DEJA VU
Ilan Pappe  

There is a disturbing sense of deja vu if one watches closely the recent events in Palestine. It brings us back to distant and more recent destinations. The strongest sense is the recurrence of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah. More than fifty years later there is a sense that the future of mandatory Palestine was not as yet decided, and that its future is going to be determined by force and not by negotiations. In 2002, the question has different geographical dimensions. The focus is on who will control the only 22% of Palestine which had not been part of the state of Israel in 1948. Israel in 1948 was built on 56% of Palestine allocated to it by the UN and additional 22% that were occupied by force. Most of the Palestinians living in the newly formed state, roughly 900,000, were expelled by force, their villages destroyed and their city neighborhoods settled by Jewish immigrants. The making of Israel was thus enabled by military power, ethnic cleansing and de-Arabization of the country.


Ever since 1967, and more so since 1987, the future of the remaining 22% is the main issue of the local, and to some extent regional, agenda. Until 1993, the various Israeli governments wished to keep all the area under their full control, short of formal annexation, while expanding Jewish settlement and executing a policy of slow transfer. Any popular or armed resistance was brutally squashed and yet the first Intifada led the Israeli government in 1993 to be content with direct control only over part of the 22% and to allow for the creation of a bantustan in the rest. This map, together with a demand to forgo the Palestinian right of return, was presented as a dictate to Arafat in Camp David in the summer of 2000. His refusal and a chain of, by now known, events have led to the outbreak of the second Intifada.

The margin between what Arafat was offered in Camp David and the vision of Ariel Sharon in 2002 is very narrow. The difference is in square kilometers that should be allocated to the Bantustan but it is the same principle that guides both ex-generals. And the principle is a Palestinian political entity devoid of any significant sovereignty and independence, with an ‘end of conflict’ situation in which the Palestinians would give up their Right of Return or aspirations for a capital in Eastern Jerusalem. Sharon is not alone; he has the full support of the Israeli Labour party; not only in his vision of the future but also in the tactics employed by him to reach his goals. Through his war against the Palestinian authority and the creation of what he calls ‘security zones’, Sharon wants to impose by force a new map on Palestine and Israel. Such a map should ensure, as had been the Zionist aspiration in 1948, an Israeli control over as much area as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. Massive jailing, transfer and intimidation were and will be used to redraw the map of Israel. Double talk and failing any real chance for negotiations, in the few lulls in the fighting that opened such opportunities, are also part of the same strategy.

This is where the second, more recent, deja vu, that of 1982 Lebanon, appears. It is the same Sharon who believes that it is within his power to impose new political realties. He wanted to create ‘a new Lebanon’, and now he thinks he has the power to create a new Israel and Palestine by moving a population, killing thousands and de-judaizing additional parts of Palestine.

But the repetitions of history are sometimes worse than the original events and less acceptable instances of human folly and cruelty. The power of Israel and the power it is willing to employ are far more destructive than in the past. The systems that mobilize public opinion inside the Jewish State are far more sophisticated and effective than in the past and hence the voices of dissent are fewer and weaker.

America is still behind Israel as it had been in 1948 and 1982, but at least part of Europe is not. The Arab world is committed, but as in the past mostly in words not deeds. The Palestinians are so far alone against a powerful enemy poised on destroying them, as in the past. The Israeli means vary with time, the intend is still there. Many Jews in Israel, nonetheless, still adhere to noble aspirations such as the wish to build a democracy, to maintain a very modernized economy and expand the wonders of Jewish and Hebraic culture and existence. But all these aspirations are dwarfed, and indeed are defeated, by the decision to sustain all these achievements at the expanse of the indigenous population of Palestine, at whatever price.

Other states which would have opted for a similar policy and strategy would have long been defined as pariah states. But a European guilt complex (which indeed is understandable given the horrors of the holocaust) and a strong Jewish lobby in the United states, absolved so far politicians such as Sharon from facing similar fate to that of Slavodan Milosovictch.

The last two weeks the amazing immunity of Israel led some elements in the global civil society, for the first time, to question that extraordinary status. And this even before the full extent of the havoc wreaked by the IDF was exposed, due to the Israeli mini war against media coverage of the IDF actions in the West Bank.

Even with the attempt to cover-up, some basic facts emerge about what the IDF is doing and what is basically Sharon’s strategy. The IDF is poised on destroying not only the Palestinian Authority, but also the infrastructure for independent, or even autonomous, Palestinian existence in the West Bank. This would create a vacuum Sharon wants to fill with a mixture of two old Israeli notions of how to ‘rule’ Arab areas: Israeli officers fulfilling the task of controlling life in areas deemed crucial by Israel and a network of collaborators, modeled on the Villages Societies, Sharon had tried to establish in vain in 1981 as a substitute to the PLO. The way to impose such a new regime can be done in two modes: either Sharon would reach an agreement with a local Palestinian leadership, sponsored by some Arab states, Europe and the United States, or more likely, force would be used again, but in a more subtle manner, to ‘dilute’ - - if we use for a moment the inhuman and de-humanized new political dictionary of Israel – the West Bank population. With what ever means the government could find, it would ‘encourage’ movement of Palestinians to Gaza and to Jordan.

