IHTG asked what I thought about this article. He wrote:
My feeling is that the settlers with their sense of community and extremely high birthrates find it easier to imagine surviving in a multi-ethnic society along with Arabs, in a sort of mini-Austro-Hungary, with themselves as the Austrians.
For the rest of us, it could turn out more like Lebanon, with us as the Maronites…
Off the top of my head, I can think of the following proposed solutions (in Israel) to The Conflict:
- Maintaining the status quo of Israeli sovereignty within the 1949 borders, plus limited territorial autonomy for Fatah in Samaria and Judea total Hamas autonomy in Gaza.
- Coming up with another form of autonomy, such as the personal autonomy mentioned in the Camp David Accords.
- The Jordanian Option: Israeli law is extended to Samaria and Judea; the non-Jews there get Hashemite citizenship (again) and remain as permanent residents, with Gaza residents getting Egyptian citizenship. The Hashemite regime gets special influence and authority in Jerusalem and of course over its subjects.
- Expulsion, forced or voluntary, of Samaria-Judea Muslims and extension of Israeli law to these territories.
- Redefining Israel and Samaria-Judea as one binational (or multinational) state, with two or more ethno-national-religious groups that each get formal status and recognition of specific rights, either territorially based like in Yuogslavia or personally based like in Lebanon.
- Partition into two states, with or without border adjustments and population exchanges.
- Confederation of some sort, with independence for Samaria-Judea but as part of a regional arrangement with at least Israel and the Hashemite entity, and possibly other countries, that binds the confederates together and limits all of their ultimate sovereignty.
- Secular-unitary state, which means granting full citizenship and full equality of citizenship to everyone, and also erasing the Jewish character of Israel and even changing its name to something non-sectarian.
- City-states replacing nation-states (ok, this is only my idea and I haven’t yet heard anyone propose it for Israel).
- What did I miss?
Some of these ideas are more far out than others, but all of them make the same mistake: they treat the Muslims as non-actors who can be acted upon (mostly) and who’ll (mostly) accept whatever is acted upon them. This mistake is deeply ingrained in the Israeli and western psyche that seeks an explanation for every problem here in something Israel has done.
But actually, Muslims do more than respond in an instinctual and mechanical way to stimuli: they can think and act according to their values and goals. The core of the Palestinian identity is Islamic-colonialist and Arab-imperialist, hatred of Jews and opposition to Zionism and everything Israel does and wants. In short, they will reject any solution we propose. Hence Ariel Sharon’s strategy of cultivating extremely close relations with President Bush while simultaneously never ceasing to act and trying to balance his actions against every side, if possible.
Anyway, in the last generation we’ve seen war rebranded as a “peace process” (no need to stop the hostilities first!) in a chillingly Orwellian manner, and then just since 2002 we watched as “peace process” was redefined as Fatah-state-generation process. Almost no one even stops to ask anymore if “peace” could have any other meaning aside from President Bush’s “vision” from June of that year. I was barely aware of Israel before the early 1990s and I’ve read the Israeli news every day since the Oslo Accords were announced; it’s weird for me to think to what extent partition has supplanted every other option above in just that time, but I can’t even imagine what people who actually support partition are thinking.
The article above does a pretty decent job trying to get into the heads of the settler types (in my dreams, the religious/right/settler media would have this kind of analysis of leftist/progressive thought) who want to do a sort of modified version of secular-unitary. I know a lot of these people. I first heard discussions about it in early 2005, in the run-up to Expulsion 2005. My more radical friends then were coming to a new understanding: Israel’s conflict was not one of Arabs/Muslims vs. Jews/Israelis, but actually it was Arabs/Muslims vs. Jews/Settlers vs. Israelis/Leftists (I’ll simplify this as Arabs vs. Jews vs. Leftists, even though the “Leftists” are of course Jewish Israelis). They saw that the Leftists sided with the Jews sometimes, in some issues, and with the Arabs sometimes, in other issues, and that the Leftist-Arab alliance was not being adequately combated due to the Jews’ unwillingness to lift their arms against their brothers, the Leftists, in a civil war.
They saw that the whole game was quite rigged and that, in order to change the rules of the game, they needed to do some different things and think about things differently (like everyone’s favorite descendant of Trotsky was doing at the time with Revava). Changing the rules of the game meant finding a way to formalize the complex and unspoken relationship between Arabs and Leftists. Taking away from Leftists the power to transcend Israel’s political system and use enemy outsiders to manipulate us could bring them closer in a lot of ways. It could also push them further way…
But no one really knows how any of the three groups would be transformed by implementing a solution like the one in the article. Make no mistake – these ideas are not a dalliance, like the ideas for an Israel-Palestine-Jordan confederacy or a binational state. They are an endgame. Their proponents understand that they are playing with fire and that changing the rules of the game could help them but could also lead to the destruction of everything they’ve built. But they are tired of being pawns of this other group, the Leftists, and in order to shake things up they’re willing to co-opt some Leftist ideas.
