Martin Woollacott is impressed by Ghada Karmi's eloquent argument for a single Israeli-Palestinian state, Married to Another Man.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
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