I Can't Hear You

The Israeli-born and now US-based Holocaust historian Omer Bartov has been on a journey. Returning on a visit to Israel in August 2024, he was deeply disturbed not only by the rhetoric of IDF soldiers protesting at the very idea of coexistence with the Palestinians of Gaza but at the degree to which such views had become the common sense of the country. He identified two sentiments: a fear and rage that "threatens to make war into its own end", and "the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza". The parallel with his own study of European societies in the 1930s and 40s should be obvious. A year later, Bartov wrote a noted article for the New York Times - I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It - in which he reluctantly came to the conclusion that Israel was "committing genocide against the Palestinian people". Bartov has now published a book - Israel: What Went Wrong? - in which he discusses how this acceptance of genocide came about, and more particularly how Zionism evolved from a movement of liberation to a settler-colonial project.

I've not read the book, and probably won't because the arguments as summarised in his interview with the Guardian are already well-known. Chief among them is "the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights." The determination of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, to avoid enshrining citizenship in a constitution, thereby either having to grant rights to Palestinians in situ or immediately formalise a system of apartheid, was not some personal eccentricity but the core of the new state's rationale. As such, genocidal intent has been there since the expansion of Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 30s, even before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. To imagine that Zionism has only lately been perverted, that it has "become" genocidal, is to ignore the logic of its declared goal to create an exclusive Jewish homeland. This is the delusion of liberal Zionism: that there was ever the possibility of satisfying the Zionist cause while also respecting the rights of Palestinians. Ben Gurion recognised this.

What is interesting, if depressing, about Bartov's journey is that he still holds out hope for the return of a liberal Israel. As the interview notes, "Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy." Before getting into the details of what this plan actually means, or how such a Utopia might come about, it's worth marvelling at the strained parallel with the EU.

The first point to make is that the previous version (the "Partition Plan") failed in 1947 because it was so obviously biased. The Jewish state would have 56% of the Mandatory Territory, the Palestinians would have 43% (the remaining 1% being an internationally-administered Jerusalem and Bethlehem). At the time, the Palestinian (and non-Jewish minority) population was twice the size of the Jewish population: 1.2m versus 600k. Among other things, this would have meant that 45% of the Jewish state population would be Palestinian. Given everything that has happened since, notably the mass expulsions of the Nakba in the following year, it is reasonable to assume they would have been second class citizens and encouraged to depart. The Arab states at the UN clearly saw this as a land-grab and voted against it. The second point to make is that the "pre-1967" borders were not those of 1947 but of 1949, after the First Arab-Israeli War when Israel increased its share of the former Mandatory Territory to 78%, reducing the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza. What happened in 1967 was that Israel then took over those areas as well and set about steadily eroding them through settlements and military exclusion zones.

The latest iteration of the confederation plan, as explained by Dahlia Scheindlin, is a liberal attempt to craft a solution that avoids pluralism in any form. It is presented in contrast to two inferior alternatives: "the two solutions usually discussed by policymakers: the failed “two-state solution” framework of the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the “one-state reality”—the currently emerging de facto condition of a single state of Israeli citizens and oppressed Palestinian subjects." What is not to be considered is the single state solution - i.e. equal rights for Palestinians in a merged Israel and Palestine. This is because Zionism always trumps liberalism in liberal Zionism. The plan has obvious echoes of 1947 in its asymmetry. For example, "Palestinian refugees can attain Palestinian citizenship, along with the right of residency in Israel. Existing Israeli settlers will retain Israeli citizenship with residency rights in Palestine if they abide Palestinian laws and sovereignty, and most will not be expelled from where they currently reside." Compare "can" to "will". In other words, the illegal settlements in the West Bank will remain. The freedom of movement and residency is "to be implemented over time", which may mean never.

On the question of enfranchisement, the plan proposes that "Palestinians and Israelis will be able to vote in the national elections of their respective states and in local elections, in whichever state they reside." The problem this gives rise to is the tension it creates between the grant of residency and political influence. Palestinian refugees currently in Lebanon or Jordan aren't going to be granted residency in Israel, and indeed there is every reason to suspect that Israeli Arabs would become more vulnerable: "Palestinians who already have Israeli citizenship will retain it, with the option to have dual citizenship in Palestine." As the UK showed with Shamima Begum, dual citizenship is handy if you want to expel a nominal citizen. Will Palestinians in the West Bank be granted residency in West Jerusalem if they can then form a decisive voting bloc in local elections? The suggestion is that it would be the capital of both states but "structured, by institutional design, to represent both communities", which sounds like the power-sharing that has led to paralysis in Northern Ireland. As that parallel indicates, the likely outcome is for local government to become attenuated and more power reserved to the national authority - i.e. direct rule.

