A recent post here in Mondoweiss printed Michael Manekin
and Peter Beinart’s sunless one-state prognostications. They claim equal rights
in Palestine
can’t work. Their arguments are bad – and they make bad arguments in service of
Jewish privilege in Palestine.
Before addressing the arguments themselves however,
it’s worth considering The Cult of the Sober-Minded Analyst. You know them when
you see them – the men and women who employ a gravitas-laden manner of speech
to make a point. They overlay stentorian pronouncements with a
patina of foreboding. It’s supposed to be impressive when people do it but it’s
really just masque; bluster can’t supplant intellectual or moral
authority, particularly when its real purpose is to dismiss alternative views
as “unserious.”
Anyway, the arguments:
Manekin claims that one state is a “fantasy.” He
doesn’t use the word “solution” because he regards it as inapplicable, now and
forever, it seems.
In fact, Palestine/Israel is already one country. It’s
just a state riven by deep apartheid and a doctrinal belief held by one half of
its inhabitants that they are the just beneficiaries of racial privilege. It’s
an odious outlook but one that (some) Zionists proclaim accords
with humanist values. They project a crimson light through the year 1945
to color our present-day reality. The rest of us, meanwhile,
struggle to draw breath in 2015.
The second argument goes to “safety.” In
honesty, I struggle to suppress my deep and abiding contempt for
Zionism when its supporters argue for apartheid through the
evocation of personal insecurity. All things flow from the suppurating
wounds of 1948. The savage occupation and apartheid regime guarantee the
abscess’s continued productiveness. But a spirt of generosity dictates that the
arguments are addressed in good faith.
So: If you want “safety” dismantle your apartheid
regime. Commit your efforts in forums and conference calls to defunding
and dismantling the vicious “reality on the ground.” Spend less time
worrying about the maintenance of your Jewish privilege in Palestine. It’s an ugly thing that only you
and a dwindling number of wan zealots really believe in.
The last point Manekin makes is about the army. How
can an army work in a single shared state, he asks. There’s a subtext here.
“How can an army that spent decades savaging, pillaging, dispossessing, and
murdering work in a shared state?” The right answer is that it can’t. Like
every implement of apartheid it will have to be reformed just like the army in South Africa (if not Iraq) was. It also stands to reason
that the army’s role will be diminished in society – since it will no longer be
charged with oppressing the apartheid subjects of the state.
The spirit of the question – the psychological frame
necessary for its issue by anyone – is of more serious concern than
the question and its answer are. It seems to assume a static or reactionary
posture whereby an individual’s (or civil society’s) efforts and real
social and political outcomes are untethered to anything, much less to one
another. History unfolds. And the efforts of ordinary humans to shape it
are ineffectual. In other words, Jewish-Israelis like Jewish privilege in Palestine, so why bother?
It is unlikely that Manekin and Beinart really
believe that they are powerless – they wouldn’t engage in Zionist advocacy if
they did. Rather, their message appears to be targeted at activists who
would work for true equality. “Don’t do it,” they seem to say, “It’s just too
hard. Plus, my safety… and it’s dangerous…”
Ultimately it’s an argument born of moral or political
weakness. It’s a reflection of unacknowledged personal disempowerment (who,
after all, is more irrelevant at this stage than “liberal Zionists?”). It
amounts to pleading, “I do not have the power to shape events, but please,
don’t you either.” It’s an argument that would cause Theodor Herzl, once a
politically-empowered racist in Palestine,
to lament the desiccated state of his intellectual inheritors today.
And that’s the real story here. We are in the
privileged position to watch a loathsome and once-fierce intellectual
movement wither in full public view. The unimaginative and embarrassing reactions to
student activity on college campuses belie a childish and petulant view of
Zionist exceptionalism. Truly, they’ve trundled a long way from, “If you terrorize them, they
will come.”
20/02/2015 en MONDOWEISS.
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