- (YellowTimes.org) The Sharon government is widely regarded,
even by Israel's friends, as a negative force in the current politics of
the Middle East. Its brutal repression of the Palestinians, its intransigence
over engaging in the peace process and its defiance of world opinion on
such matters as settlement expansion and the separation wall has alarmed
everyone concerned with this issue. Seldom before has Israel provoked such
criticism from friend and foe alike, and there is a feeling that a different
Israeli leadership, drawn perhaps from the Labour party and the Zionist
left, would restore the previous status quo. Such a new leadership could
be expected to re-start the peace process and offer the Palestinians something
more satisfactory and all this would lead to peace and stability. This
widely held view ignores the real problem.
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- As a Zionist, Ariel Sharon is as faithful and committed
a servant as the Jewish state could ever have hoped for. He has merely
followed the tenets of Zionism to their logical conclusion. It is not he
who should be castigated but the ideology he and the state of Israel espouses.
For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism was all about,
a spate of recently published pieces will make salutary reading.
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- The most remarkable of these is an interview with the
Israeli historian, Benny Morris, that appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz
on January 4, 2004, followed by a second article by Morris in the January
14th edition of the London Guardian newspaper. In these, he explains with
breathtaking candor what the Zionist project entailed.
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- Few Zionists outside the ranks of the extreme right have
been prepared to be so brutally honest and Benny Morris claims to be on
the political left. More significantly, it was he who first exposed the
true circumstances of Israel's creation. Using Israel state archive documents
for his groundbreaking book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem
published in 1987, he was hailed as a courageous "revisionist historian."
His work suggested to many that, having learned the facts of the case,
he was bound to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. In the last few years,
however, he has been expressing ever more hardline views, as if he regretted
the pioneering research that helped expose the savage reality of Israel's
establishment. This shift seems to have culminated in his most recent utterances
about the nature of Zionism. Unpalatable as these are, we must thank him
for saying so bluntly what all Zionists, however "liberal," at
bottom really think but do not say.
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- Right from Israel's inception, Western states have been
prepared to swallow this ideology, since they were not its direct target.
But for Arabs, it was different. There was a time when they understood
Zionism to be the basic cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. From the 1920s
onwards, the Palestinians, being the ones most targeted, feared that Zionism
would take over their country. They tried to fight it but failed and the
Zionist project took hold. As this happened, the other Arabs joined the
fight and it was commonplace to hear Israelis being called simply, "the
Zionists" and Israel, "the Zionist entity." People wrote
tracts, articles and books about Zionism and it seemed a black and white
issue.
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- But after the 1967 war, a new ambiguity appeared. Resolution
242, accepted by the Arab states, introduced the idea that the basis of
the conflict was the Israeli occupation of post-1967 territory, without
reference to what had gone before. This set the pattern for all subsequent
Arab-Israeli peace proposals which aimed to bring about Israeli withdrawal
from these territories in exchange for Arab recognition. The first successful
application of this principle was the 1979 Camp David Agreement between
Israel and Egypt in 1979, trading Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory
occupied in 1967 for a peace treaty. By the time of the 1991 Madrid peace
conference, the (post-1967) land-for-peace formula was firmly established.
Madrid involved the Arab front-line states only, but in the March 2002
Saudi peace proposal, the offer had been upgraded to one of Israeli withdrawal
from all the 1967 territories in exchange for normalization of relations
with the whole Arab world.
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- Meanwhile, the Arab stance towards Israel as an illegitimate
body forcibly implanted into the region whose ideology, Zionism, inevitably
meant aggression and expansion to the detriment of the Arab world, quietly
slipped out of view. Now, it was only Israel's post-1967 occupation that
was the problem and, once rectified, Israeli integration into the region
could proceed. The Palestinians had a clearer view of Zionism. In 1969,
the PLO propounded a vision of a democratic state replacing Israel that
would give equal rights to all its citizens, Muslims, Christians and Jews.
This was a direct challenge to the idea of an exclusive Jewish state, but
more importantly a refusal to acquiesce in the Zionist theft of 1948 Palestine.
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- However, the huge power imbalance between the parties
forced the PLO to modify its stance and by 1974, a decision was taken to
accept much less. The two-state solution was born and in 1988, the PLO
formally recognized Israel in its 1948 borders. By 1993, the PLO had signed
up to the Oslo Agreement that finally legitimized Zionism. The terms of
the agreement excluded any discussion of 1948 Israel and confined themselves
to the dispute over the 1967 territories. And by accepting these terms,
the PLO signaled its acceptance of the original Zionist claim to Palestine.
This process has found its apotheosis in the recent Geneva Accords, which
require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as "the state of the
Jews." No greater turnabout in history could be imagined.
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- Accompanying this evolution of attitudes has been a sort
of Arab flirtation with Zionism. Following the Israel-Egypt treaty, a number
of Arab-Israeli projects and initiatives came into being. These were mirrored
in the West during the 1980s, where various Arab-Jewish "dialogue
groups" sprang up and the breaking of traditional taboos became enticing.
