[WCUSP] The Nation: For a Secular Democratic State

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

_http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/makdisi_ 
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/makdisi)  
For a Secular  Democratic State
by SAREE  MAKDISI 
[from the June 18, 2007  issue] 
This month marks the fortieth  anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the 
West Bank, Gaza Strip and  East Jerusalem. Four decades of control  established 
and maintained by force of arms--in defiance of international law,  countless 
UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory  
Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague--have enabled Israel  to 
impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in  
its own image.  
The result is a continuous  political space now encompassing all of historic 
Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as  the colonial world ("a world 
cut in two") famously described by Frantz Fanon in  The Wretched of the Earth. 
 Indeed, Fanon's 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the 
occupied territories as fresh,  insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings 
of Cape  Town or Algiers that it made available when it was  first published.  
Israel maintains two  separate road systems in the West Bank, for  example: 
one for the territory's immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one  for its 
indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.   
The roads designated for the  Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, 
continuous and uninterrupted;  they tie the network of Jewish "neighborhoods" 
and "settlements"--all of them in  reality colonies forbidden by international 
law--to each other and to Israel.  The roads for the West Bank's native  
population, by contrast, are poorly maintained, when they are maintained at all  
(they often consist of little more than shepherds' trails); they are  
continuously blockaded and interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks  (546 at 
last count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank's indigenous  
population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of Jewish  settlers--who 
are, moreover, allowed to drive their own cars on the roads set  aside for 
them, whereas Palestinians are not allowed to drive their cars beyond  their own 
towns and villages (the entrances to which are all blockaded by the  Israeli 
army).  
The wall that Israel has been  constructing in the West Bank and East 
Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in  concrete and barbed wire the outlines of the 
discriminatory regime that  structures and defines everyday life in the 
occupied territories, separating  Palestinian farmers from crops, patients from 
hospitals, students and teachers  from schools and, increasingly, even parents from 
children (it has, for example,  separated one parent or another from spouses 
and children in 21 percent of  Palestinian families living on either side of 
the wall near Jerusalem)--while at  the same time enabling the seamless 
incorporation of the Judaized spaces of the  occupied territories into Israel itself. 
And a regime of curfews and closures,  enforced by the Israeli army, has 
smothered the Palestinian economy, though none  of its provisions apply to Jewish 
settlers in the occupied territories.   
There are, in short, two  separate legal and administrative systems, 
maintained by the regular use of  military force, for two populations--settlers and 
natives--unequally inhabiting  the same piece of land: exactly as was the case 
in the colonial countries  described by Fanon, or in South Africa under 
apartheid.   
All this has enabled Israel to  transplant almost half a million of its own 
citizens into the occupied  territories, at the expense of their Palestinian 
population, whose land is  confiscated, whose homes are demolished, whose 
orchards and olive groves are  razed or burned down, and whose social, economic, 
educational and family lives  have been, in effect, all but suspended, precisely 
in order that their land may  be made available for the use of another people. 
 
