The False Prophets of Peace

Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine

Tikva Honig-Parnass

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781608462148
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book refutes the long held view of the Israeli left as adhering to a humanistic, democratic and even socialist tradition, attributed to the historic Zionist Labor movement. Through a critical analysis of the prevailing discourse of Zionist intellectuals and activists on the Jewish-democratic state, it uncovers the Zionist left's central role in laying the foundation of the colonial settler state of Israel, in articulating its hegemonic ideology and in legitimizing, whether explicitly or implicitly, the apartheid treatment of Palestinians both inside Israel and in the 1967 occupied territories. Their determined support of a Jewish-only state underlies the failure of the "peace process, " initiated by the Zionist Left, to reach a just peace based on recognition of the national rights of the entire Palestinian people.

CHAPTER 1

The Physical and Symbolic Erasure of the Palestinian Presence from the Land, Past and Present

This chapter reviews the relentless efforts made by Israel’s state agencies to erase the collective memory of the 1948 Nakba, as well as any physical, geographical, or cultural remains of Palestinian society from before the 1948 war. It focuses on the role played by Zionist Left intellectuals as the guardians of collective memory, sustaining the state’s official ideology and narratives. The chapter further examines the supposition of Zionist Left intellectuals that the 1967 occupation is the root cause of the “conflict,” and their associated disregard of the structural discrimination of Palestinians in the Jewish state.

Wiping Out the Pre-1948 Palestinian Presence

In the process of strengthening its hegemony, the newborn state quickly gained command over the historical legacy and narratives of the Zionist movement regarding the 1948 war and the Nakba. The state solely determined what should be erased from collective memory and what should be inscribed into the nation’s consciousness. Any evidence of 1948 crimes was vehemently disputed. Deviations from the official narrative and the state’s agenda were simply unacceptable. Such deviations were depicted as a challenge to “the justification of our existence in this land” and, therefore, were outside the boundaries of public discourse. Instead, Zionist themes like the rights to the land and the right to return to their homeland were made central to the official state ideology. The story of the Jews’ heroic resistance to Greek and Roman occupiers in ancient times was presented as the model for the younger generation. All state agencies were involved in this comprehensive project of creating a collective homogeneous consciousness so as to ensure full commitment to the colonial settler Jewish state, led by the Zionist Left.¹

At first the state abolished physical and geographical evidence of the pre-1948 existence of Palestinians. The housing and infrastructure of former Palestinian villages were destroyed, only after they were looted, and farmland was legally seized. The immediate purpose of this mass destruction was to preempt any threat of international sanctions. For example, if “there was nowhere to return to,”² Israel could not be forced to accept Palestinian refugees. Next came the physical and symbolic erasure of what was once a vigorous, pre-Nakba Palestinian civilization. All traces, memory, and records of the pastoral lifestyle of the Palestinian villages and their flourishing agriculture, and the emerging modernism that existed in Palestinian cities, which included abundant civic organizations, nationalist and women’s movements, and buds of economic development—all of it was done away with.³

The theme of an “empty land”—the barren desert to which the Zionist settlers brought greenness and fertility—was consistently propagated by all state agencies. The narrative that Jewish settlers were “making the desert bloom” was used to mask the physical destruction of the Palestinian villages and towns. The early Zionist slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” solicited a collective trust in the just cause of the Jewish state. “The ‘emptiness’ of the land,” says Yitzhak Laor, “has become a central motif of the literature and ideology of the young state . . . The desolation and wilderness received a new design in the state narrative: No more swamps that had to be dried [the Zionist myth regarding pre-state times] but empty plains that need to be settled soon, in order to ensure the ‘security’ of the state.”⁴ The imagined “empty land” served well the central element in the Zionist myth: the “return” of Jews to their homeland after two thousand years in exile, a homeland that was waiting for its sons to come and redeem it from its wilderness. Radical historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin of Ben-Gurion University⁵ has elaborated on the connection of the imagined “empty land” to the aspect of “return.” The Zionist narrative relied upon a historical perception that negated the Jewish experience in Diaspora. It “emptied” the time that had stretched between the loss of sovereignty over the land and the renewal of settling it, from any significant meaning in the nation’s life. In order to affirm a direct link between the Zionist project and the Biblical land and the people supposedly expelled from it, the homeland was imagined as “empty land.” Thus, argues Raz-Krakotzkin, the “denial of exile” leads also to the negation of the Palestinian national memory and to the symbolic dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland. The “empty land” was portrayed as waiting to embrace its returning sons and daughters to “make the wilderness bloom.” The perception of Zionism as a colonialist project and of Israel as its implementation could thus be rejected on these grounds.

