Morton Nadler's Open Salon Blog

Bravo, Giacomo Bagarella, Harvard '13!

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:04:13 -0400

Bravo, Harvard Crimson,

Harvard students were pilloried for daring to organize a conference to investigate the so-called one-state solution [http://onestateconference.org/]. The jerked knees were afraid the pretense of “Jewish and Democratic“ would be exposed. Recovering their composure, the knees straightened up, after all. How about an uncontroversial conference to celebrate Israel’s "real accomplishments?" By talking about the wonders of Israeli technology and corporate aptitude, and by bringing to campus the inventors of advanced technology and the creators of everyday tools, the organizers are opening discussion on a new and supposedly uncontroversial area of the Israel-Palestine debate.

Giacomo Bagarella points out in his Harvard Crimson contribution a number of disagreeable truths. “The United States has given Israel over $115 billion from World War II to today; more than half of this aid has been military. No other country in the world enjoys such extensive foreign subsidies. How can Israeli innovation be considered sustainable if it is accomplished through dependence on U.S. tax dollars?”

I may add that this largesse far exceeds anything we have given any other nation.

Giacomo further points out the commercial and financial advantages enjoyed by Israel’s economy through the illegal occupation.

The Occupation gives Israeli businesses an unfair advantage in two main ways. First, it makes economic investment in Palestine a great risk. Foreign donors have built and rebuilt schools, hospitals, flour mills, and other facilities which cyclically get destroyed in Israel’s military operations, such as the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead. Other foreign investments, such as solar and wind power installations in the West Bank, are also under unending threat of Israeli demolition. [Israel threatens solar panels donated by Germany ] The unstated charges? Those of increasing Palestinian energy independence and fostering development in local communities.

….

The “vibrant, innovative, and optimistic” Israel the organizers envisage exists on foundations of illegal activities and 64 years of lack of accountability. While it is undeniable that medical and civil technology benefit society on a large scale, the contextual ethical costs cannot be ignored. Hopefully, we can maintain these positive achievements while redressing the human rights and international law violations they emerge in, because only then will these innovations truly be to the benefit of all. Unfortunately, by inviting speakers who directly contravene international law and by obscuring the roots of the Israeli "miracle," the Israel Conference sidelines the potential for innovation in favor of the criminal potential of Occupation.

Read the full article at Harvard-israel-innovation-occupation/ The article in the Harvard Crimson by Giacomo Bagarella jerked the usual knees with their ad hominem and irrelevant objections. To paraphrase one of my father’s aphorisms about horses' anatomy, there are more knee jerks in the world than knees.

As a young American Jew at a Zionist summer camp in 1936 I came to realize that the sought after “Jewish National Home” in Palestine could only be achieved by doing to the native Palestinians what the European settlers did to the Native Americans. Further, such an enterprise could only be sustained by enormous financial subsidies from the diaspora. How true that prophesy turned out to be.

Settlers and wall builders destroy the life sustaining olive trees of the Palestinians with the help of the Israeli army of occupation exactly the same way the ranchers who settled the west destroyed the life sustaining bison of the native Americans with the help of the US Army.

Is two state dead?

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:04:35 -0400

I forwarded a Huffington Post item to some friends. One of them responded to my forwarding of the item with a well-merited sarcastic comment:

“Well duh!! After 50 years of Israeli stalling we have only a few people declaring the two state solution dead. What a joke!! The two state solution was dead when Rabin was assassinated.”

I responded, "But, Robert, you and I know this, but still, the corpse of the two state illusion—or delusion—will only be buried when the US, both public opinion and the government realize that the pungent corpse of Zionism needs to meet the same fate.

"The unequal treatment of Palestinian Israelis hides behind the appearance of equal rights (one person one vote) via religious management of family law and education, even before we consider the millions of Palestinians in “Greater Israel,” totally deprived of any human and civil rights.

"It will take a world-wide anti-apartheid movement, spearheaded by the US, similar to the one that brought down apartheid in South Africa, to finally demolish this hateful system. But as in SA, the movement requires the Palestinians themselves, in league with a few enlightened Israelis, to lay a spark in the tinder box. Not you or I but the Palestinians themselves, both in and outside of Israeli, to abandon the ill- de-lusion before the rest of us can break through the fog."

