Democracy and the 'destruction' of Israel

September 22, 1993
Issue 

By Mike Karadjis

In recent debate in Green Left Weekly over the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, two of the PLO's profoundly democratic positions have been raised: the 1974 position of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza next to "Israel proper", and its older position of a "democratic, secular state" in all of Palestine and hence the destruction of Israel as a racist state. What needs to be addressed is whether there is a contradiction between the two.

Confusion sometimes arises over what was meant by the slogan of the "destruction" of Israel in the days when it was used more often by the PLO and much of the left.

Zionist propaganda attempted to portray the PLO's "destruction of Israel" as meaning the elimination of the Jews living there. The PLO's 1968 program of "a democratic, secular Palestine for Jews, Christians and Muslims" didn't stop Zionists from trying to terrify Jewish people with the PLO "threat" to "destroy" them.

What does the PLO want to destroy? It wants to destroy the racist state that by its very nature systematically oppresses the indigenous Palestinian population. While it is positive that progressive Jews oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (and East Jerusalem?), it needs to be remembered that the Palestinian catastrophe began not in 1967, but in 1947-8.

If the horrific massacres and the expulsion of 900,000 Palestinians (i.e., most of them) were not an attempt to kill every Palestinian, there was certainly a holocaust of the whole Palestinian society as it had long existed. Similarly, Serbia may not aim to actually kill every Bosnian, but it would be difficult to argue with a Bosnian that their society had not undergone a holocaust.

These events of 1947-8 occurred for a reason: to create "the state of Israel" as we know it — an exclusively Jewish state where another people had been the vast majority of the population.

Apartheid

Being an exclusively Jewish, i.e. racist, state manifests itself in many ways, and here we're not talking about the more blatant racist oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but in "Israel proper".

Those Palestinians remaining in Israel after 1948, who today number some 800,000 (a fifth of Israel's population), are excluded from most land in Israel: the Jewish National Fund owns 94% of the land for exclusively Jewish use. The little land that is owned by Palestinians has been subject to arbitrary confiscation from 1947 right up until today, especially in the overwhelmingly Palestinian region of Galilee.

This practice does not occur only in the occupied territories, as is widely believed. It was the massive confiscations and accompanying massacres in 1976 inside Israel that led to the annual Day of the Land marches.

The education system is totally Jewish and racist in content, completely ignoring Palestinian history and culture. Palestinians are denied all kinds of welfare benefits which go together with military service, from which they are excluded.

In the words of Israeli Jewish sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis, there exist "basic apartheid-type discriminations and exclusions in the supply of amenities, state resources and supplementary benefits". Palestinians even carry different identity cards.

While Palestinians in Israel have the right to vote (unlike those in the occupied territories), the party which they overwhelmingly support, the PLO, is banned. Even raising a Palestinian flag is a highly illegal act.

On top of all this, while any Jew in the world can automatically become an Israeli citizen, the Palestinians expelled since 1947 and their children — now numbering about two and a half million people — are denied the elementary right to return, despite a 44-year-old UN resolution.

Naturally, any progressive person would advocate the replacement of such a state by a democratic state for all peoples who live there — that is, the PLO program of 1968.

Two state formula

However, given that this slogan did not gain any support among Israeli working people, the PLO began as early as 1974 moving towards a compromise formula of two states, with the occupied West Bank and Gaza, one-fifth of Palestine, becoming the new Palestinian state, while the other four-fifths would remain Israel.

Some Palestinians thought this was a betrayal of the PLO's older position. Israel, on the other hand, charges that such a state would be a step towards the PLO's older program and hence the "destruction" of Israel.

A Palestinian "mini-state" would enable the Palestinians to negotiate directly with Israel in world forums as political equals. It would be a tremendous boost to Palestinian self-confidence and international standing. The existence of a Palestinian people would be recognised.

But in itself this would not solve all the problems. The racist state of Israel would still oppress the Palestinians inside its borders. Palestinian labour would still be subject to Israeli super-exploitation. The Palestinian state would be economically dependent on its stronger neighbour.

Further, the 2.5 million Palestinians in exile mostly came from, and wish to return to, Israel proper, not the West Bank or Gaza. Any just settlement would allow them to return, meaning that the Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel would be about equal in numbers.

The Zionist rulers have traditionally maintained support among Israeli Jewish people for their racist state by cultivating an atmosphere of paranoia and xenophobia, based on the idea that the Arabs and Palestinians want to push the Jews into the sea. But a Palestinian mini-state would be militarily incapable of "destroying" Israel; in fact it would be militarily helpless and probably unarmed. This reality would seriously undermine Zionist paranoia, which would be further undermined by the PLO being able to demonstrate in practice what a democratic, secular state would look like.

Hence, while being quite incapable of militarily "destroying" Israel, such a Palestinian state would have the effect of helping to "destroy" politically the neighbouring racist state. Freed from Zionist paranoia and forced to recognise that Palestinians exist as a distinct people, Israeli Jewish progressives and working people would be able to see Palestinian workers as their allies, and jointly struggle for a democratic, secular state for all who live there.

The success of such a political struggle would lead to two democratic, secular states for Jews, Christians and Muslims on the territory of historic Palestine, probably linked in some kind of economic union. While it's impossible to predict any further ahead, the logical next step would be a single state.

Vivienne Porzsolt (GLW, August 11) gives too much credit to the Zionist rulers when she writes that Israel's refusal to give justice to the Palestinians is based on "sheer terror for survival, arising from historical experience but certainly not based on current realities". "Historical experience" means the Nazi holocaust, something the Palestinians were innocent of. There has never been any threat to Jewish survival from the oppressed and dispossessed Palestinians, and Israeli Jews have as much reason to fear Palestinians as Australian whites have to fear Aboriginal rights.

The Israeli rulers try to cultivate this "terror for survival" among the Israeli masses, but these rulers don't believe any of it. Their motivation for maintaining their racist and imperialist system is that it is profitable for them to be able to grab more and more land free of charge, destroy local Palestinian production to open more markets for their own products and then have an abundant supply of super-exploitable Palestinian labour.

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