• A Binational State in Occupied Palestine

A Binational State in Occupied Palestine. An Idealistic Dream or a Cultural act?

Will a binational state be the salvation of that Holy Land from the vortex of ceaseless violence and killing. Or is it another idealistic dream on which philosophers waste their time while professional politicians reject it.

The third millenium will most probably witness the establishment of a Palestinian state. What we call the Second Intifada is in fact the Palestinian war of independence. The violence perpetrated by the Israeli army and the colonial settlers on an unprecedented scale is no more than a bloody and pitiable expression of colonialist and vengeful hatred in the face of a revolution whose inevitable result we know. This is not the first time in the past half century that an occupying power expresses its defeat with a last convulsion of fruitless criminal aggressiveness.

The last paragraph sounds as if it was written by an Arab nationalist writer with Palestinian loyalties, who believes that Israel will be defeated in the end of this bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is still likely to continue for longer, with more bloodshed and immense sacrifices. But the surprising and interesting thing is that this paragraph was written by an Israeli writer Michael Warschawski, the head of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, who works and lives at present in France. The aforementioned words are only the first lines of his important book which was published in its French edition in 2001, and republished in Arabic by the Iskanderun Press in Damascus the same year under the title Israel-Palestine, the Challenge of binationalism. Its French title is Israel Palestine, le défi binational. Many people are not aware of this important, but relatively small, book. It seems that this lack of awareness will continue in the wake of the savage Israeli invasion of the occupied Palestinian territories which reminds us of the first Israeli occupation in 1967. The Palestinian poet Murid Al-Barghouthy has written an interesting article about "The Hero", a reference to the militant Marwan Al-Barghouthy, one of the most notable leaders of the second Intifada which is known as the Aqsa Intifada. In this article, published in April, referring to Sharon and his ferocious military campaign against refugee camps in the West Bank, he wrote: Under the rubble of our houses in Jenin and Nablus, not only has our future been buried, but also his future and the future of Israel. The meaning of this intimation is clear and its logic is convincing. This racist violence of the Israeli invasion has in fact placed deep in Palestinian soil an enormous blood feud that will not abate until the perpetrators of the crime are eradicated, both as individuals and as a social or political structure.

Burying Hope

But what the Israeli tanks buried under the ruins of the houses of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah was not only butcher Sharon s future, it is feared that these tanks may have also buried angles of a different vision of the conflict that was promising some ray of light at the end of a long dark tunnel, or at least angles that could have opened a door to discussion. This would be in the form of a serious question that would give birth to other serious questions on a rugged road of answers, and the book referred to is within this framework.

Without going into the question of agreement or disagreement with this book and the ideas of its author, particularly the ideas it presents which may have been drowned in oblivion after Sharon s invasion, it is nevertheless at the very least a serious question that in its turn requires questions, which may lead to an unexpected but useful answer. The book is an attempt at a cultural vision of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It is a vision that rests on a cultural datum from the Israeli interior, which comes close to parallel data on the Palestinian side inside Israel. It must be admitted that we are inadequate with regard to listening to this internal Palestinian voice which is besieged behind the lines of 1948. It is born of qualitative suffering, harsh and real, and has justifications for what it proposes, whether we agree or disagree with it. It is an important vision, or perhaps it is some visions of Arabs who remained inside what is called Israel. They are the Palestinians who have become, under compulsion, citizens of Israel or permanent inhabitants in it. Some literature of dubious orientation has called them Israeli Arabs. They form 22% of the population of Israel and have double the birth rate of the rest of the population of Israel. It is a percentage that is meaningful in illustrating the fragments which make up the Jewish state for which the founding Zionists planned.