Exchanges between Arab and Israeli scholars and academics became popular
and, after the Oslo Agreement, numerous Israeli-Palestinians joint projects
were initiated.
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- Contacts between several Arab states and Israel were
made, either officially or in secret. Even previously hardline anti-Israel
states like Libya and Syria have started to make overtures towards Israel,
(though admittedly with mixed motives). The majority of these initiatives
have involved "liberal" Zionists, not the small minority of radical
but marginalized anti-Zionist Jews. It is as if the old antipathy towards
Zionism as the root cause of the Palestinian tragedy and the turmoil in
the Middle East had been forgotten. Like Marxist terminology in the West
today, the anti-Zionist rhetoric so prevalent amongst Arabs in the past,
is passé and many believe that Zionists are people with whom you
really can do business.
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- At this point, Benny Morris's revelations are like a
slap in the face. He reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape
and massacre. His recent researches, cited in the new edition of his book,
The Birth of the Palestine refugee problem revisited, provide the authentic
evidence. The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic
cleansing and, he asserts, more may be necessary in the future to ensure
its survival. Force was always essential to the imposition and maintenance
of Israel, he explains; native hostility to the project was inevitable
from the start and it had to be countered by overwhelming strength. The
Palestinians will always pose a threat and they must therefore be controlled
and "caged in." He recognizes that the Jewish state project is
an impossible idea and that, logically, it should never have succeeded.
Nevertheless, it was worthwhile because it was a moral project justified,
despite the damage it caused, by the overriding need for a solution to
Jewish suffering. The Ara
- These utterances capture the essence of Zionism: that
a Jewish state could never have been established without force, coercion
and ethnic cleansing; its survival depended on superior power to crush
all opposition; it was fired by a conviction of its moral rightness which
accorded Jews a special place over others; because of this, it viewed everything
as instrumental to its goal. Morris regrets the Palestinians suffering
entailed in Israel's creation, but sees it as a necessary evil in pursuit
of the greater good. "The right of refugees to return to their homes
seems natural and just," he says. "But this 'right of return'
needs to be weighed against the right to life and well-being of the five
million Jews who currently live in Israel."
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- Thus, he eloquently shows why Zionism is a dangerous
idea: at its root is a conviction of moral righteousness that justifies
almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means
nuclear weapons, massive military force, alliances with unsavory regimes,
theft and manipulation of other people's resources, aggression and occupation,
the crushing of Palestinian and all other forms of resistance to its survival,
however inhuman -- then so be it. The truth is, of course, that the problem
for Zionism was always how to keep Palestine without the Palestinians and
hence today's Israeli anxieties about the so-called Palestinian "demographic
threat." As the impasse of ending the intifada, despite draconian
suppression, persists, there is a near panic over "demographic spill
over" diluting Israel's "Jewish character." Limor Livnat,
Israel's education minister, put this eloquently in a radio interview.
"We're involved here," she said, "in a struggle for the
existence of the State of Israel as the stat
- It is against this background that the monstrous barrier
wall being erected in the West Bank can be understood. Hence, also Ariel
Sharon's offer last December of a "unilateral" withdrawal from
40 percent of the West Bank, reversing the classical Likud position on
keeping all of the land. A January opinion poll showed that 60 per cent
of Israelis supported this. In a similar vein, his hardline deputy, Ehud
Olmert, has proposed a partition of the land, including Jerusalem, into
two states "because of demography." But that problem exists inside
Israel, too, which is currently 20 percent Arab and increasing. It is estimated
that by 2010, there will be an Arab majority in the area of Israel/Palestine.
How will the Zionists stem the tide and keep the state Jewish?
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- If Zionism is to remain, there are few choices. As Morris
says, it is only by building an "iron wall," and by eternal vigilance
and superior force to overcome "the barbarians who want to take our
lives." The two-state solution is only a stopgap because he thinks
the Palestinians will not be satisfied and sooner or later, they will destroy
the Jewish state. Ariel Sharon has done no more than follow these ideals
to the letter. His style may be more blatant, but at its basis it is no
different from all the other Zionists who have ruled the Jewish state.
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- The Zionist idea has lost none of its force today; it
is deeply implanted in the hearts of most Jews, whether Israelis or not.
No one should be under any illusion that it is a spent force, no matter
what the currently fashionable discourse about "post-Zionism"
or "cultural Zionism" may be. No region on earth should have
been required to give this ideology houseroom, let alone the backward and
ill-equipped Arab world. Nevertheless, we owe a debt of gratitude to Benny
Morris for disabusing us of such notions.. But a project that is morally
one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no long-term
future. The fact that it has gotten this far is remarkable but that holds
out no guarantee of survival. As he, himself, says, "Destruction could
be the end of this process."
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- [Dr. Ghada Karmi is a patron of Arab Media Watch, author
of In Search of Fatima and Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and
Islamic Studies.]
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