בין פלסטין לאוקראינה

מאמר מצוין על מה שאנחנו יכולים ללמוד מסיפוח אוקראינה. הדגשתי כמעט את כולו!
המחבר הגיע לאותו רעיון שאליו הגעתי, של פדרציה על-לאומית, שהוא קורה "האיחוד העל־מדינתי של ישראל ופלסטין".

דבר נוסף ניתן ללמוד, והוא שיטת הסיפוח האלגנטית של פוטין: באופן דומה, ישראל תוכל להכיר באצמעות פלסטין, ואחר כך שתי המדינות יחתמו על הסכם איחוד... וזהו, יש לנו פדרציה!

בכל זאת איני מסכים עם הכל. במקום שפליטים הפלסטינים שיבחרו לחיות בתוך מדינת ישראל - יותר נכון, במחוזות היהודיים - יהפכו לאזרחיה, הם יוכלו לחיות בשטחה אך יהיו אזרחים פלסטינים וגם בעלי אזרחות דואלית פדרלית. אותו דבר לגבי עולים יהודים שרוצים לגור ביהודה ושומרון...
אין במודל שלי טריטוריה לאומית, אלא רק מחוזות לאומיים או מעורבים.

בין פלסטין לאוקראינה

- דעות - הארץ - דימיטרי שומסקי 29.03.2014

והרי החדשות האחרונות ממזרח אירופה: למודל היוגוסלבי קם מתחרה על התואר המפוקפק "הדגם הכושל לארגון היחסים בין קבוצות לאומיות היושבות בארץ אחת". שמו – המודל האוקראיני.

התערבותו הגסה של ולדימיר פוטין בענייניה הפנימיים של אוקראינה אין בה די כדי להסביר את המשבר החריף של הזהות הלאומית־תרבותית, שבו שרויה כיום המדינה. סיבות העומק של המשבר נעוצות בחוסר ההלימה המובהק בין האופי החד־ממדי של דגם מדינת הלאום האתנית האוקראינית ובין המורכבות של המציאות האתנית, התרבותית והלאומית של אוקראינה.

אוקראינה של היום היא ארץ שתי התרבויות, האוקראינית והרוסית. בעוד שאוקראינה המערבית מתאפיינת בהומוגניות אוקראינית יחסית מבחינה לשונית־תרבותית, הרי שאוכלוסייתה של אוקראינה המזרחית והדרום־מזרחית מצטיינת בדו־לשוניות ובדו־תרבותיות רוסית־אוקראינית, ולעתים תכופות – בנטייה בולטת לעבר התרבות והשפה הרוסית. ברור, לפיכך, שמודל המדינה האוקראינית החד־לאומית בנוסח מנהיגי המרד ב"מיידן", שעיקרה הניתוק ממרחב התרבות הרוסית לטובת טיפוח הזיקה לאיחוד האירופי, יתאים אך לחלק מאזרחי אוקראינה – בראש ובראשונה לתושבי אוקראינה המערבית הרחוקים מהתרבות הרוסית. לעומת זאת, ככל שמדובר בדוברי הרוסית, וכן גם בבני האוכלוסייה הדו־לשונית במזרח אוקראינה ובדרומה, שברוח מה שאמר על עצמו אבי הספרות הרוסית המודרנית, האוקראיני ניקולאי גוגול, אינם יודעים להכריע אם נפשם רוסית יותר או אוקראינית יותר - הרי שבעבורם אימוץ הדגם החד־לאומי והאנטי־רוסי פירושו דיכוי תרבותי.

אף כי הדמיון בין הנסיבות ההיסטוריות של יחסי האוקראינים והרוסים מכאן והישראלים והפלסטינים מכאן קלוש - אי אפשר להתעלם ממכנה משותף אחד. כמו במקרה האוקראיני־רוסי, כך גם במקרה הישראלי־פלסטיני פרדיגמת ההפרדה בין שני העמים חסרת תוחלת. על מהותו המשפילה של חזון נתניהו בדבר מדינת הגטו הפלסטינית בין ג'נין לרמאללה מיותר להרחיב. ואולם, גם הקמת מדינה פלסטינית בת קיימא בגבולות 67', תוך פינוי כל ההתנחלויות, רק תרחיק את הסיכוי לפיוס אמת.

בעידן שבו שמועות על מותה של הלאומיות האתנית־דתית מתבררות יותר ויותר כמופרכות, ניתוק הישראלים ממוקדי הזהות הלאומית היהודית בארץ ישראל ההיסטורית שביהודה ושומרון, ושימת קץ לחלום השיבה של הפליטים הפלסטינים למולדתם בפלסטין ההיסטורית הכוללת גם את תחומי מדינת ישראל, יסמנו את ראשית הסיבוב הבא של הסכסוך הלאומי ולא את סופו.

מן הפח הטמון במודל האוקראיני אסור ליפול אל הפחת של המודל היוגוסלבי. אימוץ המודל היוגוסלבי במקרה האוקראיני־רוסי – הצטרפותה של אוקראינה לפדרציה הרוסית – פירושו הכפפה מחודשת של אוקראינה להגמוניה רוסית אימפריאלית. במקרה הישראלי־פלסטיני, הקמתה של מדינה אחת על שטחה של ארץ־ישראל/פלסטין תיתפש בעיני מרבית הישראלים כפגיעה אנושה בריבונות היהודית, בעוד בעיני מרבית הפלסטינים, שמעולם לא חוו את רגע הריבונות – כשלב בדרך להשגת הריבונות המלאה. בשני המקרים, לפנינו מתכון ברור למלחמת אזרחים.

הדעת נותנת אפוא, כי על האוקראינים והרוסים מכאן ועל הישראלים והפלסטינים מכאן לחפש דגם ביניים בין ביתור המרחב המשותף למדינות חד־לאומיות, המשול לפירוק בניין דיירים משותף עד כדי התמוטטותו, ובין ההכרזה על המרחב כולו כעל מדינה אחת, המשולה להסרת המחיצות בין דירות הבניין, שתגרום להתמוטטותו גם היא. בשני המקרים, את הדרך השלישית עשויה לספק התארגנות קונפדרטיבית דמויית האיחוד האירופי, שתצרף יחד את שתי המדינות – אוקראינה ורוסיה מזה וישראל ופלסטין מזה – לתוך מסגרת על־מדינתית.

במקרה של ארץ־ישראל/פלסטין, האיחוד הארצי הישראלי־פלסטיני ייתן מענה לשתי הבעיות המרכזיות של הסכסוך – הפליטים וירושלים. הפליטים הפלסטינים יוכלו לבחור אם לחזור למדינת פלסטין ולהפוך לאזרחיה, או לממש את זכות שיבתם במדינת ישראל ולהפוך לאזרחי ישראל. זאת, כשם שהעולים היהודים, השבים גם הם למולדתם ההיסטורית, יוכלו לבחור אם לעלות למדינת ישראל ולהתאזרח בה, או לעלות לאותם חלקי ארץ ישראל היקרים ללבם שיימצאו תחת הריבונות הפלסטינית, וכך להפוך לאזרחי מדינת פלסטין. אשר לירושלים – היא תהפוך, על פי מודל זה, מסמל הקיטוב בין שני העמים לסמל השותפות הדו־מדינתית והדו־לאומית, תוך שהיא תשמש בירה של שתי המדינות וכן מקום מושבם של המוסדות המשותפים של האיחוד.

אשר גינצברג (אחד העם), יליד סקווירא שבמחוז קייב, אשר גדל בסביבה האוקראינית־רוסית והבין דבר או שניים ביחסים בין עמים שכנים החולקים ארץ אחת, אמר פעם כי ליהודים וללא יהודים בארץ ישראל מוטב למצוא אותה שיטה של חיים משותפים, שתאפשר לשני הצדדים "להתחבר יחד, במקום שחיבורם יפה לשניהם, ולהתפרד איש לדרכו ולרוחו, במקום שהפירוד יותר יפה להם". נראה שהאיחוד של שתי מדינות המולדת המשותפת לעם היהודי ולעם הפלסטיני – האיחוד העל־מדינתי של ישראל ופלסטין – היה משקף את רוח דבריו בצורה הטובה ביותר.

Jerusalem has already chosen the binational solution

Contrary to widespread belief, the wall did not produce a situation of apartheid in Jerusalem, or an ethnic cleansing, but the exactly the opposite: it increased the 'Israelifization' of Palestinians and their massive arrival in Jerusalem from the WB.
The municipality, under the more pragmatic mayor Nir Barkat, has its share in the erasure of the bordure between East and West

Emphasizes are mine:

A surprising process of 'Israelization' is taking place among Palestinians in East Jerusalem

Along with the nationalist radicalization, widespread support for Hamas and widespread clashes, less predictable dynamics are afoot.

Palestinian women choose Hanukkah doughnuts in a West Jerusalem bakery. Photo by Emil Salman

By Nir Hasson
Published 14:07 27.12.12
A year ago, for the first time, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israel postal service established a post office in the village of Isawiyah, which lies below Mount Scopus, within the municipal boundaries. Along with the opening of the new branch − part of a plan to improve postal services in East Jerusalem − the village streets were given names and the houses received numbers. These developments followed a petition to the High Court of Justice, submitted by residents with the aid of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. But the municipality could not find a site for the post office, since most of the buildings in the village were illegal structures, so their future was thus in question.

“I visited the village dozens of times looking for a location,” says Itay Tsachar, an adviser to Mayor Nir Barkat and his project director for East Jerusalem. “We wanted to put the post office in the community administration building, until we discovered that it too is the subject of a demolition order.” Finally, a site for the post office was improvised between the support pillars of the neighborhood sports center.

However, on the night before the scheduled festive dedication of the new branch, which the mayor was to attend, the site was torched and slogans against normalization and collaboration with the municipality were scrawled on the walls.

“In the morning I get an urgent call from the residents,” Tsachar says. “They say: ‘Don’t ask − people tried to burn down the place.’ When I got there I found 20-30 people milling around and cursing: ‘Look what the sons-of-bitches did.’ I told them it was not a problem, because the structure was made of iron. ‘It’s just scorched a little. We can clean it up and go ahead with the ceremony,’ I told them. They organized and cleaned it up, and to this day the post office is operating just fine.”

Barkat showed up that day as scheduled to dedicate the site. His convoy was subjected to some stone-throwing on the way, but the local mukhtar, Darwish Darwish, joined a group of villagers who positioned themselves near the car to protect the mayor and the other officials.

The story of  Isawiyah’s post office is a microcosm of the contrasting trends unfolding in East Jerusalem. Along with the nationalist radicalization, widespread support for Hamas and violent clashes reported in the media, far-reaching changes are taking place among the local Palestinians. These processes can be described as “Israelization,” “normalization” or just plain adaptation. The Israeli authorities, with the Jerusalem Municipality at the forefront, are encouraging and in some cases fomenting this process, and displaying surprising bureaucratic flexibility along the way.

Examples of this trend are legion. They include: increasing numbers of applications for an Israeli ID card; more high-school students taking the Israeli matriculation exams; greater numbers enrolling in Israeli academic institutions; a decline in the birthrate; more requests for building permits; a rising number of East Jerusalem youth volunteering for national service; a higher level of satisfaction according to polls of residents; a revolution in the approach to health services; a survey showing that in a final settlement more East Jerusalem Palestinians would prefer to remain under Israeli rule, and so on.

But dry statistics tell only a small part of the story; other elements are not quantifiable. For example, there is the pronounced presence of Palestinians in the center of West Jerusalem, in malls, on the light-rail train and in the open shopping area in Mamilla, adjacent to the Old City’s Jaffa Gate. These people are not street cleaners or dishwashers, but consumers and salespeople. Another phenomenon is the growing cooperation between merchants in the Old City and the municipality.

