For Palestine might this be the darkness before the dawn?
JVL Introduction
Ilan Pappe argues that the end of the Israeli State as it now exists is likely and says that: “We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism. And, if my diagnosis is correct, then we are also entering a particularly dangerous conjuncture. For once Israel realizes the magnitude of the crisis, it will unleash ferocious and uninhibited force to try to contain it, as did the South African apartheid regime during its final days.”
He refers to the ongoing divisions within Israeli society and the growing power of the settler movement and notes that upwards of half a million Israelis have left the country since October 2023. He also argues that the power of the lobby is reducing, not least because of the significant number of Jewish people, especially young Jews who now actively support justice for Palestinians.
Nothing is certain and what follows may be more violence and turmoil but perhaps the most hopeful part of Pappe’s article is what he writes about the actions and positions of young Palestinians who are working together to establish a genuinely democratic organisation that looks beyond the Palestinian Authority’s campaign for recognition as a state to decolonisation.
LL
This article was originally published by Sidecar (New Left Review) on Fri 21 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
The Collapse of Zionism
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This is an important essay. One does not have to agree with it in all its essentials to realise that the Ilan Pappe gets the basics correct. Israel and the Zionist project is facing an existential crisis.
Hasbara doesn’t work anymore since it is very hard to justify burning alive children sleeping in a tent or starving to death. It has been my view for some time that we are seeing the beginning of the end of Zionism rather than the end of the beginning. And that end process as Ilan says is going to get even more bloody.
What is also clear is that despite normalisation with America’s client Arab regimes that the strategic balance is shifting away from Israel. We saw that on October 7 when Hamas easily dismantled the multi-billion dollar fence around it and then sliced through the Gaza Division like a knife through butter.
Drone warfare has also changed the rules of the game in terms of Israel’s ability to meet a multi-front war.
But at bottom Israel is as Ilan says an inherently divided settler colonial project – divided between those who see themselves as Jewish first and those who see themselves as Israeli. There doesn’t seem to be any way it can resolve this. Indeed it is only a common Arab enemy that has kept the two factions united.
The only missing part of Ilan’s essay is the necessity of the overthrow of the complicit Arab regimes and the introduction of democracy throughout the Middle East in place of the present kleptocracy.
We can now see the end of the Zionist project which began with ethnic cleansing and ended up with genocide
I would like to believe this is true, but I fear it may be just wishful thinking. It would require a President of the USA with a new mind set, which doesn’t appear to be in prospect in the near future.
In the long run, I agree this IS the “darkness before the dawn” but no-one should downplay the terror, grief, upheaval, cost and difficulty of getting there; nor the hundreds of thousands who will now lose the futures they’d hoped for (or even their lives) before that happens.
The new State of Palestine should have been established in 1919 but super-power self-interest, racism and Zionist special pleading blocked it. The wrongs done to the Palestinians by the UK and France extend back to 1917. Those done by the UN and Israel to 1948. Super-power America’s misdeeds are newer – but no less dreadful.
The only decent, peaceful, viable future as a state that Israel has, I believe, is as a country back within its 1967 borders and on the other side of experiencing the equivalent of Germany’s “denazification” process (a process aided in part by successful ICC and ICJ prosecutions and the “root and branch” reform of the IDF, other state services and of Israeli law).
Paying the reparations due to the Palestinians since 1948 (and more recently) will take Israel perhaps 30 – 40 years. Presumably the World Bank will need to oversee that process, as it will have to do in overseeing reparations made by Putin’s Russia to Ukraine.
We can all of us see how ferociously our own society would fight against the painful, costly transformation process that seems necessary for Israel. We can guess how difficult it’ll be to get our own governments to meet some of these costs (as we should – eg by offering homes here for displaced settler Israelis and by helping the Palestinians rebuild their schools and universities).
Somehow, though, this must happen. There has to be an end to genocide and desolation, particularly as our forebears helped it happen.
Israel the racist zionist project must be dismantled and one democratic state is the only way forward for peace.
As for offering homes to settlers that left their homes in their own countries to go and live on stolen land where Palestinian families had been murdered or driven out by pogroms are you serious?
Our hopes and prayers that there is a long lasting peace solution that recognises the Palestinians as equal residents with full equal rights. There will be the parameters for a true democracy and not the one that is imposed colonies.
Our prayers that his day should come sooner rather than later. Amen.