22, however, I now realise I was wrong. Even an iceberg lettuce would have a more informed, nuanced and ethical perspective than this:

The two-state solution: "Most people who have followed this issue and care about it, would acknowledge that there really isn't any other [sic] alternative."

Hello? Does anyone seriously believe that Di Natale has ever "followed and cared about this issue"? Even for a nanosecond?

There is "no alternative" to two states? Oh, really?

IOW, there's no alternative to:

a) an ethnocratic, apartheid Israeli state on 78% (+ settlements + Jordan Valley + East Jerusalem) of historical Palestine; and

b) an impoverished, de-militarised, non-contiguous series of Palestinianian bantustans (with no control over borders or airspace) on the bits left over.

Although Di Natale lives in a unitary state blind to ethnicity or sectarian affiliation, he doesn't see it as an alternative to the above?  Well I'll be buggered!

Scary.

Recognising Israel's existence as a Jewish state: "Of course. How can you have a two-state solution when you refuse to acknowledge the right of one state to exist? It's patently nonsense."

Let's get this straight. The occupied Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza (many of whom, BTW, are the descendents of refugees from Israel improper) should recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state which excludes the indigenous, non-Jewish Palestinians it turfed out in 1948 by denying them the right of return?

IOW, he expects the West Bankers and Gazans to kiss international law and basic, inalienable human rights goodbye and recognise an apartheid state based on the permanent exile of most Palestinians?

Apparently so. After all, as far as Di Natale's concerned, anything less is "patently nonsense."
  
BDS: "It's just not the party position. Some time ago we made a very clear statement that we didn't believe that this was a pathway to peace."

I think what Di Natale really means here is that BDS is not a pathway to peace with the Zionist lobby.

'Israeli' technology: "Israelis are at the forefront of innovative technologies around [water-saving]. Why wouldn't we be learning from some of the new technologies that the Israelis have developed?"

Which simply means that he cannot see past the brand Israel hype to Palestinian water tanks riddled by Israeli bullets and Israeli settler swimming pools brimming with water.

On visiting Israel: "Absolutely."

Iceberg lettuce? This bloke's not even a member of the plant kingdom. Is there a mycologist in the house?

On 'Liberal Zionists' & Bad Teddy Bears

It looks like one of the speakers at next month's Sydney Writers Festival will be Israel's Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land, and part subject of my 17/3/14 post Hello, Geoffrey?

Shavit has been described as a 'liberal Zionist', that is, one who opposes (how?) the occupation of the Palestinian territories but baulks at the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which calls for the return of Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948, because it would transform Israel's current Jewish majority into a minority, effectively paving the way for a binational, one-state solution to the Palestine/Israel problem.

What follows is as good an account of the psychology of the 'liberal Zionist' as I've seen in a while. It comes from the comment thread to M.J. Rosenberg's conundrum, by Lawrence Davidson (mondoweiss.net, 3/4/14):

"MJ Rosenberg and Shavit and other 'liberal Zionists' are not likely to give up their fears - roughly, I guess, either fear of another holocaust somewhere outside Israel if Israel does not remain Jewish-dominated or fear that the loss of such an Israel would be in-and-of-itself another holocaust.

"These fears make them proof against the ethical demands that normal people recognize - including most normal Jews These fears also seem to cloud their thinking, preventing them from thinking any thought that would unseat the fears. They don't see this, they cannot, for their fears are like the Teddy Bears that little kids seem to carry with them wherever they go.

"Don't get me wrong - I love little kids and think they are ever so cute, including their Teddy Bear need. I remember turning around after driving the first hour of a four-hour trip to go home to get my 3-year-old son's special blanket that we'd somehow left at home. Those blankets and Teddy Bears are really important for mental health. Everyone's.

"But MJR and Shavit are getting a bit old for dragging their particular dirty, bedraggled Teddy Bear around with them for very much longer.

