Khelil sent me this: "After
reading your review of Susie Linfield's review of Halliday I went to the The
Nation and saw that she teaches at NYU (my grad school). I did some
research:
She's
worse than I (and maybe you) thought. Here she concedes Morris' point on
expulsion (along with his view that it was part of the 'fog of war') but then
excuses it as unavoidable by Israel: "Each side realized that this was an
us-or-them war, a fact that has been swathed in mystification, at least in the
West, for decades."
Then she
finds this to dismiss: "“All we want to do is have the three religions of people
here live together in peace.” This particular woman may be expressing her
genuine wish, but as a description of the larger conflict her statement is, to
be blunt, utter hogwash, and anyone who is genuinely interested in solving the
suffering and statelessness of the Palestinians would best ignore this kind of
sentimentality."
She
speaks about "The Oslo Accords were met by a furious spate of terrorist attacks
from Hamas and Islamic Jihad" but does not mention any Israel violence,
terrorism or "settlements". And approvingly cites Morris by way of portraying
'Arafat's rejection at Camp David as a continuum of the " consistent
rejectionism of the pre-1948 Palestinian leadership"
She
thinks Albert Hourani is Palestinian: "Palestinian intellectual Albert
Hourani"
She
informs us about the cultural bridge between Israel and Palestinians, which she
caricatures solely as:
"the
secular, educated, mini-skirted women of Tel Aviv and the masked men of Gaza
will somehow merge into a unified, peaceful entity is either extremely deluded
or playing a very cruel game. What kind of legal system could such a “country”
have? (Hamas—and not only Hamas—openly professes adherence to sharia law.)"
Apparently, she is oblivious to the cultural division between secular/reform
Jews and the Haredim/Ultra-Orthodox and that Israel adheres to Rabbinical law
that prohibits civil marriage, enforces Kosher and makes divorce harder on women
than Iran. And all Palestinians are masked men.
She
follows with silly protestations akin to the line of supporters of Apartheid
South Africa but how could this state reconcile a political system, foreign
policy, ect.. and then concludes: "And since such a state would, inevitably and
fairly quickly, become demographically dominated by Palestinian Arabs, why would
anyone imagine that the rights, the freedoms and the cultural integrity of the
Jewish minority in this “binational” society would be protected?" Apparently the
opposite extant disregard for Arab rights, including citizens of "Israel", does
not occur to her and Palestinians are inherently incapable of treating Israelis
better than Israelis treat the Arabs today.
And
adds, "Put most bluntly: Israelis and Palestinians have been slaughtering each
other’s children for decades; for entirely good reasons, they regard each other
with fear and loathing, and the idea of forcing them together into a “nation” is
grotesque"
She
praises Israel, after their colonization of 78% of Palestine, for being so
enlightened to accept that the indigenous have a right to 22% (in her
understanding of Israeli policy--but leave that aside), and faults the Arabs for
not returning the favor: "Alas, the Palestinians, and the larger Arab and Muslim
world, failed to follow a parallel political development" And believes that
'Arafat was opposed to a two-state solution.
Then
there's her attack on the right-of-return and she finds a nice Palestinian; for
her "the crux of the problem": "When the Palestinians demand the “right” to
return, they are essentially demanding two states of Muslim Arabs: one in the
West Bank and Gaza, the other in Israel. To my knowledge, the only Palestinian
intellectual who has been honest enough and gutsy enough to say this, and to
point out both its disingenuousness and its impossibility, is the president of
Al-Quds University (and former PLO representative) Sari Nusseibeh—though he has,
alas, scant following among his own people."
And
akin to that article in the Wall Street Journal I sent you recently she thinks
she's being clever in referencing Arab Jews, as if leftist supporters of the
Palestinians deny the right of return AND compensation of Arab Jews. "The “right
of return” is a phrase that has always baffled me. For if return is indeed a
right for Palestinians, surely it must be upheld for others, too. And so, I
wonder, what of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who left, or were
expelled from, the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, where
they had lived for centuries? Some of them, and their descendants, might want to
go “home”: Isn’t that their right?"