Everyone involved in developments in East Jerusalem agrees that a tectonic shift is occurring, the likes of which has not been known since the city came under Israeli rule in 1967. Opinion is divided about the source of the change. Some believe it sprang from below, propelled by the Palestinians’ feelings of despair and their belief that an independent state is not likely to come into being. Others think it is due to a revised approach to the eastern part of the city by Israeli authorities, spearheaded by the municipality. Everyone mentions the separation barrier, which abruptly cut off Jerusalem from its natural hinterland − the cities and villages of the West Bank − as a factor that compelled the Palestinians in Al Quds (“the holy sanctuary”) to look westward, toward the Jews.

The huge light-rail project, which cuts across the city and greatly facilitates access from the eastern neighborhoods to the city center, is also contributing to the transformation. Most of these changes are occurring below the radar of the Israeli public, but their consequences could be dramatic, particularly with regard to the possibility of dividing Jerusalem − and the country. It is very possible that Jerusalem has already chosen the binational solution.

1. Education

Three months after Israel captured East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, the new school year began. The government, which by then had already annexed the eastern part of the city, sought to implement the Israeli curriculum in its public schools. However, the teachers, parents and principals adamantly refused. They launched a strike that became the symbol of the struggle by the Arabs of East Jerusalem against Israeli attempts to normalize the occupation. The strike persisted for two full years, until Israel finally capitulated and agreed to allow the Arab schools in Jerusalem to continue teaching according to the Jordanian curriculum. In time, that was superseded by the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians view that victory as a milestone in their resistance to Israel’s annexationist thrust. However, the triumph has begun to erode of late. Increasing numbers of parents now want their children to obtain an Israeli matriculation certificate, and more and more high-school graduates are attending special colleges that prepare them to enter the Israeli academic world. At present, there are three schools in East Jerusalem geared toward Israeli matriculation, while in others special programs are being launched with the same aim.

A school in Sur Baher, for example, initiated a track for Israeli matriculation last year. The school expected about 15 students to register, but 100 signed up − and the number is likely to grow in the years ahead.

According to Education Ministry data, the number of East Jerusalem high school students who took Israeli matriculation exams rose from 5,240 in 2008 to 6,022 in 2011. Another 400 people sat for external matriculation exams (that is, outside the formal school framework). The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleges in the city and elsewhere in the country report an increase in the number of Arab students from Jerusalem. For example, there are 63 Arab students enrolled in the Hebrew University’s preparatory course this year, up from 39 last year. Other academic institutions that are popular among East Jerusalem residents are David Yellin Teachers’ College and Hadassah College, both in Jerusalem, and Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education in Baka al-Garbiyeh, in Galilee.

Jaffa-born Amal Ayub is the founder and principal of Promise, a school in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina in Jerusalem, which adopted the Israeli curriculum three years ago.

“I came to Jerusalem 15 years ago, but what is happening in the city now is something completely new,” she says. “First of all, there is openness. We are a coed school, which at one time was taboo. When parents visit the school I see in their eyes why they don’t want their children to do the tawjihi [Palestinian matriculation]. They think it is not relevant for them, because since the separation barrier was built, it is harder to register in Bethlehem or Bir Zeit, so they aim for the Hebrew University, David Yellin College or Hadassah College, and the tawjihi is of no use there. And the recent events in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world do not encourage them to attend universities there.”

In addition to internal changes in secondary schools, there are now about 10 colleges in East Jerusalem that specialize in preparing students for Israeli universities and colleges. One of the biggest is the Anta Ma’ana (“You are with us”) Institute on Al-Zahara Street. Students of various ages crowd into a small classroom to receive help in preparing for the Israeli matriculation exams and mandatory pre-university psychometric test.

“It used to be unacceptable. People would make comments − ‘Why are you going to school with the Jews?’ − but now we are closed in and we have to stay in Jerusalem,” says Abdel Gani, the institute’s director. To which Eid Abu Ramila, who teaches civics, adds, “And then you see that the Hebrew University is just five minutes away. If you go to school in Bethlehem or to Al-Quds University, the only place you’ll be able to find work after you graduate is at the PA, for NIS 2,000 a month. So everyone is now flocking to Israel.”

Another reason for the rush to complete an Israeli matriculation − in fact, the main reason, according to most of the college’s students − is fear of the tawjihi, which is considered very tough. We met some students when we visited the college recently. Rawan, from Beit Hanina, wants to study psychology at Hebrew University; Aboud, from Beit Hanina, is interested in communications; and Azhar, from Ras al Amud, is considering nursing or law.

None has encountered a hostile reaction from family and friends for deciding to take the Israeli matriculation exams.

“It’s easier to integrate into society and to find work with a matriculation certificate [from Israel],” says Aboud.

“Civics is the hardest subject,” Abu Ramila, the teacher, adds. “I teach them about the principles of democracy, about equality, and they ask me: ‘Where’s the equality?’”

Some local Palestinians have been trying to fight this phenomenon by persuading the PA to revise the tawjihi exams. Hatam Hawis, the spokesman for the united parents’ committee of East Jerusalem, terms the Israelization phenomenon “appalling,” because it undermines the residents’ Palestinian identity. “Israel deliberately weakened the schools in the city in order to push people to Israeli matriculation,” he says.

2. Housing and water

There are hardly any water meters in East Jerusalem, because most of the homes were built without a permit, and it is prohibited to supply water or install a meter in an illegal structure. About two years ago, again after an appeal by ACRI, the municipal water corporation, Hagihon, came up with a creative legal solution. Instead of calling it a “water meter,” it’s now called a “control device.”

The change of name made it possible to circumvent the law and install water meters and a water supply system in thousands of homes − and to start charging for the service. About 10,000 of the devices have been installed in the past two years. Hagihon has also received hundreds of requests from families that want to disconnect from the Palestinian water network, which still supplies water to some of the northern sections of East Jerusalem, and tap into the Israeli grid. The reason: The water supply by the Palestinian company is sometimes erratic.

“We received so many requests from residents to be connected to the Israeli system,” Tsachar, the mayor’s adviser, says. “Let’s say I am an incorrigible Palestinian nationalist, but I also want to shower. What can I do? In that case, [asking to be supplied with] Israeli water is legitimate and pragmatic, and it will also be available all the time. I can fly a Palestinian flag next to the water container on the roof, but I would rather get the water on a regular basis. Now think about the ‘tower and stockade’ settlements [of the 1930s and 1940s]. Do you think they would have said, ‘We will not build a tower but will hook up to the Jordanian network, because it’s more practical’? Obviously not. So there is a process underway here. It’s something that cannot be ignored.”

The matter of issuing building permits provides another example of the authorities’ administrative flexibility in East Jerusalem. The main problem is that most residents cannot get a building permit because they do not have documents attesting to their ownership of property. To solve this problem, the municipality devised the so-called “Barkat procedure.”

“The problem is that if you don’t have confirmation of land ownership, the whole judicial system is stuck,” says Barkat. “We therefore created a mechanism in which the mukhtars, community directorate and municipality meet, and if they reach the conclusion that there is no reason not to believe someone who says the land is his, he gets a temporary permit.

After 20 years, if no one else claims ownership, it becomes permanent. This is a city in which legal creativity is a must. I would rather be right and smart than right and dumb.”

Barkat, who locates himself to the right of the political center, has played a crucial role in the story of East Jerusalem in recent years. The data may not show dramatic changes in budgetary allocations for East Jerusalem, but even his political foes admit he is making efforts to change the situation. From his perspective, the struggle to improve the lot of the city’s Arab population is part and parcel of his effort to eliminate plans to partition the city.

“I am determined to improve the quality of life of all the city’s inhabitants,” Barkat says. “That is precisely how I am unifying the city: by making things better for everyone. Jerusalem will not be divided. Period. It will not be able to function if it is divided, because of something very deeply ingrained in the city’s essence.” He adds, “But in Jerusalem each tribe has its own place, so I have no problem with the Arabs coming out to vote. My job will be easier if they have representatives on the city council.”

The key question is whether these developments will in fact induce Palestinians in Jerusalem to vote in municipal elections, which they have not done in any meaningful numbers since 1967. Constituting 36 percent of Jerusalem’s population, the Palestinians have the potential electoral power to change the political composition of the city council dramatically. There are voices in East Jerusalem calling for the Palestinians to vote, as part of a strategy to seek a one-state solution instead of the vaunted two-state concept. However, most experts believe that even if this eventually comes about, it will not affect the next municipal elections, which are about a year away.

“There is no doubt that Barkat has changed his strategy,” says city councilman Meir Margalit (Meretz), who holds the East Jerusalem portfolio. “He is not a political person and not a great ideologue. He is pursuing a businessman’s strategy: buying people rather than forcing his rule on them. Why bring in bulldozers and demolish things if you can get people to leave of their own free will? He is creating a situation in which people feel they have something to lose.”

A few weeks ago, Barkat convened a meeting to discuss children at risk in East Jerusalem. About 20 Palestinians from neighborhoods and villages came to the meeting in the luxurious council room at City Hall, most of them with complaints aimed at the municipality and the social affairs and education ministries. According to Barkat, they came because they feel that someone is listening to them.

“In the past, they would come and talk and see that nothing came of it, and no one knew whether it was ideology, lack of desire or impotence,” Barkat says. “Suddenly, when they see things happening, they realize it is ideology and that there is no lack of desire and no impotence.”

Among the achievements Barkat lists: investments in infrastructure and transportation, planning of neighborhoods, building of schools and more. To illustrate the altered perception on the Palestinian side, he recalls the events surrounding the city-sponsored Festival of Light in the Old City and the behavior of the merchants there. The festival, which focuses on sculptures and performances relating to the theme of light, was held for the third time this year.

“The first year we had a pilot program, only in the Jewish Quarter, and 100,000 people showed up,” Barkat says. “In the second year we held it in the Jewish Quarter and the Christian Quarter, and 200,000 people came. This year it was in all the quarters and there were 300,000 visitors. At first the merchants were afraid to open up for the event, because they got threats. But then they saw that one store opened and then another, and before you knew it they were all open. Everyone made a killing and people got used to the idea.”

3. Health

Make no mistake: Despite what Barkat says, the boundary between the two parts of the city is still very sharp. The roads in the eastern city are still strewn with potholes and twist and turn at impossible angles. Uncollected garbage continues to pile up. By every yardstick − number of garbage bins, public parks, number and quality of school facilities, number of lampposts, well-child clinics, budgetary investment per resident or per schoolchild, and so on − the east is disadvantaged compared to the western city. Likewise the Palestinians, compared to their Jewish neighbors.

A detailed study conducted by councilman Margalit found that, at best, only 13.68 percent of the city’s budget is invested in the 36 percent of its Arab residents who live in East Jerusalem. Moreover, the Arab population there suffers from rampant unemployment and poverty, and is more likely than the Jewish population of the city to be subjected to police violence. Jewish settlers hire private guards to operate in Arab neighborhoods, and the Shin Bet security service still has a say in the appointment of school principals.

Still, in one area, the gap between the Jews in the west and their neighbors in the east has almost closed: public health. The past decade witnessed something of a mini-revolution in this sphere in Jerusalem. Until about 15 years ago, the Arabs of East Jerusalem were severely disadvantaged in terms of health care, mainly when it came to the health maintenance organizations. There were few clinics, physicians were unqualified, services were lacking. In the wake of the enactment of the National Health Law, which rewards the HMOs according to the number of members they have and their upgrading of various medical indices − none other than Leumit HMO, which is identified with the Revisionist Zionist movement − decided to enter the market in the eastern city. A major draw was the fact that the East Jerusalem population is young.

