Liberal Zionists confront, or deny, the ‘Doomsday settlement’

Philip Weiss on November 29, 2017

Liberal Zionism is in crisis. The occupation is more permanent than ever. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the settlement project’s 50th anniversary in a settlement and announced many more settlements in recent weeks. The Israeli left is marginalized to the point that Labor politicians parrot the right. While U.S. politicians have failed to openly criticize the occupation, even Democrats– till they are leaving office. All signs are that the dream of a Palestinian state is over.

Here are two responses by liberal Zionists to the crisis. In the first case, Alon Ben-Meir, a long time negotiator, pleads with Americans to hold on tight, the left is still alive in Israel, and p.s., Israelis will never accept one state between the river and the sea.

In the second case, Danny Seidemann in a Peace Now podcast is more realistic about Israeli politics. Everything looks grim, he says, including approval of a “doomsday settlement” that would kill a Palestinian state; but Seidemann holds out hope that Israel might still be saved from itself.

Ben-Meir, a professor at NYU, appeared at the Palestine Center on November 17, and said the Israeli left is alive and well.

There is a very strong, well-operating left in Israel today. But you don’t hear much of the left because there is no election going on today. All you have to do is, read the Israeli newspapers, read the commentaries in Haaretz… The public is very sick and tired– the majority … are sick and tired of the conflict. They need to see an end to it. They talk openly about the two-state solution. There are scores and scores of organizations in Israel that’s all they do, promote peace peace peace, based on a two state solution.

The one state solution is never going to happen because no Israeli government from the extreme left to the extreme right will never allow to have one state and be governed eventually by a Palestinian majority. That’s not going to happen.

That’s not going to happen, plain and simple.
Ben-Meir called on the audience to “appeal to the segment of the Israeli population that wants to end this conflict.”

Danny Seidemann of Terrestrial Jerusalem spoke in a Peace Now podcast on November 15, and expressed far more pessimism than Ben-Meir.

Seidemann described an unprecedented “major surge” in new settlements in East Jerusalem since the summer. For the first time in a long time there is a “major surge in the number of settlements:” 1300 apartments on the fringes of existing neighborhoods. He pointed to four settlement plans in Sheikh Jarrah, approved in November, including a yeshiva. When these settlements are complete, Seidemann said, they will transform Sheikh Jarrah into an extension of Jewish, pre-67 Israel far east of the Green Line.

“This is a game changer because it’s a border changer.”

Seidemann also cited a “Doomsday settlement” on the south side of Jerusalem, given that nickname because it would end the two-state solution.

Secondly we’ve learned that one of the Doomsday settlements, Givat Hamatos, has been greenlighted by Netanyahu even though there’s no confirmation of that publicly. We’ve heard behind the scenes that the previous restraints have been removed by Netanyahu and the first tenders are going to be expected in the first quarter of 2018.

Givat Hamatos, on an empty hill near Har Homa, would cut off all connection between Jerusalem and Bethlehem for Palestinians.

Seidemann also described “massive infrastructures” that have erased the Green Line, integrating East Jerusalem settlements and West Bank settlements into Israel proper.

It’s possible to go from Tel Aviv to Etzion bloc [far south of Jerusalem] without hitting a traffic light, something you can’t do to my house in Jerusalem.

His conclusion :

So it really cuts to the quick… the authoritative question as to whether the two state solution is alive or dead.

Seidemann said that if there were a peace agreement, Israel would need to remove 163,000 settlers who do not live in the major settlement blocs, or about a quarter of more than 600,000 settlers east of the Green Line. That number used to be 116,000 when Netanyahu took office in 2009, but it goes up 6,000 or 7,000 a year, he said.

So if Israel has the capacity and the will to relocate 163,000 settlers, the two state solution is alive. And if it doesn’t, it’s dead.

He went on to say that Israel clearly has “the capacity” to remove those settlers, “because we absorbed 1 million immigrants from the Former Soviet Union.” But Israel doesn’t have “the will to relocate one.”

Now, here are several critical comments on the liberal Zionist crisis.

Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada responded to Alon Ben-Meir at the Palestine Center, and said that if Israelis are pressured, they could change their approach:

The claim we always hear that Israelis will never accept democracy, they will never accept equal rights for Palestinians, I think is underestimating the capacity for people to change. When I studied South Africa I looked at all the opinion surveys through the years from the 1980’s to the 1990’s… where solid majorities of whites said we will never accept a one person one vote system, that that would be suicide for us. FW de Klerk [former president of South Africa] said we will never accept one person, one vote, at the beginning of negotiations to end the racist system. And lo and behold within a couple of years, they accepted it. And no one says South Africa is utopia, but they accepted the thing they said they would never, never, never accept.

