The first time I went to Israel, in January 2004, I had been invited to participate in a conference hosted by the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace to explore the possibilities of an international network of organisations opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
What would I find? I did not, nor do I, believe that the idea of a Jewish state was motivated by colonial desires. After the terrible failure of European liberal democracy it was a response to a legitimate question: What were the conditions of Jewish security?
I was inclined to understand the conflict as one between two competing nationalisms (though definitely not nations): Zionism and Palestinian, both equally unfortunate. I was open, therefore, to searching critiques of Zionism as a form of Jewish nationalism, in the same way that I wanted to problematise Palestinian nationalism. My distance from other South African initiatives critical of Israel was precisely because of their seeming uneven- handedness. Why were they silent about the nature of Palestinian nationalism when they denounced Zionism? I had read the Manifesto of Hamas and other Palestinian literature. It is often violently anti-Semitic.
I was also anxious that on landing in Israel I would be overcome, or at least stirred, by a sense of return, by an emotion of homecoming. This was something new. I had never felt some special relationship to Israel because I was a Jew. Israel was a state like any other and I objected to any conflation of my being Jewish with my being Israeli. It was certainly another way of asserting that I was fully, flatly South African. And yet over the past few years being Jewish had come to mean more to me than simply a fact of birth.
If the risk of an affective Zionism was what worried me before departure, it was quickly disabused by an El Al flight full of South African adolescents going on a tour to Israel. They spilled from the plane in Tel Aviv to kiss, insincerely, the sacred tarmac of the Holy Land, they swirled around the airport terminal draped in Israeli flags. How plainly they resembled white South Africans flying the oranje-blanje-blou.
It is common in South Africa, especially among the Jewish establishment, to present criticism of Zionism as at best dangerously naive and at worst anti-Semitic. I was surprised to find such criticism common-place among Israeli intellectuals. More surprising, for someone who did not know the Israeli scene, was the growing preparedness of academics and activists to question the Holy Grail of Israeli Zionism: that Israel be a Jewish state. In Israel such dissent goes under the more respectable title of ”post-Zionism”.
But, even when Israeli critics throw cold water on the idea of Israel as home to a Jewish nation, it is taken for granted that the Middle East is, nonetheless, witness to a national conflict — between an Israeli (if not Jewish) nation and a Palestinian one. Nobody doubts that the Palestinians constitute a nation in and of themselves, despite the manifest ambivalence of such a politics. If the Palestinians are Arabs then to what extent are they a Palestinian nation? Now, these tensions are not simply intellectual. They configure what are deemed the limits of a possible political solution. What is at stake is the degree to which these nations are deemed different and antagonistic.
More and more Israelis and Palestinians are reconciled to the idea of two separate states to accommodate distinct nations. Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently talked of a Palestinian state. Traditionally, the Israeli right has not opposed the idea of two states because it, somehow, believes in multiculturalism. It believes that the Palestinian state already exists. It is the State of Jordan!
The idea of two states has historically been the platform of the Israeli left, as expressed by the Labour and Meretz parties. ”We wish it were otherwise,” the Labour left laments, ”but after 50 or so years of violence and conflict we have to accept that it is better if Jews and Palestinians live in separate states.” Here the idea is for Jews and Palestinians to inhabit a common state, though protected from each other by a host of political and spatial measures: a federation of Jewish and Palestinian territories or Swiss-like cantons and/or group rights and qualified franchise and so on. It means that in Israel-Palestine, what FW de Klerk and the National Party wanted for whites during constitutional negotiations in South Africa, in the form of protections against majority rule, is deemed the politics of the loony left!
I found all this surprising and deeply discouraging. The South African transition happened because we managed to avoid these ghastly terms. We had (mostly) avoided conceiving of whites and blacks as members of distinct nations. The politics of non-racialism agreed that many and diverse peoples inhabited the territory of South Africa. It insisted that some had become rich at the expense of others and, most importantly, that atrocities and crimes had been committed by some against others. For all that, none of these principles of difference constituted national differences or were enough to warrant special expression in a separate or even autonomous political dispensation This was the condition of South Africa’s miraculous transition: that we accepted the diversity of peoples, not the mutual exclusivity of nations. What would non-racialism mean in the context of Israel-Palestine? The recovery of a common Israeli-Palestinian history and culture.
This sense of mutual exclusivity in Israel is compounded by another simply ideological myth: that Israelis are Western Europeans. In Tel Aviv I met with a prominent refusenik, Rami Kaplan. He had served in Lebanon, where he had reached a senior rank and had been a platoon leader. Whereas he had been prepared to serve to defend the state of Israel, he would not be part of an occupation.
The terms of much of the debate in Israel-Palestine concern the borders of the two states: those of 1967 or some other. Indeed, the unilateral building of a wall between Jewish and Palestinian settlements is heavily criticised, including from within the Israeli establishment, for pre-empting negotiations about the respective borders of the two states. If the wall were to constitute the final frontier between Israel and a future Palestinian state, Palestine would be little more than a Bantustan: a territory of cantons, lacking physical contiguity, each surrounded by Israeli settlements. It would resemble the old Bophutatswana.
Kaplan’s discussion was littered with references to Ashkenaze Jews (those of Eastern European origin who constitute the cultural and economic elite) as whites, or Western European.
Modern, secular Israel styles itself as a Western European power and society. It is evident in the architecture, the fashion, in the political discourse. Such an association, however, is only possible on condition of an extraordinary forgetting. Jews have always been the blacks of Western Europe. So much of Jewish history and Jewish theology comes out of a dialogue with the Arab world — in Cordoba, in Marrakech, in Fez, in Cairo, in Jerusalem and Baghdad. Jews are also a Middle Eastern people. Such an association with Western Europe entrenches the supposed distance between Israelis and Palestinians by casting the conflict as a struggle between Western and Eastern civilizations. It is also responsible for extraordinary tensions and contradictions within Israeli society itself: between Ashkenaze Jews and the Mizrahim (those of North African origin) who are deemed a little too Arab for comfort.
The obstacles to peace in the Middle East do not come from the fanatical and genocidal instincts of Arabs and Palestinians. Palestinian society is deeply divided. Fanatical, religious groups are a terrifying, growing force — among Jews and Palestinians. Nor is it a lack of Palestinian leadership. There is a more fundamental obstacle to peace: the failure to recognise that Palestinians have suffered a terrible injustice. Israeli historians now recognise that hundreds of thousand of Palestinians were forcibly expelled in 1948. They have been subject to extreme distress ever since. Such a public recognition does not pre-empt the outcome of a peace settlement, nor does it de-legitimate the presence of Jews in the region. There is no future, however, for Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
Ivor Chipkin is the chairperson of Jewish Voices South Africa and a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. He writes in his personal capacity. He will speak at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg on March 3