Israel will never be recognized as a 'Jewish state'

By Issam Makhoul

Annapolis marked a departure for Israeli and American policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel, with US support, is seeking to replace the traditional understanding of the conflict as one that can be resolved by upholding Palestinian rights with one where Israeli rights take center stage. This has serious consequences for the Palestinian people in general and the Palestinian minority in Israel in particular. Israel is not only trying to replace Palestinians on their land, but replace them as the victims of the conflict.

Indeed, Annapolis can be seen as the crowning victory of one Israeli school of thought on the conflict over another: the "school of demography" has beaten away the "school of geography." Thus the project of a Jewish State now takes precedence over the project of Greater Israel, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel have been placed at the heart of that conflict.

The aim now for Israeli diplomacy is to extract international, Arab and Palestinian acquiescence to the Zionist project of an ethnically almost pure state. Israel wants to transform the conflict from an issue of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, security and national existence - rights that have been violated every moment of the past 60 years of occupation - into one that will place as a priority the security of Israel and its "Jewishness." In return for giving up their rights and acceding to this racist ideology, Palestinians will be allowed an improvement in their living conditions.

This "concept change," which is coupled with the dominant Israeli discourse of demography, is evidenced first by the conditions placed on the political process, in other words the attempt to force the Palestinian side to recognize the "Jewish state" of Israel. But the stone aims to kill more birds than one.

It has been devised to eradicate any right of return of Palestinian refugees, as called for by UN resolutions, to the homes and lands from where they were evicted by claiming that the right of return would jeopardize the demography of the "Jewish state." By the same token, it seeks to evade any Israeli responsibility for the Nakba, the calamity visited upon the Palestinians.

For Palestinian citizens in Israel, the "concept change" is an attempt to undermine their struggle to stay on their land, as well as their struggle for equal civil and national rights. Finally, the "concept change" exposes Palestinian citizens of Israel to the very real danger of population transfer.

The focus of the Israeli state and its dominating elites on the "Jewishness" of the state comes at a time when formerly dominant discourses of labor, agricultural innovation, social solidarity and the kibbutz have disappeared. It exposes the underlying racist nature of this state, based as it is on the dispossession - not only of land but of rights - of one indigenous ethnic group, the Palestinians, by another immigrant one. It also exposes the hollow nature of Israeli democracy, which is pushing out its Palestinian citizens. Finally, it is based on the fallacy that the idea of ethnic division is based on the partition plan of 1947.

That plan, which legitimized the concept of self-determination for two peoples in two states, was never one of perfect ethnic division. Indeed, the "Jewish" state that would have been created would have been comprised of a population of whom 40 percent would have been Palestinians. Furthermore, the partition concept also entails that Israel's legitimacy depends on the fulfillment of the Palestinian right to self-determination.

Israel never was, and never will be, an exclusively Jewish state. This was not intended in the original partition plan; it did not happen in 60 intervening years of Israeli attempts to undermine the national rights of the Palestinians; and it will not happen by decree of international law. Israel is a state with a Jewish majority and a large Palestinian minority that demands equality and civil and national rights within this state. The minority did not suddenly appear here. Palestinians were living on their homeland when Israel suddenly appeared.

The demographic rhetoric now prevalent in Israel with its emphasis on forcing Palestinian citizens of Israel and Arabs in general to safeguard a Jewish majority by legitimizing the "Jewishness" of the state is a direct challenge first to the Palestinian Citizens of Israel - who suffer enough from racism and discrimination as it is - as well as Palestinian rights generally. It is a measure of the decline of democracy in Israel and threatens the very concepts of equality in the country and peace in the region. Israel uses this rhetoric to prevent a just resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, whether in its broader context or with regard to the 250,000 Palestinians who were internally displaced and have been prevented from returning to their lands and villages.

Finally, the rhetoric is used to whip up fear among Israel's Jewish population, further distancing them from an understanding of the conflict that can lead to a just resolution.

The peace process as launched at Annapolis is thus trying, within the discourse of the 1967 borders, to extract a "solution" that ignores the very core of the conflict. The 1967 borders can constitute a solution, but only if other Palestinian rights, including the right of return according to United Nations resolutions, are also upheld.