EDITOR: What is brewing up in Palestine? Is the Two State solution seen to be dead?
Many are now speculating on the likely outcome of the UN vote on the Palestinian state. One thing which is not likely to emerge from it is a Palestinian state, a real state, unlike the PNA Latifundia in the West Bank. What is likely to happen is the growth of resistance, as a result of the realisation that the current situation only helps Israel to grab more land and disposses more Palestinians.
Intellectuals do not need to prepare the resistance. The resistance is best left as truly popular, not directed from anywhere but the ranks. So far so good. Palestinians must understand by now that the two-state ‘solution’ sold them by Israel and the US leads nowhere, yet they are reluctant to go back to their own better and more principled solution of a secular, democratic state in the whole of Palestine.
And what about progressive Israelis? How can they support the continuation of the occupation and settlements, afater four and a half decades? This is question one needs to direct to the so-called Israeli left.
Having come back this week from the Israeli maelstrom, I would like to make this point: There is no constituency for the One-State idea in Israel at the moment, tent protest or not… Israeli society, including its radical edges, is not ready to negotiate the future with Palestinians on any terms which take into account Palestinian aspirations, or the idea of true equality. None of them wishes to even consider changing the rules of the game. Democracy? Yes, they have a “Jewish Democracy” and cannot consider any other kind.
As all of you know, this idea (the One-State solution) not acceptable to many anti-Zionists, most of whom have not signed the current iteration of the one state document. The truth is, whether we like it or not, that none of them is ready to give up Israeli identity, or Israeli self-determination, even while living in exile and sporadically speaking against the occupation. That is at the heart of this problem. If these individuals are unable to make the small leap required towards the democratic state of Palestine, how much less likely are the masses of the occupying power? Shelley Yachmovich, the leading candidate of so-called left-leaning Avoda, has given her warm backing to the settlement project, reminding people it was her party, indeed, which built and strengthened it. This is the left wing of Israel, and not to realise this is a political error, as this directs us towards some arguments and away from others.
So why are progressive Israelis being so reactionary? I think that in the past, progressive Diaspora Jews could find no problem with the the idea of sharing democratically with the indigenous population of Palestine. This was many decades ago, of course. Now, after the normalisation not only of Israel, but mainly of the results of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war ( most Israelis have been born after 1967!) then the premise: Israel= No Palestine, has been so powerfully learnt, internalised and forgotten, that the existential prerogative is indeed of denial Read the work of Ilan Pappe and Nur Masalha about the Nakba and its denial in Israel, for example) Denial is stronger than memory – memory, after all, is socially implanted, while denial is much more deeply personal.
I have no better explanation. The connection to history is, for most Israelis, nota connection to the diaspora and 2000 years of life outside Palestine; that is strongly denied (see the work of Amnon Raz Krakotzkin on that, of course). For most Israelis, they have a connection, through implanted memory and invented community, to Bar Kokhva and Yehuda Macabeus, or to Massada, but not to the people living across the apartheid wall… Existentially, they seem to say, especially after the Holocaust, non-Jews cannot be trusted; so their lesson from the Holocaust is the opposite of mine or yours – while we are saying – never again should such racism be allowed to succeed and harm humanity, they are saying – even when they do not know it – “we cannot trust any non-Jews to guarantee our security”. I believe that is why they find it difficult to rethink the solution to the conflict, difficult to feel excited about some real democracy, rather than ‘Jewish democracy’, or about life as human beings, not as occupying soldiers on leave. They are not full human beings in that sense, and therefore they also deny Palestinians their humanity.
What is quite disturbing is that many Palestinians are seeing the logic of the One-State solution, despite the years of enmity and dispossesion – for Palestinians to be less than trusting about their occupiers would be natural. Yet, Israelis on the other hand, do not trust Palestinians as they know they have been harming them (Israelis harming Palestinians) for over six decades! Occupiers never trust the occupied, no more than robbers trust those they have robbed…
So, existentially or politically, not a hopeful scenario. However, I trust the realities created by the situation itself, as these cannot be denied or chucked away. Reality will win in the end, when all other solutions will be seen to have lost credibility.
