Lines in the sand: Reflections

"The messianic 'take-over' of Israel is close to complete."

Things have obviously changed a little since I wrote my Israel-Palestine series thirteen years ago. Actually, they changed pretty much as soon as I had written it. Always too early to the party, or too late, I flew back to Spain in September 2012, after watching the closing ceremony of the London Olympics on the television above the bar at Mike’s Place. (I had an appointment with some fighting bulls in Cuéllar.) Then, of course, that November, Operation Pillar of Defense took place. It went on for a week, the first great Iron Dome war. One hundred and seventy-four Palestinians died. Six Israelis did.

When I went to Israel and the West Bank, I went with a very clear plan in mind. I was not going to express an opinion. I went in with a single goal, which was to report whatever was told to me, regardless of what was said. I think the series rather reflects that intention. I interviewed anti-Zionist Israelis, pro-Zionist journalists, anti-PA Palestinians, pro-peace refugees, anti-Semitic guys in singlets, off-message kibbutzniks, predatory hostel proprietors, and some really quite angry Palestinian kids. I knew I had done a pretty good job when Crikey published the series piece by piece: the Israeli articles were lambasted by pro-Palestinian readers and the West Bank ones by Zionists. This, I thought, meant I had done exactly what I set out to do, and that I had done it well.

I don’t think I've added much to the conversation by republishing this series. Too much has changed, almost all of it for the worst. What is happening now is a crime, committed by a corrupt politician (who famously paid the terrorists to keep terrorising) in order to distract from his corruption. But it’s not only that. Netanyahu is his father’s son (see also: Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, in which Bibi and his brothers make a hilarious, thuggish, wholly unflattering appearance). Worse than that, he’s entirely unoriginal. To paraphrase South Park, Vladimir Putin already did it.

I don’t really want to get into this too much, because I am sick of having to do it with a Zionist friend of mine, but Israel has no more right to exist than any other country. It won its land by conquest—as did my country, so pot, meet kettle—and in any case does in fact exist. As Iran is currently learning the hard way, Israel is a fait accompli. It shall, I believe, remain one, even if, as Chris Hedges wrote only two months into the destruction of Gaza, its “facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps” by the time it’s achieved its explicitly-expressed ends. People, however, as Francesca Albanese has pointed out, actually do have a right to exist, including Gazans and West Bank Palestinians. What I saw in Hebron, more than anything else I saw on my trip, convinced me that Israel’s continued existence is predicated, not only or even primarily on dispossession, but rather on dehumanisation. (In terms of its own population, it is predicated on brutalisation, in the actual sense of that word.) As Auden wrote:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

But this will come back to bite Israel. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: genocide simply doesn’t work. As my friend Jack Jacobs put it in his award-winning piece about Stan Grant, “ there are always, always, survivors”. No one ever quite manages to kill everyone they need to—especially today, in an age of diasporas, when killing everyone you need to means breaking even more international laws than you already are—which means that the memory of your crimes always lingers. Pro-Israel sentiment among non-Jews partly exists for this reason. Western countries watched the Nazi genocide happen and remember their inaction keenly. I am reminded, in a slightly different register, of the way that Australia big-notes itself for its intervention in Timor-Leste in the late 1990s, but never mentions the tacit approval that Whitlam—that towering progressive, siding in this case with Henry Kissinger—gave the Indonesians to invade in 1975. (Obviously, in the case of Israel, there are also Evangelicals who want to bring about the second coming and other MAGA-types who simply want to own the libs. But the libs are pro-Israel, too, and well beyond the point of strategic necessity.)

I’ve always thought that the Anglophone West also rather liked clucking its tongue at the Germans on the grounds that the Holocaust was somehow worse than the genocides we didn’t quite get away with ourselves, of which we are all beneficiaries. In fact, I suspect we were a little bit excited that there was a genocide more recent than our own, and that it had been photographed and filmed. (The great thing about the Holocaust, if you’re Australian, is that you can point to it, call it uniquely evil, and then vote against the Voice. The Americans, Canadians, and New Zealanders all have their own examples.)

