 Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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"I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question ... after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine"- David Ben-Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel1 (emphasis added).
I originally wrote this up in August of 2001, but then the September 11 terrorist attack happened, and I decided to shelve it for about a half-year or so, long enough that some of the heated emotions from the attack would cool down. I contemplated ditching the article entirely, but I eventually decided to put it up anyway. For a long time, I have held the view that both sides are equally wrong, but as I have looked more closely into the situation, it has become increasingly clear to me that while both sides are wrong, it is Israel which bears primary responsibility for the situation, as Israel's formation created the problem in the first place, and Israel alone has the power to effect positive change today.
I have to get two points of the way before I start:
I am not a Muslim, nor am I a supporter of the so-called "Arab states" in the region. In fact, I find it quite tiresome that people respond to Israel arguments by criticizing Jordan, Syria, Egypt, etc., which are associated with Palestine only by race. These nations have never demonstrated much concern for Palestinian refugees beyond trying to keep them out of their own territory, and their attacks on Israel were primarily motivated by self-interest. So what do they have to do with Palestine, unless you treat all Arabs as a single group?
I am not an anti-Semite. Jews are as deserving of equality as any other race. Israel, however, is not a race. It is a nation, albeit a racist one. It has total military dominance over the area thanks to American aid, and it grants just enough human rights to keep this aid flowing. The widespread tendency to equate "anti-Israel" to "anti-Semite" is nothing more than a contemptible and fallacious attempt to dismiss criticism by attacking the critics' character.
Before we begin, let me remind you of the definition of Israel. Israel considers itself to be a Jewish state (formally codified in its 1948 Declaration of Independence), which means that its entire purpose is to provide what is commonly referred to as a "Jewish homeland". Why a race or religion must have a singular nation-state forcibly created for it is something of a mystery; my sons are white/Asian interracial, so they have no "racial homeland"; should this be considered a crisis? The natives of the Americas have no distinct "homeland" either; should families be displaced from their homes in order to create one for them?
You have probably been conditioned by the media and perhaps by religious upbringing to blindly accept that a Jewish race-state is a reasonable idea, but consider the idea of a nation explicitly defining itself as an "Aryan state", and you will see the problem. The whole idea of a race-state is obviously and intrinsically racist: how can you have a "racial homeland" unless you enforce demographic controls to retain a majority race, and how can you control the demographics of race unless you enact racist policies?
It has long been known that Israel is headed for a crisis of identity because of demographic pressures. In the late 1940s, most of their Arabs (>80%) in Palestine were driven into what is now known as "The Occupied Territories" by fear of terrorism such as the massacre at Deir Yassin (either that, or they voluntarily left their family homes to live in squalid refugee camps in order to happily make way for the peaceful Jewish takeover, if you're gullible enough to believe that story). However, the small proportion (<20%) brave enough to stay behind despite the "ethnic cleansing" have been reproducing more quickly than the Jews for decades now, and will eventually become a racial majority. This forces Israelis to ask themselves the question: is Israel a western nation which recognizes human rights, or is Israel a primitive tribal society, based on race and religion?
They cannot have their cake and eat it too: if they claim to be a democracy and recognize human rights, then they must face the fact that current trends will eventually erase the Jewish racial majority and give the Arabs real power within the system (ie- without resorting to terrorism), and Israel would no longer be a "Jewish state"; it would be a Western democracy. Conversely, if they take measures to suppress growing Arab demographics or marginalize Arab voters, it will become almost impossible to continue insisting that they are not a racist state.
To discriminate or not to discriminate? Could there be any doubt which course they would take? For a long time now, the Israeli government has been holding up requests for unification of families formed by the marriage of a Palestinian and an Israeli citizen (ie- not letting them live together in Israel). In July 2003, they went the next step and formally signed a law preventing such unifications. In the same vein, Israel has no laws guaranteeing racial or religious equality. We take such laws for granted in modern western nations, but Israel is, at heart, an anachronistic throwback to an era of primitive racial and religious tribalism.
Click here for some interesting quotes about the motivations of famous Israelis prior to its creation.
Israel has faced scrutiny on its lack of respect for human rights before, but the US has consistently shielded it. In 2001, the UN's Durban Conference on international human rights and racism was effectively marginalized when Israel and the US stormed out because Israel was not being excluded from criticism. The US was also the only nation out of more than 50 to vote against a resolution condemning the Israeli apartheid policies in the Occupied Territories (Jews there can vote but Arabs can't, among many other discriminatory rules) earlier that year, and in fact, the US has a history of repeatedly and vehemently using its veto power to quash any and all UN resolutions against Israel.
