Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only
sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been
living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as
colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political
rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab
countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of
Palestinians overcoming exile and exercising their right of return seem
as far away as ever. Hardly more promising are the immediate prospects
for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with the
international and Arab consensus, in place since at least 1976 and
rejected by the United States and Israel.
Neither armed struggle from bordering Arab countries and the occupied
territories nor popular mobilization and political struggle have brought
liberation and decolonization. The defeat or containment of one intifada
after another has only strengthened the Israeli colonial presence in the
West Bank. Despite the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from Gaza, the
area’s 1.3 million Palestinians are under intensified blockade and
siege. Since the summer nearly 400 Palestinians have been killed, many
of them civilians, as in the recent Beit Hanoun massacre. Haughtily told
by the United States that the lack of Palestinian “democracy” was the
main obstacle to peace, Palestinians freely cast their ballots in the
legislative elections in January, only to be punished for their
democratic choice: threatened by Israel with “starvation” and denied the
funds needed to pay the salaries of civil servants, the breadwinners for
much of Palestinian society. Walls, checkpoints, closures, collective
punishments, roadblocks, Jewish-only roads, massacres by shelling,
assassinations, mass imprisonment and a poverty rate of 70 percent have
come to define the Palestinian condition under occupation.
The diplomacy of the Oslo period has also failed to restitute—even
some—Palestinian national rights. In fact, as far as the Israeli elite
were concerned, the Oslo framework was never intended to end the
occupation or to bring about withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Oslo has
proved to be yet another version of the Allon Plan, first presented
after the 1967 war by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon to Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol. The Allon Plan proposed a truncated autonomy for
Palestinians in the West Bank (Allon suggested that
Arab-majority areas be placed under Jordanian jurisdiction), with
substantial quantities of their land annexed to Israel, which would
control all borders and entry points to the territory as a whole.
Since 1993, under the guise of peacemaking, Israel has doubled the
number of settlements and settlers (around 400,000) in the occupied
territories. For Israel “peace” and “security” have come to mean a
Palestinian population cut off from Israel yet at the same time totally
dependent on it—a recipe for continuing Palestinian subjugation and
Israeli domination. Palestinians have, as a result, been undergoing
their worst ordeal since their dispossession and expulsion from most of
Palestine in 1948 and their occupation by Israel in 1967. As John
Dugard, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied
territories, put it in his recent report, Palestinians are the first
occupied people in history on whom international sanctions have been
imposed—sanctions that are "possibly the most rigorous form...imposed
in modern times." Palestinian democracy, he concludes, is as curtailed
by the international community as Palestinian freedom of movement
is by Israel.
This bleak picture is compounded by grave internal divisions between
Fatah and Hamas, which in the past year have spilled over into street
confrontations and killings. For the first time in Palestinian history
there looms the possibility of civil war. The political contradictions
between those who seem ready to accept whatever Israel offers
(Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah elite) and
those who seek the complete decolonization of the 1967 lands (Hamas,
grassroots elements in Fatah and the majority of Palestinians) are
rapidly sharpening. Though the Palestinians’ steadfastness is
intact, living under near permanent siege and without hope of
immediate real change could intensify the tendency toward
self-destruction, a prospect that Israel’s leaders are happy to
encourage.
How then to respond to this deepening Palestinian crisis and to Israel’s
relentless drive toward consolidating and expanding the settlement
project? Thus far, there has been no collective or national Palestinian
self-reckoning. But conversations are beginning to take place in
Palestinian communities all over the world. Activists and intellectuals
are beginning to ask the central questions: What is the nature of the
Palestinian crisis today, and how can it be overcome?
