I am a child of World War II. I was born in Sydney, Australia, in
1942. My earliest childhood memories are of my mother's parents,
German Jews who had managed to escape from Europe before the war
broke out. For my first three years of life, I lived in the midst
of the dark cloud of hope, fear and doubt in which they were
constantly enveloped: hoping that their many relatives still in
Germany would somehow survive the war; fearing (as the war went on
and news began to emerge of the dreadful happenings there) that
they would not; and doubting whether other people could, in any
way, imagine, or even cared about, their anguish.
By war's end, it became clear that none of their large extended
family in Europe had survived. As a child I grew up in the aura of
their awful pain and I somehow absorbed into myself their terrible
loss - a loss for which there were then no words and no name. Now
it is called the Shoah, the holocaust.
But my grandparents had some relatives who, in the mid-1920s, for a
mixture of religious and political reasons, had gone to live in
Palestine. From time to time, amidst the wartime gloom and in the
years immediately after 1945, we would receive letters - I still
remember their fascinating postal stamps, picturing a domed
building, and bearing Arabic as well as English and Hebrew
characters - that also provoked mixed feelings in my grandparents:
a mixture of relief and hope, of anxiety and fear, as well as some
gratitude that others had somehow survived the slaughter in Europe.
After 1945, the tempo of my life, following theirs, began to be set
by the daily radio broadcasts detailing the collapse of the British
Mandate in Palestine, the declaration of Israel's statehood, and
the subsequent 1948 war. In many ways, I was formed by those
experiences.
Imagination and Demography
From my relation to my grandparents, I formed some of my early
understandings of history, politics and identity: ideas about the
tragedy of a people's loss of its independence and autonomy; about
the pain of dispersion and the erosion of human dignity which it
entails; about the vulnerability to which all stateless nations and
their members are exposed in this modern world of ours. On that
basis, I came to identify with and take a special pride in the
achievements of the State of Israel, which in my own lifetime had
accomplished such a dramatic reversal in the degraded condition of
the Jewish people.
For a while, that framework of historical understanding sufficed
and held firm for me. But not really for that long. One central
component of the learning experience of my entire adult life has
been my coming to terms with what, from the ashes of Jewish
destruction, the creation of the State of Israel had entailed. Jews
had indeed their ancient religious and spiritual connections with
the Holy Land. Throughout their history, they had prayed for and
dreamed of Jerusalem and made pious journeys and even returned to
live in the Holy City, but the Holy Land was not empty and
uninhabited.
The religious imagination and the land's historical demography
provided pictures which were far from identical. So the creation of
the State of Israel had entailed the uprooting of some 450 Arab
towns and villages and of 700,000 Palestinians. Alongside the Shoah
- as its uncanny counterpart - the catastrophe of the Nakba, too,
was a devastation and a disaster. By force, another dispersion,
another diaspora, had been created.
I had wept to read of the destruction of the many Jewish
communities, large and small, of Central and Eastern Europe, and
was entitled to do so. Now I wept, too, to read of the expulsion,
in 1948, of the Palestinians from Lydda and from Ramleh. I was
entitled and also obliged to do so. This is not to equate Lydda and
Ramleh in 1948 with the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943 - all such events are
unique and, in some sense, incomparable - but we can find, and must
recognize in them (despite their differences of time and place and
circumstance), some common human themes, moral lessons and
imperatives.
As new maps were drawn to reflect these newly created "facts on the
ground" in Israel/Palestine, legitimization was incrementally given
to processes for which the world has since coined the ominous and
chillingly appropriate term "ethnic cleansing." This process - of
possession, of new map-creation, and of the framing and
legitimization of new triumphalist, national narratives on the
basis of those newly drawn maps, with all their renamed towns and
villages - happened, not once, but twice (the immediate historical
events don't matter here) in 1948 and again in 1967.