"I think they will grow old and die clutching that horrible, destructive Teddy Bear, unless, perhaps, their children or grandchildren turn their backs on Israel (or on Zionism, not the same thing) and do so in a way which might teach their elders that the damage done by Zionism-in-practice was far worse than any benefit gained by it. After all, losing your kids due to crimes you approved of (and perhaps participated in) would be a heavy price to pay. Worse than losing a Teddy Bear." (pabelmont)

From Little Things Big Things Grow

I feel it's appropriate to preface this post with an excerpt from a conversation between the great Dr Fayez Abdullah Sayegh (1922-1980) and David Susskind, host of The David Susskind Show (WNEW-TV). At the time, Sayegh was acting as a consultant to the Kuwaiti delegation to the UN. The conversation/debate (Susskind was your typical American Zionist boofhead) went to air in New York on December 3, 1967:

Sayegh: Now you say we refuse to recognize Israel. Yes, we refuse to recognize Israel because the Israel you are speaking about is an act of usurpation of an Arab territory, an Arab land; an act of ouster of an Arab population. Every Israeli who is in Israel today is living in the home of an Arab who has not been compensated for his property. Every Israeli who is in Israel today is there because an Arab has been ousted. Israel is, because Palestine has been made not to be. The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine. We do not endorse the non-being of an Arab country called Palestine. We will not recognize Israel as long as that means non-recognition of Arab Palestine...
Susskind: If she's a usurper state, and inhabiting your land, the only successful conclusion, from your point of view, would be her final demise, or defeat?
Sayegh: Not necessarily.
Susskind: What else would accommodate your ambition?
Sayegh: I - what would accommodate my ambition will be - my hope - and I say this now in the utmost earnestness, whether you like to believe me or not - my hope is that the human conscience will still wake up among the Zionists living in Israel, and will make them realize that they have usurped someone else's land, and will make them accept to live as human beings in a democratic Palestine, where they and the rightful inhabitants have a place, rather than to live in an exclusively Zionist state at the expense of the rightful inhabitants of Palestine.
Susskind: Give up statehood?
Sayegh: Give up statehood, but not give up existence.
Susskind: Well, that's charming. Don't die, but go away.
Sayegh: Well, sir, you have done that... Israel has done that to the Arabs of Palestine. And I believe that the human conscience of many people in Israel will still awaken to the tragedy that they have been instrumental in inflicting upon another people that was never guilty of their suffering, that was never guilty of their persecution in Christian Europe...
Susskind: Turn over the state to an Arab country, is that it? The state of Israel?
Sayegh: While they're there it will not be an exclusively Arab country. Any Jew who has no place else to go will be able to stay in Palestine; the rightful inhabitants of Palestine must be allowed to come back to their country; and you will have a binational state of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Druse, Baha'i, atheists; all in Palestine, as Palestinians, leading a Palestinian life.

***

Further to my 10 September post - Remember Two Israelis, Three Opinions? - on Israeli NGO Zochrot's conference From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of Palestinian Refugees (29-30 September), I'm pleased to say that it proceeded without a hitch. Zochrot has just issued the following conference summary:

"The conference is over and it was a huge success! It took place as planned, despite attempts to prevent it, at the Rothschild Auditorium on the campus of the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, which was built on the lands of the Palestinian village of Ash-Shaykh Muwannis. Some 400 people attended the 2-day conference. It was broadcast live on the Internet and viewed by some 750 people from all around the world. Tens of thousands of people were exposed to posts uploaded during the conference on Facebook and Twitter. Over 25 volunteers helped with administering and documenting the conference. Speaking in English, Hebrew and Arabic, 35 presenters - academics and activists from Palestine/Israel, as well as Canada, the US, the UK, Serbia and Poland - presented their various concepts and ideas for realizing the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland and its spatial implications.

"Over the coming weeks, Zochrot will publish all the lectures and visual and textual materials presented at the conference. Videos will be uploaded starting this week, and an electronic booklet with 10 texts by conference speakers will be published in mid-November.

"In the meantime, you are welcome to view 3 visions of return which were presented at the conference and moved the audience: Planning the Future Village of al-Lajjun, Future Return to Mi'ar, and Actual Return to Iqrit. These visions were conceived by groups of Palestinian youth living in Israel, who participated over the past year in a joint project for Zochrot, Baladna: Association for Arab Youth, Arab Association for Human Rights, and the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced.

"Palestinian author Salman Natur, who mediated one of the conference panels wrote the following on his Facebook page: 'I have just returned from Tel Aviv, where I took part in a conference organized by Zochrot, an NGO which acts to promote awareness of the Nakba and disseminate information about it and about crimes against the Palestinian people in general among the Jewish public. The concepts that echoed in the auditorium were Nakba, Awda (Return), memory, displaced villagers, refugees, one democratic state from the river to the sea, acknowledgement and reconciliation. About 200 people, mostly Jews, filled the auditorium. The panel I mediated included 7 speakers from the US, UK, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, in addition to a video lecture by Dr Salman Abu-Sitta, who wrapped up the entire story by stating: 'I was kicked out of my home, and I want to return to it.' The conference is a turning point in the attempt to transform Israeli consciousness. Something noteworthy is happening here. I recommend following up on the conference's outputs. What has been said there is priceless. In fact, I recommend all Zochrot publications. The idea of a single democratic state is increasingly taking hold in the minds of many who are seeking a just peace. The one-state solution as outlined by the researchers and academics who spoke at the conference sounds more realistic than the two-state solution.'