The new books by Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah are important in this
regard. Both writers have longstanding records of engagement
with the Palestinian question: Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in
Arab Studies at Columbia University, has published several fine books on
Palestinian nationalism and advised the Palestinian delegation at the
1991 Madrid talks; Abunimah is a founding editor of and frequent
contributor to www.electronicintifada.net, an indispensable online
source of alternative information on the occupation. Both men seek, in
their different ways, to ignite more focused debate and discussion about
fundamental Palestinian and Israeli concerns. Khalidi’s The Iron Cage
examines the causes of the Palestinian failure to achieve statehood,
from the British Mandate in 1922 to Hamas’s recent electoral victory,
while Abunimah’s One Country makes the case for the creation of one
state for Arabs and Jews in all of Israel-Palestine.
Why did the Palestinians fail to achieve statehood before 1948, and what
impact did their defeat have on their national prospects thereafter?
This is the main question that Khalidi tackles in The Iron Cage, a work
of forceful historical analysis written in a spirit of
self-examination. If the Palestinians take center stage in this critical
survey of their leadership, it’s not because Khalidi is "blaming the
victims.“Rather, he is holding them”accountable for their actions and
decisions," as he puts it. Ridiculing Palestinian leadership has long
been a veritable pastime in the West, from Abba Eban’s oft-quoted line
“The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to
the myth that Arafat consigned his people to continuing occupation by
rejecting Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” at Camp David. Khalidi, in
contrast, never loses sight of the fact that the Palestinians had few
good choices, and that the odds against their struggle for
self-determination may have been insurmountable. Those odds are
well suggested by a remark made in 1919 by British Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration
supporting a Jewish “national home” in Palestine: "Zionism, be it right
or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present
needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
Since then, denial of Palestinian national aspirations has been a
constant of Western and Zionist policy in the region, and Khalidi
emphasizes its crucial significance. He minces no words appraising
the US record: "In practice the United States is, and for over sixty
years has been, one of the most determined opponents of Palestinian
self-determination and independence."
As Khalidi underscores, it is these British and American commitments to
Zionism that are centrally responsible for continuing Palestinian
statelessness and dispossession. It has long been argued that
Palestinians—alone among Arab nations—failed to establish
their independence because of their internal weaknesses: the petty
quarrels and betrayals of their elites, their lack of social
development, even an absence of genuine national consciousness. In fact,
Khalidi shows, Palestinian society compared favorably, economically and
socially, to other Arab societies that had emerged from Ottoman
rule. Indeed, it "was manifestly as advanced as any other society in the
region, and considerably more so than several."
Palestine’s history diverged from its neighbors’ because of the external
interest that no other territory in the Arab world attracted: Zionism’s
desire to create a Jewish state and Britain’s sponsorship of its
settler-colonial project. Indeed, without Britain no Jewish state would
have been possible. Britain did everything in its power to nurture
Jewish state institutions and to prevent Palestinian ones from taking
shape, creating, in Khalidi’s words, "a kind of iron cage for the
Palestinians, from which they never succeeded in escaping." Fundamental
inequalities of policy defined British imperialism in Palestine.
For most of the Mandate period, Britain facilitated and supported Jewish
immigration from Europe against the wishes of the Palestinian majority.
Although the British and the Zionist movement came to blows over the
1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase,
Britain’s colonial policies ultimately led to Zionist control of most of
Palestine in 1948, when Jews still constituted only a third of its
population and owned around 6 percent of its land.
But why, Khalidi asks, were the British able to achieve their objectives
against the obvious desires of Palestine’s Arab majority? At times, his
answer skirts dangerously close to circularity—the Palestinians didn’t
achieve statehood because they failed to build state structures that
would contest the British Mandate. But what accounts for this failure?
Khalidi’s answer is tough-minded and unsparing. Rather than establish
“alternative sources of legitimacy” and fight the Mandate, the notables
who led Palestinian society were all too trusting of the British as
intermediaries, with whom they engaged in “ineffectual beseeching.” Thus
did they deprive themselves of political leverage to substantially
affect, much less reverse, the British policy of supporting the creation
of a Jewish national home. If Palestinian leaders were co-opted and
contained by the Mandate’s iron cage, Khalidi suggests, it was in part
because they lacked any real willingness to move against British
imperialism until it was far too late. (The Palestinian elite’s tendency
to entrust their people’s fate to imperial powers would re-emerge during
the Oslo period.)
