- "No, you must finish both the meat and the vegetables;
don't pick the cheese off your sandwich and do not leave bread on the plate"
- so we tell to a choosy kid who tries to take his pick and shortcut his
way to dessert. Picking and choosing is a troublesome habit at the family
table.
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- This applies to the Israeli settlers and Jewish nationalists
as well. At last, at long last, they have begun to recognise the advantages
of One State between the Sea and the River, instead of having a Jewish
Ghetto and Arab Bantustans. So we have been told by Haaretz writer Noam Sheizaf in
a piece with the telling title (http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/friday-supplement/endgame-1.302128)
Endgame. Among new adepts of the One State, one finds the Knesset Speaker Rubi (Reuven) Rivlin,
who said, "It's preferable for the Palestinians to become citizens
of the state rather than for us to divide the country." and ex-Defence
Minister Moshe Arens who is ready to grant Israeli citizenship
to the Palestinians in the West Bank. These are heavy guns of Israeli politics,
and they are apparently supported by other Likudmembers like MK Tzipi Hotovely,
leading settlers like Uri Elitzur, Rabbis like Rabbi Froman of Tekoa,
and to an extent even by the icon of settlers, Hanan Porat.
-
-
- They speak of granting the two and a half million Palestinians
of the West Bank full rights and Israeli citizenship. This is a step in
right direction, which should be approved of. This is certainly not enough,
but as a first step it would do. However, some of these Jews want to pick
and choose. Adi Mintz, a former director general of the Yesha Council,
would like Israel to annex 60 percent of Judea and Samaria, whose 300,000
Palestinian inhabitants would be granted Israeli citizenship. This is too
little too late. Such a harebrained scheme has no chance of being acceptable
to the Palestinians, or to decent people anywhere.
-
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- "If you want the land, take it with the people".
This was the answer of Glubb Pasha in 1948. This commander of the Arab
Legion was forced to surrender the Valley of Ara to the Jews;
the Jews wanted then as now to have the land without people.
He refused. Eventually the Jews relented, and the people of the Wadi Ara remained
in their homes, received Israeli citizenship and prospered. This should
be the model but not "pick and choose". Otherwise the remainder
of Palestine will have a lot of people locked up in tiny enclaves.
-
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- All of Palestine and all of the Palestinians living there
this is a doable minimum for the first stage. This is much less than
what the Palestinians want, for they reasonably want to see the refugees
coming back home from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The Palestinians also
want to regain property lost under racist laws, notably the Absentee Property
Law. However, these demands could be more profitably discussed when there
are four to five million Palestinian voters in Israel.
-
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- Even the most enlightened and accommodating Jewish nationalists
do not want to take Gaza, for it has very little land and a lot of Palestinians.
This would preclude a true solution, but probably even the absorption of
all the West Bank with the full enfranchising of all of its present inhabitants
is acceptable as a first step in the right direction. At the same time
Gaza's re-integration could begin and last, say, a year or two; at the
end of this period Gaza would be fully integrated and its inhabitants fully
enfranchised as well.
-
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- Is it possible at all, or do we encounter here yet another
example of "Zionist spin that is planted in our discourse in
order to disseminate confusion" as our friend Gilad Atzmon has (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/on-the-israeli-rights-new-peace-agenda-by-gilad-atzmon.html)
put it? Proceed with caution, I advise. One State is good for Palestinians,
and their majority prefers it to "independence" under Mahmud Abbas or
even Ismail Hanie. However, One State is good for Jews, not only
for Palestinians. It is good for Israeli business. It is good for half-a-million
of Jewish settlers who would be able to remain in their homes. It is good
for Oriental Jews who would be re-integrated into their native Arabic milieu.
It is good for Russians who are anyway considered 'second-rate Jews'. It
is good for honest Jews, for they will find peace of mind. Their persecution
mania will hopefully go away. In short, Jews would not regret the change
overmuch, just as white South Africans do not miss the days of apartheid.
Peace with neighbours will allow full integration in the region, and integration
usually is good for Jews.
-
-
- One State is not an apocalyptic vision of the Last Days.
It is a perfectly doable and mutually profitable development. Why it did
not occur until now, is a question of psychology rather than realpolitik.
Traditionally Jews have been against intermarriage since the days of Ezra,
who expelled all mixed-marriage couples from the nascent Jewish state.
With the decrease of Jewish religiosity, nationalist Jews have inherited
this trait. Jewish nationalism was informed in the 19th c.; the nationalist
(or "proud") Jews share Hitler's hate of miscegenation and fear
of diluting their 'pure race'. They correctly believe that peaceful coexistence
will bring forth intermarriage, thereby diluting precious Jewish blood,
or race, or DNA or whatever you call it. Indeed, in the US, Russia and
Europe, intermarriage is more than 50%. If war is the only way to prevent
intermarriage, let it be war, they conclude. War is good, for "it keeps
the Israeli society from falling apart", (http://www.jungewelt.de/2010/06-19/001.php)
said Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.
-
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- This National-Socialist, warlike Judaism is outdated,
and is being undermined by Americanisation of Israel on one side of the
green line and by the influence of the land on the other side of it. The
settlers, a rough lot, live close to the most charming and delightful places
in Palestine. It is not surprising that for some of them the land has become
more important than blood. Not only the blood to be shed, but also
the blood to be mixed. Actually, the owner of Ha'aretz newspaper,
Amos Shocken, wrote in favour of the full integration and the mutual
assimilation of Jews and Palestinians. Shlomo Sand's pioneering
book Invention of the Jewish People, which debunks the concept of
a pure and ancient Jewish race, had astonishing success among Israeli Jews,
who apparently are ready for this message.
-
-
- A foreign reader might be surprised by the Jewish Nationalists'
support of this idea so rigidly rejected by the Israeli Zionist Left. However,
for us Israelis, it is not surprising in the light of organisational and
moral collapse of the Zionist Left in recent years. After all, the Zionist
Left gave us the Nakba under Ben Gurion and a lot of
settlements under Rabin and Barak. The Zionist Left also invented
the Wall and the apartheid slogan "we are here, they are there".
-
-
- Ali Abunimah correctly (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11411.shtml)
reminded us that "in South Africa, it was not the traditional
white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system's dismantling,
but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place."
Indeed, liberalism leads nowhere, ditto the wishy-washy leftie attitude.
Settlers may contain some very unpalatable elements, but they are hardly
worse than average Israeli. Many of them are perfectly human. Their Palestinian neighbours are
aware of that. Indeed Raja Shehadehconcludes his wonderful (http://www.profilebooks.com/title.php?titleissue_id=450)
Palestinian Walks by a charming encounter with a young settler who
came down to a stream to have his smoke. Shehadeh and the settler
pass the joint back and forth, as if it were a calumet of peace.
-
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- Gilad Atzmon and Ali Abunima both state that
Jewish nationalists are committed to preserving a "Jewish democratic
state" as opposed to a "state for all citizens". True enough.
A Jewish democratic state means that it is democratic for Jews and Jewish
for everybody else. However, Lincoln and his contemporaries who enfranchised
the slaves did not expect that a black man would become the US President
one day yet it happened due to the dynamics they unleashed. Likewise
in our case, let millions of Palestinians get on the voter roll, and then
these small problems will be taken care of.
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- The Jewish nationalist One-Staters should be encouraged
by our side. Perhaps this is the right time to do a One State Conference
like we did few years ago in Lausanne, but this time with settlers and Hamas,
and with everybody else who wants to live in One Palestine, Complete, to
use the words of Tom Segev.
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