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[NYTr] The Zionist Dream is Becoming a Nightmare

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Jan 26, 2007, 10:53:02 PM1/26/07
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Tikkun via Alternet - Jan 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47058/

The Zionist Dream is Becoming a Nightmare

By Jerome Slater, Tikkun

Zionism's drive to create a state for the Jewish people was designed to
serve two purposes. The most fundamental of them was to provide a
refuge that would ensure the well-being and security of the Jewish
people, wherever they were endangered by the ever-recurring historical
cycles of murderous global anti-Semitism -- most recently, of course,
the Holocaust. Beyond that, the Jewish state of Israel was to be a
moral exemplar for all mankind, "a light unto the nations," the model
of the kind of state that a liberal, well educated, sophisticated, and
morally sensitive people -- "the people of the Book" -- could create.

The Zionist dream is becoming a nightmare. There is no place in the
world where the Jewish people are more insecure than in Israel, in
part, of course, because of the continuation of anti-Semitism,
especially in the Islamic world, but also because of the policies and
behavior of the Jewish state. As for its role of moral exemplar, today
defenders of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians don't even
bother to claim a higher morality; rather, they wish Israel to be
judged as an "ordinary" state and typically complain bitterly that the
West has a double standard, condemning Israel's human rights record but
minimizing the even worse record of typical Arab autocracies. What a
defense -- it's a long way from "a light unto the nations" to "better
than Syria."

Zionism's "original sin" (in the language of many Israeli critics) was
the political dispossession of the Arab peoples of Palestine, who had a
more compelling historical case for political sovereignty over
Palestine than did the Jews. True, Palestine had been the original
Biblical homeland for the Jews, before the Romans had expelled them two
thousand years earlier. But it hardly follows that this history gives
the Jews an inherent right to the land in perpetuity, particularly in
light of the incontestable fact that for thirteen hundred consecutive
years the area had been largely inhabited by Arabs, and also because
religious and historical claims to the land by both Muslims and
Christians are no less powerful than those made by Jews.

Thus, the religious argument for Jewish sovereignty over Palestine is
unpersuasive, and the argument based on previous possession of the land
is even more so.

There is no place on earth that hasn't at one time or another
"belonged" to a different people than its current inhabitants, and no
place other than Palestine where it even occurs to anyone to argue that
the passage of two thousand years is irrelevant to judging current land
rights. Far worse, by blinding the Israelis -- and their equally
unseeing supporters among diaspora Jews, especially in the United
States -- to the reality of the conflict, these childish arguments have
had devastating consequences for the Israelis and the Palestinians
alike.

The tragedy is that these deeply flawed arguments for privileging
Jewish claims to Palestine over those of its indigenous inhabitants
were so unnecessary because by the early 1940s there was one
incontestably good -- and sufficient -- argument. After the Holocaust,
it was clear to people of good will everywhere that the creation of a
Jewish state was now morally imperative, and that there was no
practical place to put such a state other than in Palestine. True, this
would create an injustice for the Palestinians, but one that could be
mitigated by dividing the land of Palestine between the Jews and the
Arabs. Tanya Reinhart puts it this way: "As an Israeli, I grew up
believing that this primal sin our state was founded on might be
forgiven one day, because the founders' generation was driven by the
faith that this was the only way to save the Jewish people from the
danger of another holocaust. But it didn't stop there."

Everyone knows, of course, that the Palestinians -- insisting on
holding 100 percent of the land for themselves, regardless of the
consequences for world Jewry -- refused to accept the UN's partition
plan of 1947. What is not nearly so well known, however, is that
Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, and most of the rest
of the Zionist leadership also never truly accepted partition. Rather,
they regarded their agreement to the UN plan as merely a tactical
necessity, one that would later be reversed when Israel became
militarily strong enough to resume its drive for Jewish sovereignty
over all of the Biblical land of Palestine. And so they did, and so --
as Tanya Reinhart argues -- Israel continues to do today, in an only
somewhat modified manner.

Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer a continuation of
an historically unavoidable "Original Sin"; rather,it has become an
avoidable, ongoing, and ever-worsening sin. Avoidable because there was
a reasonable chance that the conflict might have been resolved long
ago, had the Israelis acknowledged the inevitable harms done to the
Palestinians by the creation of Israel as well as the subsequent
expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages,
and resolved to do everything possible to make up for these injustices
in any manner possible, short of abandoning the Jewish state in one
part of the land of Palestine. Israel's failure to acknowledge its
responsibilities and moral obligations to the Palestinians has turned a
tragedy into a crime.

Tanya Reinhart, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and a
regular columnist in Israel's biggest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot,
has written two recent books of blistering, unsparing, and entirely
persuasive criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. The
first, "Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948," covered the
1999-2002 period; her most recent book, "The Road Map to Nowhere;
Israel/Palestine Since 2003," updates her analysis through early 2006.

Reinhart argues that under the administrations of both Ariel Sharon and
current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the real goal of Israeli policy has
been, at a minimum, to unilaterally annex some 40 percent of the West
Bank, including the most productive lands and most of the water
resources of the area. Beyond that, Olmert is continuing the process of
what Reinhart openly calls "ethnic cleansing" that began with the
expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Reinhart contends that
the brutality employed in the 1948 war is no longer feasible, if only
because of the potential condemnation of the international community
and the consequences it would have for Israel, so it is being replaced
by the more indirect method of "slow and invisible transfer" -- that
is, making life so miserable for the Palestinians that they give up and
move elsewhere.

The tactics used to achieve this goal include the killing of more than
two thousand innocent Palestinians as the result of Israel's
indiscriminate attacks on "militants" or "terrorists" via bombs,
missiles, artillery fire, and the like. Besides the killings, the
Israeli government has imposed collective punishment and deliberate
impoverishment of the entire Palestinian population by, as Reinhart
describes, creating "a complex system of prisons... [pushing the
Palestinians] into locked and sealed enclaves, fully controlled... by
the Israeli army." This is done by the "Separation Wall" and other
barriers, as well as by military roads, patrols, checkpoints, and
roadblocks; the closing of Gazan trade and commerce with the outside
world; and the repeated incursions of the Israel Defense Forces. Beyond
even that, other measures seek to destroy the Palestinian economy and
ordinary life, including the destruction of Gaza's main electrical
power plant; the severe restrictions placed on Palestinian drinking and
agricultural water; the daily humiliations and often severe hardships
imposed by draconic Israeli laws against the free movement of
Palestinians throughout the West Bank; the disruption of the private
and public health systems -- and more.

Faced with this catastrophe, it is no wonder that the Palestinians have
revolted; as Reinhart notes, international law and the Geneva
Conventions "recognize the right of an occupied people to carry out
armed struggle," although not to resort to terrorism against civilians.
Even non-terrorist armed Palestinian resistance may not have been wise
in practice, Reinhart concedes, but what alternatives did the
Palestinians have? Many -- including Tikkun -- have proposed nonviolent
strategies of resistance, but there is little reason to believe that
approach would have been any more successful. Reinhart goes into great
detail on the tactics the Israeli army, police, and intelligence
services have used to suppress even nonviolent demonstrations --
including the use of tear gas, stun guns, rubber bullets, and
occasionally even live fire.

Reinhart focuses primarily on the Israeli treatment of the
Palestinians. She might well have added that the Occupation and
repression have had devastating direct and indirect effects on Israeli
institutions, society, and quality of life. As regularly discussed by
the Israeli news media and academicians, these include the following:

Israeli Democracy: All of Israel's democratic institutions are in
severe decline. The Knesset is widely regarded with contempt, as are
politicians generally. The judiciary in general, and the Supreme Court
in particular, have largely abandoned their imperative role of
upholding law and human rights against widespread governmental abuses,
so long as the government cites "security needs" as its justification.
Not surprisingly, the power of the military and security services in
Israel are greater than in any other Western democracy.

