winter 2004 volume three - issue one The Truth About Palestine Stephen Eric Bronner States of Despair Lawrence Davidson Orwell and Kafka in Israel-Palestine Ernest Goldberger The Power of Myth in Israeli Society Judith Butler The Jews and the Bi-National State Mustapha Barghouti A Place for our Dream? Moshe Zuckermann The Building of A Wall Menachem Klein The Logic of the Geneva Accord George Lichtheim A View of Israel from Paris Bruce Robbins Solidarity and Worldliness: For Edward Said Adnan Musallam The Thorny Road to Peace History and Power in the Middle East: A Conversation with Ilan Pappe Debate: Benny Morris & Baruch Kimmerling on Ethnic Cleansing Photography by Horit Peled Selected Israeli and Palestinian Poets Review Essays The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz reviewed by Sabby Sagal Four Books on Terror reviewed by Carl Boggs © Logos 2004 Stephen Eric Bronner States of Despair: History, Politics, and the Struggle for Palestine by Stephen Eric Bronnner Echoes of the Past Hope is said to have a bitter taste. Nowhere is that more the case than in the Middle East where the possibilities for peace have been squandered and the longings for justice have grown ever more burdensome over the last half-century. Worry over the treatment of Arabs by Jews stretches back to the last century over a host of modern Jewish intellectuals including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem among others. But their cautionary warnings were ignored, if not derided, by the Jewish mainstream. It is ironic since just these thinkers implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, anticipated that the Palestinians would shoulder the compensatory costs of the European holocaust. This historical trick of fate would serve as the source of an ideological competition concerning who is the real victim that still poisons the possibility of reasoned debate between Jews and Palestinians. Jews had, understandably, made a moral demand for a national haven of safety following World War II and Europe, guilt-ridden by its recent past, was willing to sanction one so long as it was somewhere else: like in "the holy land." Just as legitimately, however, its Arab inhabitants insisted that they had no part in the holocaust and that they should not be forced to pay such a terrible price for the blood spilled by others. There was one way for Israelis to square the moral circle: understand the creation of the new "Jewish" state as based on the provision of "a land without a people for a people without a land." This slogan coined in 1901 by Israel Zangwill, who ironically never believed it applied to Palestine in the first place, became perhaps the founding myth of Israel. It projected the creation of life in an empty desert by a "chosen people," a cultivated people wronged by history, at last able to build its destiny through intelligence, bravery, Logos 3.1 – Winter 2004 Stephen Eric Bronner and perseverance. Unfortunately, however, the land was not empty or bereft of civilization: it had to be made so. Herein lies the contribution of the various "revisionist" historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe as well as independent-minded sociologists like Baruch Kimmerling. Their political opinions differ radically but their research illustrates with scholarly objectivity that the "people without a land" had actually created "the land without a people" through what today would be termed "ethnic cleansing." Creating Israel involved forcibly expelling 750,000 Arab inhabitants, eliminating over 400 villages, employing rape and torture, and turning those Arabs living in the new state into second-class citizens to ensure its "Jewish" character. But the old myth refuses to die. The image still exists of a heroic battle waged by a small community of peaceful Jews against a vast army of savage Arabs, the assault on the Israeli David by the anti-Semitic Goliath, which led to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. War followed war. An attempted seizure of the Suez Canal by Israel with the backing of France and England took place in 1956 until, fearful of increased European influence in the Middle East, the United States demanded that the invaders withdraw. And they did. Then, in 1967, Israel attacked an allied force of Arab armies-from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan- massing on its borders. The "six day" war culminated in a humiliating defeat for the Arab world and the capture of the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and the West Bank. It was in response to these events that the Security Council of the United Nations passed the famous resolution #242, which demanded Israeli withdrawal from the conquered territories. Here began the shift in American policy: Israel now appeared as the dominant force in the region and a bulkhead against the Soviet Union with whose interests the Arab world became identified in the eyes of the United States. Also, in 