Even more than this dependence on the Mandatory system, what set the
Palestinian leadership apart from other Arab nationalist elites was its
specifically religious character. These were, in fact, intertwined, as
Khalidi demonstrates in a striking discussion of the role played by Haj
Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Palestine. The British created his
office—raising his stature in order to help them administer the
Mandate—and invested it with powers that no mufti had ever enjoyed in
the history of Islamic religious institutions. This put the Palestinian
national movement at a severe disadvantage: "Lacking effective vehicles
for building toward statehood, either pre-existing, provided by the
British, or developed by the Palestinians themselves, the Arab
population of Palestine was instead granted a religious leadership,
authorized, encouraged, legitimated, subsidized, and always in the end
controlled by the British."
It was only in the early 1930s, with the rise of the Hizb al-Istiqlal
al-Arabi (the Arab Independence Party), that Palestinians turned to mass
resistance to the Zionist project and its British patrons. In contrast
to the mufti and other Palestinian leaders who denounced the British in
speeches while quietly cooperating with them behind the scenes, Istiqlal
advocated Palestinian independence and Arab unity and denounced
cooperation with the Mandate authorities. Istiqlal quickly aroused
opposition from the British, the Zionist movement and from the mufti,
who would tolerate no challenges to his charismatic leadership. (As
Khalidi ruefully observes, "The Palestinians were to suffer again many
decades later from this damaging conflation of the national cause with
the personality of an overweening leader in the twilight era of Yasser
’Arafat’s dominance of the Palestinian national movement.") Under the
weight of these pressures, the party disintegrated within two years of
its founding. Yet its brief existence indicated a growing middle-class
disenchantment with elite capitulation and a rising mood of popular
militancy, particularly with regard to the deepening plight of
Palestinian peasants and their increasing dispossession by Zionists. And
in identifying the British as the main enemy of Palestinian national
aspirations, Istiqlalists laid the groundwork for the armed struggle led
by Sheikh Iz al-Din al-Qassam and for the general strike and violent
rebellion of 1936-39.
For Khalidi "the crushing of the 1936-39 revolt largely determined the
outcome of the 1948 war...for the Palestinians." He is aware that the
anticolonial mobilization may well have been doomed to defeat, pointing
out that no such revolt was successful in the interwar years and that
Britain deployed more than 20,000 troops and the Royal Air Force against
the Arab rebellion. But the revolt led the British to issue the White
Paper, a small and ambiguous concession that the mufti rejected. Thus,
writes Khalidi, the leadership "failed to take advantage of the
momentary weakness of the British position or to win any political gains
from the sacrifices that had been made by the rebels." Although the odds
were stacked against them, he insists, "the Palestinians did have
choices, and some of them may have been less bad than others," including
mass organization, non-cooperation with the British and tactical
concessions.
Khalidi rightly underscores the issue of leadership, which plays an
important, at times decisive, role in the success or failure of
political movements. But why does it always come back to haunt the
Palestinians? The self-interest of the elite and their propensity to
cooperate with the British are part of what needs to be explained. Was
there something about the conditions of Palestinian life under the
Mandate that accounts for the persistently bad choices of the
leadership? Or were there more deep-seated social causes?
Palestinian writer and PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani made a powerful case
for the latter in his 1972 study on the 1936-39 revolt. According to
Kanafani, the nature of the Zionist colonial project forced Palestinian
society to undergo "an extremely violent transformation from an Arab
agricultural society into a Jewish industrial one." This, combined with
British colonial policy, produced a weak Palestinian bourgeoisie and a
weak industrial working class and labor movement, neither of which could
mount an effective challenge to the Palestinian elite’s political
hegemony. As a result, the resistance to Zionism was led by the
peasantry—dispossessed, nationally disorganized, geographically
dispersed and ultimately powerless. As Mona Younis writes in her
excellent Liberation and Democratization: The South African and
Palestinian National Movements: "Indeed, while peasant and migrant
workers could wreak havoc through rioting, they lacked leverage with
which to force either the British or the Zionists into aborting their
colonization designs."
