Dec

27

Neither Palestinians nor Israelis can be "uninvented"

December 27, 2011 - 12:00am

Now Lebanon
http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=346508&MID=0&PID=0
A gauge of how deeply attitudes have hardened between Israelis and Palestinians is that The Jerusalem Post has just seen fit to publish a pair of commentaries by Martin Sherman, a onetime advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government, attacking Palestinian identity and laying out a systematic, albeit preposterous, plan for its destruction. This is symptomatic of a growing trend to return to a zero-sum attitude that either implicitly or explicitly posits the need for a “victory” of one national project over the other.
 
Following the recent comments of the American Republican candidate Newt Gingrich that the Palestinians are “an invented people,” Sherman argues that Palestinians must somehow be forced to accept that they do not exist as a collectivity and abandon any aspirations for self-determination. “The time has come for a concerted effort to uninvent the Palestinians,” Sherman declares.
 
Although Sherman was born in South Africa, he apparently sees his Israeli nationality and identity as self-evidently authentic and legitimate. By contrast, he asserts that the Palestinians are a “non-people,” and therefore entitled to neither a state nor even an identity.
 
Nonetheless, he does admit that “some persuasive program must be advanced for addressing the fact of their physical existence.” His phrasing suggests that this “physical existence” is an inconvenience he would well wish to be rid of altogether. Sherman’s “persuasive program” is that Palestinians must be systematically transformed from a people into “a diffuse amalgam of individual human beings.”

 

First, he proposes to shut down UNRWA, the United Nations agency that cares for Palestinian refugees. And second, he wants all the Palestinian refugees to be settled permanently in the Arab countries where they now live, just as he seeks the elimination of “all forms of discrimination” that they face in these states.
 

Sherman claims that Palestinian refugees “are denied citizenship of the countries in which they have lived for decades.” This is often the case, but the greatest offender is Israel. The largest group of refugees includes the stateless people living under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Worse still, Israel has made all the Palestinians of the occupied territories, not just refugees, stateless by simultaneously denying them citizenship and independence.

 

The second-largest group of Palestinian refugees is in Jordan, but most of them are not stateless; they are Jordanian citizens. The scandalous predicament faced by the several hundred thousand stateless Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon clearly requires an urgent solution. But it is hardly the most significant, or even a major, obstacle to a two-state solution or peace.

 

Sherman also calls for “a diplomatic drive” to pressure Arab governments hosting Palestinian refugees “to stop perpetuating their stateless status and to allow them to acquire the citizenship of countries where they have lived for decades.” Of course, he wants Israel to be immune from such standards, since providing citizenship to the several million Palestinians in the occupied territories would immediately make them a plurality, if not a majority, in his greater Israel.

 

Sherman does acknowledge the problem posed by the “physical existence” of the Palestinian “non-people” in the occupied territories. As a solution, he proposes “generous monetary compensation to effect the relocation and rehabilitation of the Palestinian Arab residents in territories across the 1967 Green Line.” Sherman thinks this collective bribery scheme will be “enthusiastically embraced by a large portion of the Palestinian population,” a contention that is simply laughable to anyone familiar with Palestinian society.

 

In Sherman’s twisted reality, there’s no formula whatsoever for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Palestinians cannot be politically or financially “uninvented,” what then is to be done? The deepest irresponsibility inherent in such extremist rhetoric is what it sets the stage for.

 

Sherman may balk at the logical conclusion of his warnings about the grave problems posed by the “physical existence” of the Palestinian “non-people.” But others who accept this diagnosis while recognizing that his prescription cannot cure the supposed malady may not limit themselves to ludicrous financial schemes. Ethnic cleansing presents itself as an obvious alternative, assuming, that is, that physical annihilation is off the table.

 

Meanwhile, among pro-Palestinian voices, ideas are gaining ground about how to undo Zionism or Israel, and these typically also center on programs based on financial and social pressures such as boycotts and sanctions. While less vicious, racist and implicitly extirpationist than Sherman’s formulae, this agenda also represents a retreat into a zero-sum analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and a rejection of the idea that the two national projects can be realized in two neighboring states.

 

It is not only reasonable for everyone to be frustrated at the lack of progress in the moribund “peace process,” it is unreasonable for anyone not to be. But to allow such frustrations to degenerate into childish daydreams that essentially outline the political elimination of the national rival, or delusional fantasies this can be achieved by financial pressures, is the height of irresponsibility.

 

Ultimately, the only plausible alternative to conflict remains two states, no matter how unattainable irresponsible policies and rhetoric have made that only truly workable solution seem.
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