So would it work? Jabotinsky argued that the local non-Jewish population could not be bought off with human rights and economic development. Their demands for group political rights would have to be addressed head-on, either by granting them or by defeating them totally. Successive Israeli leaders have tried to grant them in negotiations in the past decade and a half, only to learn that the demands grew and grew because their identity is based on a negation of ours. Granting them access to share in our identity isn’t realistic.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Here’s my take. You can temporize and try to kick the can down the road all you want, but it doesn’t solve your fundamental demographic problem (and God forbid you fold under pressure to extend the Law of Return). Ultimately you’re going to have to practice a very ugly ethnic cleansing. The press will of course paint said ethnic cleansing in the worst possible light and the damage in the court of world opinion will be extreme. My suggestion would be to prepare for said eventuality and make certain you get a cleansed nation with defensible borders out of it. Perhaps a global economic collapse would be excellent cover for doing what you need to do. No particular conspiracy IMO is required for this, I believe it’s already baked into the cake. In addition you need to rather pointedly tell your businessmen that importing foreign labor into Israel is unacceptable and there will be extreme consequences to them if they push open borders/guest workers like the US chamber of commerce does. Essentially you need to make any such advocacy beyond the pale, similar to how a National Socialist party would be treated in Israel today. Some illiberal tactics are likely to be required.
As a US citizen with similar long range demographic problems, I can’t help but be sympathetic. At least your elites aren’t almost all on the wrong side and generally recognize that there IS a problem.
I disagree on a pretty major point here: the problem Israel faces is not demographic in nature. That is to say, I don’t think it’s a numbers game and that with a certain Jews / Arabs ratio we’d be in a good position but that with a lower Jew / Arabs ratio, there’d be too many of them and not enough of us. In my opinion – and this position is basically shared by the people above who are advocating annexation and absorption of the existing non-Jewish population of Samaria and Judea into Israel – it’s not the number of internal enemies with whom we’re dealing; it’s the simple fact that we have internal enemies, a separate population that’s among us, but not of us, that opposes our existence here and the nature of our state, and that wants to see our work undone. So to me, if there are two million Muslims here but they’re all little Hirsi Alis who are nice and liberal and just want to get along as individuals with us as individuals, that’s cool and I think Israel and Zionism can absorb them peaceably. But if there are even two Muslims here who form a national minority and insist on Arabic as a national language with special rights for themselves, that is not cool and it needs to be dealt with.
By contrast, if I read the situation correctly, the problem in the United States is demographic. Parts of America are being overrun by a foreign population, true, but those people don’t hate America. On the contrary, they come to America because they love it, and they love it in all its differences from Mexico and the other central American countries they’re leaving behind. 99.9% of Mexicans in the United States do not believe in this Aztlan silliness because if the southwestern United States came under Mexican sovereignty again, they’d have to pack their bags and migrate again. That’s not to say they aren’t a problem for Americans. I’m willing to believe they are (but I’m sensitive about weighing in on the issue because I don’t vote in America, even though I can, and I would not have to suffer the consequences of a poorly reasoned position). So the question for Americans is not how to have zero Mexicans in the United States forever and ever – it’s how to have an appropriate number of Mexicans in the United States so that America is not overrun and turned into another Mexico.
I would also draw a sharp contrast between the issue of foreign laborers / refugees in Israel versus the issue of local Arabic-speaking Muslims. The former are more like the Mexicans in the US. To some extent, those two populations are inversely related; as Gaza was sealed off almost hermetically from us some years ago, the government allowed the import of mass numbers of Thai agricultural workers, Chinese construction workers, etc. in addition to the many Filipino caretakers. This is simply to satisfy demand for labor. And while I am proud to support companies that employ Jews because Avoda Ivrit means something to me, I have a hard time demanding that level of commitment from a businessman who’s seriously just trying to make a living.
Related: Unrest among the lower classes is rising.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3945636,00.html
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3945606,00.html
I’m pissed that only Shas have the cojones to speak out loudly about this. Likud politicans prefer to keep their hands clean and let Eli Yishai do the dirty work (and suffer the brunt of the consequent attacks from the media).
Related: Unrest among the lower classes is rising.
Is it really? It just looks like reactions to stimuli. Real unrest will be when someone comes in with some ideas about how to fix the problem. Maybe it will be another Kahane. I’m not too keen on that.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3945636,00.html
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3945606,00.html
I can’t tell you how amazed I am that the New Israel Fund made it into the Hebrew version, but not the English version. Just a year ago, it would have been the exact opposite. In America, it’s widely known among people who pay attention to these things that NIF is a communist front serving as a clearinghouse to funnel European money to radical and progressive organizations with an anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish/anarchist agenda, but no one has talked about this here until very recently. So that’s an interesting twist.
I’m pissed that only Shas have the cojones to speak out loudly about this. Likud politicans prefer to keep their hands clean and let Eli Yishai do the dirty work (and suffer the brunt of the consequent attacks from the media).
That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that Shas is a leftist party that gets almost all its mandates from right-wing voters. Since they flout their constituency’s wishes when it comes to taking real action to stop expulsions and negotiations, they throw these people a bone by making some obnoxious xenophobic and anti-Arab statements. Yes, those statements are true, but no, I’m not swayed when it comes from Shas.
We’ll see. Shas may not be what it was in Arieh Deri’s days. They’ve raised a generation of technocrat politicians who seem to be genuinely interested in adminstration (Ariel Atias is the iconic example).
Deri’s days were already long gone in 2005, but Shas had no trouble delivering Gush Katif to its ignominious destruction.
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