Statement: One country, one state

Press Release, Course Participants, 9 July 2007
For decades, efforts to create a just peace for Palestinians and Israeli Jews have failed. The current crisis has further set back hopes for a political solution to the conflict.

In this context, a group of scholars, journalists and activists met in Madrid, at the invitation of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, for five days of intensive discussion on alternatives to this ongoing impasse, framed by their belief that a democratic state in all of historic Palestine provides the only moral and practical basis for a just, sustainable peace.

Presentations were informed by the understanding that the attempt to partition historic Palestine, regarded by the major powers as a solution to the conflict, has failed to bring about justice and peace or to offer a genuine process leading towards them. It was argued that the two-state approach encourages separation where equality and coexistence are imperative.

Participants presented the two-state approach as failing to take into account physical and political realities on the ground and presuming false parity in power and moral claims between the two peoples.

Discussions ranged through many other issues including the forms of domination Israel exercises over the Palestinians and the racist practices this entails, such as ethnic cleansing, forms of apartheid, a legal system in Israel built on ethnic discrimination, and the denial of the Palestinian right of return, as well as how to define the rights of Israeli Jews. The discussions considered ways of reframing the question in terms of a struggle for equality and justice, equal citizenship for all the people in the land, and decolonization. Participants debated interpretations of international law, the nature of the conflict, Zionism, the role of religion, and re-imagining national identities.

Many issues for further discussion, action and research emerged, including forms of internal and international solidarity with Palestinians (such as boycott, divestment and sanctions), the lessons from other similarly structured conflicts including South Africa and Northern Ireland, rethinking the relationship between state and citizen, and how to organize a post-conflict society so that it provides a secure and dignified life to Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

The participants shared a committment to engaging deeply with these issues, in the context of their commitment to a democratic solution that will offer an enduring and just peace in a single state, and invite the widest possible participation in this quest.

The participants in the conference were:

Ali Abunimah
Omar Barghouti
Oren Ben-Dor
George Bisharat
Haim Bresheeth
Pedro Chavez Giraldo
Jonathan Cook
Leila Farsakh
Steven Friedman
Islah Jad
Joseph Massad
Ilan Pappe
Carlos Prieto Del Campo
Nadim Rouhana
Michael Tarazi
Virginia Tilley

This press release was issued on 6 July 2007 by the speakers in the course "Palestine-Israel: Un Pais, Un Estado," which took place from 2-6 July 2007 as part of the Summer Program of Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Agenda in English

Whose Coup, Exactly?

Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 18 June 2007
Having sacked Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and dissolved his democratically-elected government, Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas has now installed Salam Fayyad as the new Prime Minister, to the clear delight of the West. Mutual accusations are hurled by Abbas and Haniyeh that the other side launched a coup against the legitimate authority. Nevertheless, now a fresh line of grave Palestinian faces has lined up before the cameras as Fayyad's new "emergency government" is sworn in. That the new PA has virtually no power in the West Bank, and none at all in Gaza, is the first glaring problem with this pageantry. (Bitter jokes about a 'two-state solution' consisting of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have circulated.)

An international community worried by the 'coup' accusation might endorse the Fayyad government as the seemingly correct position. But the 'coup' claim stumbles over a basic problem -- that Abbas's appointing a new prime minister was itself entirely illegal. The new 'emergency government' is illegal, too. According to the Basic Law of Palestine (as amended in 2003), which serves as the constitution of the PA, Abbas can do neither of these things. Nor can the new 'emergency government' claim any democratic mandate. This means that Abbas and the Fayyad government are ruling by decree, outside the framework of the Basic Law. So on what basis is that government supposed to govern -- and on what basis are foreign governments supposed to deal with it?

According to the Basic Law, Abbas has violated a whole stream of Articles as well as the spirit of its checks and balances, which were designed during the Arafat era partly to limit the power of the presidency. With full US and Israel support (if not their insistence), Abbas has baldly trashed numerous provisions of the Basic Law, including:

The President can sack his Prime Minister (Article 45) but he cannot legally appoint a new Prime Minister that does not represent the majority party (i.e., Hamas).

In the event that a President sacks the PM, the Government is considered to have resigned (Article 83), but the serving Cabinet (here, the Hamas-led Cabinet) is supposed to govern until a new Cabinet is confirmed by the Legislative Council (Article 78).