One State or Two? Who Decides?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:03:20 -0400

In my recent post on the Unitary State I expressed strong support for the single democratic state. Of course, I have no chicken in the pot. I have no voice in the matter, only an opinion.

Actually, if there were a vote impending I could take a flight to Ben Gurion Airport and claim my instant Israeli citizenship by virtue of my mother's Jewishness. Unfortunately, members of the Palestinian diaspora, people with infinitely greater right than I, are excluded.

The Unitary State of the Whole land

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:03:34 -0400

In February I addressed the Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine, a Virginia Tech student organization, on the issue: One state or two for Israel and Palestine. On my initiative the club invited Hillel to participate. Three Jewish students came, ushered by an elderly gentleman.

I described how I grew up in non-Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn in the 20s and 30s, often the butt of anti-Semitic taunts – and worse – from my schoolmates. I described how at the age of 15, at a Zionist summer camp I discovered that to establish the Jewish National Homeland we Jews would have to do to the native Palestinians what the European settlers did to the Native Americans. I concluded these introductory remarks with the words: “But then came the Holocaust.”

I continued.

About 7 years ago I read an op-ed piece that raised the question: “Is the two state solution dead?” At the time I was convinced that the Palestinians needed their own state. It was then that I was reactivated on this issue.

I was thrilled by President Obama’s Cairo speech, for which he got the Nobel Peace Prize. I was thrilled by his policy of stopping the further expansion of the settlements and by our angry reaction to the authorization of several thousand new units in east Jerusalem, announced just as VP Biden came on a visit to Israel. And then…Israel realized they had nothing to fear with AIPAC firmly in control of Republican majorities in congress.

The network of settlements and their supporting infrastructure have made Swiss cheese of the map of Palestine. There is no way to create a viable state in the Occupied West Bank.

“Negotiations” are a sham, designed to make the US and EU content that something is being done. In 1992, leaving office, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declared, “I could have talked for ten years and in that time we would have reached a half million settlers.” And indeed! They have been talking off and on for decades and there are now more than a half million settlers – and thousands more units on the way. And so, reluctantly, I have given up on statehood for the sliver of land left to the Palestinians.

On the official website of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Netanyahoo’s party, Likud has posted the following.

Likud’s explicit claim to all of the land between the River and the Sea

***************************************

Settlements

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

Self-Rule

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.

The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's existence, security and national needs.

The Jordan River as a Permanent Border

The Jordan Valley and the territories that dominate it shall be under Israeli sovereignty. The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel. The Kingdom of Jordan is a desirable partner in the permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians in matters that will be agreed upon.

**********************************************

I then proceeded to describe the legal basis for Palestinian apartheid, not the chopped up Palestinian land, but the way that the Palestinian minority is kept in its place by Israel’s legal structure. Yes, it is democratic, if your definition of democracy is one citizen one vote. The non-Jewish Christian and Muslim minorities are discriminated against by a number of laws regulating residence and family unification. An example is the (Temporary Order) 5763, an Israeli law first passed on 31 July, 2003 and most recently extended in June 2008.[1] The law makes inhabitants of Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, the West Bank and Gaza Strip ineligible for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits that is usually available through marriage to an Israeli citizen (i.e. Family reunification.

This must refer to “Arab” Jews. [Note that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt are not on this list of exclusions.]

The problem for Israel is the so-called demographic time bomb. If the Palestinians in the occupied territories were to be included in Israel, they would already be close to population equality an one-person one-vote would pose grave dangers to the Jewish part of Jewish and Democratic. They would have preferred the “and without people, but “population transfer,” also called ethic cleansing, no longer works. The famous “agreed land transfers” would be a way to get rid of some Palestinians, but they will have no part of it.

Listen to Sam Bahour, American-Palestinian business man.

“Soon, if the current trajectory continues, Palestinians will tell Israelis: ‘You win! You get it all--the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Jordan Valley, the settlements, all the water, and guess what? You get us too! Now, where do we sign up for our health care cards?’"-Published 23/1/2012 © bitterlemons.org

From a trickle at the turn of the century, calls for the single state encompassing Israel and Palestine are increasing constantly. Virginia Tilley and Ali Abunimah published books in 2003, espousing the single state.

