On Arabs and Jews: Chimera of a Binational State
Walzer, Michael
There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. -NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM From the beginning, Zionists aimed at...
...Here is the maxim of a chastened humanism: good borders make good neighbors...
...It did so because they were Greeks, though they had never lived within the newly drawn borders of the Greek state...
...To deny any people statehood is not simply to put forward a theoretical position...
...What history will be taught in its schools...
...now the minorities stand in the way of national unity...
...At any rate, there are very few Jews ready to agree to that...
...They argue that a binational state can and ought to be built upon the latent class loyalties of workers from the two national groups...
...the freedom of Pakistan, Bengal...
...Yet the patent insecurity of the state of Israel, the emergence of a countryless Palestinian people, and the development in Western Europe and the United States of a New Left profoundly hostile to Zionism have clearly led to a reopening of the argument...
...There is nothing wrong, that is, with attempts to convert the Jews—or the Palestinians, Tanzanians, or Pakistanis—to socialist internationalism...
...If binationalism were a lively option, they might well MICHAEL WALZER have stayed where they were...
...Hence their attacks upon the Law of Return...
...Thus Article 1 of their National Covenant, endorsed by all the major groups: "Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinian Arab people and an integral part of the great Arab homeland, and the people of Palestine is a part of the Arab nation...
...Emigration is the private equivalent of secession, and ON ARABS AND JEWS like secession it is a right that requires more than theoretical vindication...
...And that is a right the Palestinians have, as do the Jews...
...There was never any significant number of Arab leaders ready to concede the Jewish right of return, though that right will doubtless be asserted on behalf of the Palestinians, now scattered throughout the Middle East, if a Palestinian state is ever established...
...The new parochialism with its intense pride and exclusiveness, the deep mistrust of foreigners, the actual memories of war, the uncertain balance of power and the fear it breeds: all these barriers to coexistence become enlarged and distorted beyond all reason when what is at stake is literally the future population of the proposed union...
...Unlike the upper classes even of subject nations, they have not been touched by the great imperial cultures of the prerevolutionary era— Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman, or British...
...He proved the exceptionalism of the Jews and established the need for a Jewish state, as a refuge, if for no other reason...
...I cannot discuss here the history of their efforts nor describe the reasons for their failure...
...HThe term "binationalism" does not single out a particular or coherent doctrine...
...This is one of the hardest of issues, and every other difficulty of binationalism bears upon it and is exaggerated by it...
...There is no way of avoiding the logic of the process —at least no honest way—unless one decides that one national or protonational group deserves to be subjected to another...
...And, again and again, these people have turned out to be nationalists, in the most elemental and powerful sense of that word...
...The nationalism of the oppressed is one of the major discoveries of the modern age...
...They do not make their appearance, as many European Marxists expected them to do, as russified Poles, germanized Czechs, or AngloIndians...
...It is a great deal easier to imagine a democratic secular state called Israel than one called Palestine: such a state already exists in substance (despite the power of Orthodox Jews) while Arab political culture offers little hope for anything like it in the near future...
...It appears here with the publishers' kind permission...
...The political Zionists were like those elders of Israel who came to Samuel and said, "Make us a king to judge us like all the nations...
...For them, very often, the roughness can only be smoothed a little...
...the freedom of Nigeria, Biafra...
...He writes here, in effect, as a spokesman of the Jewish national liberation movement, for Jewish history had made "gathering" the essential prerequisite of freedom...
...If the "gathering" of Jews and Palestinians is morally necessary, then two separate states, respectful of each other's sovereignty, are also morally necessary...
...What will be the official language of the new state...
...And that will not contribute to binationalism, or federation, or world socialism, or whatever we might find hopeful in the future...
...For Nehru's provisional government was warned in 1947 that communal rioting and massacre on a scale never seen before would follow the partition of the subcontinent, and it was urged to provide every possible means of transportation to carry people across the new border...
...These distinctions are sometimes abhorrent, but by no means necessarily so...