Crushed by the British and the Zionist movement, and unable either to
reorganize or to gain support from Arab governments that were more
concerned with maintaining friendly relations with the British than with
defending Palestinian national rights, the mass rebellion of 1936-39
ultimately degenerated into incoherence and infighting. The
road to the 1948 catastrophe was open. The Palestinians might have
compensated for their lack of leverage with a more coherent anticolonial
nationalism that combined principled mass mobilization of peasants and
workers with violent insurrection. The Palestine Communist Party
might have led such a struggle, as did other Communist parties in
underdeveloped countries like China and Vietnam. However, the
predominantly Jewish PCP was too weak among Palestinians to challenge
the leadership of the notables. And when Stalin decided that partition
was the best solution to the Palestine question, the party adhered to
the new line.
The Palestinian defeat in 1948 dramatically altered the political
landscape, resulting in the expulsion of more than half the Arab
population and the creation of Israel on the ruins of most of historical
Palestine. This left the Palestinians stateless and dispersed, and with
even less leverage to recover their lands and achieve their
independence. Palestinians in exile faced the challenge of
transforming Israel from outside its borders, while those still in
Israel were placed under Israeli military rule until 1966. From 1948
through the mid-1960s, Khalidi argues, Palestinians "paid scant
attention to the problem of what form of state was appropriate for
Palestine" and generally did little more than project the imagined past into the
future.... In thus attempting to turn back the clock, Palestinians once
again appear to have given little serious thought to the nature of the
relationship between them and Israeli Jews who would remain in such a
projected Palestinian Arab state, just as during the Mandate period,
there was no appreciation of Zionism as anything more than a colonial
movement that had dispossessed the Palestinians. Clearly, the fact that
Zionism had also functioned as a national movement, and had founded a
national state, Israel, was still not something that the traumatized
Palestinians could bring themselves to accept, since these things had
happened at their expense.
What difference such an “appreciation” of Zionism as both a colonial and
a national movement would have made, when it was obviously bent on
displacing Palestinians and expropriating their country, is not made
clear. Indeed, Khalidi shows that an accommodation with Zionism was
never a real option precisely because of its exclusivism and unwavering
rejection of the Palestinian right of national self-determination.
While it may be true that Palestinians between 1948 and 1967 lacked
sufficient realism in their understanding of Israel, much more evidence
than the Palestinian National Charter of 1964 is needed to substantiate
such a strong claim. It certainly doesn’t ring true of those
Palestinians who suddenly found themselves a besieged minority in a
Jewish state, or of exiled Palestinians like Kanafani, whose novella Men
in the Sun (1963) offered a powerful critique of Palestinian nostalgia
for the world they’d lost.
