[Peace-discuss] Essay Review

[David Green]

             In the 1980s, Israel ’s “new historians” challenged a Zionist narrative that had been publicly unquestioned in Israel and the United States . Among these historians, Israel could never again be viewed as an underdog David challenged by an Arab Goliath. Since then, the debate has been about whether this biblical metaphor should be turned on its head. Three recent books have made it uncontroversial to assert that the post-World War I Zionist movement, sponsored by Britain and the U.S. , should no more be seen as the underdog than we now see British colonialists in relation to Native Americans. In turn, Palestinians can no more be sensibly called anti-Semitic than indigenous Americans can be called “anti-European.”   
              These three books evoke the Zionist-Palestinian conflict with metaphors of confinement, separation, and exclusion: the “iron cage,” the “iron wall,” and the “glass wall.” In The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Khalidi documents British support for a Jewish national migration movement in Palestine since World War I, and concurrent opposition to an indigenous Palestinian national movement, most violently during the revolt of 1936-39. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine , by which the British ruled from 1923-1948, endorsed a “national home” for the Jewish people while never citing the Palestinians by name. Thus, “the (90%) Arab majority was effectively ignored as a national and political entity.” 
   
  The brutal suppression of the Palestinian revolt effectively decimated Palestinian leadership and resistance thereafter. In contrast, after World War II Zionist terrorism caused Britain to give up its Mandate, and to acquiesce in the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages that began during the Mandate’s final months while British forces remained. It has been claimed that in the wake of Holocaust, Zionists had to confront both a British Goliath and an Arab Goliath. It is clear that an increasingly well-armed and bold Zionist movement provoked a weakened British Goliath into abandonment, gained American and Soviet support, faced timid, compromised, and militarily inferior Arab regimes, and subsequently overwhelmed a virtually defenseless Palestinian society with profound internal problems, violently “transferring” over 700,000 Palestinians with relatively little provocation or resistance.
   
              In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has documented—house by house, village by village, city by city—the violent and sadistic expulsion of the Palestinians from the end of 1947 into 1949. It has long been established that the Palestinians fled not in response to “Arab broadcasts,” but to physical intimidation, including unprovoked massacres. Based on Pappé’s meticulous research, it is now clear that this ethnic cleansing was premeditated, thorough, not retaliatory, and half completed before the feeble and ineffectual intervention of Arab armies in May of 1948. “If there was a turning point in April (1948), it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population toward the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed.” This ethnic cleansing was based on a belief among Israeli leaders that an “iron wall” was required to separate an overwhelming Jewish majority from the
 Palestinians, who were understood then as now to pose not a military but demographic threat to a Jewish state.
   
              This demographic threat is addressed by Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in the Arab Israeli city of Nazareth , in Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 are now over 1 million, over 20% of the population, a percentage that increases due to their high birthrate. This presents a problem for a Jewish state that has used a harsh but “legal” discriminatory “glass wall” between its Arab and Jewish citizens that is “needed to cloak the contradictions inherent in the concept of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state.” These contradictions have been exposed by Israeli attacks on unarmed Palestinian civilians during the outbreak of the intifada in 2000, by increasing suspicion of the loyalty of historically quiescent Arab Israelis who demand social equality, and by increasing calls for expulsion by popular right-wing politicians. All of this has resulted in plans to
 re-draw borders in order to transfer as many as a quarter of Israel’s Palestinian citizens to a future Palestinian state, an outcome in no way supported by those affected.
   
              Metaphors of separation, confinement, and exclusion are made literally concrete by the wall that Israel has built mostly inside the occupied West Bank . While largely invisible to Israelis, in areas where visible it has been, according to Cook, “painted with murals on the Israeli side, reimagining the view that was now missing while making sure that it was empty of the Palestinian villages that could be seen before its construction.” Pappé adds that also eliminated are “the people who live in them.” The rights of those people—and of all Palestinians—have been made invisible not only by Zionist aspirations for a Jewish state on land that had to be taken by diplomatic chicanery and brute force, but by British and American policies that have exploited those aspirations for their own imperial ambitions.
   
  David Green

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