...Our Jewish destiny," wrote Buber in a letter to Gandhi, "is indissolubly bound up with this possibility of gathering, and this in Palestine...
...If the liberation movements of North Africa had not aimed so explicitly at creating Arab nationstates, they might never have become immigrants at all...
...Yet the efforts to create a JewishArab state go back many years, and in the 1930s and '40s were supported by men as committed to their own people as to the principles of internationalism...
...The various subject nations had little to do with them, except as victims, for they had no share in political power...
...What group will constitute or come to constitute the majority of the population...
...Jews who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians," according to Article 6 of the Covenant—which means that the great majority of Israeli Jews would not find a homeland in the new Palestine...
...So it is not being argued these days that no one can be secure in a world of competing nationstates, but only that the security of Israel's Jews and the aspirations of the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of Israel...
...The second alternative is probably the only true binationalism...
...The third alternative is to give up any sort of unified sovereignty and opt for a federation of virtually autonomous "entities"— states, for all practical purposes, though advocates of binationalism think the term opprobrious...
...The defense of national liberation and then of the right to statehood represents such a beginning...
...Until the revolution is upon us, people will seek the protection of the nation-state, much as they will go to work week after week while waiting for the Messiah...
...Instead, we must begin our theories with the choices men actually make and have made...
...nor were the foremost advocates of binationalism in the decade before Israeli independence—men such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and the leaders of the left-socialist parties—willing even to consider the end of Jewish aliyah [immigration...
...Sometimes that criticism isn't very interesting...
...I don't want to pretend that this is very much more than a minimal moral position...
...ON ARABS AND JEWS...
...It is virtually inconceivable, 498 however, that the two rights could be accommodated within a single binational state...
...The need for good borders is not all that follows from the recognition of nationalist feeling I have been urging...
...Having immigrated, they are likely to associate their objective interests with the state that offered them a place to go...
...NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM From the beginning, Zionists aimed at a kind of normality, and political Zionists at a very particular kind...
...First, it now focuses on a group of Jews reunited in a small corner of the world and no longer on a community dispersed throughout the world...
...Within those empires profoundly different peoples— Greek and Turk, Hindu and Muslim, Arab and Kurd, Ibo and Hausa—lived side by side in adjacent, even in the same villages and towns...
...he choice of brethren and comrades cannot be dictated by abstract theory...
...Political freedom, the freedom of a community rather than of an individual, may begin with the removal of imperial bureaucrats, but its full development involves the sharing and shaping of a common life...
...And then binationalism must be opposed, not only because it would deny Jews the right of national liberation, but also because it would deny them the protection of a state at a time when there is less hope than ever before of surviving without that protection...
...But assuming that the immediate cause of the liberation movement is the experience of sovereign power in someone else's hands, the effort to gather it into one's own hands is not merely understandable, it is morally irresistible...
...It is even possible to urge that the right to statehood be foregone, so long as one continues to defend the right and the security of all those peoples who choose to exercise it...
...They appear as Polish, Czech, and Indian nationalists, and they can be effec tively organized for political action only in movements and parties that promise national liberation...
...It points toward an immediate and pressing problem: emigrants from country X must become immigrants to country Y. There must be a place to go...
...That is why their major propaganda effort focuses on the people of the United States and Western Europe rather than on Israelis and Palestinians: it is not aimed at those who must be convinced if binationalism is ever to work, but rather at Israel's international allies...
...Their self-government, when it comes, produces a political culture radically different from the cosmopolitanism of the old elites, if only because it is the achievement of men and women with whom the old elites never bothered to talk...
...That is not the case with another, more important critique of Zionism, rooted in Jewish experience but shaped largely by socialist ideology...
...But if we apply this principle, we are forced to worry about drawing lines between the new nations...
...It would provide for separate and equal national institutions within a framework of state sovereignty...
...No doubt there are ways of rationalizing such judgments or refusals of judgment, and even expediential reasons to offer for them...
