Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israel: The alternatives (English - Lungo)

The New York Review of Books:
Volume 50, Number 16 ¡P October 23, 2003
Israel: The Alternative
By Tony Judt
The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed.
Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority
and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a
similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building
illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President
of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's
dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's
fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian
Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the
corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser
Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do.
Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental
empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states,"
territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others
might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov
empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity.
A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about
privileging their national, "ethnic" majority¡Xdefined by language, or
religion, or
antiquity, or all three¡Xat the expense of inconvenient local minorities,
who were consigned to second-
class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.
But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The
dream of an appropriately
sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had
to wait upon the retreat of
imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world
war. And thus it was only
in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman
Palestine. But the founders of
the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as
their fin-de-siecle
contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly,
Israel's ethno-religious self-
definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always
had more in common with,
say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to
acknowledge.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not¡Xas is sometimes suggested¡Xthat
it is a European "enclave" in
the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a
characteristically late-nineteenth-
century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of
individual rights, open frontiers,
and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"¡Xa state in which
Jews and the Jewish religion
have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever
excluded¡X is rooted in another
time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
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In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous
insecure, defensive microstates
born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma.
Thanks to its occupation of the
lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It
can dismantle the Jewish
settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within
which Jews constitute a clear
majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one
with a constitutionally
anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza,
whose Arab
population¡Xadded to that of present-day Israel¡Xwill become the demographic
majority within five to
eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an
ever-larger majority of
unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot
be both.
Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of
the overwhelming majority of
the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them
of land and livelihood,
leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed
remain both Jewish and at
least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern
democracy to conduct full-scale
ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel
forever to the status of an
outlaw state, an international pariah.
Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a
Jewish state has not been
watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West
Bank over the past quarter-
century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some
of them currently in
government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the
Likud. Its major component
is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir
Jabotinsky's interwar
Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and
territorial niceties once attracted
from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's
deputy prime minister, Ehud
Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of
assassinating the elected president
of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than
ever. Political murder is what
fascists do.
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The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless.
Suicide bombers will never
bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons.
There are indeed Arab radicals
who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they
represent no strategic threat
to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear
much more than Hamas or the al-
Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater
Israel," and above all the erosion
of the political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent
Labor politician Avraham
Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the
reality of Israel is a colonial
state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic
morality."[1] Unless something
changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.
This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a
disaster for American foreign
policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly
flouted UN resolutions
requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the
only Middle Eastern state
known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning
a blind eye, the US has
effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such
weapons from falling into the
hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's
unconditional support for Israel
even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest
of the world no longer
credits our good faith.
It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's
reasons for going to war in Iraq
were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the
current US administration, a major
strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the
Middle East in a manner
thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making
belligerent noises toward Syria
because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been
moved there¡Xa claim for
which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs
Hezbollah and the Islamic
Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant
international threat. However, Damascus
has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like
Iran, another longstanding target
of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the
United States as a friend than
an enemy. Which war are we fighting?
On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking
Israel to desist from its
threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves
recognize, off the record, that the
resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild
pronouncements of Israel's
present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a
major impediment to peace.
But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our
credibility as an honest broker
in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer
surprised at such actions, but
they are saddened and disappointed all the same.
Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own
difficulties for many years; why do we
continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? The US has tentatively
sought in the past to pressure
Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of the
money that goes to
subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last time this was attempted, during
the Clinton administration,
Jerusalem got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure."
Washington went along with the
subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over four years, between 1993
and 1997, less than $775
million was kept back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we
don't even try to stop
it.
This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded
American domestic debate.
Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and
pundits slander our European
allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent
anti-Semitism when Israel is
criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to
break from the consensus.
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But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away. President Bush will
probably be conspicuous by his
absence from the fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the
"road map" in June to
placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American statesman is going to
have to tell the truth to an
Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals
and moderate Palestinians have
for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel
to dismantle nearly all the
settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab
recognition of those frontiers and
a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by
Western and international
agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just
and possible solution.
But I suspect that we are already too late for that. 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. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground,
and that, as Israelis say,
reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and
subsidized Jewish settlers
would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will
happen. Many of those
settlers will die¡Xand kill¡X rather than move. The last Israeli politician
to shoot Jews in pursuit of state
policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun
militia in 1948 and
integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not
Ben-Gurion.[3]
The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution¡X the
core of the Oslo process and
the present "road map"¡Xis probably already doomed. With every passing year
we are postponing an
inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far
acknowledged, each for its own
reasons. 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. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the
choice; and that is why they
anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the
survival of a Jewish state.
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. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, is a
dead letter; Western
civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of
Christians, Jews, Muslims,
Arabs, Indians, and many others¡Xas any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva
will know.[4]
Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains
distinctive among democratic states
in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank
its citizens. It is an oddity
among modern nations not¡Xas its more paranoid supporters assert¡Xbecause it
is a Jewish state and no
one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in
which one community¡XJews ¡Xis
set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.
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For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After
1948 it took in hundreds of
thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel
their condition would have
been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel.
The circumstances of its
birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the
German project to exterminate the
Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably
back to the memory of that
project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to
exploit. To find fault with
the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative
configuration in the Middle East is
to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.
In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not
live in Israel were often
reassured by its very existence¡Xwhether they thought of it as an insurance
policy against renascent
anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would
fight back. Before there was
a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer
anxiously over their shoulders and
keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years,
the situation has tragically
reversed.
Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and
vulnerable to attack for
things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian
one, which is holding them
hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli
policies, but they are implicitly
identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their
allegiance. The behavior of a
self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The
increased incidence of
attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to
misdirected efforts, often by young
Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's
current behavior is not just bad for
America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as
many Israelis silently
acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.
In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry
at will; where cultural
and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more
and more of us have
multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to
answer to just one of them;
in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism
but a dysfunctional one. In
today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and
belligerently intolerant, faith-driven
ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.
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: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial
electronic fence now being
built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The
"fence"¡Xactually an armored
zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and
a wall up to twenty-eight feet
tall in places¡Xoccupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy
villages, livelihoods, and
whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million
per mile and will bring
nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall,
it confirms the moral and
institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.
A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly
engaged American
leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed
by international
force¡Xthough a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much
easier policing militants of
all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from
outside and can appeal to an
angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational
state in the Middle East
would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political
class. The very idea is an
unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin.
But the alternatives are far,
far worse.
¡XSeptember 25, 2003
Notes
[1] See Burg's essay, "La revolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde,
September 11, 2003. A former head
of the Jewish Agency, the writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's
Parliament, between 1999 and
2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first
appeared in the Israeli daily
Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward
(August 29, 2003) and the
London Guardian (September 15, 2003).
[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the
July 2003 issue of Vanity
Fair.
[3] In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister
Begin and Defense
Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish
settlements in the territory belonging
to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with
force, though no one was
killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a
quarter of a million, and the land
in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."
[4] Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in
England all continue to encounter
hostility. A minority of voters in France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and
Norway, support political
parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only platform.
But compared with thirty
years ago, Europe is a multicolored patchwork of equal citizens, and that,
without question, is the shape
of its future.
[5] As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best
recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to
the fate of Palestinian children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we
surprised when they blow us up
in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it would change
nothing." See Burg, "La
revolution sioniste est morte."

Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
Se lo dice lui...
-Stefano