Ben White: 1948 and Israel's Deceptive Bargaining Position
[Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer, specializing in Palestine/Israel.]
The refrain from Israeli politicians and the country’s allies and apologists is familiar: There can be no peace deal until the Palestinians "recognize" Israel as "a Jewish state." While this can sound reasonable to the casual listener in the West, this demand actually points to critical flaws in the "peace process" and the way in which the international community approaches the Palestine/Israel question.
This is because such a demand, and understanding why it is so unacceptable to Palestinians, means going back to 1948 -- when hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, their inhabitants forbidden from returning by the new Jewish state -- and throwing the spotlight on two groups of Palestinians that the so-called peace process has ignored or marginalized: the refugees of '48 (and their descendants) and the Palestinian minority that's left inside Israel. The unpleasant reality is that Israel as "a Jewish state" means the permanent exile and dispossession of the former, and the colonial control of the latter.
In the West, even talking about Palestinian citizens inside Israel risks confusion, since for so long they have been referred to as "Israeli Arabs" or "Arab Israelis." This is a formulation intended to obfuscate their Palestinian identity, a discursive erasure symbolic of far more brutal methods (some of which are described below). The lack of attention paid to the issues faced by Palestinians in Israel by Western politicians and pundits is unfortunate, since their historic and contemporary reality radically undermines the well-worn cliché that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East."
The Palestinian minority (around 20 percent of the population) are those who managed to remain inside the Jewish state after the expulsions of 1948, events described in Arabic as al-Nakba, or "The Catastrophe." With their society shattered -- at least 85 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel were expelled -- the minority was then subjected to military rule until 1966. This martial law combined with legislation passed in the Knesset to effect what is perhaps the defining dynamic in the relationship between the Jewish state and its Arab minority: land confiscation.
By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost between 65 and 75 percent of its land (see, for example, Ian Lustick’s 1980 study "Arabs in the Jewish State"). Policies that nowadays most people associate with Israel’s regime in the West Bank -- seizure of Palestinian land in order to build Jewish settlements -- have been routine inside Israel with regards to the Palestinian minority. Since 1948, around 1,000 Jewish communities have been created in Israel -- but not one Arab town. Arab municipal communities make up 2.5 percent of state land, though the Palestinian minority has grown seven-fold....
Read entire article at Salon
The refrain from Israeli politicians and the country’s allies and apologists is familiar: There can be no peace deal until the Palestinians "recognize" Israel as "a Jewish state." While this can sound reasonable to the casual listener in the West, this demand actually points to critical flaws in the "peace process" and the way in which the international community approaches the Palestine/Israel question.
This is because such a demand, and understanding why it is so unacceptable to Palestinians, means going back to 1948 -- when hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, their inhabitants forbidden from returning by the new Jewish state -- and throwing the spotlight on two groups of Palestinians that the so-called peace process has ignored or marginalized: the refugees of '48 (and their descendants) and the Palestinian minority that's left inside Israel. The unpleasant reality is that Israel as "a Jewish state" means the permanent exile and dispossession of the former, and the colonial control of the latter.
In the West, even talking about Palestinian citizens inside Israel risks confusion, since for so long they have been referred to as "Israeli Arabs" or "Arab Israelis." This is a formulation intended to obfuscate their Palestinian identity, a discursive erasure symbolic of far more brutal methods (some of which are described below). The lack of attention paid to the issues faced by Palestinians in Israel by Western politicians and pundits is unfortunate, since their historic and contemporary reality radically undermines the well-worn cliché that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East."
The Palestinian minority (around 20 percent of the population) are those who managed to remain inside the Jewish state after the expulsions of 1948, events described in Arabic as al-Nakba, or "The Catastrophe." With their society shattered -- at least 85 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel were expelled -- the minority was then subjected to military rule until 1966. This martial law combined with legislation passed in the Knesset to effect what is perhaps the defining dynamic in the relationship between the Jewish state and its Arab minority: land confiscation.
By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost between 65 and 75 percent of its land (see, for example, Ian Lustick’s 1980 study "Arabs in the Jewish State"). Policies that nowadays most people associate with Israel’s regime in the West Bank -- seizure of Palestinian land in order to build Jewish settlements -- have been routine inside Israel with regards to the Palestinian minority. Since 1948, around 1,000 Jewish communities have been created in Israel -- but not one Arab town. Arab municipal communities make up 2.5 percent of state land, though the Palestinian minority has grown seven-fold....