The Illegitimate Child of Ethnic Nationalism
Press Action
Sunday, February 19, 2006
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand02192006/
By Mark Hand
Review of The Case Against Israel by Michael Neumann (CounterPunch, 2005, 220 pp.)
I wanted to stop reading Michael Neumann’s The Case Against Israel after the first page. There was one particularly injurious sentence, a mishmash of words knotted around an assumption. In the sentence, Neumann, in his trademark hardheaded approach, was putting a polemical spin on the “rights” of “peoples.” He juxtaposed the “inalienable right of self-determination” with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Here’s the offending passage:
“On the Palestinian side, the Palestinians could have a right to the Occupied Territories even if the Jews had a right to a homeland in Palestine, or no right even if the Jews had no right to those territories either.”
Huh? Such an ungraceful beginning to a book about which I had read so many good things made me wonder whether I would survive the next 200-plus pages. Giving up so soon on a book would not have been unprecedented. I’ve tuned out many writers greater than Neumann. William Faulker, for example, has authored a few supposed masterpieces that sent my brain cells into convulsions after only a few pages.
Fortunately, I decided not to obsess over the meaning of a single sentence on the first page of what Neumann describes as an “essay.” (At 220 pages, including an index, The Case Against Israel is a book. An essay is what I’m in the process of trying to write right now.) I turned the page and gave Neumann a second chance to prove he simply wasn’t a university professor of philosophy bent on turning the Israel/Palestine conflict into a theoretical morass.
My patience paid off. The Case Against Israel turned out to be the most impressive analysis of the Israel/Palestine conflict that I had read since … hmm. Well, perhaps it’s not a stretch to say this is the most impressive analysis of the Israel/Palestine conflict that I’ve read, period. The Case Against Israel surpasses Noam Chomsky’s best writings on the topic, which is saying a lot because Chomsky has produced some valuable studies of Israel’s origins and its conduct as a nation-state. (Neumann takes exception to some of Chomsky’s conclusions, including the MIT professor’s views on Zionism. But Neumann clearly, at least from my vantage point, appreciates Chomsky’s contributions to this debate.) Norman Finkelstein, who Neumann also cites in the book, has produced some strong material on Israel in recent years. Edward Said. Simha Flapan. The list goes on of writers who scrutinized the question of Israel and published books that contributed to my understanding of the issue.
What, then, sets The Case Against Israel apart from the others? Once you get past the first page, Neumann’s prose flows naturally and elegantly. The citations are numerous but they don’t disrupt the narrative. In short, The Case Against Israel is a well-written book.
Second, the book is well-researched, with abundant footnoting. I was somewhat taken aback, though, by Neumann’s mention in the preface that he used no material from Palestinian sources, presumably to ward off accusations of bias in favor of the Palestinians.
Finally, Neumann does a masterful job of making his case—that the Zionist goal of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine is to blame for the long-running conflict, which has become appreciably more desperate for Palestinians in the past five years. He incorporates each of these elements—a captivating writing style, in-depth research and persuasive argument—into a tightly constructed book.
In particular, Neumann condemns the creation of Israel but concludes that there’s no turning back the clock and that the most pragmatic and humane solution to the conflict would be the creation of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel.
In his discussion of the birth of Israel, Neumann explains:
“Their project was not like raising a child who, unexpectedly, turns psychotic, but like releasing a homicidal maniac—a child of ethnic nationalism-- into the world. This is why the blame for the conflict falls so heavily on Zionist and so lightly on Palestinian shoulders.”
Neumann unequivocally states that the Nazis’ Final Solution did not justify the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. “Let no one throw up the Nazi era as some excuse for Israel.” He continues:
“At most, the Nazi menace might have justified some Jewish activities in Palestine between 1933 and 1945. After that, the Jews no longer had a right to refuge in Palestine, much less to a Jewish state. That such a state might have some questionable tendency to protect the Jews against possible recurrences of the danger is not nearly enough. I cannot retain possession of your house simply because, even after the lynch mob and its organizers have been suppressed, there is some indeterminate chance that I might somehow be exposed to such dangers again. The Final Solution does not justify the Zionist solution.”