Historian Avi Shlaim explained in an interview at Jadaliyya that the left in Israel was killed by Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Having failed to negotiate a deal with the Palestinians in 2000, Barak convinced the public that there was no Palestinian partner for peace:

This was a tragic mistake and it had a real impact on Israeli politics, because if there is no Palestinian partner for peace then negotiations are pointless and hopeless. If there is no Palestinian partner for peace, Israelis don’t need to vote for a party like Labour that believes in negotiations. And rather than a moderate leader, a man of compromise, they would look for a strong one who is good at killing Arabs…. There was a Likud victory in 2001 and either it or an offshoot of the Likud, Kadima, which is also a right-wing party, has been in power ever since.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is a shadow of its former self and no longer represents a clear alternative to the Likud. It has become a nationalistic party, and has changed its name from the Labour Party to the Zionist Union, which tells you everything. So it’s a Zionist party which believes in the land of Israel, that Jerusalem is the unified and eternal capital of the Jewish people, and that Israel should keep all the major settlement blocks in the West Bank in a final settlement. It is therefore not a moderate party, it is not a socialist party, it is not a left-wing party, it is a hybrid sort of centre-left party with no coherent ideology and with no clear alternative to the policies of the Likud.

Seidemann foresees Israel holding on to those settlement blocs. They contain about 200,000 settlers in the West Bank, in addition to the 200,000 or so settlers in East Jerusalem.

David Shulman writes in the latest New York Review of Books that we have now entered the period of a struggle for equal rights within a single country, as a minority of Palestinians now believe in the possibility of a Palestinian state. He is dismissive of the traditional liberal Zionist position. Labor Zionists started the settlement project and have never changed their minds about anything. “Inhabiting a mythic cosmos tends to reduce reality to a manageable set of indubitable equations,” he said.

Finally, Scott Roth points out that equating Israel’s ability to absorb the immigrants from the Soviet Union with removing settlers is a false equivalence because in fact those settlers are doing what the Soviet immigrants did: fulfilling the Zionist ideology. In fact many of the immigrants became settlers in illegal settlements out of the state’s Zionist impulse.


About Philip Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Other posts by Philip Weiss.

Israeli Labor sells out African refugees, as ‘infiltrators’

from Mondoweiss
Jonathan Ofir on November 21, 2017

”What has become of you? Are you the Zionist Union or the expelling union? Have you gone mad? In your tactics for wooing votes, you’ve abandoned your fundamental values and ability to tell right from wrong.”

Tamar Zandberg, a lawmaker from the leftist Meretz Party, shouted that at the left-bloc Zionist Union members who yesterday backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s draconian legislation to forcibly deport the remaining roughly 40,000 African asylum seekers to a third country – Rwanda.

Zandberg’s party leader Zehava Gal-On, added that the Zionist Union leader, Avi Gabbay, has “forgotten what it means to be human” – playing a bitter pun on the Gabbay’s recent echoing of Netanyahu, where he said that “the left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu told the cabinet on Sunday that it is time to “increase the pace of deporting African migrants”, as the Jerusalem Post reported, introducing a bill which passed 53-10 on Monday – much thanks to Gabbay’s support of a policy that is contrary to Labor’s former position.

Jerusalem Post Gil Hoffman yesterday summarized Gabbay’s many shifts rightwards since his being elected chair of Labor this summer:

Gabbay said recently that there would be no need to evacuate settlements in a peace deal, that he would not sit in a coalition with the Joint (Arab) list, that he was not sure if there was a partner on the Palestinian side, that “the Left forgot what it means to be Jewish”, and that “the whole land of Israel is ours, because it was promised to our patriarch Abraham by God”.


Tamar Zandberg of Meretz, from her Twitter feed.

Indeed, with an opposition like this, who needs Netanyahu? As Meretz leader Gal-On put it, Gabbay was moving so far right, that he could even “outflank Bayit Yehudi [Jewish Home] leader Naftali Bennett”.

