The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Why a two-state solution is anachronistic and a one state solution the most viable solution
THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | I argued in this column last week, that arbitrary violence by Hamas has always played right into the hands of hawks in Israel. Today, the forces for peace inside Israel are in retreat. Even if they left won an election, its leaders would find it hard to deliver a peace treaty. Why? Zionists argue a peace agreement with Palestinians amounts to capitulation and insist on the original aims of the Zionist movement to occupy the entire land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan river. These need Hamas violence to justify their position.
In any case, a two state solution that would lead to peace has become anachronistic. Since 1997, Israel has rapidly expanded settlements in the West Bank from 80,000 people to over 800,000 now. The amount of land they occupy in the West Bank makes even the land swaps Bill Clinton envisaged impossible. Besides, these settlers now form a powerful voting block inside Israel. Hamas will add to their power by increasing their sense of insecurity.
So even if the right lost an election, they win the war of occupation. Even if a progressive government came to power committed to peace, it will find it politically difficult to turn against 800,000 settlers in the West Bank. What should happen to those settlers if a peace deal was reached? Evict them? They form about 9% of the population of Israel and 15% of the Jewish population of Israel. That is a very powerful voting bloc to alienate. Besides they have many allies on the right inside Israel proper.
There are three solutions to the Palestinian problem. The first is the two state solution. But this solution has been overtaken by events. The problem now is the size and scale of Jewish settlements in the West Bank which have expanded by leaps and bounds since 1997 and now control over 50% of the territory. And I think this was a deliberate strategy by those opposed to a Palestinian state to make it a practical impossibility.
So the only two state solution that can work is one where the settlers accept to live under such a Palestinian state as equal citizens. Can they? Besides, even if such a Palestinian state was created, it is no longer possible to really give it sovereignty in the classical meaning of a state. It would not have an army, control its borders, its airspace and access to the sea. It would have to have the Israeli military permanently stationed inside the West Bank to ensure the security of Jewish settlers there.
Therefore any Palestinian “state” created would be akin to native reserves in the USA and Canada which are considered “dependent nations” and whose residents would have no rights under Israel law. Basically, it would be a continuation of apartheid. This would stimulate resistance from the Palestinians and in turn provide a justification (in fact a pretext) for Israel to sustain its repression. Which Palestinian leader would sign such agreement? If he/she did, they would lose legitimacy before the Palestinians.
The third option would be a one state solution where both Jews and Palestinians live together with equal rights. This may seem difficult to imagine but I think the experience of Rwanda and South Africa would be helpful. I will focus on Rwanda which I know better but also because it had the worst inter communal violence known to history. In 1994, no one thought that after the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsis, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda could live together peacefully! Indeed, everyone talked about a two-state solution.
Although the genocide in Rwanda was organised by the state, it was executed by society in the most popular and even democratic manner. The carnage in Rwanda was also very close and personal: father killed wife and children, neighbour murdered neighbour, friend hacked friend to death, teachers slaughtered their students, business owners their workers, and priests their parishioners. It was carnage unseen in human history. The leading experts, scholars and diplomats of the time called for a two state solution to the Hutu-Tutsi problem. And who could blame them?
For President Paul Kagame and his colleagues in the RPF, this option was not even considered. They saw Rwanda as one country and the Tutsis and Hutus as one people. The two peoples had lived together peacefully for centuries. There was nothing in Rwanda oral traditions that posited the Hutu-Tutsi as an antagonistic relationship. It is Belgian colonial rule that politicised identity and made it toxic. Kagame and his colleagues believed that it is possible, with political will, to make victim and killer live side by side in peace and harmony. And this was possible because they had secured a decisive military victory. It was them, as victors, who had something to give. And that something was forgiveness.
The same can be said of Palestinian Jews, Muslims and Christians. They had lived together peacefully and in harmony for centuries in that land. Then came European Jews armed with the ideology of Zionism. Zionism was born of European ideology about a nation-state being homogenous and therefore requiring ethnic cleansing through mass evictions and genocide of those not supposed to belong. This politicised identity and made Jewish-Muslim-Christian relationship in Palestine toxic. Israel became a European settler colony like Canada, the USA and Australia.
