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Searching for a universal, non-Biblical justification for Israel’s existence, secular Zionists asserted that persecuted Jews had deserved a safe haven. But this argument contained a number of flaws. A need for refuge is not a license to dispossess. Zionists did not come to Palestine seeking to integrate into local society, but to establish their own exclusive state at the natives’ expense. The need for safe haven was not the original motivation for establishing a Jewish national home. As Michael Stanislawski, the Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, writes:
The all-too-frequent claim that modern Jewish nationalism was born in response to anti-Semitism or to the outbreak of violent attacks (“pogroms”) against the Jews which began in the Russian Empire in 1881–[18]82 is quite simply wrong: the first expressions of this new ideology were published well before the spread of the new anti-Semitic ideology and before the pogroms of the early 1880s. …the fundamental cause of the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism was the rise, on the part of Jews themselves, of new ideologies that applied the basic tenets of modern nationalism to the Jews, and not a response to persecution.
The original aim of modern Jewish nationalism was to prevent the assimilation of Jews into the nations in which they lived—the rescue of Jewish identity, not of Jews. When, in the period 1903–1905, the Zionist movement was presented with a choice between an actual, immediate refuge—offered by the British, in East Africa—and the pursuit of an uncertain dream in Zion, it was the argument for the latter that won. The pogroms that followed the rise of modern Jewish nationalism increased the attractiveness of Zionism for some Jews, but many more responded by immigrating to the United States. Even well after those pogroms began in 1881–1882, and until the end of the Holocaust, Zionism remained a minority movement, rejected by most rabbinic and lay leaders. Today, when Israeli flags are at the front of many American synagogues, it is easy to forget that during its first half-century, Zionism was a sect within a dissident sect: most Jews were not Jewish nationalists, and even many Jewish nationalists were not Zionists but members of the secular, socialist Bund, which called for Jewish autonomy in the places in which Jews resided, not in Palestine. Almost all the Jews who did seek to escape persecution chose to go elsewhere. From the start of Zionist settlement in 1882 to the outbreak of World War I, some 2.5 million Jews left Eastern Europe, mostly to America. Only 60,000 went to Palestine, of whom about 8,000 were committed Zionists—comprising less than 0.5 percent of the Eastern European Jewish emigration. More than half of these immigrants left Palestine.
***The Israeli “peace camp,” contrary to what the country’s political right and the settlers claim, has no desire to turn Israel into a liberal, universalist state with equality for all its citizens. It seeks, in fact, to preserve Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state. The peace that it proposes is less one of reconciliation than of separation. In the words of Yitzhak Rabin, “It is better for the Arabs not to be swarming around here.” Religious and right-wing Zionists see enormous hypocrisy in the left’s presentation of itself as a noble seeker of peace, with the settlers cast as villains. In the Yesha Council’s monthly magazine, Nekuda, Vered Noam, a Tel Aviv University professor of Talmud and winner of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, described the Zionist left’s support for enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza behind fences and walls in this way:
The left views a barrier as a didactic means, an accelerator of the Jewish recognition of the need to separate between the populations, an exercise in Palestinian statehood.… However, the central motivation is not the concern for the civil rights of the Palestinians. The continued suffocation and starvation of two million people [in Gaza] does not sit well with such a concern.…the true stimulus of the left is separation from the Arabs. The closure [of Palestinian areas] exposes a surprising similarity between the majority of leftists and the extreme right which upholds the idea of transfer [of Palestinians to other countries]. The central aspiration of both is to dispose of Arab presence.
Every Israeli settlement plan—from the Allon to the Sharon, Drobles, and Super Zones plans—discarded most of the densely populated Palestinian cities in Gaza and the West Bank, leaving them to the Palestinians for self-rule. Israel wanted to take over Palestinian land only when it didn’t require absorbing too many of its non-Jewish inhabitants. This Israeli aversion to integrating urban Palestinian areas—where Israel has instead implemented its policy of hafrada, or segregation—is the foundation of worldwide belief in the possibility of a two-state solution. Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that “we don’t want to govern them,” and from this true statement a number of wild leaps have been made, most notably that autonomy in a handful of disconnected Palestinian cities can be stretched, bent, and twisted into a Palestinian state.
The Zionist left’s primary objection to annexation is that it would harm the goal of having as few Palestinians as possible within the borders of the Jewish state. One of the groups illustrating this was The People Against Annexation, formed in 2020. It was handsomely funded by a board member of the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Stacy Schusterman, whose family foundation supports numerous Israel advocacy groups (in the 2020 election campaign, Schusterman donated $550,000 to defeat the Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and more than $1.2 million to a pro-Israel group that ran ads against Senator Bernie Sanders). The People Against Annexation was headed by the former Israel director of J Street, the Democratic Party-aligned pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, D.C. Among the ads produced by the organization was a poster demonizing Palestinians as Islamist terrorists by implying that annexation would mean renaming a Tel Aviv street after Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas.
In Israel’s liberal, anti-settlement circles, it is often asserted that the Occupation is a terrible blight, an aberration from the democratic values of the first nineteen years of the state. In fact, those years provided the template for the segregation, land confiscation, ethnic domination, and separate legal regimes for Jews and Palestinians that characterize the present-day West Bank. In more than seventy-two years of statehood, there have been only six months when Israel did not place most of the native population under military rule while it confiscated their land and deprived those people of basic civil rights.
Since 1967, Israel’s policy has been to have its occupied subjects pay for their own occupation, primarily through Israeli-collected taxes (though also through Israel’s extraction of natural resources). The army’s blueprint “Operational Principles for the Administered Territories,” published in the war’s aftermath, states that “the economy of the administered territories should weigh on the Israeli budget as little as possible.” Today, much of Israel’s occupation is underwritten by the United States—not only through the $3.8 billion the US gives Israel every year, but also through infrastructure projects in the West Bank that are paid for from a separate USAID budget. Ostensibly, this is for Palestinian development; in practice, it means that US taxpayers are subsidizing the infrastructure of ethnic segregation in areas that Israel is steadily colonizing. In 2013, the year that USAID upgraded the Jaba road in Area C, the organization spent $440 million in the occupied territories, $50 million of it on infrastructure. The US provided an additional $3.4 billion to the Israeli military that year.
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