Learning the Lesson
All this has happened. How are we to live with it? What is
essential is to see and to admit what happened, and to draw the
human and moral implications which flow from this.
The basic moral and political lesson must be this. Ours is and,
perhaps, must be a world of nation-states, where every distinctive,
recognizable people may see itself as a community of common
historical identity and political fate called a nation; and where
every such nation is entitled to organize its common life within
the political framework of a state, as the symbol and vehicle of
its nationhood. Yet, in such a world, it is clearly impossible,
both morally and, therefore, also politically to build one's
nationhood upon the denial or negation of the nationhood of another
people.
This is the situation we are addressing today. This is the mutual
tragedy of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. How did this
situation arise? It is clear that its origins go back to the
beginnings of the age of modern nationalism.
Within the Ottoman Empire, a distinctive Palestinian national
identity began to take shape from the mid-19th century. Meanwhile,
in Europe too, especially within the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
minorities asserted their claim to nationhood where they were local
majorities. A majority nowhere, Europe's Jews were often defined as
lying outside those new national communities.
In a world now reorganizing itself on this new national basis, some
Jews too took the same option. If the modern world was a world of
nations, and if the Jews, by virtue of their special history and
cultural distinctiveness, were not a proper part of anyone else's
national community, then they would simply have to create one of
their own, many felt.
This movement, the revolution within Jewish life to define the
Jewish situation and redesign Jewish identity in modern national
terms, took for itself the name of Zionism, orienting its dream of
autonomy and local political self-sufficiency, not within an
increasingly inhospitable Europe, but to the Holy Land of their
remote ancestors, which had remained the focus of their spiritual
and religious life during 2,000 years of dispersal, exile and
diaspora.
In this form, Zionism won some significant moral and political
support in influential circles in Europe, often because, by
supporting Zionism, many Europeans could avail themselves of an
apparently low-cost and conveniently "offshore" or external
solution to Europe's own internal problem: what to do with its
"indigestible" Jews who had been declared "unassimilable" into the
national life of the great European nations.
Balfour and Buber
So far, all this was just so much day dreaming. What changed things
was World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empires. One week after our Australian Light Horsemen
defeated the Ottoman forces at Beersheba in late 1917, opening the
way for General Allenby to take Jerusalem, the British government
issued its Balfour Declaration, supporting the establishment of a
"Jewish national home" in Palestine. Subsequently, as a British
Mandated territory under the League of Nations, Palestine was to
become the arena for two distinct nationalisms - a local
Palestinian nationalism and an initially immigrant Jewish
nationalism - to develop their rival agendas. Contested by rival
nationalisms, Palestine became (as the philosopher Martin Buber put
it) a "land of two peoples."
With his passionate but practical moral logic, Buber was able to
admit that even the best of the early Zionists "knew that we were
reducing the space for future generations of Palestinians."
Ultimately, Buber argued, if things came to an impasse, then - in
view of the historical circumstances which had brought the
returning Jews into contact with the Palestinians, and in view of
the fact that the Zionist project of overcoming Jewish dispersion
and homelessness was to be realized alongside and among the
Palestinians - it was up to the Zionist side to seek and make
possible some mutually agreed accommodation with the Palestinian
people.
What no discussion of the Middle East can ignore is that the land
then known as Palestine is now a land claimed by two peoples, two
nations, two authentic, locally based nationalisms. As Buber
continually argued, these two peoples had somehow to work out for
themselves the basis for mutual understanding, for historical,
political, economic, cultural and religious conciliation.
Given a little historical vision and generosity of spirit on each
side, Buber maintained, they had real prospects of achieving some
acceptable, even culturally creative, accommodation. Recognition of
this fact - in those long-ago pre-Netanyahu days - fell squarely
within the limits of acceptable Zionist debate. (In those times,
the morally myopic and clichéd slogan that Zionism was the
project of "a people without a land for a land without people,"
convinced few who had eyes to see.)