Kagame and the RPF allied with moderate Hutu forces to isolate the Hutu extremists. They reached out to many ordinary Hutus with a shared history and nationhood. Instead of demonising Hutus, they demonised genocide ideology and its bearers. They offered a state that gave equal rights to all citizens regardless of identity. Israel has done the exact opposite. It subjugates non-Jewish residents of that land. Rather than work with the moderate PLO in the West Bank, it undercuts its legitimacy by accelerating settlements and employing violence to govern. This plays into the hands of Hamas who call for counter violence. Instead of imaging Israel as a country where all its people can have equal rights, Israel believes that equal rights for Palestinians would lead to its destruction.
Therefore, at the heart of the existence of the state of Israel is the belief that for it to exist, it should be a Jewish majority state. But this state is in lands with a large native Palestinian population. Hence, by making the Jewish identity the basis of the state, the ideological foundations of Israel demand that those who are not Jewish should be evicted, killed or subjugated.
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amwenda@independent.co.ug
Andrew, thanks for your article and views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and on how it can be settled. However it’s full of historical negationism and here is why:
The Zionist movement, when Jews began immigrating to Palestine in significant numbers, buying up land, building new settlements, and reviving Hebrew, began around 1882 (though the first early Zionist-style Jewish agricultural settlement in the land was established in 1878 by Jews already in the country and the first Jewish agricultural school was established there in 1870). Before that, everybody knew what was what: the Jews were a minority under an Arab majority and no one questioned it. The Zionist movement fundamentally changed things, though in a gradual way. Serious conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine over Zionism began in the 1920s.
For centuries, Jews lived under Arab rule in both Palestine and throughout the Arab world. Anti-Zionists love to talk about Jewish-Arab “coexistence” prior to Zionism and how peaceful it all was, usually citing some anecdotes of peaceful cooperation or how it wasn’t as bad as Europe. The truth is far less nice. Of course, treatment of Jews varied from time to time and place to place, but generally speaking Jews were looked down on as a minority. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jewish ghettoes called mellahs were established in Arab cities to separate Jews from Muslims, reminscent of the Jewish ghettoes of Europe. At times Jews prospered and were well-treated in Arab lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire but they were subjected to violent pogroms every now and then, and their treatment got worse as the empire weakened. In addition to violent riots, they had to endure countless everyday indignities. It was actually a common custom in the Arab world for children to throw stones at Jews, knowing that Jews wouldn’t dare respond. This is from the account of a 19th century traveller in Morocco:
“I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gabardine. To all this the Jew was required to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to strike a Mohammedan.”
And Morocco was actually one of the better places for Jews to be in the Arab world. Let’s take a look at Yemen. Jews in Yemen were forbidden to to ride an animal lest their head stand higher than that of a Muslim. They were forbidden to build their synagogues higher than the shortest local mosque.
By law Jewish orphans were forcibly converted to Islam. One time in the fifteenth century, in an incident remembered in Jewish history as the Mawza Exile, nearly all Jews were banished from the cities and towns and sent to an inhospitable region to die before they were called back because the economy couldn’t withstand their loss. Every now and then they gained equal rights (the situation improved after the Ottomans took over) but for the most part Yemenite Jewish history is one of oppression. And you know the infamous yellow star Jews in Europe were compelled to wear by the Nazis so they could publicly be identified as Jews? Know where that first happened? In 8th century Baghdad, where Jews were compelled to wear special markings singling them out by Caliph Umar II.
Sure there are stories of coexistence and tolerance but the oppression was always there, lurking in the background. Some Jews managed to reach high positions but even that could end in disaster. In 1465, a mob in Fez, Morocco descended on the city’s Jewish Quarter and murdered most of the Jewish population due to popular outrage over appointments of Jews to positions of power and influence.