For their part, Israel and its so-called "amen chorus" in the US complain that Israel is singled out for criticism even though there are other, much worse human-rights violators in the world. This is a valid point; many Arab and Islamic nations throw stones from a glass house when they condemn a Jewish nation for racial and religious discrimination. There are, of course, several equally valid counterpoints:
A criticism can be true or false regardless of who makes it. If a human-rights violator condemns another nation for human-rights violations, there is something rather surreal about that, but if the criticism is valid, this only means that the critic should face subsequent scrutiny himself, not that the target is somehow exonerated.
The Western world bears special responsibility for Israel. Simply put, Israel would not exist if Britain had not promised the land (liberated from the Turks with the help of the Palestinians in return for their independence) to the Jews (who contributed nothing to this liberation but stood ready to swoop in with a three thousand year old land claim). Israel was eventually formed by UN decree at the behest of the western powers, and since they created and protected it, Israel should answer to their values, which it does not.
The ethics of a problem and the urgency of a response depend not only on its absolute principle but also on the magnitude of its effects, ie- "how many people are currently suffering because of it?" Anti-Jewish discrimination in Jordan, for example, is unquestionably bad but since there isn't exactly a large Jewish population in Jordan, it does not cause widespread suffering. Anti-Arab discrimination in Israel, on the other hand, continues to affect millions.
Should Israel be left alone, like the region's so-called "Arab states"? Perhaps, but "left alone" is hardly an appropriate term for Israel's current status as a recipient of billions of dollars in foreign aid every year. Given the magnitude and nature of that aid (much of which is military), Israel should carry much higher expectations in terms of human rights than its neighbours. It is quite simply ridiculous to pour vast amounts of money into someone's pocket while not expecting him to make any more concessions to your value system than anyone else.
So what's it like to be a Palestinian in the so-called "Occupied Territories"? For starters, Jews can vote, but you can't. You must go through military checkpoints on a daily basis where soldiers can harass you or destroy your property with no compensation or even reprimand (reporters have witnessed Israeli soldiers casually destroying farmers' crops while laughing at them). Your life is literally worth less than that of a Jew; the Israeli military likes to fire indiscriminate heavy weapons such as rockets or shells at Arab neighbourhoods if they think a terrorist might live there, and they casually dismiss dozens of innocent casualties or even deaths as unfortunate but necessary. Of course, it goes without saying that they would never do such a thing in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, no matter who they suspect of being there.
However, if you're killed, whether it be at a checkpoint by a trigger-happy soldier or as "collateral damage" due to the indiscriminate use of powerful area-effect weapons, you can take comfort in knowing that somebody in Israel will promise an investigation ... that quietly goes away without ever penalizing anyone. It's even worse if someone in your family or extended family joins a terrorist organization; the Israelis believe in a primitive tribal justice, which means that you will be punished if one of your relatives does something. If your children are shot dead by Israeli soldiers, you can look forward to beating your head against a brick wall in search of justice which will never come. Luckily, since you are impoverished, you probably won't be able to access the Internet and read Usenet and bulletin-board posts from Americans who casually dismiss it with lines like "yeah, well, the kid probably provoked it. You know how those Palestinians are".
But what if you're lucky enough not to have any relatives in a terrorist organization and you manage to avoid becoming "collateral damage" in one of Israel's countless indiscriminate uses of heavy weapons? Well, then you can look forward to a life of uncertainty, as no Palestinian can look forward to a secure future. The Israelis dismantled the public education system in the Occupied Territories years ago, so your children have no real future except as unskilled labourers. You could try saving money, but there are no jobs for Arabs that pay well enough to do anything but pay the bills, if that. Even a house is hardly a guarantee of security, since you could spend 15 years scratching out a living to pay for one, only to see the Israeli army casually destroy it and kick your family out into the street with no compensation.
But take heart; as you lay weeping in the street with your family while the soldiers destroy your house and your belongings, you can take heart in knowing that your sacrifice made way for proud Jewish settlers (you know, those people who can vote in Israeli elections even though this territory is supposedly not part of Israel). These settlers will, of course, consume far more natural resources than you, since you must live on strict daily quotas of drinking water and marginal electricity supplies while Jewish settlers run lawn sprinklers, water fountains, and Internet access. Hard work is almost pointless in light of the way your family can be thrown out on the street with no warning at any time, but you don't have much choice; after all, it's not as if anyone else is going to feed your children.
Love is restricted too: you shouldn't marry anyone who lives in "Israel proper" (the popular code-word for the part of Israel outside the "Occupied Territories" where the Israelis are forced to recognize a modicum of human rights in order to keep the international aid flowing), because you won't be allowed to go live with that person.
