Anti-Zionist Israelis would turn Jewish state into another Diaspora

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Many people today advocate policies that would eliminate the Jewish and Zionist nature of Israel by recreating a one-state Palestine, one in which Arabs would in fact probably constitute a majority. They label Israel an “apartheid” country, since it ostensibly “privileges” Jews.

You might be surprised to learn that there are even some Israeli intellectuals who support this option. They regard the entire 1947-1949 War of Independence as a conspiracy of the Zionist leadership, which intended right from the beginning to expel the Palestinians from the country to turn it into a Jewish state.

According to this view, explained Israeli journalist and former Knesset member Uri Avnery in an article published during Passover, “the soldiers of 1948 were war criminals who implemented a vicious policy, much as the pioneers of the preceding generation were land robbers, knights of ethnic cleansing by expulsion and expropriation.”

Avnery is a longtime political activist and founder of the left-wing Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc), which was a vigorous critic of the recent Gaza operation.

Uri Davis, born in Jerusalem, who describes himself as a “Palestinian Hebrew,” is another such anti-Zionist. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Durham’s Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in England.

Davis’s latest book to classify Israel as an apartheid state was published in 2004, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, which describes what Davis refers to as war criminal policies against the Palestinian Arabs: mass deportation and ethnic cleansing in 1947-1949, followed by military government, prolonged curfews, roadblocks, and economic, social, cultural, civil and political strangulation. For him, Israel is a rogue state.

The book was, not surprisingly, praised by the late Palestinian academic Hisham Sharabi, the co-founder of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington and the longtime editor of the influential Journal of Palestine Studies. Sharabi called it “a devastating critique of Israel’s internal Apartheid system and by extension the entire ideology of political Zionism.”

Another academic who subscribes to this perspective is Haifa-born Ilan Pappe. A professor of history, also at the University of Exeter, he previously taught at Haifa University from 1984 to 2007. In 2006 Pappe published The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which asserted that the Zionist leadership intentionally planned to evict the Arabs in the country during the War of Independence through terrorist attacks executed by the Haganah and the Irgun.

The premeditated expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians in 1947-1949 was, he wrote, part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state.

Pappe supports academic, economic and political boycotts of Israel, and his work has been praised by anti-Zionists such as Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi. Khalidi, who has taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton, considered The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine to be “a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness.”

True, these writers represent only a small minority of Israelis, but their influence should not be discounted. The fact that they are Israeli Jews is, for opponents of Israel, a piece of good fortune. It provides cover for antisemites who can cite their books.

After all, if even Israelis acknowledge that the creation and very existence of the Jewish state is a crime, why can’t others? And do their proposed solutions not make the vision of a state where Arabs and Jews will live in harmony more than just a utopian fantasy?

But even if the destruction of the Jewish state would not lead to the eviction and mass murder of its Jewish population, it would still mean that, for Jews, the land of Israel itself will have become, politically, just another part of the Diaspora.

It would no longer be a Jewish state, but merely a place with a large Jewish population – like the pre-1914 Russian Pale of Settlement, or parts of, say, Los Angeles, New York or Toronto today.

Assuming this “post-Israel” remained a democracy (a dubious proposition), Jews could theoretically aspire to any political office – but only as individuals, even if their base of support happened to be fellow Jews.

After all, a Jew has been chancellor of Austria, premier of France, president of Guyana, and prime minister of New Zealand. Many Jews have been elected to the US Congress, the Canadian House of Commons, and other parliaments.

But no one would mistake those countries for a Jewish homeland or confuse Georgetown, Ottawa, Paris, Vienna, Washington or Wellington with Jerusalem.