Moses and the Wheelchair. posted by Richard Seymour

Take that filthy smirk off your face. Yes, you know what’s about to happen. I’m going to open my big mouth about Israel again and invite more junior Zionists to brand me an anti-Semite. Big frickin deal. I wish I was Jewish, then I could just be, what, “a self-hating Jew”? Oh well…

Why did Israel bomb the house in which Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was sitting on Monday? Why now? And why did Ariel Sharon make it his personal task to oversee the entire mission? There are plenty of ready-made explanations. Michael Hoffman of the Independent explains that it was an act of self-defense and wonders “If a Jew could have got close enough to Hitler, would it have been wrong to kill him?” Purple-faced non-sequiturs aside, the Israeli line is that Yassin is, or was, the “Palestinian bin Laden”, a man responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. He was, for them, the head of a terrorist organisation whose life was not worth the risk to Israeli soldiers in attempting an arrest. Israel does not waste its soldiers “on the likes of Ahmed Yassin”, Jonathan Freedland reports an official claiming. (Freedland, The Guardian, 24th March 2004). The pretense that this sick, dying old bastard was actually directly involved in operations against Israel is not particularly compelling. Indeed, according to Freedland, the true explanation is much more sinister.

Israel, he suggests, is going to withdraw from the Gaza strip unilaterally, as the one last shot at peace. In doing so, however, it does not want to cut a figure of retreat as it did in pulling out of Lebanon under fire from Hezbollah. It especially does not want to leave Hamas with the lingering after-thought of what more it might have accomplished with a few more bombs. So, Israel has risked its own security, strengthened extremists on both sides, and raised the ire of the international community for the sake of a withdrawal which, according to Freedland, is not really going to lead to a Palestinian state since it may include land grabs that make a real Palestinian state de facto impossible.

In offering this explanation, Freedland seems to have a realistic grasp on the priorities of the Israeli government – they must be forced by might to accept whatever crumbs we offer them. But in dissenting from this opinion, I only wish to offer another theory, which has at its core roughly the same broad understanding of Israeli policy. First of all, I think it highly likely that Israel does indeed have some to withdraw from the West Bank. Possibly even the Gaza strip, under more fortuitous circumstances. The prolonged indecisiveness over what to do with the occupied territories (or even whether they should properly be called “occupied”) reflects one of the most basic contradictions underpinning Israel’s existence – “the demographic problem”.

That, essentially, is the crux of the matter. It has been at the heart of Zionist policy-making since it first acquired Balfour’s stamp of respectability. So when, for example, the right-wing bloc around Likud won the 1977 election on a clear platform of annexing the West Bank (which they called Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza strip, they subsequently abandoned the policy, with the pretext being that they wished for Labor’s Moshe Dayan to be their Foreign Secretary, and he would not join the government if it threatened to annexe these territories. The more likely explanation is that the Arab Palestinian population was rapidly growing in these territories, and a state that managed to have as many Arabs as Israelis would become a bi-national state ex nihilo. Current demographic projections indicate that the future population will favour the Palestinians more. According to Arnon Sofer, a geographer at Haifa University, the population of historic Palestine by 2015 will reach 15.1 million, out of which only 6.1 million will be Jews. A ‘Jewish state’ which had more non-Jews than Jews in it would be a reduction to absurdity that Israeli right-wingers would wish devoutly to avoid.

On the other hand, the occupied territories are, as a matter of Zionist faith, the proper possession of the Land of Israel. A settlement which saw these rescinded to a weaker enemy would surely be regarded with considerable disdain and regret by these right-wingers. Isn’t this the reason why Moshe Dayan once ridiculously suggested that the West Bank be divided in rule between Israel and Jordan – the latter would run the civic society and provide the citizenship, while the former would patrol the streets with their army and control the water, thus preventing the existence of a Palestinian entity which both Jordan and Israel would have some reason to fear. But that was happily rejected for the non-started that it was, Jordan seeing no reason why it should cede the water supply to Israel. So, how to resolve the contradiction?