But hey, why take my word for any of this? Look at Amnesty International's page on the subject, or perhaps Human Rights Watch. Of course, anything they say will be dismissed (sight unseen) by Israel's "amen chorus" in the US because they're all "a bunch of left-wing tree-hugging hippies". It's almost pointless to link to any articles written by an Arab source since the "amen chorus" will simply ignore it all as lies and propaganda, so why not check out Israeli organizations such as Rabbis for Human Rights or Gush Shalom or Yesh Gvul? There's also the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, but perhaps all of those groups can be ignored as well; it is difficult to say just how far the "amen chorus" is willing to go in its dismissal of criticism.
Nice life, eh? Maybe even enough to utter a Moses-like "let my people go", followed by a Moses-like round of terrorism? Unfortunately, you're not allowed to hate the Israelis despite all of this, otherwise you will be blamed for making them do this to you.
OK, so the life of a Palestinian is pretty bad. How about the life of an Israeli Arab? That's much better, right? You know, the descendants of the small minority of Arabs who stayed in their land rather than run from the ethnic cleansing of the late 1940s? Life is pretty good for them, right? They can vote and everything?
Well, sort of. The Israelis know they can't openly treat the Arabs as vermin outside the Occupied Territories where they have a flimsy excuse for doing so (the excuse being that it's not really part of Israel even though they control the territory and Jews there can vote in Israeli elections), but that doesn't stop them from having different rules for Jews and Arabs; the differences simply aren't as stark as they are in the Occupied Territories.
First and foremost, Arabs within "Israel proper" are largely segregated. They live in separate communities, with separate schools. This fact alone provides an opportunity for enormous discrimination in terms of government services, with the result that the Arab infant mortality rate is twice as high as the Jewish infant mortality rate. Poverty rates are also vastly different. They have inferior sanitation, water, electricity, access to resources, education, etc.
The citizenship rules are a model of racism: any Jew and his or her entire extended family is automatically granted Israeli citizenship no matter where they come from, while an Arab's spouse is treated as an illegal alien. There are also special organizations in Israel such as the World Zionist Organization or the Jewish National Fund whose sole purpose is to advance Jewish interests. This might not be that surprising except for the fact that these groups are paid for with government funds and have direct power, as quasi-governmental organizations with authority over housing, land permits, etc.
Israel also has a "Starship Troopers"-style scheme of granting special rights to those who have served in the military. Since most Jews serve in the military (whose job often usually involves suppressing Palestinians) while few Arabs do (for obvious reasons), this has been decried as an excuse to discriminate against Arabs. While one could make arguments for both sides of this, it turns out that Jewish Yeshiva students (who do not serve) get these special benefits anyway, thus demolishing any claim that system is not discriminatory (see Human Rights Watch for more info).
It almost goes without saying that there is no freedom of religion. Israel may have secularists living in it, but it is adamantly not a secular state. It is a religious state, and unapologetically uses the power of the government to uphold the religion of the majority.
Until Arabs in Israel reach a demographic majority and gain the power to effect real change, they will remain very much like blacks in Jim Crow's America. They may be marginalized and weighed down by institution that reaches up into government, but they have the right to vote on paper, which proves that they do not suffer any discrimination at all. Or at least, that's what Israel's "amen chorus" is telling us, anyway.
This section was moved onto a separate page.
As mentioned previously, the most common tactic of Israel's "amen chorus" when faced with criticism of Israel is to attack Jordan, Syria, or Egypt. This plays to the common belief that all Arabs are a single monolithic group, so the Palestinians are somehow responsible for the actions of Egypt or Jordan.
These nations are legitimately bad players. They are totalitarian religious theocracies, ruled with an iron grip by various dictators. Despite the vast oil riches of their lands, their populations live in poverty because virtually all of the wealth is held in the hands of literally 5 or 6 families. Their societies function on medieval values, and their contributions to world science and technology are virtually nonexistent. They oppose modernity in all its forms, and they appear intent on restoring the Islamic civilization that ruled much of Europe 800 years ago.
For all of their public rhetoric over the Palestinians, they have done nothing to mitigate the humanitarian problems they speak of. Hell, even Arafat's Palestinian Authority has a history of corruption, greed, and abuse of power, hence widespread Palestinian disgust with it (not to mention the fact that Hamas is regarded by many Palestinians as more of a legitimate government than the PA).
However, the conduct of Jordan, Egypt, etc. is not relevant to the question of whether Israel has violated human-rights laws in its treatment of the Palestinians. The harsh reality of the situation is that the Palestinians have been victimized by both Israel and its enemies. They are the proverbial pawn in the chess game, and they lose no matter who wins. There are no good guys here; just a group of violent, immoral states with a similar tendency towards racial and religious discrimination. One of them obviously has superior military skill and has ruthlessly pushed that advantage to the hilt, but the fact remains that its enemies are no angels either.