...For what they aspire to is independence...
...Free from conventional political loyalties, they also freed themselves from any sense of Jewish identity and imagined that they already were the future citizens of the world socialist republic...
...Precisely for this reason, national liberation is threatening to all those minority groups who find themselves trapped within the boundaries of a new nation-state, face to face with a community mobilized for action, eager to affirm its collective identity...
...It remains true, however, that the second is at least an honest and integral vision, the first only a rhetorical mask...
...But their nationalism is nevertheless not an illusion, and whether liberation occurs just once or again and again, what the people insist on 495 each time is the reality of a national history that includes them and of the symbols and rituals of national unity...
...It is even generally recognized in the international community that certain states have special responsibilities toward certain peoples...
...For here is the point where all the arguments about sovereignty come into sharpest focus...
...And finally, the New Left has made its peace with virtually every nationalism in the world except that of the Jews...
...Nor have events since that time made it any less important...
...but set the Biafrans free...
...If recent history is any evidence, they will fare badly in the hands of newly liberated peoples and their new and busy officialdom...
...Once, however, those nations were mobilON ARABS AND JEWS ized and organized, the common life of the villages rapidly became impossible...
...I am not sure how such judgments are made, but I doubt very much that the Jews of old Palestine would rank high on any available moral scale had they turned their backs on the Jews of Hitler's Europe and sought an alliance with the (virtually nonexistent) Arab Left...
...and conversely, for those leftists already committed to Palestinian liberation, Palestine requires Israel...
...So Israel began, and so Palestine no doubt would begin, if the dreams of al-Fatah came true...
...And a good border, in a time of growing national antagonism, is a line so drawn that different peoples are on different sides...
...it cannot be avoided...
...There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at...
...At such moments, it seems to me, ordinary decency requires the drawing of new lines on the map—an uninspiring, often arbitrary and cruel business, but necessary nevertheless...
...What holidays will be celebrated...
...After World War II, it seemed the prerequisite also of survival, and that is a time Israeli Jews are not likely to forget...
...Indeed, there are times when it seems that the sum total of the new "internationalism" is binationalism in old Palestine...
...There isn't anything else to say...
...When political power was the issue between them, only mass transfer of populations could avoid the fury of mutual slaughter...
...THE SECOND ALTERNATIVE We must consider more closely...
...Greek and Turkish peasants could live at peace under the indifferent rule of Ottoman bureaucrats...
...Similarly, 497 after World War II, Poland received refugees from the east, as did Germany, and the preferential treatment accorded these peoples was never, so far as I know, called discriminatory...
...Contemporary advocates of binationalism are at least sometimes engaged in just such an attempt...
...IVI have been talking about Jews and Arabs all along, though I have used other names and attempted a more general argument...
...and the most radical and dangerous way is still to be countryless or stateless...
...But I can see no secure or justified general position short of support for every popularly based movement (though not for every vanguard elite) that aims at national liberation...
...there must be havens for refugees...
...The real crimes of imperialism were the work of these elites...
...That is an old and honorable leftist occupation...
...And, sometimes, it can only be smoothed by helping people to leave who have to leave, like the Indians of Kenya and Tanzania, the colons of North Africa, the Jews of the Arab world...
...But this question opens up every other: How will decisions about immigration policy be made...
...It pays attention to what people want, always a good thing to do, and imperative, one would have thought, for the Left...
...The same story can be told of India, and here there is a special poignancy...
...Indeed, it is the masses who are the carriers of nationalism...
...They sought the normality of statehood: a people on its own land, with its own institutions and its own police and army, freed from the dangers of exile and persecution (though not from the dangers of war...
...Here there are, so to speak, no problems at all, beyond those that have to be faced every day right now...
...If it is really to be democratic, such questions will presumably be settled by the majority...
...I am inclined to think that the argument remains settled...
...At some point— perhaps...
...So the Zionists have won this much at least: the Jewish question is at last recognized to be susceptible to a local solution...
