The Betrayal of Zion

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I recently spoke with Shelly Katz, who directs the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, about the conflict then still raging in Lebanon. When I asked whether the U.S. was right to have delayed so long in pushing for a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, she chided me, “The war is not between Israel and Lebanon; it is between Israel and Hizbullah. Lebanon happens to be caught in it.”

Katz was prima facie correct. But my mistake was easily made: After watching Israel set Lebanon back 20 years in a matter of weeks, observers might naturally have begun to think of the war as being waged on Lebanon as a whole. I’d spoken earlier with senior International Crisis Group analyst Mouin Rabbani, who is based in Amman, Jordan, and he put it this way: “The biggest loser in this campaign on the Lebanese side of this equation is not Hizbullah, but the Lebanese government and the Lebanese people.” When I asked Katz about this, she replied, “Israel has nothing against Lebanon. They are good neighbors, they are good people, they have a beautiful country. Israel only wishes to defend itself.”

Katz’s platitude was a pitch-perfect example of the kind of tendentious thinking that has for many years been isolating Israel from the affection of the world, to the degree that now, as Israel’s respected political commentator Nahum Barnea put it, “In the eyes of a large part of the world, Israel has become a pariah country.” Katz’s comment called to mind a point made recently by the Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor in the London Review of Books. Speaking of the Israeli media coverage of the war, Laor wrote, “There aren’t, it seems, any Lebanese in this war. So who is dying under Israeli fire? Hizbullah. And if we ask about the Lebanese? The answer is always that Israel has no quarrel with Lebanon.”

It is not altogether clear why Israel engaged the second Lebanon war. Jerusalem’s Haaretz newspaper characterized the decision as an “impulsive spasm,” while the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh published an article accusing the Bush administration of colluding with Israel to attack Hizbullah as a precursor to a possible preemptive U.S. attack on Iran. Either way, it is now clear that the war was a strategic failure. The enormous quantity of bombs Israel dropped turned Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, into an icon of Arab unity and righteous resistance, and gave Iran an important achievement in its struggle to undermine the legitimacy of moderate Arab regimes.

Yet even as the strategic thinking of Israel’s leaders remains obscure, the second Lebanon war is symptomatic of the militarism of the modern Israeli state. Since the hubris-inducing victory of 1967, the Israeli government has squandered the goodwill originally extended to the secular, democratic Zionist project. The reason is not — as Israel’s apologists would have us imagine — because of growing anti-Semitism. It is because the world has watched curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, political assassinations, and illegal settlements slowly but surely shatter an entire people. Many Israelis — and Israel’s American supporters — still think of Israel as the David defending itself with restraint against the Goliath of the Arab world. That this self-description is palpably absurd — Israel is a regional colonial power, with one of the most powerful militaries in the world — is evident to all but the most ideological observers. Equally clear is that the victims are Palestinian, or Lebanese as the case may be. They are not Israeli, and no blithe assertions about Arab terrorism — or worse yet, the legacy of the Holocaust — will convince the world otherwise.

In 1967, when General Ariel Sharon offered to “wipe out the Egyptian army” for a generation, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told him, “Nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here.” Today, most Israeli security experts believe terrorism against Israel — from within Palestine and without — cannot be defeated unless Israel offers Palestine a credible prospect for achieving statehood. Without such a political prospect, Israeli retaliations degenerate into vengeance that has no claim to greater moral justification than Palestinian terrorism. Specifically, Israel could offer Palestine: a clear agreement that any Palestinian state would be limited to Gaza and the West Bank, nothing more; a promise that if the right of return is offered to some of the estimated four million Palestinians illegally expelled from Israel, it would not be enough to threaten Israel’s Jewish demographics; and a negotiated settlement on the administration of Jerusalem.

Hamas’s top elected official, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, has indicated he would accept these or similar terms in principle. “We have no problem with a sovereign Palestinian state over all our lands within the 1967 borders,” Haniyeh recently told an analyst in his Gaza City office, shortly before an Israeli missile destroyed it. “But we need the West as a partner to help us through.”

As for Israel, it seems self-evident that a Palestinian state along the original 1967 borders — within which 90 percent of Israelis live — represents the best option Israel has for securing its future. It would fulfill Israel’s obligation to international law, which for 40 years has mandated the return of the Occupied Territories to Palestine. It may convince the rest of the Middle East that Israel does not believe its citizens are the only people who count. And it would stave off what Ariel Sharon called the “demographic nightmare” threatening Israel: At current rates, Palestinians and other Arabs in the unsettled areas of the West Bank will outnumber Jewish Israelis in three to five years (some observers say they already do). This means that if Israel does not disengage from the territories, it will become either a non-Jewish democracy or a Jewish state with a disenfranchised Arab majority. It will not remain both democratic and Jewish.

Unfortunately, however, there may now be enough large, effectively irremovable settlements in the West Bank (which contain an estimated 260,000 residents) to permanently preclude a full evacuation of the occupied territories. As Haaretz found in February, “The Israeli government has, over the last few years, almost totally severed the West Bank from the Jordan Valley and transformed the Jordan Valley into a Jewish region. … Between the eastward expansion of Ma’aleh Adumim, the westward expansion of the Jordan Valley communities, and the expansion of the settlement blocs toward the Green Line, the Palestinians are left with no territory on which to establish a state.”

If this is true, we must begin to consider the possibility of a one-state solution. If Israel has made it impossible to give back to the Palestinian people what is rightfully theirs, then we must consider the possibility that Israel must offer Palestinians the right to be citizens of Israel. This would entail significant security hurdles, but would not be impossible; after all, every other major democracy in the Western world provides the opportunity for ethno-religious diversity, even when that diversity comes with racial tension.

Of course, this would represent the most dramatic possible backfire to Israel’s current unilateralism. Israel was created out of the ashes of the Holocaust as a haven for persecuted Jews everywhere. Its creation was necessary. But it is possible that through years of repression and flagrant disregard for international law, Israel has forfeited its chance to be the state of the Jews. If so, this would represent a great tragedy for all who believed — and continue to believe — in the potential of a secular, democratic Zionist project.

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