The Original “No”: Why the Arabs Rejected Zionism, and Why It Matters. By Natasha Gill. Middle East Policy Council, June 19, 2013. Abridged version at Haaretz, July 31, 2013.
Why the Palestinians Said “No!” By Paul L. Scham. Partners for Progressive Israel, June 19, 2013.
Gill:
IN THE
BEGINNING THERE WAS . . . “NO SOLUTION!”
Everybody
sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not
everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There
is a gulf, and nothing can fill that gulf ... I do not know what Arab will
agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews — even if the Jews learn Arabic .
. . And we must recognize this situation. If we do not acknowledge this and try
to come up with “remedies,” then we risk demoralization . . . We, as a nation,
want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be
theirs. The decision has been referred to the Peace Conference.
— Ben
Gurion, Speech to Vaad Zmani, June 1919
What is
missing in the logic of the pro-Israel view of the Palestinian No is the
disturbing prospect, articulated by Zionist luminaries such as Vladimir
Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion in the 1920s, that a nonviolent or satisfactory
solution to the Arab-Jewish confrontation in Palestine might not have been
possible.
This
poignant and chillingly lucid appraisal was proposed by many Jews and Arabs in
the early years of the conflict and has been acknowledged by many more since,
but it is still largely absent from the current mainstream debates about the
conflict or peacemaking. And yet accepting the Israel/Palestine conflict as an
elemental clash grounded in overlapping and irreconcilable aspirations, rather
than a chimera that could have been avoided had one party acceded to the wishes
of the other, is necessary for understanding both the limitations of and
prospects for peacemaking today. For if the Zionists perceived Jewish
self-determination as a natural response to their predicament, the
implementation of this mission in Palestine, a land where an Arab majority
lived, was almost certain to provoke hostility from the native population.
Given
the urgency of their situation, it is understandable that the Jews were not
concerned with the response of the Palestinian Arabs to their project. After a
tragically failed attempt to identify spiritually, emotionally or
intellectually with the cultures and nations within which they resided, the
Jews learned the hard way that the modern world was increasingly defining
self-determination in exclusionist, not liberal, terms. The pogroms and
persecution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did even more
to shape the tenor and nature of the Zionist movement than the brutality of the
Holocaust; it was that predicament which gave birth to what might be called “The
Original Never Again” — the determination on the part of the Jews never again
to be supplicants, dependent on the kindness of strangers, or feeble bystanders
to their own persecution, waiting pitifully for the world to evolve beyond
prejudice. Influenced by the character and tenor of nationalism as it evolved
in Europe, where blood and soil were the hallmarks of legitimate belonging, the
Zionists had concluded that they could only overcome their outsider status by
settling in Palestine — a land where their “insider” status could be unearthed,
and their physical and spiritual links with the past revealed.
But
while Zionism was more multidimensional than the reductive formulas provided by
today’s anti-Zionists, it is neither surprising nor strange that the Arabs in
the early part of the twentieth century would reject the reasoning and
rationale behind Jewish nationalism. They were engaged in their own pursuit of
national self-determination, inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s proclamations, their
own cultural, linguistic and religious revival, and the trends toward
territorial independence taking hold in neighboring countries. Despite the fact
that the Arab response is incessantly represented as aberrant, it is unlikely
that any people anywhere would have said Yes to the prospect of becoming a
minority in their own home, or to their land being offered to those they
considered foreigners, even if they recognized that the latter had a historical
presence and religious ties to the area, or that they faced mortal danger in
their countries of residence. It is even more unlikely that any people would
say Yes to the manner in which the policy of the Jewish national home was
implemented — without their consent, enforced by foreign powers, and in
contradiction to what they believe they deserved and were promised.
Finally,
although there is controversy over the extent to which the leaders of the
Palestinian national movement represented the views of the masses, or whether
the “opposition” parties considered taking another course, even if a minority
of Arabs was ready to accept some form of Jewish national rights in Palestine,
this should not be reason to impugn the majority Arab feeling that the creation
of a Jewish state in Palestine was unjust and unacceptable. Jews should resist
the temptation to parade Arab “super-moderates” in triumph as vindication of
their cause; the Arabs will not accept this any more than Jews accept
Palestinians justifying their own positions by appealing to the views of a
minority of Israeli or Jewish anti-Zionists.
A POLICY STRIPPED OF ITS RATIONALE
Politically
speaking it is a national movement . . . The Arab must not and cannot be a
Zionist. He could never wish the Jews to become a majority. This is the true
antagonism between us and the Arabs. We both want to be the majority.
— David
Ben-Gurion, after the 1929 riots in Palestine
The
appraisal of the early years of the conflict, advanced above, clashes
fundamentally with the traditional pro-Israel view, which relies on the belief
that the Arab opposition to Zionism was both immoral and unnecessary, and that
the Jews had an absolute and incontestable right to create a Jewish state in
Palestine: in other words, that Zionism was blameless in the creation of the
Palestine problem and the Palestinians brought their nakba upon themselves.