Around the same time, whether by chance or not, the Leumit logo also underwent a transformation: The long-time Star of David morphed into a flower. Within a few years, unbridled competition broke out between HMOs in the eastern city, which are run by local concessionaires − for the most part physicians, but in some cases businessmen.

The competition and privatization generated protests by organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights and ACRI. Their concern was that there was substandard supervision by the HMOs and a preference for making a profit instead of improving medical care. In the end, the process brought about a situation in which almost every neighborhood now has a number of clinics that boast advanced equipment. Following a number of cases in which ambulance drivers refused to enter Arab neighborhoods, some of the clinics now have their own forward ER units. In some cases the residents get free transportation to the clinics, free subscriptions to health clubs or free dental care, to ensure that they don’t switch to a rival HMO. The directors of the HMOs in the city still shudder when they recall how, three years ago, one concessionaire got tens of thousands of people to switch to a different HMO by reaching a better agreement with the competition.

Fuad Abu Hamed, a businessman and community leader from Sur Baher, runs the Clalit branches in his village and in Beit Safafa. He proudly shows off his clinic, which has an advanced ER unit, an X-ray center and a dental clinic. He speaks of extraordinary achievements in the realm of preventive medicine.

“When the need arose to perform mammograms, we got 95 percent of the women, which is unprecedented. That’s because I know the community, and if a woman refuses we talk to her husband or sister, and I send a car to bring her. We don’t give in.”

Prof. Yosef Frost, director of the Jerusalem district of Clalit, describes the health developments in East Jerusalem over the past few years as an international record.

“Take the quality indices, which are objective and universal, and examine the quality of medical service,” he says. “Four years ago, the indices were extremely low, whereas now they are almost equal to the Israeli national average. Some of the clinics in East Jerusalem are the leaders in the whole district; I could easily put them in the center of Tel Aviv.”

According to Frost, the health quality indices in East Jerusalem rose from a grade of 74 in 2009 to 87 today. That is the same grade the clinics in West Jerusalem receive, and just one point below the national average of Clalit clinics.

4. ID cards

The most advanced phase of the Israelization process appears in the requests for an Israeli ID card. In contrast to the territory in which they live, which was fully annexed to Israel, the residents themselves were annexed only partially; nearly all of them hold only a residency card. Residency status denies them many rights, including the right to vote in Knesset elections. But more important, it deprives them of the right to live wherever they wish.

Unlike citizens who can live in the territories or anywhere else, a Palestinian Jerusalemite who moves to the territories (or if the municipal boundary places his home across the line), or who goes abroad to study for too many years, is liable to lose his residency status − and thereby also the right to return to his native city.

The road to obtaining full citizenship is seemingly open, but in practice Israel heaped obstacles in the way of those who sought citizenship. In any event, applicants for citizenship were few, as they were considered “traitors” who accepted the occupation. However, that barrier too has apparently been breached. Interior Ministry data show that several hundred Palestinians from East Jerusalem received Israeli citizenship in each of the past few years. Lawyers who are involved in this process say the queue of applicants is getting longer all the time.

“The shame barrier has fallen,” says attorney Amnon Mazar, who specializes in applications for citizenship. “People have reached the conclusion that the PA will not be their salvation and that Israel is a cornucopia. So they do it for their personal benefit. People who obtain Israeli citizenship are no longer necessarily considered traitors to their nation. It’s the trend. They don’t feel they have anything to be ashamed of.”

The fall of the shame barrier was also discernible in a survey conducted among East Jerusalem residents by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy − an independent think tank − last January. The results were dramatic. One question was, “In the event of a permanent two-state solution, which state would you prefer to live in?” No fewer than 35 percent of the respondents chose Israel, 30 percent opted for Palestine and 35 percent refused to answer.

“It was a surprise,” admits Dr. David Pollock, who conducted the survey. “We thought people would not want to say or admit it, but they did. You can see from the large number of people who declined to answer that it is a highly sensitive issue. So I would say that these figures are the minimum.” In reply to the question, “What would your neighbors prefer in that case?”, 39 percent replied that their neighbors would prefer to live in Israel.

What’s the explanation? The number of explanations for the processes
being undergone by Jerusalem and by its Palestinian residents is equal to the number of experts one asks.

Some cite the separation fence, which cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank, its natural market and hinterland, and drove the residents into the arms of the Israelis. Others point to the deadlocked peace process and the attendant despair of change that has gripped the East Jerusalem Palestinians. There are experts who think the Arab Spring and general instability in the Arab world are pushing the Palestinians in Jerusalem to search for a future in the unified city. Another cause sometimes mentioned is the ongoing crisis and division within the PA. Or it may be simply due to the fact that, after so many years of occupation, a generation that was born into the situation prefers to look for its material future rather than raise the national flag. But everyone agrees that the driving force behind these developments is not love of Israel, but a desire to survive.

“The Israeli ID card is part of my summud,” says a Palestinian who obtained an ID card, referring to the concept of steadfastness. The Israeli attorney Adi Lustigman, who represents residents in the naturalization process, believes that requesting Israeli citizenship actually empowers Palestinian identity. “It’s what makes it possible for them to preserve their land and their rights in the place where they live,” she says. “They are still Palestinians; the fact that they are granted citizenship does not make them settlers. On the contrary: it gives them more freedom of movement and the possibility to stay in touch with the Palestinians in the West Bank, to work in Ramallah and live wherever they want without having to account to anyone.”

Tsachar: “A habit becomes natural, and this habit too will ultimately become natural. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Israelization or pragmatism. The farther you move along the axis of time, the more the disparity between 1948 and 1967 is reduced. There are many new milestones on the axis. It’s human nature.”

According to Israel Kimchi, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, it’s vital to remember that more than half the population of East Jerusalem “was born into this situation [of Israeli rule]. Things are moving toward greater moderation, more of an acknowledgment of the existing situation, of living the day-to-day as long as that’s possible. What interests them is having a playground for the children, like in the western city.”

“Survival” is also the word used by Dr. Asmahan Masry-Herzalla, a researcher in the Jerusalem Institute, to describe the behavior of East Jerusalem Palestinians. She too agrees that, contrary to expectations, the current process will actually bolster the Jerusalem Arabs’ Palestinian identity.

“It’s sheer survival. It doesn’t mean they want to become Israelis. They want to walk between the raindrops,” she says. “But when a young Palestinian man engages in study, it will heighten his awareness and reinforce his identity. Look what happened to the Arabs in Israel: the more they integrated, the more aware they became of their Palestinian identity.”

Jawad Siyam, from the village of Silwan, which abuts the Old City, is a prominent political leader in East Jerusalem. He is at the forefront of the struggle against the Jewish settlers in his village, and has been arrested many times. “Our life in East Jerusalem is complex,” he says. “We are Palestinians and need to belong to a place where we feel we have respect, and that is not Israel. In the meantime, we have an Israeli [residence] card and have to deal with the Israeli authorities, and I understand that some people are taking out an ID card in order to make life easier. But in the meantime, everything Israel and the settlers are doing only makes the Palestinians feel more Palestinian.”

Kimchi, who for years produced proposals for political solutions to divide the city, doesn’t think this process will affect the partition option. “In the end, the decision will be a political one. Nothing will help them,” he says, referring to the Arab residents. “No one will ask them.”

According to Margalit − who made these remarks before the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine nonmember observer-state status − “More and more Palestinians have despaired of the Palestinian Authority. They do not believe partition will happen. They see what is happening between Hamas and Fatah, and within Fatah, and they say ‘No thanks. We have enough problems of our own, so why should we step into that mess? We would rather be under Israeli rule.’ For someone like me, that is a truth that is hard to accept.”

Indeed, for Margalit, a veteran activist on behalf of the Palestinians’ rights in Jerusalem, the new situation creates vexing dilemmas. “There is daily soul-searching here between the humanistic consideration and the political consideration. It’s true that things are a little better for the Arabs of East Jerusalem,” he says, “but in the long term, we as Jews, and all of us together, will pay a higher price. That’s because what’s underway is destroying the foundation of the two-state solution.”

“I went through the period of whining, when we said ‘only the Jews are to blame.’ I do not say they are not responsible, but I also want to look after myself,” adds Abu Hamed, who, in addition to being the director of HMO branches, chairs a volunteer committee to promote education in Sur Baher. Both roles bring him into constant contact with the Israeli authorities. What drives him, he says, is the feeling of discrimination.

“It’s a harsh feeling. It burns me up when I drive through Armon Hanatziv [a post-1967 Jewish neighborhood next to Sur Baher] and see that they are scraping the old asphalt in order to repave the road, and you say to yourself, ‘Dear God, I wish we had even the old asphalt.’ The expectations of the people in East Jerusalem extend to banal services like roads and sewage disposal. It’s not their fault that the Six-Day War happened. Let them at least let us live with honor, whether it’s 40 years or 400 years. When the political solution comes, then we will see.”

After this article went to press, there was another clash between Palestinians and police in Isawiyah. Eighteen youths were arrested. The post office was not attacked.

Islands of anarchy

The undeniable processes by which the eastern part of Jerusalem is being unified with the western side do not incorporate all the residents of East Jerusalem. They include mainly the more established neighborhoods, and, more specifically, the people of means in those neighborhoods. These processes are completely absent in the Palestinian neighborhoods that are outside the separation fence. In fact, the situation in those areas is almost the reverse.

Some 70,000 Palestinians, almost one-third of all the Arab residents of Jerusalem, now live on the other side of the separation fence. Their neighborhoods have become islands of complete anarchy between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The police, the municipality, the infrastructure companies and the other Israeli authorities barely operate in these neighborhoods, and the PA is barred from entering them under the terms of the Oslo Accords. The result is that their inhabitants are doomed to a life of hardship, lacking even the most basic services, and with a constantly diminishing connection to their city, which has left them on the wrong side of the checkpoints.

For the past few years, mayor Nir Barkat has been trying to get these neighborhoods placed under the responsibility of the army’s Civil Administration, which controls the West Bank. Barkat wants “to adjust the municipal boundary to conform with the fence,” adding, “I cannot operate when a fence crosses the municipal boundary. The fence is a real barrier in terms of supplying services.”

Redrawing the municipal boundary on this scale would of course be a dramatic move. Some would say it signals the start of Israel’s relinquishment of East Jerusalem. In the meantime, the political decision makers at the state level are refusing to consider Barkat’s idea.

The King’s Garden

Two years ago, a political storm was unleashed over a plan to develop the area of East Jerusalem known as the “King’s Garden.” Under the plan, which mayor Barkat supports, a new tourist area would be created on the lower slopes of the village of Silwan, below the City of David. The plan calls for the demolition of 22 of the 88 illegally built homes in the neighborhood of Al-Bustan, with the residents being moved to new housing in another part of the neighborhood.

The plan drew widespread condemnation. Local residents erected a protest tent that became a rallying point for months of violent demonstrations. Governments across the world spoke out against the plan, and Meretz left the municipal coalition in protest. (The party reentered the coalition about a year later.)

In the meantime, the mayor and his staff continued to visit the area and discuss with the residents the possibility of their voluntary departure. Barkat says many of them have already agreed to the plan, even if they are unwilling to say so publicly. “I come to them with a win-win approach. What goes on in Abu Ghosh on Saturdays is nothing compared to what can be done here,” the mayor says, referring to the droves of Israeli Jews who flock to the Arab village west of Jerusalem (and inside Israel) to eat and shop on the weekend.

“The plan will upgrade their assets to a level they can only dream of,” Barkat continues, “and they now take a completely different view of it. In the end, they will understand that it’s a serious proposition and they themselves will request it.”

Attorney Ziad Kawar, who represents most of the tenants involved, and Morad al-Sana, a neighborhood resident, vehemently deny that negotiations are underway with the municipality. “Maybe one person out of a hundred signed off on the plan, but that means nothing,” says Sana.

