A project of dispossession can never be a noble cause

Israel's liberal intellectuals lament the malaise that grips their

country - but refuse to face up to the ethnicide at the heart of it

Ahdaf Soueif

Friday November 17, 2006

Guardian

Before Donald Rumsfeld departed from the Pentagon, the "Transformation

Group" he headed worked with an Israeli army team to develop ideas for

controlling the Palestinians after Israel withdraws from the occupied

territories. Eyal Weizman, an Israeli academic who has written about

this cooperation, tells us that they decided to do this through an

invisible occupation: Israel would "seal the hard envelopes" around

Palestinian towns and generate "effects" directed against the "human

elements of resistance". We saw this concept being implemented in Beit

Hanoun last week when the Israeli army killed 19 sleeping people with a

missile attack.

The world can look forward to more of the same. According to Weizman,

the chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, Dan Halutz, confirms

that the Israeli army sees the conflict as "unresolvable". It has

"geared itself to operate within an environment saturated with conflict

and within a future of permanent violence ... it sees itself acting just

under the threshold of international sanctions ... keeping the conflict

on a flame low enough for Israeli society to be able to live and prosper

within it." So here's another function for the separation wall Israel is

building: to shield Israeli society from too close a knowledge of the

brutal acts their army carries out in their name.

And yet Israeli intellectuals wonder at the malaise that grips their

country. Two Nobel prize laureates, Yisrael Aumann and Aaron

Ciechanover, were recently quoted bemoaning the "fatal disease: the

depletion of spirit ... [the] cancer that has spread through Israeli

society". They attribute it to a kind of generalised "selfishness"

which, oddly, they think may be OK in Switzerland but not in Israel.

It's nothing to do with "the enemy" they say, because they can handle

the enemy with their "wisdom and technology". Again, as we saw in Beit

Hanoun.

Einstein, their distinguished predecessor, expressed grave doubts about

political Zionism. A letter he signed, published in the New York Times

in December 1948, warned against the emergence in Israel of (the future

prime minister) Menachem Begin's "Freedom party". It cited Deir Yassin,

where Begin and friends, eight months earlier, had killed 240 men, women

and children and "were proud of this massacre". "This," the letter goes

on, "is the unmistakable stamp of a fascist party for whom terrorism ...

and misrepresentation are means, and a 'leader state' is the goal."

Professors Aumann and Ciechanover might consider what Einstein would

have made of the scenes in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiye over the last

several weeks.

David Grossman seemed to many commentators to be evoking Hamlet in his

Rabin memorial address on November 4, published in the Guardian. But

when Grossman in effect argued that something was rotten in the state of

Denmark he was merely referring to the lack of a "king" in Israel - a

leader "to appeal to the Palestinians over the heads of Hamas" to start

another peace process. But the peace processes the Palestinians have

been subjected to have only led to their further dispossession. The

Palestinians elected Hamas last January because two decades of

interacting with a variety of Israeli governments has bankrupted the

secular Palestinian leadership politically and morally. So the wish to

engage in yet more talks, to get the "peace process" back on track, is

either catastrophically blind or expresses ill faith. It always comes

with lamentations over a "noble" project that has somehow gone wrong.

The secret rotting at the core of the state of Israel is its refusal to

admit that the Zionist project in Palestine - to create a state based on

the dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land - was never

noble: the land it coveted was the home of another people, and the

fathers of the Israeli nation killed, terrorised and displaced them to

turn the project into actuality. But the Palestinian nation lives on -

visibly and noisily and everywhere. To make its own denial stick, Israel

has to deny and suppress Palestinian history. To impose its design on

Palestine, it has to somehow make the Palestinians disappear. "Things

bad begun make strong themselves by ill"; and so the ethnicide

continues. The new deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, plots

against the Palestinians within Israel. The Israeli army kills and

terrorises the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Zionists and

their friends are desperate to silence the voices of and for Palestine.

Meanwhile, Israel insists it is civilised, decent, peaceable - a light

unto nations. How can a society caught in such delusion thrive? And how

can people living within the Zionist project as privileged Jewish

citizens bewail their embattled lot or be puzzled by it? Liberal

Israelis of the left should heed another couple of lines from the bard:

"Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more;

Macbeth shall sleep no more."

Israel will not be well until it acknowledges its past and makes amends

for it. The process has a name: truth and reconciliation. Israelis

cannot remain within the Zionist framework and profit from it and think

of themselves as good citizens of the world. Many thoughtful and brave

Israelis have made a choice. Some have left Israel, others remain.

Practically all have made it their life's mission to expose how Zionism

really works - and what it costs.

Since 1988, initiatives, peace talks and road maps have aimed to

establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital

in Jerusalem, and to do justly by the Palestinian refugees. For 12 years

none of this happened, and first-hand accounts of the Camp David talks

in 2000 show that Israel did not have the political will then to make

the necessary minimum offer. Presumably it still doesn't; hence the

"sealed envelopes". But, perhaps because the stakes are now so high,

people are once again speaking of the visionary solution: the secular

democratic state, a homeland for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinian social scientist Ali Abunimah and the Israeli historian

Ilan Pappé's recent books are the latest to make the case for this. They

find hope, as Pappé puts it, in "those sections of Jewish society in

Israel that have chosen to let themselves be shaped by human

considerations rather than Zionist social engineering" and in "the

majority of the Palestinians who have refused to let themselves be

dehumanised by decades of brutal Israeli occupation and who, despite

years of expulsion and oppression, still hope for reconciliation".

· Ahdaf Soueif's latest book is Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common

Ground

ahdaf@hotmail.com