Democratic Palestine : 29 (ص 31)
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- Democratic Palestine : 29 (ص 31)
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leader, Khalil Al Wazir (Abu Jihad).
Speaking at the main celebration,
Defense Minister Rabin, mastermind of
the unprecedented campaign of repres-
sion mounted against the uprising,
stated: «We know this is one long war
that our enemies have forced upon us»
(International Herald Tribune, April
20th). On the concluding day of the
Israeli celebrations, with half the
Palestinians in the 1967 occupied ter-
ritories under curfew and the rest
‘estricted from moving outside their
area, Shamir could find nothing better
to say than, «Look, Israel is not the
sort of state where life is quiet, ideal,
pastoral» (International Herald
Tribune, April 22nd).
A senior Israeli official close to
Foreign Minister Peres was a bit more
articulate in expressing how the
Zionists see their current situation:
«We’re heading back to the 1940s. The
extremists are driving the whole Arab
community and pushing us to the right.
Everything is vanishing: their chances
for an independent state and our
chances for normality» (/nternational
Herald Tribune, April 11th). Echoes of
1948, and the Zionist crimes of that
time, also figure prominently in the
escalating racist threats of avowed
right-wing Israeli politicians (see box).
The continuity of the Palestinian
uprising in the occupied territories
shows that the Zionist leadership,
which promised a haven for Jews from
all over the world, is today unable to
provide minimal security and normality
for their own population. On July 3,
1950, Ben Gurion said in the Knesset,
«These two laws, the Law of Rcturn
and the Citizenship Law, constitute the
Bill of Rights, the Charter, guaranteed
to all Jews in the diaspora by the State
of Israel.» Yet less than 20% of Jews in
the world opted to live in the Zionist
state, and those who did found that the
‘return’ posited them as coloniailists
fighting men, women and children who
cling to their homeland, and as can-
nonfodder for imperialist wars to ex-
pand Israeli territory. By the early
1980s, it became apparent that the
number of Israelis emigrating from the
Zionist state was greater than the
number of Jews who were immigrating.
The reversed ratio was attributed to
economic recession and to the constant
state of war whose futility was heralded
by the Zionists’ near fiasco in the Oc-
tober 1973 war. Though it is too early
to present statistics, the trend of in-
creasing emigration can only be ag-
zravated by the curren¢ Palestinian
uprising which bears daily witness to
the fact that Zionism, as a colonial
movement, cannot offer real or lasting
security for Jews.
This is especially true in as much as
Zionism has also depended on brute
force to build its state and resolve its
own crises. Yet, as the current uprising
demonstrates in very literal terms, «of-
ficial Zionism, as embodied in Israeli
state policy and in the discourse of its
loyalists in the West, has no military
option against the Palestinians, who
seem destined to remain irritatingly
before !srael, challenging Zionist set-
tlements, vociferously protesting and
fighting the abrogation of their rights,
popping up in precisely those places
(the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon,
for instance) where they were supposed
to have been defeated» (Edward Said,
Race and Class, Winter 1988, p. 33).
Though the major political blocs
: depo am
d a large fi
SIT
wherever ity
24th, Tr.
“Sharon said «that if
ide Mir
war b
(Labor and Likud) have shown ex-
cmplary ‘national unity’ in endeavors
to repress the uprising by brute force,
this has simply not worked. Instead,
Zionism’s political bankruptcy has
become apparent, for there is no Israel’
consensus on any other type of solu-
tion.
THE IRON WALL
In contrast to Labor Zionism which
tries to couch its racist, colonial ven-
tures in liberal and even ‘socialist’
phraseology, Revisionist Zionism (the
precursors of the Likud) has always
said point blank that the struggle for
Palestine is a fight for existence,
whether for the Zionists or the Palesti-
aians. Thus, Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote
in 1923, «Zionist colonization, even the
most restricted, must either be ter-
minated or carried out in defiance of
the will of the native population. This
colonization can, therefore, continue
and develop only under the protection
of a force independent of the local
population - an iron wall which the
native population cannot’ break
through. This is, in toto, our policy
towards the Arabs. To formulate it any
other way would only be hypocrisy»
(quoted in Lenni Brenner, The Iron
Wall, Zed Books, 1984, pp. 74-5).
Moshe Dayan, a main architect of the
1967 occupation, acknowledged the
same reality when he said, «There is not
a single settlement that was not
established in the place of a former
Arab village» (Haaretz, April 4, 1969).
This true face of Zionism can be seen
today in the resurgence of blatantly
racist and aggressive statements by
Israeli officials, such as the ones made
by Shamir when opening an ancient
castle near Bethlehem as a tourist site:
«Anybody who wants to damage this
fortress and other fortresses we are
establishing will have his head smashed
against the boulders and walls.» Ad-
dressing the Palestinians in revolt, he
continued, «We say to them from the
heights of this mountain and from the
perspective of thousands of years
history, that they are like grass-
hoppers compared to us» (Jnternational
Herald Tribune, April Ist).
Such demagogy in the face of crisis
exposes Zionism’s bankruptcy on
several levels. from a_ historical
perspective, such colonialist bravado is
doomed. Alongside the apartheid
regime in South Africa and its occupa-
tion of Namibia, ‘Israel’ stands as an
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