Gadi Taub’s Site and Occassional Blog
The reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas is certainly bad news for peace. But this does not mean it is bad news as such. Because the most urgent need for the future survival of both Israel and Palestine is not peace. It is partition. And the reconciliation may actually be good news for the prospect of partition. It is perhaps time to embrace mutual unilateralism. (Read the full piece in The New Republic…)
It is an old adage that political opposites converge. But when it actually happens, it’s still a surprise. And in the last year or so, in Israel, it did: Extreme hawks on the right, and extreme anti-Zionists on the left, seem to have arrived at more or less the same plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Read the full piece in The New Republic…)
About Herzl, Zionism, the anti-Israeli and British Neo-Colonialism.
Here’s an excerpt:
MW: One of the more interesting points you make in your settlements book is that settlers seem to be echoing the sentiments of the anti-Zionist left in calling for a binational state. You quote Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Shlomo Aviner and others who make it plain that they’d rather see Greater Israel with an Arab majority than any division of land. That the intelligentsia of the Yesha Council more and more resembles the collective wisdom of the London Review of Books might be taken for a sign of how just marginalised and discredited the settlement project is.
GT: I think that’s very true. Which is why recently some on the right have been arguing for annexation which will include full citizenship to all residents of the territories.
I have very little respect for that solution when it comes from them, just as I have little respect for it when it comes from anti-Zionists.
A look at Gaza, where the differences between Hamas and Fatah were settled by the use of arms, should help us all wake up from imaginary schemes of peaceful bi-nationalism. I don’t see how Gaza would have turned into a liberal democracy if only there was a Jewish faction added to the mix. What the one-statists are promoting is going to be a chronic Lebanon style civil war. And the odd thing is, how little the London Review has drifted from old colonial habits of mind. The natives – we Jews and Arabs – aspire to national self-determination. But the good ol’ Brits, never tired of carrying the White Man’s Burden, know that the natives are too barbaric to understand what the right form of self-determination should be for them. So until they grow up, we, Western intellectuals, will serve as their political parents, and impose on them the state we know they should want. Because it is Western and enlightened, of course.
(This piece originally appeared in The New Republic print edition, on October 28th.)
It is more than likely that the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) will reach a dead end. If not on the issue of settlements then on other matters. It’s not in the details, it’s in the big picture: Benjamin Netanyahu will not go as far as his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinians have already rejected Olmert’s generous deal. So it is probably a good idea to start thinking about Plan B. To do this, we Israelis must first set our priorities straight. (Read the full piece…)
The importance of the settlement question goes even beyond politics. It is not just a matter of policy, it is also one of ideology. The question goes down to the very foundation of Israel’s existence because asking about settlement is really asking what Zionism should be: Is Zionism about liberty, or is it about land?
(Read the full piece in English, or go to the original version in German published in Die Zeit)
The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism, by Gadi Taub is now out with Yale University Press.
“Anyone who has been concerned or angered by the debate over the future of liberal Zionism… should hurry to read The Settlers.” Adam Kirsch, Tablet. (Read more…)
The Israeli press, as well as the Israeli public, are not impressed by the opening of direct negotiations slated for next week. It hardly makes any headlines here. And rightly so. The left tells us Netanyahu will refuse any reasonable peace deal, which is true. The right tells us the Palestinians will refuse any reasonable peace deal, and that too, we should remember, is true.
There are many, from Meretz all the way to Kadima who still believe the Palestinians are just about to sign a final peace accord. What they say behind closed doors, we are told, is that they now regret not accepting Ehud Olmert’s generous peace deal. But they have been saying – always behind closed doors – that they are ready for a full deal for the past 17 years. And somehow whenever they emerge from behind those doors, the deal evaporates.
So maybe there’s a simple explanation for all this. Maybe, it is not a coincidence but a strategy. Maybe, as they keep saying openly, they have not given up on the demand to return the refugees and their offspring into Israel itself (a demand which they call a “right” though there is no such right by international law for refugees, much less for their offspring); Maybe they really don’t intend to give up Jaffa; Maybe it is no coincidence that they refuse to recognize the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a state of its own.
And there may be a sound logic behind all this. If they still view Zionism as a colonial enterprise, and still believe Israel should not exist, the one sure way to destroy it is not terrorism. It is to refuse partition, and just wait. First, Israel is the only Western democracy that holds a large population devoid of political rights under its rule. If it holds on to the occupation the country’s legitimacy will keep eroding, till our friends too turn their backs on us. Secondly, without partition Jews will eventually turn into a minority in Israel.
Both the radical right and the radical left tell us all this is not as bad as it seems. There are those on the left who tell us that the so called “one-state solution” will create a bi-national, or a non-national democracy, in which both peoples can live peacefully. It takes quite a bit of self-deception, not to say downright dishonesty, to promote this view. One look at Gaza is enough to remember why.
The radical right has its own version of wishful thinking. There are those on the right who would supply us with alternative demographic data, designed to support their enthusiasm for further settlement. Yoram Ettinger is the most vocal among these and he tells us there is nothing to worry about. Demography, he believes, is in fact working in Israel’s favor. He and his colleagues rely on a study conducted in Bar Ilan University called “The Million Person Gap”.