...Israel was set up to be such a haven, and in turning now more directly to the question of binationalism, I want to focus on that feature of the new state...
...there are as many ways as ever to be frightened and insecure...
...When Marx wrote that the workers have no country, his words were false with reference to the workers, but they were an accurate description of most of the world's Jews...
...Now the question that faced and still faces advocates of a Jewish-Arab state is simply this: What people or peoples are to be given preferential treatment...
...How can one measure the value of one people's self-discovery and nationalist self-assertion against another's...
...Contemporary advocates of binationalism almost always insist that the Israelis must repeal the Law of Return, which declares that Jews will receive preferential treatment...
...It is, however, as I have stressed before, only a beginning...
...But they spoke Greek, worshiped according to the Greek Orthodox rite, thought of themselves as Greeks, and were not regarded as foreigners by the citizens of Greece...
...Each act of liberation makes the next more necessary, if crime and cruelty are to be avoided.The universal principle that all men have a right to govern themselves points toward the proliferation of what, from the standpoint of the old empires (or of the world socialist republic), must look like parochial and archaic communities: the return of peoples long repressed...
...They want to have a life of their own, reasonably secure against the interventions of foreign powers...
...They did not always live in peace: there were communal riots, pogroms, semiofficial and spontaneous massacres—little enough, however, compared to all that has happened since...
...After the Holocaust, statehood became an ethical imperative...
...It forces us to look again at the multinationalism of the old empires, probably the true historical source of the Marxist vision...
...Probably the argument reflects a theory of history according to which class struggle must at some point supersede national conflict, and "objective material interests" must override national feeling...
...One might, of course, question the moral necessity, and advocates of binationalism probably must do this at some point, though recent advocates have tended to press their skepticism only against the Jews...
...One should simply rehearse the recent history of the Jews, or try to indicate to them how their own security and dignity are intimately connected with the exercise of sovereignty in their name...
...TV But there is a great deal that is wrong with attempts, before the conversion of the Jews, to undermine the state of Israel or call its survival into question...
...Nor will such efforts contribute to a peaceful settlement in the Middle East, for no settlement there is possible that does not provide the conditions of "normal human existence" for both Jews and Arabs...
...This is so for three reasons...
...Similarly, the freedom of Israel requires that of Palestine...
...Since it involves the living together of peoples who have been at war for a quarter of a century, it may be useful to begin with a more general question...
...First the various views must be set out in some order, roughly characterized at least, though I cannot attempt an analysis of the detailed positions of different political groups...
...What they have in common is the formal repudiation of the nation-state, more particularly the Jewish nation-state, which is condemned for its exclusive, parochial, and discriminatory character...
...When they enter the historical arena, they come with their language, religion, age-old customs and, above all, their shared memories of oppression at the hands of foreigners...
...And what division of power will be worked out with the (equally unknown) minority...
...With a special eagerness (which marked them out even when they felt closest to their gentile comrades), they looked toward the world Marx described in The Communist Manifesto, where "national differences and antagonisms between peoples are already tending to disappear more and more...
...BUT IT is a dilemma that universalism should lead so inexorably to parochialism on a uni 496 versal scale...
...it is virtually to make war against them...
...What is required is equal political recognition for all those aspiring nations which accept the principle of equal political recognition...
...How will immigration policy be determined...
...But the mere advocacy of federalism makes it no easier to draw the line...
...The existence of Egypt and Syria, let alone of France and Germany, is not at issue...
...Antagonisms between peoples are greater than they have ever been (for reasons I will try to suggest...
...but surely not at this point...
...For what the Left has done, again and again—it ought MICHAEL WALZER to be a source of pride—is to mobilize oppressed and passive people...
...At any rate, this is the centerpiece of the contemporary leftist critique of Zionism, and its one, rather curious virtue is that its achievement neither ON ARABS AND JEWS requires nor would contribute to a world revolution...
