january 2005
When Jewish loyalty meets the
brutality of Israel
By Robert Manne
December 6, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Robert-Manne/
When-Jewish-loyalty-meets-the-brutality-of-Israel/2004/12/05/1102182154280.html
On occasion I am asked by people who read my column why I never write about the problem of Israel and the Palestinians. Sometimes the question is raised simply out of curiosity. Sometimes it has an aggressive edge. If I am willing to write about the impact of British settlement on the Australian Aborigines, why do I remain silent about the impact of Jewish settlement on the Palestinians?
Part of the answer to this question is banal. I am not a specialist in the politics of the Middle East. Part of the answer is, however, complex. For a long time I have found the question of Israel and the Palestinians an unusually troubling one. As a post-Holocaust Jew I feel the tug of loyalty to my people. Yet precisely because of what the Jews have experienced at the hands of other people, the brutish behaviour of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians in recent years has seemed to me particularly shameful.
My general attitude to the question of Israel and the Palestinians is most easily explained autobiographically.
The explanation must begin with the fact that I am, not now, nor have ever been a Zionist. Zionists believe that because of the inevitability of anti-Semitism, for Jews to become safe they need a national home. This seems to me simply wrong. Since the end of the World War II, the place of Jews in all Western societies has been unproblematic.
Yet although I am not a Zionist, I have been throughout my life a supporter of the idea of Israel. As a result of the Holocaust, in 1947 the international community decided to establish a Jewish state. That decision seems to me to have been just and, as importantly, irrevocable.
Partly as a consequence of Arab military opposition to the creation of Israel and partly because of the calculated policy of the Jewish leadership, the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who now fled or were forcibly driven from their ancestral homes suffered grievously as a result. To the Palestinian question - why should we have been asked to pay the price for the Jewish tragedy in Europe? - I have never heard, or believed there to be, a morally adequate reply.
My deepest pro-Israel feeling occurred in 1967 at the beginning of the Six-DayWar. For a brief moment it seemed possible that Israel would be annihilated. As a consequence, however, of its victory in this war, Israel gained control of vast new territory - on the West Bank of the Jordan, in Gaza, on the Golan Heights and in Sinai. It now seems clear to me that Israel's failure to relinquish these territories sowed the seeds of future tragedy. It did not seem so clear at the time.
In the mid-1970s I went to Israel on an academic tour. Our group was assured that the "administered territories" were merely being held temporarily, as useful bargaining chips, in future peace talks with Israel's hostile neighbours. I dutifully believed what we were told.
In June 1977, the right-wing "revisionist" Zionist Likud bloc was elected. Likud had never accepted the legitimacy of the partition of Palestine. It called the occupied territories by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria. Immediately a far more active policy of Jewish settlement, in the lands God was supposed to have given the Jews in perpetuity, was announced.
Sometimes political questions are complicated. Sometimes they are simple. The June 1977 situation was of the simple kind.
I argued at this time that if Israel remained in permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza it would eventually be forced to decide whether or not to grant these Palestinians basic political rights. Enfranchising the Palestinians would, on demographic grounds, destroy the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. It would, therefore, not occur.
The logic of permanent occupation was permanent oppression. This would lead to an Algerian-style resistance movement and to the state of Israel coming to be seen as a neo-colonial regime.
These predictions have all turned out to be true. They required no expertise or perspicacity. Yet among the supporters of Israel they were angrily denied.
Ten years after Israel succumbed to the temptation of permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a Palestinian uprising began. If anything, I was surprised by how long it took to come.
Since that time I have never wavered from support for the idea of a two-state solution to the problem of the Palestinians and the Jews, on the basis of an Israeli withdrawal to something like the borders of June 1967 and an unambiguous Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state of Israel as a permanent fixture of the political geography of the Middle East. For Palestinian renunciation of the right of return to Israel, what is asked of Israel is an admission of the wrongs Palestinians have suffered at Jewish hands since 1948.
Since the intifada erupted in 1987 the nightmare of the Israeli occupation regime has grown ever more grim. On one side there have been Israeli military strikes, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, house demolitions, curfews, checkpoints and daily humiliations.
On the other side there have been Palestinian terrorists' savage suicide bombings of innocent Jewish civilians. All this had led to a climate of fearful hatred, whose depth outsiders find difficult to fathom and which even decades might not be able to erase.
As I write this, a new government is being formed in Israel; post-Arafat elections for the presidency of
the Palestinian Authority are being
prepared. Once more there is talk of peace.Whether all this will once more end, as have all previous initiatives, from Oslo to Taba, in blood and acrimony, no one - not even the experts, far less a non-expert like myself - can possibly know.
Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.
photo: Shimon Peres of the Israeli Knesset.
Forwarded from networker Tom Baxter to all on VVAWNET:
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Not For Oil?....To Understand
What is Going On.
The Financial Times recently reports a straw in the wind: "Iraq has awarded its first post-Saddam oil
contract to a Turkish-British-Iraqi consortium and plans to sign four more deals by early next year, a senior Iraqi oil official said yesterday".
The article provides some details , mentions an Irish-British firm , a Canadian firm, but no US firms.
Now for the 'oil war' enthusiasts, this is not good news. The US should be shouldering aside all comers, arm-twisting the Iraqis into sweetheart deals with Haliburton, thus slam-dunking the case for oil imperialism. However , so far , such is not the case. So much for standard-issue left-wing ideology, which also claims that Israel is but an aircraft carrier for the Pentagon. {that the 5th fleet or is it the 6th fleet? has no need for Israel's putative 'aircraft carrier' seems to be lost on these folks as well.)
Of course, to be good political scientists, we need to watch for non-competitive bid oil contracts handed to the US. And, so we shall.
To repeat my alternative mantra: no WMD, no oil grab, therefore it is a war for Israel primarily (which includes war on Islam and war on Palestinians), and secondly , a war for Empire wherein the US and Israel position themselves for general domination but where that domination is little concerned about oil and acutely concerned about power. Israel must succeed, it must be guaranteed, and that can only be accomplished by the defeat of Arab nationalism, any resistance to Israel, etc.
But, Noam Chomsky, and the left generally, subscribe to the principle of the l948 Israel borders as
legitimate (see page 39 of C.'s Fateful Triangle, l999 edition wherein he so states, and also states that Jews and Palestinians have equal rights to Palestine. Chomsky. also denies the right of return for Palestinians.
Let me state again Samuel Huntington's general thesis as it bears on the Middle East. Civilizations do not change, or, change so slowly, that it is folly to insert, in this case, Israel, into the Civilizational
geography of the Middle East. Why not insert, with guns, a Chinese, or Islamic state, into the east coast of the US, drive out a million or so US citizens, etc, you see the point.
Israel, with US in its back pocket thanks to Jewish Power , will start the 3rd world war?. Nuke Iran?
Joe Web©