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Israel has the right to exist but also the duty to concede 'Its necessary foundation on injustice makes it incumbent on Israel to be the one that offers most concessions' David Aaronovitch 08 March 2002 I have always quite liked the slogan "a democratic, secular state of Palestine". Territorially the thing would look quite elegant, a proper blade-shaped sliver running from Lebanon to Eilat. Not at all like the tortured digit and mottled patchwork of any two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. So neat. And everybody living together: Arab, Jew and Christian. Just as in the (mostly) tolerant days of the Ottoman Empire, except with voting and without an official state religion. Aesthetics then, a strongly secular cast of mind, a cosmopolitan view of culture and an internationalist outlook predispose me – and I suspect many readers of The Independent – against nationalism and exclusivity. I have never seen Israel as a possible haven from a new anti-Semitism, I have never wanted to live there, I found my one visit – 26 years ago at the height of Menachem Begin's rule – supremely depressing. Ten years after the six-day war there were road signs in Hebrew and English, but none in Arabic. Aggressive men with yarmulkas and American accents would buttonhole me outside the University in Tel Aviv and tell me that I must know "that the Jewish heart is a good heart", before revealing the biblical necessity for "reoccupying Judea and Samaria". The Jewishness that I had known and liked was Yiddish. The Jewishness I found here was Hebrew. I could have added two reflections, if I had been observant enough at the time. One was that I would have found it even more depressing to stand listening to an explanation in Cairo or Baghdad or Damascus of why democracy was still-born in all these places. And two was that Yiddish was the language of the victim and Hebrew the tongue of a people determined not to be the victim again. But whatever I thought about there being an Israel was beside the point, because it was not going away. So I didn't really bother thinking about it at all. Apart from a few far-leftists, Arab nationalists and Palestinian romantics, the notion of the non-existence of the Jewish state per se was, as practical politics, nonsense. I wonder if that is still the consensus. So violent have been the events of the last 18 months, so desperate the struggle, so bloody, so grim the news, so insanely intractable the leadership of Sharon, so weak and dishonest the leadership of Arafat, that I sense a change. If there can be no peaceful solution, if no way can be discovered to parcel out the land and set the boundaries, then why not go back to the fundamental. Which is: why do we need a Jewish state at all? Wasn't the whole creation of Israel a massive injustice perpetrated against the Palestinians and one that only the disappearance of the said state can solve? This is the coffee-time question. You hardly need to be told that each side has its myths. Or, rather, its uni-explanations. Tiny Israel, born out of the Holocaust, full of progressive kibbutzim, wanting only peace, hemmed in by the many Arab millions intent on her destruction, forced into war, every act an act of self-defence. Poor Palestine, happy and united before the Zionists forced partition, before the Zionists threw the refugees out to spend a short eternity living on unreliable Arab charity, forgotten and unrecognised. Every act an act of desperation, born of weakness. Let's dispense with all that for now. It could all be true. All of it, however, originates in the decision first that there should be a Jewish state and then that it should be in Palestine. Once those decisions were taken – as they were first by the League of Nations and then in resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 – it was pretty much inevitable that many Palestinians would lose their homes and their birthrights to make way for the new dispensation. So, are Jews "entitled" to a homeland? Bit rough on them if they aren't. The Welsh have one, the Kurds, many think, should be given one, and you would be thought mad if you even raised the question about the British. The national experience of the modern era, from the late 18th century onwards, was all about the creation of states founded on cultural affinity. And almost all of these were, at some time or other, constructed on the forced migration of peoples. In addition the Jews had been an almost uniquely persecuted people, exploited and then expelled from most European countries, and subject to violent pogroms in others. As one critical author, Jerome Slater, has written: "It is hard to imagine that any other people has had a more powerful case for possession of a state of their own." Where though? The Soviets, keen on engineering solutions to national questions, created an autonomous Jewish region in Siberia, around Birobidjan. It didn't catch on. Various European heads of state, for various reasons, fixed upon Madagascar, presumably because it was quite a big island, and there was plenty of room, none of it filled with white people. That never happened. Theodore Herzl, top Zionist, flirted with Uganda for a while. His fellow Zionists flung the idea out. Though there were relatively few Jews still living in Palestine, nevertheless that was the place where they had historic links and that had been promised in the book of Exodus. The argument that such an exodus is not supported by the archaeological facts is wonderfully irrelevant here. So did the Jewish right outweigh the Palestinian right? In one way yes, in another way no. Palestinians are Arabs and Jews are not Africans, Siberians or Malagasy. There was no other Jewish state. On the other hand, the Palestinians had been there for longer and more recently. No real zero-sum result was possible; in the end some justice for the Jews meant injustice for the Palestinians. This does not, incidentally, mean that the equation of Zionism with racism has any meaning. Zionism, the desire of the Jews for a national state, is not based on an idea of racial superiority, but rather on achieving for the Jews an equality: one without which they are in jeopardy. So today there is the reality of Israel, which will not be wished away and which – I now realise – should not be wished away. Perhaps, in a more enlightened, more globalised world, the boundaries between peoples will be less important, but we aren't there yet. Nevertheless its necessary foundation on injustice makes it incumbent on Israel to be the side that offers most concessions. The Palestinians, as Jerome Slater has pointed out, have already – force majeure – conceded. Can you see Ariel Sharon understanding this? The need for a different type – a different mentality – of Israeli leadership was never more marked. From somewhere – soldiers on the West Bank, academics in the universities, young officials – must come the leadership of the future that can comprehend the price that was paid for Israel's existence and wishes – of itself – to make some recompense. And the question for the rest of us, and particularly for the Jewish communities, is what we can do to encourage that leadership to develop. More of that, as they say, anon. |