This state, as well as the Palestinians in its heart, is suffering from anxiety that 50% of the immigrants who came to it from the former Soviet Union (Russia at present) are not of the Jewish faith, or do not regard themselves as Jews. They form 10% of the overall inhabitants. With an additional 8% of immigrant workers from South East Asia, Central Europe and Africa. So 40% of the inhabitants of this state which they wanted to be Jewish consist of non-Jews. But the group who are suffering most in this state are of course the Palestinian Arabs. They are confronted by racist provocations more than anyone else, particularly since their new and prominent visibility in the heart of the Zionist entity. Through a bloody and persevering struggle the Palestinian people in Israel (the Arabs of Israel ) managed to have a place of their own in the street, the universities and workplaces which used to be forbidden to them. Also in first-class football teams, in culture and information, in the universities, and in parliament (the Knesset). This visibility has not the diminished segregation and racist persecution practised against the Arabs in Israel, indeed it has made them sharper and more inflammable. There are Arab lands which are confiscated and given to Jews, as happened in Rouha area which is a few kilometres away from the city of Umm Al-Fahm, the second largest Palestinian city in Israel. Israel only revoked the confiscation after ten days of violent demonstrations. Also the confiscation of residence permits from Jerusalemites (Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem) is a common practice. And finally the malicious trials of all who raise their voices in favor of Arab rights in the Israeli parliament (Azmi Bishara and Al-Tibi as examples).

This new visibility of the Palestinians in Israel as Warschawski describes in his book - has been accompanied by the emergence of new points of view not only among Palestinians, but also among some Israelis. Palestinians born after the 1948 disaster formed a new generation which came to reject the crumbs from the Israeli budget and Israeli persecution, and insist on equality and the right to the growth of its own culture. They rely in this on the existence of human rights organizations with international connections, and some features of the law in the Israeli Supreme Court which claim that there is equality between citizens , as well as criticisms by new sociologists, new historians and finally new film-makers in Israel.

The Illusion of Equality and Justice

At the same time, in 1992 a group of Arab and Jewish members of left-wing political parties presented what is called a Carter of Equality to work for a program to make Israel a genuine democracy that treats all its citizens equally and to transform the ethnic regime into a secular democratic republic. That was the first demand of this group. The second demand was the concept of autonomy for the Arab minority, its identity and its culture, together with granting it the means to administer aspects of its life.

Meanwhile, a new Arab political party came into existence in Israel, the Democratic National Alliance Party which is represented in the Israeli parliament by Dr. Azmi Bishara. It adopted the Charter of Equality, of which it was one of the drafters, in its thinking and its struggle. Azmi Bishara explained this charter in an article published in the Arabic version of the Journal of Palestinian Studies Summer 1999, in which he wrote: We are aware that the demand for a state for the citizens, all the citizens, is contrary to the Zionist character of Israel. It is clear that the adoption of this political project for equality between citizens will require the Arabs of Israel to fight Zionism and strengthen their national and cultural identity more.

Bishara’s Dream

With this clarity, the thinking militant or militant thinker Azmi Bishara declared his understanding of the Charter of Equality. Hence the ruling Zionist establishment could not put up with him, and put him on trial, dissembling its aim of containing him, if not destroying his courageous effectiveness. For all these reasons we are turning our attention to the concept of ism which Azmi Bishara himself has adopted as an Arab demand inside Israel, with all seriousness and cultural respect, regardless of the final outcome of the discussion.

Warschawski stated in his book that there are three models which alternate in advancing towards a crossroads. Where the state of Israel is positioning itself as a Jewish state. The first of these is the undemocratic model which keeps a large part of its citizens in an inferior and unjust situation. It is a model that is full of tension and contradictions which cannot be resolved even within the ruling group itself. The second model involves complete separation between nationalism and the state, between ethnic origins and citizenship. It is a model of a state which is a nation for all its citizens, and is not concerned with their ethnic or national origin. It is the model which was created by the French Revolution, which wanted to establish a nation made up of citizens by erasing their racial, ethnic or religious affiliation. It is the model of a republic which was chosen by the African National Congress, Mandela s party, in its struggle against racial segregation in South Africa. But the basic weakness of this model is the weakness of the republican model in the third millenium: that it does not take into consideration the basic diversity of a collective national or ethnic identity of people who are supposed to form a nation of citizens. This is particularly so since the state, in Israel, is not doing its duty as a just organizer between the elements of the "nation", which in their turn are not groups of citizens. Here emerges the third model, which is adopted by Warschawski and his book: the multinational state which assumes the existence of several peoples with different collective identities, the diversity of whose nationalisms is recognized in a single state. By a concentration of language, from this third model emerges a project of nationalism, which brought forth the demand for a binational state. This came for the first time as a demand stated by Azmi Bishara, one of the main leaders of Palestinians in Israel, as the writer says. But one cannot conclude from the statement of a demand or a technical term by a Palestinian national leader and thinker renowned for his courage and sincerity what Warschawski has concluded. Azmi Bishara’s tactical and strategic concept of statement of the demand for a binational state had been put forward earlier, in confronting the tyranny and injustice which Palestinian citizens encounter in Israel.

