Two people, one state - deal with them together

Maher Mughrabi, The Age, May 15, 2008
The unique Palestinian-Israeli situation demands a different approach.
In August 2004, the Israeli politician Shulamit Aloni received an invitation to a memorial. The event being commemorated was a massacre of Jews by Arabs in the city of Hebron during British rule of Palestine in 1929. The invitation said that it would be a state occasion, attended by Reuven Rivlin, then speaker of Israel's parliament.

In July 2006, this time in Jerusalem, a ceremony was held to honour the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel by members of the Zionist underground fighting British rule. That attack killed 91 people. The ceremony was not sponsored by the state, but it was attended by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former Israeli prime minister and the country's opposition leader.

The King David ceremony drew a protest from the British ambassador to Israel, who objected to "an act of terrorism" being dignified. Yet for Netanyahu and many other Israelis, that bombing is part of a heroic liberation struggle.

This year, for Israelis and Palestinians, is punctuated by anniversaries from 60 years ago. But as we have seen, who you are can play a big part in what you choose to remember, and how. It can even divide people according to when they remember: Palestinians today mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, using the Gregorian calendar, while Jews mark the same event — Yom Ha'Atzmaut, or independence day — on May 8, using the Hebrew calendar.

That one nation's triumph is another's injury might strike us as obvious — that's history. But what happens when two peoples lay claim to one land?
When she got her invitation to the memorial, Aloni was quick to note that Hebron — which is called al-Khalil in Arabic, in memory of the patriarch Abraham — is not inside the recognised boundaries of the state of Israel. By contrast, Deir Yassin — which in April 1948 was the scene of a massacre of Arabs by Jews — is inside those boundaries.

There is no place in Israel's official memory for those killed at Deir Yassin. The village was razed and a mental health complex built on the site.

Elsewhere in Israel, the Arab village of Ein Houd, near Haifa, still stands, but today is an Israeli artists' colony.

Some of the families driven from its houses can be found two kilometres up the hill, living in "New Ein Houd", a village they built without Israeli government approval.

At the height of the peace process in 1994, the state recognised that village's existence and moved to give its inhabitants — Israeli citizens, lest we forget — mains electricity and roads. Within 18 months, a new government had withdrawn that recognition and funding.

Those who talk about peace between Palestinians and Israelis today frequently talk about separate states for separate peoples, before going on to congratulate Israel on 60 years of statehood.

But as today's armed Jewish settlers in the occupied territories and unrecognised villagers in Israel show, the two peoples do not live in separate spaces but under separate regimes.

It is this separation that affects Palestinians whether they hold Israeli passports, live under occupation in the West Bank or under siege in the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian cannot build a house, plant a tree, buy land, ask someone for their hand in marriage or vote in an election without wondering when Israeli state power might undo their decision.

Israel's supporters often point out that Palestinians suffer discrimination in surrounding Arab countries as well. It is true, and Palestinians haven't forgotten. But there is a crucial difference: when Israel does these things, it does them to Palestinians in the place they come from.

It is the failure to recognise this simple fact — that there is no past and no present between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the Palestinian Arabs — that has doomed all talk of peace for more than 80 years.

A few Jewish Israelis have grasped this, forming groups such as Zochrot (Remembrance), dedicated to marking Palestinian presence on the land, or Yesh Gvul (There Is A Limit), which seeks to pull Israeli soldiers back to the Green Line that is the state's only recognised boundary (and which for years has been absent from Israel's school textbooks). There are Israelis fighting alongside Palestinians for equal rights.

But what would it look like if world leaders grasped this principle? Firstly, it would mean no mention of Israel's achievement without connecting it to the facts of Palestinian deprivation and the need for reconciliation.

Reconciliation would require foreign governments to avoid meeting Israeli leaders without democratically elected Palestinian leaders present, and vice versa. Trade and cultural relations would also have to acknowledge that until there are two recognised and sovereign states, Palestinians and Israelis must be engaged with in tandem or not at all.

In modern international relations, this would be a highly unusual arrangement. But to pretend that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are separate parties on an equal footing, and that the usual approach to peacemaking between states therefore applies, is to condemn both peoples to further years of fruitless photo opportunities in foreign capitals while ordinary people are killed in their streets and homes.

Maher Mughrabi is a staff writer and part of the Palestinian diaspora.