However, councilman Meir Margalit of Meretz, who holds the East Jerusalem portfolio and is closely acquainted with the developments, believes that, below the surface, negotiations have reached an advanced stage.

“There are increasing indications that some residents have arrived at understandings, even if things have not yet been signed,” Margalit says.

“I say this with great sorrow, because politically, this plan must not go ahead,” he continues. “I am convinced that the Elad organization will have a foothold,” he says, referring to the controversial, ultranationalist group that runs the nearby, City of David site. “But if I had a house of 40 square meters without ownership papers and I could get a house twice that size and with papers − well, I can’t really blame them.”

The Jewish state - the essence of peace

Follows an article by former Knesset member Einat Wilf I found very interesting, and an occasion to tell you about my own conceptions.

I liked this article, yet, I don't agree with her when she says that "Israel does not need Palestinian recognition in order to know what it is".
If Israel was really a Jewish state, recognizing Israel would be automatically a recognition of the Jewish state. Israel don't know what it is in fact: the state of all its population living in its territory, like all nation-states. Israel is meant to be the state of its nation, the Israeli nation, 'the Israeli people' or 'the people in Israel' as some say. The problem is that the Israeli nation is a pure fiction... We are two nations here, at least, a Jewish one and an Arab one.

I do not quite agree either  when she write that "Being the Jewish state simply means being the one place in the world where the Jewish people, as a people, are free and sovereign to interpret Jewish civilization and determine their own fate".
I would have written 'free and independent to interpret...' because the Jewish political conception says that the Creator, through His Law, is the sovereign, a supranational sovereign, Him and not its people, which He took out of the Egyptian slavery and turned immediately into His servitors.
The Children of Israel have not been 'sovereign' one second. Free, and independent of other peoples, yes, but still under the rule of the transcendent Law.

I have another reservation: "Being the Jewish state simply means being the one place in the world...", a Jewish state is not a place, it is not defined by a territory. The Hebrew word for 'state' is 'medina', from 'din', which means 'law' or judgment'. A Jewish state is defined by its laws, it needs to have the Jewish law as the basis,  at least,  of his legislation in order to be called Jewish. It do needs a place in order to be independent of other peoples - this place is Eretz Israel - but the state is not a place. It doesn't need a place to exist, the Jewish state with its Talmudic laws and institutions existed in exile for centuries, without a territory...

Does this question of the nature of a Jewish state - a nation-state like others for Jews, or a state having a political Jewish structure - may have an impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Yes, I think so: a state based on Jewish law wouldn't impose itself on another people: Jewish law applies only onto Jews personally - like Islamic law applies only on Muslims - and not on the territory and anyone found being there. Muslim and Christian Arabs might finally recognize that, like them, Jews submit themselves to the Sovereign of the World, and have the same conception that 'to Him belongs the Earth'. Jews couldn't be seen then as a western colonialist offshoot. The door would be open for Jews and Arabs to see each other as another tribe of the People of God, and sharing by covenant the Holy Land would be most natural....


Emphasizes mine.

The essence of peace

02/24/2014
To build a peaceful future, the Palestinians need to leave behind the idea that the Jewish people are strangers who have come to a strange land.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her entire government are in Israel as great friends of the State of Israel and its people. The talks between the two governments are taking place in anticipation of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s Framework Agreement for Peace. Early leaks indicate that the document will include a statement, requested by Israel and its prime minister that, as part of any final peace agreement, the Palestinians recognize Israel as the “Jewish state” or as the “Homeland of the Jewish People.”

While this request is supported by the vast majority of Israelis, as well as the chairman of the Opposition and the Labor party Isaac Herzog, some have not understood what it means and why it is necessary. Others have argued that it is merely a hawkish ploy to avoid reaching any agreement with the Palestinians, or that it is a sad mark of Israel’s low self-confidence that it needs the Palestinians to tell it what it is.

The prime minister’s request is none of the above. It is the one core demand that, once met, will mean that peace is possible. Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people is not a condition for peace – it is the very essence of peace.

Israel does not need Palestinian recognition in order to know what it is. Those who have dreamed, founded and built it have done so with one purpose in mind: create a sovereign state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. It doesn’t matter if those who established the Jewish state were secular atheists who set out to build an egalitarian socialist utopia in the spirit of the Hebrew prophets, religious Jews who hoped to restore biblical traditions to the modern state, or national liberals who imagined Jew and Arab, Christian and Muslim, living side by side in peace in a Vienna-inspired Judenstaadt. They all wanted a Jewish state, but their visions of it were very different.

Being the Jewish state was never to be a simple concept.

Jewish civilization, like all ancient civilizations, is so rich as to support any system of governance and any set of values that its bearers choose. Unlike what Palestinian leaders say when they reject the Israeli request for recognition, there is nothing in the concept of Jewish state that is necessarily religious rather than secular, nor anything that implies that such a state is only for Jews.

Like all ancient value systems that have been constantly evolving, Judaism serves as a repository of liberal, as well as ultra-conservative values; it is in the eye of the beholder and the interpreter. It is partial to neither.

Being the Jewish state simply means being the one place in the world where the Jewish people, as a people, are free and sovereign to interpret Jewish civilization and determine their own fate. Being the Jewish state means nothing more, but also nothing less.

The Palestinians need to recognize Israel as the Jewish state, not for the sake of the Jews, but for their own sake and dignity and for the cause of peace. Time and time again, the Palestinians have rejected opportunities to live freely in their own sovereign state because doing so means coming to terms with the Jewish state.

Already in 1947, the Arab world, including the Arabs of Palestine (later to be termed Palestinians), rejected the partition of the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state as proposed by the United Nations. They did so because they told themselves that Zionism is not the self-determination movement of the Jewish people, but rather a colonial movement that has brought strangers to their land, strangers who – faced with determined resistance – are destined, sooner or later, to leave it.

In comparing the Jews in the Land of Israel to foreign colonials who will succumb to sustained resistance, the Palestinians might have told themselves a comforting story about a future without Jews and without Israel, but one that has repeatedly robbed them of their present.

They have refused any solution that would create a Palestinian state because the price of doing so meant finally accepting that the Jews should have their own state, too. They preferred to have nothing rather than the dignity of their own state, if it meant sharing the land with the state of the Jewish people.

To build a peaceful future, the Palestinians need to leave behind the idea that the Jewish people are strangers who have come to a strange land and, therefore, will one day go away. Once the Palestinians recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, they will finally be accepting that in creating the State of Israel, the Jewish people have come home. In doing so the Palestinians will signal to the world, to Israel and, above all, to themselves, that they are finally ready to part with a false future in order to build a real present: one in which both the Jewish people and the Palestinians people can live in peace as a free people in their own sovereign states – one Jewish, one Palestinian.

The author is a Senior Fellow with the Jewish People Policy Institute and a former member of the Israeli Knesset. A version of this article was published in German in Der Zeit.

The ‘Day After’ the Palestinian Authority collapses

It could happen soon if the present negotiations end in a clear failure.
Chaos, anarchy, even terror or take over by Hamas and their repression could help Israel by pushing more Palestinians to emigrate. Annexation of the West Bank in a Greater Israel would turn then to be easier. No doubt this is a good scenario for some rightists..

Photo: Photo Essay

It is time - more than ever - to prepare a peaceful alternative: recognition of the independent State of Palestine by Israel, followed by an union agreement between  the two states.
The PA would turn into a transitional Palestinian government, part of the Israel-Palestine Federation...

Emphasizes mine:

The Palestinian Authority is on the brink of collapse, study says

The Palestinian Authority is on the brink of collapse, study says
Only achieving statehood could save the West Bank from an impending wave of violence, crime, chaos, disease, says major Palestinian report.

By Amira Hass | Mar. 21, 2014

The breakdown of the Palestinian Authority would turn the West Bank into a violent, criminal, chaotic, disease-ridden place. But even though most Palestinians want the PA to survive, either for the sake of basic social order or personal interest, and although Israel dreads having to resume responsibility for 3 million West Bankers, President Mahmoud Abbas’ regime will collapse before too long if Israel continues to thwart Palestinian aspirations for independence.

This is the conclusion of a massive six-month study by the highly-regarded Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, directed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki.

A great many Palestinians have a deeply vested interest in the PA’s continued existence, Shikaki notes. Connections with the PA bring “financial well being, social and political status in society, and there are circles that depend on their relation to PA. Anything that happens to the PA will take all of that away from them. These could be organizations, business interests or individuals who have positions of power that allow them to reward sympathizers.

“If they could call the shots, they would do their best to prevent [the PA’s collapse],” Shikaki said, “But even those who have a vested interest in satisfying Israel, for the sake of preserving the PA, cannot do it for too long.”

If ordinary Palestinians still support the existence of the PA, it’s because they have a need for some kind of order, he adds. “People do not want to see themselves without a central authority that prevents chaos and anarchy in the streets, even if they have a lot of criticism of the PA and its functioning. But the Palestinians are willing to risk it collapsing completely, if it happens in the midst of a struggle for a change in the status quo. If there is a good reason for it to collapse, then [the attitude is] let it be.”

The PA is 20 years old, but voices questioning its efficacy were already being heard at the start of the second intifada in 2000. They’ve returned and intensified over the past two or three years, as it has become clear that the PA is not delivering on either of the two goals it was established to achieve: statehood and the provision of public services. Add to this the increasing economic difficulties and the rupture with the Gaza Strip, and the picture of failure is complete.

Unprecedented report

“The ‘Day After’ Final Report: The Likelihood, Consequences and Policy Implications of a PA Collapse or Dissolution” is unprecedented in its scope and willingness to grapple with this issue. More than 200 Palestinian professionals participated in the discussions that led to the 250-page report.

The PA could break up in one of three ways, the study concluded. One, the least likely scenario, is a voluntary decision by the Palestinian leadership to dissolve it. The second is collapse as the result of Israel’s punishing economic, military and political power, and political and economic pressure, mostly American, in response to Palestinian steps that violate the status quo, such as petitioning the International Criminal Court or leading a non-militarized uprising. The third possibility is a breakup that results from internal Palestinian unrest and rebellion.

Among participants, there are those who view the disintegration of the PA as a near certainty, given Israel’s refusal to reach a two-state solution in line with international principles and decisions. According to Shikaki, those who see the collapse of the PA as a positive thing are in the minority for now, and tend to be those who support a single, binational state. But it’s clear that the three main players – the PA itself, Israel, and the international community – are not interested in the PA’s disappearance.

Shikaki said he asked the Israelis “under what circumstances Israel might lose interest in preservation of the PA, and their assumption was that Palestinians are not stupid and don’t want to go too far so that we [Israel] would change our priorities.” This Israeli perspective seems to reinforce the position of Palestinian critics who claim that the PA serves Israel’s interests. Indeed, Shikaki says, “All Palestinians who participated in the discussion shared the view that Israel and the PA have a common interest in keeping the PA functioning. Palestinian society in general understands that the PA is able to exist as long as Israel is happy with it, and as long as Palestinians find it useful to them.”

Did the Israeli interviewees understand that Israeli policies were liable to topple the PA? Yes, Shikaki said. “They think that [Israeli policy] could worsen conditions significantly, but that Israel will step in at the last minute and prevent a collapse.”

Shikaki noted that all the participants assumed that “at all levels there will be an attempt to prevent a collapse.” Paradoxically, he said, “This gives each of the actors the comfort to believe that they can do a lot of harm to the other party without risking that other party’s collapse.” Thus, the Israeli-PA relationship becomes like a game of chicken, an analogy used in the discussions which focused on ways the Palestinians could force the Israelis to blink first.