The result has been  catastrophic for the Palestinians, as a World Bank 
report published in May makes  clear. While the Jewish settlements in the West Bank 
and East Jerusalem enjoy  growth rates exceeding those of Israel itself, 
Palestinian towns and  villages are slowly being strangled. While Jewish settlers 
move with total  freedom, the combination of physical obstacles and the 
bureaucratic pass system  imposed by the Israeli army on the Palestinian population 
has not only  permanently separated the Palestinians of the West Bank from 
those of Gaza, East  Jerusalem and Israel (movement among which is forbidden for 
all but a tiny  minority) but has also broken up the West Bank into three 
distinct sections and  ten enclaves. Half of the West Bank is  altogether 
off-limits to most Palestinians; to move from one part of the rest of  the territory 
to another, Palestinians must apply for a permit from the  Israelis. Frequent 
bans are imposed on movement into or out of particular  enclaves (the city of 
Nablus, for example, has been under siege for  five years), or on whole 
segments of the population (e.g., unmarried men under  the age of 45). And all 
permits are summarily invalidated when  Israel declares one of its  "comprehensive 
closures" of the West  Bank--there were seventy-eight such days in 2006--at 
which point the  entire Palestinian population stays home.  
The lucky few who are able to  obtain passes from the Israelis are channeled 
from one section or enclave to  another through a series of army checkpoints, 
where they may be searched,  questioned, hassled, detained for hours or simply 
turned back. "The practical  effect of this shattered economic space," the 
World Bank report points out, "is  that on any given day the ability to reach 
work, school, shopping, healthcare  facilities and agricultural land is highly 
uncertain and subject to arbitrary  restriction and delay." Given the 
circumstances, it is hardly any wonder that  two-thirds of the Palestinian population 
has been reduced to absolute poverty  (less than $2 a day), and that hundreds 
of thousands are now dependent for  day-to-day survival on food handouts 
provided by international relief  organizations. Not only has the international 
community refused to intervene; it  has actively participated in the repression, 
imposing--for the first time in  history--sanctions on a people living under 
military occupation, while the  occupying and colonizing power goes on violating 
the international community's  own laws with total impunity.  
To all of these charges,  Israel and its supporters have but  one response: 
"security." But as the World Bank report argues, it is "often  difficult to 
reconcile the use of movement and access restrictions for security  purposes from 
their use to expand and protect settlement activity." Moreover,  the Bank 
notes, it seems obvious that Israeli security ought to be tied to  Palestinian 
prosperity: By disrupting the Palestinian economy and immiserating  an entire 
population--pushing almost 4 million people to the edge--the Israelis  are 
hardly enhancing their own security.  
Such arguments miss the point,  however. No matter how fiercely it is 
contested inside Israel,  there remains a very strong sense that the country is 
entitled to retain the  land to which it has now stubbornly clung for four decades. 
Even while  announcing his scheme to relinquish nominal control over a few 
bits and pieces  of the West Bank with heavy concentrations of  Palestinians, 
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted on his country's  inherent right to 
the territory, irrespective of the demands of international  law, let alone 
the rights and claims of the Palestinians themselves. ("Every  hill in Samaria 
and every valley in Judea is part  of our historic homeland," he said last 
year, using Israel's official, biblical terminology for the  West Bank.)  
Although some people claim  there are fundamental differences between the 
disposition of the territories  Israel captured in 1967 and the territories it 
captured during its creation in  1948--or even that there are important moral 
and political differences between  Israel pre- and post-1967--such sentiments of 
entitlement, and the use of force  that necessarily accompanies them, reveal 
the seamless continuity of the Zionist  project in Palestine from 1948 to our 
own time. "There are circumstances in  history that justify ethnic cleansing," 
argues Israeli historian Benny Morris,  with reference to the creation of 
Israel. "A Jewish state would not  have come into being without the uprooting of 
700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it  was necessary to uproot them. There was no 
choice but to expel that population.  It was necessary to cleanse the 
hinterland and cleanse the border areas and  cleanse the main roads. It was necessary 
to cleanse the villages from which our  convoys and our settlements were 
fired on."  
Israel's  post-1967 occupation policies are demonstrably driven by the same 
dispossessive  logic. If hundreds of thousands have not literally been forced 
into flight,  their existence has been reduced to penury. Just as Israel could 
have come into  being in 1948 only by sweeping aside hundreds of thousands of 
Palestinians,  Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory--its 
imposition of itself  and its desires on the land's indigenous 
population--requires, and will always  require, the use of force and the continual brutalization 
of an entire people.   
Indeed, the discriminatory  practices in the occupied territories replicate, 
albeit in a harsher and more  direct form, those inside Israel, where the 
remnant of the Palestinian  population that was not driven into flight in 
1948--today more than a million  people--continues to endure the systematic 
inequalities built into the laws and  institutions of a country that explicitly claims 
to be the state of the Jewish  people rather than that of its own actual 
citizens, about a fifth of whom are  not Jewish. Recognizing the contradiction 
inherent in such a formulation,  various Israeli politicians, including Deputy 
Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman,  have explicitly called for the territorial 
transfer--if not the outright  expulsion--of as much as possible of Israel's 
non-Jewish (that is, Palestinian)  minority. Although it would be intended to mark 
the ultimate triumph of the  dispossessing settler over the dispossessed 
native (Lieberman is an immigrant  from Moldova who enjoys rights denied to 
indigenous Palestinians simply because  he happens to be Jewish), such a gesture 
would actually amount to a last-ditch  measure, an attempt to forestall what has 
become the most likely conclusion to  the conflict.  
For, having unified all of  what used to be Palestine (albeit into one 
profoundly divided  space) without having overcome the Palestinian people's will to 
resist, Zionism  has run its course. And in so doing, it has terminated any 
possibility of a  two-state solution. There remains but one possibility for 
peace with justice:  truth, reconciliation--and a single democratic and secular 
state, a state in  which there will be no "natives" and "settlers" and all will 
be equal; a state  for all its citizens irrespective of their religious 
affiliation. Such a state  has always, by definition, been anathema for Zionism. But 
for the people of  Israel and Palestine, it is the only  way out.  






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