The Specter of Binationalism in Israel

...Its stated goalwas "to attain the objective of liquidating Israel," whose Jewish identity had solidified in a very distinctive manner (although the status of its Arab minority had remained problematic...

...It also was more highly motivated to achieve its own sovereign state by the trauma of the Shoa— by the feeling that 6 million Jews had been systematically murdered in modern Europe during World War II just because of their Jewishness, and because they could not find secure shelter anywhere...

...As Arthur Hertzberg demonstrates in his new book, The Fate of Zionism, even the most liberal Arab position in that era, spelled out by historian George Antonius, saw Palestine as an "independent Arab state" where Jewish immigration would be subjected to the decisions of the Arab majority...

...Their mixing had many manifestations, like the spreading of Jewish settlements into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, plus two intifadas and the development of suicide bombing into a conventional terrorist weapon...

...Nor could Weizmarm have forgotten his own removal from the Zionist presidency in 1931, inpart because of his "lack of sympathy for the attainment of a Jewish majority in Palestine...

...Four armed confrontations had already taken place between the two camps, all initiatedby the Arab side (in 1920, '21, '29, and '36-'39...

...Brit Shalom faded away in the mid1930s, yet the notion of binationality persisted in Jewish circles, especially after the British government withdrew its plan to carve out a small Jewish state along part of the Mediterranean coast...

...But he worried that the Zionist enterprise had no parallel and Jewish immigration would never be massive...

...Sprinzak would shortly be the first Speaker of the Knesset, andKaplanthe first Israeli Minister of Finance, but they did not come to herald the establishment of a Jewish state...

...And the numbers have changed over the last 36 years to 5.4 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs (including the 1.2 million who are Israeli citizens...

...Some rationalized that most of the Arab inhabitants were never exiled descendants of the ancient Jewish population who assumed the religion and identity of successive conquerors, and thus could be reassimilated...

...Why did they advocate that course in spite of all the risks involved...

...a new communal culture of the Near East...

...The conflicting interests of the two national movements—not to mention their deep cultural, economic and psychological differences—were too evident, and too bloody, to permit any possibility of peaceful co-existence within one political framework...

...So it is not surprising that in May 1948 Chaim Weizmann and Léon Blum recognized independently that binationalism was no longer a realistic option...

...The bulk of the 539.000 Palestinians who fled or were uprooted from their homes in 1948 (and their descendents) were confined to miserable refugee camps...

...Its participants were elder statesman Léon Blum—the first Jew and first Socialist to become Premier of France—and two senior leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, Joseph Sprinzak and Eliezer Kaplan...

...In Israel's case, one can hear that the country has passed an irreversible threshold...

...Both Blum and Weizmann emphasized the need for the Jews to take advantage of the extraordinary political moment and immediately found a nationstate in their historic homeland...

...When an armistice was signed in February 1949 the young State of Israel possessed 78 per cent of Palestine...

...But it was besieged by an ocean of hostile Arab regimes that simultaneously denied its existence and sought to purge it from their midst...

...In May 1964, under the auspices of the Arab League, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed...

...Three years later, in early June, the Six-Day War broke out...

...And they were aware of the options—exclusive of a nation-state—that had been entertained from the time of the first Zionist Congress, held in Switzerland in 1897...

...More common today is the sight of societies on their way from multinationality back to the "good old" nation-state...

...Since the 1920s the pioneering Jewish community in Palestine had similarly advanced a variety of notions inconsistent with the concept of a purely Jewish entity...

...More to the point, why didn't either man propose forming a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine— as many around the globe, and even in some Israeli circles, are nowadays suggesting...

...Yet probably most important, after the Jews in Palestine and around the world enthusiastically acceptedResolution 181, was the essence of the Arab reaction to the 33-13 Assembly vote on November 29,1947: "What was written in ink in Lake Success [the UN's temporary location] will be erased in Palestine with blood " This was translated immediately into the beginning of an Arab-Jewish war there...

...Faced with the frightening prospect of a binational state, most Israelis will hear the echo of Léon Blum's "It's now or never...

...In fact, the Basel Program, the defining document adopted at that conclave, set as Zionism's goal simply the building of a Jewish "home secured by public law" in Ottoman Palestine...

...And days before the British departure Golda Meir, returning from a clandestine meeting with King Abdullah in Jordan, could see some of the expeditionary forces from neighboring Arab countries that were about to join the fighting...

...At best, the top personalities of such groups conducted sporadic dialogues with their Arab counterparts...

...hence the semi-binational "economic unity" mentioned in Resolution 181 never materialized...

...The same was true for Ihud (Unity), a small association organized in 1942 under the leadership of Judah Magnes, an American Reform Rabbi who served many years as president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

...Weizmarm was well informed, too, about the ideas of his bitter militant opponent Ze'ev Jabotinsky regarding a secular state in Greater Palestine on both banks of the Jordan River, where the "son of Arab, son of Nazareth and my son" would live harmoniously under a Jewish president and an Arab prime minister...

...To be viable, he concluded, Zionism had to guide the Jews toward "integration in the circle of the Orient peoples and create with our race-brothers, with the Arabs...

...No Palestinian entity was proclaimed in the non-Israeli areas beyond the border known as "the Green Line...

...To be sure, the West does have several pluralistic, multiethnic, multicultural societies...

