A Bold Vision For Israel/Palestine: One Democratic
State For All Its Citizens
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Issues
Spring - Summer 2021
Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine:
Zionism, Settler Colonialism,
And The Case For One Democratic State
By Jeff Halper.
Pluto Press,
256 Pages, $19.95
Shortly after a cease-fire was announced in May between Israel and Hamas,
President Biden reaffirmed his commitment to a “two state solution,” to the
establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In the opinion of
many, this is no longer a realistic possibility because Israel has
introduced hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers to the area which would
have become such a Palestinian state. Eight years ago, early in his tenure
as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry declared that, “I
believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have
some period of time—-a year to year-and-a-half to two years, or it’s over.”
The two-state idea has, in the view of many, run its course and into this
stalemate comes Jeff Halper with a bold vision: transform Palestine into a
genuine democracy, with equal rights for all of its residents, regardless of
their religion or ethnic background. This, of course, is an old idea. During
the British Mandate of 1920 to 1948, Palestinian leaders petitioned for such
a unitary state. Many Jewish voices echoed this desire, although they were a
decided minority.
Jeff Halper, a Jewish American who immigrated to Israel, is head of the
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is a founding member
of the One Democratic State Campaign. An anthropologist, he was nominated by
the American Friends Service Committee, along with Palestinian intellectual
and activist Ghassan Andoni, for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for work “to
liberate both the Palestinian and Israeli people from the yoke of structural
violence,” and “to build equality between their people by recognizing and
celebrating their common humanity.”
He is the author of “War Against the People” (2015) and “An Israeli in
Palestine” (2010). He describes himself this way: “I am not a Palestinian
and I certainly cannot speak for Palestinians—-or for 98 per cent of Israeli
Jews, for that matter. I am an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew, a settler/immigrant
from the U.S... What defines me most appropriately is ‘a colonist who
refuses.’” Here he is quoting the French-Tunisian Jewish author Albert
Memmi.
Zionism as a Settler-colonial Movement
Halper provides a theoretical and comparative analysis of Zionism as a
colonialist movement and shows how Zionists have imposed themselves as a
settler-colonial reality on the indigenous people of Palestine. He cites the
work of Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini and other scholars of settler-
colonialism and uses the phrase “dominance management regime” to describe
settler-colonial policies implemented by Israel.
These policies have, for many years, been virtually immune to international
sanction. The reasons for this, is assessed by Halper: “By making itself
useful to the world’s hegemony, employing skillful lobbying, the strategic
use of the massive financial resources, manipulation of the Holocaust and
strategic accusations of anti-Semitism, Israel fears no international
sanctions from any quarter. Having marginalized the Palestinians politically
and militarily, it feels it has rendered the ‘conflict’ to the sidelines,
among the Israeli Jewish public as well as internationally... And it has
done so in large part through conniving with governments to keep the ‘two-
state solution’ alive as an effective means of perpetual conflict
management, by separating the process of (seeming) negotiating from its
actual resolution. In addition to all this, because the Zionist/Israeli
settlers have become so deeply embedded in the country, they have rendered
Zionist settler-colonialism difficult to dismantle.”
In Halper’s view, Zionism is clearly a settler-colonialist enterprise:
“Driven by persecution and the rise of nationalism in Europe, it was
European Jews with little knowledge of Palestine and its peoples who
launched a movement of Jewish ‘return’ to its ancestral homeland, the Land
of Israel, after a national absence of 2000 years.
In their newly minted nationalist ideology, they were the returning natives.
In their eyes, the Arabs of Palestine were mere background. They had no
national claims or even cultural identity of their own. Palestine was, as
the famous Zionist phrase put it, ‘a land without a people.’ The European
Zionists knew the land was peopled of course. But to them the Arabs did not
amount to ‘a people’ in the national sense of the term. They were just a
collection of natives—-though not THE natives—-a status the Jewish claimants
reserved for themselves. They played no role in the Zionist story. Having no
national existence or claims of their own, the Arabs were to be removed,
confined or eliminated so as to make way for the country’s ‘real’ owners.”