"The conference is also receiving ongoing attention in the media. Recent articles include: Gideon Levy & Alex Levak, Haaretz; Esther Zandberg on the al-Lajjun Project in Haaretz; The Times of Israel; Ma'an News; Tom Pessah, 972mag.com."

Zionism Happened

Drop everything and read this fascinating account of the Galilee village of Buqei'a in the 1920s:

"Turning aside, the cavalcade rode into the village [of Bukeia], one of the oldest in Palestine, and extremely interesting as it holds the most ancient community of Jews in the Holy Land. They have been there for many centuries; according to their own story they are the descendants of the Jews who lived there before the Dispersion, it is quite probable they are, and that they escaped both Roman and Arab exterminators. It is in a most inaccessible spot in the mountains, and may well have been overlooked, even by those professed and bitter anti-Semites, the Crusaders. In this village, small as it is there are 3 distinct communities, Christian, Jew and Moslem, they live, and always have done, in the most perfect amity and accord. The Jewish community claims that both the Christians and Moslems living amongst them are of Hebrew blood, that they represent the people who apostatized many centuries ago. It is certain that the good offices of both these communities have time and again, according to the local tradition, saved the Jews of the village from persecution and even martyrdom, under the many conquerors these villages have known since Flavius Josephus surrendered in the well of Jotapata, and the last trace of independent Israelitish rule disappeared. A small Druze community, also, inhabits the outskirts of the place and lives on the most cordial relationship with the other peoples." (Galilee Galloper, Douglas V. Duff, 1935, pp 92-93)

The "cavalcade" referred to by Duff was a contingent of Palestine police led by a Briton known to the Palestinians of western Galilee as 'Abu George'. They had ridden into Buqei'a to investigate the murder of a Christian woman.

Writes Duff tellingly:

"Riding into the village at the head of his men, Abu George had expected to find the place seething with excitement, and to find the Christians demanding vengeance at his hands from one of the other sects, a situation which would have arisen in any other part of Palestine. Here the elders of the four communities had met together and were solemnly discussing the affair."

(The murderer, as it happens, turned out to be the woman's husband.)

Known also as Peki'in (or Peqi'in) in Hebrew, Buqei'a is now an almost exclusively Druze town.

Almost: "The only Jewish resident to remain in the village is Margalit Zinati, whose family has lived in Peki'in for centuries." (Last Jewish family leaves Peki'in, Goel Beno, ynetnews.com, 3/12/07)

In Buqei'a we have the intriguing case of a Palestinian Arab village, in which Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Arab Jews and Arab Druze had lived harmoniously together for centuries, but which is now almost exclusively Druze.

So what happened to destroy this tiny model of sectarian co-existence? 

In a word, Zionism.

In the 1920s and 30s, the British flooded Palestine with European Zionist colons, the latter hell-bent on transforming a multi-sectarian land into a Jewish majority state. The native Arabs, as natives have done throughout the history of European colonialism, resisted this foreign invasion, a resistance that today's Zionists and their dupes still seem to find utterly surprising and totally unreasonable for reasons that escape me.

Unfortunately for Palestine's Arab Jews, however, the Zionist colons' fraudulent conflation of Zionism with Judaism led to them being tarred with the Zionist brush. And so, when indigenous Arab resistance to the Zionists and their British backers peaked, in 1929, and again from 1936-1939, Arab Jews also felt the heat. The result in Buqei'a? In 1936, at the start of the first great Palestinian uprising, most of its Arab Jews left, never to return.

Those in search of an indigenous Palestinian model of ethno-religious harmony, as inspiration for a future non-sectarian, non-Zionist state between 'the river and the sea', need look no further than the little Palestinian village of Buqei'a as it was in the 1920s.

If They're Good Enough for the Technion...

