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A QUESTION OF ZION
Foreword to Professor J. Rose, A Question of Zion,
(Melbourne University
Press, 2005).
There is no more important, yet no more intractable,
international question than how to secure a relatively peaceful coexistence
between Jew and Arab in a “holy land” divided between the
focused power of the state of Israel and the ramshackle “authority” of
Palestine. Peace proposals seemingly agreed at Oslo (1993) Camp David
(2000) and Geneva (2002) have faded; the “roadmap” has thus
far led to a brick wall. The way forward may well mean retracing steps,
to identify wrong turnings and the reasons for taking them. At a time
when, in Barbara Tuchman’s phrase, “history is still smoking” it
is appropriate to analyse the ideas of the idealists who set it alight.
I have had no involvement in Arab/ Israeli issues and
can claim no Jewish descent so it came as a surprise to be asked by Melbourne
University Press to provide a foreword to a book about Zionism. Perhaps
it was thought my neutrality would provide balance, because Professor
Rose frankly expresses her critique of the state of Israel and its policies.
It is difficult for anyone absorbed in these issues to remain dispassionate,
but if any permanent solution is to be found it will be through international
humanitarian and human rights law accepted by all parties at the same
time and applied even-handedly to the historical facts.
The question of Zion is in many ways a question of justice.
It was the appalling injustice done to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer
wrongfully convicted by French court-martial, that convinced Theodor Herzl
that Jews would never be permitted to “assimilate” in Europe.
His inspirational pamphlet The Jewish State launched political Zionism,
a claim that the British equivocally accepted in 1917. “His Majesty’s
Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for Jewish people” said the Balfour Declaration. But how could “a
national home” mean “a national state”, in a land of
400,000 Arabs and 30,000 Jewish settlers? “Nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine” the Declaration added ambiguously: in
1917, these “rights” did not include self-determination. For
the next 30 years Britain ruled Palestine in a kind of colonial fugue,
permitting some Jewish settlement but incapable of appreciating the impossible
demographic tensions its policy would produce. In the end, for these unwise
administrators, partition seemed the solomonic solution.
Then came the Holocaust, to compensate for which UN
Resolution 181 of 29th November 1947 ceded over half the land to the state
of Israel, against the wishes of neighbouring Arab states who declared
war, and by losing it, doomed Palestinians to the refugee camps. In 1967,
after the Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following
renewed Arab aggression and the Six Day War, the UN Security Council produced
the first “road map”: its Resolution 242 emphasised “the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called
both for withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from occupied territories
and for cessation of violence by or against Israel (a recognition, essentially,
of its sovereign existence).
Today, the international law position is tolerably clear.
In Justice Roslyn Higgins’ pithy summary: “Israel is entitled
to exist, to be recognised and to security, and the Palestinian people
are entitled to their territory, to exercise self-determination, and to
their own state”. Both sides are under a duty to negotiate but neither
has been prepared, at least simultaneously, to give peace a chance. Diplomatic
efforts have failed, often through the truculence of Palestinian leaders
and their Arab state backers, although international law has been marginalised
by Israel’s all-purpose justification of “self-defence”,
even for expansion of the settlements. That defence has in recent years
been made more credible by a crime against humanity – the campaign
of suicide bombing – perpetrated by Hamas and other militant groups.
And even as the government of Israel strives to comply, up to a point,
with international law by withdrawing from Gaza, it is opposed by extremist
settlers chanting a form of Zionism of which Herzl would have been ashamed.
Is there to be no end to the vicious cycle of violence, now transmitted
by Al Jazeera throughout the Arab world to inflame passions and raise
funds (especially from the Gulf) for further acts of jihad (a.k.a. terrorism)?
Patience with Israel is beginning to wear thin as well,
at least for those without blood ties or blood guilt. The Zionist project
was approved in 1948 by a world ashamed that the Holocaust could happen,
but as the last old Nazis die unlamented, their depravity can no longer
be permitted to block criticism of Israeli policy. It still seems reasonable
enough, amongst the “rights of peoples” guaranteed by the
Universal Declaration, to acknowledge a “peoples” right to
a homeland from which they can draw cultural identity and, in the case
of a wickedly persecuted race, to recognise their right to a safe haven
carved out of the lands of their persecutors. In retrospect, this would
have meant a retributive right to a Jewish homeland asserted against Hitler’s
willing executioners – a large slice of Saxony, perhaps. But that
was not the Zionist dream (although in 1903 many of its early supporters,
reluctant to risk their destiny in the desert, had been prepared to accept
Britain’s offer of a slab of Uganda).
The creation of Israel involved a different kind of
claim, which had a different consequence – the domination of indigenous
Arab people who also called Palestine “home”, and were already
in residence. This difficulty was fudged by the slogan “A land without
people for a people without land”. But Palestine was not terra nullius:
by 1948 it contained 1.3 million Arabs and a minority of Jewish settlers.
It was to the rights of the Palestinians, and the long-term danger of
overriding them, that some notable Jewish intellectuals had turned their
minds and their pens in the course of questioning the “blood and
soil” strain in Zionism.