Indigenous Population is Irrelevant
To the Zionists, Halper writes, Palestine’s indigenous population, “At best,
they are irrelevant, a nuisance on the path of the settler’s seizure of
their country, an expendable population, one that must be ‘eliminated,’ if
not physically annihilated then at least reduced to a marginal presence in
which they are unable to conduct a national life and thus threaten the
settler enterprise. Such a process of unilateral, asymmetrical invasion that
provokes resistance on the part of Native peoples threatened with
displacement and worse can hardly be called ‘conflict.’ Rather than the
‘Israeli/Palestinian/Arab Conflict,’ we must speak of Zionist settler
colonialism.”
The early Zionists, Halper shows, knew exactly what they were doing. As far
back as 1914, Moshe Sharett, a future Israeli prime minister, declared: “We
have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we
have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it
by virtue of its language and savage culture... If we seek to look upon our
land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our
estate—-all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.”
David Ben Gurion, Halper shows, had long advocated for “compulsory
transfer.” In 1937, he established a Committee for Population Transfer
within the Jewish Agency. And, Halper writes, “Of course, transfer, a
euphemism for ethnic cleansing, was in fact carried out at a mass level in
1948 and again in 1967.” One of its perpetrators, Yosef Weitz, director of
the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Department, wrote: “It must be
clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples... The only
solution is a Land of Israel without Arabs... There is no way but to
transfer the Arabs from here... to transfer all of them, perhaps with the
exception of Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must
be left, not one tribe.”
“Disappearing the Arabs”
Israeli historian Tom Segev notes that, “Disappearing the Arabs lay at the
heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its
realization... With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the
desirability of forced transfer—-or its morality.”
There were always a few voices within the Jewish community in Palestine who
objected to the mistreatment of the indigenous population and to plans to
forcibly remove them. Halper notes that in 1925 a group of Jewish
intellectuals established Brit Shalom, the ‘Covenant of Peace.’... Inspired
in part by Ahad Ha’am’s concept of Palestine as a cultural home for Jews,
they realized that... the domination of Jews over Arabs would not work.
Instead, they focused on the part of the Balfour Declaration that promised
that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’... Brit Shalom
sought accommodation between Jewish and Palestinian Arab nationalities
within a binational state.”
Among the leading figures in Brit Shalom were Ahad Ha’am, Eliezer Ben
Yehuda, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and Gershom Scholem.
Halper provides this assessment: “Brit Shalom even aspired to formulate a
joint Constitution for the shared country. Cultural Zionism offered an
alternative over an exclusive ethnocentrism-nationalism. Cultural Zionists
argued that the Jewish people needed only a cultural space where it could
develop and flourish. They understood the pluralistic nature of pre-state
Palestinian society and the necessity of acknowledging the Palestinian
presence... Cultural Zionism had little chance of prevailing against
Political Zionism and the Military Way. But it demonstrated that seeds of an
alternative to zero-sum colonization were to be found... As it turned out...
Political Zionism ‘won.’ But has since exhausted itself... it has reached
dead-end. Cultural Zionism, though defeated in its time, may well resurface
as a bridge between the Israeli Jewish public and the Palestinians as they
move together toward decolonization and a newly constituted political
community, offering a way out of zero-sum colonialism.”
Two States No Longer Viable
The idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Halper argues, is no
longer a viable possibility. He notes that Israeli settlement blocs in the
occupied territories, which would constitute such a Palestinian state,
occupy 30 per cent of the West Bank, plus East Jerusalem. He points out
that, “... they also destroy any territorial contiguity a Palestinian state
may have on the remaining 70 per cent. Israel proposes ‘transportational
contiguity’: the ability of Palestinians to drive from one West Bank city to
another, but under Israeli supervision. Nor would the West Bank be connected
to Gaza... We are left at best with autonomy. Relieving itself of almost 5
million Palestinians under its control while confining them to truncated
enclaves on 10 per cent of their homeland is of course the only political
option a settler regime like Israel could adopt, since it alone makes
possible a successionist Jewish state. The beauty of the security paradigm
is that it requires apartheid.”