In his propaganda piece in yesterday's Australian contra Sydney University's Student Representative Council's decision to back Associate Professor Jake Lynch's academic boycott of Israel, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, Philip Chester, drew attention to the Technion's alleged embrace of Palestinian-Israeli (or in Zionist parlance Arab Israeli) students:

"About 20% of the [Technion's] students are Arabs, which is proportionate to the Arab component of Israel's population... For more than 12 years, the Technion has been running an outreach program that specifically prepares Israeli Arab high school students for university... Some of the most successful collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis is in the field of science." (Appalling attempt to boycott Israeli uni)

(Which talk, incidentally, reminds me of the joint Israeli/Palestinian sporting teams set up by the Peres Centre for Peace, one example of which turned up in Australia in 2008,* designed to distract gullible Westerners from an understanding of Israel's colonial, apartheid reality.)

Chester is suggesting, of course, that a boycott of Israeli academic institutions such as the Technion is in fact anti-Palestinian/Arab and therefore counterproductive.

To argue in this way, however, is a potentially risky strategy for Zionist propagandists because it raises - or should raise - some fundamental questions about the very nature of a supremacist Jewish state in Palestine: if Palestinian-Israelis/Arab Israelis are good enough to study at one of Israel's oldest and most prestigious universities (or to play in Israeli sporting teams), then why are they not good enough to be treated as equal citizens with Israeli Jews; and why, for that matter, aren't the exiled Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 good enough to be repatriated as full and equal citizens with Israeli Jews in a bi-national, secular, democratic Israeli-Palestinian state?

Philip?

[*See my 5/10/11 post The Peace Team: Politics & PR.]

Bu(llshi)do for Peace?

Two items of interest heard on SBS World News tonight:

"Barack Obama has bluntly told Cambodia it won't have a full relationship with the US until it improves human rights and undertakes democratic reforms. Obama's visit is a first by an American president to Cambodia, a country shunned for decades over the Kmer Rouge's genocidal regime. But all is not forgiven. The US remains concerned at the lack of free and fair elections, detention of political prisoners and land seizures. The president told the Cambodian leader Hun Sen these issues remain an impediment to relations."

Let me get this right: the US isn't quite ready to kiss and make up with Cambodia because of a "lack of free and fair elections*, detention of political prisoners and land seizures," but there's no daylight whatever between the US and Israel, which is guilty of all 3 and more. [*The Israelis expelled most of their Palestinian voters in 1948.]

And speaking of kissing and making up, hugs were all the go between the Palestinian and Israeli coaches of a joint Israeli Jewish/Palestinian karate team in an item filmed at the Karate World Championship in Sydney this week. Budo for Peace, as the joint team is known, was described by SBS as "a Middle Eastern martial arts organisation dedicated to peaceful cooperation between Jews and Arabs."

Said one of its members, Dror Zigel: "We all live in Israel. It doesn't matter whether we're Arab, Christian, Jewish. We all live in Israel."

Very good, Dror, but I've got a question: if it doesn't matter whether a team member is Jewish or non-Jewish, because "we all live in Israel," why then must Israel be a Jewish state?

The Very Shadow of a Shadow of a Shade

Next time you hear Julia Gillard or any other Western politician droning on about a two-state solution to the Palestine problem, it's worth casting your mind back to the very first two-state proposal for Palestine, that of Britain's 1937 Peel Commission, which proposed dividing the restive territory,  25 - 75%, into a Jewish and an Arab state. (It was of course vehemently rejected by the Palestinian Arab leadership - after all it was their country - and more cautiously by the Zionist leadership, who have only ever paid lip service to the idea of lines on a map.)

The stark fact these days, taking the much trumpeted two-state solution seriously for the moment, is that  the Palestinians can expect far less than what the Zionist immigrants of the 1920s and 30s were offered by the Peel partition plan. The question arises, therefore, as to why any self-respecting Palestinian today should take the notion of a Palestinian micro-state seriously.

The following description of what a Jewish micro-state in Palestine may have looked like in 1937, had it ever come into being, was recorded by former Palestine policeman and author Douglas V Duff in his 1938 travel memoir, Poor Knight's Saddle. On a visit there in 1937, he asked the Deputy High Priest of the Samaritans in Nablus the following question:

"'Eminence... will you be good enough to say what you think of this scheme of dividing Palestine between Briton, Jew and Arab.'"

The following conversation (with Duff referring  to himself as "the Scribe") ensued:

"'Do you wish for my opinion as a priest, or as a man who knows Palestine,' he demanded with a twinkle in his deep-set eyes. 'If you want me to speak as a priest, I must refuse, for my people must be considered when we speak as the mouthpiece of Israel.'

"Then as an intelligent man who knows all that there is to be known of this vexed matter,' said the Scribe.