Only the Legislative Council can confirm the new PM and Cabinet and the new officials cannot take their oaths (Article 67) or assume their duties (Article 79) until this is done. We might now look for the Fayyad government to go to the Legislative Council for post hoc approval, but if the Legislative Council cannot vote for lack of a quorum -- because too many of its members are in jail or refuse to participate -- then the Cabinet cannot be legally confirmed. The Basic Law provides no remedy for conditions where the Legislative Council cannot vote to confirm the Cabinet or the actions of the President.

The President can rule by degree during emergencies (Article 43) but the Legislative Council must approve all these decrees at its first meeting.

The President cannot suspend the Legislative Council during a state of emergency (Article 113).

The President has no power to call early elections, either.

The Basic Law has no provision whatsoever for an "emergency government."

What does this mean for the PA? It is no longer the same animal. The Fayyad government is the step-child of an extra-legal process with no democratic mandate. The whole manoeuvre is not precisely a palace coup, but it is something like it.

What does this mean for the world? Foreign governments now confront one of the most unwelcome events in international diplomacy -- the sudden transformation of a government into a different kind of government. As in any revolution or coup, diplomatic recognition of Salam Fayyad's "emergency Government" as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people must now be reassessed. For example, by what authority does the "emergency government" act in the name of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? What capacities and responsibilities does the "emergency government" now have? On what legal and political bases are diplomatic relations to be sustained?

We must admit that these are legal but also political questions. The PA is the invention of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords (it was supposed to serve for a period "not exceeding five years").

But the Basic Law was developed later, to confirm and ensure its democratic character. This set of laws represented a Palestinian state-building measure, providing a start-up framework for Palestinian democracy in anticipation (or at least affirmation) of eventual Palestinian statehood.

Hence the Basic Law refers in its introduction to the 1995 Oslo 2 accord but also invokes the Palestinian people as its ultimate political authority (Article 2: "... the people are the source of power ..."). Governments may therefore attempt to justify sustaining relations with the new Fayyad government out of solidarity with the Palestinian national effort -- albeit one in crisis.

Still, in attempting this, foreign governments now face dubious and perplexing options:

They could suspend diplomatic relations with the Fayyad government, on grounds that it is illegal, and deal with the elected Haniyeh government. But this might cripple their communication with Ramallah at a critical time and put them at odds with the US and Israel.

They could sustain diplomatic relations with the Fayyad government, accepting its claim that the Hamas government launched a coup, but they would then be endorsing a government that is violating its own laws and has itself effectively pulled a coup.

They could accept the new Fayyad government on condition that it now obey other provisions of the Basic Law, such as gaining Legislative Council approval and/or calling new elections. But the Basic Law doesn't allow the Cabinet to call new elections and this new Cabinet doesn't have any legal standing to govern anyway. (It's also hard to see how new national elections could be held when the Haniyeh government refuses to recognize the new Cabinet and conditions in both territories are so contrary to free and fair elections.)

They could pull a classic diplomatic side-step by calling the situation a temporary constitutional crisis and maintaining relations with both sides, but this tactic will quickly bog down because present events look more like the complete collapse of the Basic Law and its framework.

Facing this mess, they could do a back-step: suspend formal diplomatic relations but maintain communication with both sides, pending further developments, but what about those formal agreements (exchange, trade, security, diplomatic representation) they may have signed with the PA? Which side is truly representative and to whom are they accountable?

There are other legalistic maneuvers they could try, such as treating the PA under terms established by the Oslo Accords or the Gaza-Jericho agreement of 1994. But none of those documents provide for a prime minister or any of the procedures being acted out in Ramallah.

In short, the diplomatic landscape is now in utter disarray. The Fayyad Government has no democratic mandate, is not operating by the very rules that establish its democratic legitimacy, and so is only a facsimile of the 'government' with which many of the world's states established diplomatic relations. It does not help that the United States, an obedient Europe, and legless Arab states have trotted up to anoint it as the sole legitimate authority. Nor does it help to pretend that Hamas -- a broad movement with popular legitimacy -- will simply disappear through decrees from Abbas and some nice political theatre.

It is not clear how long this flimsy diplomatic pretense can hold up to scrutiny by a skeptical world. Nor is it clear what political costs foreign governments will have to absorb if they try to play along with it -- especially when the now-traumatized Palestinian people, in the territories and in Diaspora, begin protesting their government's being hijacked by anti-democratic figureheads for Israeli and US agendas. Being targeted as supporting this pantomime government was not the goal of those governments who recognized the PA to support the Palestinian people. As UN official Alvaro De Soto put it in his eloquent 'End of Mission Report' this May, 'It may be better to be the one who raises questions about the Emperor's new clothes than to be ridiculed as the naked Emperor oneself.'

