The gaza catastrophe, p.13
The Gaza Catastrophe, page 13
3 The universalism–particularism antithesis belongs to the vocabulary of Christian theology. The affinities between the universalist doctrine of Redemption and that of the rights of the human person are, moreover, to be counted among the contributions of Christianity to political humanism.
4 Florence Gauthier vigorously stressed this point at the time of the bicentennial of the 1789 revolution. See Gauthier, “Le droit naturel en révolution”, in Étienne Balibar et al., Permanences de la Révolution, Paris: La Brèche, 1989.
5 “Wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in an Arab Palestine in the twentieth century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and to the development (completely normal sociologically speaking) of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis to a military confrontation between the two ethnic groups.” Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad, 1973, p. 77.
6 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, London: H. Pordes, 1972, p. 71. “We should there [in Palestine] form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism” (p. 30). The reference to colonists is on p. 46.
7 Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886–1948, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, pp. 542, 544. Rather than rehabilitating the Zionist far right, one discredits still more its democratic professions of faith in recalling, as Alain Dieckhoff does, that “the various proclamations by the Irgun [the Zionist Revisionist armed organization] always mentioned, like that published in July 1946, that the aim of the political struggle was to found an independent democratic society where equality of rights would be guaranteed for all whatever their origin and their belief.” Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel, trans. Jonathan Derrick, London: Hurst, 2003, p. 229. Interestingly, the English translation of Dieckhoff’s book published in 2003 omitted the sentence that followed in the original French version: “It even made reference to drawing up a constitution based on the United States Declaration of Independence.” Dieckhoff, L’invention d’une nation: Israël et la modernité politique, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, p. 264.
8 Nearly 55 per cent of the territory of British Mandate Palestine was assigned to the “Jewish state”, though the Jewish residents of this territory only constituted one-third of its total population. Even allowing that all the residents – newly arrived immigrants, like indigenous inhabitants – would have enjoyed equal rights to sovereignty in the territory, the partition plan was manifestly iniquitous. In effect, the UN took up the Zionist thesis of the right of the Diaspora Jews to sovereignty in Palestine. “The authors of this partition saw this demographic relationship in a dynamic perspective: the expected immigration would very quickly allow the constitution of a Jewish majority.” Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, “Palestine: l’enjeu démographique”, in Revue d’études palestiniennes 7 (Paris, Spring 1983), pp. 27–9.
The victors in World War II, Truman’s United States in particular, sought to rid themselves of the troublesome burden of the survivors of the Holocaust by diverting them to Palestine, in concert with the Zionist movement. Recall the vehemence with which the Zionists had previously opposed the Roosevelt plan to admit the refugees to other countries, including the United States. See Morris Ernst, So Far So Good, New York: Harper, 1948, and Alan Taylor, Prelude to Israel, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. During the Holocaust, Roosevelt himself had failed to come to the aid of the Jews of Europe, as has been shown in David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941– 1945, New York: Pantheon, 1984. The same author admits, however, although in an apologetic fashion, that the Zionists deliberately chose to privilege their Palestinian project to the detriment of saving the Jews of Europe (pp. 175–7).
This was Ben-Gurion’s choice, as his biographer Shabtai Teveth explains: “In spite of the certainty that genocide was being carried out, the JAE [Jewish Agency Executive, presided over by Ben-Gurion] did not deviate appreciably from its routine … Two facts can be definitively stated: Ben-Gurion did not put the rescue effort above Zionist politics, and he did not regard it as a principal task demanding his personal leadership”. Ben-Gurion, p. 848. Teveth attributes this attitude to what he called a “philosophy of the beneficial disaster” (p. 850), quoting Ben-Gurion, who said: “The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism” (ibid.). In this respect, Ben-Gurion was only taking after his inspirer, Theodor Herzl, who stated in the prologue to his book-manifesto: “the present scheme … includes the employment of an existent propelling force … And what is our propelling force? The misery of the Jews.” Herzl, Jewish State, p. 8.