"Well, speaking as an ordinary man, voicing my own personal opinion, I doubt whether this scheme will be very attractive to the Zionist Jews. Why should it? They are being asked to give up the very substantial things which they have won during the past few years, and to exchange for them the very shadow of a shade.

"'This State that is offered them will be sovereign only in name. It will have no rights except on paper. The British will always be there, behind the scenes, with Treaty rights to use their roads, their railways, and the air above their fields. They will have the right to maintain garrisons within the boundaries of the Jewish State. There will be islands of British land in the very middle of the State, at Nazareth and along the waters of the Sea of Galilee. The State will be cut across by the Jaffa-Jerusalem corridor. They are not to have Jerusalem, not even the New City which is entirely theirs, and, to add to the difficulties,, there is to be a free, sovereign and independent Arab City, Jaffa, right on the doorstep of Tel Aviv, their biggest city. I say, honestly, that the Zionists will be mad if they agree to accept so foolish a suggestion. They are not mad, Effendi, they are very capable, honest men, firm in their belief that they are merely the trustees for the generation that will come after them. No, this crazy proposal of your legislators will never do, it cannot be accepted." (pp 117-118)

Uncannily familiar, isn't it?

Now if, as His Eminence averred, the Zionists would have been crazy to accept such a crazy proposal, how much crazier would Mahmoud Abbas's mob be to accept the even crazier proposal - the very shadow of a shadow of a shade if you will - now being dangled before them?

Roll on the one-state solution.

Three Magic Words

In the spirit of keeping it real, drop everything and read this:
Excuse me, but Israel has no right to exist by Sharmine Narwani

"The phrase 'right to exist' entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those 3 magic words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, 'are you saying Israel doesn't have the right to exist??'

"Of course you couldn't challenge Israel's right to exist - that was like saying you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have... rights, with all manner of Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.

"Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault - or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even caught myself - shock - rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence.

"What moves me instead in this post-two-state era is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing.

"What a fantastical idea, this notion that a bunch of rank outsiders from another continent could appropriate an existing, populated nation for themselves - and convince the 'global community' that it was the moral thing to do. I'd laugh at the chutzpah if this wasn't so serious.

"Even more brazen is the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by persecuted Jews, newly arrived from their own experience of being ethnically cleansed.

"But what is truly frightening is the psychological manipulation of the masses into thinking that Palestinians are somehow dangerous - 'terrorists' intent on 'driving Jews into the sea'. As someone who makes a living through words, I find the use of language in creating perceptions to be intriguing. This practice - often termed 'public diplomacy' has become an essential tool in the world of geopolitics. Words, after all, are the building blocks of our psychology.

"The United States and Israel have created the global discourse on this issue, setting stringent parameters that grow increasingly narrow regarding the content and direction of this debate. Anything discussed outside the set parameters has, until recently, widely been viewed as unrealistic, unproductive and even subversive.

"Participation in the debate is limited only to those who subscribe to its main tenets: the acceptance of Israel, its regional hegemony and its qualitative military edge; acceptance of the shaky logic upon which the Jewish state's claim to Palestine is based; and acceptance of the inclusion and exclusion of certain regional parties, movements and governments in any solution to the conflict.

"Words like dove, hawk, militant, extremist, moderate, terrorist, Islamo-fascist, rejectionist, existential threat, holocaust-denier, mad mullah determine the participation of solution partners - and are capable of instantly excluding others.

"Then there is the language that preserves 'Israel's Right To Exist' unquestioningly: anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the myths about historic Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty - as though God was in the real-estate business. This language seeks not only to ensure that a Jewish connection to Palestine remains unquestioned, but importantly, seeks to punish and marginalize those who tackle the legitimacy of this modern colonial-settler experiment.

"But this group-think has led us nowhere. It has obfuscated, distracted, deflected, ducked, and diminished, and we are no closer to a satisfactory conclusion... because the premise is wrong.

"There is no fixing this problem. This is the kind of crisis in which you cut your losses, realize the error of your ways and reverse course. Israel is the problem. It is the last modern-day colonial-settler experiment, conducted at a time when these projects were being unravelled globally.

"There is no 'Palestinian-Israeli conflict' - that suggests some sort of equality in power, suffering, and negotiable tangibles, and there is no symmetry whatsoever in this equation. Israel is the Occupier and Oppressor; Palestinians are the Occupied and the Oppressed. What is there to negotiate? Israel holds all the chips. They can give back some land, property, rights, but even that is an absurdity - what about everything else? What about ALL the land, property and rights? Why do they get to keep anything - how is the appropriation of land and property prior to 1948 fundamentally different from the appropriation of land and property on this arbitrary 1967 date?

