My new column is up at The American Prospect:
Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s favorite Palestinian leader — a true ally, a blood brother. What they share is an all-or-nothing approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: either complete Palestinian rule over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan or complete Jewish hegemony. Neither man is a totally immovable object — roped and dragged by an irresistible political force, either might agree to less than the whole land, but only in violation of his life’s central conviction.
Haniyeh reiterated his views on Sunday at a Gaza rally, expressing “great hope of bringing an end to the Zionist project in Palestine.” Netanyahu seized that comment as a gift from an ally and quoted it the next day in his own speech to the Knesset, using it as proof that “this is not a conflict over 1967; this is a conflict over 1948, over the very existence of the state of Israel.”
Let me add several bits of context: First, in Israeli political debate, “1948” and “1967” are misused as shorthand. If the key to the conflict is the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip ever since, then agreement on a two-state solution is possible. It will be based on an Israeli pullback more or less to the pre-1967 borders and creation of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.
If, however, the intractable core of the conflict is Israel’s establishment and the flight and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 — what Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe — a two-state compromise won’t work. Rolling back the consequences of 1948 means eliminating the Jewish state, creating a single political entity between the river and the sea, and allowing all of the refugees of ’48 or their descendants to return to Israel. Outside of a fraction of the Israeli radical left, which insists on a single, shared state, Israelis are understandably unwilling to accept such a “solution.” But the claim that the conflict is essentially about 1948 is exploited by the Israeli right: If the Palestinians, every last one of them, will never settle for less than a reversal of 1948, then there’s no point in giving up the West Bank. The conflict will just continue.
Second, Haniyeh’s and Netanyahu’s comments came at the start of a week and a half overtangled with political developments, even by the standards of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. Haniyeh spoke on May 15, when Palestinians commemorated the Nakba. The same day the Arab Spring literally spilled into Israeli-controlled territory, when Palestinian demonstrators from Syria — mobilized via Facebook, with some wearing business suits to emphasize that they came unarmed — managed to march into the Golan Heights.
Netanyahu cited that event along with Haniyeh’s speech in Parliament, warming up for a Washington trip that will include a meeting with President Barack Obama, a speech before Congress, and another at the convention of AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel lobby. Obama has his own speech on Middle East policy today, and another before AIPAC’s thousands. Count on Netanyahu to repeat the 1948 arguments, bolstered with some cherry-picked quotes from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s New York Times op-ed this week and with a “peace offer” designed to be rejected. The question facing Obama is whether he is finally willing to be the winch dragging Israelis and Palestinians toward peace or whether he’d rather be cheered by the AIPAC crowd, which does not want to hear any criticism of Netanyahu or of the status quo.
Third, the either-or argument about 1948 versus 1967 is deeply misleading. …
Read the rest here.
The over-hyped “Two State Solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which promises “peace for our time” (remember Neville Chaimberlain?) and endorsed by almost the entire world, is wrong, undoable and a recipe for certain disaster. If Israel were forced to give up the strategic Samarian Highlands, in the northern West Bank, she’d be signing her own death warrant.
Read all about it here:
http://shomroncentral.blogspot.com/
I’m sure Morris is right about the Palestinian exodus being a mixed story and that both expulsions at gunpoint and “normal” flight of civilians from war (as “normal” as that can be) happened. But aside from the fact that the exodus started months before the war and continued, including forcible expulsions, into the early 1950s, the story is woefully incomplete without mentioning that Israel subsequently barred the refugees who found themselves east of the ceasefire line from returning to their homes and villages, destroyed though many of them may have been. This decision can by no stretch of the imagination be called anything but fully deliberate. Only this made the Nakba complete; hardly anyone would be talking about, much less commemorating a “catastrophe” today, had all the refugees been allowed to return, as was and is their right.
This article makes a good point, that the meanings of past events are malleable. That’s why I do have hope for peace sometime in the unforeseeable future. Still, the shorthand of “1967” and “1948” is not as misleading as Mr. Gorenberg suggests. As he himself says, “1948” is about the establishment, and therefore the continued existence, of the State of Israel. It’s not, as he implies later in the article, about whether a few hundred or a few thousand refugees from 1948 will return. It’s about whether Israel will continue to exist. “1948” is about refugees only to the extent that the “right of return” is itself shorthand for the destruction of the State of Israel. Negotiating a symbolic return of a few refugees does not seriously address the issue of “1948.”
This crucial statement wasn’t really supported:
This is what we’ve been hearing from the Zionist left for at least the last two decades: of course most of the Arabs say they want to liberate all of Palestine, but they don’t really know what they want; once we (on the Zionist left) give them 22% of Palestine, they’ll be willing to forget all about the rest, as we’ve forgotten about the East Bank of the Jordan. I think the last two decades belie that claim, but I’d still like to see it argued. I think that here it was more just asserted than argued.