Zygmunt Bauman: Palestinian persecution echoes the Shoah, which began with discrimination, ghettoes and pogroms: Mondoweiss
by PAUL MUTTER, WITH EVA SMAGACZ on SEPTEMBER 5, 2011
Several weeks ago, the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman gave a stunning interview to the Polish journal, Polityka, on Zionism, the Holocaust, and Israel’s cult of war. In it he charges Israel’s leaders with actively discouraging peace, with seeking war instead of peace, and accuses them of manipulating the Holocaust’s lessons to justify repression. In one of his most charged claims, he says the wall surrounding the Occupied Palestinian Territory is little different than the walls surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto.
Bauman is one of the foremost social theorists in Europe, an alchemist of post-Marxist, post-modernist thought whose work has tackled everything from the Holocaust to globalization to “liquid modernity.” He is also a member of the Holocaust generation, a Polish-born Jew who survived Hitler by escaping to the Soviet Union only to be forced out of Eastern Europe for good during Poland’s 1968 anti-Semitic purges. As such, his words carry enormous influence, and his interview has stirred up a small frenzy.
Bauman’s interview is, at the moment, only available in Polish. Eva Smagacz has been gracious enough to provide to this site with an English translation of some of the highlights of the interview, which you can read below.
I don’t know how people will interpret what is happening today when they will look back at it in 25 years. But the fact of it being an unknown does not mean that we shouldn’t judge what is happening in front of our eyes.
I would use the point made by [Tony] Judt in his memorable article published in the New York Review of Books in 2003, that Israel is becoming a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state”, that the middle eastern “peace process” is finished – “it did not die – it was killed.”
I was expressing similar sentiments nearly 40 years earlier in “Haaretz” as I was leaving Israel in 1979. My concerns were related to the toxic and corrosive characteristics of the Occupation, its putrefying effect on ethics and the moral scruples of the occupiers. I was concerned at that time that the younger [Israeli] generation was growing in the belief that state of war and military readiness – in 1971 still treated as “state of emergency” – was normal, natural, and probably unavoidable.
I was concerned with a country that was learning to hide its numerous and inevitably growing internal social problems, washing its hands of those problems by inciting and inflaming the sense of external threat, [thus] losing the skill to deal with these problems in the process.
Inside that besieged fortress, arguing – no, even expressing a simple difference of opinion – is [becoming] both criminal and treason.
I was also disconcerted with the inversion of the Clausewitzian doctrine of war, where war is a continuation of policy, and transmogrifying policy into . . . military ventures, the consequence of which has been the remorseless erosion of democratic habits.
I was concerned with the deepening inability of Israel to live in a state of peace and with people’s growing disbelief in the possibility of life without war, and with the political elite’s fear of peace when they would no longer know how to govern [without war].
I also share the fear expressed by Judt as to the use of Holocaust by Israel’s rulers as a get-out-of-jail card for their own depravity and absolution of their sins, both those that they have already committed and those they are going to commit.
I also wrote about it in “Modernity and the Holocaust” (1989), citing Menachem Begin when he calls Palestinians Nazis, and paints having them as neighbors of Israel, of seeking another Auschwitz. Begin was answered – very mildly and in an oblique way – by Abba Eban, who was a minister in the Labor Party, that it was time for Israel to stand on its own feet, rather than standing on the feet of six million murdered victims.
The way of “commemorating” the Holocaust in Israeli politics is one of the main obstacles in realizing the potential of the Shoah as a moral purging [for Jews] – and in a way is a post-mortem triumph for Hitler, who dreamed of creating conflict between Jews and the whole world, and between the whole world and the Jews, in preventing Jews from ever having peaceful coexistence with others.
[My] radically opposite way of “commemorating” the Holocaust can be summarized as follows: It is forbidden to stay silent in the face of Israeli crimes and their persecution of Palestinians exactly because the fate of Jews in Europe had similar beginnings – discrimination, pogroms, ghettoes, concluding with the Shoah.