...Others dreamed of the crystallization of a modern "Canaanite" nation ofHebrew-speaking natives who would create a new collective ethos dissociated from the religious legacies of the Jewish diaspora and of Pan-Arabic Islam...

...There was the sense of a pressing need for a nation-state that would be open to every Jew, regardless of "absorption capacity" (the term used by the British government to block Jewish immigration to Palestine) or any other limitations nonJewish elements might impose...

...The next year, when Ruppin quit the organization, he issued a statement saying, "Even though we did not work hard enough in the past to find a formula that would meet not only the essential Jewish interests but also the Arab interests, we do not need what we can receive from them and we cannot receive that which we need...

...Initially his views were shared by several important Jewish leaders in Palestine, including Ben-Gurion, who took part in the early discussions...

...there were positive economic and social aspects to the post-'67 relations...

...What they wanted, therefore, was Blum's advice on how to stop Ben-Gurion and prevent the catastrophe...

...Perhaps in an ideal world a binational solution to the present Israeli-Palestinian confrontation would be possible...

...Furthermore, he was quite familiar with the binational approach of Brit Shalom (the Peace Association), formed in 1925 under the direction of Arthur Ruppin, a German-bom lawyer, sociologist and demographer...

...At its conclusion, Israel controlled all of the land that had been administered by the British forces...

...Instead, the Jews had to limit their desires to establishing a "spiritual center," as Achad Ha'am proposed, while enjoying autonomy in a binational country (actually, an Arab country...

...Some five years down the road, notwithstanding the violent clashes between Jews and Arabs, a preponderance of the active members felt there was no place for Jewish "political hopes" in Palestine...

...Yes, early on as the two sides at least got to know each other...

...Amos Carmel, a previous NL contributor, is a columnist and the Op-Ed page editor of the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot...

...In the summer of 193 9, for example, the League for Jewish-Arab Understanding was founded to promote binationalism, but did not attract any Arab members...

...It is said that because of the broad deployment of Jewish settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria, and the radical ideology of too many settlers, there is no realistic chance of territorially separating the Israelis and Palestinians, and so there is no chance of a compromise between them...

...To their astonishment he responded, "It's now or never...

...Some Palestinians, and some Israelis who are spiritual descendants of Brit Shalom, raise this option as an alternative to drawing new borders...

...The relatively small group was soon dominated, though, by several scores of intellectuals—among them Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem...

...He asked Golda Meir, who was serving as Ben-Gurion's envoy, to put off declaring Israel's independence and agree to remain in "a uniform country with autonomy for its Jewish parts...

...The historical and cultural differences as well are too great, and too fundamental, to permit an unprecedented melding of these rival nations...

...Three days later the famous Zionist Charm Weizmann, who did not then hold any official title mainly because of his rivalry with Ben-Gurion, urged Tel Aviv in a phone conversation from New York, "Proclaim the State, no matter what happens...

...She said no...

...In the real world, however, the result would be either a gradual elimination of Israel's presence from its traditional homeland, or a new series of brutal clashes to assure the state's permanence...

...Although no territory, except Eastern Jerusalem, was formally annexed to Israel, a new demographic situation emerged: Two previously separated populations—one composed of 2.2 million Jews and 350,000 Arabs, the other composed of 1.3 million Arabs, were willy-nilly thrown together with the elimination of the borders that had kept them apart...

...Achad Ha'am, a prominent Zionist intellectual, believed the movement could only fashion a "spiritual center" in Palestine and consequently saw no sense in striving for wider objectives...

...Another strong motivating factor was the United Nations General Assembly's passage of Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states (while retaining their "economic unity...

...But those that have thrived tend to be endowed with substantial core national characteristics that accelerate the assimilation of minorities within the indisputable majority...

...Fortunately, the relevant Israeli situation is reversible...

...Indeed, the ensuing full-scale war seemed inevitable...

...Quite the contrary...

...Accordingly, he founded Brit Shalom to explore ways of meeting this challenge...

...Knowing that David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the recently formed provisional Council of State, was determined to declare Israel's independence when British mandatory rule expired the following week, they feared the Arab world's expected violent reaction...

...Still, generally and practically, the bottom line is that there has been no indication either side wants to take steps toward realizing some sort of genuine binational formula...

...The heavy, dark memories on both sides seem destined to cast their cold shadows for a very long time...

...Hoping to head off the invasion, Abdullah, themostmoderate Arab ruler, had offered in effect a "binational" solution to the crisis...

...Former Czechoslovakia is the famous example, but not the only one...

...Now the Jewish collective in Palestine was far better organized than the Arab one...

...In their view, a binational state would not only be acceptable to the international community, but it would possess the potential for fairly quickly becoming a state of two equal national groups, and soon afterward a state dominated by an increasing Palestinian majority...

...Nor is there a compelling example of such a modern effort having truly succeeded even where the prospects were more promising...

...After all, the two men were well acquainted with the culture and modern history of the civilized West, not religious extremists or fanatic nationalists...

...Called the architect of the Zionist settlement in Palestine, he legally purchased land and set up kibbutzim, farms and cooperatives in rural and urban communities...

...Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism, in his Utopian novel Altneuland, envisioned a "New Society" that would be cosmopolitan and pluralist, but "not a state like the European states...

...None of the Arab dignitaries and scholars, however, spoke about binationality...

...This theory of irreversibility, coupled with the current Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine and their comparative fertility rates, has given new momentum to talk of a binational state...