Netanyahu’s legislative move comes after a Supreme Court ruling two months ago that limited the state’s practice to coerce refugees to accept being deported to a third country, through indefinite imprisonment. At that point Netanyahu, together with Culture Minister Miri Regev (who has earlier called African refugees “a cancer in our body”), went on a major incitement tour against African refugees in southern Tel Aviv, saying that “We are here on a mission to give back south Tel Aviv to the Israeli residents”.

Netanyahu was making clear that he will not be deterred by the court ‘limitation’:

“We’ll have to enact new laws that will enable us … to send the illegal infiltrators out of our country”, he said.

As the Times of Israel rightly noted at the time, “expulsion to a third country is largely unprecedented in the Western world. Italy and Australia signed similar agreements with third-party countries — Italy with Libya, and Australia with Malaysia — but both proposals were shot down by local courts. In both cases, courts ruled the bills inconsistent with international law and the 1951 UN convention on refugees — to which Israel is also a party.”

But the court did, in fact, not rule against Israel’s practice of deportation to a third country – which is now known to be Rwanda. It merely limited the state’s practice of indefinite detention aimed at putting pressure on refugees to agree to be deported. It limited the imprisonment period to 60 days. In other words, refugees who seek to hold on to their human rights could still be imprisoned for it, but ‘only’ for 60 days.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was clear at the time about the necessity of this coercive measure, in her statement condemning the Supreme Court decision:

“The High Court removed from the state the ability to pressure the illegal infiltrators,” she said. “It turned the [migrant’s] lack of cooperation into a reward. We will fight this until we achieve the necessary results,” she said.

So Israel is now working on moves that would simply legalize what the court has struck down, and let’s see how far it goes before it’s challenged. As Ilan Lior reported in Haaretz on Friday, “The border authority will formally announce within a few weeks a new policy, under which asylum seekers will have to return to their countries of origin, agree to be sent to Rwanda or be jailed indefinitely in Israel.”

Gabbay’s recent push to support Netanyahu’s bill has divided the Labor leaders, and even Shelly Yachimovitch of Labor– the one who demanded immediate pardon for medic-killer Elor Azarya– said that it’s “morally impossible to support this.”

Labor lawmaker Zouheir Bahloul said, “I don’t understand how the party can support such an immoral move by the right, which seeks to throw refugees to hell.” He added: “Angela Merkel was willing to take the political risk until Election Day and take her moral stance of accepting thousands of refugees, and we hesitate and squirm here. Israel can handle a few tens of thousands of refugees and spread them across the country.”

In the end, most of the Zionist Union MKs who are against refugee rights (and that’s the plurality of the 22 Zionist Union members) were absent from the Knesset vote. But the measure still passed, as mentioned, 53-10.

With all the dissent, let’s look at what the leaders of the Israeli left say in the end:

Gabbay’s predecessor Isaac Herzog (still leader of Zionist Union in Knesset as Gabbay isn’t MK), said that “The infiltrators took Israeli Arab jobs.” Wow. The ‘infiltrators’. Netanyahu uses the same term. And is Herzog’s concern now really about ‘Arabs’ – the one who warned the Israeli center-left not to be seen to be ‘Arab lovers’?

Think about it – “Arab jobs”. Does anyone in Israel even notice the vile, blatant, racism here?

And Labor’s Merav Michaeli, (who recently said that “a lot of the BDS movement is good old anti-Semitism”), backed Herzog’s line, just a touch more “liberally”, without the ‘Arabs’ and substituting “infiltrators” with “migrants”:

“Residents have been left at home with no work, because of the migrants”, she said. “There are MK’s in the opposition who cannot look in[to] the eyes of residents who are screaming for us to save them”, she added.

Gosh, what empathy. The Israeli residents are screaming to be saved. Nonetheless, the cries of the refugees, who at best are called “migrants” and commonly regarded as “infiltrators”, even by the left, appear inaudible.

Gabbay is no doubt wooing votes from the right, and he said behind closed doors yesterday that “this is not an issue of right or left”. Already assuming his future constituency, he said that “we would pay a price for arguing with the public”.

So whilst not wanting to argue with “the public”, Gabbay apparently didn’t mind arguing with his own party leadership to support Netanyahu’s bill.

The Israeli Labor is further shedding masks. But let us not forget, that this is also the movement whose leaders contemplated genocide in Gaza in 1967, as newly declassified documents show. This is the same political movement that was responsible for the major ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, subsequent major ethnic cleansings in 1967 and on, and the settlement project since 1967.