Neumann also takes aim at the claim of some of Israel’s supporters that the Palestinians simply could pick up and leave their land if they were unhappy with their treatment by the Zionists. “Today it is regularly suggested that the Arab world could and should accommodate the Palestinians, most likely in Jordan,” he writes.
Aside from the fact that Arab states do not want to provide refuge to the Palestinians, transferring the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories to a nation like Jordan would be impractical. Jordan has never expressed a willingness to take in any more Palestinian refugees. Jordanian forces also killed many Palestinians during “Black September” in 1970. “Moreover, Jordan’s economy is in no position to carry a large influx of dispossessed people…,” Neumann writes.
Meanwhile, commentators—both Zionists and supporters of Palestinian freedom from Israeli control—have historically referred to the conflict as one between Israelis and Arabs. Neumann emphasizes that this practice and the notion of an “Arab people” has hurt the Palestinians “by allowing the Zionists to believe and to convince others that the Palestinians do not really have their backs to the wall: why, they can just go live with their Arab brethren!” In reality, though, the Palestinians “for all practical purposes stand alone, and they have nowhere to go,” he says.
What is the solution? Perhaps naively, I have leaned toward a one-state solution. It seems to serve as the most practical and peaceful manner to improve the living conditions and security of all inhabitants in Israel/Palestine, no matter their ethnicity or religion. But many commentators, including Neumann and Finkelstein, contend going on such a fanciful quest would only prolong the suffering of the Palestinians. Instead, the swift removal of the Israeli settlers from the West Bank followed then by the creation of an autonomous Palestinians state—free of all Israeli control—would be the quickest and most reasonable method for curtailing the violence.
Neumann’s call for a two-state solution is a popular one, although commentators and policymakers seem to have different interpretations of the meaning of a Palestinian state.
Neumann writes in the book’s Afterword:
“Israel continues to build settlements in the West Bank and has done nothing whatever to confer sovereignty on the Palestinians in any part of the still-Occupied Territories, including Gaza. This means that the Palestinians are still at the mercy of Israel, that Palestinians continue to live and die at Israel’s good pleasure. It means that the encroachment on their vital living space and resources continues.”
Once again, the answer, according to Neumann, is for an immediate and full Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. As he wrote in a memorable CounterPunch essay in the spring of 2003:
“The left needs to demand, as it should have demanded a long time ago, that the U.S. switch sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict. This means that the US should ally itself with the Palestinians and with the Muslim world, against Israel, to secure prompt, unconditional and complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.
‘Against’ means ‘against’, not ‘not with’. It implies a commitment to meet Israeli intransigence with increasingly severe responses, as severe as the United Nations will endorse. A posture of benign neutrality would hardly, in the post-911 sense, ‘change everything’, but switching sides would undoubtedly do so. No one needs shout ‘no war for oil’: changing sides would bring no war *and* oil. It would also instantly reconcile the US with the UN and with its estranged European allies. The war on terror would fight itself; anti-Americanism would go out of fashion in Islam. The civil rights of Arabs and Muslims in America would no longer be an issue. There would be no problem with the US having an inconsistent position on weapons of mass destruction. Even without pure intentions, even without consciousness-raising, the US would recoup everything it has lost since 9-11. Last and least, the clash of civilizations would become an illusion: suddenly it would transpire that Muslims are not really that much more upset about skin on MTV than half the American population."
The Case Against Israel serves as the perfect companion to CounterPunch’s release in 2003 of The Politics of Anti-Semitism, in which Neumann was one of the featured essayists. (Again, The Politics of Anti-Semitism was a book of essays and The Case Against Israel, contrary to Neumann characterizing it as an essay, is simply a book.)
I found The Case Against Israel of much greater value than The Politics of Anti-Semitism, though, because it provided a book-length platform—not individual, disjointed essays—for one of the most astute thinkers on the Israel/Palestine conflict to explain in rich detail the perfectly reasonable reasons why Israel can and should withdrawal from the Occupied Territories for the sake of peace and security for all.