Sharon has about ten ministers in his government who endorse the plan openly, and few in the Labour party who implicitly take similar positions. In the process, and as we come closer to the next Israeli general elections, the Labour party, may leave the government, probably only to come back, after it, as a member of yet another unity government. But this should not blind us to the responsibility of the Labour party leaders to the destruction of the Palestinian social, economic and political infrastructure in the West Bank, and maybe even later in the Gaza Strip. A destruction that has been accompanied by humiliating acts and abuses of human rights on a collective and massive scale, as well as on a very symbolic level, towards Palestinian leaders, up to the top, to President Arafat. Acts of humiliation that were also accompanied by massacres and physical destruction of houses and roads. All part of a punitive mission guised as ‘war against terrorism’.

Very few in Israel point to alternative interpretation of the ‘war against terrorism’. Shocked by the human bombs that have produced a sense of personal insecurity and rising death toll, the Israeli public in general is unable and unwilling to look through the catastrophic plans of the man they have democratically elected in an unprecedented majority. His posture also caters well to the racist and ethnocentric dormant attitudes of vast majority of Jews in the country. Attitudes that had been nurtured through the years by the educational and cultural systems of the country.

A coalition of groups opposing the war is trying to offer an alternative explanation to the bombs exploding in Israel and to the general Israeli policy. This coalition is made of two blocs. The major one is lead by ‘Peace Now’ and has very little chance of providing a significant alternative. Its discourse, and genuine conviction, is that Barak did make the most generous offer to the Palestinian side and that Arafat disappointed them. There most common discourse is that of, ‘notwithstanding Arafat’s unforgivable conduct, we have no other option but to conclude peace with this awful man’. What they have in store, is again the equation Barak made between Israeli withdrawal and peace. They did not clarify to themselves and to the Jewish public what ‘peace’ entails. As far as one can tell it is one without a solution to the refugee problem, without a change in the status of one million strong Palestinian minority in Israel – on whose vast support they rely for their demonstrations – and without full sovereignty for the future Palestinian state. The evils of occupation are recognized, but mainly as corrupting the Jewish society, not as crimes against the local population, and definitely not as a continuos evil that had begun with the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Still this is the only coalition that can recruit massive demonstration to illicit outside pressure on Israel to end its present military operations, and one should not underestimate the urgency of such a development, but I doubt its ability to produce the necessary change in the Jewish public opinion that would open the way for peace and reconciliation. This element within the anti war coalition widens the margins of the public debate in Israel, in a time when the electronic media, have silenced any debate or reports that question the government’s policies, But even with it, these margins are still quite narrow as far as the attitude to the Palestinians, their plight and rights are concerned.

The smaller group in this coalition is not even legitimized by the major component. It is centered around non-Zionist Jewish organizations and most of the Israeli-Palestinian parties. It offers genuine alternative explanation and a way forward. But it is marginalized and fought against not only by the establishment, but also by the major component in the new peace and anti war collation. Its importance lies in its contacts with regional and global organizations that can mutually empower the local and external action against occupation and for peace. This small component in the Israeli public space, as long as it is not totally silenced, can point to a wider set of issues which construct the oppressive nature of Zionism and Israel: the apartheid characteristics of the policies towards the Palestinian minority in the country, the historical context of the Israeli actions against the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the need of the Jewish society to first acknowledge, then reconcile with the crimes committed ever since the ethnic cleansing of 1948 until the recent ‘Homat Magen’ (A Defensive Waal) operation. The name should remind of operation for the Peace in Galilee of 1982. Two euphemisms Israel employed in destructive wars against Lebanon and the Palestinians.

If I may be allowed, a more personal note, I would add a personal deja vu. As in 1993, during the hey days of Oslo, so also to day, the same despairing frustration sips in, about the future. I argued then, as I argue today that even Peace Now is part of the same Zionist outlook which does not allow either recognition in the past evils or in the future needs of genuine reconciliation with the Palestinian victims of Zionism and Israel. I am convinced today as I was convinced then that a far more fundamental and structural change has to occur in the Jewish society for that to happen. Ten years ago I pointed nervously that we did not have the time to wait for another ten years to pass as more tragedies were in store. Now again the sense that there is no time for long term transformation is even more acute. We are definitely running out of time today given the danger of transfer and even genocide, hovering above us. There is a need for strong international intervention and pressure, so that the Israeli state and Jewish society alike would understand the moral and political price they would have to pay, for not adopting past and present policies.

People abroad who read what I - and my friends with similar views - write, think wrongly that we easily scribble these analyses and predictions. Quite to the contrary, a very long process of hesitation, deliberation and articulation took place before these positions were formulated. They pose the holder of such views in a very precarious position in his or her own society. We are treated at best as insane and at worst as traitors, even by those who see themselves as the upholders of the values of free speech and opinion in Israel. I am not analyzing such a posture from the point of view of risk or retribution, but rather from that of effectiveness. How can people, like myself, so alienated by their own society and so abhorred by what it had done and its government is doing, be effective in changing local public opinion. It sounds almost a quixotic exercise. But then I remember all the Jews who joined the ANC, the civil rights movement in the USA and the anti-colonialist movement in France. I recall the brave Italians and Spaniards who did not succumb to the lure of Fascism and I drew courage from all these examples to go on telling my own people, from within, to break the mirror that shows them a superior moral body and replace it with the one that exposes the crimes they, or on their behalf their various leaderships and governments committed, against humanity and the Palestinian people.