Is There a Way Out?

(This is the last of a three-part series. The previous articles can be found in Part 1 & Part 2.)

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

November 30, 2023 — The first part of this series detailed how Israel is carrying out a mass dispossession of Palestinians in Gaza — a new Nakba, like the 1948 catastrophe that led to Israel’s founding as a colonial settler state. The second documented how long-standing Israeli government policy made possible the October 7 pogrom by Hamas.

This concluding part focuses on what may be a way out of these dire conditions.

The setbacks to Palestinian rights over the last three decades, combined with seemingly unending cycles of violence that reached a new peak since October 7 and Israel’s response, has led to a growing “lethal psychological chasm” between Israelis and Palestinians, wrote New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in a November 20 article.

“In a conflict marked by complete incomprehension on both sides, the ability to see each other as human has been lost,” said Cohen, who is Jewish, reporting from Jerusalem.

“The consequence is a psychological chasm so deep that Palestinians are invisible as individuals to Israeli Jews, and vice versa,” Cohen continued, indicating that the space for efforts of cooperation between Israeli peace activists and like-minded Palestinians is virtually closed.

“There are exceptions, of course,” he added. “Some Israelis and Palestinians have dedicated themselves to bridging that divide. But generally, the narratives of the two sides diverge, burying any perception of shared humanity.”

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Many supporters of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland express a similar pessimism.

Rashid Khalidi spoke to this point in a recent interview. Khalidi is a Palestinian American, a historian of the Middle East, and a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.

Asked about the prospects for a solution to the conflict, Khalidi responded, “So how do you get these two people to live together in one state after the blood that has been shed? And it will, I’m afraid, continue to be shed… I don’t think that in the short term, there’s any particular reason for optimism about any solution.” (See ‘End Oppression of One People by Another’ Part II.)

Khalidi referred to the strategy represented by Hamas’s course as “not acceptable.” He also described the PLO as “moribund.”

“Fatah [the main organization in the PLO] is in decline because of its association with a corrupt, inept Palestinian Authority in Ramallah,” Khalidi added. Since the PA accepted as its main role — outsourced to it by Israel — policing Palestinians in the West Bank, both the PA’s and the PLO’s political influence among Palestinians have diminished significantly.

Recent events bear out Khalidi’s point. On October 17, hundreds of Palestinians marched in Ramallah to express their frustration with the PA president, after Abbas cancelled a planned trip to Jordan that day in the aftermath of an airstrike that damaged the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza. PA security forces responded by firing tear gas and stun grenades. Similar clashes also broke out in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Tubas, and Jenin, according to Al Jazeera.

The lack of revolutionary leadership among Palestinians that Khalidi alluded to is the weightiest challenge to any prospect of revival of the national liberation struggle, which now faces perhaps its lowest ebb as a new Nakba unfolds in Gaza.

The picture of these adverse conditions would not be complete without noting the dangerous rise in incidents of Jew hatred around the world, combined with a spike of anti-Arab discrimination and Islamophobic attacks in Australia, the United States, and other countries.^[1]

Actions of any kind that target Jews, as opposed to those that clearly challenge the Israeli government and its aggressive war against Palestinians, set back the Palestinian struggle and should be opposed. Just as all discrimination, bigotry, or physical attacks aimed at Muslims or Arabs should be condemned.

The November 25 shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont, is the most recent example of the latter.

In reporting on the Vermont attack, the New York Times noted, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations said that its offices have seen a huge rise in reports of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias since Oct. 7, the day that Hamas attacked Israel. The Anti-Defamation League said in late October that there also had been a considerable increase in reported cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault compared with the year before.”

The views of World-Outlook’s editors on these issues flow from lessons learned from Fidel Castro, the central leader of the Cuban revolution, and Nelson Mandela, the main leader of the democratic revolution in South Africa. Both unequivocally supported the struggle of the Palestinian people for national self-determination and with equal resolve opposed any form of Jew hatred.

Important acts of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation

Pessimism is not a political program or strategy. While extremely modest today, whatever resistance there is to the war inside Israel is a beginning. Such resistance faces enormous challenges. Israel’s war is coupled with extreme Zionist rhetoric, police and mob attacks on anyone daring to even question aspects of how Tel Aviv is conducting the war, and a crackdown on Palestinian citizens of Israel that includes firings and indiscriminate arrests.

Under these conditions, public events of cooperation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians calling for a ceasefire, ending the war, and an end to Israel’s brutal occupation of millions of Palestinians are rare. But they offer a much-needed glimpse of hope for the future.

One such example was the October 30 meeting at a mosque in Haifa, Israel, where the 600 Muslims, Jews, and others present called for a ceasefire. (See Hundreds of Jews, Muslims in Israel Call for Ceasefire in Gaza.)

The recent U.S. speaking tour of Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Alon-Lee Green, an Israeli Jew, is a similar example. The two are leaders of the Israeli peace group Standing Together. Its website declares, “Where there is struggle there is hope.”