If there is a voluntary decision to dismantle the PA, “Palestinians might seek to force Israel to either deepen its occupation, reverting to the situation that prevailed before 1994, or change its policies by seriously negotiating the end of its occupation, or unilaterally withdraw from most of the West Bank,” according to the center’s final document. Alternatively, in the event of a collapse resulting from external or internal pressures, “This expected [security] instability might force Israel to re-examine its options.”

The report concludes that the results of a PA shutdown would depend largely on whether the various components of the Palestinian leadership break long-time habits of poor planning, lack of transparency, excessive centralization, lack of consulting bodies and the immediate gratification of personal and sectarian interests. Preferably, the Palestinian leadership would decide to restore the status of the PLO and include Islamic movements in its ranks; decentralize planning and management and transfer those responsibilities to civil organizations and institutions; build an alternative management mechanism; or establish a government in exile.

Hamas would be big winner

These are some of the preliminary steps that participants in the study recommended to mitigate the severe repercussions of the PA’s collapse. These include economic damage to the public and private sector; widespread poverty; social and political disintegration; the spread of disease, with particular harm to children’s health; looting of infrastructure facilities; strengthening of tribes and clans; deepening of the rift between the Gaza Strip and West Bank; rise of armed gangs and security chaos; and a return to violence as the primary avenue of the struggle. One certain result is that Hamas, and in particular the Hamas government in Gaza, would be strengthened.

Participants in the study included university professors, current and former government ministers, legislators from all the factions, business people and executives of nongovernmental organizations. The looked at the effect of a PA shutdown on security, economy, Fatah-Hamas relations and political life, health, education, infrastructure, telephony and communications, local government, the judiciary, and the future of the struggle for independence.

The center also conducted interviews with 180 Palestinians to gain a deeper understanding of prevalent attitudes. In addition, Shikaki interviewed 12 Israelis from the military, Civil Administration, various political factions (though not from the extreme right) and research institutes, though Shikaki declined to name them.

A simple truth that needs to be said

There is a simple truth that needs to be said, Ari Shavit has written it in Haaretz:
Mahmoud Abbas refuses to recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-definition. By this refusal, he is "in danger of burying not the Jewish state, but the two-state solution."

I wrote already one year ago that Palestinians are not interested by the two-state solution, and have no reason to advance it:
- because it will not give them anything they do not have already;
- because by simply waiting passively, they bring a de facto one-state solution that endanger the very existence of Israel and prepare the Greater Palestine through democratic (demographic) taking over...

Here is the article, emphasizes are mine:

Turning on the 'Jewish state'

There'll be no peace if the Palestinians don’t contribute their share; but they won't contribute their share unless people who want peace insist they contribute it.

By Ari Shavit | Mar. 20, 2014

In Washington, New York and even Tel Aviv, an overall offensive is being waged on the Jewish people’s national state. American and Israeli peace seekers are furiously attacking the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Suddenly not only the settlements are a war crime, but also the Jewish people’s demand to recognize its right to self-definition. Suddenly Zionism’s fundamental idea, which was recognized in the Balfour Declaration, the UN’s partition resolution and the Israeli Declaration of Independence, is not legitimate.

The thought that alongside the Palestinian (non-democratic) nation-state there will be a (democratic) Jewish nation-state makes many good people fly off the handle. People who are usually committed to equality are not ready to grant the Jews what they firmly demand for the Palestinians. People who want peace are rejecting out of hand the threshold demand of peace – real mutual recognition.

More than enough has been said about the essence of the matter. It’s a conflict of mutual blindness. We didn’t recognize the existence of a Palestinian people entitled to its own sovereign state and the Palestinians didn’t recognize the existence of a Jewish people entitled to its own sovereign state. It’s clear, therefore, that the end of the conflict must entail an end to the blindness. It must involve each side’s recognition of the other, whose existence and rights it has ignored for the past 100 years or so.

Israel has already opened its eyes. In 1993 it admitted that there is a Palestinian people; in 2000 Israel agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and in 2009 the right’s leader embraced this double recognition. So now it’s the Palestinians’ turn to open their eyes. When Israel accepts the principle of dividing the land on the basis of the 1967 borders, they will have to declare that there is a Jewish people with legitimate rights to the land, which is entitled to define itself as a Jewish democratic state (as long as it respects all its citizens’ rights and preserves full religious freedom). Simple, so simple. Elementary.

Yet, at the moment of truth, the simple suddenly becomes complicated. The elementary is seen as surreal, wacky. Even though Yasser Arafat already recognized the Jewish state and even though John Kerry’s peace plan was based from the start on recognizing the Jewish state, the term has suddenly become a four-letter word.

The most basic demand directed at the Palestinians is suddenly seen as a whim. Why? Because when Mahmoud Abbas says no, many in the international community and the Israeli left cave in. They lack the courage required to stand up to the Palestinians and tell them “this far.” Even when the Palestinian stance is clearly immoral, they feel an obligation to toe the line.

Prof. Alexander Yakobson is an historian who was formerly active in a peace party. When he left his party he told me its platform was excellent. The problem, he said, was that beneath the platform there was a clause written in invisible ink, saying that all the previous principles are subject to the Palestinians not opposing them. So the moment the Palestinians veto anything, the Zionist left’s platform collapses and loses its validity.

The invisible ink is the in-depth problem of the international and Israeli peace camp. Paradoxically, the invisible ink is currently one of the greatest obstacles to peace. There will be no peace if the Palestinians don’t contribute their share to it. But the Palestinians won’t contribute their share if people who want peace in Israel and the world don’t insist they contribute it.

So it’s time that those who really want to end the occupation and divide the land stand up, face Abbas and demand that he too crosses the Rubicon. If he fails to do so, the landslide will be immensely dangerous. Abbas is in danger of burying not the Jewish state, but the two-state solution.

Discard the false visions of a binational state

Discard the false visions of a binational state

This article illustrate well to which contradictions leads the inability to think anew the usual concepts of nation state, nation, religion, ethnicity: the author can't imagine an independence of two nations without territorial division; the nationality he wanted to protect by opposing a single binational state, he reduces to a mere "diplomatic-civic" linguistic difference after separating religion, ethnicity and nationality from the state; in the end, both "nation states" have to be in fact binational, because both peoples "are tenants of a shared homeland"...
You understood something?
This is really a "false vision" disconnected from our reality....


Here is the article, emphasizes are mine:

"The time has come to speak to the point. Both the Jews and the Arabs aren’t going anywhere. And in the absence of partition, the conflict will not be solved.

By Salman Masalha - Haaretz  | Mar. 19, 2014 | 5:07 AM |

The time has come to speak to the point. The Jews and the Arabs aren’t going anywhere. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that the present situation is intolerable both morally and politically. Anyone who claims that the conflict in Israel is a national one must have enough honesty and intellectual courage to present his own vision of a national solution.

There are some people, both on the hallucinatory right and the equally hallucinatory left, who are thinking about not dividing the country. But in the absence of partition the conflict will not be solved. We won’t reach a situation of “one person, one vote,” but rather a continuation of the occupation and splashing around in the mud puddles of the Jewish and Muslim religions. So we have to put aside the false visions of life in a binational state. Since the absolute majority in each of the Jewish and Palestinian communities wants to live a national life in its country, there is no avoiding a division of the land into two nation-states, with all that entails.

An end to the conflict requires good will among both nations. Such good will demands that both sides internalize, fully recognize and agree on the basic principle: Both nations have a strong connection to this land. Clearly anyone who rejects this fundamental principle is not seeking a genuine solution to the conflict.

It must be emphasized that dividing the land is a diplomatic division into two nation-states: A Hebrew-Israeli one and an Arabic-Palestinian one. The division will be based on the Green Line, not because of any sanctity attached to it, but because it’s the line that enjoys broad international backing. In addition, in order to ensure that the agreement between the two nations will in fact end the conflict, the principle of separation of religion and state must be anchored in a Basic Law in the parliaments of both countries. Such a law is designed to bypass the complications related to the religious, ethnic and national definitions of the citizens of the two countries.

When the State of Israel itself is unable to define who and what is a Jew, it cannot make demands to be recognized as a Jewish state. Even more so when one fifth of its citizens are Arabs living in their country and their homeland. Therefore, if there is insistence on recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” it is equally important to insist on it being a “Jewish state and the country and homeland of the Arabs who are citizens of the state.”

It’s clear that the “linguistic majority” in every country is what determines its cultural identity. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt the majority to learn and know the language of the minority, the language of the next-door neighbor. That’s why in both states the language of the neighboring state should receive official status. Determining the status of the neighbors’ language is required for the education of the coming generations. Because the citizens of both countries are like tenants in a shared house. They are tenants of a shared homeland.

Like any properly administered country, and in accordance with the rules of international law, it should be emphasized that the nationality in both states is no more than a diplomatic-civic nationality. A Jew who chooses to remain under Palestinian sovereignty will be considered a Palestinian for all intents and purposes, like any other Palestinian citizen. The same is true of all citizens under Israel sovereignty. The suggested separation between civic nationality and religious-ethnic nationality is designed to bypass a prohibitively tall obstacle – the demand to define the states based on the ethnic-religious majority of its citizens.

A state, as such, has no religion. The citizens of the state can believe in one religion or another, or not believe in any religion at all. In the final analysis, it is the dominant language that determines the identity of the place. Therefore, what will bring an end to the conflict once and for all is the recognition of Palestine as an Arabic – not a Muslim – state, and of Israel as a Hebrew – not a Jewish – state, and a redeemer shall come to Israel and Ishmael.

Race against space

Here is an article by the journalist Khaled Diab, who is a member of our Federation.

I like his expression "non-geographical Israeli and Palestinian community governments":

"I am personally in favour of a single binational state made up of two non-geographical Israeli and Palestinian community governments which oversee the affairs of their peoples, and a joint federal government which manages common issues, such as trade, defence and foreign policy."

It expresses well my concept of non-territorial nation state, which sounds too abstract and technical.

Race against space

By Khaled Diab

Both time and space are running out for the two-state solution. If Israelis wish to preserve the Jewish identity of their state, they need to act now to create a Palestinian state.

The Jerusalem Post
Monday 25 July 2011

Perched on a scenic hilltop named ‘Mont de Joie’ (‘Mountain of Joy’) by the Crusaders for its commanding view of the Jerusalem they were about to conquer, Nabi Samwil’s 250 or so Palestinian inhabitants have little to feel joyous about. They are cut off, by Israeli settlements and the separation wall, from the rest of the West Bank, while the West Bank IDs they carry deprive them of access to Jerusalem, even though Israel considers their village to be within the municipal boundaries of the city.

“We’ve become like a tiny island,” describes Mohammed Barakat, a local lawyer, who lives with three branches of his family, i.e. 13 people, in a small house of about 120m2. “If a child needs a doctor, you have to embark on a very long journey to get to other nearby villages or Ramallah.”

As he speaks, Barakat, who was crippled in a car crash in Amman, is sitting on his bed working on his computer, one of the few connections he has with the outside world. In addition to being a key advocate of the villagers’ rights, Barakat runs an NGO appropriately called, given the confinement of his village, Disabled without Borders.

One practical problem associated with their imposed isolation is getting relatives and friends from other parts of the West Bank into the village. Mohammed’s brother, Rebhi, who is a member of the village council, is somewhat anxious about a local wedding that is due to take place later in the week.

“The Israeli civilian administration insists on knowing the names of everyone who is coming,” he complains. “But you can never know who exactly is coming because each person you invite usually brings along their family and friends.”

The villagers’ woes don’t end there. Owing to draconian Israeli building restrictions, the bride and groom, like many other young people, are forced to abandon the village in search of housing elsewhere. Villagers report that only two houses have been built since Israel took over control in 1967, while numerous homes were demolished near the mosque and the tomb that is believed by some, despite the absence of archaeological or biblical evidence, to house the prophet Samuel.

