South
Africa seen As
Model For Palestine
By Ali Abunimah
14 November , 2006
The Chicago Tribune
As
I watched the images last week of destruction from the Gaza Strip, where
an Israeli shelling attack had killed an entire family, as a Palestinian
I could understand the feelings of one survivor who said, "I cannot
see a day when we will live in peace with them." But I also know
there is no other choice.
When Israel was established,
its founders said it would be an exemplary, moral state. For many Jews,
it seemed like a miraculous redemption after so much suffering and loss
in the Nazi Holocaust.
Palestinians experienced
a different reality. Israel became a "Jewish state" in a country
that had always been multicultural and multireligious. The expulsion
and exclusion of Palestinians from their own homeland has led Israelis
and Palestinians into an endless nightmare of mutual non-recognition
and bloodshed.
For decades, the conventional
wisdom has been that this conflict can only be resolved by partitioning
the country into two states. Yet despite enormous political and diplomatic
efforts to achieve this, the two peoples remain thoroughly if unhappily
intertwined. Israel's project of establishing settler-colonies inside
the territories where Palestinians wanted to create a state has rendered
separation impossible.
At the same time, Israel
finds itself in a conundrum. For the first time since the state was
founded, Israeli Jews no longer form an absolute majority in the territory
they control. Today there are roughly 5 million Jews and 5 million Palestinians
living in the same land. The trends are incontestable. Within a few
years, Palestinians will form the clear majority.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert recognized in 2003 what this would mean: "We are approaching
the point where more and more Palestinians will say, `There is no place
for two states,'" in this country, and "`All we want is the
right to vote.' The day they get it, we will lose everything."
Warning that Israel could not remain both a Jewish state and a democracy
if it held on to all of the occupied Palestinian territories, Olmert
added, "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that
shouldered the burden of struggle against apartheid, will lead the struggle
against us."
Some Israeli extremists,
like the new Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, believe this "demographic
problem" can be solved by expelling non-Jews. Israel's chosen solution,
which it calls "unilateral separation," walls Palestinians
into impoverished ghettos Palestinians compare to the townships and
Bantustans set up for blacks by the apartheid government of South Africa.
The result of this approach, as we see in Gaza, is more hopelessness,
resistance and defiance, and sure disaster for both peoples.
The two-state solution remains
attractive and comforting in its apparent simplicity and finality. But
in reality, it has proved unattainable because neither Palestinians
nor Israelis are willing to give up enough of the country that they
love. Faced with this impasse, a small but growing group of Israelis
and Palestinians are tentatively exploring an old idea long dormant:
Why not have a single state in which both peoples enjoy equal rights
and protections and religious freedom? Many people dismiss this as utopian
dreaming.
Allister Sparks, the legendary
editor of the anti-apartheid Rand Daily Mail newspaper, observed that
the conflict in South Africa most resembled those in Northern Ireland
and Palestine-Israel, because each involved "two ethno-nationalisms"
in a seemingly irreconcilable rivalry for the "same piece of territory."
If the prospect of "one secular country shared by all" seems
"unthinkable" in Palestine-Israel today, then it is possible
to appreciate how unlikely such a solution once seemed in South Africa.
But "that is what we did," Sparks says, "without any
foreign negotiator [and] no handshakes on the White House lawn."
To be sure, Palestinians
and Israelis would not simply be able to take the new South Africa as
a blueprint. They would have to work out their own distinct constitution,
including mechanisms for ethnic communities to have autonomy in matters
that concern them, and to guarantee that no one group can dominate another.
There would be hard work to heal the terrible wounds of the past. Such
a solution offers the chance that Palestine-Israel could become for
the first time ever the truly safe home where Israelis and Palestinians
can accept each other. It may be an arduous path, but in the current
impasse we cannot afford to ignore any ray of light.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago
Tribune
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