Israel’s senior demographers were unimpressed. Professor Arnon Sofer from Haifa University called it a “politically motivated” study, which is nothing more than self-deception. Professor Sergio DellaPergola, senior demographer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, concluded that “juggling numbers” as the study does will not change the facts on the ground. He found it manipulative and scientifically irresponsible.
So perhaps it is time we look reality in the eye and face two basic facts. The first: contrary to what the left believes the current round of talks to open next week is but another way for two recalcitrant sides to stall. The second: contrary to the right’s beliefs, time is working against Israel. Our international standing is fast eroding, and we are turning into a minority in the land of Israel.
This is why it is time we drop the illusion of negotiations and start planning a unilateral move out of Judea and Samaria. Whatever its results, they would be far better than the alternative. Because if we do not achieve partition into two states, it would be the end of Zionism.
This piece was first published in Hebrew as an op-ed in Yedioth Ahronoth, on August 25, 2010.
A people that has already achieved self-determination, that lives in a state which expresses its identity, finds it difficult sometimes to remember what it is like to live without such a privilege. It finds it hard to remember how relevant this right, which is essentially collective, is to private life. Here is a reminder, from a biographical story of a woman I never knew. I saw her recorded testimony at Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, in a discussion which actually raised my concern regarding the justification of Zionism: the discussion was about Zionism and the Holocaust. It raised my concern, because of the temptation to reduce Zionism into “the lesson of the holocaust” and to reduce the Holocaust into a kind of prelude to the Zionist revival. But all of this is not what the woman wished to talk about.
Instead, she described a moment she experienced as her happiest at the Second World War’s end. When she boarded an illegal immigrant ship to Israel, she saw a sign that said “Knisa” [Hebrew for "Entrance"], and it was this sign that filled her heart with joy. An Israeli by birth may find it hard to guess what was so exciting. A metaphor, perhaps? Entrance to a new world? To a different future? Entrance to a home? No. None of these. What struck the woman, what literally took her breath away, she explained, was the size of the letters. She never so Hebrew letters so big. Hebrew was for her, until then, she said, a language written in small, private print, embarrassed and always hidden.
This experience, the exhilaration of seeing Hebrew as a functional language of the public sphere, entails a deep Zionist insight: there is no such thing as private self-determination. Privatizing identity sabotages, rather than frees, the individual. This is why the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and Emancipation failed. Because there is no such thing as “a Jew in your home and a human being outside it.” If you cannot be a Jew on the street, then you are not a free person.
Part of the movement of the elite in Israel, from values of solidarity to values of individualism, manifests itself as the abandonment of this deep insight. The new, liberal elite offers a different, privatized conception of identity. According to it, an identity does not represent the common within the group, but rather a unique compound to be concocted by each individual. It is like a colorful mosaic that each individual shall create on his or her own. Each one of us shall walk through the big supermarket of identity components (profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, folklore), and be free to assemble his or her own unique identity. Only this way, we are told, can we keep our private self free from collective coercion. Only this way can we complete our political freedom (protected by civil rights) with cultural freedom (which is the option to choose our identity).
However, this is not a new freedom, but an old slavery. It has not protected the individual from the tyranny of the collective; it is the ancient prohibition on Jews stepping – as Jews – out of their home and into the public sphere. It is a return to the emancipation that gave “To Jews as individuals – everything. To Jews as a collective – nothing.” Emancipation did not fail incidentally. The problem was never circumstantial. It failed in principle. It failed because it privatized what is public in essence, because it denied what it claimed to provide. It offered the Jews the right to self-determination provided they would not determine themselves in any public sense. But identity is public, and leaving it in the closet cripples it.
That sign which said “Entrance” really meant “Exit”. For this woman it was the exit of Hebrew and of Judaism, from privacy and secrecy, into the public sphere, literally from darkness to light.
(A Hebrew version of this article was first published in Yedioth Ahronoth, June 30, 2009)
There once was a very successful campaign in Israel for road safety. Its slogan was, “On the road, don’t be right, be smart.” The day after the flotilla raid last week, more than one pundit in the Israeli press brought up the slogan. We’re right, they said, but why can’t we also be smart?
The raid was by no means smart. Israel blindly stepped into a p.r. campaign orchestrated by Turkey and Hamas, doing enormous damage to its own international image and credibility. But the raid was not an isolated incident. Rather, it is only the latest example of how Benjamin Netanyahu’s prime ministership is steadily eroding Israel’s legitimacy. Read the full piece on The New Republic website…
“The “one state” under discussion would be a state with a solid Arab-Muslim majority (which would quickly be created by taking advantage of the right of return) in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. To believe that this state would really be binational you have to assume that the Arab-Palestinian people would agree, over the long haul, to be the only Arab people whose state would not have a clearly Arab character and would not be officially defined as an Arab state or as part of the Arab world.” (Read the full peice…)
