Since its creation Israel was haunted by the specter of its original sin perpetrated against the Palestinian victim. Yet Israel refuses to confess its sin by ignoring the tragic developments of its creation and continues to nurture its traditional narrative on the (Nakba), the events of 1948 and the saga of the heroic Jewish national liberation movement which triumphed against the British mandate and Palestinian terrorism. Obsessed by the logic of power and superiority it closed its heart and mind as well as it closed its doors in the face of its Arab and Palestinian neighborhood behaving like a besieged castle. Israel went on with its castle mentality and found its salvation by launching additional wars and occupying more Arab land to use it as barter, in the hope to compel Arabs to bargain on new occupations and forget previous ones.

On the internal front and in relation to the Arab remaining minority inside Israel it practiced a policy of racial and cultural discrimination. Arabs in Israel were treated as second or third class citizens. All kind of repressive measures were practiced against them in order to force them to emigrate and leave the floor to Jewish immigrants. In spite of their loyalty to the Jewish national state the oppressed Arab minority never felt as full citizens of Israel. For the last 60 years the policy of discrimination went on regardless of minor improvements in their daily life on different levels.

The official Israeli narrative recounts that Israel is a state for the Jewish people and has to preserve its Jewish character and maintain its Jewish majority. An Arab minority has to be kept in a limited size and the demographic balance between Jews and non-Jews should not shift to the benefit of the Arab minorities. There fore Israel has to encourage Jewish immigration from Diaspora countries in order to keep that balance unchanged.

After the first Gulf war and the resulting Madrid Conference in 1991, Israel was tacitly recognized by all Arab States. Secret negotiation took place between Israel and the PLO led to the Oslo agreements of 1993. A new dawn of peace started to show up and Israel started to reconsider its former policies and the castle mentality started to crack. However, painstaking questions were raised by the Arab minority about their status and their rights. A country claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East cannot go on propagating a democratic discourse while one fifth of its citizens suffer from discrimination and oppression. 

Besides, some open minded Jewish academics started to raise questions about the Israeli treatment of the remaining Arab minority in Israel. A new Israeli tendency started to talk about an opening towards the Arab and Palestinian surrounding. Neo-Zionist enlightened thinkers and academics advocated the notion that Israel belongs to all its citizens and should enjoy equal rights, whether Jews or non-Jews. A major argument used by Dr. Azmi Beshara, a Knesset member and an Arab leading political figure in Israel. The U.S. model which unites all kinds of races, cultures and religions living together in social harmony provides an excellent example for Israel. 

However, self-identified post-Zionists differ on many important details, such as the status of the "law of return" and other sensitive issues. Modern post-Zionism is closely associated with the new historians, such as Ilan Pappee, represent a school of historical revisionism which examines the history of Israel and Zionism in light of classified government documents with an eye to uncovering events, hitherto down played or suppressed by traditional Zionist historians- especially those pertaining to the dispossession of the Palestinians, which the new historians argue was central to the creation of the state of Israel. Many post-Zionists advocate the evolution of Israel from a theological state in to a non-ideological, secular, liberal and democratic state. They also say that "with the proclamation of Israel, Zionism has attained its goal. Now a new epoch begins, which consists of the normalization of the internal and external mechanism of the Zionist structure."

According to the norm established by post-Zionists, "Zionism as a national movement is essentially obsolete, incapable of responding to the challenges of the present time. It obsesses itself with a problem which has long ceased to exist, or which has undergone a metamorphosis which demands solutions very different of those of yesterday."

"Since its inception, Zionism was an intrinsically colonialist movement, which never really offered a solution to the problem it ostensibly wished to solve. However, it is responsible for the series of gross injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian people, and, hence, has also defamed the Jews," according to post-Zionists. There fore, "it is high time then for a different route to be taken, in the hope of overcoming past wrongs and marching to the beat of the prevailing individualistic and supra-national tendencies of post-modernism."

Nevertheless, post-Zionism, in its initial phases, strives for the logical extension of Zionist objectives, not their negation. The contemporary brand of post-Zionism, however, emerges as a harsh critic of the very nature of the Zionist movement. 

The tendency of opening found a door to the Israeli ministry of education during the mandate of Yossi Sarid as Minister of Education in the Barak government. Sarid started by admitting some changes and amendments in the Israeli curriculum, thus paving the ground for mutual understanding and social peace between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. A new program was introduced calling for understanding the tragic dimension of the Palestine question and the reconciliation with it. It intended to teach the new Israeli generations a new enlightened formula of the history of the state of Israel far away from propaganda, incitement and stereotyping. This aroused the anger of the castle mentality proponents represented by the Likud and other religious extremist parties. Consequently, with the advent of Sharon in 2001 and the elevation of Limor Livnat to the post of Education minister the whole process was stopped. Walking on the footsteps of Jabotinski, Livnat advocated in an article in the Jerusalem Post on January 26, 2001 the idea of the "iron wall" as a negation to the Oslo ideology of opening towards the Arabs and Palestinians.

The not honoring of the Oslo agreements unleashed the Intifada and raised again the painful question of reconciling Israel with its Arab and Palestinian neighborhood. However, if Israel has to take such a wise step, it has to start by confessing its original sin, and rectifying its error by shouldering its moral and historical responsibility towards the tormented Palestinian victim. Only through reconciliatory steps from both sides the long awaited historical reconciliation between Israel and its next door Palestinian neighbors and Arabs can take place. 

* Mahmoud Labadi served as the spokesperson of the PLO until 1983. He was the director general of the Palestinian Legislative Council until his retirement in 2005.

©  EsinIslam.Com

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