Erasing the Memory of the Nakba

There is ample evidence, from Zionist sources during the period of the 1948 war and immediately afterward, that indicates “members of the military and political elite, secondary leaders and intellectuals close to them knew very well what happened to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, to say nothing of rank-and-file soldiers and kibbutz members, who actually expelled Palestinians, expropriated their lands and destroyed their homes.” But soon after the war ended, state officials, with the help of Zionist Left intellectuals, began to consolidate an official discourse that enabled most Israeli Jews to “forget” what they once knew about the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.⁶

Until the late 1980s, when the “New Historians” emerged onto Israel’s intellectual scene (see chapters 6 and 7), the great majority of Zionist Left intellectuals were involved in the state project of forgetting or whitewashing the war crimes committed by Israel in the 1948 war.⁷ They frequently downplayed the extent of the catastrophe inflicted upon the Palestinian people, and refused to acknowledge that Zionism was responsible for it. The role of the Marxist-Zionist Mapam (the Unified Workers Party) in creating the false narrative of the Nakba is emphasized by Stanford University professor of Middle East history Joel Beinin: “[Despite what they knew] after the war, it was Mapam’s prescription for the conduct of Israeli forces—rather than the reality of expulsion—that became official Israeli history, and eventually, came to define the Jewish Israeli collective memory of what happened in 1948.” Mapam’s hypocrisy in calling for “Zionism, Socialism and Fraternity Between Nations” is demonstrated in the report of historian Yossi Amitai, a member of Hakibbutz Haartzi-Hashomer Hatzair (the extreme Zionist Left Kibbutz movement affiliated with Mapam).⁸ “Most greedy [among the different streams of the Kibbutz Movement] was the Hakibbutz Haartzi-Hashomer Hatzair movement. Mapam members were not satisfied like other Kibbutzim with gaining control of abandoned lands, but demanded also lands on which their [Palestinian] owners still resided.”⁹

For decades, the state of Israel, and traditional Zionist historians, argued that the Palestinian Arabs fled on orders from Arab military commanders and governments. These governments, they said, hoped to return behind the guns of victorious Arab armies. Consequently, the Zionist authorities have admitted little or no responsibility for the fate of the Palestinian refugees and their descendants.¹⁰ The Zionist Left lacked compassion when referring to the Nakba. Even its most humanist figures often expressed justification for the 1948 ethnic cleansing in a laconic, offhand manner, claiming it was a necessary and inevitable response to the existential danger that the Yishuv was confronted with.

The perception of anti-Semitism and Arab “hatred of Jews,” as a historical phenomenon, is regarded as the ultimate justification for the Zionist colonization, the Nakba, and the establishment of an exclusivist Jewish state. Moreover, these views nourished Israel’s image as the eternal victim. The internationally acclaimed author Amos Oz, who is also a leading moral and ideological authority of the Zionist Left, has taken this narrative to the extreme:

The assassination of European Jewry . . . was the ultimate, consistent conclusion to be drawn from the ancient position of the Jewish human being within the culture of the West. The Jew in Europe, in Christianity, and in the Paganism within Christianity is not a “national minority,” is not “a religious group” and is not a “class problem.” It has been thousands of years in which the Jew is perceived as a symbol and expression of something with a non-personable essence. Like the steeple, the Cross, Satan and the Messiah, so the Jew is a construction of the Western spirit. Even if all Jews were to have been absorbed among the European peoples, the Jew would continue being present. Somebody was compelled to play his role, to stand up as a primordial prototype in the depths of Christian souls. He ought to be brilliant and frightful, to suffer and deceive, to be liable to both genius and the most abhorrent deeds. Therefore, to be a Jew in the Diaspora means Auschwitz is intended for you. This is so because you are a symbol and not an individual person—the symbol of a vampire who is justly persecuted, or the symbol of the victim who is unjustly persecuted. But always and at any time, you are not an individual person; you are not you, who are only a fragment of a symbol.¹¹

Oz assumes that the political positions of the Palestinian national movement represent the ideology of Jew hatred, which is shared by the majority of Palestinian people:

