[lbo-talk] Re: The Chomsky vs. Dershowitz debate: both sides wereawful!

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Mon Dec 5 05:38:06 PST 2005


Leaving aside Chomsky, the Israelis, and the international community for a moment, let's consider what it is that the Palestinians themselves are proposing.

Apart from Hamas - which is admittedly not an insignificant register of Palestinian opinion - the PLO and probably the majority of the community has reluctantly acknowledged (like Chomsky) that the best they can hope for is a weak state of their own, and their struggle at this stage has been reduced to just how much independence they can expect to obtain from Israel. Actually, Hamas tacitly accepts this premise also. The Palestinians are no longer pursuing - or, like Hamas, are winding down -their armed struggle, having been beaten into submission by a half century of vastly unequal warfare. It is an outcome not unlike that experienced historically by aboriginal peoples in the Americas, Africa and elsewhere overrun by well-armed Western settler states. In these circumstances, escape from the reservation, development, and reparations supplant the recovery of lost territory as the national goals. Further strategic disengagement from parts of the West Bank after the next Israeli election - unilaterally by the new Sharon government or as part of a formal surrender called a "peace settlement" with the Palestinians under Abbas - will accelerate this process.

Unfortunately, if Joanna was living in Palestine, she would have to choose between Hamas' purely formal refusal to recognize the "Zionist entity" or the PLO's open recognition of it. Like all Palestinians, it would be a political rather than a moral choice forced upon her. Of course, there are some secular Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals still advancing the idea of a unitary state from a progressive standpoint - and the Palestinian leadership has periodically threatened to launch an anti-apartheid struggle pointing towards this end in the absence of progress towards an independent state - but, given the legacy of the long war on both sides, it has not sunk popular roots in either community, and its adherents are isolated.

This will change over time. Zionism is the product of a seige mentality which was incubated in Europe and became virulent in the Middle East. It's powerful hold on the Israeli and international Jewish community will abate as the conditions which nourished it recede. Significantly, you had the beginnings of an anti-Zionist movement among Jewish historians and other academics in the brief period of relaxation which followed the Oslo agreements, accompanied by corresponding movement on the Palestinian side. Among other things, that is what alarmed the Zionist right about Oslo, which understood the connection between war and the maintenance of a strong national "will" and allegiance to an ethnically pure "Jewish state".

---------------------------------------- Travis Fast wrote:


> Joanna, I agree with the principles of what you have written but it would
> be a cold day in hell before the power bloc would contemplate a single
> state even sans US funding. Perhaps after two decades of sanctions like
> the south African case would change their minds but there does not seem to
> be any unified stomach for this on the part of the international
> community. So Chomsky's recognition of this is different from Dershowitz'
> celebration. Lumping Chomsky in with the KKK is just nonsense.
>
> Travis
>
> joanna wrote:
>
>>
>> I support a unitary secular state. I think this becomes much more
>> realistic when the economic and military support for Israel by the U.S.
>> comes to an end. I think the uprooted and oppressed Palestinians deserve
>> full citizenship in a Palestine that includes both former Israelis and
>> Palestinians. They also deserve reparations on the scale that the Jews
>> received following WWII. Those reparations to be paid by the U.S. and
>> Israel. That's what I support.
>>
>> The reality of a Middle Eastern peace will not happen so long as the
>> Zionist, blood-based state of Israel continues. (Oh, and in case we need
>> to establish credentials, I am the daughter of a Jew who was in a labor
>> camp, lost his entire (and considerable) family fortune to the nazis, and
>> I have relatives who live in Israel.)
>>
>> Joanna
>>



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