It is important to recognize, nevertheless, that a qualitative shift in
Palestinian political history did occur with the emergence of Fatah and
the PLO from the mid-1960s onward—a story that has been told in
exhaustive detail by Yezid Sayigh in his study Armed Struggle and the
Search for State. For Sayigh and most historians of the Palestinian
national movement, the PLO has served in effect as a state in exile,
seeking a territory to rule. Pointing to the Palestinian Authority’s
abject failure to achieve even the semblance of independence and
sovereignty, Khalidi suggests that "this entire teleology, and the
narrative about the PLO that is based on it, is very much open to
question.“He finds too much”clear evidence that it was not seriously
preparing to build the Palestinian state that had been its formal
objective for several decades," including contradictions between
rhetoric and practice, armed struggle and diplomacy. Again and again,
Khalidi attributes the PLO’s failure to its lack of preparation. While
he accepts the notion that the PLO was bureaucratized and that it had
become "more and more of a quasi-state and less and less of a national
liberation movement,“he argues that this process never deepened into”regularization and organization on a legal basis of the organs of the
PLO, their democratization, and their preparation for a move into the
occupied territories.“But if there was too little”regularization and organization," as
Khalidi puts it, there was also far too much bureaucratization,
authoritarian leadership and lack of accountability. The only way to
overcome these impediments would have been to foster, not undermine,
mass mobilization and democratic participation. But Fatah elites were
always averse to participatory democracy. In such a milieu,
self-deception all too easily took root in the leadership. Thus Arafat
was capable, in 1972, of characterizing the Palestinian revolution as "a
succession of temporary setbacks until final victory." Never mind that
in 1970-71, the Palestinian resistance had been brutally crushed in
Jordan (in the events of “Black September”) and expelled to Lebanon. But
how can such extraordinary defeats bring about victory? How can
worsening conditions of operation lead to transformation without any
thoroughgoing reassessment of the causes of failure and without devising
more successful strategies of resistance?
Arafat’s thinking has been far too prevalent in the Palestinian
movement. It came into its own politically, as Gilbert Achcar has shown
in Eastern Cauldron, after what he describes as the “catastrophic”
liquidation of the Palestinian left’s most progressive and committed
cadres. This defeat led to a policy of increasing dependence on Arab
dictatorships and the petrodollars of Gulf monarchies and to the
deepening bureaucratization and corruption of the PLO, whose purse
strings were controlled by Arafat.
Why did Arafat’s conservative nationalist policies prevail after 1970?
The reasons behind such developments were subject to considerable debate
in the movement itself in that period, particularly on the
Palestinian left; one wishes that Khalidi had examined more closely
the period between Black September and the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut
in 1982, which he too quickly brushes aside in phrases like "the
futility of exile politics." For it was precisely during the exile
period in the early ’70s, and after Black September, that a serious and
democratic critique of the PLO developed. Within Fatah it was
voiced by Husam al-Khatib, a member of the central committee who
recognized that the defeat of the resistance in Jordan was not just
about “the question of leaderships” (masalat al-qiyadat) but about
revolutionary clarity, organizational structure and political form. What
Khatib championed was “revolution within the revolution,” an internal
transformation of the PLO’s structures that would foster popular
participation and advance the organization’s ends more
effectively. Interestingly, Khatib referred to this process as an
“internal intifada.”
A similar critique of the PLO was advanced by Syrian Marxist philosopher
Sadek Jalal al-Azm, who attributed the defeat of Black September to
Fatah’s capitulation to King Hussein and its policy of
“non-interference” in Arab authoritarian regimes. For the PLO to achieve
its desired objectives, he argued, it needed to assume the mantle of
democracy and revolution in the whole Arab world. Only then could
the Palestinians establish the political leverage that they lacked
as a nation-in-exile. This would help them correct the balance of
forces and push Israel and the West to recognize Palestinian
self-determination. This road was arguably available to the
Palestinians; at the very least it should have been considered among
their historical options. Such a revolutionary road may well have been
blocked and defeated by Israel and the United States. But it remained a
road not taken, and it marks a possible alternative in the Middle East
of the 1970s, destroyed by Arab authoritarian brutality, with the
backing of Israel and the West. By re-examining this radical period
in Palestinian history, Khalidi may well have recognized that bad
leadership after 1948, as in the Mandate period, is a symptom of deeper
causes. Nevertheless, The Iron Cage compels us to reflect more deeply on
the problems that continue to bedevil the Palestinian movement.
