The Growing Belief in a One-State Solution by Nadia Hijab
Column by the Institute for Palestine Studies' Senior Fellow syndicated on April 3, 2009, by Agence Global.
Ehud Olmert's nightmare is at hand. Not only does the former Israeli prime minister now really have to fight those corruption charges. He also faces the realization of his fears that the Palestinians might give up on a two-state solution in favor of a struggle for equal rights that would mean, as he put it, the "end of the Jewish state."
Yo, Ehud, that struggle is a growing movement, and it isn't a threat to Jews -- on the contrary, Jews are very much a part of it.
Just last weekend in Boston, American and/or Israeli Jews accounted for nearly a third of the 29 speakers at a conference organized by TARI (Trans Arab Research Institute) with the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts.
This is the second major public conference on how to achieve a single democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis. The first was held in London in November, and a third is slated for Toronto in June.
In a sign of the one-state movement's persistence, the conference was over-subscribed weeks before it was held; dozens were turned away because the hall only seated 500 people. Those who got in remained glued to their seats as one intense presenter followed another, in spite of limited time for questions and, on day two, no lunch.
For my part, I remain agnostic. As I said in my remarks at the conference, both states must provide equality for all their citizens -- Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, women or men, whatever their ethnicity. And, by the way, this isn't currently the case in either the established Israeli state or the putative Palestinian state.
In other words, even if two states are established, Israel cannot continue to be a state that privileges its Jewish citizens over its non-Jewish citizens. So either one or two states would mean the end of a Jewish state -- although not of the state of Israel.
Besides, I believe other vital challenges face the Palestinians, including how to keep Palestinians physically on the land of Palestine, and how to effectively and non-violently challenge a leadership that represents at best a quarter of the Palestinian people so as to prevent the abrogation of Palestinian rights.
I share the view of policy analyst Phyllis Bennis who warned at the conference that the United States might seek to impose a mini-state with minimal sovereignty and rights.
That's why my talk focused on an analysis of the sources of non-violent power available to the Palestinian people, including economic, moral, cultural, legal, and political power.
One important fact (simple but of utmost importance) was reiterated by several Palestinians -- from the occupied territories, from within Israel, and in exile. They said loud and clear that working for the one-state solution means working with Israeli Jews. As acting TARI chair Hani Faris put it, "The idea of one state cannot fly without a Palestinian wing and a Jewish wing."
Political scientist Laila Farsakh acknowledged this would be difficult given the anger Palestinians feel at Israel after Gaza and given their history of dispossession at Israel's hands. As one strategy to overcome this anger, she suggests a debate on identity that would cover the past and present role of Jews in resisting Zionism. Another is to examine treatment of Jews in Arab societies.
There is no "monolithic Jewish voice," Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti reminded, adding that it is anti-Semitic to claim otherwise. He pointed to the "disproportionate number of Jews" in the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until Palestinian human rights are achieved.
And political scientist As'ad Ghanem emphasized that no one can decide for a people what their national consciousness is: "I know who I am as a Palestinian; I cannot decide for the Israelis who they are."
As for the Jews, several referred to the way that Zionism had subverted the values of Judaism, and highlighted alternative discourses. As law philosopher Ori Ben-Dor put it, "Zionism abuses the Jewish memory and the humanist message of the holocaust." Historian Norton Mezvinsky said Palestinians and other Arabs have not been the only victims of Zionism.
Historian Gabriel Piterberg held up the poetry of the late Avot Yeshurun as a model of blending narratives and identities by mixing Arabic and Yiddish idiom into Hebrew poetry. Anthropologist Smadar Lavie said a common struggle against the oppression of Jews of Arab descent and Palestinian Arabs offered a way out of Zionism towards co-existence. Historian Ilan Pappe pointed to many concrete "de-Zionising" projects on the ground, including shared kindergartens.
A remarkable aspect of the conference was the way nearly all speakers highlighted the Zionist project -- creating an exclusivist state -- as the root of the problem, and discussed ways to challenge it.
Civil rights advocate Nancy Murray and others suggested presenting the attack on Gaza in the context of how Israel was created as well as pointing to the parallels of the one-state discourse with the values Americans uphold.
One of the few - perhaps only - Zionist speakers at the conference, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, came to bury Zionism not to praise it. "As a Zionist, I wanted a Jewish state but that option is abrogated. The 'one state' is already here, the only question is what kind of state it will be."
Many critiqued the two-state political platform as the "savior of Zionism" -- especially well argued by Nadim Rouhana.
A shared theme was the urgent warning that future Israeli assaults on Palestinians cannot be ruled out. Ilan Pappe and this author drew the audience's attention to the Israeli High Court decision to allow 100 Israeli extremists, whose leader belonged to a banned Israeli party, to march in the Israeli Arab town of Umm El Fahem guarded by thousands of heavily armed Israeli security forces.
This is a scary echo of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's insistence on walking through Al Aqsa mosque, the spark that lit the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000 and set the stage for the brutal crushing of the Palestinian Authority in 2002. It is especially alarming given the loud calls for the transfer of the Israeli Arab population or denial of citizenship, most vociferously by Israel's new foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman.
A major theme was the need to reconstitute the Palestinian body politic. Political scientist Karma Nabulsi outlined existing efforts and strategies as she reviewed how the "discourse about solutions has derailed and disenfranchised the Palestinian popular collective and excludes the people as the source of legitimacy and sovereignty."