1968, the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed and, a year later, Yasser Arafat was elected its chairman. Incarnating the demand for a Palestinian state, the PLO was born under the long shadow of the "catastrophe" (nakba) of 1948, the expulsion resulting from the creation of Israel, and the disastrous military defeat of 1967. Logos 3.1 – Winter 2004 Stephen Eric Bronner Cycles of Violence Terror and denial expressed the desperate reality of defeat and colonial oppression. There followed the hijacking of airplanes, the assassination of eleven Israeli athletes in 1972 at the Munich Olympics, and the refusal of the PLO to accept the existence of Israel. The opprobrium heaped by the western press upon the Arab world in general, and the PLO in particular, intensified following the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. This culminated in yet another defeat of the Arabs by the Israelis. The money began pouring in from the United States and the Jewish diaspora. A nation under siege faced a nest of terrorists with whom negotiation was impossible. It didn't matter that in 1987, following the Israeli military incursion into Lebanon, an intifada -or "resistance" - spontaneously took shape in Palestine that placed primary emphasis upon civil disobedience, a refusal to cooperate with the Israeli authorities, and the emergence of a network of non- governmental organizations to build communal solidarity and resistance. But the imbalance of economic, political, and military power grew in favor of Israel. Settlements were expanded, constrictions on the populace increased, repression intensified. Indeed, by the time the "second intifada" began in September of 2000, Palestinians were facing an Israeli nation that had become the seventh largest military machine in the world, a major arms dealer to previously colonized countries, and the beneficiary of $4 billion per year in foreign aid from the United States. Fifteen thousand people were arrested, or sent into exile, or had their houses destroyed, or were hurt or killed during and after the first intifada. Committed activists were replaced by inexperienced youths, armed gangs arose, the lure of fundamentalism grew, Palestinian civil society was virtually destroyed, and conditions in the community degenerated. Such was the basis for the new reliance on suicide bombings and organized violence generated during the second intifada, which a militant Palestinian friend told me "did not deserve the name of an intifada," made it different from the earlier uprising. This most recent action was provoked by Ariel Sharon who, surrounded by 10,000 troops, walked up the Temple Mount - known to Arabs as the "noble sanctuary" or Hareem al-Shareef - as a publicity stunt. A hero to Logos 3.1 – Winter 2004 Stephen Eric Bronner the right-wing religious settlers of the West Bank, and despised by the Palestinians for his role in the slaughter of refugees in the Lebanese towns of Shabron and Shitilla in 1982, Sharon symbolized by his actions that Israel still exerted sovereignty not merely over one of the holiest Islamic shrines, but over Jerusalem itself. Rioting took place in response to this provocation. The Palestinians attacked with stones, Molotov cocktails, and a few automatic weapons while the Israelis retaliated with live ammunition, anti-tank rockets, helicopters, and missiles. The Israeli military systematically destroyed the houses of terrorist "sympathizers" and family members; thousands were arrested or tortured; citizens of the occupied territories were denied the most elementary medical and social services; and, finally, construction for "security" purposes was begun on more than seven hundred and fifty roadblocks and a huge "wall of separation." Jenin has been reduced to rubble; nearly half of the 35,000 inhabitants of Hebron have left the city, and Qualquilya was literally closed off from the world for 22 days. Since the beginning of the second intifada more than 2600 Palestinians, mostly young people, have lost their lives and more than 24,000 have been wounded as against roughly 800 deaths and 6000 wounded among Israelis. Israel has used the eruption of the second intifada to again expand the number of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, further curtail civil liberties, seize Palestinian bank accounts, build a wall, and ward off what Binjamin Netanyahu has called "the demographic threat." All this was undertaken by Israel in the name of "security" as elements of the Palestinian resistance, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, seized upon the idea of suicide bombing. This decision has resulted in a moral and a political disaster for the Palestinians. Any possibility of capturing the moral high ground has been squandered. Innocent ivesl have been destroyed and the dramatic pictures of terrorist attacks-young Israelis torn limb from limb in a bombed out discotheque-have tended to eradicate the real if less dramatic oppression that Palestinians suffer every day.