Virginia Tilley is a US citizen now working in Pretoria, South Africa. She can be reached at vtilley AT mweb DOT co DOT za.

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BY TOPIC: Key Events: Civil War in Palestine?

On the Academic Boycott of Israel

Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 27 May 2007
Academics don't like academic boycotts. In fact, we detest external limits of any kind. We treasure our own universities for offering precious sanctuary for critical debate (even though they rarely do) and we don't like to see any of them banned, even for ostensibly laudable reasons. Sure, universities in some countries are little more than fig leaves for their regimes. But that's not usually their fault. So we avoid the lectures of state hacks rather than denounce them and we protect the universities so that they can nurture that rare point of light.

Still, in very exceptional cases, an academic boycott comes onto our agenda. This happens when a country's universities are recognized as central players in legitimizing a regime that systematically inflicts massive human rights abuses on its own people and any pretence that the universities are independent fortresses of principled intellectual thought becomes too insulting to the human conscience. But since universities in many oppressive regimes fit those criteria, in practice a second condition is required: their faculties have the freedom to act differently.

In democratic countries where human rights abuses abound as rampantly as in Israel, it is not tenable that faculty entertain and promote the notion that their institutions -- cranking out the architects and professional foot soldiers of occupation -- have no role in those abuses and can join in mixed company as fine upstanding members of the international scholarly club. It is especially not tenable when universities themselves perpetrate discrimination in their research and their grants and admission policies. University faculties are supposed to hold their institutions accountable to basic standards of objectivity, fairness, and non-discrimination. Where they are capable of acting on those standards and refuse, the hack becomes the hypocrite. Moral paralysis becomes moral culpability.

On this reasoning, back in the 1980s offended foreign academics launched an academic boycott of apartheid South Africa, whose universities were finally rightly identified as bastions of white supremacy and whose white faculties, privileged by racial democracy, could be held accountable. Similarly, we now see a boycott of Israeli universities being urged by, among others, Britain's University and College Union. Israeli academics, naturally enough, are appalled by the idea of a boycott and the Israeli government is worried that the idea is gaining momentum. Hence an Israeli academic delegation has to come to England to wage battle against the boycott, and all the old banners once waved by apartheid's defenders -- 'academic freedom', 'balance', 'proportionality' -- are being waved again in this one.

Israeli academic arguments are indeed too reminiscent of apartheid South Africa to escape the comparison. Especially, South African academics trying to defeat the boycott typically avoided discussing the abuses of apartheid. Israeli academic arguments against the boycott also do not discuss the reason for it, which is Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and the subjugation of almost four million civilians under military rule. Instead, they stress the need for 'balance' -- which, in Israeli parlance, is a code word for shifting attention entirely away from the occupation to reiterate a tired canon of Israeli innocence, victimhood, and deniability. And because they do not discuss the occupation, they do not address their own universities' responsibility for it.

Whatever our conceits of political neutrality, academics never work in a vacuum. In conflict zones, our work is as inherently political as any other activity. For example, let us briefly suspend disbelief and accept Ben-Gurion University Professor Zvi Hacohen's claim, cited in Ha'aretz (15 May 2007) that 'there is widespread cooperation between our universities and Palestinian and Jordanian universities', although he does not specify what this 'widespread' cooperation is. His argument is hardly supported by Palestinian faculty, whose only public voice on the question has been to support the boycott.

But in any case, he cannot pretend that such collaboration is apolitical when Palestinian research partners are held captive under draconian military rule by his own government and the occupation is wrecking their families' hopes and lives, their institutions' viability, and their entire community's basic safety. Nor can he pretend that his own university is politically neutral when it subsists partly on privileges gained by such appalling human rights violations and conducts research designed to preserve and strengthen those privileges.

Ignoring such complicity is not neutral: it is enabling. It promotes a veneer of normalcy over a ghastly human rights situation and so helps shelter it from scrutiny.

Israel's defenders in this controversy also protest that a boycott violates the moral economy of academic work. 'Communication, understanding and international collaboration is what this field is all about,' said Professor Miriam Schlesinger of Bar Ilan University, who was asked to resign from the board of a translation journal because she is Israeli. Yet the ethic of communication, understanding, and collaboration with Palestinian universities is precisely what Israeli universities have unacceptably abandoned. Instead, Israeli scholars are casually allowing Palestinian institutions to crumble on their doorsteps, at the hands of their own government, while they themselves share elevated discussions in the paneled salons of Oxford and Cambridge.

