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CounterPunch
March 3,
2003
An End to the Israel Experiment?
Unmaking a Grievous Error
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
Now that Ariel Sharon has been returned to power
and his regime endorsed in its brutal occupation of Palestine,
it seems to me that the time has come to ask whether the 50-year-old
experiment known as the state of Israel has proven to be a failure
and should be abandoned.
Two things seem abundantly clear from
the long months of multi-ethnic carnage in the Middle East. The
first is that Israel cannot live in peace with the Palestinians
unless it finally establishes a dictatorial apartheid rule and
confines them in Arab bantustans.
The second is that the Palestinians will
not live in peace with Israel, not even if they achieve their
promised statehood, for they share the deep, decades-old hostility
to the Jewish state that has not abated but increased throughout
the Arab world in recent years. We may disregard as hollow the
rhetoric claiming that Israel would be accepted if it was confined
to its pre-1967 borders, which is something that it will not
do, anyway.
With the Likud electoral victory, we
can expect, even if eventually some American-brokered peace plan
is nominally agreed upon, that Israel will fortify its borders,
continue occupying Palestinian territory at will, bolster its
support for West Bank settlements, and keep on using military
retaliation for any Palestinian acts of sabotage or terror. And
that Palestine, though most of its armed organizations will have
been decimated, will be unable or unwilling to stop such acts,
including suicide bombing, newly fueled by the hatred stemming
from the present Israeli occupation.
Israel will win this little war against
the intifada, and Palestine will be effectively disembowled,
but there will not be peace. In fact, there is guaranteed to
be more violence.
And there will continue to be violence
as long as Israel exists amidst a population that for the most
part abhors, and in only a few quarters tolerates, its presence.
We all understand the reason for Israel's
existence in the first place. Guilt, and reparation. But was
it not a certain recipe for unrest and disorder to forcibly establsih
a Jewish homeland in the Middle East and, in effect, put down
2 million Jews in the middle of 200 million Arabs?
What would have happened if it was decided
in 1948 that 2 million African-Americans should be returned to,
say, a partitioned Ghana, supported by an annual $6 billion in
aid from the American government? Or, perhaps more to the point,
if those African-Americans, who arguably deserve reparation of
some kind, were established in that part of the Middle East,
approximating the present borders of Israel, that their African
ancestors settled from about 100,000 years ago on? Their claims
of priority would vastly outrank any Biblical ones for the Jews,
but it is hard to think that they would have been welcomed by
the Arabs there, and tolerated only if they had superior military
power and the support of the U.S.
Yes, I am arguing that the original idea
of a Jewish state, from the Balfour Declaration on down, was
a mistake, and to establish it in an Islamic Middle East essentially
by force and with the emiseration of millions of natives was
a tragic mistake. We are reaping the awful results of that error
today.
It is of course not so easy to know what
to do to undo that mistake, but I would argue that a world that
can make a state can unmake it. In its place one might establish
a non-religious Palestine covering all of the original British
Mandate in which Jews, Moslems, Christians, and others would
have equal rights and equal votes, as a few Israelis have suggested
in recent years; or a "bi-ethnic/bi-national" state
with equal powers toJews and Moslems something along the lines
of Switzerland, Belgium, or a future Ireland; or an Islamic state
that would be forced by international vigilence to give, and
maintain, full religious and political rights to the Jews, who
would then be free to settle in the West Bank and elsewhere.
The process need not be unduly rapid-and
just the prospect of it might well be enough to put an end to
the present intifada-and it should include an extensive international
effort to resettle those Israelis who would not want to remain
in the Middle East. Given the skill and intelligence of the
Israeli workforce one can imagine that a great many countries
would welcome such settlers, even in large aggregates. The diaspora,
after all, has existed since 70 A.D., far longer than the state
has, and might even be thought of as the natural or historic
role of Jewry.
I know full well that such ideas are
an anathema to most Israelis, who after all have made the land
their home in the last 50 years. But I would suggest that the
way things are going their options in maintaining a Jewish state
are limited: an apartheid state with Palestinians forcibly removed
from Israael and no end to the violence; a Stalinist police state
with an end to both violence and democracy; and a democratic
one-person-one-vote state encompassing all Jews and Arabs, in
which Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.
Among those choices, abandoning the experiment
of the Israeli state does not seem so far-fetched or undesirable.
Kirkpatrick Sale
is the author of nine books, including Rebels
Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial
Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age and The
Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian
Legacy. He can be reached at: kirksale@counterpunch.org
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February 28,
2003
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