In Palestine there was a Jewish population for centuries, even after the Jewish majority was lost in the centuries following the Jewish rebellions against Rome and throughout the period of Arab rule. And Jews there too were occasionally massacred. The Jewish community of Safed was subjected to a violent riot in 1517. The Jewish communities of Safed and Tiberias were devastated in 1660 and in 1834 the Jews of Safed were brutalized by an Arab mob once again.
For the most part, Jews in the Arab world were a minority. They were expected to be meek and submissive to their Muslim masters and know their place, even when facing insults or being pelted with rocks. And there were violent pogroms every now and then. Basically is the same sort of attitude that white people had towards black people in the southern USA during the Jim Crow era. An economically useful minority but a despised one, subjected to immediate, brutal consequences for any perceived failure to submit to the majority’s superiority.
Enter Zionism. Although it was mainly a European Jewish project, lots of Jews from the Arab and Muslim world joined in and they became a substantial part of the Yishuv, or Jewish community in Palestine. From the 1880s to the 1920s, for the most part the Jews and Arabs had a varied relationships. Jews hired Arabs as workers and guards but also had to deal with Arab banditry. The new Zionist pioneers lived in Jewish agricultural settlements separate from the Arabs. Overall Palestine was a sleepy backwater province with not much going on there. In 1913 there was a particularly sharp clash at the settlement of Rehovot that saw attitudes harden, but in the 1920s, with the British now in charge, relations became increasingly violent as Jewish immigration picked up and the Arab leadership began vying to thwart it. The 1929 riots were particularly brutal. They saw the destruction of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, and the final nail in the coffin of good relations between the descendants of the pre-Zionist Jewish community and the local Arabs. In the 1930s and 1940s Jews and Arabs shot, bombed, rioted, and sabotaged infrastructure to achieve their nationalist goals, attacking each other and the British.
It should be noted that it was primarily Arabs who started attacking Jews and Jewish violence mainly came in response. The Jewish leadership was willing to partition the country but the Arabs demanded it all, even the parts of Palestine owned by Jews and which had a Jewish majority.
In 1948 with the formation of Israel, the antisemitic attitudes of the Arab world were on full display when the majority of Jews in Arab lands had to leave, often times expelled or fleeing in fear of oppression and persecution. The level of oppression varied but the antisemitic attitudes of Arab governments were on full display. Jews were targeted in riots as a reaction to Zionism in 1947 and 1948. Egypt expelled Jews, Iraq imposed severe restrictions on it’s Jewish community and encouraged them to leave, while Syria imposed stringent restrictions on it’s Jewish community including banning them from venturing more than 5 kilometers from their hometowns, banning them from driving, tapping their telephones and reading their mail, and seizing all Jewish schools, forcing Jews to escape clandestinely.
So overall, for centuries Jewish-Arab coexistence was “peaceful” in the sense that the Jews were a hapless minority who knew their place and took whatever Arabs dished out, with violent Arab attacks on Jews every now and then. In the decades leading up to 1948, Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine got more violent but it was mainly Arabs who started it and Jews who responded.
One sums, you post has been very educating to me. Thank you.
It is a shame how shallow thinking Andrew comes up, most especially when it comes to Rwanda and Kagame. So much literature shows that the genocide (in terms of number of deaths) the Tutsi (supported and sponsored by Rwanda government) have committed against the Hutu in Congo is by far larger than the genocide in Rwanda. Google and read official sources. The former commissioner general of UNHCR, Ogata and many researchers clearly documented this fact. Many Hutu refugees and civilians have been killed and many innocent join the armed rebellion as a way to survive and protect themselves. Indeed Hutu are silently demonized in Rwanda by Tutsi minority. You will clearly test this when a strong presidential candidate of Hutu background comes up.
Onesmus, thank you the post. I add the history of Jews is not just of yesterday but very well documented the Bible, both in old and New Testament which are consistent, inspite of a period of 400 years between the old and New Testament. Some reading:
We acknowledge that one of the greatest miracles of the Bible is before our very eyes: the continuing existence of the Jewish people.
Again and again, throughout the many centuries and empires, attempts to wipe out the Jews have always failed. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, and the Nazis of Germany all failed in their aggressive attempts at genocide.