...In all the new countries, there are old men—I have met both Jews and Arabs—who remember those days with a nostalgia I do not want to imitate...
...In the aftermath of World War I and of the Balkan settlement, for example, Greece received many refugees from presentday Turkey and treated them differently from other immigrants...
...When the citizens of powerful states like our own disdain Jewish aspirations to statehood or suggest that Jews (especially) should seek nobler ends, they act like those upper-class radicals who are impatient with working-class materialism...
...The value doesn't derive only from the fact that human beings respond to oppression, and survive it, by nourishing and cultivating their particular ethnic, racial, and religious identities...
...But I can at least suggest one of the reasons by exploring the question of immigration policy, which is central to the debate even today...
...Those Jews who might plausibly struggle alongside Arab workers are mostly immigrants or refugees from Arab countries...
...Whatever the virtues of their position, Hitler settled the argument, at least temporarily, against the Marxist critics of Zionism...
...It is also and more importantly the case that they cannot live in freedom without creating such identities...
...Faced with a people responding to its own fear and suffering, seeking immediate relief, MICHAEL WALZER whatever criticisms we might want to make of the state as an institution have to be postponed— or redirected...
...Religious, cultural, and social separatism would be permitted (whether on a territorial basis 494 or in some other way), economic cooperation encouraged, and political unity maintained...
...It has been reopened, however, in a peculiarly parochial form...
...it is more likely because of its success...
...To be sure, the citizens of new states often find themselves, after independence, with little more than what Marx called "the illusion of a common life...
...Whatever may be unique in their two histories, their inability to live together is not unique...
...But surely this would compromise rather than fulfill the binational character of the successor state, for it would deny the existence of a nation of Jews capable, as Greeks, Poles, and Germans are capable, of rescuing and rehabilitating their fellow nationals...
...Indeed, the guerrillas have always been perfectly open about their own nationalism, even while insisting on their democratic and secularist commitments...
...Second, the Palestinians, far from describing themselves as universal men of the future, have developed a more or less straightforward nationalist position...
...They denied, in effect, what the Zionists had always insisted upon: that the case of the Jews was exceptional, that exile was abnormal...
...Now that the deracinated, frenchified, neoMarxist elite of the FLN has produced a state so profoundly Arab and Islamic (and undemocratic) as contemporary Algeria, what is there to expect from al-Fatah...
...Turn Norway and Sweden into a binational state if you can...
...Why is it that national differences and antagonisms between peoples (not only between these two peoples) have not tended to disappear, as Marx thought they would...
...0 This article is part of Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, Irving Howe and Carl Gershman editors, copyright © 1972 by Bantam Books, and published this spring by Bantam Books in paper and by Quadrangle Books in cloth...
...There are at least three views of what the successor state to present-day Israel might look like, and they suggest very different ways of dealing with the nationalist feelings of Jews and Arabs...
...At this moment in history, those conditions are represented by the nation-state...
...Having established boundaries, it remains to fight for minority rights, equal protection, and all the liberal safeguards within them, and then for economic and political cooperation across them...
...Both Jews and Arabs, of course, regard Jewish or Arab statehood as perfectly compatible with democracy and secularism, and they are right to do so, at least in theory...
...They thought communal hatred was an imperial contrivance...
...But it does not provide, nor do those who use it, any specification of the precise character of the arrangements...
...So it is not enough to call for the independence of this or that oppressed nation, though that is surely the right thing to do...
...It is not easy to respond to such people, though no elaborate argument is necessary...
...in its full fury it was, in fact, the child of independence...
...Once a line is drawn and the right of the people on either side mutually recognized and guaranteed, all sorts of things would be possible...
...The phrase suggests a set of arrangements whereby Jews and Arabs would share an equal citizenship under a unified sovereignty...
...And since leftists did not expect the dilemma, it should not be surprising that so many of them have coped with it so badly, choosing to support or not to support this or that national group on the basis of the most arbitrary distinctions (progressive/reactionary) or practicing a kind of guilt by association (as if oppressed people did not search for allies wherever they can find them...