According to Israel's "amen chorus", Israel has made repeated efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians, only to have the Palestinians rise up and bite them in the ass. However, when you examine the text of various peace accords such as the Oslo accords, you will quickly see that its supposedly generous offer is nothing of the sort.
You've probably heard the line: "we offered them self-government and 90% of the disputed territories and they rejected it! They will settle for nothing less than the total annihilation of Israel!!" This is an oft-repeated line, but it carries about as much historical accuracy as a documentary made by Michael Bay.
At no time has the Israeli government ever offered the Palestinians anything resembling a viable or independent state. The number "90%" sounds impressive, but offering the Palestinians 90% of the territory they presently occupy is not exactly a concession. And self-government sounds impressive until you discover that this supposedly self-governing body would have no military whatsoever, no say on its own border policies, no control over its own airspace, no right to prevent arbitrary border incursions by the Israeli military, and not even control of its own water supply! Worse yet, the territory they "controlled" under the Oslo Accords would have been sliced into pieces which were separated by access roads that were controlled by ... you guessed it, the Israeli military, with the ever-present daily checkpoints.
In short, the Oslo Accords basically offered them the existence they have now. And so it has historically been with all peace offers; they offer nothing. The end result of any peace plan is invariably to have Israel controlling everything and Palestine being "independent" only insofar as it has latitude to carry out Israel's wishes. Naturally, when Palestinians reject such plans, these rejections are packaged along with fiery rhetoric from certain Arab leaders in order to "prove" that Palestinians are totally unreasonable and unwilling to cut deals.
The various people involved tend to envision one of three scenarios:
Status Quo: Let the Israelis keep all of the fruits of their past military aggression. Keep the Palestinian people in a perpetual state of house arrest in order to curb what are supposedly inherent violent tendencies. Continue killing hundreds of Palestinians every year in the idiotic hope that this will deter retaliatory violence rather than inciting it. Continue to aggressively settle the occupied territories in the hopes of someday forming Greater Israel.
Jihad: Destroy Israel through terrorism and/or military conquest. Replace it with a glorious Islamic state called Palestine. This is the vision of most Islamic fundamentalists in the region, who clearly have no capacity for rational thought.
Wishful Thinking: Restore Palestinian independence. Ask Israelis to voluntarily withdraw from the occupied territories. Declare Jerusalem an international territory. Expect Israel to give up its long-term vision of restoring its Old Testament borders, and expect Palestine to give up its long-term vision of restoring its pre-1947 existence. Expect the two nations to live happily ever after, in peace and harmony. Hey, why don't we just ask them all to gather round a really big fucking campfire and sing kumbaya?
None of these options would ever work. The status quo merely guarantees continued violence, Arab victory would only guarantee that the Jews are persecuted and driven out, and wishful thinking is just that.
In my opinion, the only solution that would actually work is a radical one that would probably never happen: declare that Israel is no longer a "Jewish state", but rather, a secular democracy, and write an Israeli Constitution upholding human rights (it does not presently have one). Its stated goals of being a Jewish state and a western democracy are mutually contradictory. One cannot uphold western values of religious and racial equality while simultaneously stating that you intend to promote the welfare of one people over another.
If Israel dropped this "Jewish state" nonsense and adopted modern values throughout its entire territory (yes, that includes the so-called "Occupied Territories"), it might be able to put itself on the long road to recovery. A tremendous amount of damage has been done, and lasting hatreds created, but there is no solution to be found in simply continuing to treat Palestinians as "the enemy" and suppress them. The language of Israel vs Palestine has traditionally been the language of military thinking, and while military thinking is great for winning wars, it is not so good at winning the peace.
Of course, I doubt that any of this will happen. Neither side appears willing to unilaterally alter its approach, since both sides point the finger at the other guy and insist that he start first. Israel has superior power and wealth, and is in a far better position to unilaterally move for positive change than whatever passes for a central authority in Palestine (hint: there really isn't one), so the onus is really on Israel to move first, despite its protestations. Nevertheless, I can't imagine that any of this will happen, or that the US is willing to put the kind of pressure on Israel that would be necessary to bring it to the table (strongly worded statements don't mean much when you continue to dutifully send billions of dollars per year in military and economic aid). And so, both sides will continue fighting, while we play both sides against the middle, because we need Arab oil and we need Israel as a bulwark against Islamic extremism in the region.
You know, just talking about this subject is tiring and frustrating. It reminds me that despite all our pretensions at civilization, humans are still amoral savages at heart. I need a beer, goddamn it.
1. The Birth of Israel, Simha Flapan (note that the quote obviously refers to "ethnic cleansing" rather than gas-chamber extermination, so his "final solution" is not the same as Hitler's "final solution". The choice of words is still fascinating, however).
Last changed: 2003/04/08
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