An end to the Israel Experiment?

An End to the Israel Experiment?
A very provocative article with a different perspective.

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March 3, 2003
An End to the Israel Experiment?
Unmaking a Grievous Error
By KIRKPATRICK SALE - Counter-Punch

Now that Ariel Sharon has been returned to power and his regime
endorsed in its brutal occupation of Palestine, it seems to me that
the time has come to ask whether the 50-year-old experiment known as
the state of Israel has proven to be a failure and should be
abandoned.

Two things seem abundantly clear from the long months of multi-ethnic
carnage in the Middle East. The first is that Israel cannot live in
peace with the Palestinians unless it finally establishes a
dictatorial apartheid rule and confines them in Arab bantustans.

The second is that the Palestinians will not live in peace with
Israel, not even if they achieve their promised statehood, for they
share the deep, decades-old hostility to the Jewish state that has
not abated but increased throughout the Arab world in recent years.
We may disregard as hollow the rhetoric claiming that Israel would be
accepted if it was confined to its pre-1967 borders, which is
something that it will not do, anyway.

With the Likud electoral victory, we can expect, even if eventually
some American-brokered peace plan is nominally agreed upon, that
Israel will fortify its borders, continue occupying Palestinian
territory at will, bolster its support for West Bank settlements, and
keep on using military retaliation for any Palestinian acts of
sabotage or terror. And that Palestine, though most of its armed
organizations will have been decimated, will be unable or unwilling
to stop such acts, including suicide bombing, newly fueled by the
hatred stemming from the present Israeli occupation.

Israel will win this little war against the intifada, and Palestine
will be effectively disembowled, but there will not be peace. In
fact, there is guaranteed to be more violence.

And there will continue to be violence as long as Israel exists
amidst a population that for the most part abhors, and in only a few
quarters tolerates, its presence.

We all understand the reason for Israel's existence in the first
place. Guilt, and reparation. But was it not a certain recipe for
unrest and disorder to forcibly establsih a Jewish homeland in the
Middle East and, in effect, put down 2 million Jews in the middle of
200 million Arabs?

What would have happened if it was decided in 1948 that 2 million
African-Americans should be returned to, say, a partitioned Ghana,
supported by an annual $6 billion in aid from the American
government? Or, perhaps more to the point, if those African-
Americans, who arguably deserve reparation of some kind, were
established in that part of the Middle East, approximating the
present borders of Israel, that their African ancestors settled from
about 100,000 years ago on? Their claims of priority would vastly
outrank any Biblical ones for the Jews, but it is hard to think that
they would have been welcomed by the Arabs there, and tolerated only
if they had superior military power and the support of the U.S.

Yes, I am arguing that the original idea of a Jewish state, from the
Balfour Declaration on down, was a mistake, and to establish it in an
Islamic Middle East essentially by force and with the emiseration of
millions of natives was a tragic mistake. We are reaping the awful
results of that error today.

It is of course not so easy to know what to do to undo that mistake,
but I would argue that a world that can make a state can unmake it.
In its place one might establish a non-religious Palestine covering
all of the original British Mandate in which Jews, Moslems,
Christians, and others would have equal rights and equal votes, as a
few Israelis have suggested in recent years; or a "bi-ethnic/bi-
national" state with equal powers toJews and Moslems something along
the lines of Switzerland, Belgium, or a future Ireland; or an Islamic
state that would be forced by international vigilence to give, and
maintain, full religious and political rights to the Jews, who would
then be free to settle in the West Bank and elsewhere.

The process need not be unduly rapid-and just the prospect of it
might well be enough to put an end to the present intifada-and it
should include an extensive international effort to resettle those
Israelis who would not want to remain in the Middle East. Given the
skill and intelligence of the Israeli workforce one can imagine that
a great many countries would welcome such settlers, even in large
aggregates. The diaspora, after all, has existed since 70 A.D., far
longer than the state has, and might even be thought of as the
natural or historic role of Jewry.

I know full well that such ideas are an anathema to most Israelis,
who after all have made the land their home in the last 50 years. But
I would suggest that the way things are going their options in
maintaining a Jewish state are limited: an apartheid state with
Palestinians forcibly removed from Israael and no end to the
violence; a Stalinist police state with an end to both violence and
democracy; and a democratic one-person-one-vote state encompassing
all Jews and Arabs, in which Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.

Among those choices, abandoning the experiment of the Israeli state
does not seem so far-fetched or undesirable.
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Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of nine books, including Rebels
Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial
Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age and The Conquest of
Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. He can be
reached at: kirksale@c...