Abunimah eloquently presented the case for absorbing the lessons of history and “the facts on the ground.”

“Suppose I accept the argument that in 1947 Palestinians rejected a generous UN partition plan that would have given them a state in 45 percent of their own country, and granted 55 percent to the Jewish minority, most of which had recently arrived from Europe-a plan that in hind- sight they should have embraced. How does that help me deal with the fact that today approximately five million Jews and five million Palestinians live in that same country, the vast majority of whom were born after 1948? Should the supposed sins of the Palestinian fathers be visited on their children for generations to come? And if I take the view that Israel's Zionist founders intended only harm to the native population in whose country they came to establish a Jewish state, what then shall I do with their five million Jewish descendants? The fact is that today there are two communities who have a right to life, freedom, and absolute equality no matter what happened in the past or continues to happen in the present. If we start from this premise, reconciliation becomes conceivable, even possible.”

The model should be based on the worldwide campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. We must convince the young generation of Israelis of the crime of apartheid perpetrated on the Palestinian-Israelis and from them the entire people between the River and the Sea. We must convince the world and, particularly, the Americans, to support the movement to end Israeli apartheid.

Already there are cracks in the elaborate structure. The film “Budrus” shows Israelis and youth from other countries supporting the Palestinian villagers in their struggle to keep The Wall from encroaching on their territory. Recent news tells of the BDS [Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions] spreading across US campuses.

On February 25th, 2912, “Economist” published an article under the headline: “Feeling isolated, Israeli Arabs look to Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Feb 25th 2012 | NAZARETH AND RAMALLAH | from the print edition The Economist. [http://www.economist.com/node21548295]

The article relates new ties that have been established between two Palestinian towns, one in Israel, one in occupied territory. The Palestinian Israelis are no longer seen as collaborators.

Many who used to call themselves Israeli Arabs now prefer the term “Palestinians with Israeli citizenship”. A growing number of Israeli-Arab lecturers and students are enrolling at West Bank universities. Many also go there to shop or dine, after the army lifted a ban on Israeli Arabs entering West Bank cities.[This ban did not apply to Jews].

A recent meeting of Arab parliamentarians from Israel’s Knesset and Palestine’s Legislative Council discussed how, one day, to turn their common identity into a political unit.

Reaching out from the other side of the divide

In a recent review of Israel’s strategic options, “Israeli Statecraft: National Security Challenges and Responses”, Yehezkel Dror, an academic who used to advise Israel’s government, offered controversial proposals for making Israel more inclusive. He discussed adding a Palestinian stanza to the national anthem, which currently speaks only of Jewish yearning for Zion, and an Islamic crescent to the blue-and-white flag alongside the Star of David.

The two peoples are too intricately intertwined for any sensible separation into two viable states can be imagined. It will take time and effort, but eventually one bilingual state must take the place of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Israel will just not permit a truly independent Palestine to come into existence in the Swiss cheese they’ve made of the occupied territory.

Some of the young people are ready for the change. In spite of appearances, polls show that a strong majority would be ready to abandon Zionism. A great part of world opinion, including, increasingly, Western Europe, is readying itself for an analogous BDS [boycott-disinvestment-sanctions] campaign such as brought down apartheid in South Africa.

When the day comes that the United States says to Israel, “Enough!” that will be the day that apartheid dies in Palestine, the day they can get serious about building the unitary democratic state of The Whole Land.

Whatever it will be called, there will be a single democratic state between the River and the Sea.

Note: in the discussion that took place following my presentation to the students last month, it became clear that the Jewish students were very uncomfortable with the label apartheid. Although the term Poppulation Transfer had been used by David ben Gurion, founding Prime Minister of Israel, they rejected the idea that Israel had engaged in it. And they claimed that the majority of Israelis were in favor of the two-state solution. They had no answer to my question: “Why then do they want the Palestinian application to the UN for recognition to be vetoed?"

Some recent Books about the One-State Solution

Sun, 4 Mar 2012 19:03:02 -0500

Virginia Tilley, “The One-State Solution,” University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005

Ali Abunimah, “One Country,” Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2006

Joel Kovel, “Overcoming Zionism,” Pluto Press, London, 2007

Constance Hilliard, “Does Israel Have a Future?” Potomac Books, Washington DC, 2009