Focused on the sources of the Palestinians’ failure to build a state of
their own, Khalidi does not explicitly advocate a particular solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although a longstanding supporter of a
two-state solution, he expresses doubts about whether even this will
come to pass, given the enormous odds Palestine now faces). Since the
1967 war, the Palestinian national movement has formally adopted
two main solutions to end the conflict with Israel: from the late ’60s
to the early ’70s, a single democratic state in Palestine, which would
incorporate all religious groups and existing populations; and, since
1974, a commitment to building a state on any liberated part of
Palestine, formalized at the Palestinian National Council’s 1988 meeting
in Algiers into a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with East
Jerusalem as its capital, in accordance with the international
consensus. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the West, the two-state
solution has long been the dominant program of the Palestinian movement,
still supported by a majority of Palestinians and their representatives,
including, implicitly, by Hamas, despite its maximalist rhetoric. Though
most Palestinians have never regarded the creation of a state in 22
percent of their land to be a just resolution of the conflict, they have
also viewed the end of the occupation as a necessary condition before
other issues, such as the right of return and Israel’s status as a
Jewish state, can be discussed.
Ali Abunimah’s principal argument in One Country is that Israelis and
Palestinians are so deeply “intertwined” geographically and
economically, and the occupation so deeply entrenched, that
binationalism, or a single democratic state with equality and
self-determination for both peoples, is “the only viable solution.”
(Similar arguments have been made in recent years by, among others, Tony
Judt, Virginia Tilley, Meron Benvenisti and the late Edward Said.) For
Abunimah, binationalism resolves many inherent problems with Zionism:
its exclusivism; its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (which is
becoming increasingly popular in Israel, where Russian-born settler
Avigdor Lieberman, an advocate of “transfer,” recently joined Ehud
Olmert’s Cabinet); and its racist obsession with demography. It
would also crucially allow the Palestinians to return to their
usurped lands and to live in peace with Israelis on an equal basis.
What’s missing in his account, however, is an appreciation of immediate
Palestinian needs and strategies. Although Abunimah draws on a number of
examples to support his proposal, including Northern Ireland and South
Africa, the creation of a single democratic state is not a pressing
demand for most Palestinians. Indeed, he concedes that today neither
Palestinians nor Israelis want to live together in one state. What is
more, if Palestinians have been struggling to no avail to implement the
much less demanding two-state solution with international laws and
resolutions solidly on their side, how can they be expected to work
toward an end that is even less feasible than it was thirty years ago,
namely ending political Zionism? Abunimah consoles us with the
assertion that Israelis “do aspire to progressive values.” It’s hard to
share his faith, however, with the erosion of the Israeli peace camp and
a society permanently lurching to the right. So one cannot help but
wonder: Is it fair to ask 3.5 million occupied Palestinians to
wait for redress of their daily sufferings and national humiliation
until there is sufficient support among both peoples for a binational
solution?
When Palestinian and Jewish socialists, notably Noam Chomsky and the
Israeli Matzpen group, advocated a binational state in the
1970s (an issue ignored by Abunimah), its realization was premised
on large-scale social and political transformation: Radical movements on
both sides, with strong and capable constituencies, would pull toward
each other and end their separation. When that option evaporated with
the deepening colonial expansion of Israel and the rise of Jewish
fundamentalism, many socialists shifted toward advocating a two-state
solution, while remaining hostile to political Zionism. With the global
retreat of radical politics since the mid-’70s, there is even less
reason to believe a binational constituency exists in Israel-Palestine
today. "Binationalism without social, political agents on the ground is
an idea: an interview here, an article there," says Azmi Bishara, the
Palestinian leader of the National Democratic Assembly in the Israeli
Knesset, who, as a supporter of a state for “all its citizens,” can
hardly be accused of hostility to binationalism. "Are there
masses—social movements—that are raising binationalism? I say no.
There are not.... Among the Palestinian masses, the mood is still
national. National-Islamic. Not binational." And if the binational idea
remains largely divorced from politics, it has no legs to stand on.
Bishara is hardly mentioned by Abunimah, who ignores much of
the literature on binationalism. The binational idea has a history in
both societies, and it cannot be encompassed in a few passing references
to PLO documents and to Martin Buber’s writings. Unlike Khalidi,
Abunimah overlooks Towards a Democratic State in Palestine (1970), the
only one-state proposal ever produced by Fatah, written in English by a
group of Palestinian intellectuals at the American University of Beirut.
