December 2001/
January 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Reflections on Israel and Palestine

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Simmons College, Boston.

The recent suicide bombings in Israel provided the world with stark and ghastly images of dismembered bodies and grotesque destruction. No one could fail to be moved to revulsion and disbelief of human beings' capacity to inflict such devastation on other humans. Many insist on reducing the answer to demonized attributes of the perpetrators. This may satisfy the inclination to rage and to demands for revenge, but it masks the well from which such acts erupt.

Women in Black, Government Center, Boston © Ellen Shub

In so many ways, the Israeli scene is reminiscent of the dramatized, but authentic scenes portrayed in the film Battle of Algiers, which portrayed the beginning of the Algerian revolution. After 130 years of French colonialism marked by French settler exploitation of indigenous Algerian Arabs, their lands, and their resources, Algerians exercised their right of resistance. They succeeded in releasing themselves from the oppressive French colonial stranglehold and in routing the French settlers. I recall a particular scene in the film where an Algerian woman, dressed as a European, placed a bomb package in a French café. There they were, young French settlers dancing in that café, when suddenly the bomb exploded, and the strewn bodies of the dancers lay still on the floor dismembered, bloodied, dead and dying. The French response to what Algerians considered to be acts of resistance was massive and indiscriminate military reprisals, including the blowing up of sections of the Casbah and use of the most extreme forms of torture to extract information from captured Algerians.

Two Faces of Israel

The reason it is so difficult for the general public to connect recent events in Israel/Palestine to the colonial profile exemplified by Algeria, is that Israel has two faces. The face understood by the public, and promoted widely by Israeli public relations campaigns, is that of an historically victimized Jewish people seeking to re-establish in Palestine its original homeland of Israel as a haven for Jewish people everywhere. Many Jews understand Israel in this way. In this version, the indigenous Palestinians are portrayed as illegal and violent intruders and obstructers of Jewish national rights.

Contemporary Israel is defined as the rightful heir of the historically short-lived and mythologized ancient Israel, conceptualized as the only authentic source of national rights. This social construction of the history and meaning of Israel fits neatly into the empirical reality of Jewish history in Europe. Here are people returning to the land of their forebears to escape the horrors experienced abroad. The Palestinian obstructers of this journey of refuge are structurally attached to the Jewish historical narrative of victimization. They are a continuation of the victimization of Jews as convincingly symbolized by one man, Hitler. This conceptualization allows Jews to feel total rage against, and to issue calls for death to Palestinians when events such as witnessed these past weeks occur.

There is another face of Israel, however--the face of a racist colonial settler state, bent on transforming all of centuries-old Palestine into the state of Israel, and de-legitimizing the indigenous Palestinian population as the rightful owners of the land. From its inception, the Zionist movement sought to remove the Palestinian people from the land and to destroy any traces of their existence in Palestine. The Zionist movement planned carefully for the transformation of Palestine. Neither their weak demographic presence in Palestine, nor their very limited land ownership, nor legal barriers prevented Zionist leaders from pursuing their goal of converting Palestine into Eretz Israel.The Zionists understood their strength was in pairing with an imperial power--Great Britain, followed later by the United States. They counted on the mutual sense between them that Palestinian and other Arabs were not important or competent actors in the region.

However Zionists/Israelis chose to define and distort agreements, accords, and UN resolutions regarding Palestine, few or no protests were mounted against them. The 1947-1948 expulsion of some 750,000 of an estimated 900,000 Palestinians from the area the Zionist movement conquered in 1948--namely, 78 % of Palestine--brought forth UN resolution 194 in December 1948 calling for Palestinians' right of return, but Israel ignored the resolution and the UN agency created to implement it. Then in 1967, Israel conquered the rest of Palestine--the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. These are defined as occupied territories under international law and UN Security Council resolution 242. Nonetheless, Israel had no intent ever of giving up them up since they were seen as part of Eretz Israel.

Immediately, illegal settlements were planted in all of the territories to create "facts on the ground." However, Israel was faced with a new demographic problem. The Palestinian residents of the territories occupied in 1967, including those who were refugees from 1948, did not flee as Palestinians were made to do during the 1948 war when media coverage was limited and an era of post-holocaust sympathy for Jews blocked criticism. For Israel, occupying the territories, planting settlements, and controlling the resources and Palestinians, were steps that would eventually confirm the areas as part of Eretz Israel. As for the Palestinians there, they would either have to leave, or remain as compliant aliens in their own land.