The End of Zionism

Let us not agree or disagree temporarily with the term binational state, and test it in its framework. It is certainly a concept that contradicts the philosophy that exists at the heart of Zionism. For Zionism is a philosophy of division, alienation and rejection of pluralism, that calls for a clear racist homogeneity, which is centered round, or clings to, the slogan One state, one people, one nation, one culture, one ideology. All this revolves around the axis of the Jews and Judaism, from a political rather than a religious perspective.

The mere presentation of the demand indicates a real impasse inside Israel. Approximately half the society, through their situation, interests and suffering, reject the racist homogeneity of the state. This is what causes Warschawski to say that the idea is closer to reality. It is part of an objective vitality related to the economic and social growth of Israel as well as the effects of globalization on its culture. The walls of Arab population concentrations inside Israel are no longer completely closed as they used to be three decades ago, as the same Israeli author admits: Haifa, Jaffa and Ramleh have become multinational and multicultural cities, where Jews, Russians and Arabs are different, and south Tel Aviv is a racial mixture.

Here, in the wake of the Sharonist invasion of the Palestinian territories beginning with the massacres and crimes in Jenin, to the exile of those who were besieged in the Church of the Nativity, the ideas of Michel Warschawski seem in fact to be an idealistic dream. They are a nightmare if we take them from the Israeli side whose voters chose Sharon s model, which demands a purely Jewish state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and would throw the Palestinians beyond the River Jordan, and whose popularity increases the more deeply it penetrates into Palestinian blood.

Nevertheless, if we accept the possibility of a multinational or binational state - and all of us, and foremost among us the Palestinian people, must listen to this appeal which will be significant in future we ask: why should this state not be Palestine rather than Israel, particularly since the historic land of Palestine is antecedent to, and more comprehensive than, Israel? Then the demand for a secular democratic state emerged clearly and was crystallized in the thinking of the Palestine Liberation Organization since 1969.

The book concludes with a chapter entitled "An Addition or a Late Introduction" by the Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar, who criticized the author of the book for reading history through its results only, to where it has reached, and this is a serious mistake which distorts this history. Sanbar continues, He traces the history of the emergence of the idea of binationalism to the 1920s, when it appeared among a small group of Jewish thinkers who came to Palestine, among them the philosopher Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes, the founder of the Hebrew University. As for the transformation of the idea into the demand for a binational state, it was natural that this should come about in confronting Zionism, which the Palestinian citizens encountered in Palestine, so that they should obtain their rights in full. For long and bitter years they have been waging a battle for equality inside Israel which is based on the racist slogan, the state of the Jews only". From this it is clear that the idea of a "binational state" was not born from Dr. Azmi Bishara's head, but rather from the situation of his society. Thus we understand and appreciate the adoption of this idea as a demand for the Palestinians, or some Palestinians inside Israel. It is a political act as much as a cultural one which, through the dream of a minimum degree of equality, exposes the spuriousness of Israel s racist democracy and the Western democratic societies and states which stand behind it, and repels its ethnic racism and fundamentalist deceptions based on the Torah and the Talmud which confirm the breakdown of its allegedly civic and civilized character.

Sulaiman Al-Askary

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