Al-Ahram Weekly
September 27, 2001
By Ilan Pappe
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Anyone visiting Israeli academia in the mid-1990s must have felt a fresh breeze of openness and pluralism blowing through the corridors of a hitherto stagnant establishment, painfully loyal to Zionist ideology in every field of research that touched upon Israeli reality, past or present. The new atmosphere allowed scholars to revisit the history of 1948, and accept some of the Palestinian claims about that war. It produced local scholarship that challenged dramatically the historiographic picture of early Israel. In the new research environment, pre- 1967 Israel was no longer a small defensive country and the only democratic state in the Middle East; it was now depicted as a power structure that oppressed its Palestinian minority, discriminated against its Arab Jewish citizens and conducted an aggressive policy toward neighbouring states in the region. The academic critique transcended the ivory towers to reach other cultural media such as the theatre, film, literature and poetry and even documentary TV films and textbooks in the official school system.
It would take a very imaginative and determined visitor nowadays to find any trace of that openness and pluralism -- among the major consequences, or shall we say victims, of the last Intifada in Israel. It was part of the decline of what was once called the "Israeli left" in the immediate aftermath of the Intifada. The "left" was that part of Jewish public opinion which, with varying degrees of conviction and honesty, held peaceful positions on the question of Palestine. Since 1967, its members had declared their willingness to withdraw from the occupied territories; they accepted a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital next to Israel, and they spoke of the need to grant full civic rights to the Palestinian minority in Israel itself.
A large portion of this group, on the eve of the present Intifada, publicly and privately confessed how wrong they had been to trust the Palestinians and without hesitation voted for Sharon in the February elections (either by voting directly for him or by blocking the way to a third candidate instead of Barak, who had promised to join Sharon in a unity government after the elections). The chief "gurus" and leaders of this group expressed their "disappointment" with Israel's Palestinian citizens -- with whom, so they claimed, they had concluded an "historical alliance." The Israeli Palestinians' boycott of the February 2001 elections was the last straw that broke the back of that "historical pact." The dehydration of the Israeli cultural, intellectual and academic scene and the disappearance of a political moral voice that accepts at least the Palestinian right to independence and equality, if not the right of return, were twin processes that occurred at an amazing speed. One would have expected, especially in society's more learned and intellectual circles, long processes of reflection and deduction. But it seems that what took place instead was a frantic rush, accompanied by loud sighs of relief, to shed off the few thin layers of democracy, morality and pluralism that had covered Zionist ideology and praxis throughout the years. The swift disintegration of the institutes that advocated peace policies and compromises, the hasty removal of peaceful and moral terminology from the public discourse and the disappearance of any alternative views to the sticky Zionist consensus on the Palestine question -- all testify to the shallowness of the Israeli peace discourse and camp before the Intifada.
Israeli analysts attribute the phenomena we are witnessing to genuine trauma. The shock has been caused by three factors: Arafat's insistence on the right of return, the PA's rejection of Barak's generous offers at Camp David and the violent uprising. But these are false explanations, as many of those who bring them up would be the first to recognise. Arafat never relinquished the right of return -- indeed, he could not, even if he had wished to do so. He openly and constantly talked about it from Oslo onward. As for the fable of the generous offers made at Camp David, it seems that as Shlomo Ben Ami and Yossi Beilin recently admitted that such offers were made only at Taba -- and then tongue in cheek, since everyone concerned already knew Barak was a lame duck and had no power to execute them. Moreover, many Israeli "leftists" read the American reports from Camp David, translated into Hebrew in Haaretz, and knew that at Camp David Arafat was presented with a dictate he could not accept under any circumstances. Did he really disappoint them by failing to resist the popular anger in the occupied territories at the cul-de-sac into which both sides had been pushed, and which for the Palestinians meant the perpetuation of the occupation?
The great prophets of this camp, A B Yehoshua and Amos Oz, warned long before the uprising that if peace were not achieved in Camp David, war would reign instead. There was no element of surprise; references to disappointment stem from the fact the people on the left moved gladly to the centre and the right, where they were embraced as the lost sons returning home from a long exile, even before allowing themselves time to examine the development.