Israel, while occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of
international law, actually denies the very idea of “occupation.” Halper
explains this anomaly: “Israel has never accepted the legal fact of
occupation since it contradicts Zionism’s claim of entitlement to the whole
of the Land of Israel... Israeli rule extends today from the River to the
Sea with almost 700,000 settlers now living in massive settlement ‘blocs’ on
land that will never be de-occupied.”
Discussing the creation of a single state for both Israelis and Palestinians
is not as fanciful as it might sound, in Halper’s view, because, “A single
state already exists over all of Palestine; our task is to transform it from
an apartheid state to a single, pluralistic democracy. Judaization has
already succeeded in creating one governing authority between the River and
the Sea, the state of Israel. Israel’s deliberate, systematic and forthright
elimination of the two-state compromise, which favored Israel itself,
demonstrates the irreversibility of its colonial program. Given that stark
political reality, our task is crystal-clear: to transform the apartheid
regime that Israel has imposed on all of Palestine into a democratic state
of all its citizens.”
One Democratic State
The idea of one democratic state has been growing for some time. In 1999,
Professor Edward Said wrote a much-discussed article in The New York Times
entitled simply “The One State Solution.” Professor Tony Judt wrote an
influential article in 2003 in the New York Review of Books, “Israel, the
Alternative.” The same year Virginia Tilley published “The One State
Solution” in the London Review of Books, and a book with the same title
later that year. Many similar calls for a single democratic state appeared,
such as Mazin Qumsiyeh’s “Sharing the Land of Canaan.”
The first working plan towards a one-state solution came out of the Lausanne
conference on “One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel,” held in 2004. A
London Declaration was issued in 2006 entitled “Challenging the Boundaries:
A Single State in Palestine/Israel.” In 2009, three one-state conferences
were held. In 2012, the Munich Declaration was issued, followed by the One
Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) in Haifa in 2018. In 2019, the One
Democratic State in Palestine group (ODS-Pal) issued its “Call for a
Palestine Liberation Movement.”
The movement is still a small one. Halper notes that, “A starting point in
our project of decolonizing Zionism/liberating Palestine is the 10-point
program of the One Democratic State Campaign . The ODSC is a Palestinian-led
group of Palestinians... and Israeli Jews that came together in Haifa in
2017.”
Fragmenting the West Bank
The preamble to the ODSC program states, in part: “The two-state solution...
was endorsed by all the Palestinian parties represented in the Israeli
Knesset. But on the ground Israel strengthened its colonial control,
fragmenting the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza into tiny, isolated and
impoverished cantons, separated from one another by settlements, massive
Israeli highways, hundreds of checkpoints, the apartheid Wall, military
bases and fences. After a half century of relentless ‘Judaization,’ the two-
state solution must be pronounced dead, buried under the colonial enterprise
on the territory that would have become the Palestinian state. In its place
Israel has imposed a single regime of repression from the Mediterranean Sea
to the Jordan River.”
Further, the ODSC declares, “The only way forward to a genuine and viable
political settlement is to dismantle the colonial apartheid regime that has
been imposed over historic Palestine, replacing it with a new political
system based on full civic equality, implementation of the Palestinian
refugees’ Right of Return and the building of a system that addresses the
historic wrongs committed on the Palestinian people by the Zionist
movement... We, Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike, have therefore revived
the one-state idea. Although differing models of such a state range from
binational to a liberal, secular democracy, we are united in our commitment
to the establishment of a single democratic state in all of historic
Palestine.”
To the question, “How do we get there?” Halper has a number of ideas. He
compares the groundswell of international opposition to Israel’s occupation
and mistreatment of Palestinians to the movement which grew in opposition to
apartheid in South Africa:
“The Palestinian cause has attained a global prominence equal to that of the
anti-apartheid movement. Palestinians have become emblematic of oppressed
peoples everywhere. A wide range of activities advance the Palestinian
cause... Israel’s panic over the BDS campaign demonstrates that it has
already lost in the Court of Public Opinion. Only the shallow support of
governments, Christian evangelicals and a diminishing Jewish establishment
remain.”
