[This post first appeared at Engage and is reproduced here with the author's permission. I strongly urge you to read it.]
Jon Pike has responded convincingly to Adam Keller's refusal take seriously the charge of discrimination that we have been raising against the boycott proposal. However, throughout the extended discussion with David Hirsh, Keller's assumptions concerning Israeli history have gone essentially unchallenged. Keller summarizes his understanding of this history by saying
'In my view, Israel belongs to the family of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - i.e. countries which were founded by immigrants from Europe who were mainly interested in the land and essentially regarded the people who lived on the land as an inconvenience to be gotten rid of in one way or another.'
In short, Keller buys into the currently fashionable story that Israel is a standard instance of European colonialism ruthlessly dispossessing an indigenous population. The only relevant difference that Keller sees between Israel and the other cases he cites is one of age. Israel is committing ethnic cleansing now and did so in the more recent past than other more venerable products of colonialism.
This is, in fact, a thoroughgoing distortion of the facts, and there is no reason to accept it as the basis for discussion. It is certainly the case that Israel's occupation and settlement of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem is a colonial enterprise that should be resisted and reversed. However, projecting this enterprise back in time to characterize the development of the Yishuv and the creation of Israel as nothing more than the antecedent of the current occupation is a gross misrepresentation of the relevant events. To see this, it is important to consider the following obvious points of disanalogy between the creation of Israel and European settler states.
1. Settler states were created by colonial powers to serve economic and political interests. The Jews who immigrated to Palestine from Europe and the Middle East did not come as agents of a colonial mother country, but as refugees from host societies that rejected them. They were, for the most part, not seeking wealth or political power but escape from violent racism and, in the case of Europe, genocide. Israel is, then, better described as a refugee state than a settler state. This is not to deny that its creation resulted in the dispossession of large numbers of Palestinians, nor is it to underestimate the extent of Palestinian suffering that this process caused. However, recalling the reason for the movement of Jews to Palestine in the twentieth century requires that one recognize the radical difference between immigration for purposes of conquest on behalf of an imperial interest and immigration as flight from persecution.
2. Colonial settlers generally come to a country with which they have no previous connection. Contrary to Keller's assertion, Jews have a long historical association with Israel/Palestine that extends from ancient times to the present. Significant Jewish communities existed in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Acre for most of the Middle Ages and modern era. These centres were replenished by ongoing small scale Jewish immigration over centuries. The Jewish residents of these cities fought with their Arab neighbours against the Crusaders. The Muslim rulers of Palestine recognized the Jewish connection with Israel and invited Jews from the diaspora to re-establish the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem after the Muslim conquest of Palestine from the Byzantines, and after Salahadin's liberation of Jerusalem (the Crusaders had evicted the Jewish residents of the city along with the Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Christians). Most Jews looked upon Israel as a cultural/religious focus and a homeland throughout the centuries of their diaspora. As a result the Zionist Organization rejected Britain's offer of Uganda as an alternative territory at the beginning of the twentieth century. This connection does not, in itself, provide title to the land, but it certainly establishes a substantial historical relationship that is entirely absent in the case of settler states. Ultimately, it casts doubt on the claim that Jewish immigrants to Palestine were foreign in the way that settlers of European colonial states are.
3. As Keller notes, settler states were invariably created through the deliberate dispossession of native populations that were treated as devoid of rights. There were certainly elements of the Zionist movement who regarded the Arab residents of Palestine in this light. They were not the mainstream in the formative period of the Yishuv and the creation of the State. One can accuse the leaders of the Yishuv of naïveté and insensitivity in their dealings with the Palestinians. One can criticize them for not handling certain conflicts with Arabs in a wise or reasonable way. There is no basis for portraying them as Jewish conquistadors who came with the intention of sweeping the country clean of its native population. The Zionist left proposed a variety of models for a binational state. The mainstream of the Yishuv opted for partition, first accepting the Peel Commission's recommendation in 1937 for a Jewish state in 20% of western Palestine, and then endorsing the 1947 UN partition plan that assigned Israel 55% of the land. All of these proposals were rejected by the Palestinian and broader Arab leaderships. Are there any instances of a colonial settler state offering binational solutions or repeatedly accepting international partition plans in order to arrive at an accommodation with the indigenous population? The 1948 war which produced the Palestinian refugee problem was the result of a military assault on the Yishuv by Palestinian forces and Arab armies (with active British assistance). The objective of this attack was the destruction of Israel and the deportation (or worse) of the bulk of its Jewish population. How many settler states were required to fight wars of survival if this kind?
