Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy

5. States of Despair: History, Politics, and the Struggle for Palestine

60 BLOOD IN THE SAND States of Despair 5 History, Politics, and the Struggle for Palestine Echoes of the Past Hope is said to have a bitter taste. Nowhere is that more true than in the Middle East, where the possibilities for peace have been squandered and the longings for justice have grown ever more burdensome over the last half century. Worry over the treatment of Arabs by Jews stretches back to the last century over a host of modern Jewish intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, and Gershom Scholem, among others. But their cautionary warnings were ignored , if not derided, by the Jewish mainstream. It is ironic, since these thinkers implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, anticipated that the Palestinians would shoulder the compensatory costs of the European Holocaust. This historical trick of fate would serve as the source of an ideological competition over who is the real victim—a competition that for so long has poisoned the possibility of reasoned debate between Jews and Palestinians. Jews had, understandably, made a moral demand for a national haven of safety following World War II. Europe, guiltridden by its recent past, was willing to sanction one so long as it was somewhere else, such as in the Holy Land. Just as legitimately , however, its Arab inhabitants insisted that they had played no part in the Holocaust and should not be forced to pay such a terrible price for the blood spilled by others. There 61 STATES OF DESPAIR was one way for Israelis to square the moral circle: understand the creation of the new “Jewish” state as being the provision of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” This slogan coined in 1901 by Israel Zangwill, who ironically never believed that it applied to Palestine in the first place, became perhaps the founding myth of Israel. It projected the creation of life in an empty desert by a “chosen people,” a cultivated people wronged by history who were at last able to build their destiny through intelligence, bravery, and perseverance . Unfortunately, however, the land was not empty or bereft of civilization: it had to be made so. Herein lies the contribution of the various “revisionist” historians such as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, as well as independent-minded sociologists such as Baruch Kimmerling. Their political opinions differ radically, but their research illustrates with scholarly objectivity that the “people without a land” actually created “the land without a people” through what today would be termed “ethnic cleansing.” Creating Israel involved forcibly expelling more than 750,000 Arab inhabitants , eliminating more than 400 villages, employing rape and torture, and turning those Arabs living in the new state into second-class citizens to ensure its Jewish character. But the old myth refuses to die. The image still exists of a heroic battle waged by a small community of peaceful Jews against a vast army of savage Arabs, the assault on the Israeli David by the anti-Semitic Goliath, which led to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. War followed war. An attempted seizure of the Suez Canal by Israel with the backing of France and England took place in 1956 until, fearful of increased European influence in the Middle East, the United States demanded that the invaders withdraw. And they did. Then, in 1967, Israel attacked an allied force of Arab armies—from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan— 62 BLOOD IN THE SAND massing on its borders. The Six-Day War culminated in a humiliating defeat for the Arab world and the capture of the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and the West Bank. It was in response to these events that the Security Council of the United Nations passed the famous Resolution 242, which demanded Israeli withdrawal from the conquered territories. Here began the shift in American policy: Israel now appeared to be the dominant force in the region and a bulkhead against the Soviet Union, with whose interests the Arab world became identified in the eyes of the United States. The National Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Fatah), which was formed in 1959, took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when, in 1969, Yasir Arafat was elected its chairman just after it came into existence. Incarnating the demand for a Palestinian state, the PLO was born under the long shadow of the “catastrophe” (nakba) of 1948—the expulsion resulting from the creation...