23 July 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
A
fascinating debate is entering
Israel’s political
mainstream on a once-taboo subject: the establishment
of a single state as a resolution of the conflict, one
in which Jews and Palestinians might potentially live
as equal citizens. Surprisingly, those advocating such
a solution are to be found chiefly on Israel’s
political right.
The
debate, which challenges the current orthodoxy of a
two-state future, is rapidly exploding traditional
conceptions about the Zionist right and left.
Most
observers -- including a series of US administrations
-- have supposed that Israel’s peace-makers are to be
found exclusively on the Zionist left, with the right
dismissed as incorrigible opponents of Palestinian
rights.
In
keeping with this assumption, the US president Barack
Obama tried until recently to sideline the
Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyhau, Israel’s rightwing prime minister,
and bolster instead
Ehud Barak, his
defence minister from the left-wing
Labour party, and the opposition leader
Tzipi Livni, of the centrist Kadima
party.
But,
as the Israeli right often points out, the supposedly
“pro-peace” left and centre parties have a long and
ignominious record in power of failing to advance
Palestinian statehood, including during the Oslo
process. The settler population, for example, grew the
fastest during the short premiership of Mr Barak a
decade ago.
What
the new one-state debate reveals is that, while some
on the right -- and even among the settlers -- are
showing that they are now open to the idea of sharing
a state with the Palestinians, the left continues to
adamantly oppose such an outcome.
In a
supplement of Israel’s liberal
Haaretz newspaper
last weekend largely dedicated to the issue,
Yossi Beilin, a former leader of the
ultra-dovish Meretz party and an architect of Oslo,
spoke for the Zionist left in calling a one-state
solution “nonsense”. He added dismissively: “I’m not
interested in living in a state that isn’t Jewish.”
The
Israeli left still hangs on resolutely to the goal it
has espoused since Mr Barak attended the failed
Camp David talks in 2000: the annexation
to Israel of most of the settlements in the West Bank
and all of those in
East Jerusalem.
The consensus on the left is that the separation wall,
Mr Barak’s brainchild, will ensure that almost all the
half million settlers stay put while an embittered
Palestinian population is corralled into a series of
ghettoes misleadingly called a Palestinian state. The
purpose of this separation, says the left, is to
protect Israel’s Jewishness from the encroaching
Palestinian majority if the territory is not
partitioned.
The
problem with the left’s solution has been summed up by
Tzipi Hotoveley, a senior Likud legislator who
recently declared her support for a single state.
“There is a moral failure here [by the left]. … The
result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and
turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of
massacres, to put it bluntly. It’s the left that made
us a crueler nation and also put our security at
risk.”
The
right is beginning to understand that separation
requires not just abandoning dreams of
Greater Israel
but making Gaza the template for the West Bank.
Excluded and besieged, the Palestinians will have to
be “pacified” through regular military assaults like
the one on Gaza in winter 2008 that brought
international opprobrium on Israel’s head. Some on the
right believe Israel will not survive long causing
such outrages.
But if
the right is rethinking its historic positions, the
left is still wedded to its traditional advocacy of
ethnic separation and wall-building.
It was
the pre-state ideologues of Labour Zionism who first
argued for segregation under the slogans “Hebrew
labour” and “redemption of the land” and then adopted
the policy of transfer. It was the Labour founders of
the Jewish state who carried out the almost wholesale
expulsion of the Palestinians under cover of the 1948
war.
For
the right, on the other hand, the creation of a “pure”
Jewish territory has never been a holy grail. Early
on, it resigned itself to sharing the land. The
much-misunderstood “iron wall” doctrine of Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the
Likud’s
intellectual father, was actually presented as an
alternative to Labour
Zionism’s
policies of segregation and expulsion. He expected to
live with the Palestinians, but preferred that they be
cowed into submission with an iron wall of force.
Jabotinsky’s successors are grappling with the same
dilemmas. Most, like Mr Netanyahu, still believe
Israel has time to expand Israeli control by buying
the Palestinians off with such scraps as fewer
checkpoints and minor economic incentives. But a
growing number of Likud leaders are admitting that the
Palestinians will not accept this model of apartheid
forever.
Foremost among them is
Moshe Arens, a
former defence minister and Likud guru, who wrote
recently that the idea of giving citizenship to many
Palestinians under occupation “merits serious
consideration”.
Reuven Rivlin,
the parliament’s speaker, has conceded that “the
lesser evil is a single state in which there are equal
rights for all citizens”.
We
should not romanticise these Likud converts. They are
not speaking of the “state of all its citizens”
demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish
non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians
accept life in a state dominated by Jews. Arens, for
example, wants to exclude the 1.5 million Palestinians
of Gaza from citizenship to gerrymander his
Jewish-majority state for a few more decades. None
seems to be considering including a right of return
for the millions of
Palestinian refugees.
And almost all of them would expect citizenship to be
conditional on loyalty, recreating for new Palestinian
citizens the same problematic relationship to a Jewish
state endured by the current Palestinian minority
inside Israel.
Nonetheless, the right is showing that it may be more
willing to redefine its paradigms than the Zionist
left. And in the end it may confound Washington by
proving more capable of peace-making than the
architects of Oslo.
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
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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