Model for Decolonization
Surveying the history of settler-colonial regimes, Halper believes that,
“The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa offers a useful model for the
decolonization of Palestine/Israel. Despite some major differences, the
fundamentals of South Africa and Israel/Palestine are similar enough to
suggest to us a working strategy....the most relevant similarity is that
Israel is an established and strong settler state just as South Africa was,
yet neither was able to defeat or marginalize an Indigenous population with
state-national aspirations.”
To the question, “The two-state solution works and has been accepted by the
international community. Why abandon it now?” Halper replies: “Had it been
implemented, the two-state solution might have worked even if it wasn’t
fair. Palestinians would have had a viable, sovereign (if small) state on 22
per cent of historic Palestine. Refugees could have come back (albeit into a
small state). The Palestinian state would have had borders with both Israel
and two Arab countries (Jordan and Egypt), as well as a seaport and airport
in Gaza. The international community, of course, accepted the two state
solution already in 1967. The PLO officially accepted it in 1988 (before the
Oslo peace process). And in 2002 the Arab League did so as well. But Israel
rejected it. Israel governments going back to 1967 have rejected the notion
of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel. They even reject
the very fact of occupation. Instead, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and
moved 700,000 settlers into the territory that would have been a Palestinian
state. It confined 95 per cent of the Palestinians to the tiny islands of
Areas A and B in the West Bank, and a besieged Gaza. In January 2020, Prime
Minister Netanyahu announced that Israel would annex the Jordan Valley ‘and
all the settlements,’ in accord with Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century,’ without
even offering the annexed Palestinians Israeli citizenship.”
Halper concludes, “So, true, while the two-state solution may have worked,
it was never accepted by Israel. Regardless, it is now dead and gone, buried
under massive settlement blocs. We must move on.”
Getting Our Program Out
In a January webinar, Halper noted that the one state idea has been
discussed for some time but that the ODSC “has given some substance to it. I
wrote this book partly to get our program out.” But in order for this plan
to move forward it needs acceptance from Palestinians, something which is
yet to happen. If Palestinians were to embrace the one state solution and
work to advance it, Halper believes it could be successful. In his view,
Palestinians must move to a more active form of resistance. He states,
“Samud (steadfastness) keeps them on the map, keeps them in place, doesn’t
allow Israel to win, but at the same time, there’s no program connected to
it. You have to have a political program if you are in a political
struggle.”
The global support Palestinians are receiving must, Halper believes, be
effectively channeled by launching a clear political campaign for a single
democratic state. He notes that in South Africa, the African National
Congress brought an end to apartheid by mobilizing their allies—-religious
communities, universities, trade unions and others. “The good news,” he
says, “is that the Palestinians have that infrastructure as well. I think
the Palestinian issue has achieved the level of significance of the anti-
apartheid struggle in the world, but that what we’re missing is a political
program. You can have all the sympathy and all the solidarity in the world,
but unless you have a program that you’re advocating for, you’re powerless.”
It is essential, Halper argues, that what is happening in Israel/Palestine
be viewed in the settler-colonial framework and the “conflict” be understood
as one between colonizers and an indigenous population rather than between
equals. He notes that, “understanding settler colonialism really does open
up all kinds of possibilities of resolving this in a way that the term
‘conflict’ doesn’t. Conflict locks us into a ‘conflict resolution mode’
that’s never worked. Settler colonialism really opens things up and lets us
get to a genuine resolution.”
Ultimate Aim is “Decolonization”
The ultimate aim of the one state solution, Halper writes in a chapter
entitled “Addressing the Fears and Concerns of a Single Democratic State,”
is, “Decolonization. The dismantling of all structures of domination and
apartheid, replacing them with a single democratic polity and an inclusive
civil society. Rooted in the equal rights of all the country’s citizens, the
goal is to achieve a shared life that protects and nurtures the national,
ethnic, religious and cultural identities and heritage in a pluralistic
society.”
