[Peace-discuss] Upcoming speaker

Sat Oct 13 15:46:39 CDT 2007

This morning on News from Neptune, I referred to an upcoming visit by Yosef Gorny, an Israeli historian. What follows is a letter to the DI that will most likely not be published. Below that is a Commentary submitted to the NG that was also not published. My purpose here is to interest critics of Israel to engage in these events which, as I suggest below, would (I suspect) customarily take place within the limits of allowable debate--that is, "liberal" Zionists and their right-wing critics. As I suggested this morning, it is almost inconceivable that one of Israel's "new historians" would be invited to our campus. Khalidi has been, of course, but not to address issues raised in The Iron Cage, as far as I an aware.

  If you care, you can google "gorny sternhell" and get an idea of the academic debate between a "new historian" and and old one. 

  DG

  http://www.jewishculture.uiuc.edu/

  ______________________ 
  Later this month, the Program for Jewish Culture and Society will be hosting resident scholar Yosef Gorny, an Israeli historian who has addressed the problem of Zionist ideology. While Gorny is reputable, his visit raises troubling concerns on a number of levels.

  First, visiting scholars invited by PJCS are invariably Israeli, as if Jewish culture and society as an academic discipline is defined by Zionism. Second, Israelis that are invited are invariably supportive of the Zionist project, which has been one of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and aggression, continued on a daily basis. Third, dissenting scholars from Israel have never been invited. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, for example, has written convincingly about the planned and unprovoked nature of the 1947-49 Palestinian expulsion in “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Given the record of PJCS, it is unimaginable that Pappe or other Israelis who fundamentally question the morality of the Zionist project would be invited. Fourth, there is no consistent institutional effort from any quarter to bring Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voices to this campus to address these issues. Finally, while the field of “cultural studies” has attempted to shine a critical and
 self-critical light on historically dominant cultures, PJCS promotes an ethnocentric, elitist, and self-justifying view of Jewish-American and Jewish-Israeli culture and politics that enforces oppressive and hegemonic assumptions, very much in accordance with those of U.S. imperialism, leaving little room for meaningful critique at any level.

  Professor Gorny, as an Israeli “moderate,” will doubtless be criticized from the right by hard-core local Zionists. But his essential support for the Zionist project should also be questioned by those who support basic principles of social justice on a consistent and universal basis.

  ________________________________________

  An understanding of the history of Israel-Palestine is required in order to address the current situation

              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 lives in Champaign

---------------------------------
Boardwalk for $500? In 2007? Ha! 
Play Monopoly Here and Now (it's updated for today's economy) at Yahoo! Games.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20071013/986ddb23/attachment.htm