One of the sad consequences of this inability to build which I witnessed is that some two dozen children have to squeeze into the village’s tiny one-room school, which will soon lack a properly functioning toilet because the one they built has a demolition order on it.

Isolated as Nabi Samwil is, it is not an isolated case – demolitions and displacements are a daily fact of life. This is clearly illustrated in a new report by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which is due out on 21 July. Entitled Forced Out, the sobering document focuses on displaced communities in Area C, more than three-fifths of the West Bank over which Israel retains full civil and security control under the Oslo Accords.

It documents how local communities – faced with restrictions on their movement, a freeze on building and settler violence and intimidation – are facing severe housing shortages, with many moving to Areas A and B as a result. Among the hardest hit are farming and Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, some of whom have even resorted to building concrete structures inside their tents to conceal them from the army.

“While the intent behind the various policies applied by Israel to Area C is unclear, their effect is to make it impossible for many Palestinian communities to develop,” says UN Humanitarian Coordinator Maxwell Gaylard who expresses “concerns about demographic shifts and changes to the ethnic make-up of Area C”.

Although Israel’s intentions are indeed unclear, the fact that a sharp increase in demolitions and evictions has taken place this year seems to suggest a bid to “create realities on the ground” before the Palestinian leadership gets a chance to go to the UN to seek recognition for an independent Palestine. OCHA’s records show that over 1,100 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced so far in 2011 in Area C and East Jerusalem.

Area C, which has experienced a massive upsurge in settlement building since the signing of the Oslo Accords, is currently home to twice as many Israeli settlers as Palestinians (300,000 as opposed to 150,000). Nevertheless, it possesses the majority of Palestinian agricultural and grazing land and is the only contiguous territory in the West Bank, which was foreseen to provide, under the ‘land for peace’ formula, the bulk of the space upon which a future Palestinian state would be established.

However, with 70% of Area C currently set aside for settlements or the IDF, there is little room left for the two-state solution. This might partly explain why the Palestinian leadership, caught as it is in a race against space, has desperately resorted to the UN path, despite its slim chances of success.

But it is not just Palestinians who should be worried about the changing reality of Area C and East Jerusalem, ordinary Israelis should be, too. If current policies remain unchecked, most of the Palestinian population will soon be living in a series of disconnected islands that will be impossible to join up into a coherent territory, leading to a de facto single Israeli-Palestinian state.

Once they realise that their dream of an independent state is dead, Palestinians are likely to start focusing their attention on demanding equal civil rights and Israeli citizenship. This will leave Israel with a dilemma: either live up to its democratic credentials and grant Palestinians full rights and dilute the country’s prized Jewish identity, or continue an unsustainable and increasingly oppressive occupation, with all the disenfranchisement it involves, to hold on to this Jewishness.

I am personally in favour of a single binational state made up of two non-geographical Israeli and Palestinian community governments which oversee the affairs of their peoples, and a joint federal government which manages common issues, such as trade, defense and foreign policy.

Although a growing minority of Israelis supports this vision, most favour a state with a clearly Jewish identity which, by implication, makes them supporters of an independent Palestine on the pre-1967 borders. However, the current government, which holds the land to be holier than its people, is unlikely to take any meaningful steps to achieve the two-state vision.

This leaves it up to ordinary Israelis to bring pressure to bear on the government to act now or risk forever holding back peace. Last Friday, some 4,500 protesters, mostly Israelis, marched through East Jerusalem to voice their support for an independent Palestine. The time has come for hundreds of thousands more to join them.

An Israeli leftist finds glimmer of hope

An Israeli leftist finds glimmer of hope - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

I had the occasion to meet former Knesset member dr. Einat Wilf and professor Mohammed S. Dajani, and have great respect for both. Einat Wilf has a doctorate in Political Sciences, Mohammed Dajani is the founder of Wasatia, a moderate Islamic movement.

 Can this common declaration, written by Einat Wilf and Mohammed Dajani, unite Israelis and Palestinians around the divisive issue of Israel as a Jewish state and Palestine as the Palestinian people's homeland?

"The Jewish people around the world and Palestinian people around the world are both indigenous to the Land of Israel/Palestine and therefore have an equal and legitimate right to settle and live anywhere in the Land of Israel/Palestine, but given the desire of both peoples to a sovereign state that would reflect their unique culture and history, we believe in sharing the land between a Jewish state, Israel, and an Arab state, Palestine, that would allow them each to enjoy dignity and sovereignty in their own national home. Neither Israel nor Palestine should be exclusively for the Jewish and Palestinian people respectively and both should accommodate minorities of the other people.
Who else will join us in our journey to find true partners on both sides?"


How can we guaranty the sustainability and safety of the sharing of the Land of Israel/Palestine between two nation states, a Jewish state, Israel, and an Arab state, Palestine, in a sharing allowing everyone to settle and live anywhere in this land? How are we going to prevent religious or nationalist extremists from both side to torpedo any such agreement?

The fact that Prof. Dajani asked to change the word "partition", used by Mrs. Wilf, to "sharing" is very significant in this perspective.

In my view, the solution is to include those two states into a federation, the only sovereign onto the undivided land, having one federal army and Jerusalem as united federal capital. I don't see another possibility.

We propose to get out of the usual partition rationality and try another, a sharing rationality:

This land belongs to God and shouldn't be divided. It should be shared.
Neither Jews nor Arabs should have sovereignty: our common Creator alone is the Sovereign, we can only be independent and free from each other under His supranational rule of Law and Justice. This religious ideal has to be politically translated into the rule of a supranational and secular Federation of the two peoples.

I wouldn't justify the right of either of both peoples to self-determination in this Land by indigeneity:
- the ancestors of many Palestinians, may be most of them, came from diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire when no political borders existed inside the Middle-East.
- the ancestors of most Israeli Jews emigrate from abroad, and none can prove his descent from the Jews of 2000 years ago...

The point is that as Nations, both Jews and Palestinian Arabs don't conceive of any other homeland than this Land of Israel-Palestine. This is the way we both define ourselves. We have to reciprocally recognize this fact, despite its apparent subjectivity, because it is a political and historical fact.

For Wilf, only this recognition by Palestinians will allow a real peace. The problem is that if we wait for Palestinians to understand Jewish identity and Zionism, we might wait for a long time.
The federal model we propose is based on a covenant between the two peoples themselves, and not between states; the constitutional democracy neutralizes the demographic problem. It means that the political frame really embodies the mutual recognition of the peoples and their right to live on the Land of Israel-Palestine.
It can be hoped that this federal frame and the fruit of civil peace will influence individuals to progressively  understand the point of view of the other side, but we don't need to wait and reach this stage in order to create the Federation of Israel-Palestine.


Here is the article by Einat Wilf. Emphasis is mine:

An Israeli leftist finds glimmer of hope
I was born into the Israeli left. I grew up in the left. I was always a member of the left. I believed that the day that the Palestinians would have their own sovereign state would be the day when Israel would finally live in peace. But like many Israelis of the left, I lost this certainty I once had.

Why? Over the last 14 years, I have witnessed the inability of the Palestinians to utter the word "yes" when presented with repeated opportunities to attain sovereignty and statehood; I have lived through the bloody massacres by means of suicide bombings in cities within pre-1967 Israel following the Oslo Accords and then again after the failed Camp David negotiations in 2000; and I have experienced firsthand the increasing venom of anti-Israel rhetoric that only, very thinly, masks a deep and visceral hatred for the state and its people that cannot be explained by mere criticism for the policies of some of its elected governments.

But one of the most pronounced moments over the past several years that has made me very skeptical toward the left were a series of meetings I had with young, moderate Palestinian leaders to which I was invited by virtue of being a member of Israel's Labor Party.

I had much in common with these young Palestinian leaders. We could relate to each other. However, through discussion, I soon discovered that the moderation of the young Palestinian leaders was in their acknowledgement that Israel is already a reality and therefore is not likely to disappear. I even heard phrases such as, "You were born here and you are already here, so we will not send you away." (Thank you very much, I thought). But, what shocked and changed my approach to peace was that when we discussed the deep sources of the conflict between us, I was told, "Judaism is not a nationality, it's only a religion and religions don't have the right to self-determination." The historic connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel was also described as made-up or nonexistent.

Reflecting on the comments of these "moderates," I was forced to realize that the conflict is far deeper and more serious than I allowed myself to believe. It was not just about settlements and "occupation," as Palestinian spokespeople have led the Israeli left to believe. I realized that the Palestinians, who were willing to accept the need for peace with Israel, did so because Israel was strong. I realized that, contrary to the leftist views in Israel, which support the establishment of a Palestinian state because the Palestinians have a right (repeat: right) to sovereignty in their homeland, there is no such parallel Palestinian "left" that recognizes the right (repeat: right) of the Jewish people to sovereignty in its ancient homeland.

These did not remain personal reflections. For the following years, these conversations impacted my political career as I found myself within the Labor Party increasingly alienated from what I began to term as the "self-flagellating left," to which the conflict was entirely due to Israel's actions and which demanded no responsibility or recognition from the Palestinians. As a member of the Knesset, on behalf of the Labor Party, I helped carry out a split within the party between its dovish and hawkish wing in order to allow the hawkish wing headed by then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak to remain in the coalition with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This realization has also motivated my continued work around the world to defend Israel and Zionism, insisting that all peace must be rooted in the mutual recognition of the equal right of both peoples to the land.

So, it was somewhat ironic when, just several months ago, I received an email from the Israeli-Palestinian meeting's organizer to write a response to one of the program's core funders as to whether the program had an "impact on anything or anybody." I was asked to "reflect back a few years" and to write whether the program "had any impact on you — personally, professionally, socially, politically … " Naturally, I responded. I wrote that the program had a "tremendous impact on my thinking and I continue to discuss it to this day in my talks and lectures." I shared the above story with the organizer, recognizing that "it is probably not a perspective you want to share with your funders."

In response, the organizer sent me an email saying that there are "many, not one, grass-roots and political Palestinians who truly believe that Jews have a right to part of the land." I responded enthusiastically that meeting even "one Palestinian who believes that the Jewish people have an equal and legitimate claim to the land would be huge for me," and that "I've been looking for someone like that ever since I participated in the program many years ago."

Shortly thereafter, I received the following quote from a Palestinian participant who expressed a desire to renew the program so that "we can reach a resolution to this conflict by having an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as it's capital living in peace side-by-side with the State of Israel." I responded, "I do not see that this individual writes that he recognizes the equal and legitimate right of the Jewish people to a sovereign state in their own homeland." I was then asked to write precisely what would convince me that we have a true partner for peace in the Palestinians. So, I drafted the following phrase:

"The Jewish people and Palestinian people are both indigenous to the Land of Israel/Palestine and therefore have an equal and legitimate claim to a sovereign state for their people on the land." I added that this sentence could be expanded to say, "Both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people around the world have an equal and legitimate claim to settle and live anywhere in the Land of Israel/Palestine, but given the desire of both peoples to a sovereign state that would reflect their unique culture and history, we believe in partitioning the land into a Jewish state, Israel, and an Arab state, Palestine, that would allow them each to enjoy dignity and sovereignty in their own national home." I would also add here that it should be clear that neither Israel nor Palestine should be exclusively for the Jewish and Palestinian people respectively and both should accommodate minorities of the other people.