The confederation plan is a phantastic object meant to assuage the cognitive dissonance of Israeli progressives and their supporters in the West. At the heart of the Zionist project is the rejection of pluralism in favour of ethnic exclusivity, the original argument that split Jewish opinion between the Zionist nationalists and the socialist Bund. Liberal opinion in Israel survived for decades by denying this reality in favour of a mythos built on self-defence, cultural superiority and a self-conscious democracy. But this has been too difficult to maintain since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the failure of the Oslo process. Israeli society has become more intolerant towards dissent in its own ranks, with the political left redundant and religious conservatism on the rise. Liberal opinion is now firmly on the right of the political spectrum, more concerned with the image of liberalism than its active practice. This isn't exclusive to Israel: this drift to the right is visible in most countries. But Israel has a particularly acute case of it because it is engaged in systematic violence, from settler assaults in the West Bank (deplored but not restrained) to the invasion of Southern Lebanon.

The latter outrage is symbolically important because that country exists as an affront to Israel. As Ussama Makdisi puts it, "Israel’s expansion into Lebanon and apparent weaponization of Lebanon’s religious diversity ultimately underscores its own commitment to its prevailing ideology as a Jewish state committed to subjugating its regional environment: from the occupied Palestinian territories to the Syrian Golan Heights, and now to southern Lebanon. In that way, Lebanon is its antithesis: a state that reflects, however imperfectly, an indigenous pluralism." Makdisi notes that "Hezbollah does not resist Israel simply because it is a Shiite organization supported by Iran; it resists Israel primarily because Israel has repeatedly invaded, scorched and occupied Lebanese land, and because Israel uprooted and terrorized its community." The attempt to cast Hezbollah as simply an Iranian proxy is a conscious tactic to undermine Lebanon as a state and to suggest that the centuries-old Shiite presence in the south of the country is anomalous as much as it is is a threat to Israel. In other words, Lebanon's legitimacy as a state is called into question by virtue of it multi-ethnicity and its historic attempts at power-sharing. Israel has repeatedly undermined the latter over the years, not just for contingent tactical advantage but because it vehemently rejects power-sharing in principle.

This rejection of pluralism is increasingly visible in the diaspora as well. The current demand is that solidarity with the Jewish community against antisemitism must be exclusive, not qualified by appeals to a wider anti-racism and certainly not tainted by association with the idea of equal rights for Palestinians. This is a demand that some in the West have been happy to cynically exploit for domestic political gain, thereby denigrating the entirety of progressive causes in some cases. It might seem odd that this line has been pushed in particular by the Guardian, but that paper's commitment to liberal Zionism is arguably its most consistent value since the millennium. Leftists arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism fail to appreciate that for many Jews they are identical because they have come to identify Israel exclusively with Zionism. There is no domestic anti-Zionist opposition to speak of, outside of those with religious scruples, while diaspora anti-Zionists are routinely dismissed as self-hating Jews.

Israeli society is, as Omer Bartov noted, fearful and angry and lacking in empathy. It should come as no surprise that Jews in the UK are encouraged to exhibit the same traits, if only in sympathy with Israel. The refusal to accept that sincere anti-racists can deplore antisemitism as much as Islamophobia or the denial of Palestinian rights is necessary because to admit otherwise would be to accept the contention that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that would be a betrayal of Israel or, to put it in Bartov's terms, what it has become. The demand for solidarity with the Jewish community therefore comes with strings attached. You cannot dilute it by extending your empathy to other communities. Your solidarity must be exclusive. For liberal newspapers steadily backtracking on their support for progressive causes, from trans rights to the NHS, this is a model exercise in virtue but also a wonderful opportunity to express their contempt for the left. "Where are those who are usually so vocal in their opposition to racism" asks Jonathan Freedland, a man who has had his fingers in his ears for decades.