And there you have it. It is a mission of the survivors of the Shoah to bring salvation to the world and protect it from repeated catastrophe: to expose those hidden from the world, but still suffering – to prevent another disgracing of civilization.
The greatest of historians of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, understood that mission when he used to stubbornly repeat that the Shoah machine did not differ in its structure from the “normal” organization of German society. To put it another way: the Shoah was one of the expressions of that society. And again, theologian Richard Rubinstein remembered that just as personal hygiene, subtle philosophical concepts, superb works of art, or sublime music are expressions of civilization, so too is imprisonment, war, exploitation, and the concentration camp. The Shoah – he said in conclusion – “was not an expression of a collapse in civilization but of its progress.”
Unfortunately, this is not the only lesson of the Shoah. Another one is that the one who hits first becomes the top dog, and the more iron the fist, the better chance of getting away with it.
The rulers of Israel are not the only ones that draw on and amplify this sinister lesson, they are not the only ones that should be blamed for the post-mortem triumph of Hitler. Yet when Israel, whose founders took up the mantle of being the custodians of Jewish fate, does these things, then the shock is much greater than in other cases – because this fact also destroys a myth, a myth accepted by us, that is important to us:
That suffering ennobles, that victims come out cleansed, exalted and altogether saintly. And here it turns out how things turn out in reality: As soon as their suffering is over, victims stand waiting for the first opportunity to pay back their persecutors; and if taking revenge on yesterday’s persecutors is somehow unattainable or inconvenient, they rush to erase the dishonor of yesterday’s weakness . . . and show that they also know how to wave the baseball bat and crack the whip – and that they will use whatever is at hand to achieve victory.
What is the wall built around the Occupied Territories if not an attempt to surpass the creators of the wall surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto?
Hurting people debases and morally destroys those who are doing the hurting . . . [Hurting others] does, however, initiate the process that the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson named “schizmogenesis” – a sequence of action and reaction where each consecutive behavior may exaggerate one another, leading to an ever more deepening schism.
Polish-Jewish sociologist compares West Bank separation fence to Warsaw Ghetto walls: Haaretz
Zygmunt Bauman says Israel ‘terrified of peace’ and ‘taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts,’ in interview with Polish weekly ‘Politika.’
By Roman Frister
Zygmunt Bauman, the Jewish sociologist and one of the greatest philosophers of our time, castigated Israel harshly this week, saying it did not want peace and was afraid of it.
Bauman said Israel was “taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts,” and compared the separation fence to the walls surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in the Holocaust.
In a long interview to the important Polish weekly “Politika,” Bauman said Israel was not interested in peace. “Israeli politicians are terrified of peace, they tremble with fear from the possibility of peace, because without war and without general mobilization they don’t know how to live,” he said.
“Israel does not see the missiles falling on communities along the border as a bad thing. On the contrary, they would be worried and even alarmed were it not for this fire,” the Polish-British sociologist said.
Bauman, who lived in Israel briefly, referred to an article he wrote in Haaretz, in which he expressed concern that the younger Israeli generation was being raised on the understanding that the state of war and military alert were natural and unavoidable.
The Polish public has not heard such a diatribe against Zionism and Israel since the anti-Semitic propaganda campaign the Communist regime conducted after the Six-Day War.
Not surprisingly, leading Jewish figures came out against it.
“Politika” published the criticism alongside the letter of Israeli ambassador in Warsaw Zvi Bar, who rejected Bauman’s “half truths” and “groundless generalizations.”
Bauman, who was born in Poland in 1925, has been living in England since he left his lecturer’s chair at Tel Aviv University in 1971.
He is seen as one of the greatest sociologists of our time and has dealt extensively with the ties between the Holocaust and modernism, globalization and consumer culture in the postmodern era.
Some of his books have been translated into Hebrew, including “Liquid Love.”
His grandson is attorney Michael Sfard, of the human rights group Yesh Din.