Recently, the Zionist movement has again been inciting the departure of the Jewish population of the former USSR, and has sought to channel them toward Israel, contrary to the wish of the great majority of emigrants to go to North America. “Mr. Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, complained that the [US] administration offered them the freedom to choose their country of destination. This free choice, in effect, is unfavorable to Israel. Ninety per cent of Soviet Jews prefer to go to the United States.” Le Monde, Paris, 4 October 1989.
9 This debate is today dominated by the work of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
10 Chagnollaud, “Palestine: l’enjeu démographique”, p. 31.
11 On the odd debates in Israel about the definition of Jewish identity, see Akiva Orr, The UnJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel, London: Ithaca, 1981. See also on this subject, Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Israël, Paris: Maspero, 1969, pp. 310–19.
12 This was true to the point that the teaching of the Jewish religion is even imposed on Arabs: “At the end of his studies, the Arab high school student knows much more of the history of the Jewish people than that of the Arabs. The Koran is less studied than the Torah.” Doris Bensimon and Eglal Errera, Israéliens: Des Juifs et des Arabes, Brussels: Complexe, 1989, p. 443.
13 See the “Note” by Claude Klein preluding to his new French translation of Herzl’s manifesto, L’État des Juifs, Paris: La Découverte, 1990, pp. 5–12.
14 “In fact, there is an identity between the emergence of Yiddish, that is its passage, or its promotion, from the status of ‘jargon’ to that of language, and the appearance of Jewish national sentiment”, wrote Claude Klein (p. 135) in his excellent Essai sur le sionisme, published as an appendix to his translation of Herzl – ibid., pp. 117–86.
15 Herzl, Jewish State, p. 71.
16 Ibid., p. 54. The phrase that I stressed here conceals, and for good reason, the specificity of Yiddish, which was spoken by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.
In Dieckhoff’s Invention of a Nation – a brilliant work, though not free from ambiguities and contradictions in his attempt to stress the “political modernity” of Zionism – the author stumbles in explaining the patent inadequacy of this ideology so far as secularism is concerned. He attributes this inadequacy principally to the persistence in Zionism of an “ardent longing for community life” (p. 96) – a quasi-tautological explanation. The author shows nonetheless how this inadequacy is inherent to the Zionist doctrine of the “Jewish nation”, to the “invention” of which his book is devoted without for all that ever questioning the postulate. Indeed, only the pan-Jewish postulate explains why “the religious criterion was in the last resort the only one that could precisely define the contours of the Jewish nation, all the other parameters – cultural, subjective, etc. – being too vague or inapplicable” (p. 131). And it was the insufficiency of this same criterion to cement a nationalism which impelled Zionism to “invent” a veritable new nation, the Israeli nation (which Dieckhoff does not even mention), founded on a new-old language – modern Hebrew – and on the destruction, for the purposes of assimilation, of the original national particularities of the immigrants, in the first place the Yiddish language.
Thus, one can understand the paradox of Zionist nationalism, at the same time anti-assimilationist and strongly assimilationist, which considered the French model of national integration “unsuitable when applied to the detriment [sic] of the Jews (as in France in 1789), but perfectly valid when it enabled the Jews to rediscover a collective substratum.” (p. 99). Perhaps one can thus keep in mind the fact that “Zionism also included an element of protest against, even rejection of republican modernity which had assumed for the Jews the form of civic emancipation and integration in the host societies” (p. 73).
17 The convergence between religious and political Zionism has been reflected, since Herzl, by the alliance between the two currents inside the World Zionist Organization.
18 Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State: Fifty Years After – Where Have Herzl’s Politics Led?”, in Gary Smith, ed., Zionism – The Dream and the Reality: A Jewish Critique, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974, pp. 67–80.