The first virtue of Professor Rose’s lectures
is that they allow those who planned and fretted over the Zionist project
to speak for themselves. By dint of her extensive research and stimulating
presentation, these extraordinary figures address us across the years,
articulating the hopes and fears which drove them in the search for a
way of life that would not be threatened by the pogrom or the concentration
camp. It is impossible not to be stirred by the dreams of Herzl and the
rhetoric of Weizmann and Ben Gurion. And it is impossible not to credit
the prescience of some of their critics – Hannah Arendt, Martin
Buber, Ahad Ha’am and Hans Kohn and other neglected voices – who
predicted that Israel in arms would be in danger from its own sword. Here
is the babble of agonising debate amongst mittel-European Jewry in the
first half of the last century, a sound archive which reverberates with
portentous passion. Against it, Rose hangs the hypothetical teaser: what
if? In this case, she asks, what if the project had committed itself from
its inception to justice and human rights?
Some readers might answer that there would have been
no Israel, and a few might think there should be no book even provoking
that question. But every “ism” must be looked at with a critical
eye and Zionism, one of the most successful, has had little analysis,
for all the massive and continuous news coverage and comment about Israeli
policy. It may fairly be said that Palestinian national identity has had
even less, and although more recent (it discernably dates from the revolt
against the British, 1936-9) its myths are just as deserving of demolition.
So be it: peace will only be possible when both sides can unlock their
mind-forged manacles.
In Rose’s account, ironies abound. She explains
how the Zionist project was first sold to the crown heads of Europe, almost
as a “final solution” of the problem of the Jew in their midst.
This was one reason why many thoughtful assimilationist Jews in Europe
came to oppose it, as a recipe for their separation and stigmatism. It
was a solution to which even Hitler was not at first averse and nor was
the Menzies government. (The Holocaust museum in Washington has a display
which prominently features Australia’s uncaring refusal in 1938
to contemplate the admission of a shipload of Jewish refugees from Germany).
Little wonder, in those times of barely conceivable anti-Semitism, that
Jewish leaders should seek a place of safety in which to validate their
existence. Once ensconced they have been harsh to their enemies, an attitude
that Rose attributes to a desire to block out the “shameful” memory
of the generation that meekly boarded the trains to Auschwitz. Suicide
bombers, presumably, are indoctrinated to think that they can avenge the
humiliation of their race by taking in their last conscious moment the
only power on offer.
Australians have made their own unfinished attempts
to identify – and then to respect – indigenous rights. Terra
nullius after all, was the law by which England staked its claim to the
continent: it has recently been abolished and we have found through “native
title” some ways of harnessing the inherent decency of the common
law and the apolitical promise of “equity” to provide land
rights. Something of the same development may be seen in the recent work
of the Israeli Supreme Court, which in 1999 outlawed the use of force
by Shin Bet during interrogations and has recently taken a more proactive
stance in holding the army to account for its helicopter forays into the
occupied territories and Palestine.
The parallels are by no means exact but the message
from countries where an indigenous population has been dispossessed or
humiliated or deprived of political power is that the law – national
or, failing that, international – must protect them from discrimination
and do so in a way which respects their dignity and gives them fair share
in the fruits of the land they have lost. Some distinguished Israelis – like
former Attorney General Michael Ben Yair – recognise (at least,
when out of office) that their country is breaching international law
in this respect. For all Israel’s achievement in “making the
desert bloom” its curfews and check-points have had what the UK
government describes as a “catastrophic” effect on the Palestinian
economy: over half its people live in poverty on less than $2 a day. The
World Bank predicts that the poverty rate will rise dramatically if present
conditions continue, and the Red Cross has pulled out in despair, because
humanitarian aid cannot help until Israel allows Palestinians “to
live as normal a life as possible”. The UK has condemned the Knesset’s
discrimination against Arab Israelis (20% of the population): the “targeted
killings” (executions without trial) of suspected terrorist leaders,
and the loss of innocent lives – over 500 children killed by army
incursions into the occupied territories since the last intifada.
In fairness there is another side to this story, and
it is a consequence of the continuing unrealistic refusal in some Arab
quarters to accept Israel’s right to exist and indeed to flourish
in a security enforced not only by its own army but by the policing powers
of the Palestinian authority and neighbouring states. Sadly, the Palestinian
authority has mired itself in corruption: while its school textbooks manage
to ignore the existence of 5 million Jews. The Authority has taken no
credible action to punish those responsible for inciting acts of terrorism
- including suicide bombing, a tactic so barbaric that no group resorting
to it should ever be permitted to prosper. That these people can be posthumously
praised as “martyrs” is a reason to despair, and defiance
by both sides of the Geneva Conventions seems to make Auden’s weary
point:
I and the public know
What all school children learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
The founding fathers of Zionism never envisaged this
future and the promise, from Balfour onwards, of a safe haven for Jews
has been turned on its head: notwithstanding the recrudescence of anti-Semitism
in some parts of Europe, the promised land remains the country where Jews
are most at risk, in a conflict which has a ripple effect on peace and
security elsewhere in the world. That was what the Zionist doubters predicted,
unless the cause could fully commit to justice and human rights. Professor
Rose owns to “an overwhelming sense of a moment missed”, but
by reminding us that indigenous rights and Palestinian welfare were a
real concern at the outset of the movement, she helps to make it a possibility
that the moment will come again.
Geoffrey Robertson QC
Doughty Street Chambers
July 2005
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