February 6, 2001
Betrayal of the Zionist Left
A Palestinian grassroots response to Shulamit Aloni, Amos Oz and David Grossman
By Nizar Sakhnini
Gil Hoffman reported in The Jerusalem Post this morning that Shulamit Aloni, Amos Oz, and David Grossman had issued a call to Arab citizens yesterday to vote for Ehud Barak and prevent Likud leader Ariel Sharon from taking power. They warned that failure to do so would be viewed as a betrayal of the peace camp.
What Aloni, Oz and Grossman ignored and failed to mention is that it was the "Zionist Left" had long ago betrayed themselves, betrayed their people, betrayed the Arabs and betrayed all human values that true leftists were supposed to uphold.
This betrayal started a long, long time ago. The Zionist Left had different opportunities to correct their betrayal but failed to do so.
Betrayal of the Zionist Left started when they adopted the racist Zionist colonizing project in Palestine at the expense of the destruction of its indigenous people.
Aloni is "worried by the way the Arabs are forfeiting their place in the Israeli democracy and bringing about their own disaster." What democracy does Aloni talk about? And what "disaster" does Aloni want the Palestinian Arabs to avoid?
The former Meretz chairman charged that Israeli Arabs and those on what she called the militant left, "have forgotten their history and would regret their inaction."
As a Palestinian and as a human being I would like to remind Aloni that Palestinian Arabs have never forgotten their history. Palestinian Arabs know well how the Zionist movement had entered into an agreement with the Western "Great" powers to create a "Jewish State" in Palestine that would act as an "outpost" for Western capitalist imperialists in the area. This agreement was reflected in what became to be known as the "Balfour Declaration" of 2 November 1917. That was the historic moment that opened the road to the real "disaster" that led both peoples to an inevitable and tragic confrontation.
Oz warned that if parts of the Left bring to power what he called "a government of settlers, haredim, and transferists, it will be the worst thing that has ever happened in the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Unfortunately, Oz, like Aloni, seems to ignore the documented facts of history related with what he calls the "Arab-Israeli conflict." He ignores that it was the Zionist leftists under the leadership of Ben-Gurion who initiated and designed the "Transfer" plans as of the mid-thirties. It was the Hagana underground militants controlled and guided by the Zionist Leftist Ben-Gurion who implemented these "Transfer" plans as of early April 1948 when they launched plan "Dalet" designed to ethnically cleanse the country of its Arab majority.
Grossman joined Aloni and Oz in ignoring history. He "innocently" inquired if "any of the punishers of Barak know of a leader who would lay the heart of the conflict on the table as Barak has, and if there is such a person, why has he not appeared since 1967?" Here, once more, recorded and well documented history tells us that it was Israeli Governments led by the Zionist Left who designed and implemented plans and policies that encouraged the Zionist Right and the Religious Zionist Nationalists to come forward following the 1967 conquest and replicate the same racist and colonization policies and behavior that were applied within the "Green Line" as of 1948.
Instead of blaming the Palestinian Arabs and the "militant Left" it is about time that the Zionist Left should start a real self-soul searching and realize that it was denial of Palestinian reality and Palestinian rights that led to the present tragic situation. Occupation, dispossession, humiliation, violation of human rights, human moral values, international law and human rights conventions lay at the core of the Zionist-Arab conflict. An immediate end to occupation and an admission of the wrong done to the Palestinian people and a sincere will to correct the injustice done is the proper way to avoid the disaster.
Who ever win these elections is not the issue. Discriminatory racist and colonialist policies and behavior applied by both Left and Right Zionists is the core issue that had to be faced in a courageous way by the Zionist Left.