The Decline of the Israeli Left

By Helena Cobban, Boston Review. Posted July 20, 2009.

Even in its pro-peace form, this argument is problematic: it summarily disenfranchises the great portion of the Palestinian people--now numbering five million or more--who live outside Mandate Palestine and who are prevented by Israel from returning to their ancestral or actual homes inside it. No peacemaking effort can be successful without the buy-in of the vast majority of the refugees themselves. The argument also implies that it is acceptable to keep a significant number of Palestinians living under the burden of military occupation so long as Jewish Israelis outnumber them, but the moment that Palestinians become a numerical majority, some significant moral change occurs.

Despite its flaws, the demographic argument for peace retains considerable traction among pro-peace organizations in the United States, including avowedly "progressive" organizations such as J Street. Inside Israel, however, Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and other political forces have put the argument to new uses. Their version is: "If the demographics prevent us doing what we want on the ground, we will change the demographics." As the British-Israeli political analyst Daniel Levy recently observed: "We have to recognize that Liebermanism is a bastard child of the whole way the Israeli peace movement has used the demographic argument for so long."

Zionists have traditionally described demography-altering proposals as "transfer," but the rest of the world typically calls this ethnic cleansing. Few in Israel still speak crudely, as they once did, about rounding up Palestinians in trucks and sending them across the border. Nonetheless, during the recent election, Lieberman expressed support for establishing a truncated Palestinian state that would incorporate some of the Palestinian-populated areas of Israel that abut it. Palestinians in those areas would summarily lose their Israeli citizenship, and thus be "transferred" administratively, if not physically.

There may be other, more subtle, demographic strategies. Jonathan Cook, a British journalist who has reported from Nazareth since 2001, argues in Disappearing Palestine that Israel has deliberately encouraged the voluntary emigration of Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied territories by making life there unbearable through "the ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs." Hard figures on the levels of emigration are difficult to come by, but, according to my observations, nearly all families now living in the West Bank and Gaza have numerous members who have moved away during the 42 years of Israeli occupation. Israel forbids most such emigrants from returning except for short visits.

Finally, the argument that an independent Palestinian state would immediately become a "Hamastan"--either chaotic and ungovernable, and therefore a source of continuing violence, or controlled by Hamas, and therefore a source of continuing violence--has eroded support for a peace agreement.

The Hamastan argument usually runs something like this: "We withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005; Hamas took over there; look at the violence and chaos that ensued! How can you expect us to repeat that in the West Bank?" It has proven very potent inside Israel. But it ignores, most notably, that the unilateral way in which Sharon undertook the 2005 withdrawal strengthened Hamas by enabling it to claim that its policy of resistance, rather than negotiations pursued by PA/Fatah head Mahmoud Abbas, had forced Israel's hand. A speedy and generously negotiated withdrawal from the West Bank would likely look very different.

The Hamastan argument also ignores the fact that while Israel withdrew its military and settlers from the Gaza Strip, it has retained complete control over Gaza's access to the outside world as well as other key aspects of Gazan life. Since 2006 Israel has imposed a tight blockade on the Strip. (And since the end of the recent war, Israel has prevented the entry into Gaza of even the basic materials needed to rebuild the thousands of homes and other structures the IDF demolished there.) The United Nations, the United States, and other governments have all judged that under international law Israel remains an "occupying power" in Gaza.

When Israeli officials argue to outsiders that the emergence of a Hamas-dominated government in the West Bank would be intolerable because Hamas uses unprovoked and gratuitous violence, or because Hamas's supporters and leaders are inherently evil, violent, or primitive people, they are also being disingenuous. They ignore the long record of Israel's own lethal use of violence against Gaza in the years between 2005 and 2008, a record that has been amply documented by the United Nations and by Israeli human rights groups such as B'tselem.

Hamas's continued capacity for violent resistance and its refusal to adopt Abbas's compliant, warm-and-fuzzy approach to peacemaking have made the idea of a Hamas-ruled state a hard one for many Jewish Israelis to accept. But within Israeli society (if not the political leadership), there is considerable realism in attitudes regarding Hamas. Many Jewish Israelis understand the reciprocal--indeed, grossly asymmetrical--nature of the violent exchanges that have been maintained across the Gaza-Israel border since January 2006, and have expressed appreciation for the restraint that Hamas has shown during periods of (never negotiated, but sometimes reciprocal) cease-fire with the IDF. For some years now, a small majority of Israelis have even favored government talks with Hamas, though the influential poll regularly conducted by Hebrew University's Truman Institute showed that this percentage dropped between December and March from 55 percent to 50 percent. In March 69 percent of Israelis still supported the idea of their government dealing with a Hamas-Fatah unity government.

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Helena Cobban is a Friend in Washington for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

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