So said Tony Karon, the proprietor of Rootless Cosmopolitan, on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence. Zionism is dead. Karon is a senior editor at Time.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. He was born in South Africa and became active in the Labor-Zionist Habonim movement in his teenage years, before moving on to join the anti-apartheid struggle as an editor in the alternative press and as an activist of the banned African National Congress. Karon is now a New Yorker and maintains the website Rootless Cosmopolitan.
Here’s Karon’s latest condemnation of Zionism. Like his fellow South African, Ronnie Kasrils, Karon cannot abide with the injustices entailed in the Zionist quest for a greater Israel. However, if Zionism is dead, then you have to wonder why the house demolitions, land confiscations, and all of the other dispossession techniques continue on the West Bank, as reported daily by the International Solidarity Movement Is he really getting it?
Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Don’t believe the hype about an Iranian threat – Israel certainly fears Iran attaining strategic nuclear capability, but not because it expects Iran to launch a suicidal nuclear exchange. That’s the sort of scare-story that gets trotted out for public consumption in Israel and the U.S. Behind closed doors, Israeli leaders admit that even a nuclear-armed Iran does not threaten Israel’s existence. (Israel’s security doctrine, however, is based on maintaining an overwhelming strategic advantage over all challengers, so the notion of parity along the lines of Cold War “Mutually Assured Destruction” with Iran is a major challenge, because without a nuclear monopoly, Israel loses a trump card in the regional power battle.)
Palestinian militants may be able to make life in certain parts of Israel exceedingly unpleasant at times, but they are unable to reverse the Nakbah of 1948 through military means. (Hamas knows this as well as Fatah does, which is why it is ready to talk about a long-term hudna and coexistence – although it won’t roll over and accept Israel’s terms as relayed by Washington in the way that the current Fatah leadership might.)
Israel, in other words, is here to stay – and its citizens know this, which may be why they appear to more indifferent to the search for peace with the Palestinians than at any time in the past three decades. So confident are the Israelis in being able to withstand whatever the Palestinians throw at them that they are able to turn away from the hellish life they have created for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Sure, let Olmert – a weak and skittish leader whose domestic political standing is comparable to that of President Bush, except that the Israeli prime minister can’t seem to shake off the whiff of corruption – engage in the charade of negotiating a hypothetical peace (let’s be very clear about this: the current talks between Abbas and Olmert are aimed only at designing a “shelf” agreement, the elaboration of an “horizon” not unlike the Geneva exercise by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed-Rabbo a couple of years ago – not a series of steps or deadlines that anyone plans to implement — this is its most optimistic outcome; even that seems doomed to fail, though…) with a hypothetical Palestinian leader. (To paraphrase Stalin on the pope, how many divisions does Mahmoud Abbas command?) Who cares? It’s not as if Olmert is going to confront the settlers or even dismantle most of the 600 or so roadblocks that choke life in the West Bank. So let him and Abbas perform their endless duet of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”…
The fact of Israel’s survival until now, and for the foreseeable future, is a grim reality for its 1 million Palestinian citizens, whose citizenship is at best, second-class – and more so for the 4 million Palestinians over which it maintains sovereign power in the West Bank and Gaza, without granting them citizenship – for whom Israel means living under an apartheid regime. And that, in turn, means that the trappings of globalized modernity enjoyed by Israel’s secular middle class – the American lifestyle, the high-tech economy and the European football – all come at the price of perennial uncertainty under a cloud of potential violence.
Just as there’s little chance of Israel being eliminated in the foreseeable future, so is there little chance of it militarily eliminating Palestinian resistance. There’s no serious peace process in the works, right now, and the geography created by Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since their capture in 1967 has made the prospect of a Palestinian state largely hypothetical, too – it takes an optimistic imagination to conceive of a viable independent state comprising of Gaza and those West Bank cantonments that lie between the major Israeli settlement blocs and the roads that connect them.
So, while Israel has prevailed in the conflict over its creation that has raged since 1948, it has been unable to end that conflict on its own terms. The Palestinians driven out during the Nakbah have not simply disappeared or been absorbed into surrounding Arab populations, as Israel’s founders had hoped. And without justice for the Palestinians, Israel is no closer now than it was 60 years ago to being able to live in a genuine peace with its neighbors.
At this point, however, the Israelis don’t seem to care.
What most Israelis care about today are things like McDonalds and other trifles of daily living made possible by the exclusion of Israeli Palestinians from participating in Israel’s Jim Crow democracy, and the Wall, which keeps the alien Palestinian “terrorists” (i.e., freedom fighters) in the West Bank at bay. It is only occasional incidents, like the bulldozer rampage in Jerusalem the other day, that remind Israelis that the frustrated Palestinians are still there and will not go away.
If Zionism is dead, as Karon contends, then what is it that drives the stalemate. One would guess here that it has much to do with the death of the two-state solution and Israel’s dilemma: where do we go from here. If Zionism is dead, there is certainly no evidence of it in Israel’s relentless colonialism in the West Bank.
The right wing Zionists these days like to talk a two state solution when they know damned well that such a solution is now way out of reach. But it makes them sound peaceful, doesn’t it?
