Proposed annexation is a red
herring, relieving liberal Zionists of
responsibility for Israel's broader apartheid system
and ongoing Palestinian suffering.
By Richard Silverstein
June 25, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Annexation is a
sham.
Don’t get me wrong: this doesn’t mean that Israel’s
proposed annexation of the Jordan Valley won’t further
dispossess Palestinians. Israel will be stealing 30
percent of the land set aside for a Palestinian state
under previous, failed peace proposals, causing further
suffering to Palestinians.
But this particular annexation proposal, to which the
new Israeli government
agreed in its coalition deal, is a red herring - a
distraction from the systemic nature of Israel’s
dispossession of Palestinians. It permits liberal
Zionists and the international community to focus their
attention on undoing this particular evil, relieving
them of responsibility for the entire apartheid system
Israel has developed, both inside and outside the green
line.
Religious intolerance
Statements from
British Jewish leaders,
US Congress members,
European Union officials and
human rights experts have warned of the consequences
of annexation. They have targeted the soft, “moderate”
underbelly of the governing coalition, Blue and White
MKs, telling them how badly the world would look upon
Israel if this proposal was enacted.
But all of this liberal whining avoids a far greater
evil: a Judeo-supremacist regime built on religious
intolerance and ethnic cleansing.
The problem with the Israeli state is not one
particular policy, no matter how odious. It goes back to
the very foundations of the state and the thinking of
its founders, foremost among them David Ben-Gurion.
While there were
some voices among early Zionist leaders who sought
integration, or at least peaceful coexistence with their
Palestinian neighbours, Ben-Gurion
was a maximalist who espoused ethnic cleansing in
his diaries and letters well before he founded the
state.
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The sine qua non of statehood for him was a
Jewish majority and Jewish superiority. “Arabs”
might remain inside the new nation’s borders, but
only if they acquiesced to their diminished status.
Even then, Ben-Gurion feared the Palestinian presence
so much that he and the Palmach militia
organised and conducted Plan Dalet, which resulted
in the Nakba - the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in
conjunction with the 1948 founding of Israel.
Palestinian communities that survived the war
remained under
martial law for two decades, though they posed no
security threat.
Boiling the frog
As an American Jew, I was raised on liberal Zionism.
I was taught from an early age that Israel was a Jewish
and democratic state. I was taught to be proud of the
mutual coexistence of those two terms. But the religious
component of Israeli identity, as it has come to be
defined, precludes democracy; they cannot coexist. It
took me decades to realise this.
While it would be ill-advised to attempt to eliminate
or suppress religion in a truly democratic state of
Israel-Palestine, religion must be separated from the
political realm if this state is ever to become
normalised.
The religions of Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian
citizens will remain critical to them and their
identities. If practised appropriately, they will enrich
the fabric of the state without prejudicing one
religious or ethnic group over another. But the present
Israeli regime has as much, or more, in common with
Iran’s Islamic republic, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic
protectorate, or the Afghan Taliban than it does with
western democracy.
One of the clever elements of Zionist expansionism is
to pursue its goals gradually, rather than all at once.
The poor frog doesn’t realise that he’s being boiled in
the pot until it’s too late, because the flame raises
the temperature gradually and almost imperceptibly.
Thus, Netanyahu has already
backed off his original proposal of annexing the
entire Jordan Valley. He is now entertaining
“annexation-lite”, absorbing the major settlement
enclaves of
Ariel, Maaleh Adumim and Gush Etzion, while leaving
the remaining territory unannexed. This hides the fact
that once these blocs become part of Israel, the
surrounding territory is Palestinian in name only;
whatever is left will be hemmed in by Israeli fences,
roads and infrastructure. And Israel could, at a later
date, annex the rest.
Silver lining
In a recent
Middle East Eye webinar, Professor Rashid Khalidi
described annexation as “largely a red herring”, noting
that it has been ongoing since 1967 in various ways,
with Israeli law already applying throughout the
occupied territories.
“We have to be thinking in broader terms than the
narrow diplomatic language that’s been used. Israel has
been annexing and creating a one-state reality since
1967. This [current annexation plan] is just a tiny step
in the process,” Khalidi said, noting that Netanyahu’s
more limited proposal regarding the three settlement
enclaves amounts to a “charade”.
“We should be talking in much more fundamental terms
about the systemic structural problems that are going to
have to be addressed if this problem is to be resolved
on a just and equitable basis,” he said.
If there is any silver lining in the annexation plan,
it is that liberal Zionists, who once denounced the
boycott movement and anyone labeling Israel as an
apartheid state, have been forced to reckon with the
failure of their vision.
South African anti-apartheid campaigner Benjamin
Pogrund, who has spent decades fighting the notion that
Israel is an apartheid state, recently
said in an interview: “If we annex the Jordan Valley
and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop.
There’s no question about it.”
South Africa’s bantustans “were simply a more refined
form of apartheid to mask what it really was”, Pogrund
added, noting that the consequences of Israel’s planned
annexation “will obviously be extremely grave. Friends
of ours in the world will not be able to defend us”.
Cracks and divides
Similarly, the pro-Israel German party Die Linke has
also
called for sanctioning Israel if it goes forward
with this plan. “Should the Israeli government resolve
to carry out the annexation, Die Linke will advocate for
the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement,”
it said in a statement.
This EU protocol is important not only because it
offers Israel tariff-free trade and privileges of member
states, but also because of the status it confers on
Israel, both in Europe and around the world. To lose
these privileges would be an economic and political
blow.
The party’s statement, as noted by journalist Ali
Abunimah, comes close to abandoning a two-state
solution, which is at the very heart of the liberal
Zionism Die Linke upholds: “In the face of the Israeli
government’s seeming rejection of a just two-state
solution, in which citizens from both sides would live
with equal rights, Die Linke calls for equal civil
rights for Palestinians and Israelis,” the party stated.
“For Die Linke, the following principle holds
everywhere and at all times: all inhabitants of every
country should enjoy equal rights - irrespective of
their religion, language or ethnic group.”
It’s important not to exaggerate the significance of
these changes. They certainly mark a shift in the ranks
of Israel’s liberal advocates. There is also no doubt
about the tectonic shifts in US politics on
Israel/Palestine, which have considerably widened
discourse. But as we’ve seen in the past, just as
tectonic plates can crack and divide, geological forces
can drive them back together again.
Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun
Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the
Israeli national security state. His work has appeared
in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los
Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection
devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out
(Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel
and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman
& Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle
Times)
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