Hard
Limits And Long-Observed Taboos
By Ali Abunimah
17 January, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
With his book Palestine Peace
Not Apartheid reaching the top of the bestseller lists, former President
Jimmy Carter appears to have made a breakthrough in the ossified debate
on Israel-Palestine in the United States.
In dozens of packed appearances
and in the media, Carter has shattered long-observed taboos by talking
about "the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied
Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and
strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers
in the West Bank." It is still difficult to imagine any other senior
US politician doing that.
Carter has been vilified
by the pro-Israel lobbying industry in the United States with the frequent
intimation that he is anti-Semitic. Yet even this furor demonstrates
the hard limits which the debate still faces. In defending himself against
such attacks, Carter has been careful to stress that he is only talking
about the situation inside the territories occupied in 1967, East Jerusalem,
the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "I know that Israel is a wonderful
democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew.
And so I very carefully avoided talking about anything inside Israel,"
he said.
Thus what even Carter acknowledges
is that a debate about the racist nature of the Israeli state itself
remains off-limits. An obvious question is how a "wonderful democracy"
could operate a system of apartheid just a few miles away. Discrimination
against non-Jewish citizens of Israel is legally enshrined and openly
discussed in Israel. It includes separate and unequal education, laws
that reserve the best land for Jews only, massive discrimination in
allocation of resources, exclusion of non-Jews from government office,
and the "Law of Return" that encourages Jews to move to the
country while indigenous Palestinians remain banned from returning home.
The US media, with a few
exceptions, continue to treat these facts, uncontroversial even within
Israel, as if they don't exist. This underlines the persistent segmentation
of the discussion of the conflict in the US and Europe. There is the
official peace process industry, or mainstream discourse that dominates
media coverage and government pronouncements resting on a number of
false assumptions: the US and the "Quartet" are honest brokers;
everyone agrees on the outlines of a two-state solution except for minor
details; Israel has good intentions and merely awaits a Palestinian
partner; Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is potentially
that partner, while Hamas are outlaw extremists who must be curbed,
forced to "recognize" Israel and "renounce terrorism"
and so on.
Only rarely is reality allowed
to intrude on this official discourse, which is what Carter did in a
limited way. Sometimes bald facts also call it into question, if only
momentarily, such as when Israel announced a major new settlement in
the northern Jordan Valley part of the West Bank, just days after an
Abbas-Olmert summit that the peace process industry had hailed as a
breakthrough. A scab of distortion and spin quickly forms to cover up
whatever reality may briefly have been revealed. What is remarkable
about this official dialogue is that most Palestinians do not subscribe
to it, with the exception of a minority who are the favored clients
of the industry -- at this time, Abbas and his entourage, the US-armed
and EU-backed Gaza warlord Mohammad Dahlan and the rest of the class
that benefited directly from Oslo.
Contrasted with the official
discourse is an insurgent one that remains marginalized in the academy,
among activists and in the alternative media. But it is gaining strength.
Like the vast majority of Palestinians, it continues to view the Palestine
situation as one of anti-colonial struggle, comparable to the long fight
against South African apartheid. Yet Carter's intervention offers the
potential to connect these views; if it becomes legitimate to describe
Israel's tyranny over the occupied Palestinians as "apartheid",
it may not be long before Israel's own internal colonialism against
more than one million Palestinians faces similar examination. When Israel
is no longer viewed as a "wonderful democracy", as US politicians
without exception continue to label it, then the possibility for genuine
peace based on the principle that Palestine-Israel belongs to all who
live in it without discrimination based on religion, ethnic or national
origin may open up. This is the danger that pro-Israel groups clearly
perceive and are working night and day to stop.
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