(Written for foreign consumption under the aegis of PLO official Nabil
Shaath, the document mainly sought to convince a Western audience that
Palestinians accepted the Jewish presence in Palestine.) Abunimah’s
discussion of the PLO amounts to two paragraphs, one of which is a long
quote. He ends with this: "But if a single state was unthinkable in the
past, many of the conditions that made it so have changed. Perhaps the
most important is that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians now
understand that the other community is here to stay."
But the fact that they know this doesn’t mean that the conditions for
binationalism are emerging. Nor does it make sense to describe the
Israeli-Palestinian relationship as “intertwined,” as Abunimah often
puts it. One can make that claim only about either Palestinians living
inside Israel, however unequal their access to power and social goods
may be, or about occupied Palestinians between 1967 and 1991, when Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin started instituting his policy of closure and
separation. Only then was Israel significantly dependent on Palestinians
and their migrant labor. As Mona Younis argues, only then did Zionism
make a partial exception to its exclusionary logic of expulsion and
incorporate the Palestinians into the Israeli polity as subordinate
laborers. And this, in turn, gave the occupied Palestinians some
leverage to pursue certain forms of mobilization. The first intifada is
a great example of what such inclusionary dynamics can generate, and
it’s the closest Palestinians have ever come to decolonizing Gaza and
the West Bank. Even then their democratizing force was checkmated by an
exiled PLO bureaucracy that feared losing its authority—and crushed by
severe Israeli repression. Today the situation in the occupied
territories is totally different, and much worse, leaving Palestinians
with even fewer options for change and transformation than before.
Israel has unilaterally cut Palestinians off and excluded them from
access to its territory and settlements, even to their own surrounding
areas. How can walls and closures be described as intertwining? In fact,
Israel is no longer and in no way dependent on occupied Palestinians,
while Palestinians remain dependent on Israel in every way. And this,
incidentally, may well explain why Palestinian terror attacks against
Israeli civilians (shelved by Hamas for the past eighteen months, while
Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians continues) were prevalent as
a resistance tactic after Oslo and its institutionalization of closure.
However morally indefensible and politically counterproductive, suicide
bombings were the only way desperate Palestinians felt they could "get
at" their occupiers. Notions of interdependence, then, are simply wrong,
and miss what is fundamental about Zionist colonization since 1991: its
powerful exclusionary form. Comparisons with American
settler-colonialism and its treatment of Native Americans are,
therefore, much more apt than comparisons with inclusionary
settler-colonialisms like apartheid. One hopes that the Palestinian
solidarity movement doesn’t get too distracted by the surface
similarities between South Africa and Palestine, like the question of
violence or boycott, to understand their crucial differences—and that
it aspires to be as uncompromisingly realist as it is hostile to
political Zionism.
Palestinians are entering a critical stage in their history. More
oppressive structures are firmly established now, raising the
possibility of permanent dispossession and national disintegration.
Geographically and politically divided, Palestinians around the world
know neither their immediate goals nor their long-term objectives. Such
a deep crisis requires widespread collective engagement and effort. It
may be useful to take the recent Palestinian Prisoners’ Document of
National Conciliation, amended and agreed upon by both Fatah and Hamas
on June 27, as a launching pad for emerging debates and discussions. The
prisoners clearly call for the end of the occupation, dismantling of all
settlements and realization of Palestinian national rights. Their
position is supported by a majority of Palestinians in the occupied
territories, who realize that it may well prove to be the strongest
basis for national unity today. A national liberation movement can
achieve success only if it is based on values of self-organization,
independence, democracy and active mass participation, including women
and workers. A new anticolonial national movement is still possible and
ever more necessary. And if the outcome of decolonization also produces
a constituency in Israel happy to live in peace and equality with the
Palestinians without walls and borders, so much the better. But there’s
no shortcut around the struggle against the occupation.