The movement that has so arduously created such a great Palestinian refugee crisis for the sake of the Jewish State– what is the meaning to Labor of another 40,000 African refugees after all?

How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution

from Mondoweiss 11/11/17
Avi Shlaim

Jadaliyya has posted an excellent interview with the British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, in which Shlaim states that he is an “Arab Jew” because he was born in Iraq and describes the long history of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in the Arab world before the rise of Zionism in the 20th century.

Palestinians, Shlaim says, were not the only victims of Zionism.

[T]here are other victims of Zionism—the Jews of the Arab lands. There was a Jewish community in Iraq which had been there for two and a half millennia, and had no wish to leave. It is only because of the rise of nationalism in the twentieth Century that peaceful coexistence was no longer possible.

Shlaim has no faith in Donald Trump’s ability to resolve the conflict. Trump is only listening to Netanyahu. Shlaim points out that President Obama promised to treat Palestinians fairly in Cairo in 2009 and did not follow through at all, but failed to pressure Israel, instead increasing aid. When will U.S. establishment voices begin to echo this truth:

The American-sponsored peace process, which began in 1991 after the Gulf war, is all process and no peace. It is a charade. It is pretence. It is worse than a charade because the peace process gives Israel the cover it needs to pursue its aggressive colonial project on the West Bank.



Shlaim is proud of his Israeli background, including his serving in the Israeli armed forces in the 1960s. He used to be for partition, but today he has given up on the two-state solution. He describes his progress as he observed Israel’s steadfast refusal to allow a Palestinian state.

I was a proponent of a two-state solution for most of my life because there can never be absolute justice for the Palestinians. I believe that the creation of the state of Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians but I don’t want to go a step further and say that Israel should be dismantled in order to deliver justice to the Palestinians. I accept the reality of Israel within its original borders, I accept the legitimacy of Israel within its original pre-1967 borders.

Edward Said described the two communities as two communities of suffering. We have to take into account the tragic history of the Jews as well as the suffering of the Palestinians. The two-state solution seemed to be not a perfect solution but a reasonable solution. The PLO by signing the Oslo Accords gave up the claim to 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine in the hope that they would get an independent Palestinian state on the remaining 22 percent, on the West bank and Gaza. So I supported the two-state solution but Israel under both Labour and Likud governments continued to expand settlements. This is incompatible with a two-state solution.

The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.

So a two-state solution is no longer a viable option and that is why I have become a supporter of the one-state solution, a single state with equal rights for all its citizens. Ideologically, I don’t have any problem with a one-state solution. Ideologically, it is very attractive, it is a noble vision of two communities living in harmony in one space with equal rights for all its members. But, I am not naïve enough to think that the one-state solution is a realistic prospect because there is no support for a one-state solution in Israel. And if pushed really hard I think Israel would withdraw to the wall on the West Bank and annex whatever bits it wants of the West Bank. It would annex the main settlement blocks in Ma’ale Adumim, and the whole area around Jerusalem, and it would do so unilaterally rather than have a one-state so I am not in the least bit optimistic that the one-state solution is a viable proposition. But this is where I stand and I blame Israel for eliminating the alternative of a two-state solution.

Note that the one-state solution is the idealistic alternative, two peoples sharing sovereignty democratically. And if you object that it is not realistic, alright– but neither is two states.

Shlaim also endorses BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, saying that it frightens Israel and it is the only hope Palestinians have of making progress globally.

BDS is a global grass-roots movement which has been gathering support at a very impressive pace and it has had a large number of successes with major companies divesting from Israel. It has also had considerable impact on public opinion throughout the world, delegitimising the Israeli occupation. The Israelis take it very seriously. They have formed a unit with a budget of GBP 40 million in order to fight BDS by launching personal attacks on individuals and delegitimising them rather than engaging with the arguments of BDS. And it seems to me that there is now hope that western governments will change their policy of support for Israel….

So going back to BDS, there is no hope for the Palestinians to bring about the end of occupation through the support of western governments or the UN, the only hope that the Palestinians have is through BDS.

That is not to say that in the foreseeable future BDS could bring about an end of the Israeli occupation. But that is the only hope the Palestinians have of making progress.

It’s amazing that these simple straightforward ideas are not reflected in the U.S. discourse. Though I would say that progressive Americans readily accept these ideas, and that is why the Democratic Party establishment is today running scared of these ideas entering the mainstrea