Several participants noted the need to move from discussion of the concept of one state to concrete strategies on how to get there to address not just agnosticism but outright opposition among many Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world. As law professor George Bisharat put it, one-staters need to address the "image that one state is utopian and unattainable."
Stating that "We are still at the first question," As'ad Ghanem offered a particularly frank critique. The Jewish state, the Islamic state and the two-state options all have more public support. The difficult questions are:
• Who are the citizens of the one-state, Israeli or Palestinian?
• What would be its relationship to the Jewish Diaspora and the Arab national movement?
• How could Palestinians and Israelis be convinced it would serve their needs?
In offering concrete strategies, Omar Barghouti's examples included ways in which restitution of inherent rights could be achieved without harming acquired rights.
The discussion of concrete steps challenged my agnosticism. So did the passion and creativity of the debate. The best vision of the one-state solution does make the alternative debates "barren," Ghada Karmi put it.
Think about it. Who's defending the two-state option today? The Palestinian Authority, its case ever weaker against the decades-long clanging of Israeli bulldozers as they colonize Palestinian land and demolish homes.
And the realists in the United States, Europe, and Israel, whose core argument is that a Palestinian state is the only way to save a majority Jewish state -- an argument that does not inspire.
Those who support a two-state solution must do better if they want to hang on to hearts and minds. For, make no mistake, as American politicians are fond of saying, the adherents of the one-state movement share a faith. And fear and brute force - whether exercised by Israel, America, or the Palestinian Authority - are no match for faith.
A Museum of Tolerance we Don't Need by Saree Makdisi
latimes.com
Opinion
A Museum of Tolerance we don't need
The Simon Wiesenthal Center should abandon its plan to build a facility on the site of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.
By Saree Makdisi
February 12, 2010
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's plan to construct an outpost of Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance atop the most important Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is temporarily in disarray. This presents an opportunity to call on the center to abandon this outrageous project once and for all.
The site in question is Ma'man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery, which had been in continuous use for centuries until 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or driven into flight and their private property, including Ma'man Allah, was handed over to Jewish users.
Like Muslim and Christian sites throughout Israel -- which, as a 2009 State Department report pointed out, implements protections only for Jewish holy sites -- the cemetery has long been threatened. Parts of it have been used as a roadway, parking lots, building sites and Israel's Independence Park. Among the trees in the park, Palestinian tombstones can still be seen, eerily and all too appropriately.
In 2002, the Wiesenthal Center -- which had been given part of the cemetery by the city of Jerusalem -- announced that architect Frank Gehry would design a complex to be called the Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Ground was broken in 2004. Palestinian and Muslim concerns were ignored until a lawsuit led to the suspension of excavation in 2006. In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court -- dismissing the appeals not only of Palestinians with relatives buried there but also the protests of Jews appalled by desecration of any cemetery -- cleared the way for the project.
The center claims to see nothing wrong with erecting what its leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier, calls "a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility" on top of what remains of another people's cemetery. It has resorted to endless dodges to support its claim.
To those protesting construction on ancient cemetery land, the center says it's merely using a part of the site that has been a parking lot for years. To Jews outraged at desecration, it says, in effect, that different standards apply to Muslim cemeteries than to Jewish ones. To Muslim clergy and legal scholars who insist on the inviolability of cemeteries in Islam, the center disagrees, in essence claiming that it knows more about Islamic jurisprudence than they do. To those who protest today, the center asks where they were in 1960, when an Islamic judge approved Israel's construction of the parking lot (it does not, however, mention that he was a state employee, nor that he was subsequently removed from office for corruption).
To archaeologists who say the site should be spared construction, the center says that only a couple hundred bodies needed to be moved. And with reference to Palestinians who have filed legal actions and persisted in expressing anxiety over their families' remains, Hier had this message just last month: "The case is over; get used to it."
That was his paraphrase of the high court's dismissal of a final appeal made by Palestinian families based on the testimony of Gideon Suleimani, the chief archaeologist at the museum site. Suleimani said that the Israel Antiquities Authority withheld from the court his opinion that construction should not be approved, and that the site still contains four layers of Muslim graves dating from the 12th century. "We're talking about tens of thousands of skeletons under the ground there," noted Suleimani.
Last month, Gehry announced that he had decided to pull out of the project, citing other commitments. At the same time, the center said it was scaling back the museum; it is short of its original $200-million fundraising target. Now the center lacks an architect and a plan. Hence the opportunity to stop this project.
This week, moreover, Palestinians with relatives buried in the cemetery made a last-ditch effort to end its continued desecration. They appealed directly to the United Nations, pointing out that the desecration violates international conventions forbidding discrimination and protecting cultural heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs and the right to culture and family.
Protecting the cemetery should never have become a legal issue. This project is something that any decent human being should recognize as wrong. And it can still be reversed -- if the Wiesenthal Center can be persuaded to turn "tolerance" and "human dignity" into principles for action, not just empty slogans.
For all its sanctimoniousness, the center now presides over a big hole from which scores of bones have been unearthed. Those remains were disinterred without respect. As Suleimani put it: "The Muslim dead have no one to defend them." It is not, however, too late to safeguard the rest of those as yet undisturbed.
In wanting to lay the dead to rest, however, we should think also of the living. Displacing living people -- something Israel does every single day -- is hardly any better than displacing dead ones. And this disgraceful episode is only part of a much longer history of displacement and dispossession dating to 1948.
The real lesson of Ma'man Allah and the museum project is this: Peace will come to Palestine/Israel only when the blind insistence on displacement ends and both peoples are allowed to belong to the same land.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."