"Why are the colonial-settlers prior to 1948 any different from those who colonized and settled after 1967?

"Let me correct myself. Palestinians do hold one chip that Israel salivates over - the one big demand at the negotiating table that seems to hold up everything else. Israel craves recognition of its 'right to exist'.

"But you do exist - don't you, Israel?

"Israel fears 'delegitimization'' more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance, and a lone UN Security Council veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be known as the 'least safe place for Jews in the world'.

"Strip away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn't even have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn't have borders. After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later, it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians walking home.

"Israel is a failed experiment. It is on life-support - pull those three plugs and it is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who thought they could pull off the heist of the century.

"The most important thing we can do as we hover on the horizon of One State is to shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway - it was just the parlance of that particular 'game'. Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities - the new state will be the dawn of humanity's great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.

"Naysayers can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels that Palestinian refugees have called 'home' for three generations in their purgatory camps.

"These universally exploited refugees are entitled to the nice apartments - the ones that have pools downstairs and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because the kind of compensation owed for this failed western experiment will never be enough.

"And no, nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears - the one 'firewall' remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don't even care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don't hate Jews. It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If Jews who didn't live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany - and good luck to you.

"For anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade elsewhere - you are part of the reason this problem exists.

"Israelis who don't want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous Palestinian population - the ones who don't want to relinquish that which they demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago - can take their second passports and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude - Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors - without proportional response - shows remarkable restraint and faith.

"This is less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage - we will get through it just fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all, universally, Palestinian - undoing this wrong is a test of our collective humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.

"Israel has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: 'Israel has no right to exist'. Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your Facebook status update - do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here - have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was." (al-akhbar.com, 17/5/12)

Who's Afraid of Tony Judt?

This post is prompted by Phillip Adams' Late Night Live discussion with US historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and prominent Australian author and academic (politics) Robert Manne on April 10. The topic: Thinking the 20th Century: the life & work of Tony Judt.

Born in the UK of Jewish parents, Judt was a highly acclaimed historian and essayist who died in tragic circumstances in 2010. (See my 7/8/10 post Tony Judt (1948-2010) RIP.)

As it happened, much of the discussion that night focused on Judt's controversial essay, Israel: The Alternative, published in The New York Times Review of Books in 2003.

What particularly struck me was the extent to which both Snyder, who had helped the stricken Judt put together his last book, Thinking the 20th Century, and Manne, who stated that Judt was "by far the contemporary intellectual I feel most connected with," sought to distance themselves from that essay. It had me thinking: here it is 2012, and two highly educated men, professing nothing but the highest regard for Judt and his example, still found the content of that essay (I presume alone of all Judt's writings) too hot to handle, such is the baneful and chilling influence still of the Zionist thought police on Western liberal intellectuals.

Because neither Snyder nor Manne could bring themselves to grapple seriously with what Judt had to say in his Israel essay, most of which, I hasten to predict, they would have accepted without demur if the subject had been South African apartheid, I intend to address the essay (including its flaws) before moving on to our two intellectuals' instructive reaction to it.

Judt correctly put his finger on George W Bush's reduction to the role of "a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli [Sharon] cabinet line: 'It's all Arafat's fault'."

He correctly described the Palestinians as being "corralled into shrinking Bantustans."

He correctly located the Zionist movement in the wave of ethnographic nationalist movements which sprang up following the collapse of the Habsburg and Romanov empires and which sought to carve out ethnically homogenous states from the rubble of those empires, often at the expense of "inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status." It is in this context that Judt famously observed: "The very idea of a 'Jewish state' - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

So far so good. It is in his discussion of Israel's 'democracy', however, that Judt stumbled. Failing to note that Israel can only claim to be both Jewish and (at least formally) democratic because the vast majority of Palestinians were expelled beyond its 'borders' in the period from 1947-1950, he concluded that, given the rising Palestinian birthrate in the occupied territories and among its own remnant Palestinian population, Israel would eventually end up with a de facto Arab majority and can therefore only remain Jewish and democratic if it becomes "the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project."