To those who say, “Arabs and Jews hate each other and can never live
together in peace,” Halper replies: “Palestine, like the rest of the Middle
East, had long been multicultural, multiethnic and multi-religious. Despite
occasional (very occasional) exceptions, Jews have lived in Arab and Muslim
countries far more securely than in Europe. The very basis for the
persecution of Jews, anti-Semitism based on the enmity of Christianity to
Judaism, is missing in the Arab/Muslim world. Jews and Muslims lived shared
if communally separate lives. When the Inquisition forced Sephardic Jews to
flee the Iberian Peninsula, they found refuge in the Muslim world. Indeed,
Jews (and Christians) were formally recognized religious communities there.
Nowhere in the Muslim world were Jews submitted to the type of
discrimination, exclusion and persecution found in Europe....Israeli Jews
and Palestinian Arabs already live together in a single state—Israel.
Palestinians represent 21 per cent of Israeli citizens and participate (if
under substantial limitations) in the country’s political and economic life.
Indeed, despite displacement, occupation and repression, the vast majority
of Palestinians in the Occupied Territory also seek an inclusive political
solution.”
In his “Last Word,” Halper concludes this way: “Decolonizing Israel,
Liberating Palestine—-I don’t know if I’ll live to see it (although I firmly
believe that it is do-able in the not-too-distant-future if we organize,
plan, strategize and work seriously). But the point is not to ‘be there’
when the glorious day comes, though that would be nice. The point is to do
the best you can to marshal all the political resources at your disposal
and, effectively as possible, move the struggle that much forward. I hope
I’ll live to see justice for Palestinians. Hopefully this book will
contribute to that
While some may view Halper’s goal of a genuinely democratic single state in
Israel/Palestine as utopian, particularly given Israel’s right-wing
government and the massive U.S. aid it receives, making its military the
strongest in the region, many have hailed his vision. Richard Falk, the
Princeton professor of International Law who was appointed the Special
Rapporteur for the United Nations Human Rights Council on “the situation of
human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967,” calls
Halper’s book, “The finest work of advocacy scholarship I have ever read.”
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, director of the European Centre for
Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, calls Halper’s book, “A
powerful and convincing case.”
Remembering South Africa
The comparison of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with apartheid in South
Africa brings back memories of the time I spent in South Africa during the
years of apartheid. For several years I was the correspondent in Washington
for Afrikaans-language newspapers, DIE BURGER in Cape Town and BEELD in
Johannesburg. I visited the country on a number of occasions and had many
conversations about its future with my Afrikaner friends. I remember one of
them telling me that, “In this country, 5 million white people can control
20 million black people indefinitely. But in order to do so, we must become
a totalitarian state. But we are Western Christian people who believe in
freedom. Our children do not want to live in a totalitarian state. They will
leave for America, Canada and Australia. Apartheid violates all of our
values. We must bring apartheid to an end.”
That, of course, is what happened. White South Africans, recognizing that
apartheid was immoral, voluntarily abandoned it. There were, of course,
those who wished to maintain apartheid, but they were a minority. South
Africa became a multi-racial democracy. In Israel, there are a growing
number of men and women who understand that their country has become eerily
similar to South Africa under apartheid. Sadly, at the present time they are
a minority. The majority seem comfortable with the occupation and seem
prepared to live with millions of Palestinian non-citizens under their
control. White South Africans chose democracy and abandoned apartheid. This
is the choice now facing Israelis.
A Road Map for the Future
At this time, as Halper understands, the majority of Israelis seem prepared
to live with the current situation. Different from white South Africans, the
majority appears indifferent to international public opinion. The phrase
“The whole world is against us” is frequently heard in Israeli right-wing
circles, solidifying intransigence. Halper hopes this will change as world
pressure against Israel’s occupation and its treatment of Palestinians
grows. There is every indication that this is now taking place, particularly
among the younger generation of Jews in the United States and elsewhere in
the world. Once such pressure becomes irreversible, Jeff Halper has provided
a road map for the future.
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