“From its very onset they [the Palestinian leadership] ignored (‘closed their ears’) to the disaster of Jews, hardened their hearts, named the Jew’s desperate distress ‘an European problem which is not of our business.’ They sought the right opportunity to exterminate the Jews. This movement’s wickedness reached its peak in their leaders’ readiness to help Hitler with the ‘solution’ of the Jewish problem in Europe.”¹² By contrast, notes Oz, Labor Zionism had from its inception moral supremacy over Palestinian nationalism. All it asked for was recognition that those who suffered from persecution and wanted to survive in the divided land had just cause. Zionism’s arrogant claim of moral supremacy is ironic in light of Oz’s disinclination to deal explicitly with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948:

The justification in the eyes of the Arab residents of the land cannot rely on our centuries of longing (to return) . . . What’s it got to do with them? [Hence][t]he Zionist project does not have any justification but the justification of a drowning person who holds onto the only plank that he can hold on to, to save his life. There is an enormous moral difference between the drowning person [Zionism—representing the persecuted Jewish people] which is holding on to the plank and [while doing so] is pushing aside—even using force—the others who are sitting on the plank [the Palestinians], and the drowning person who takes control of the entire piece of wood and throws the others who are sitting on it [the Palestinians] into the water. This is the moral argumentation which underlies our repeated principal agreement to the partition of the land. And this is the distance [difference] between the Judaization of Jaffa and Lydda [former Palestinian cities inside Israel] and the Judaization of Nablus and Ramallah [cities in the ’67 occupied territories].¹³

The Palestinian national movement, however, was indifferent to the distress of the drowning Jews and refused to create space on the plank for them, namely by agreeing to the partition of Palestine in 1947.

Political scientist Zeev Sternhell of Hebrew University makes a similar argument regarding Zionism’s just cause. He also shares Oz’s evasiveness about the Nakba:¹⁴ “Not the historic right but the necessity to save those who lived was the moral basis of the conquest of the land. Hence it was the natural right of all human beings to ensure their existence by means of erecting an independent political framework that justified taking over the area, which permitted the establishment of Israel. Since as we know the land was not empty . . . The Arabs’ long, bitter opposition [to the creation of Israel] has not left any doubt about their awareness of the danger which confronts them.”

Even after abundant historical research, which has confirmed at least the partial responsibility of the Zionist army in the 1948 catastrophe,¹⁵ there are still many Zionist Left intellectuals who cling to the their distorted views on the Nakba. Shlomo Avineri, the renowned professor of political science at Hebrew University, famous for his enlightened worldview and for his “dovish” positions on the solution to the conflict, noted his opposition to a proposal for a law that would prohibit the official public commemoration of the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day. He calls the prohibition law proposal wicked and stupid.¹⁶ However, he defines the Palestinians’ public commemoration of the Nakba as an anti-Israeli act, which drains his opposition to the law of any genuine meaning:

Undoubtedly, the attitude of some Israeli Arab leaders and elected officials toward what they call the Nakba is infuriating. First, because its message implies a challenge to Israel’s legitimacy. Second, because they lack any self-criticism of the fact that the Arab community in pre-state Israel chose to respond to the [UN] Partition Plan with armed struggle . . . Indeed, it is hard to admit responsibility for failure in war, and one of the failures of the Palestinian leaders of the time, was their shirking of moral responsibility for the results of the war caused by their own choice.

The colonialist-style warning with which Avineri concludes his article points to the conditional nature of his support to Palestinian citizens: “The Israeli Arab leaders who continue their denial today [of the Palestinian responsibility for the Nakba] are making a grave political and moral error.” Avineri’s and other Zionist Left members’ disregard for the pre-1948 dispossession of the indigenous population of Palestine and the crimes of the Nakba helps to enable the prevailing conception of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: that of two nations fighting over one piece of land.

The Zionist Left has always rejected the notion of Israel as a colonial settler state, one designed to advance and expand the Zionist colonial project with the backing of the imperialist US and the West. The Israeli Socialist Organization, known as Matzpen, was the only political group that, as early as the 1960s, adopted this stance (see chapter 6).^17...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Physical and Symbolic Erasure of the Palestinian Presence from the Land, Past and Present
• 2: “Jewish Majority” Spells Racism
• 3: Equal Rights
• 4: A Theocratic Jewish State
• 5: The Assertion of the Democratic Nature of the State
• 6: Post-Zionism—a Failed Departure from Zionist Left Discourse
• 7: Revisionist Social Sciences: Pre-State Colonization and the 1948 War
• 8: The Postmodernist Current in Post-Zionism
• 9: The Zionist Left and “Peace”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About Haymarket Books
• Also from Haymarket Books
• About the Author