A third argument is that a boycott is too sweeping, punishing Israel's intellectual progressives along with nationalist reactionaries and passive enablers. Schlesinger even calls it 'collective punishment' -- an unfortunate reference, since Israel's occupation and brutalization of some 4 million people is often denounced as collective punishment and the phrase suggests, again, that peculiar Israeli interpretation of the word 'balance'. Yet collective punishment is wrong where collective responsibility is lacking. Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp are not capable of controlling and therefore not responsible for what some militants do to resist occupation, and resisting occupation is a human right in any case. Israeli professors have the capacity to take a stand against human rights abuses furthered by their own institutions and therefore have the moral responsibility to do so.

Hence it is also false moral symmetry for Dr. Schlesinger to equate her right to serve on the board of an academic journal with the right of Palestinian students to university education. She was denied her board position not just because she is Israeli but because she is complicit, through the privileges and power she enjoys through her nationality and her job, with a brutal occupation. Palestinians are being denied their right to education solely because they are not Jews. The former ban, even if controversial, is a moral gesture; the latter ban is a racist one.

A fourth argument is that Israel is being unfairly singled out. For example, since the US and Britain have recently teamed up to kill, or cause to die or be killed, hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, surely a better case can be made for boycotting them. This argument trips over the grave of South African apartheid, however, for South Africa attempted the same claim of proportionality and the world had none of it. For one thing, state sins are not measured by death counts alone, nor are they ranked by their measurable gravity. If they were, we would focus on just one conflict at a time.

For another, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip is not a foreign policy gone wrong. The entire Israeli state system -- its laws, its policies, its ideology of Jewish statehood, the privileges that serve its Jewish-national society -- is implicated in a grand demographic strategy to exclude, imprison, and subjugate some 50 percent of the state's own territorial population solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. This distinguishes Israel from other states behaving badly by casting it into the particular moral abyss of an apartheid state.

And there's the rub. The small but growing international boycott of Israel signals that the political ground is shifting -- that its occupation is sliding conceptually, if not yet legally, into an apartheid model. The UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhuman acts' similar to apartheid, such as 'the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups' by denying 'the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality [citizenship], the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association'. The Convention particularly prohibits any measures 'designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos'.

If this package does not sound like Israel's military rule over Palestinians, it is hard to imagine what apartheid outside South Africa would look like or how the Convention might ever be applied again.

Israel hotly rejects the apartheid analogy, of course, partly on grounds that Palestinians are not a racial group but a national or ethnic group (defined in the negative, as non-Jews). Also, Palestinians are not supposed to be Israel's citizens, but rather are considered citizens of some nonexistent state that may exist some time in the future. But no one looking at the dismembered and walled West Bank enclaves now left to the Palestinians can imagine that these prison camps are intended to constitute a state, and the distinction between ethnicity and race in this context is losing all meaning. The A-word is everywhere now, and the boycott is one signal that the apartheid paradigm is seeding broadly into international civil society. Israel's hapless academics are fast losing ground fast to its growth.

Because they are in denial about the horrors of the occupation itself, Israeli academics protesting the boycott may not grasp its real purpose, which is to force them to confront those horrors. It is not acceptable for them to insist on ivory-tower privileges with so terrible a human rights catastrophe as the occupation stark on their doorstep, perpetrated by their own government and involving their own institutions in its cruelties and deceptions. When Dr. Schlesinger protests that being treated according to her nationality rather than her individual character 'was a blow,' she misses the entire point. To claim a right to principled treatment, one must extend it to others. Israeli academics must become serious about according their Palestinian colleagues the dignity and respect they expect themselves. When they do, given their formidable talents and resources, the occupation will face its toughest opponents.

Virginia Tilley is a US citizen now working as a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. She is the author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock.

Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left

Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left
Steven Friedman and Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2007

A Response to Uri Avnery

...it may seem odd that many people working hard for a stable peace in Israel-Palestine find Mr. Avnery so immensely irritating. The reason stems from his moral contradictions, all too common to liberal Zionism: that is, while taking an unflinching moral stand against racist abuses of Palestinians, he somehow drops the same principles in assuming that Israel itself has a right to preserve its "Jewish character" at the expense of Palestinian rights. For it is all too obvious that sustaining an "overwhelming" Jewish majority in Israel, essential to preserving its "Jewish character," requires that Israel sustain a whole cluster of racist practices, such as giant Walls to keep people from mixing and not allowing Palestinian exiles to return.

