David Grossman’s widely publicized speech at the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin earlier this month has prompted some fine deconstruction of his “words of peace” from critics.
Grossman, one of Israel’s foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country’s apologists — in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike — desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli Army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism’s legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.
In reality, of course, Grossman draws from the same ideological well-spring as Israel’s founders and its greatest warriors. He embodies the same anguished values of Labor Zionism that won Israel international legitimacy just as it was carrying out one of history’s great acts of ethnic cleansing: The expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, or 80 percent of the native population, from the borders of the newly established Jewish state.
(Even critical historians usually gloss over the fact that the percentage of the Palestinian population expelled by the Israeli Army was, in truth, far higher. Many Palestinians forced out during the 1948 war ended up back inside Israel’s borders either because under the terms of the 1949 armistice with Jordan they were annexed to Israel, along with a small but densely populated area of the West Bank known as the Little Triangle, or because they managed to slip back across the porous border with Lebanon and Syria in the months following the war and hide inside the few Palestinian villages inside Israel that had not been destroyed.)
Remove the halo with which he has been crowned by the world’s liberal media and Grossman is little different from Zionism’s most distinguished statesmen, those who also ostentatiously displayed their hand-wringing or peace credentials as, first, they dispossessed the Palestinian people of most of their homeland; then dispossessed them of the rest; then ensured the original act of ethnic cleansing would not unravel; and today are working on the slow genocide of the Palestinians, through a combined strategy of their physical destruction and their dispersion as a people.
David Ben Gurion, for example, masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 before very publicly agonizing over the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — even if only because of the demographic damage that would be done to the Jewish state as a result.
Golda Meir refused to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people as she launched the settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, but did recognize the anguish of Jewish soldiers forced to “shoot and cry” to defend the settlements. Or as she put it: “We can forgive you (the Palestinians) for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”
Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman’s most direct inspiration, may have initiated a “peace process” at Oslo (even if only the terminally optimistic today believe that peace was really its goal), but as a soldier and politician he also personally oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities like Lid in 1948; he ordered tanks into Arab villages inside Israel during the Land Day protests of 1976, leading to the deaths of half a dozen unarmed Palestinian citizens; and in 1988 he ordered his army to crush the first intifada by “breaking the bones” of Palestinians, including women and children, who threw stones at the occupying troops.
Like them, Grossman conspires in these original war crimes by preferring to hold on to what Israel has, or even extend it further, rather than confront the genuinely painful truth of his responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians, including the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the millions of their descendants.
Every day that Grossman denies a Right of Return for the Palestinians, even as he supports a Law of Return for the Jews, he excuses and maintains the act of ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinian refugees more than half a century ago. And every day that he sells a message of peace to Israelis who look to him for moral guidance that fails to offer the Palestinians a just solution — and that takes instead as its moral yardstick the primacy of Israel’s survival as a Jewish state — then he perverts the meaning of peace.
Another Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, diagnoses the problem posed by Grossman and his ilk with acute insight in a recent article. Although Grossman wants peace in the abstract, Avnery observes, he offers no solutions as to how it might be secured in concrete terms and no clues about what sacrifices he or other Israelis will have to make to achieve it. His “peace” is empty of content, a mere rhetorical device.
Rather than suggest what Israel should talk about to the Palestinians’ elected leaders, Grossman argues that Israel should talk over their heads to the “moderates,” Palestinians with whom Israel’s leaders can do business. The goal is to find Palestinians, any Palestinians, who will agree to Israel’s “peace.” The Oslo process in new clothes.
Grossman’s speech looks like a gesture toward a solution only because Israel’s current leaders do not want to speak with anybody on the Palestinian side, whether “moderate” or “fanatic.” The only interlocutor is Washington, and a passive one at that.
If Grossman’s words are as “hollow” as those of Ehud Olmert, Avnery offers no clue as to reasons for the author’s evasiveness. In truth, Grossman cannot deal in solutions because there is almost no constituency in Israel for the kind of peace plan that might prove acceptable even to the Palestinian “moderates” Grossman so wants his government to talk to. Were Grossman to set out the terms of his vision of peace, it might become clear to all that the problem is not Palestinian intransigence. Although surveys regularly show that a majority of Israelis support a Palestinian state, they are conducted by pollsters who never specify to their sampling audience what might be entailed by the creation of the state posited in their question. Equally the pollsters do not require from their Israeli respondents any information about what kind of Palestinian state each envisages.
This makes the nature of the Palestinian state being talked about by Israelis almost as empty of content as the alluring word “peace.”
After all, according to most Israelis, Gazans are enjoying the fruits of the end of Israel’s occupation. And according to Olmert, his proposed “convergence” — a very limited withdrawal from the West Bank — would have established the basis for a Palestinian state there too.
When Israelis are asked about their view of more specific peace plans, their responses are overwhelmingly negative. In 2003, for example, 78 percent of Israeli Jews said they favored a two-state solution, but when asked if they supported the Geneva Initiative — which envisions a very circumscribed Palestinian state on less than all of the West Bank and Gaza — only a quarter did so. Barely more than half of the supposedly left-wing voters of Labor backed the Geneva Initiative.
This low level of support for a barely viable Palestinian state contrasts with the consistently high levels of support among Israeli Jews for a concrete, but very different, solution to the conflict: “Transfer,” or ethnic cleansing. In opinion polls, 60 percent of Israeli Jews regularly favor the emigration of Arab citizens from the as-yet-undetermined borders of the Jewish state.
So when Grossman warns us that “a peace of no choice” is inevitable and that “the land will be divided, a Palestinian state will arise,” we should not be lulled into false hopes. Grossman’s state is almost certainly as “hollow” as his audience’s idea of peace. (To be continued)
— Jonathan Cook is a freelance writer, based in Nazareth, covering the Middle East since September 2001. He founded the Nazareth Press Agency in February 2004.
