[Peace-discuss] Dear Mr Netanyahu: Sorry we dared to dream. Yours, Israel’s Arab population

[David Green]

Sayed  Kashua is a resident scholar at the Program for Jewish Culture and Society at the U of I:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/dear-mr-netanyahu-sorry-we-dared-to-dream-yours-israels-arab-population/
For a moment I was optimistic.For one moment this week the hope I had utterly lost last summer – a summer suffused with racism, hatred, blood and devastation – came back. For one moment, after I left Jerusalem with my family for life in Illinois, I thought that maybe there’s still a chance, maybe there are still enough people in Israel who refuse to rule and oppress another nation.The last pre-election polls in the Israeli media predicted a loss for the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the head of the Arab parties’ Joint List, the young lawyer Ayman Odeh, gave me hope that it was not too late to stop the fascism. Odeh took part in a television debate with Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who as usual called Odeh and the rest of the country’s Arab citizens – people like me – a fifth column, the spearhead of the terrorist organisations in the Knesset.Odeh smiled tranquilly, and spoke about unity, cooperation, terminating the occupation in the Palestinian territories and forging a future of equality in Israel. The young lawyer succeeded in cutting Lieberman down to size, and showed him exactly for what he is: a benighted, pathetic racist.For a moment I no longer felt afraid of Lieberman and of his threats against the Arab citizens; for a moment I wanted to believe it was still possible.Not that I thought, heaven forbid, that Lieberman’s rivals from the Zionist Union would, when they came to power, immediately set about ending the occupation and granting the Arab citizens rights. But the very thought that a prospect existed of terminating Netanyahu’s rule gave me some solace. It was a wobbly base for change of some sort; a glimmer of hope with which I could deceive myself into believing that it would, after all, be possible to return home and lie to my children that one day there will be peace, that one day they will be equal citizens in a democratic state.I was wrong. I was wrong because I wanted to be wrong. I was wrong because I sought hope at any price. Because deep in my heart I refused to believe that people could be so indifferent to the suffering of others. “The Arabs are voting in their masses,” our prime minister incited the Israeli public on election day, declaring unabashedly that those masses were not truly citizens but enemies bent on our destruction – beware of them. After all, his election slogan was “It’s us or them”. And he succeeded. Once more he opted for intimidation, factionalism, hatred and incitement, and once more he succeeded.“If I am elected,” Netanyahu promised the people of Israel, “there will not be a Palestinian state.” True, it’s no secret that Netanyahu was not intending to support the establishment of a Palestinian state. The change lay in the fact that he said so openly, in order to persuade Israeli voters to flock to him. Who, then, should one be disappointed in – the prime minister, or the Israeli majority?And no, I don’t buy the official Israeli excuses that try to explain the occupation by resorting primarily to the words “fear” and “security”. No fear and security can explain settlements in the heart of a Palestinian population in the West Bank, in the heart of East Jerusalem or in Hebron. No fear and security can explain the expulsion of Palestinians from their home in favour of Jews, blacking out their cities, stealing their drinking water, surrounding them with concrete walls. No explanations and no theories based on threat, fear or security can explain separation and cruel discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens. Racism can explain it, messianic impulses seizing on divine precepts can explain it, so can ethnic cleansing.“Better to have Bibi in power,” some of my Arab colleagues will say, “better to have someone like Binyamin Netanyahu, who will expose the country’s true face.” They may be right. There may be something to the argument that it’s preferable to have a prime minister who asserts loud and clear that there will not be a Palestinian state and who does not consider the Arabs in Israel as true citizens. Preferable to a more sophisticated Zionist leadership that will throw sand in the eyes of the international community and talk in dulcet tones about a political agreement with the Palestinians, but will do all it can to prevent Palestinian independence. Others of my colleagues will also say that this is preferable, because it’s a sure recipe for the emergence of a single binational state that will be forced on the Israelis in the future without their having intended it.However, that’s an extremely problematic argument. The hope for a binational state that Israeli policy will bring about unintentionally, will be shunted aside for years by the racist separation that already exists in the occupied territories. Israel will continue to expand at the expense of Palestinian land, the Palestinians will continue to be squeezed into densely populated cantons encircled by walls, until the international community will ostracise Israel and force it to grant civil rights to the Palestinians – thereby perhaps bringing about a binational state.That’s a dangerous process, grounded in the trampling of the Palestinians. And even if the situation does play out like that, what exactly will the Palestinian society look like after long years of poverty, distress, overcrowding and adversity?What kind of people will these ghettos of Palestinians produce? What form of morality, national consciousness and hope will people be left with after so many years of stifling occupation and a sense of hopelessness? Will the Palestinian people still retain the strength to struggle for a binational state, or will we have become, by then, the fallout of a people barely able to stand on its feet?“There will not be a Palestinian state,” the prime minister declared, sealing the fate of his subjects in the occupied territories, who are deprived of the right to vote. But he has never said what there will be. It sometimes seems that the only plan the Israeli government has for the Palestinians is for them to sit quietly while Israel does whatever takes its fancy, equipped with its army, with laws it promulgated and with courts it established. As for the Palestinians, their role is to keep quiet, except perhaps to say thank you.We are already weary, battered and bereft of hope. The Palestinians have tried everything and by God, it’s Israel’s governments that taught us that the only thing the Israelis appreciate is force. Except that we have no force.“There will not be a Palestinian state,” the prime minister stated, and thereby declared that there is also no point in the existence of the Palestinian Authority, which was created and defined as a stage on the way to the establishment of a state. Possibly the time has come to dismantle the PA and return the keys to Netanyahu. After all, he’s the real landlord, and a direct occupation without intermediaries is preferable.Now that we know that Israel officially has no intention of bringing about the creation of a Palestinian state, maybe the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will start to demand Israeli citizenship instead of independence?A Palestinian state will not come into being without massive and immediate international intervention, but Netanyahu has already proved that he will get backing from the US administration for all his actions.The likely scenario is that the King of Israel will continue from the place at which he stopped three months ago in order to hold early elections. His government had just then approved the “Jewish nation-state” bill. That legislation aims to perpetuate the discrimination against Arab citizens within Israel and to make it clear that in any clash between the state’s values as Jewish and democratic, its Jewishness will have the upper hand.How dumb I felt for having allowed myself to cultivate hope. How foolish of me to think that I’m allowed to dream of a day when, as citizens of the state, we will be partners in decision-making. How naive I must be to dare to dream that Israel’s Arab citizens will be able to live wherever they wish in their country, have access to its resources and no longer make do with alms the state throws in their direction and demands that they be grateful.“It’s us or them,” the prime minister said. Well, it’s you, Mr Prime Minister. You won, and proved that we have no right of existence. Sorry we dared to dream, sir.
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