15 - 21 November 2001
Issue No.560
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560 |
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Those who stay behind
Palestinians inside Israel are caught between the ambivalence of their compatriots and the racism of their host state. Mohamed Khaled Al-Azaar* outlines their dilemma
Assessing the position of the "1948 Arabs" in the Palestinian national liberation movement is not an easy task. The broad outlines of the best-known platforms do not address the status of this segment of Palestinian society, which has been subject to Israeli control since 1948. In addition, throughout the peace process, negotiators have ignored the fate of the million Palestinians inside Israel, having accepted the Israeli principle that they should be excluded from consideration in a process that will determine the future of the Palestinian people -- although the Arabs of '48 are an integral part of that people.
The Palestinian negotiators' deference to this Israeli principle is difficult to explain, especially since it will shroud the implementation of any settlement in ambiguity. Yet no one has given the issue the attention it merits. How is it possible to assume that any settlement will be comprehensive and lasting if its excludes a Palestinian population of that size, particularly one in which Palestinian and Arab patriotic sentiments are still powerful and manifest themselves at every available opportunity? The attempts of the Palestinians inside Israel to demonstrate support for the Al-Aqsa Intifada is but one example of the force of these sentiments.
What concerns us here is that Israeli policy is not ambivalent toward the Arabs of '48. There are many indications that Israel is psychologically and structurally unable to assimilate that segment of the Palestinian nation. The Zionist project, however, is equally unable to persist in its policy of isolating them and divesting them of their Palestinian-Arab culture.
Zionism, by definition and in practice, is a racist ideology that links the Jews, the land and the sacred. This bond is inherently exclusive; it allows no room for others. In this context Arabs are simply objects embedded in a state that seeks to enclose a purely Jewish society in terms of land, people and governance.
The problem of the Palestinians who stayed behind has obsessed Zionist political thinkers, who have suggested "solutions" ranging from assimilation to expulsion. Between these two extremes lie apartheid, political and economic marginalisation, and the deliberate obfuscation of identity -- all intended to atomise the Palestinian population and deprive it of a collective identity. Such solutions, according to those who wish to "purify" Israel, will allow the state to cope with the "Arab minority" without diluting that purity.
Many efforts have been made to apply these solutions. All failed, because they defied the logic governing the relationship between an indigenous population and a colonialist settler society. The notion of assimilation conflicts with the need to preserve a space separating Jews from Arabs, a space that emanates from the state's inherent bias toward Jews in terms of rights and duties. It is impossible to close this space entirely, so intrinsic is it to Zionist thought and practice. Zionism and true equality are mutually exclusive.
Geographical isolation and the dismantling of the Arab social structure along regional, sectarian, tribal or class lines: these projects, too, have failed in practice. The Israeli government, for instance, declared that the Arabs of '48 are several "minorities" rather than a single one. This bid to negate the bonds that unite the Palestinians in Israel was doomed to fail. It disregards the reality of their single collective ethnic affiliation, and neglects two global phenomena: the rise of the nationalist spirit among groups long submerged or assimilated into a larger body (as in the Balkans and Central Asia), and the speed of communications made possible by globalised technology. Overlooked, too, were the dynamics of the Palestinian national resurgence taking place only metres away from those the Israelis hoped to strip of their roots or any nationalist expression thereof.
These concrete circumstances have broken all the barriers to contact among the Arabs of '48, and between them and the outside world. The "green line" separating them from their historical compatriots in the occupied territories is no more. Modern technology has broken through the wall Israel hoped to put up between them and the greater Arab world (at one point, Palestinians in were prohibited from buying transistor radios so that they could have no access to Arab news broadcasts and Abdel-Nasser's speeches). Thus strengthened, this segment of the Palestinian people, which Israel sought to isolate geographically, disinherit culturally and, of course, neuter politically, are demanding at least the right to self-rule as a national minority, on the very valid grounds that they are the indigenous population and the Zionist settler state is the intruder.
The appeal to expel the Arabs of '48 has had no greater success than the other "solutions." Many Israelis, of course, have called for "transfer," and many more, from all shades of the political spectrum, have sympathised, to varying degrees of candour, with this call, regardless of its legal and ethical implications. In the 1950s, leaders of what would later become the Israeli Labour Party came up with a scheme to expel Arabs to South America, and pressure was applied, on Palestinian Christians in particular, to this end. A plan to transfer large numbers of Palestinians to Libya also surfaced in the '60s. Nor is there any indication that political forces in Israel have put such schemes behind them. On the contrary, Rehavam Ze'evi, the minister of tourism who was assassinated last October, was one of the most vocal proponents of the "transfer" option; and he was a member of the Sharon government. Yet there is no indication that such a policy could be carried out in practice. Palestinians inside Israel do not intend to budge: they know only too well what awaits them if they leave their land under any circumstances.
Why, then, are the Palestinians of '48 so determined to obtain equality and full citizenship? What is the secret behind Azmi Bishara's tenacious pursuit of the democratic option, given his acute awareness of Israel's non-democratic nature -- given, indeed, his first-hand knowledge that Israel is a state for Jews only?
These questions underscore the profound crisis of political affiliation, the incoherence and ambiguity of status that the Arabs of '48 face every day, caught as they are between a Palestinian national project that so far has failed to consider their future with any clarity and a Zionist state that ultimately rejects them. They must make difficult choices in negotiating with the systems that have been imposed upon them by the convoluted course of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Despite the potential risks to their safety, several prominent Palestinian intellectuals and politicians inside Israel have gone to considerable lengths to remedy this crisis. Azmi Bishara has made important breakthroughs in reconciling the drive to democratise the Israeli system from the inside with the need to safeguard Palestinian national identity within that system. He had the courage to run for prime minister against Barak in 1999.
With predictable vehemence, Israel lashed out at Bishara's attempt to practice equal citizenship within a state that claims to be democratic. Recently, the Knesset voted to strip him of parliamentary immunity, in preparation for his trial. Bishara's crime: violating what the Jewish state holds to be its political and ideological ideals.
This is a clear warning to the Palestinians of '48 that they should know their limits. The Zionist ruling elite has only to sense or imagine the slightest threat to Israel's identity and ideology for it to bring out the heavy artillery of repression, reminding the Arab minority, especially the more recalcitrant members of that minority, that Israel is a state for Jews alone.
Stripping Bishara of his immunity was not an isolated act, but rather part of a general policy targeting Palestinian activists in Israel. The Israeli police also summoned another Palestinian Knesset member for questioning on charges of assaulting Israeli soldiers during demonstrations in Jerusalem. In addition, Jewish extremists belonging to the notoriously racist Kahana movement attacked Mohamed Barakeh, another Knesset member, who described this incident as reflecting the racist climate that encourages violence against Arabs.
This climate is not new. But it will grow more repressive still as the repercussions of the assault on civil liberties in the world's most democratic nations begin to spread. If civil liberties can be curtailed so blithely there, they are all the more vulnerable in Israel, where racism is structurally pervasive by virtue of the origin and definition of the state.
The story of Bishara and his colleagues confirms that there can be no immunity for the Palestinians of '48 in the Jewish state. It also confirms that a regime so belligerent and racist in the regional and global environment cannot be democratic domestically.
*The writer is a Cairo-based Palestinian political analyst.
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