MAX SALTMAN
Israeli settlers march in a newly-built settler outpost near the Palestinian village of Beita, in the occupied West Bank, on June 21, 2021. Throughout the day, settlers held 14 marches to intimidate Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank, where Israel retains full control over planning and construction. (AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2021, pp. 57-58
Waging Peace
All nations have myths. Indeed, the French historian Ernest Renan wrote in 1882 that “forgetfulness” and “historical error are essential in the creation of a nation.” The State of Israel is no exception.
On June 16, George Washington University and the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) convened a virtual panel to dispel and debunk selected myths regarding Israel and Palestine.
Shira Robinson, a historian at George Washington, began the panel from a historical perspective.
Israel has certainly experienced a resurgence of right-wing populism since the early 2000s, as seen in the passage of the 2018 Jewish nation-state law, she noted. However, “it would be a mistake to accept the common refrain that the rise of the settler right represents a tragic perversion of the original national dream or an abandonment of the state’s foundational commitments to equality and pluralism,” Robinson said. “Israel has never been a republican democracy in the sense of the state belonging to all of its citizens.”
Israel’s roots are in Jewish settler colonialism, Robinson explained. “Israel views Palestinians as a problem by virtue of their presence on the land as non-Jews…regardless of whether they live in 1948 Israel, East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, or in the Gaza Strip.”
Jadaliyya co-editor Mouin Rabbani spoke on one of the more explosive myths of the Israel-Palestine conflict: “Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism.” According to Rabbani, much of the modern public discourse surrounding anti-Zionism and its relationship with anti-Semitism began in 1975 with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379. The resolution, which included a clause stating that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” was vociferously criticized by the United States and Israel preceding its adoption by the General Assembly.
“The U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, windbag extraordinaire Daniel Patrick Moynihan, declared that ‘the United Nations is about to make anti-Semitism international law,’” Rabbani said. “The statement echoed a declaration two years earlier by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that ‘one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.’”
Contrarily, Rabbani continued, for much of its early history, Zionism’s most outspoken critics were Jewish. Both Orthodox Jews and secular left-wing Jews regarded the ideology as “either an act of religious blasphemy or a secular heresy that undermined the struggle for Jewish emancipation in Europe.”
“Until at least 1945, and probably through 1967, the majority of diaspora Jews were in fact either non- or anti-Zionist,” noted Rabbani, “a pattern that appears to be repeating itself in the 21st century.”
Next, Rabbani attacked the idea that the expulsion of Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah “is a property dispute exploited by Palestinian agitators for political objectives.” Although Jewish families certainly lived in Sheikh Jarrah prior to Jordan’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem, the facts on the ground make it difficult to believe that Israel is seeking restitution for those Jews expelled from the neighborhood.
“It is an established fact that none of the Israeli plaintiffs claiming ownership of Sheikh Jarrah property have any connection to those Jews who resided in Sheikh Jarrah prior to 1948,” Rabbani pointed out. “Israel and its settlers are, in fact, making their claims on an exclusively sectarian basis.”
“The absurdity that lies at the heart of this issue needs to be properly recognized,” Rabbani continued. He noted that retired Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair was born in Sheikh Jarrah in 1942, fled the area with his family in 1948, and was compensated for the loss of his property. Yet, “unbeknownst to Ben-Yair,” years later a settler organization appointed themselves as the Ben-Yair family’s trustees and currently collect rent from Palestinians living in Ben-Yair’s former home in Sheikh Jarrah.
“Ben-Yair is currently fighting a losing battle to claim ownership of the building to which he has a higher claim than the settler organization,” Rabbani said, “and has stated that he does not want to see the current Palestinian residents expelled from it.”
University of Cambridge historian Mezna Qato next debunked the idea that the crisis in Gaza is solely “a conflict between Israel and Hamas.” Qato noted this myth presumes that Hamas, an Islamist political group operating in a besieged territory, and Israel, an internationally recognized state overseeing the blockade of Gaza, are equivalent actors.
“Hamas is a political party. It’s currently in power in Gaza. But it’s not a state. Nor is Gaza a state,” Qato said. “Moreover, Hamas, in fact, is only part of a broader military coalition in Gaza. The rockets are not, in that sense, only those of Hamas. They could be from Islamic Jihad, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and a myriad of other military factions though [Hamas] is, of course, the largest.”
Portraying the fight between Israel and Hamas as equal “is a kind of both-sides-ism,” Qato stated. This myth and others, the panelists agreed, could not be farther from the truth.
—Max Saltman
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Tags: Israel| Waging Peace