Liberal Zionists who cling to Mr. Avnery's analyses consistently trip over this moral fallacy. They want the occupation to end and find oppression of Palestinians morally abhorrent, and some even believe that discrimination against Palestinian Arabs must end. But they don't want Israel's status as a state run for only one ethnic group to end. They must therefore endorse whatever discrimination is deemed essential to preserving Israel's Jewish majority, particularly in keeping those Palestinians expelled from what is now Israel from ever coming back. In this view, Israel itself is morally okay -- a "miracle," as David Grossman recently put it -- or it would be okay if its leaders hadn't stupidly stumbled into military occupation after the 1967 war.

The result of this conundrum is moral chaos. While bald ravings about ethnic cleansing by racists like Avigdor Lieberman are considered repellent, the earlier ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel is considered acceptable -- a convulsion of war violence that has (it is never explained how) been morally transcended. The solution, in this view, is not to redress that founding sin but simply to stabilize Jewish statehood, which is understood mostly as relieving Jewish-Israeli fear of attack or annihilation. Recognizing that some modicum of justice is required to achieve this "peace", the liberal-Zionist goal is to create a Palestinian state next door (safely demilitarized, of course, and not necessarily within the 1948 green line).

It takes a special kind of denial to hold onto this worldview, especially in light of fresh histories like Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which demolish the soothing fantasy that Israel's history of ethnic cleansing was an accident of war. This isn't surprising in itself: nationalist myths everywhere dismantle slowly. But Mr. Avnery does not fall into the classic category. He exposed Zionist crimes before anyone else. Yet he has never lost his affection for Jewish statehood or his dedication to preserving Israel's Jewish majority in Israel. He knows that, in 1948, Zionist troops ruthlessly terrorized and expelled hundreds of thousands of defenceless Palestinians from their villages and threw them out of the country. But he believes that the agenda of preserving the Jewish-Israeli society that he treasures not only mandates but grants moral authority to not allowing them back.

It is from this muddle of contradictory tenets that Mr. Avnery approaches the "apartheid" charge, given new publicity by President Carter's recent book. In a recent Counterpunch essay, "Freedom Ride: Israel and Apartheid", he rejects any lessons the comparison suggests for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


This article was widely submitted to the many “alternative” websites that regularly publish Uri Avnery’s writings, including his piece “Death of a Myth” which is critiqued here. Most either ignored it or refused to publish it, revealing the esteem in which the tiny Zionist left in Israel – of which Avnery is the figurehead – is held by Western radicals. Miftah was one brave exception.

Uri Avnery’s original article, “Death of a Myth”, can be found at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7850

A Reply to Uri Avnery's 'Death of a Myth'
Miftah
Date posted: May 17, 2005
By Jonathan Cook

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read Uri Avnery’s recent offering, "Death of a Myth", about the deathbed confession of Naomi Shemer regarding "Jerusalem of Gold", her song that became a second Israeli national anthem after the Six-Day War of 1967.

The Israeli public was apparently duped: Shemer had plagiarised the song from a Basque lullaby she had heard a few years earlier. Her defence was that the melody had been absorbed into her subconscious.

As Avnery implicitly admits, no one was more fooled than he. At the time of the Six-Day War, he was a member of the Knesset and unsuccessfully tried to pass a law to have the song replace the national anthem, "Hativkah" or "The Hope".

It would be nice to believe Avnery’s account of his behaviour and motives in the late 1960s in relation to promoting this "immortal song" as he calls it. But I suspect this retrospective view of his thinking around the time of the Six-Day War is another dose of the myth-making which Shemer indulged in for most of her life.

The evidence? Let’s consider the following account of Avnery’s position - not with the benefit of nearly 40 years of personal hindsight but from a book written a few years after 1967. Fouzi el-Asmar, an Arab intellectual from Lod who was much persecuted by the Israeli authorities, was working in Tel Aviv’s leftwing media with Avnery at the time of the Six-Day War.

In his book "To Be an Arab in Israel" (unfortunately, long out of print), el-Asmar recalls the extremely fearful and tense popular atmosphere in Israel just before the outbreak of war - and the extreme change of mood that swept the country after Israel’s rapid victory over the Arab armies arrayed against it.

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It is fortunate for Avnery that this book, one of the few accounts of the early Israeli left written in English by an Arab citizen, has been almost impossible to obtain since it was printed in 1976.

No one should hold it against Avnery that he has changed his positions repeatedly during the nearly six decades of Israeli history. But let him not judge the confessions of Naomi Shemer until he is a prepared to make a confession or two himself.