Unfortunately, at this point, Judt completely overlooked the full-scale Zionist ethnic cleansing of the late forties which enabled Israel to claim that it was both Jewish and democratic in the first place. To omit this (probably not deliberately) was a cardinal error indeed and constitutes the real problem with Judt's essay. His failure to further factor in the legal right of all ethnically-cleansed Palestinians to return to their homeland within pre-1967 Israel only makes the earler omission worse.

Judt's argument that the time has passed for a two-state solution - "there are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws" - has only grown in credence since he made it almost 12 years ago.

As has the relevance of the following statement: "The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians."

And this: "But what if there were no place in the world today for a 'Jewish state'? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural."

That is not to say that Judt sees a one-state solution to the conflict as a cakewalk, as he made clear in his conclusion: "To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea."

Now observe how first Timothy Snyder and then Robert Manne duck and weave when reminded by Phillip Adams of Judt's argument for a one-state solution and his assessment of Israel as an anachronism:

"There you're onto an important thing in this book about the way Thinking the 20th Century works. It doesn't work by way of me telling Tony how smart he is and how I agree with him about everything and how wonderful Tony Judt might be. It works as a long argument between him and me which I think... [Adams, interrupting: But that's what makes it work. If it wasn't that it could have become an exercise in being sychophantic.] Yeah, frankly it would have been disrespectful to the way Tony and my relationship always was and the way he was in the wider world. But that's just all by way of saying I didn't particularly think that that was intellectually Tony's most impressive achievement. I mean he published it right around the same time he published an essay about Belgium where he thought the one-state solution that is Belgium will not work. So the suggestion that a one-state solution in Israel is plausible when it's not plausible in Belgium, which is after all a much nicer neighborhood, struck me as not particularly convincing. But it really goes back to your previous question because what I think he was doing was not so much criticising Israel - you know the debate about the one-state/two-state in Israel is sort of old hat - what he was trying to do I think was to begin a serious conversation in the US about what Israel is, might be, should be, and that he failed in that I think speaks badly about us [ie the Americans]. But that he tried to do it and that he had the optimism about us that you could just talk about these things in principle as opposed to ad hominem, that's the kind of optimism you have to have if you want to be an intellectual in politics."

OMG! Is Belgium still standing? Thank God for nicer neighborhoods. Hm, I wonder what made Palestine a not-so-nice neighborhood?

"[Adams: Robert, your view on this issue?] I was hoping you'd ask. Look, I don't think he was right about the one-state solution. I think it's one of the moments of political naivety which is very rare for Tony Judt. On the other hand... it seems to me that his understanding of what went wrong with Israel was profoundly important and he's asked by Timothy in the book whether he thinks he's courageous for having been a lone voice in the mainstream, deeply critical of the drift of Israel and he says 'No, not at all. I might've been a bit more honest than other people but I wasn't particularly courageous in that'. But what he saw and the central truth of all this is that when Israel made the decision in 1967 to hold on to the West Bank and Gaza it made a catastrophic decision for its future, and that everything that one could've thought from then about what would happen has happened, and I think he's a very important intellectual for the fact that he saw how deeply wrong that decision was and what flowed from it, and even though I don't think in any way it's his most distinguished writing, it's very important writing because I think it shows hard-headedness and courage. I think he was wrong to say he wasn't courageous. In Australia it's easy to say certain things and you only get a little bit knocked about. He was, as I understand it, severely taken apart by his own peer group, the liberal Jewish intellectuals and I think history will show him to have been absolutely right in his fundamental judgment on what had gone wrong with Israel from 1967 onwards in particular."

In his essay, Judt's focus is not on how Israel supposedly 'lost its way' only after the 1967 conquest and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. There is no suggestion in it, as Manne would have us believe, of the soft-Zionist conceit whereby Israel's fabled 'soul' was doing just fine until sullied by the fateful decision to remain in occupation of the Palestinian territories it had conquered in 1967. But by leading us down this particular garden path, Manne conveniently sidesteps Judt's two key arguments: that, in a multiethnic and multicultural world, the blatantly ethnographic Israel is an anachronism; and that, however difficult the transition to a binational state in Palestine/Israel, it is still the least traumatic and most desirable outcome.

Despite Manne's stated admiration for Judt's intellectual courage, he has always shied away from dealing with the core issue of the Middle East conflict - the morality of establishing an ethnographic, apartheid state in the land of another people. There's no way, it seems, he's prepared to risk being severely taken apart by his own peer group by going there.

Clearly, he's no Tony Judt.

[See also my 2/9/11 post on Manne, Who Speaks for Palestine?]