I actually agree that Netanyahu and the right over-simplify “1948” and “1967,” but their over-simplification is closer to the truth than is the Zionist left’s. Here’s my 1948/1967 question: in the likely event that the “1948-oriented” Palestinians (Hamas, Islamic Jihad) refuse to lay down their arms following a two-state peace agreement, what will the “1967-oriented” Palestinians (Abbas et al.) do to suppress the formers’ armed struggle to liberate the part of Palestine occupied since 1948?
Aaron: “the “right of return” is itself shorthand for the destruction of the State of Israel”
That may be so for both Palestinian and Jewish extremists, but that doesn’t mean those of us who are neither have to make it our frame of reference. The ROR is an individual, not a collective right. No leader, elected or not, has a mandate to bargain it away, and I think Abbas is very well aware of this. OTOH this also militates against viewing the Palestinians as a monolithic bloc of would-be-returnees, to the last of them. I’ve seen numbers floating around, none of them reliable, of course, between 100000 and 1 million who would even want to return, all a mere fraction of the some 5 million diaspora Palestinians, and a fraction of the Jewish population of Israel, too.
It might also help (that might be a pious wish, but I prefer it to cynicism) to shed that damned tribalist zero-sum group-think. “The Arab” is no more the Anti-Jew than “the Jew” is the Anti-Christ.
Well, here I go again, acting as though my words could matter. Apart from death, fear, and loss of potential this conflict can also boast creation of an amazingly robust word industry.
Some more words:
1) United Nation recognition of a Palestinian State (strangely unboarderd) implicitly affirms the 48 recognition of Israel. The same process legitimizes both.
2) The “character” of Israel is no business of any other State. It is, in fact, infirm for Israel to demand others tell itself what it is. I have elsewhere on this blog offered a constitutional solution to the “character” demand: the Israeli Decleration of Independence, by stipulating minimal rights for any future constitution, implicitly defines Israel as “Jewish” in so far as the Decleration forever insures migration into Israel for any Jew; and is “democratic” in so far as any born or legal immigrant residents of Israel must, by the Decleration, enjoy equal access and protection of certain rights. This latter means that the cultrual nature of Israel is an internal political matter, but the deck is somewhat stacked towards “Jews” (as those where only one thing) by the right of migration. How things play out cannot be determined by any other State’s pathetic decleration Israel is “Jewish.”
3) The “right of return” is an individual right EXCEPT that Jewish migration can never be curtailed. I have suggested, again on this blog, that the simplist solution is to allow all born in Palestine pre-1948, plus their direct descendents, the right to buy land in Israel (yes, I know what that means, but equality of right will force the same for Arab Israeli citizens anyway). This will trickle a return, but it will be open ended. It will not be token as such, for the financial base might grow; indeed, evil Arabs might loan money to that end. It would be scary, but not unworkable–and Jews may also rush to buy land offered by Israel or its citizens in open market. The millions of refugees outside the occupied territories are mostly lost. Which will scare Lebanon, Jorden, Syria.
4) I have no doubt that EITHER side in c 1948 would expunge the other. We have to recognize that that hunger resides in all of us. We have to fight, as I have also said herein, our own evolution. In fact, the only way out of this slow motion hell is for evolution to fight itself. And Aaron’s question, above
” in the likely event that the “1948-oriented” Palestinians (Hamas, Islamic Jihad) refuse to lay down their arms following a two-state peace agreement, what will the “1967-oriented” Palestinians (Abbas et al.) do to suppress the formers’ armed struggle to liberate the part of Palestine occupied since 1948?”
MUST be addressed, not in toto before action is taken, but as part of an ongoing process. (I think, however, that Aaron ignores the evidence that extremely violent groups can dismantle themselves–e.g., the IRA; his use of “likely” in his question is one of fear–and it is exactly what must, somehow, be addressed.)
5) Israel has been in constitutional crisis for decades, the unending Palestine conflict a fix to avoid examining what happens in its home. I can think of no Israeli politician who has not played the matter for home standing. Israelis need to confront themselves in a Constitutional Convention–which is what was supposed to happen in the first Constituent Assembly. I actually believe that such a convention would shift matters, internally and externally, to the better.
6) Finally, a side note on Obama’s speech. He said a Palestinian State must be “contiguous.” How can Gaza and the West Bank be so connected? Are we all so druged that all we care about is our next fix, words rollling out of us, some real people, hopefully distant, dying to no consequence?
Gershom Gorenberg should know it very well. There is no fog over the aim of the Palestinians. They clearly declare that they see Israel retreating to the “1948” status. Hamas says it clearly and the Fatah only hinting by the common code known as the “right of return”. You might hear the PLO’s leaders trying to lower suspicious by declaring that Israel should accept that demand in principle and accept few symbolic “returnees”. But their aim is to pour into Israel as many Palestinians as possible when time will be proper. This is the last and the non-military weapon that the Palestinians have in order to ruin Israel. People should know this full picture before condemning Israel for taking precautions against the political Palestinian’s attacks.
Israel must never give up control of the strategic Northern West Bank (Samaria).
See what a return to the ’67 lines will mean for Israel:
http://shomroncentral.blogspot.com/