19 See Teveth, Ben-Gurion – Chapter 26 in particular. The Ben-Gurion–Jabotinsky meetings and their 1934 agreement (halted by the opposition of the Zionist left) were the occasion for the two men to note their “like-mindedness” (Teveth, Ben-Gurion, Chapter 29, p. 482). It was Ben-Gurion’s Rafi that insisted in 1967 on including Menachem Begin’s Gahal in the government of national unity (see note 36, below). On the convergence between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky–Begin, see Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
20 This is eloquently explained by Alain Dieckhoff:
In all this an essential question arose: was building a Jewish national home compatible with scrupulous respect for democratic rules? Jabotinsky’s reply was unhesitatingly negative, for an obvious reason. If the British Mandatory power applied the democratic (i.e. majority rule) principle in its full rigor, political power would automatically go to the Arabs, the largest community in numbers, and they would make haste to ban Jewish immigration and put a stop to consolidation of the socio-political infrastructure of the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine]. So the national objective required non-application of the majority rule principle … As usual Jabotinsky proclaimed without unnecessary flourishes the cold facts on which his left-wing opponents preferred to maintain hypocritical silence.” (Invention of a Nation, p. 182)
Astonishingly, the same author shortly afterwards takes as good coin the democratic proclamations of the Irgun (see note 7, above): he uses them as an argument to refute the anathemas hurled against this organization by Hannah Arendt, who characterized it as terroristic and chauvinist, similar to fascism and Nazism. One of the main ambiguities of Dieckhoff’s work, moreover, is his attempt to absolve Jabotinsky of the accusation of fascism (to be distinguished from any comparison to Nazism, which would be excessive certainly in his personal case, although justified for some of his comrades). The main argument invoked by the author is the proclaimed “liberalism” of the founder of Revisionism, which supposes an antinomy between economic liberalism and Mussolini’s fascism (a debatable postulate: see Cohen, Zion and State, pp. 170–4). Moreover, Dieckhoff obscures the full extent of the relationship between Jabotinsky and fascist Italy, which he shunts aside later in a few lines (Invention of a Nation, pp. 242–3). As to the alleged “contempt” held by Jabotinsky for the cult of the Führer and the Duce (p. 209), anybody familiar with the trajectory of the “Rosh Betar” can judge its worth.
21 Judah Magnes, “A Solution through Force?”, in Smith, Zionism, pp. 109–18.
22 Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, New York: Pantheon, 1987, p. 37.
23 The first paragraph alludes to the case of the burial of Joseph Steinberg, son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, which made the news in 1958. Quoted in Smith, Zionism, p. 131.
24 In the sense Élise Marientras deploys in Les mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine, Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1992. Moreover, the founding myths of the Israeli nation clearly imitate US founding myths, to the point that one could detect a narcissistic dimension in the mutual admiration between the two nations.
25 Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 234.
26 Ibid., p. 236. Emphases in original.
27 See Teveth, Ben-Gurion, Chapters 34 and 35, as well as p. 853. Chaim Weizmann shared the same opinion – see Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, New York: Viking, 1986, pp. 320–30). The aim was, he said, “to get a fulcrum on which to place a lever … leaving the problems of expansion and extension to future generations” (p. 323).
28 To the argument of Lebensraum and the references to the Bible, there was added, after 1949, the security, or “strategic” motivation which predominated in the eyes of the Israeli political-military establishment, and whose key argument turned upon the narrowness of the strip of territory between the Mediterranean and the old Jordanian frontier (the “Green Line”), where the majority of Israelis lived.
29 Saul Friedländer has summed up the concerns of the Ashkenazi Labor establishment with admirable frankness: Faced with the presence of a vast Arab population inside Israel, one can conceive the reinforcement of Jewish extremist tendencies inspired as much by economic as by religious or national motives, to demand the expulsion of all the Arabs or the application of an “apartheid” regime. If these elements succeeded in imposing themselves, the Jewish state would be cut off from the world and the Jews of the Diaspora themselves. Finally, if it is probable that in contact with a vast Arab population the “Oriental” Jews would tend to integrate themselves more rapidly inside the “western” population to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, it is not entirely excluded that the poorest elements among them would be attracted by the Arab proletariat on both the social and cultural levels. The Arab population could then become an active element in the disintegration of Jewish society. (Saul Friedländer, Réflexions sur l’avenir d’Israël, Paris: Seuil, 1969, p. 146).