While I believe that Netanyahu behaves the way he does in part for short-term gain, I also believe he has much more in common with his bigoted coalition partners than his allies and supporters elsewhere have long assumed. Again, his father was a ethno-nationalist psychopath who poured bilge down his children’s throats from the moment they were born. The trick now, I believe—in addition to setting up distractions elsewhere, like a sleight-of-hand magician—is to eventually run out the clock: one day, no one will remember this, Israel thinks, and so it shall never have happened. Israel will, like rest of us, be a beneficiary of wanton but forgotten violence. But it’s wrong to think that no one will remember. This time it’s been live-streamed.

A few years after I was in Israel and the West Bank, I had an idea for a three-novella collection. I may still write it. It was to be called Tales of the Century. One part was to be about Israel, another about Kashmir, and a third about Tibet. These were the three great crimes of the immediate post-war era and all are still being perpetrated. We only ever focus on one of them, and I think that stems from the shame noted above. Well, good, we should be ashamed, but fuck me if we’re not going to feel more ashamed down the line because of what’s happening now. I do think it’s interesting that we focus so little on the plight of the Indian Kashmiris, and not at all on that of the Tibetans. But the Middle East is the Middle East, and we’ve been knee-deep or more in that at least since “Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and [...] agreed that, after the war, France and England should share the Turkish Empire”. One day—mark me—we will owe yet another historical debt, this time to the Palestinians, the same way we owed a historical debt to European Jewry, and still owe one to the Kurds. Which is to say that we will owe them a debt unless they no longer exist, in which case we shall conveniently forget them, the same way we conveniently forget everything else.

I am not Jewish. I was once told, in New York, that I am Jew-ish, which is one of the loveliest and funniest things a goy can be told in a bagel place while ordering whitefish on schmear. I have heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that the safest place in the world for a Jew is anywhere other than Israel. (You will remember Hadar telling me about all the times she spent with her kids in bomb shelters.) I would add that Zionism in its current form—by which I mean both its settler-colonialist form and its Greater Israel one—is both un-Jewish and, worse, the primary cause of antisemitism in the world. When they say “river to the sea,” well, it’s not just what Isa told me in East Jerusalem. Listen to the settlers in the West Bank. They mean it, too.

I guess I believed in a two-state solution back when I wrote the series. I’ve never really believed in a one-state one. I do agree with Jonathan Spyer that a one-state solution would be, for Jewish Israelis, the beginning of the end. At the same time, I also believe, along with everyone else, that Israel either stays Jewish or stays democratic. If I believe in anything at this point, I believe in forever war, mostly because that’s what I’ve lived though and experienced and Zionism is a stupid enough idea to keep it going. I’m going to write something now that I believe to be accurate, much though it may cause me to vomit in my mouth. Israel shall win. I see the one-state solution coming to pass, drenched in blood. As Antony Loewenstein told me the other day, when I sent him the first draft of this piece, the “messianic ‘take-over’ of Israel is close to complete, and those who claim to be shocked or opposed to it but [are] still ‘supporting’ Israel remain in delusion. It’s over. At least in any democratic form. Which it never was.” In short, there shall be no Palestinians in Palestine. There shall be a Jewish state, but it will be less democratic than fascistic. The settlers will, as they’ve always planned, eventually control the river to the sea. Maybe the Messiah will come? It sure as shit won’t be the Mahdi.

We are watching ethnic cleansing take place before our eyes, and we shall let it happen, and we shall never mention it again. What does “never again” even mean these days? In twenty or thirty years, yeah, we’ll all feel fine about it, because things will have moved on, but we’ll know, deep down in our waters, that we let it happen. I am proud of the series I wrote thirteen years ago. I am not very proud of anything I have done in relation to this issue since. Never let yourself forget that, when push came to shove, you watched the shoving happen, and let it. Lord knows you don’t want to be called antisemitic. Islamophobic, though? Well, look…