Sari Nusseibeh has done it again. In an article titled “Why Israel Can’t be a
‘Jewish State,’” published on the Jewish New Year of all dates, the supposedly
moderate president of al-Quds University goes to great lengths to explain why
Jews, unlike any other nation on earth, are undeserving of
statehood.
“[T]he idea of a ‘Jewish State’ is logically and morally
problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social
implications,” he wrote. “The implications of this term therefore need to be
spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people – and most Israeli
citizens, we trust – will not accept these implications.”
Not that this
should have come as a surprise. For decades, Nusseibeh has tirelessly advanced
the “one-state solution” – a euphemistic formula that proposes the replacement of
Israel by a country, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine,
in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority.
This
advocacy of the destruction of a long-existing state, established by an
internationally recognized act of national self-determination, has hardly dented
Nusseibeh’s “moderate” credentials. That can be partly explained by the
desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for Palestinian and
Arab peace partners. That desire dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s, despite
countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the
narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the
“noble savage” in general, and the Westernized native in particular. With his
posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard degrees and
impeccable western demeanor, Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before
him, represents the ultimate product of the “white man’s civilizing mission,” a
contemporary replica of George Antonius, the Cambridge-educated Syrian political
activist who was the toast of the British chattering classes in Palestine and
beyond during the 1930s.
I was personally privy to this feting during a
London meeting in the spring of 1989. I was then a senior fellow at Tel Aviv
University’s Jafee Center for Strategic Studies, and like many well intentioned
Israelis at the time and since, we aspired to lay the ground for
Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation through secret talks with Palestinian
interlocutors, including members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
then an outlawed organization in Israel. The group we met was headed by Faisal
Husseini, then the PLO’s most senior official in the disputed territories,
flanked by Nusseibeh and a few prominent London-based Palestinian
academics.
The meeting was pleasant and informative enough, with the
courteous British hosts going out of their way to keep their Palestinian guests
sweet. Yet I was taken aback when Nusseibeh, the celebrated epitome of
Palestinian moderation, turned out to be the most extreme member of the group.
Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution – Israel and a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – he sang the praise of the “one-state
paradigm,” demanding the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into
the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to be followed by Palestinian
“refugees” from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.
In subsequent
years, Nusseibeh would pay customary lip service to the two-state solution while
consistently questioning the very legitimacy of the state with which he
ostensibly wished to make peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop,
unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for example, he told an old Oxford
friend that “one day, in the near or further future, all this [Israel and
Palestine] will be one binational state. It’s just a question of how we get
there.”
In an April 2005 debate at Dartmouth College, Nusseibeh advocated
the creation of a bi-national state as the only viable solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
“We will have spent 100 years killing and
fighting each other, doing our best to avoid a one-state solution, and we will
find ourselves in that exact situation in 40 or 50 years,” he argued.
IN
A 2007 political memoir Nusseibeh missed no opportunity to denigrate and
delegitimize the Jewish state through sharp, short, often subtle yet always
false readings of history.
He does this in spades in his latest article.
A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because “no state in the world is – or
can be in practice – ethnically or religiously homogenous.” But the Jewish state
that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally
homogenous: unlike the Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s
to date, has insisted on a Judenrein Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to
diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for nearly 20 percent of its
total population.
As David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own
(Mapai) party in 1947, the non-Jews in the Jewish state “will be equal citizens;
equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will be their
state as well.”
Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition
be either a theocracy or an apartheid state, and that its Jewish nature opens
the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority (whose very
existence he previously denied) “to second-class citizens (or perhaps even
stripping them of their citizenship and other rights).” This, too, flies in the
face of Israel’s 63-year history, where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before
the law, and have been endowed with the full spectrum of democratic rights –
including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
In
fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition
of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective
communities, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious
autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities
anywhere in the democratic world.
Small wonder that whenever an Israeli
politician proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-Arab settlements in
the future Palestinian state, as part of a land exchange within the framework of
a peace agreement, the residents of these localities immediately voice their
indignation. Moreover, recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east
Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel
across Israel’s pre-1967 borders, would rather become citizens of the Jewish
state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.
But Nusseibeh is not
someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the misconception, prevalent among
Arabs and Muslims, that Jews are a religious community and not a nation
deserving of statehood.
Hence, instead of insisting on being accepted for
what it has been for 63 years, or what the UN partition resolution envisaged it
to be, Israel should shed its Jewish identity and become “a civil, democratic,
and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism” like many of its Arab
neighbors which have Islam as their official religion “but grant equal civil
rights to all citizens.”
This of course is the complete inverse of the
truth.
The Jewish state is a civil, democratic and pluralistic society,
something that none of its Arab neighbors can stake a claim to. On the contrary,
precisely because Islam is enshrined as state religion throughout the Middle
East, the non-Muslim minorities have been denied “equal civil rights” and have
instead been reduced to the historic dhimmi status whereby they can at best
enjoy certain religious freedoms in return for a distinctly inferior existence,
and at worst suffer from systematic persecution and oppression.
And this
is the “one-state paradigm” offered by Nusseibeh to Israel’s Jewish
citizens.
The writer is research professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, director of the Middle East
Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.