Bible prophecy is, indeed, history written in advance. Israel is the lens through which the Bible presents both the past and the future of the world itself. It is the means through which God’s program for the redemption of mankind will be performed.
The Israelites originally went down to Egypt as a family, were enslaved, and after four centuries, emerged as a nation. God referred to this emergent nation as His “firstborn” (Ex 4:22). And it was His plan to use them to bring forth the One who would be the Redeemer of mankind.
Their saga begins with God’s covenant and land grant to Abraham.1 Their prophets warned that the en-tire world would ultimately go to war over this land grant and that is exactly what is being challenged by the world today.
But there is much more at stake than simply Israel’s right to the land. God’s plan for the redemption of mankind is ultimately at issue.
Israel’s vicissitudes—both ups and downs—were continually predicted by the prophets throughout their entire history. After the civil war following Solomon’s death, the histories of both the Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom became astonishingly graphic. The dismal decline of the Northern Kingdom resulted in their being obliterated from existence.
The commitment of God to David’s dynasty is all that prevented the Southern Kingdom from a similar fate. Although the Kingdom suffered as a captive of the Babylonian Empire (prophesied in Deut 28:49-57), through the prophet Jeremiah it was promised deliverance after seventy years and a return to the land. And those seventy years were fulfilled to the very day!2
Dispersion
Though Israel’s Babylonian captivity was its first removal from the land, God restored and continued to woo the nation to faithfulness. Christ’s arrival, ministry, and ultimate rejection are well-known historically, but few people realize how much this led to the Jews’ later dispersions. Jesus Himself gave us His perspective when He said:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chick-ens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.
Matthew 23:34-39
The tragedy of all history—the rejection of Christ—led to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. In fact, Luke 21:24 foretold that the Jewish people “shall be led away captive into all nations,” a statement that reflects the very language of Deuteronomy 28:64: “Then the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other” (NKJV).
The Diaspora simply cannot be understood without the background of Deuteronomy.
The Regathering
The regathering of the Jews into their own home-land—the second time—is the key to understanding the times in which we live.
And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
Isaiah 11:11,12
Their first regathering was from their captivity in Babylon. The second time, prefigured in Ezekiel 37’s colorful “dry bones” prophecy, is one of the dramatic events of the twentieth century.
Many Bible scholars have felt that the Diaspora was a permanent judgment upon Israel for having rejected their Messiah. They felt that a literal return of the Jews to the land of Israel was fanciful and misinformed. It was a debate at the time between the “old-fashioned fundamentalists” and the modern “liberals.”
During World War II, many pundits were viewing the rise of Hitler as the “Antichrist.” However, there were a few radio commentators, M.R. Dehahn, H.A. Ironside, and others who pointed out that he couldn’t be: be-cause the nation Israel was not in its land.
A Litmus Test for Scholars
It was a dramatic day on May 14, 1948, when David Ben Gurion, using Ezekiel as his authority, announced on international radio the name of “Israel” as the new state and homeland for the Jews. It was a great day for the Jews. And it was a most significant day for Biblical scholarship as well. The debate about the literalness of God’s promises should have ended.
Immediately set upon by their Muslim enemies, Israel shocked the world by the miraculous victories in their War of Independence. Vastly outnumbered, they nevertheless established their fledgling state in the midst of impossible conditions.
In 1967, they again startled an astonished world with their miraculous victories in the Six-Day War. And again, in 1973, in the Yom Kippur War.
The saga of the Israeli Defense Forces has become a modern legend. And yet, the worse is still to come.
Israel’s Future
We continue to watch world events as they relate to the future of Israel, specifically the forthcoming “Time of Jacob’s trouble,” the climax of the current “struggle for Jerusalem”—one of the many strategic trends that we are witnessing now—and the ill-fated “Magog” invasion of Israel, predicted in Ezekiel 38-39.
These events are critical, yet-to-be-revealed moments in Israel’s ongoing history.
1. Genesis 12, 15, 17.
2. Jeremiah 25:11-12. Failure to keep the Sabbath of the land for 490 years (70 x 7) was the cause for this particular period of 70 years of captivity.