Oslo and After

When the Madrid/Oslo process was foisted on Israel in 1991 by President Bush, who sought to consolidate American interests and control in the Arab region after the Gulf war by eliminating the destabilizing effect of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Prime Minister Shamir balked. However, it was clear to the next Prime Minister, Yitzak Rabin, that Israel could use the peace process to solidify its control over the territories while ridding itself of responsibility for the large remaining Palestinian population. It was at that moment that Israel embarked on more intense settlement, by-pass roads, rigid checkpoint areas, and forcing all Palestinian economic activity to go through Israel. The latter would limit the ability of Palestinians to develop an economy that could undergird a viable state. It is also clear that Yasir Arafat negotiated poorly, and allowed himself to be put in the position of policing his own people in Israel's interest. Arafat closed off all secular voices for democratic input into his administration and his further negotiations with the Israelis. As he agreed more and more to untenable Israeli terms, the quality of life declined appreciably for Palestinians. Israeli settlers ranged freely over Palestinian lands, and exercised a ruthless disregard for Palestinians.

As Palestinian rights became whittled down to conditions of practical bondage, the only resistance movement that Arafat could not shut down was the Islamist movement, including both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad (smaller and less effective). With the outbreak of the second intifada after the failure of Camp David II to yield any significant rights to Palestinians--contrary to Israeli propaganda claiming that major concessions were offered--Palestinians understood that the Oslo peace process was a fraud. The election of Sharon as Prime Minister confirmed the fraudulent nature of Oslo. Sharon did not offer linguistic palliatives to the Palestinians as had some of his predecessors, especially Shimon Peres. While objecting to Oslo, he said he was prepared to offer Palestinians the 40 % of the West Bank (itself only 20% of what pre-1948 Palestine was) as his final offer, and only after the Palestinians stopped the intifada. It should be noted that the Palestinians had full autonomy over only 17.2% of the West Bank. The other 22.8% was jointly controlled with the Israeli army.

Sharon had no intention of allowing even the 40%. His strategy is to constantly provoke situations which allow him to use excessive force against Palestinians in the occupied territories. The intent is to encourage Palestinians to leave by making their lives totally miserable and tenuous. House demolitions, land confiscation, destruction of olive trees, closure, refusal to turn over the customs and tax funds due the Palestinian Authority, blockage of Palestinian products and produce from reaching markets, and blocking imports of materials needed for Palestinian construction and projects, all intensified under Sharon. Palestinian life became increasingly intolerable, while Palestinians felt they had already conceded much to Israel. They had de facto accepted the notion of a Palestinian state on the occupied territories only, i.e., 22 % of pre-1948 Palestine instead of the 45% allotted by the 1947 UN partition resolution, and instead of their legal right under the 1919 League of Nations Covenant, article 22, to all of Palestine.

From the time of Rabin on, during the Madrid/Oslo process, Palestinians were constantly asked to compromise the compromise. Israel often refused to implement interim agreements. It failed to redeploy (a word that replaced withdraw) its forces away from Palestinian areas. Israel is actually required under international law to negotiate the schedule of its withdrawal from occupied territories, to refrain from putting settlements in the area, and to refrain from violating the rights of occupied peoples guaranteed under the fourth Geneva convention. Oslo did not follow international law, and Arafat failed to launch an objection. In all this the United States complied.

Understanding the Resistance, Righting the Wrongs

Given all this, the only resistance movement sufficiently organized among Palestinians--the Islamists--have directed Palestinian resistance against Israeli civilians, just as the Algerian resistance did to French settlers and to targets in Marseilles and Paris. While we all are stunned by the results, we should also be horrified by the excessive force used by Israelis to kill Palestinian citizens in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods, and by the wanton destruction of Palestinian infrasturcture. The Israeli policy of targeted assassinations, coupled with economic deprivation, and use of helicopter gunships, F16s, and tank missiles to terrorize the Palestinian population into leaving or into total submission, must be fully recognized as murder and mayhem.

Yes, we must condemn the killing of the Israeli citizens, but that condemnation rings hollow unless we condemn Israeli policy and its atrocities committed against the Palestinian people. Condemnation alone is not enough. The international community must move into the occupied territories and remove the Israeli military occupation and settlements, and then provide the context for real negotiations to resolve all problems in accordance with international law.

Unlike the French in Algeria, the original Jewish settlers up to 1967 should not be expected to leave. The French could return to France if they so wished, whereas for most Israelis, Israel is home. Nonetheless, they must extend equal rights to the Palestinian citizens of Israel--those Palestinians who managed to stay in what became Israel after the 1948 war. They must also be willing to negotiate all other outstanding rights with a new Palestinian government that would come into being once the occupation leaves.

Even if these things are done, violence won't cease immediately. Diehard post-1967 settlers will attempt to undermine the move to sane resolution based on law and rights. But over the years, they will lose support for their extremism. Jacques Soustelle and his French Alagerian followers lost theirs.

It is surely difficult for an Israeli is to admit that Zionism, beyond doing much to improve the lot of some Jews, may also be a colonialist movement. Such an admission might seem to destroy the moral justification of Zionism. Israelis may fear that any admission of guilt for the past deprives them of all rights to live in Israel. But the children of colonialism do have rights, especially if they are settlers who have nowhere else to go.

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