4. Finally, it is worth pointing out that while the Yishuv was initially populated largely by Jews from Europe, Israel absorbed the bulk of Middle Eastern Jewry in the first twelve years of its existence. Well over half of its Jewish population comes from Arab and Muslim countries. Israel is frequently portrayed as a country of European immigrants set up to assuage European guilt over the Holocaust, and built on the dispossession of the Palestinians who had to pay the cost of this guilt. In fact, the majority of its Jewish population is descended from refugees fleeing persecution in Arab countries. The official propaganda line of the anti-Zionist left holds that Middle Eastern Jews were forced to leave their homes by Zionist coercian and manipulation. A more sophisticated version of this view is that the Jews had lived in idyllic harmony and equality in their Arab host countries until the advent of Zionism produced an understandable anti-Israel backlash in these countries. Neither story is historically accurate. While the Arab world did not engage in the organized mass murder of Jews that characterized Europe during numerous periods of its history, Jews occupied a narrowly circumscribed and deeply subordinate role in Arab society througout most of its history. With the rise of Arab nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century their place in this society became increasingly tenuous and exposed. For those of you who still buy into the old 'leftwing' apologia for the ejection of Middle Eastern Jewry from their host countries, it might be instructive to look at Albert Memmi's (1975) piece 'Who is an Arab Jew?'. Memmi is a Tunisian Jew who participated in the Tunisian revolution and wrote one of its principal texts, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957). He was forced to immigrate to France shortly after the revolution, and he provides a distinctly sobering and revealing description of Jewish life in an Arab country. The fact that so many of the refugees that Israel absorbed come from the Arab world does not justify the dispossesion of the Palestinians, but it renders the facile image of the country as a European settler state particularly unpersuasive.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been chronically obscured by two competing and mutually exclusive mythologies. The traditional Zionist myth describes Palestine as desolate and largely empty of inhabitants in the late nineteenth century. Successive waves of Jewish pioneers created prosperity and attracted Arab immigrants from neighbouring counries. When the 1948 war broke out, the Arab residents left voluntarily under the influence of Arab propaganda. This story is clearly false, and fortunately it has been largely debunked by Israeli historians. It no longer has much credibility in Israel, where Benny Morris's book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is taught in high schools. According to the Palestinian myth, European Zionists colluded with Britain and other colonialst powers for the express purpose of setting up a beach head of western imperialism that would evict the Palestinians from their land and serve as a base for European and American interests to dominate the Arab world. Unfortunately, not only does this myth continue to hold sway amongst most Palestinians, it is now widely accepted throughout the Islamic world, and it is fast becoming orthodoxy in the midst of what passes for liberal opinion in Europe. This chronicle is no less mythic than the traditional Zionist story, but its uncritical acceptance by increasing numbers of people is proving toxic to Jewish life in the diaspora.
A rational and just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute will only be possible when these myths are set aside, and the conflict is normalized. This involves acceptance of the basic legitimacy of both sides to the conflict and recognition of the fact that each party has threatened the survival of the other in pursuit of what it takes to be its most elementary interests. Accommodating each other's minimal needs demands more than an improvised pragmatism concerning the political and territorial concessions needed for a settlement. It requires making room for each other in historical as well as political terms. (Shalom Lappin, Department of Computer Science, King's College London)