Zionist Colonialism, Palestinian 'Trauma'

BEIRUT -- A juxtaposition of several simultaneous events this week indicates just how difficult it is going to be to achieve any meaningful progress in Arab-Israeli peace talks, when the heart of the conflict is land that Israelis and Palestinians both claim as their ancestral patrimony. The four events are:
• the American drive to secure confidence-building measures from the Arabs in return for Israel’s freezing of its settlements in occupied Arab lands;
• Israel’s demand that we Arabs recognize it as a “Jewish state”;
• the Israeli government’s forcible eviction of Arab Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district of Arab east Jerusalem; and,
• the Israeli speaker of parliament attempting to show, unconvincingly, that he understands how the creation of Israel in 1948 was such a “trauma” for the Palestinians who were made homeless and exiled by the event.

These events simultaneously highlight that ever since 1947-48, this conflict has been and continues to be defined by Zionist-Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs that generates sustained Arab resistance. It remains totally in the realm of fantasy to expect the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world to formally recognize and live with Israel as a “Jewish state” when it evicts dozens of Palestinians from homes they own in Arab east Jerusalem and replaces them with Jewish settlers. Such ethnic cleansing of Arabs and implanting of Jewish settlers captures the single most sinister aspect of Zionism for the Arabs that we have fought, mostly unsuccessfully, for the past 60 years or more.

Israelis now defy the United States along with the rest of the world in continuing their settlement and colonization of Arab lands occupied in 1967. The Obama administration will soon have to make the choice that has confronted all other recent American leaderships: Does it try and force Israel to comply with international law and UN resolutions and live according to the rules that all countries are asked to honor? Or, does it succumb to Israeli obstinacy and the threats of the American pro-Israel lobby, and instead seek the easier route of demanding more concessions from the Arabs in order to placate Israel?

The problem with demanding more Arab concessions and “confidence-building” measures in order to make Israel feel secure enough to comply with the dictates of law and morality is that this approach has failed consistently. Israel continues to kill, imprison and expel Palestinians, and colonize their land. The Arabs, not surprisingly, no longer accept to play the fool by making gestures to accept Israel while Israel keeps cleansing Jerusalem of its Arab inhabitants.

The most depressing aspect of all this, going back to the 1940s, is that Israelis refuse to acknowledge that what they see as the miracle of the birth of their state came at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. About half the native Arab population of Palestine was exiled in 1947-48, and they and their descendants now comprise the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees who mostly reside in lands adjacent to their ancestral Palestine. Israel refuses to admit any role in the creation of the refugee issue, despite extensive documentation by Israeli, Arab and international historians of Israel’s extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns that deliberately drove out or caused over 700,000 Palestinians to flee during the 1947-48 fighting.

Israeli Knesset (parliament) Speaker Reuven Rivlin this week once again accentuated the Israeli collective blind spot when it comes to acknowledging major responsibility for the dismemberment and exile of the Palestinians. In remarks delivered August 3, according to a Haaretz newspaper account, he called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel, urging the founding of a "true partnership" between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of "the special needs and unique character of each of the sides."

In his speech, Rivlin was reported to have said that "the establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel's Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line -- a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for."

That’s it? Rivlin admits that the wholesale dismemberment, occupation and exile of Arab Palestine was something that “accompanied” the creation of Israel, but he will not admit that the two are causally linked? Perhaps similar to the Native Americans’ experience of some “trauma” when the American colonies were created and expanded into an independent country -- but these were two independent and unrelated experiences?

If Israelis really want to coexist with the Arabs, they will have to summon the courage and honesty to admit how Zionism dismembered Arab Palestine in 1947-48, and Jews everywhere must finally break the ugly bond between Zionism and colonialism.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.