How is conciliation of the kind urged by Buber to be attained in
our time and what is its essential precondition? Those now deciding
Israel's future must accept what a majority of Israelis now
recognize. They must accept the case for Palestinian statehood. As
long as the Palestinian people are denied that recognition, there
is no basis upon which they can effectively enter into the
construction of a common peaceful future with Israel. It was that
possibility which, five years ago, Rabin and Peres implicitly
accepted; it is that recognition which subsequently Netanyahu has
cruelly and even cynically denied.
Conditions for Peace
In the one land of two peoples, there have emerged, like it or not,
two authentic local nationalisms, and, now, two nations. One is
shaped by its project of return to an ancestral biblical home. The
other is born of its experience of Ottoman overrule and neglect, of
British Mandatory government, of emergent Israeli statehood, of
Arab military defeat and subsequent abandonment amidst the
balance-of-power scramble of Arab international politics. It is
shaped by Nakba, dispersion, diaspora and the ensuing powerful urge
to remedy the pain of national homelessness.
These have been, it is true, two contending nations and
nationalisms, but they are now nations which, because of their
long-standing, but not immutable rivalry, are intimately
intertwined in each other's origins and development. They have
developed together, cheek by angry jowl, throughout the 20th
century, becoming inseparably part of each other's innermost
nature.
To deny - as Netanyahu and his supporters do - the Palestinian
entitlement to statehood while asserting their own, to base the
overcoming of one's own homelessness on the imposed homelessness of
another people, is simply (in the Israeli writer Amos Oz's telling
phrase) "moral autism." Between these two peoples, peace is
possible only by finding, on the moral as well as on the
geographical terrain which they share, the room and also the
political will to create two parallel states: one Israeli and the
other Palestinian.
The State of Israel rests on a certain logic: that of the
entitlement of peoples, in a world of nation-states, to statehood.
It is a logic which cannot be applied selectively. It is a logic
which, if you accept it at all, pushes inexorably towards the
conclusion that Israelis and Palestinians must, somehow, work out
together the terms under which both peoples may have a state of
their own within that one, small, richly historied, and much
contested piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the
Jordan River.
If Israel is to make peace in this fashion with the Palestinians,
with their active cooperation and wholehearted consent, it can only
be made under conditions which embody the recognition that -
whatever the other disparities between an established nation-sate
and an emergent, still stateless nation - each party is an equal
part of the process of fashioning the conditions of mutual
acceptance. The only basis for successful negotiations is the
premise of equality. Each side must accept the other's full
entitlement to statehood.
Undermining Oslo
Regrettably, it is this point from which, under Binyamin Netanyahu,
Israel has conspicuously retreated. His objective has been not to
attack directly the Oslo agreements and the political process of
mutual national recognition which it set in motion. Rather, while
paying the so-called peace process lip-service and making cynically
selective use of the Oslo understandings when it has suited him, he
has sought to stall and negate, to empty and cancel, that process
from within. His government's consistent policy has been one of
calculated provocation, coupled with the speedy disowning and
blustering denunciation of its predictably damaging consequences.
It is a sickening spectacle.
Each side needs the other's recognition of the historically
grounded legitimacy of its national identity and rights. So long as
acceptance of this fact is not the basis from which both sides
conduct serious, substantive negotiations, there is no prospect of
enduring reconciliation between them. And it is Binyamin Netanyahu
who now refuses this basis of negotiation, this essential
foundation of reconciliation and peace.
Those who desire the end, must accept the means. If Netanyahu and
his followers truly want peace, they must accept that the
precondition for negotiating and creating peace is nothing other
than complete and symmetrical mutual recognition between the
Israeli and Palestinian sides, between the Israeli and Palestinian
nations. There can be no basis for negotiation that does not
recognize and make possible the creation of a Palestinian state
alongside, and on equal terms with, Israel.
From a speech delivered at the commemoration of the Nakba at
the University of Technology Sydney on May 15, 1998.
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