...Because it figures in the programs of the Palestinian guerrillas, the "democratic secular state" is currently the most important, as it is the most mysterious, of the alternatives to Israeli statehood...
...All states have immigration policies and most states make distinctions in their treatment of different groups of possible immigrants...
...There may, of course, be some other political arrangement than conventional statehood that would make this possible: so advocates of binationalism (among others) claim...
...Surely it is not because of the failure of the Left...
...And so on...
...But the warning was ignored, at least partly because of the socialist convictions of Nehru and the men around him...
...They assume that such loyalties are morally superior to the manifest commitment of Jewish workers to diaspora Jewry (and I suppose, though the point is not stressed, of Palestinian guerrillas to the "Arab nation...
...And countrylessness bred socialist internationalism, much as Marx thought it would, though the psychological mechanisms were more complicated than any he suggested...
...No doubt this is a defeat for socialist internationalism, as it is for ordinary liberalism, but the refusal to help only leads to a worse defeat...
...They have already chosen nation over class, as has virtually everyone in the Third World —which is not to say that the class struggle is at an end in Israel or anywhere else...
...Given the parallel and opposite commitments of virtually all Israeli Jews, it is hard to imagine a democratic secular state that did not begin with the departure of one or another of the two peoples...
...One's political virtue is always tested by the nation that comes next...
...One can still attack the internal character of this or that movement or new state (I have a list of movements and states that need attacking) or call for radical forms of cooperation across party lines and international borders...
...III The left has always underestimated both the intensity and the value of national feelings, even when its parties and movements were systematically exploiting them...
...In the past such minorities made their peace with imperial bureaucrats and were protected or ignored by them...
...Theirs was not a utopian vision, though it was often expressed in prophetic language, and it was and is open to utopian criticism...
...Jews have always been among the most fervent internationalists in the socialist and communist movements...
...And sometimes that advocacy serves as a substitute for the politically necessary defense of the two entities and, above all, of Israel, the entity that already exists—which only makes it harder to draw the line...
...But then how would a democratic secular state differ from either a Jewish or an Arab state...
...The freedom of Iraq, then, requires the freedom of Kurdistan...
...But whatever we do, nation-building in new states is sure to be rough on groups marginal to the nation (and too small or scattered to secede from the nation)—those archetypal aliens of the Third World, for example— Jews, Levantines, Indians, and Chinese, or colonial settlers like the French of Algeria...
...but given the nonexistence of the state, who will decide who is to be the majority...
...There is, in fact, no acceptable way of getting everyone on the right side of the line, and there remain individuals of all sorts for whom neither side and possibly no side can be right (the position, once, of the Jews) : they will stay behind to test the quality of the new nation...
...That is, if one could draw the line between an Arab and a Jewish entity, few people would object to making it a dotted line and compromising in small or even in significant ways the absolute independence of the two political systems...
...What made multinationalism possible was the oppressive rule of cosmopolitan and imperial elites, aliens within the communities they governed...
...This is the proposal that I will be referring to most often in what follows, and yet as soon as one asks how political power might be apportioned in such a state and what this or that apportionment might mean, the problems of the second alternative begin to look rather like the problems of the first...
...But it is hard to see how binationalism in any form can avoid having that same character, since there would necessarily be some third nationality with regard to which the binational state is exclusive, parochial, and discriminatory (in its immigration policy, for example, an abiding issue in the Middle East...
...But they could not live at peace under Greek or Turkish officials acting in the name of the liberated Greek or Turkish nation...
...The "democratic secular state" is clearly a false binationalism...
...And then leftists are discovered simultaneously supporting secession here and the slaughter of secessionists there, paying close attention to this national liberation movement while pretending that that one does not exist...
...Leaving aside the most perverse of measurements, which devalues one's own people, and the next most perverse, which exalts only one's own, surely the relevant measuring principle is equality...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