He Just Doesn't Get It

"During that time [in the Communist Party], I fell hopelessly in love with Jews. No, not with Judaism. With Jews. It was a consequence of realising that a remarkable number of people I most liked and admired were secular Jews. And I met a great many in the Communist Party... By now I was writing for The Bulletin... And I began to realise that without the Jews the Victorian Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne Theatre Company would have found it hard to survive. For the Jews were central to Melbourne's culture - to its music, its literature, its theatre. The tiny community of Jews made a disproportionate contribution to the arts, literature, science, philanthropy and the nascent civil rights movement everywhere I looked. At the age of 16 I found myself wishing I'd been born Jewish." ('I am proud that', Phillip Adams, October 1998, jmm.aaa.net.au)

What follows is an extract from Phillip Adams' 25 minute interview with Saree Makdisi, nephew of the late Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, and author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2008), on Adam's "little wireless program" Late Night Live on 16/9/09. Adams just doesn't seem to get it:

Makdisi: My understanding is that, for there to be genuine reconciliation between the 2 peoples, there must be one state where all its citizens are treated as equals. What that means for Palestinians is that they would not have an independent Palestinian state, which is what they've been struggling for for the past 60 years. What it means for Jewish Israelis is that there would be no more Jewish state as such...

Adams (alarmed, interrupting): But they would see this as demographic suicide, would they not, given the population patterns?

Makdisi: But the point is that one people achieving what it wants at the expense of another is unworkable. Reconciliation has to happen when both peoples realise that they're both there to stay and that they have to find a way to live and find self-expression, and even self-determination, with an understanding that they have to do so equally and with each other rather than against each other.

Adams (surprised, as though hearing the one state idea for the first time - despite Ali Abu Nimah's conversation with him last year): A singular... single secular state with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side with what? equal rights?

Makdisi (incredulous): Yes, which is not that (laughing) difficult to imagine. Most countries in the world do work like that. That's what the basis of the modern liberal state is...

Adams (interrupting): Saree, let me ask you a question. Could it be called Israel?

Makdisi: Israel has constituted itself legally and officially as a Jewish state. That's why, legally speaking, there's no such thing as an Israeli nationality, it's only Jewish nationality [indistinct] So can that state become truly democratic? I don't think so. It understands itself, defines itself, not just juridically and institutionally as a Jewish state - even at the expense of its own Palestinian citizens. I think the path to peace and reconciliation is one where such exclusivist claims have to be abandoned and equality has to be embraced.

Adams: How long would it take before the Jewish Israelis were a minority in Israel?

Makdisi: I don't know. I don't even know that that question really matters. The whole question of minorities...

Adams (interrupting, testy - for the avuncular Adams): It sure as hell matters to them.

Makdisi: It may, but does it really matter in terms of the way a state is constituted? Should a state be constituted to guarantee minority rights at the expense of the majority? I don't think so. I believe in a state where everybody's equal. That's certainly the state I grew up in in the US. It's the model that the American constitution enshrines. That's the kind of polity I personally believe in.

Adams (divert! divert!): Can we look at another state in the time we have together, which needs a solution, and that's California?

Unbelievably, the remaining 5 minutes of the interview was devoted to the troubles of California and Obama. Saree Makdisi deserves a medal for his patience and forbearance.

Kicking for Justice?

"About 160 Muslim, Jewish, Aboriginal and Christian youth from various schools... huddled together last Thursday for a chance to kick balls with the Israeli-Palestinian team, which is competing in the AFL International Cup this week. Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the Jewish Board of Deputies (NSWJBD), welcomed the youth to the Auskick Harmony Day clinic, a joint venture of the Australian Chapter of the Peres Centre, AFL NSW/ACT, Erebus International and the NSWJBD. 'We leveraged the presence of the Peace Team to promote a message of goodwill, harmony and acceptance of difference here in Sydney', he said. 'I watched the team train in Israel 6 months ago, and it is inspirational to see Muslim and Jewish young men overcome logistical and cultural barriers and work together as a unit. The symbolism is very powerful'." (Kicking for peace, Chantal Abitbol, The Australian Jewish News, 29/8/08)

Quite! But if Palestinians are good enough to play football with, why aren't the Palestinian refugees (and their descendants), ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948, good enough to return to Israel as equal citizens? Wouldn't it be "inspirational" to see Israeli Jews and former Palestinian refugees "working together as a unit" as equal citizens of a secular, binational state of Palestine/Israel? Now there's an idea to kick around, Vic.