Democratic and Human Rights: There are many Israeli commentaries about
the radical decline of values and ordinary moral norms and constraints.
Among the consequences are the growth of (1) class and intra-Jewish
ethnic and religious conflict; (2) organized and unorganized crime,
including routine intra-Jewish violence; (3) anti-Arab sentiments and
other forms of racism; and (4) the abuse of women, including white
slavery. As academics like Aviad Kleinberg and journalists such as Tom
Segev have concluded, "interest in human rights has never been so
negligible," and Israeli society, gripped by "moral and political
paralysis," is "gradually coming undone."

Economic Injustice: Israel has completely abandoned its earlier goal of
creating a democratic socialism in favor of "rampant capitalism."
Consequently, while some Israelis grow fabulously wealthy, other
sectors of the society suffer through high unemployment rates, high
inflation, and continuously widening income inequalities.

To add to the picture of this third-world style pathology, Reinhart
notes that a 2005 World Bank report found Israel to be one of the most
corrupt and least efficient Western states.

Education and Culture: Religious messianism and fundamentalism are on
the rise. This together with the secular but primitive nationalism of
Sharon and his successors has created an environment in which academic
freedom is under severe attack, Israel's intellectuals are increasingly
regarded with scorn, and the education system as a whole has radically
declined, becoming increasingly government-controlled, politicized, and
ineffective. As Adir Cohen, a chaired professor of education at Haifa
University, recently wrote, the deterioration in the Israeli education
system (as reported by a spate of recent studies) is accompanied by a
national move in "an anti-cultural direction. The art institutions are
being suffocated, the orchestras choked, the theaters closed down. ...
Public libraries are in a terrible state. For 2,000 years we were
People of the Book. Now we've become the country bumpkins."

Though it cannot be said that all of these problems are attributable
only to the consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor that
they would disappear if that conflict were settled, it is equally
obvious that the conflict, the Occupation, and the repression of the
Palestinians has played a major role in either creating or exacerbating
them.

What Can the American Jewish Community Do?

Not only is Israel's democracy and society at stake, but even its basic
security. As Reinhart puts it, Israel is a "small Jewish
state...surrounded by two hundred million Arabs," and it "is making
itself the enemy of the whole Muslim world. There is no guarantee that
such a state can survive. Saving the Palestinians also means saving
Israel." Sooner or later the most fanatical of the Islamic
fundamentalists by one means or another are likely to acquire nuclear
weapons -- and they may very well use them against Israeli cities,
regardless of the obvious consequences to the Muslim world from Israeli
retaliation. And that will be the end of Israel, and much of the Middle
East.

Only serious pressures by the American government, including making
continued political, economic, and military support contingent on the
end of the Is-raeli occupation and repression of the Palestinians, can
stop the Israelis from marching over this looming cliff. Given the
confluence of rightwing ideology and domestic political realities in
the United States, however, it is hard to imagine any American
government imposing such tough-love policies on Israel without strong
support from the American Jewish community. Reinhart argues that "Part
of the reason why the pro-Israeli lobbies [in the U.S.] have been so
successful... is the massive lack of knowledge about what is really
happening in Israel-Palestine." However, matters are even worse: it is
not so much innocent ignorance that accounts for the unwillingness of
most of the American Jewish community to help save Israel from itself,
for by now there has been considerable coverage -- even in the
super-cautious American news media -- of what Israel is doing to the
Palestinians and to its own best interests. Thus, the real issue is the
willed ignorance -- the psychological need not to know -- of our
community. The price -- to the Palestinians, to the Israelis, and to
American national security -- is already unbearable, and it may well
soon become apocalyptic.

[Jerome Slater is University Research Scholar, SUNY/Buffalo]

B) 2007 Independent Media Institute.

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