The organizer promised to get back to me. Weeks and months passed, and I was about to publish this piece, opening up the conversation, hoping to find partners who share my belief, so that I could rekindle my hope that peace is possible. At the last minute, I was contacted by professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, the head of American Studies at Al-Quds University and founder of the Palestinian centrist movement, Wasatia. All he asked was to change the word "claim" to "right," and "partition" to "sharing," saying that "right" was more positive, and "partitioning" had in the deep psyche of the Palestinians the negative connotation of the 1947 UN partition plan recommendation. He emphasized that 67 years later, he hopes that Palestinians would realize that sharing the land by a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, as envisioned by the UN resolution, was "the right thing to do" in 1947, since both people do have a legitimate right to the land, and remains "the right thing to do" today. I found these changes wholly acceptable and welcome. So the statement we share now reads as follows:

"The Jewish people around the world and Palestinian people around the world are both indigenous to the Land of Israel/Palestine and therefore have an equal and legitimate right to settle and live anywhere in the Land of Israel/Palestine, but given the desire of both peoples to a sovereign state that would reflect their unique culture and history, we believe in sharing the land between a Jewish state, Israel, and an Arab state, Palestine, that would allow them each to enjoy dignity and sovereignty in their own national home. Neither Israel nor Palestine should be exclusively for the Jewish and Palestinian people respectively and both should accommodate minorities of the other people."

Who else will join us in our journey to find true partners on both sides?

Brit Shalom Definition

Zionism and Israel - Encyclopedic Dictionary
Brit Shalom Definition

Brit Shalom - (Hebrew, ברית שלום Meaning "Covenant of Peace) Jewish peace group founded in 1925, primarily inspired by German Zionists, to seek coexistence with the Arabs of Palestine by advocating a binational state rather than a Zionist state. The idea arose primarily in opposition to the Iron Wall concept and seemingly uncompromising stance of Ze'ev (Valdimir) Jabotinsky and in an effort to head off Arab opposition that was evident in the riots of 1921.

Martin Buber , Robert Weltsch, Hans Kohn and Hugo Bergmann are credited with being the originators of the idea. They were followers of Achad Haam and stressed the spiritual importance of a Jewish national home and the effect of Zionism on renewal of individuals. They found an ideological home in Hapoel Hatzair . In these circles, the idea for a binational state had been discussed long before the foundation of Brit Shalom, They did not consider it practical to oust Arabs by force, and did not believe Arabs would agree to live in a Jewish state. They discounted the importance of political power and amassing of material possessions and land.

Their credo was already formulated in 1921 if not before. "Palestine cannot be a nation state, not only because this is not a step forward, but also because it is impracticable. It must be bi-national rather than Eretz Yisrael." (1921 letter from Kohn to Weltch, quoted in Lavsky p. 652). Supposedly, Chaim Weizmann agreed with this idea as well, at least at one time in his career. The formation of the Brit Shalom movement in 1925 was catalyzed by Jabotinzky's formation of the Revisionist party in that year. The issues at stake were not only the question of relation with Arabs, but also the means of development of Palestine. The Fourth Aliya peaked in 1925, and brought with it a large number of people opposed to workers ownership and public development, who wished to develop the land based on private enterprise.

An open split occurred at the Fourteenth Zionist Congress between the confrontational approach of Jabotinsky and the conciliatory approach of mainstream Zionism to the Arabs. Chaim Weizmann said:

In true friendship and partnership with the Arabs we must open the Near East to Jewish enterprise... Palestine must be built in such a way that legitimate Arab interests are not impinged upon in the slightest...- we must take Palestine as it is, with its sands and stones, Arabs and Jews as they are. That is our work. Anything else would be deception.,,, We shall rise or fall by our work alone. (Protocols of Fourteenth Zionist Congress pp 328-329, translated by Lavsky, and cited in Lavsky, p. 664)

Arthur Ruppin agreed:

... there is the possibility... to establish in Palestine a community where both nations, with no ruling advantage (Vorherrshcaft) to the one, nor oppression of the other, shall work shoulder to shoulder in full equality of rights towards the economic and cultural development of the country. (Protocols of Fourteenth Zionist Congress p 438, translated by Lavsky, and cited in Lavsky, p. 664)

Brit Shalom was organized at an initial meeting in Ruppin's house in mid-November of 1925. The founders, especially Weltsch, believed they had the support of Weizmann, but that perhaps Weizmann found himself unable to speak out because of the duties of office.

Yehuda Magnes, President of the Hebrew University, was a friend and mentor of the Brit Shalom movement but was not a founder or member. Though initially successful and long influential in German Zionist circles, Brit Shalom lost the support of Ruppin and many others who were disillusioned by the brutal Arab riots and massacres of 1929.

Brit Shalom apparently never had more than a hundred members, but its binational State state platform was adopted by Mapam , the leftist "United Workers Party in the 1940s.

Byt he time of the Arab uprising of 1936, it became obvious to at least some in Brit Shalom that the binational state was impractical.

Arthur Ruppin admitted on May 16, 1936:

“The peace will not be established in this land by an ‘agreement’ with the Arabs, rather it will come in due time, when we are strong enough so the Arabs will not be so certain in the results of the struggle and be forced to accept us as an existing fact.” ref

That was not so different from the original thesis of Jabotinsky in The Iron Wall . In August, Levi Billig, a member of Brit Shalom was brutally murdered. ref The movement lost most of its adherents.

However, in 1942, perhaps in reaction to the Biltmore Program , Brit Shalom adherents and sympathizers including Yehuda Magnes, Martin Buber , Ernst Simon and Henrietta Szold founded the small IHUD (Union) party that advocated a binational state. They presented their case to various international commissions and continued to function until 1948.

A different version of Brit Shalom was created recently. It seems to have little relation to the former group. Brit Tsedek VeShalom, an American non-Zionist Jewish peace group also based on the original name evidently.

Ami Isseroff

September 7, 2009

Reference:

Lavsky, Hagit, German Zionists and the Emergence of Brit Shalom, translated from the Hebrew, reprinted in Reinharz, Jehuda and Shapira, Anita eds. Essential Papers on Zionism, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 648-670.

The Federalist Revolution and the Way to Peace

I republish here in full an article of the great theorist of federalism, late prof. Daniel J. Elazar.

Let's learn with him the lesson of the twentieth century: how federalism brought peace. This is the lesson we are such in need of, here in Israel-Palestine.

The Federalist Revolution and the Way to Peace

Daniel J. Elazar

The Lessons of a Century of Total War

The twentieth century has been a century for proclamations of eternal peace and the realities of total war. One of the saddest truths that we have learned in the twentieth century is that ideas for and sympathies toward achieving peace alone are not enough. It is true that in order to have peace in the world we first must have acceptance of the idea of peace in the minds of men. But peace in the minds of men is not enough. Human cultures must also be oriented toward peace and there must be institutional mechanisms and frameworks for the achievement and maintenance of peace.

The twentieth century began with the First World War, perhaps the most horrible of all modern wars because it was so totally unnecessary; a war that threw the whole world into decades of convulsion, cost tens of millions of lives directly and other tens of millions indirectly, and maimed the lives of literally hundreds of millions of others, all because of the personal ambitions and weaknesses of a handful of European leaders.

The dominant political stance among the European masses at the time was socialism. The socialist leadership firmly believed that the commitment of socialism to not fighting in capitalist or royal wars would be sufficiently powerful to overcome nationalism and prevent the explosion that took place. Yet in July and August of 1914, when the governments of the states involved mobilized their armies, hardly any of the ordinary people called up, including the most fervent socialist workers, refused to go. On the contrary, they marched out with banners flying, singing the nationalist songs of the time, their socialist ideas notwithstanding. Nationalism proved to be a far stronger ideology than socialism.

In the last analysis, if the political institutions of the world are directed toward war or have no way to avoid it, ordinary humans will be dragged along into conflict and will acquiesce either out of conviction or out of necessity.

Nor are the causes of war easily identified and isolated. At one time it was widely believed that the elimination of poverty would eliminate war. Today we are more likely to believe that, ironically, poverty may limit the chances of war because people who are too poor do not have the resources or the energy to fight and that prosperity, at least in its early stages, may actually make war both possible and more likely. The same energy that brings the first prosperity may generate ambitions that only can be satisfied by war. At the same time, it is entirely possible that advanced prosperity may indeed lessen the chances for war for the most selfish of reasons, as people grow lazy and slothful, they are unwilling to risk their comfort for any reason.

I mention these negative elements in irony, but in part because we must be open-minded enough to pursue the fostering of peace in the minds of men even through those elements of human personality and culture that are less attractive from other perspectives. Ultimately, however, we must recognize that in every population there are those humans who are drawn to the most difficult challenges and cannot control their desire for gain. One of the wisest of all men, Abraham Lincoln, described the problem in his famous speech to the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois in 1838:

It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passions, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,[.] What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.

It is for such reasons that men like William James, one of the world's eminent philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century, who foresaw with foreboding the transition from a century of relative peace to one of total war, sought to find a moral equivalent for war to engage human energies and ambitions.

More than two generations later, we humans, sadder and perhaps wiser, have adopted a different equivalent of war in the form of sport -- local, national and international -- to engage those human urges, passions and ambitions which were formerly devoted to the battlefield. However pleasurable, sport is not exactly the moral equivalent of war but if less noble, it may be an even better one.

Our century has indeed been the century of total war. Its first generation from 1914 through 1945 witnessed two global wars whose scope and human cost were unequalled in history. These wars brought with them a totality of involvement and destruction which only the new technologies of modernity could make possible. In their wake they brought revolutionary totalitarianism to scourge the world -- Fascism, Nazism, Communism. It was a generation in which the periods of so-called peace witnessed so-called limited wars and mass killings hardly less extensive than those of the two world wars.

The second generation of the twentieth century, from 1946 to 1976, was informed by a Cold War between the two Great Powers and their allies which also extended worldwide, punctured by several limited "hot war" confrontations between those powers or their clients. Yet that generation also witnessed the decolonization of what came to be known as the Third World. And the Cold War, however unpleasant, was confined and generally kept from becoming hot.

Now we are in the third and final generation of this century. Since 1977, the trend has been toward ending the Cold War and related conflicts, great and small, a trend that reached new heights in the late 1980s with glasnost and perestroika, the self-liberation of Eastern Europe, East-West rapprochement and serious moves towards disarmament, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the settling of various outstanding regional conflicts tied in one way or another to the Cold War. For a moment we seem to be at a springtime for the world when peace may indeed be within our grasp. There will indeed be setbacks in the dismantling of totalitarianism and other anti-peace forces. But the air is full of promise, a promise which we must transform into fulfillment. To reach that fulfillment we must address people's minds, their cultures, and their institutions.

The Federal Idea as the Key to Peace

One of the most promising vehicles for addressing all three is the federal idea. While federalism is normally understood as having to do with political structures, in fact the federal idea speaks principally to the character of human relationships. In its roots in the biblical idea of covenant, it understands humans as autonomous equals, capable of entering into covenants to establish the rules and institutions for their own self-government, who form their civil societies and polities through covenanting with one another on the basis of mutual consent to advance human cooperation in such a way that all the partners preserve their respective integrities, even as they create a common framework for cooperating to secure common ends.

The word "federal" is derived from the Latin foedus which means covenant. The political federalism that we know is one expression of the federal idea. The evolving world order with the United Nations and its agencies at its center may be another.

Federalism is the practical application of the covenantal way to the organization of political authority and power. The great political philosophers of the seventeenth century saw constitution-making as a federal act because, properly done, it was the assembly of the people as equals to constitute civil society and government. International relations were also seen by those philosophers as federal in that the community of nations was a community of equals, which also had to establish rules of conduct and control the exercise of power in the international arena.