Anticipating
the rebuttal, she writes: "Think, if only for a minute, of the havoc that would
ensue. With the “return” of so many “refugees,” both to Israel and the
surrounding states, what would happen to the millions who would, of necessity,
subsequently be displaced? Why would this not create new generations of
refugees or at least masses of enraged, displaced people? How would this grand,
mad population transfer take place? What relation does any of this have to
justice, and why would it not result in social catastrophe and ruin on a massive
scale?" Oh yeah, because building new homes isn't an option. Israel after all is
a pioneer in 'new settlements'.
And
Palestinian rights must be contingent not only on Arabs Jews, but the world:
"Indeed, if each Palestinian has the right of return, so must every other
displaced person on Earth. What, then, of the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians,
Croats and Serbs who lost their homes (and much more) in the bitter Balkan wars
of the 1990s?"
Her
efforts to attack right-of-return is clearly an obsession, she jumps to citing
it as "bad faith" and even a corollary of fascism: "And if return equals
justice, let’s take it further; post-World War II history is replete with states
that came into being at the cost of immense violence and immense dislocation,
and that have made some of their neighbors quite unhappy. Why not retract the
division of the subcontinent—which resulted in massive expulsions, population
transfers and an estimated million deaths—and impose a one-state “solution” on
Pakistan and India?...These examples are absurd, but only because they
illustrate the essential bankruptcy of the concept of restoration, which
obsessively revisits, and tries to re-create, a presumably edenic past rather
than accept the far more difficult task of building a viable future. Indeed, the
idea that justice lies not in creating history but in un-making it—which
is the key idea behind the “right of return”—is the very definition of reaction,
which is precisely why it is never advocated as a solution for anyone but the
Palestinians, and why it is a sterling example of bad faith. In most
circumstances, this attempt to vanquish history is commonly called revanchism,
and is usually associated with ultranationalism and fascism."
Oh
yeah, and it's ugly too: " It seeks ultimate justice: which may seem, at first
glance, a beautiful thing but which usually turns out to be an ugly
thing."
Again
she quotes Morris on the failure of two-state: "Morris writes, “primarily
because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such
an outcome.""
Conceding
Morris' point that a West Bank/Gaza state may be two small to even be viable,
she is giddy about the Jordanian option: "the reconstitution of Transjordan:
that is, a West Bank-Jordanian Palestinian state. ... In Morris’ view, it is the
only candidate that could realistically absorb the Palestinian populations of
the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora and build a sturdy, reasonably prosperous
state with them. I cannot tell whether this proposal has even the slimmest
chance of being seriously considered by the Palestinian leadership, the
Israelis, the surrounding Arab states or the Jordanian monarchy. (Jordan’s
Hashemite leadership probably has zero interest in sharing power with the
Palestinians; it was the Jordanians who went to war against, and expelled, PLO
guerrillas in 1970-71 and who slaughtered hundreds [notice she writes hundreds]
of Palestinian civilians in the process.) ... But any opening up of the
political possibilities in what has become a desperately intractable,
ever-deteriorating situation is to be welcomed—though it probably won’t
be."
But
here it all comes into focus for this Zionist:"And yet the left’s increasing
antipathy to Israel—not just to its policies, but to the existence of a Jewish
state itself—is, to me, both fatally misguided and puzzling. Take, for instant,
the incessant criticisms of Israel, and the almost unanimous support for the
one-state “solution,” in publications like Le Monde Diplomatique, The Nation,
The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. ... The echoes here
are very loud, and they lead me to wonder why the grand, deluded schemes of the
left are any less imperialistic or hubristic—any less tragic—than those of our
antagonists on the right.
The
left’s embrace of Israel’s enemies, and its rejection of historical accuracy or
even historical sense, is even more rebarbative.
Anti-Zionism
has become the anti-imperialism of fools, and talk of a one-state solution is a
party to this folly. ... But I very much hope that [Morris' book] will ignite a
freer, more honest, radically different conversation on the left, one informed
by historical knowledge and current realities rather than the
fantasies—alternately sentimental, infantile and grandiose—for which such a high
price has been paid by all sides."
