Partition is Not the Answer, Roger H Lieberman

"Horrible as the present situation is on the ground in Palestine, it is made worse still by the inability of the Israeli “peace camp” to come to grips with the crisis..."

By Roger H Lieberman
PalestineChronicle.com

Today, in the middle of the occupied West Bank, miles to the east of Israel’s pre-1967 frontier, the Israeli Offense Force is busy erecting an encircling monstrosity of concrete, barbed wire, and guard towers. Completely, utterly illegal by anyone’s definition, it is rarely even mentioned in the Western press – except, occasionally, in Orwellian new-speak, as Israel’s new “security fence”.

Like some gargantuan gray boa constrictor, it slithers though the West Bank – engulfing thousands of acres of fertile farmland, alienating tens of thousands of Palestinians from land their families have tilled for centuries, and strangling every last drop of vitality out of what was once the lovely land of Palestine.

In a provocative report by Ran HaCohen, published by Antiwar.com (5/21/03), the ghastly specifics of the wall project are laid bare. When completed, this ugly barrier will stand 8 meters in height, and run a meandering length totaling nearly 1000 kilometers. It will break up the West Bank into two strangulated enclaves – one in the north encompassing Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin, one in the south around Hebron – and permit Israel to unilaterally annex huge swaths of land between them. The entire Jordan valley, East Jerusalem, and a large, verdant area south of Tulkarm and Qalqilya are to be swallowed by the Zionist State as part of “Greater Israel”.

What will be left to the Palestinian Arabs, according to Sharon’s scheme, amounts to less than 50 percent of the 22 percent of historical Palestine that Israel seized in 1967, and upon which the Palestinian leadership had hoped to establish an independent state. What this means, in human terms, is that 3 and a half million men, women, and children will be imprisoned – permanently, Israel hopes – within one-tenth of their original homeland. Desperately short on water and food, deprived of virtually all means of earning a living, and languishing in the slow death of crowded ghettos and refugee camps. To compare this nightmare to the notorious bantustans of Apartheid South Africa is, if anything, to give the Israelis an unwarranted COMPLIMENT!

Horrible as the present situation is on the ground in Palestine, it is made worse still by the inability of the Israeli “peace camp” to come to grips with the crisis, and understand what the times demand of them. Indeed, most members of the utterly useless Labor Party – including “Mr. Generosity” Ehud Barak – have warmly endorsed Sharon’s Ethnic Cleansing Wall. The more “liberal” members of Sharon’s “opposition” may argue for a change or two in the wall’s sinuous path – for a “kinder, gentler” apartheid – but nothing more. The idea that Palestinians are full human beings who must be treated as brothers seems too difficult for most of the “voices of conscience” in the Near East’s “only democracy” to grasp. Even a genuinely descent, peace-seeking Jewish American leader, Rabbi Michael Lerner, clings to the “two-state solution” like a preschooler to a security blanket, hoping somehow this defunct idea could produce the reconciliation between Jews and Arabs he sincerely hopes for.

Why should we, the people whose job it is to roll back the present floodtide of racism and imperialism, stymie our own struggle by wrapping ourselves in the two-state ideological straightjacket? There is no moral defense for carving Palestine into Jewish and Arab “states”, any more than there is for dismembering America into a “white state” and a “black state”, or a “Protestant state” and a “Catholic state”. Such notions of statehood tied to ethnicity and religion are our vile inheritance from old Europe’s obsession with racial “purity” – a pathology that spawned two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the more recent horrors in Bosnia and Kosovo as well. But we who inhabit the world of the 21st Century need not be prisoners of this dark past. We, in America, learned long ago that a nation must be a state for its citizens, not just for one privileged, or “chosen”, group.

The only bright future for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs lies in the establishment of a single, democratic state, where all are equal before the law. The prime objective of the peace movement must not be a vain attempt to erect some more “equitable” barrier in Palestine-Israel, but in bringing all the inhabitants of this land closer together. This can only be achieved by dismantling every discriminatory law governing ownership of land, employment, political representation, and immigration. There is a logical first step in the process of building democracy – the dissolution of the present Israeli government, followed by free elections open to all inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as pre-1967 Israel. That is the paramount political goal for which we must campaign tirelessly.

A great deal depends upon the Palestinians’ forging friendship with Israeli Jews who share their commitment to liberty and justice. Indeed, slowly but surely, support for binationalism is gaining strength on both sides of the “Green Line”. Most Palestinian Arabs have long recognized that the rich, cosmopolitan history of their land sets a positive precedent for the integration of Jews, Moslems, and Christians in a modern democracy. And some courageous Israelis, sick at heart with the crimes committed by their government in their name, are rediscovering the lost voice to Jewish humanism – the voice of Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, and Judah Magnes, all eloquent advocates of binationalism in their time.

We remember well the joyous scenes of November 1989, when the Berlin Wall – once the intractable symbol of the Cold War – succumbed to the power of human freedom. We can only hope that Ariel Sharon’s wall will soon meet the same fate, crumbling into so much debris, while the cheers of Palestinians and Israelis rediscovering their brotherhood fill a moonlit night.

*Roger H. Lieberman is a senior at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, majoring in Geology.