Scapegoat: The Jews. Israel and Women's Liberation by Andrea Dworkin

Author:Andrea Dworkin
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Laqueur writes that “[a] 11 over the Middle East, Arab countries were gaining independence. The previous year the Arab League had been founded. Why should the Palestinians give up a single inch? What would have happened to the Jewish minority in this case? The Mufti and Jamal Husseini made no secret: The Jews would have to return to where they had come from; only some of those who had lived in Palestine in 1917, before the Balfour Declaration, would be permitted to stay. ”94 In 1991 Sari Nus-seibeh made the point current: “Bluntly put, Palestinians essentially believe that any bargaining with Israel over Palestinian territory is like bargaining over stolen property with the very thief who stole it by force. ”95 It was not all by force, however; much of the land was bought by Jews—usually from absent Arab landlords who had a legal, if not a moral, right to evict tenants and sell to Jews. A corrupt Arab oligarchy sold out a farming population of poorer Arabs to those who became—but were not yet—an ethnic enemy. It is certainly the case that Israel would not exist without the use of force; but—on the model of Thomas Jefferson’s buying the Louisiana Purchase from the French even though it belonged to an indigenous population—much land was bought: it would be good to see the Arab oligarchy share some of the responsibility for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. In the same way, Arab corruption continues: U. S. President Jimmy Carter “was able to make the revealing observation... that he had ‘never met an Arab leader who in private professed the desire for an independent Palestinian state. ’”96

Force, of course, was not only necessary to take the land: it was essential to the making of an Israeli. As Yaron Ezrahi writes in Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel: “Since Zionist ideology has rested on a Jewish narrative of redemption, of return and liberation, it has encouraged fantasies of force as monumental as the dream itself. ”97 Force had to be used in the same way and for the same reason that Israel itself had to be based on agricultural collectives; as Ben-Gurion said in January 1918: “Eretz Israel can of course be built entirely on capitalist lines, like other countries, but building a country that is entirely capitalist will not bring about the implementation of Zionism. In a purely capitalist economic system, there would be no Jewish labor and the soil would not be in Jewish hands. Without Jewish labor and Jewish land, Zionism would be a mere hoax. ”98 Seventy-some years later Israeli novelist Amos Oz would write in Touch the Water, Touch the Wind: “... it stands solid and high, just a Jewish mountain, as if it was the simplest thing in the world to be a Jewish mountain or a Jewish sea or forest, or even just a plain Jewish log for all the world like any other damned log, a Bulgarian log, a Turkish log, only it’s a Jewish log in a Jewish country.

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