Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israele: Passato, presente e futuro

http://imeu.net/news/article0013494.shtml
his article was originally published by The Electronic Intifada and is
republished with permission.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at the Conference for
the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on
21 June 2008.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary
that he did not favor sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he
wrote, to "try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across
the border by denying it any employment in our own country ... Both
the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be
carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
He was proposing a program of Palestinian emigration enforced through
a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the
indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist
organizations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the
main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by
denying them rights to work the land or labor in the Jewish-run
economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through
ethnic separation.
Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the
problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine -- separation
and transfer -- were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be
mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used
together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear
voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his
most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.
In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule
about to reach parity with the Jewish population, the threat of a
Palestinian majority has loomed large again for the Zionists.
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Not surprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist solutions
to pursue, separation or transfer, have resurfaced.
Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps
loosely associated with Israel's center-left (Labor and Kadima) and
right (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu). The modern political arguments
between them turn on differing visions of the nature of a Jewish state
originally put forward by Labor and Revisionist Zionists.
To make sense of the current political debates, and the events taking
place inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first
examine the history of these two principles in Zionist thinking.
During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the
dominant Labor Zionist movement and its leader David Ben-Gurion
advanced policies much in line with Herzl's goal. In particular, they
promoted the twin principles of "Redemption of the Land" and "Hebrew
Labor," which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed to
separate themselves from the native population in working the land and
employing only other Jews. By being entirely self-reliant in
Palestine, Jews could both "cure" themselves of their tainted Diaspora
natures and deprive the Palestinians of the opportunity to subsist in
their own homeland.
At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation,
the Histadrut, which denied membership to Palestinians -- and, for
many years after the establishment of the Jewish state, even to the
remnants of the Palestinian population who became Israeli citizens.
But if separation was the official policy of Labor Zionism, behind the
scenes Ben-Gurion and his officials increasingly appreciated that it
would not be enough in itself to achieve their goal of a pure ethnic
state. Land sales remained low, at about six percent of the territory,
and the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian
labor.
Instead, the Labor Zionists secretly began working on a program of
ethnic cleansing. After 1937 and Britain's Peel Report proposing
partition of Palestine, Ben-Gurion was more open about transfer,
recognizing that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most of the
indigenous population was cleared from within its borders.
Israel's new historians have acknowledged Ben-Gurion's commitment to
transfer. As Benny Morris notes, for example, Ben-Gurion "understood
that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab
minority in its midst." The Israeli leadership therefore developed a
plan for ethnic cleansing under cover of war, compiling detailed
dossiers on the communities that needed to be driven out and then
passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to commanders in the field.
During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied of at least 80
percent of its indigenous population.
In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben-Gurion
responded to the political opportunities of the day and recalibrated
the Labor Zionism of Herzl. In particular he achieved the goal of
displacement desired by Herzl while also largely persuading the world
through a campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was
mostly voluntary. In one of the most enduring Zionist myths,
convincingly rebutted by modern historians, we are still told that the
refugees left because they were told to do so by the Arab leadership.
The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude
to the native Palestinian population. Paradoxically, given their
uncompromising claim to a Greater Israel embracing both banks of the
Jordan River (thereby including not only Palestine but also the modern
state of Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labor Zionists to
allow the natives to remain where they were.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 --
possibly in a rebuff to Ben-Gurion's espousal of transfer -- that "it
must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish
state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the
removal of non-Jewish citizens." The Revisionists, it seems, were
resigned to the fact that the enlarged territory they desired would
inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They were therefore less
concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make them
accept Jewish rule.
In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly
included the notion of separation but not necessarily transfer: an
"iron wall" of unremitting force to cow the natives into submission.
In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their subjugation
could be reached only "through the iron wall, that is to say, the
establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be
influenced by Arab pressure."
An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the
future Jewish state in simple colonial terms, as a European elite
ruling over the native population.
Inside Revisionism, however, there was a shift from the idea of
separation to transfer that mirrored developments inside Labor
Zionism. This change was perhaps more opportunistic than ideological,
and was particularly apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben-Gurion's
success in forging a Jewish state through transfer.
One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become a
Likud prime minister, was leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that
committed one of the worst atrocities of the war. He led his fighters
into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they massacred over
100 inhabitants, including women and children.
Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers
consciously inflated the death toll to more than 250 through the pages
of The New York Times. Their goal was to spread terror among the wider
Palestinian population and encourage them to flee. He later happily
noted: "Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of
'Irgun butchery,' were seized with limitless panic and started to flee
for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened,
uncontrollable stampede."
Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused
ethnic cleansing, including the late General Rehavam Ze'evi, whose
Moledet party campaigned in elections under the symbol of the Hebrew
character tet, for transfer. His successor, Benny Elon, a settler
leader and rabbi, adopted a similar platform: "Only population
transfer can bring peace."
The intensity of the separation vs. transfer debate subsided after
1948 and the ethnic cleansing campaign that removed most of the native
Palestinian population from the Jewish state. The Palestinian minority
left behind -- a fifth of the population but a group, it was widely
assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration -- was seen
as an irritation but not yet as a threat. It was placed under a
military government for nearly two decades, a system designed to
enforce separation between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Such
separation -- in education, employment and residence -- exists to this
day, even if in a less extreme form.
The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel's
conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. With Israel's erasure of
the Green Line, and the effective erosion of the distinction between
Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, the problem of a
Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.
Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government.
Almost alone, Moshe Dayan favored annexation of both the newly
captured territories and the Palestinian population there. Others
believed that such a move would be seen as transparently colonialist
and rapidly degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and
Palestinian non-citizens. In their minds, Jabotinsky's solution of an
iron wall was no longer viable.
But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid lip-
service to human rights, the government could see no way to expel the
Palestinian population on a large scale and annex the land, as Ben-
Gurion had done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no way of
persuading the world that such expulsions should be characterized as
voluntary.
Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction,
neither fully carrying out a transfer program nor enforcing strict
separation. Instead it opted for an apartheid model that accommodated
Dayan's suggestion of a "creeping annexation" of the occupied
territories that he rightly believed would go largely unnoticed by the
West.
The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from
Herzl's notion of separation in one important respect: in apartheid,
the "other" population was a necessary, even if much abused, component
of the political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian thinker Azmi
Bishara has noted, in South Africa "racial segregation was not
absolute. It took place within a framework of political unity. The
racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the
whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity."
In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in
Herzl's concept of separation was ignored for many years of Israel's
occupation. The Palestinian labor force was exploited by Israel just
as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the Palestinians
was formalized in the Oslo accords, which were predicated on the kind
of separation needed to create a captive labor force.
However, Yitzhak Rabin's version of apartheid embodied by the Oslo
process, and Binyamin Netanyahu's opposition in upholding Jabotinsky's
vision of Greater Israel, both deviated from Herzl's model of transfer
through separation. This is largely why each political current has
been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend towards
"unilateral separation."
Not surprisingly, the policy of "unilateral separation" emerged from
among the Labor Zionists, advocated primarily by Ehud Barak. However,
it was soon adopted by many members of Likud too. Ultimately its
success derived from the conversion to its cause of Greater Israel's
arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realized the chief manifestations of
unilateral separation, the West Bank wall and the Gaza disengagement,
as well breaking up Israel's right-wing to create a new consensus
party, Kadima.
In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved
through imposed and absolute separation -- just as Herzl had once
hoped. After the Gaza disengagement, the next stage was promoted by
Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for convergence, limited
withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain in
place, has been dropped, but its infrastructure -- the separation wall
-- continues to be built.
How will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer?
How will Herzl's original vision of ethnic cleansing enforced through
strict ethnic separation be realized in today's world?
The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement,
Israel has been able to cut off at will Gazans' access to aid, food,
fuel and humanitarian services. Normality has been further eroded by
sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated small-scale
invasions that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly
among civilians.
Gaza's imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily
reality. In fact, Gaza's condition is far worse than imprisonment:
prisoners, even of war, expect to have their humanity respected, and
be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed. Gazans can no
longer rely on these staples of life.
The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently
clear: transfer. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of
a normal life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave
-- in what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus.
And if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist
thinking they have forfeited their right to it -- just as earlier
generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done by
supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.
Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of a
modern policy of "transfer through separation" faces severe
limitations.
First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind support
for Israel. Such support is likely to be undermined by the current
American misadventures in the Middle East, and a gradual shift in the
balance of power to China, Russia and India.
Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only
from international law but also from the values upheld by most
societies and ideologies. The nature of Zionist ambitions is likely to
be ever harder to conceal, as is evident from the tide of opinion
polls showing that Western publics, if not their governments, believe
Israel to be one of the biggest threats to world order.
And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during
their slow eradication. The historical evidence most certainly shows
that they will not.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran
and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008) , and
Disappearing Palestine (Zed, forthcoming).

 his article was originally published by The Electronic Intifada 
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 21 June 2008.
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