Abed, reported the New York Times, said the situation felt so toxic that the two feared their 10-day trip to talk about the ways Palestinians and Jews can work together would only lead to attacks from all sides. Instead, in New York, Washington, Boston, and elsewhere they found packed auditoriums and eager audiences in community centers, synagogues, libraries, and the offices of politicians.

“We’re trying to play a different game in Israel and Palestine,” Green told a group of people organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice at a November 9 meeting in Brooklyn. “And this game is very simple. It says that both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”

“We need to start working from this point,” he said, receiving a wave of nods.

No safety for the Jewish people in Israeli aggression

Another courageous act was Anne Boyer’s resignation from her post as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. In her November 16 public resignation letter, she protested her employers’ pro-Israel bias and highlighted an essential point:

“The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone,” Boyer said. “There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.”

Boyer ’s view echoed the warning Marxist scholars Isaac Deutscher and George Novack issued so clearly more than 50 years earlier. (See How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism.) It has only become more urgent in the wake of Israel’s barbaric assault today:

“They [the Jews] now appear in the Middle East once again in the invidious role of agents… of powerful western vested interests and as protégés of neocolonialism,” said Deutscher in a June 1967 interview with New Left Review, immediately following what is known as the “six-day war.”

“This is how the Arab world sees them, not without reason. Once again, they arouse bitter emotions and hatreds in their neighbours, in all those who have ever been or still are victims of imperialism,” Deutscher added.

“What a fate it is for the Jewish people to be made to appear in this role,” he continued, “their role is altogether lamentable; and they are placed once again in the position of potential scapegoats. Is Jewish history to come full circle in such a way? This may well be the outcome of Israel’s ‘victories’; and of this Israel’s real friends must warn it.”

Khalidi made a similar point: “But one hopes that someone somewhere is going to begin to say that Israel’s political approach is completely bankrupt.”

What is the way out?

Awad Darawshe, 23, was a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a peace advocate. He was working as a paramedic at the music festival in southern Israel that Hamas gunmen transformed into a killing field on October 7. He was among the more than 360 people Hamas massacred there.

His cousin, Mohammad Darawshe, is among a minority of Palestinians and Jews who see a chance to transform today’s abysmal state of affairs into an opportunity for peace and justice in the future, reported the October 22 New York Times.

That state of drift, in which peace had become a forgotten or even risible word, now feels untenable, Darawshe and other promoters of Jewish-Arab dialogue in Israel say.

Netanyahu’s policy of maintaining the status quo while periodically conducting a brutal punishment of Gaza, by “mowing the grass,” in the dismissive Israeli expression for these assaults, while Tel Aviv normalized relations with more and more of the surrounding Arab countries, is now also shattered.

“I am a realist, and realistically two states are still possible,” said Darawshe. “It may be nice to dream of one shared homeland, but Israelis will not give up their state. And Palestinians also need their own state, with the two strongly interconnected.”

Referring to the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the land that would be Palestine, Darawshe said, “The vast majority of them, perhaps 95 percent, are on 3 percent of the land that can be swapped for an equal amount of Palestinian land. Then the relocation of the remaining settlers would become conceivable. But you need the will.”

Others, like Khalidi, no longer believe the two-state plan can be implemented.

Whatever solution can be found, another of Deutscher’s conclusions still resonates today:

“Arab nationalism will be incomparably more effective as a liberating force if it is disciplined and rationalized by an element of internationalism that will enable the Arabs to approach the problem of Israel more realistically than hitherto. They cannot go on denying Israel’s right to exist and indulging in bloodthirsty rhetoric.”

Today Hamas is the embodiment of the opposite.

The PLO once made a point of its internationalism, identifying with other national liberation struggles around the world. But the role of the Palestinian Authority in policing the West Bank for Israel makes any such remaining appeals little more than meaningless rhetoric.

The most reactionary Palestinian voices, like the most reactionary Zionist voices, embrace a nationalist outlook that rejects internationalism and solidarity among all those who face oppression and bigotry.

The only viable solution is one that allows Palestinian people to exercise self-determination, whether in two-states, a confederation, or one state where they can live on the same land under equal rights with Jews and people of other nationalities. Palestinians working in alliance with like-minded Israelis could bring this seemingly distant goal to fruition one day.

To achieve that future goal, however, the Israeli drive today toward a new Nakba — the annihilation of thousands and perhaps tens of thousands more Palestinians, and the further dispossession of more than one million Gazans — must be unequivocally opposed. That includes opposition to all U.S. military and other aid to Israel.

(This was the last of a three-part series. The previous articles can be found in Part 1 & Part 2.)

NOTES

[1] Recent incidents of Jew hatred include the attempted storming on October 30 of a plane carrying Jewish passengers by a right-wing mob in the Russian republic of Dagestan — thwarted only by the intervention of the Russian military — and the November 15 arson of Yerevan’s sole synagogue in Armenia by a group claiming to act in solidarity with Gaza. An increasing number of Islamophobic attacks have also been reported in Australia, the United States, and other countries.

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