The modern epoch -- from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries -- was the epoch of runaway nationalism dominated by two principal features of political behavior. One, national separatism, featured not only the multiplication of states but the myth that each state had to serve a single nation whose special character gave it a privileged position in the world and the right to pursue its national genius and, most especially, to recover what it defined as its national territory (to the best of its ability) through whatever means, including war. Accompanying that myth was the second one that only through centralized unitary government with its concomitant concentration of power in a single center could the nation-state be maintained and pursue its divine mission. These two myths fostered endless wars, large and small, both external and internal: external, to secure the separation of nations and their territorial aggrandizement; internal, to suppress divergent groups or dissident forces that kept the new state from being a homogenous nation-state.

In the twentieth century, both of these myths were intensified in many states by the addition of ideological homogeneity as a requisite, leading to totalitarian repression. Today, these myths have been exploded, unfortunately, all too literally. Two world wars and the many revolutionary convulsions demonstrated to Europeans how false these myths were. Despite the wars and revolutions, in no case had nation and state become coterminous where they were not in pre-modern times. Each state either was composed of several nations (e.g. the United Kingdom ), continued to have significant national minorities (e.g. Italy) or each nation was scattered over several states (e.g. the Germans). Nor had the centralized states delivered peace and prosperity, rather, they had delivered wars and repression. Exhausted from their conflicts, when they were free to do so, Europeans slowly turned to the development of a new European political order, one that accepted the existence of many polities and sought to limit statism in both the international and the internal spheres.

From the initial federation of the previously warring Balkan states and peoples into now collapsed Yugoslavia to the development of the European Community anchored in the newly peaceful relationship between France and Germany, the two major historic enemies of Western Europe, the federal principle has become Europe's new idea and federalism, not necessarily in its modern meaning of federation but in many new ways such as confederation, federacy, associated statehood, and autonomy is fast becoming Europe's way. This new way provides political, social and cultural autonomy for even more polities than could be accommodated in the traditional state system, while providing for far greater interstate economic integration, political cooperation, and personal liberty than the old system allowed.

This federal idea and way is not designed to foster the establishment of a new universal state subject to all the evil propensities of the nation-state on a larger (and more threatening) scale; it is, rather, a leaguing of states to limit their political sovereignty for the sake of greater benefits. It is not even necessarily committed to federation -- the sole accepted manifestation of the federal idea in the modern epoch -- though federation has been a successful device in integrating or decentralizing and thereby restoring peace to some European states, including Austria, Belgium, the German Federal Republic (now with the former DDR as well), Spain, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. In Western Europe, what was initially a league of states for limited economic purposes is being transformed into a confederation which preserves the full political integrity of the confederated states while creating a new common, if limited, regime for them all. There the struggle is between those seeking confederal unity and those seeking bureaucratic federalism -- a version of the Jacobin state writ even larger.

The confederal variant of the federal idea was unable to sustain itself in practice in the modern epoch when the separatist and centralist orientations of statism were too powerful. Now it is being successfully revived under the very different conditions of the post-modern epoch.

At times, the federal idea takes on other forms of practical expression. Sometimes they are asymmetrical, as in the ties between France and Monaco, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Italy and San Marino, Britain and its offshore islands, Finland and the Aaland Islands. These applications of the federal idea have enabled micro-states to survive and prosper in the new Europe. In the case of Andorra, a formed Spanish-French condominium has preserved the freedom of that little republic for 700 years in the face of the rivalry of these two great powers.

What is happening in Europe can be seen as building on what began in North America at the height of the modern epoch when 200 years ago the United States of America invented modern federalism as federation, an idea that spread to the new worlds of British colonization and to Latin America in the Western Hemisphere in the next century. It had great success in fostering and preserving peace and a climate of peace in Canada and Australia, even in the face of separatist tendencies. Even where federal principles had to compete with authoritarian ventures as in Latin America, the federal idea introduced as a key element in Latin American revolutionary liberalism, was more often than not associated with the pursuit of peace, not war. As peace and democracy have come to Latin America, federal ideas and practices are a strong part of the new reality.

The federal idea has had mixed success in the Third World which, at the beginning of the postmodern epoch, has had to confront those very same statist myths which had been imported from Europe and were then being exploded there. Where the colonial powers tried to introduce federal arrangements as means of inter-ethnic accommodation, their efforts usually failed because those who sought power could call upon the by now discredited European statist myths to serve their own ends. Nevertheless, in India, that greatest of Third World countries, the federal way has made union and civil peace possible, despite all of the difficulties that country has encountered. India means federation, first and foremost, although Indian federalism has several other dimensions as well, from a federacy arrangement with Bhutan to consociational arrangements in some Indian states and even internal condominia (e.g. the city of Chandigarh as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana).

Perhaps even more interesting have been the efforts at confederation in the West Indies. British efforts to establish a West Indies Federation failed. The island states involved were simply too insular, but the need for some kind of linkage of those micro-states was necessary if they were to more than merely survive. What they did was establish a network of overlapping joint authority that preserved their separate status as states, yet enabled them to share a common currency, a common supreme court, a common university, a common central bank, and, to some extent, a common market. As a result, they have been moving toward a level of regional integration that has taken on confederal characteristics, These new regional institutional arrangements are possible only when there is a will, where the minds of men are attuned in that direction.

In most cases, these federal experiments have succeeded where the states themselves have abandoned the idea that the concentration of power in a single center is the best way. The states themselves have adopted federal or consociational structures or arrangements or have undertaken constitutional transfer of functions to their local governments. In other words, the first step is a shift in the minds of men from thinking statist to thinking federal. Once begun, the possibility for combining various arrangements of different degrees of scope and intensity has wide limits. I have already referred to the Indian example.

So, too, the United States of America is noted for being a federation, now of 50 states. As such, it has always been predisposed toward thinking federal and fostering non-centralized government, so much so that when the courts held the states to be unitary and not federal in their internal composition, the overwhelming majority (45 of the 50) adopted home rule provisions, most in their constitutions which extend great autonomy to their cities and counties. Since 1952, the United States has developed and constitutionalized asymmetrical federal arrangements with Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas as federacies in which any change in the relationship requires the consent of both parties, and more recently with the three Micronesian republics (one of which is itself a federation of islands), which can be terminated unilaterally under certain conditions by either party. Increasingly, American Indian tribes, defined by the United States Supreme Court over 150 years ago as "domestic dependent nations," are developing their own asymmetrical federal relationship with the federal and state governments.

Across the Pacific Ocean, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), carefully preserving the political sovereignty of each member state, has moved from being a defensive league to the threshold of confederation through the development of a growing number of overlapping functional linkages. Although it has not crossed that threshold and may not in the next few years -- nor should it until it is ready to do so -- it is a good example how thinking federal can begin to lead a region along the paths of peace.

Peace is only possible when such institutional arrangements are in place and succeed. Thus one of the first tasks for developing the idea of peace in the minds of men as one that will realistically contribute to the advancement of peace is to shift human thinking from statism to federalism, from the way of centralism and separatism to cooperative power-sharing, internally and externally.

In the last analysis there are only three ways to establish political relationships. One is by conquest or force. We are all too familiar with that way, which is the antithesis of the achievement of peace. A second is through organic development, seemingly by accident. Under the right conditions, organic development can sometimes lead to domestic peace, but it is very chancy indeed and is likely to lead to continuing wars between states in pursuit of their respective myths and ambitions, hence not to be depended upon for peace in our highly interdependent world. The third way is through reflection, choice, and covenant, through the establishment of communities of equals on an equal basis by pacts reflecting agreement and consent.

Democracy grows out of covenant or reflection and choice which, like the other ways, has a history that goes back to the beginning of time. And democracies are notably reluctant to go to war, especially against other democracies. The Federalist, speaking to the American people who were the first moderns to embark on the federal path, put it thus:

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force (Federalist #1).

That is now the choice before the entire world. The Federalist continues: "A wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind." How much more so is this true of humanity on this planet today.

Democracy, which is rooted in covenants and constitutions, has a history that goes back to the beginnings of what are today referred to as the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible, in describing the making of the covenants that instituted constitutional government in ancient Israel, speaks in the same terms of reflection and choice between good and evil ways. Modern constitutionalism is the most widespread current manifestation of establishing peace by covenant within nations.

In the twentieth century covenant has been introduced into the international arena, at first haltingly and defectively through the League of Nations, but since 1945, still haltingly but more effectively by the United Nations and the network of organizations linked with it. We are still in the very first stages of this process, building an international community through overlapping covenantal linkages. It is a community that does not purport to be federal in its structure in the modern understanding of the term but, rather, international, protecting the status of each member state. Nevertheless, world events have overtaken that careful constitutional position. An interconnected world community has developed in economics, in communications, and increasingly in matters of public opinion and peace and security. We need not seek more of this than the reality, nor should we impose more of a burden on this fledgling world community than it can bear, but as we think of how to build peace in the world, I believe that we can see the direction in which we must go.

Combining Will, Culture, and Institutions

None of this is to suggest that it is our task to strive for some kind of world federal government. Our world is not built for such a thing. Rather, the task before us at this time is the reorientation of our thinking from the exclusivism of national sovereignty toward federalist cooperation through regional and world functional arrangements, and as the time becomes ripe, toward the resolution of conflict through federal devices of all kinds.

From John Locke and Immanuel Kant to our days, the greatest philosophers have urged humans along a dual path, to democratically constitute their national polities and to redesign the international arena so that it will be an arena of peace. They recognized that to do so there had to be three things: the will to achieve peace, an appropriate political culture that could promote and sustain peace, and appropriate institutions to secure peace, justice, and liberty. In the past these philosophers could speak only of the promise of a distant future. Today events have made that future a growing reality -- a single world economy to which even the most powerful nations are bound; a growing international communications network, which is no respecter of state boundaries and which cannot be controlled by governmental fiat, a network that increasingly links individuals and all peoples, whether those in power wish it or not; a shared world popular culture, for better or for worse, and a growing recognition that in matters of environment, even more than in matters of economy, our planet is one small spaceship in a vast universe and all humans are affected by what occurs to its environment.

Nor are any states fully sovereign in the political arena any more. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, even the ability to decide to wage war is limited to a greater or lesser extent. Unfortunately, our political culture has lagged behind our popular culture, just as our will for peace has lagged behind our need for it in all too many cases. We must begin with the minds of men and indeed with their hearts if we are to end up with the institutions required to bring peace to this earth.

These years of the breakup of the Communist empire, the development of a common shield for human rights in Europe and North America, and the coming together of the United Nations to stop aggression in the Middle East should be seen as a promising next stop on the long road toward universal peace. If we are far from the biblical choosing between good and evil, let us at least choose covenants of peace based upon the striving to be able to make that choice.

Thomas Hobbes, one of the most hard-headed of philosophers whose expectations of humanity were minimal, prescribed the need for such covenants of peace and what they must contain. He listed fifteen articles:

1. To seek peace, and follow it.
2. By all means we can, to defend ourselves.
3. That men perform their covenants made.
4. That a man which receiveth benefit from another of mere grace, endeavor that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will.
5. That every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest.
6. That upon caution of the future time, a man ought to pardon the offences past of them that repenting, desire it.
7. That in revenges, men look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow.
8. That no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare hatred, or contempt of another.
9. That every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature.
10. That at the entrances into conditions of peace, no man require to reserve to himself any right, which he is not content should be reserved to every one of the rest.
11. If a man be trusted to judge between man and man, that he deal equally between them.
12. That such things as cannot be divided, be enjoyed in common, if it can be; and if the quality of the thing permit, without stint; and if the quantity of the thing permit, without stint; otherwise proportionally, to the number of them that have right.
13. That the entire right; or else, making the use alternate, the first possession, be determined by lot.
14. That all men that mediate peace, be allowed safe conduct.
15. That they are at controversy, submit their right to the judgement of an arbitrator.

In a world of greys, these are the least we can require of each other. As we strive for a new world order, let us do so realistically, at least from this Hobbesian starting point. If we can achieve that then we shall open up great new possibilities.