To
challenge this view is not to condemn the entire Zionist project as inherently
sinful, but to recognize that it will always be seen as such from the Arab
side, because from their perspective, Jewish Israel could only have come about
at the expense of Arab Palestine. This common-sense view was the driving force
behind Vladimir Jabotinsky’s rationale for the Iron Wall — a position grounded
in the avowal that the Jews aimed to appropriate the land that the Arabs lived
on, loved and believed was theirs. Jabotinsky maintained that it was only
natural that the Arabs would resist Zionism, for “any native people — it is all
the same whether they are civilized or savage — views their country as their
national home, of which they will be always the complete masters.”
Today,
those who would be Jabotinsky’s heirs appropriate the Iron Wall as implicit
policy, while abjuring Jabotinsky’s own rationale for that policy: his belief
that Palestine was not an empty desert but that there were native inhabitants
there who were deeply attached to their land, and therefore it was both
reasonable and inevitable that they would resist Zionism, and resist violently.
In contrast, today’s revisionists rally support for an Iron Wall policy while
burying Jabotinsky’s interpretation under a now familiar if still peculiar
specter: a people that did not exist on a land they never had and whose loss
they resisted for no particular reason.
Despite
its notable incoherence, this kind of reasoning still drives the standard
pro-Israeli view of the conflict. The result is that those who wish to show
their support for Israel have no tools to formulate their own response to
Palestinian grievances or demands, or to properly interpret the growing opposition
to Israel on the international scene. Thus, they risk marching blindly down a
path that only aggravates their own dilemma and puts Israel itself in further
jeopardy.
BREACHING
THE BLOCKADE
There
can be no settlement, no final settlement, until the Zionists realize that they
can never hope to obtain in London or Washington what is denied them in
Jerusalem.
—
Albert Hourani, Testimony to Anglo-American Committee, 1946
The
paradox of any potential peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians is that
neither side is likely to be satisfied with the possibility of attaining the
tangible dividends of peace, even in the unlikely event that these were
attainable. Each side continues to demand ideological conversion from the
other, despite the fact that neither can recognize (in the sense of validate or
embrace) the other’s narrative without by definition repudiating its own. This
is not only the case for the Palestinians, who are being asked to deny their
history and experience for the sake of being validated as partners for peace.
The Israelis too cannot and will not embrace the anti-Israel camp’s notion that
their national movement was born in sin. And notwithstanding the power of the
United States of America or President Obama’s recent pronouncements in
Jerusalem, no third party can, or has the right to, issue a verdict on history.
But while neither side should be asked to recognize the legitimacy of their
adversary’s view of the conflict, they will have to find a way to accept that
this view cannot simply be wished away, and that it will manifest itself in
various ways at the negotiating table and in any peace deal.
Thus,
although supporters of Israel need not embrace the Palestinian view of the
causes of the conflict, they should recognize that the Arab’s rejection of
Zionism was not irrational and cannot be reduced to anti-Semitism: and they
need to move beyond the long-obsolete mantras about the origins of the conflict
that prevent them from identifying genuine points of impasse or making the best
of opportunities. This does not mean Israel is the sole responsible party —
Israelis are justified in questioning whether the Palestinians are able or
willing to fulfill their own side of a negotiated bargain, prepare their public
for a compromised settlement or recognize that the Jewish narrative cannot be
eradicated by an act of will. But the Jewish community should not hide its own
rejectionism behind the Palestinians’ No, or behind rabid circular debates that
all slam into the STOP sign of 1947.
For
while many Palestinians have (in various agreements and public commitments)
been saying Yes to Israel’s de facto existence since 1988, they will continue
to say No to Zionism itself. Condoning
it would require Palestinians swallow whole the major tenets of the Jewish “narrative”
and sign on the dotted line affirming that the creation of a Jewish state on
land they considered as their own was a legitimate enterprise; that their own
rejection of that enterprise was irrational or morally wrong; and that the
Arab's 1400-year history in Palestine should be seen as a brief and
inconsequential interregnum between two more important eras of Jewish
sovereignty.
This
will never happen. The sooner the pro-Israel camp accepts this and stops trying
to change the unchangeable, the sooner they can determine what steps might be
taken in the interests of their own peace and security. Schoolyard choruses — “they
started it” and “they are worse than us” — cannot serve as an interpretive framework
for a 130-year-old conflict, or form the basis of national policy. The Jewish
community must breach the blockade that currently stands between moribund
talking points and the actual origins of the conflict. An encounter with the
Original No might release them from their dependence on the interpretations
provided by the salesmen of the Jewish world, who for decades have been
pitching an obsolete product to hapless customers in search of certainty — the
very opposite of what is required in order to “prepare the public for peace.”
And it might provide supporters of Israel with the tools they need to construct
their own interpretation of what took place In The Beginning, and formulate
their own vision of what, if anything, can be done to address the fallout
today.
Actually, Gill is wrong. Resolving the conflict will come down to changing the Palestinian narrative, a point Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe makes. Indeed the mark of decisive victory in a war is when the losing side is compelled to repudiate its narrative and adopt the narrative of the victors, however grudgingly. This was the case for the South after 1865, and for Germany and Japan after 1945. Unless the Palestinians change their narrative to accept that Jews have legitimate historical ties to the Land of Israel, and a right to sovereignty and self-determination rather than dhimmitude, then any treaty would be a hudna at best and not be worth the paper it is written on.