The answer may lie in some useful precedents going even as far back as the genesis of modern Israel. Specifically, the way in which Zionists solved the original “demographic problem” in response to the 1947 UN partition agreement. I think we can safely say that the intentionality behind the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 is established beyond reasonable doubt. This was not the benign intention gone awry, pace Benny Morris. It was a matter of both Zionist ideological conviction and military doctrine. The Book of Haganah History, an eight-volume publication of the Israeli military publishing house, relates the strange tale of General Yigael Yadin, and his Plan D doctrine, formulated in 1947. According to Plan D, it was necessary, if the State of Israel was to become a reality, to evacuate Arab towns and villages in the Jewish zone, especially those that could not be “controlled”. A large Arab population, particularly one inhabiting core towns with the werewithal to develop a resistance, would leave the Jewish State fatally weakened. For Israel even to get off the ground, a certain measure of ethnic cleansing would be necessary.

We don’t need to ask too many questions about whether high-level politicians expressed particular approval of this doctrine, because we already know it was put into practise. 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, many thousands murdered – most notoriously, the massacre at Deir Yassin took several hundred lives when Haganah troops descended on the town, told the residents they had fifteen minutes to leave, then began to shoot the place up. When Israeli apologists bleat that the Palestinians want to drive them into the sea, think of Palestinians being driven into the deserts and mountains.

The Six Day War and its aftermath offer another Illustration of the problem. Having successfully fought and won this war, having so humiliated the hostile Arab forces that allegedly threatened Israel with extinction, why did Israel not move immediately to annexe the territory it had claimed? Why does it remain “occupied territory”? The problem once again is demographics. The raison d’etre of Israel is the privilege, protection and cultural unity it offers to the most historically oppressed group of people in Europe (comparisons with non-European slavery, if they must be made, should be done so with considerable reservation about the moral implications). If Israel loses that relative homogeneity, it ceases to be Israel in all but name. If the people of the occupied territories become full citizens of Israel, with full social security, legal and employment rights, then a rather improbable project is at an end.

Far better, then, to extinguish Palestine as an entity. Baruch Kimmerling, the Israeli social theorist, refers to this process as “politicide”. It is a process that dissolves “the Palestinians’ existence as a legitemate social, political and economic entity” and “may also but not necessarily entail their partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel”. Isn’t this the reason for the talk of “population transfer”? For Ariel Sharon’s ridiculous notion that Palestinians could be deposited in liberated Iraq to be protected by US troops? And for the fact that the government includes right-wing extremist factions dedicated to the forceful expulsion of Palestinians (the pretense that this would be entirely voluntary is a ruse to get around 1985 anti-racism legislation)?

So my theory would be something like this – this government wants finally to assert Israel’s unimpeachable hold on Eretz Yisrael, (and also on the part of some of its components to halt what is seen as the corruption to the internal fabric of Israeli society that results from exercising domination over another group of people). It cannot do so as long as there is an expanding Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. It can solve the problem in two ways: one is to abandon the bulk of the territories and allow the Palestinians to form a limited kind of “state” (heavily supervised, of course, by surrounding settlements); the other is to annexe the whole territory, remove the Palestinians and build another “Iron Wall” against any possibility of a Palestinian resurgence. The latter is clearly the preferable option for Israeli ideologues, but it would have to overcome both internal and external resistance. It would have to win the approval of the United States government, and also of the Israeli people, before it crushed the resistance of the Palestinians. The only way to do this is to provoke a climactic round of bloodshed, some series of atrocities so awful that Israelis will acquiesce in almost any ghastly venture to protect themselves. What is euphemistically called “the international community” would be powerless to mount a serious opposition to Israeli measures. The US government would be inclined to give Israel carte blanche to do what it wants.

As I say, this is but a theory. The Freedland option seems plausible, but if it proves so it will be because a new Plan D has not been feasible. I might also suggest that if a “unilateral” withdrawal takes place (an odd way to describe it – imagine someone pontificating on the likelihood of Saddam Hussein “unilaterally” withdrawing from Kuwait), it will not be the end of the matter. Extremists in Israel are on the ascendancy, just as they are in Palestine. The population dynamic will prove highly problematic for Israel, and genuine Palestinian statehood on top of that would be a healthy thorn in its side. How a future Israeli administration would respond to this is an open question, but the range of answers is terrifying.