30 As this essay is devoted to the solution that finally imposed itself, this is not the place to go into the different points of view expressed, in Israel, in the debate on the fate of the territories occupied in 1967. On this subject, see, for the immediate post-1967 debate, Éli Lobel, “Palestine and the Jews”, in Ahmad El Kodsy and Eli Lobel, The Arab World and Israel, trans. Brian Pearce and Alfred Ehrenfeld, New York: Monthly Review, 1970, pp. 63–137; Peretz Merhav, The Israeli Left: History, Problems, San Diego: A.S. Barnes/London: Tantivy Press, 1980, Chapters 24 and 25. For a review of the more recent debates, see Louis-Jean Duclos, “La question des frontières orientales d’Israël”, in Revue d’études palestiniennes 9 (Autumn 1983), pp. 17–31.
Moreover, since this article deals with the Israeli–Palestinian settlement, I have not gone into the debates concerning the non-Palestinian Arab-occupied territories.
31 See Yigal Allon, Israël: la lutte pour l’espoir, Paris: Stock, 1977. The Allon Plan met with the approval of the United States and, remarkably, of François Mitterrand (see the extracts from Yeruham Cohen’s book in Hebrew on The Allon Plan, reproduced in the appendix to the preceding book, pp. 243–7). Allon died in 1978.
32 Allon, Israël, pp. 180, 184. Emphasis in original.
33 For a detailed description of the Allon Plan, see Chagnollaud, “Palestine: l’enjeu démographique”, and Alain Dieckhoff, Les Espaces d’Israël, Paris: FNSP, 1989, pp. 28–33. The Likud in turn divided the northern enclave (Samaria) into two sections. This is what Dieckhoff calls a “strategy of segmentation of the territory and of demarcation between human groups” (p. 79). Emphasis in original.
34 Allon, Israël, p. 189.
35 Allon was already in 1948 a partisan of the conquest of the whole of Palestine up to the Jordan River, as he himself recalled: “I say it openly: I disagreed with the way in which the war ended … I was already convinced that we should go as far as the Judean desert and the Jordan to create the conditions of a stable defense … while finding a solution to the problem of the Arab population” (Israël, p. 37). Allon had certainly conceived this “solution” well before presenting it to the Israeli cabinet. In 1967, he was the leader of Ahdut Haavodah (“Unity of Labor”), which laid claim to the whole of Palestine, as well as of the Hakibbutz Hameuhad movement, which pioneered the creation of strategic settlements in the aftermath of the “Six-Day War”. It is also significant that he was in charge of the Ministry of Absorption of Immigration from 1967 to 1969.
36 See Merhav, Israeli Left. In the debate that raged inside the Labor Party in 1969, Allon’s faction, Ahdut Haavodah, allied itself to Rafi, the rightist faction led by Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, against the “doves” of the party (Abba Eban and Pinhas Sapir, allied to Mapam).
37 Lobel, “Palestine and the Jews”, p. 85. Subsequently, the drift to the right of Israeli society revealed by the electoral victory of the Likud would make Allon appear a “dove”. Simha Flapan, the former leader of Mapam, could not fall victim to this optical illusion. In his posthumous work, he recalled that “the first settlements in the West Bank were constructed at the instigation of Yigal Allon”, and that “it was again Allon who gave his agreement to the attempts of the fundamentalist rabbi Moshe Levinger to establish a Jewish community in the heart of Arab Hebron” (Birth of Israel, p. 239). One of the Hebron settlers carried out the massacre in the Tomb of the Patriarchs/Mosque of Ibrahim in February 1994.
38 Alain Dieckhoff gives a remarkable analysis of this process of partial annexation and the strategies that underlie it in his already cited work, Les Espaces d’Israël. See also Michel Foucher, “L’‘intersection’ cisjordanienne”, in Maghreb-Machrek 108 (Paris, April 1985), pp. 38–59.
39 “Peace will not come as a result of a ‘revolution of hearts’ among them [the Arabs], but as the corollary of the balance of forces and cold political realism. It will be lucidity and the acceptance of reality which will lead them to reconciliation, negotiation and peace.” Allon, Israël, p. 179.
