There is always too much and too little to write. Everything here is extraordinary, and nothing is new. This week Israelis commemorated the Holocaust and their fallen soldiers, and celebrated “Independence Day.” This week Palestinians lived another week under occupation, with an eye towards “Al Nakba” (the catastrophe), a commemoration of the tragedy that 1948 was for the Palestinian people. This week my Israeli friends were beaten and arrested by Israeli police officers in Tel Aviv while protesting the Israeli army killing of two Palestinian boys the previous day. This week I stood in support of Palestinian villagers in Assira who opened the roadblocks that the Israeli army had placed to block them from going to Nablus on this road for the past 5 years. This week a friend in Dheisheh asked my advice on whether he should accept money for his organization from US AID, which requires a signature on an “anti-terror” statement (“I’m against terror,” my friend told me, “but by my definition, not theirs. I’m against killing of Palestinian children and Israeli children...”). This week I asked the same friend what he thought of Jewish Palestine solidarity activists using Israel’s discriminatory immigration laws in order to do this work. He told me what many Palestinians have told me: you and hundreds of other like-minded people should get Israeli citizenship and vote the bastards out (paraphrased). But isn’t that a bit like the soldiers at checkpoints who tell me, “I’m serving in the army in order to humanize it. I’m the good soldier”? You can’t humanize a checkpoint, you can’t humanize the occupation, and you can’t humanize a state that was founded on someone else’s land (like the US, I realize, but I was born in the US and my citizenship there was not a choice), and whose existence is based on the concept of rights for only a small group of people. There is a larger number of non-Jews in Israel than non-Christians in the United States. What if the US were declared a Christian country? Some may argue that our current leadership is bringing us closer to that, but Bush would never dare say that non-Christians cannot buy land, or build additions to their houses, or enjoy other rights of citizenship granted to the ever-shrinking majority population.
I am increasingly frustrated by “left-wing Zionists,” people who believe in an end to the 1967 occupation and in the creation of two states, but who don’t question the character of those two states; people who admit to me that they’re not quite sure how Zionism and democracy can coexist, but that there has to be some way, and besides, their “bottom line” is that Jews need a state. They are not willing to think their thoughts to their logical conclusions. They simply end with their “bottom line,” while millions of Palestinians live in refugee camps all over the world waiting for that bottom line to change.
The uncomfortable truth I’ve come to is that Zionism and democracy are incompatible. This is not to say that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth. This is simply to say that you can’t have a democratic state and a Jewish state at the same time. You can’t have a democratic nationalism that is based on religion and ethnicity instead of geography. I’ve heard people say Israel can be a “Jewish state” if it embodies Jewish values of justice and humanity. Fine, then let Israel be that kind of Jewish state, which will also make it a Muslim state, a Christian state, a Buddhist state, a secular-humanist state, ...
Israel has been pushing and pushing at the borders, expanding and expanding, cantonizing the Palestinian population and essentially making a two-state solution impossible. So some of the progressive thinkers on both sides may end up being right, and may find themselves living in the one state they’ve been calling for for so long. I think this is a likely scenario for the far future, that all of historic Palestine will be one state (whether it’s called Israel, Palestine, or something else), and that everyone in that state will have equal rights, at least under law. I don’t see a viable long-term alternative. This is an end to Zionism. The question is, how long will it take until people come to terms with this necessity? How long will it take until people realize that Zionism is only a pit stop in the history of the Jewish people? And, perhaps most importantly, how many Palestinians will lose their land, their homes, and their lives in the meantime?
These are my thoughts during this week of “Israeli independence.” Questions and comments are welcome. I realize this is incomplete, so maybe I’ll write a follow-up after seeing what you all have to say. The purpose is not to create a political doctrine or to advocate any particular vision for the future (ultimately I think that’s up to the people living here to figure out), but simply to offer a few thoughts (admittedly, not new thoughts) as honestly as I can. Also, for any of you out there who are believers in justice and democracy, and consider yourselves Zionists, please explain to me how this can work (I may not be convinced, but I would at least like to understand).
The following is an excerpt from a book I just read by Mourid Barghouti, called “I Saw Ramallah.” The passage begins with him describing his reaction to Rabin’s speech at the signing of the Oslo accords. I find it particularly powerful this week...
“I felt that tremor that I know so well and which I feel when I know that I have not done my best, that I have failed: Rabin has taken everything, even the story of our death.
This leader knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli blood, the blood of every Israeli individual without exception. He knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated by us. He changed facts, he altered the order of things, he presented us as the initiators of violence in the Middle East and said what he said with eloquence, with clarity and conviction. ...
It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly.’ Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with “Secondly,” for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with “Secondly,” and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British. You only need to start your story with “Secondly,” and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly,” for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim. ...
The houses built on top of ours gallantly declare their willingness to understand our odd predilection toward living in camps scattered in the Diaspora of gods and flies, as though we had begged them to throw us out of our homes and to send their bulldozers to destroy them in front of our very eyes. Their generous guns in Deir Yassin forgive us the fact that they piled our bodies high at the sunset hour there one day. Their fighter jets forgive the graves of our martyrs in Beirut. Their soldiers forgive the tendency of our teenagers’ bones to break. Israel the victim polishes its hot, red knife with the sheen of forgiveness.”