It seems now that those, such as the writer of this article, who had warned that the Oslo accord was no more than a political and military arrangement meant to replace Israeli occupation with another form of control, were right. Oslo did not cause any significant change in the basic Israeli interpretations (from left and right) of the past, present and future in Palestine. Most of Palestine, in the view of both left and right, was Israel, and there was no right of return -- just as Jews' only hope of survival was within a Zionist state, over as much of Palestine as possible, with as few Palestinians as feasible. The argument was about tactics, not goals. The "moderate" tactic was presented to the Palestinians in Oslo as a "take it or leave it" proposition, in return for which the Palestinians were expected to cease all attempts to achieve more than had been offered. This did not work, although it seemed for a while that it had. This was due to President Clinton's deep involvement, impressions conveyed by the Palestinian leaders that this was indeed a peace process, and the somnolence of the Arab world. Israel reaped dividends and paid nothing back.
The "peace camp" in Israel had enemies: those on the right, and especially the settlers, who found even that attempt superfluous. In the name of god and nation, they preferred to use sheer force to impose the Zionist reality over all of Palestine. Because of these opponents and their violence, the Oslo camp had a martyr (Yitzhak Rabin); since they had victims, they were convinced they were fighting for peace. In fact, what they were struggling for was the creation of a Bantustan, a protectorate on most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In return, they sought to solicit from the Palestinians an "end of the conflict" declaration. This did not necessitate reassessment of Israel's role in, and responsibility for, the ethnic cleansing it had carried out in 1948, a revision of its brutal polices in the occupied territories or a review of its refusal to allow the Palestinians a full sovereign state on at least 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in full).
This also led to the illusion that the Israeli left had succeeded in Zionising the Palestinian minority in Israel as part of the overall deal. It took time for the Palestinian minority and its leaders to understand that a final peace map included the perpetuation, if not accentuation, of discriminatory policies and practices against the minority in the Jewish State. As the Palestinians were told in Camp David to accept the "mother of all deals" -- meaning they were expected not to raise any more demands in the future -- so were the Palestinian citizens of Israel counted upon to forsake any aspiration of turning it into a state for all its citizens as well as any hope for its de-Zionisation.
When the Intifada broke out in the occupied territories and in the Palestinian community inside Israel, the very narrow limits of the genuine Jewish peace camp was exposed. It had always been small, but with the help of the international media, American peace discourse and the fanaticism of the Israeli right, it had appeared large enough to justify hopes for a comprehensive and just solution in the Middle East as a whole.
It was a bubble that burst. Now the time has come to reassess, in a much more sober and realistic way, how the genuine peace camp within Jewish society can regroup and make an impact on the Palestine question. It should allow the few committed who remain to speak more openly in their support of the Palestinian struggle for independence -- even if now such public support is akin to treason in the eyes of most Israelis. It should introduce openly the need to de-Zionise Israel as the only means of achieving peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people. It should not only uphold the Palestinian right of return; it should also offer practical ways of implementing it. It should forsake the petty dissension and conflicts that characterise left-wing movements, and realise that the main task is to prevent an Israeli onslaught on both the Palestinians in the occupied terriers and in Israel itself. And finally, it should produce and publicise bold new ideas about how to build a political structure in the future for a situation that renders the idea of two states irrelevant, given the demographic distribution of Palestinians and Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Such new structures could take the form of a binational or secular democratic state, or something in this direction.
This may prove too much, but each of the above is a priority and the task of convincing as many Jews as possible to follow such directions for both functional and moral reasons can only be fulfilled from within the Jewish community. The urgency of some of the dangers to be averted is such that, in the meantime, the non-Zionist Israeli left should spur the international community to interfere and prevent the dangers facing the existence of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel. For the time being, this group of people, with all its good will, does not have the power to do so.
The writer is a professor at Haifa University