Zionism’s Dead End
By
Jonathan Cook
in Nazareth
27 June,
2008
Countercurrents.org
The following is taken from
a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the
Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in
his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives.
Better, he wrote, to “try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian]
population across the border by denying it any employment in our own
country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal
of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through
a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous
population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations
had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors
of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them
rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision
was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.
Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem
of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine -- separation and transfer
-- were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually
reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together,
the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary,
the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring
legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.
In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule
about to reach parity with the Jewish population, the threat of a
Palestinian majority has loomed large again for the Zionists. Not
suprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist solutions to
pursue, separation or transfer, have resurfaced.
Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps
loosely associated with Israel’s centre-left (Labor and Kadima)
and right (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu). The modern political arguments
between them turn on differing visions of the nature of a Jewish state
orginally put forward by Labor and Revisionist Zionists.
To make sense of the current political debates, and the events taking
place inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first examine
the history of these two principles in Zionist thinking.
During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the dominant
Labor Zionist movement and its leader David Ben Gurion advanced policies
much in line with Herzl’s goal. In particular, they promoted
the twin principles of “Redemption of the Land” and “Hebrew
Labor”, which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed
to separate themselves from the native population in working the land
and employing only other Jews. By being entirely self-reliant in Palestine,
Jews could both “cure” themselves of their tainted Diaspora
natures and deprive the Palestinians of the opportunity to subsist
in their own homeland.
At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation,
the Histadrut, which denied membership to Palestinians -- and, for
many years after the establishment of the Jewish state, even to the
remants of the Palestinian population who became Israeli citizens.
But if separation was the official policy of Labor Zionism, behind
the scenes Ben Gurion and his officials increasingly appreciated that
it would not be enough in itself to achieve their goal of a pure ethnic
state. Land sales remained low, at about 6 per cent of the territory,
and the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian
labour.
Instead, the Labor Zionists secretly began working on a programme
of ethnic cleansing. After 1937 and Britain’s Peel Report proposing
partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion was more open about transfer, recognising
that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most of the indigenous
population was cleared from within its borders.
Israel’s new historians have acknowledged Ben Gurion’s
commitment to transfer. As Benny Morris notes, for example, Ben Gurion
“understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large
and hostile Arab minority in its midst.” The Israeli leadership
therefore developed a plan for ethnic cleansing under cover of war,
compiling detailed dossiers on the communities that needed to be driven
out and then passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to commanders in
the field. During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied
of at least 80 per cent of its indigenous population.
In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion responded
to the political opportunities of the day and recalibrated the Labor
Zionism of Herzl. In particular he achieved the goal of displacement
desired by Herzl while also largely persuading the world through a
campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was mostly
voluntary. In one of the most enduring Zionist myths, convincingly
rebutted by modern historians, we are still told that the refugees
left because they were told to do so by the Arab leadership.
The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude
to the native Palestinian population. Paradoxically, given their uncompromising
claim to a Greater Israel embracing both banks of the Jordan River
(thereby including not only Palestine but also the modern state of
Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labor Zionists to allow
the natives to remain where they were.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 --
possibly in a rebuff to Ben Gurion’s espousal of transfer --
that “it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth
of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion
as the removal of non-Jewish citizens”. The Revisionists, it
seems, were resigned to the fact that the enlarged territory they
desired would inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They were therefore
less concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make
them accept Jewish rule.
In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly included
the notion of separation but not necessarily transfer: an “iron
wall” of unremitting force to cow the natives into submission.
In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their subjugation
could be reached only “through the iron wall, that is to say,
the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced
by Arab pressure”.
An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the
future Jewish state in simple colonial terms, as a European elite
ruling over the native population.
Inside Revisionism, however, there was a shift from the idea of separation
to transfer that mirrored developments inside Labor Zionism. This
change was perhaps more opportunistic than ideological, and was particularly
apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben Gurion’s success in
forging a Jewish state through transfer.
One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become
a Likud prime minister, was leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that
committed one of the worst atrocities of the war. He led his fighters
into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they massacred over
100 inhabitants, including women and children.
Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers consciously
inflated the death toll to more than 250 through the pages of the
New York Times. Their goal was to spread terror among the wider Palestinian
population and encourage them to flee. He later happily noted: “Arabs
throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun
butchery’, were seized with limitless panic and started to flee
for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened,
uncontrollable stampede.”
Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused
ethnic cleansing, including the late General Rehavam Ze’evi,
whose Moledet party campaigned in elections under the symbol of the
Hebrew character “tet”, for transfer. His successor, Benny
Elon, a settler leader and rabbi, adopted a similar platform: “Only
population transfer can bring peace”.
The intensity of the separation vs transfer debate subsided after
1948 and the ethnic cleansing campaign that removed most of the native
Palestinian population from the Jewish state. The Palestinian minority
left behind -- a fifth of the population but a group, it was widely
assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration -- was seen
as an irritation but not yet as a threat. It was placed under a military
government for nearly two decades, a system designed to enforce separation
between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Such separation -- in
education, employment and residence -- exists to this day, even if
in a less extreme form.
The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel’s
conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. With Israel’s erasure
of the Green Line, and the effective erosion of the distinction between
Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, the problem of
a Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.
Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government.
Almost alone, Moshe Dayan favoured annexation of both the newly captured
territories and the Palestinian population there. Others believed
that such a move would be seen as transparently colonialist and rapidly
degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and Palestinian
non-citizens. In their minds, Jabotinsky’s solution of an iron
wall was no longer viable.
But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid lip-service
to human rights, the government could see no way to expel the Palestinian
population on a large scale and annex the land, as Ben Gurion had
done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no way of persuading the
world that such expulsions should be characterised as voluntary.
Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction,
neither fully carrying out a transfer programme nor enforcing strict
separation. Instead it opted for an apartheid model that accommodated
Dayan’s suggestion of a “creeping annexation” of
the occupied territories that he rightly believed would go largely
unnoticed by the West.
The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from Herzl’s
notion of separation in one important respect: in apartheid, the “other”
population was a necessary, even if much abused, component of the
political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara
has noted, in South Africa “racial segregation was not absolute.
It took place within a framework of political unity. The racist regime
saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The
whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity.”
In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in Herzl’s
concept of separation was ignored for many years of Israel’s
occupation. The Palestinian labour force was exploited by Israel just
as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the Palestinians
was formalised in the Oslo accords, which were predicated on the kind
of separation needed to create a captive labour force.
However, Yitzhak Rabin’s version of apartheid embodied by the
Oslo process, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s opposition in upholding
Jabotinsky’s vision of Greater Israel, both deviated from Herzl’s
model of transfer through separation. This is largely why each political
current has been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend
towards “unilateral separation”.
Not surprisingly, the policy of “unilateral separation”
emerged from among the Labor Zionists, advocated primarily by Ehud
Barak. However, it was soon adopted by many members of Likud too.
Ultimately its success derived from the conversion to its cause of
Greater Israel’s arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realised the
chief manifestations of unilateral separation, the West Bank wall
and the Gaza disengagement, as well breaking up Israel’s rightwing
to create a new consensus party, Kadima.
In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved
through imposed and absolute separation -- just as Herzl had once
hoped. After the Gaza disengagement, the next stage was promoted by
Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for convergence, limited
withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain
in place, has been dropped, but its infrastructure -- the separation
wall -- continues to be built.
How will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer?
How will Herzl’s original vision of ethnic cleansing enforced
through strict ethnic separation be realised in today’s world?
The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement,
Israel has been able to cut off at will Gazans’ access to aid,
food, fuel and humanitarian services. Normality has been further eroded
by sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated small-scale
invasions that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly
among civilians.
Gaza’s imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become
a daily reality. In fact, Gaza’s condition is far worse than
imprisonment: prisoners, even of war, expect to have their humanity
respected, and be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed.
Gazans can no longer rely on these staples of life.
The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently clear:
transfer. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal
life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave -- in
what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus. And
if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist
thinking they have forfeited their right to it -- just as earlier
generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done
by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.
Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of
a modern policy of “transfer through separation” faces
severe limitations.
First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind support
for Israel. Such support is likely to be undermined by the current
American misadventures in the Middle East, and a gradual shift in
the balance of power to China, Russia and India.
Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only
from international law but also from the values upheld by most societies
and ideologies. The nature of Zionist ambitions is likely to be ever
harder to conceal, as is evident from the tide of opinion polls showing
that Western publics, if not their governments, believe Israel to
be one of the biggest threats to world order.
And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during
their slow eradication. The historical evidence most certainly shows
that they will not.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto, 2008), and “Disappearing Palestine” (Zed, forthcoming).