Why do you support a system of separation between Palestinians and Israelis, rather than one of integration and coexistence?

I used to believe in peaceful coexistence, but those days are long gone. I believe that if there is to be coexistence, both Jew and Arabs should enjoy the same rights AND have the same responsibilities.

Currently, Arabs in Israel proper (pre-1967) are in a sort of “cease-fire” agreement with the state – they enjoy some rights of Israeli citizens like the right to vote, and should (in theory) enjoy fair and equal treatment under the law. BUT they do not recognize the state as a Zionist entity that is the homeland of the Jewish people, and more importantly, they don’t pay taxes and don’t serve in the army, the 2 most important responsibilities the Israeli state requires of its citizens. Thus they enjoy a special status within Israel, one with less rights and less responsibilities. However this inequality in both rights and responsibilities has ended up working against the Arabs’ interests. Because the government does not see tax revenue from Arabs, it does not invest enough in infrastructure in Arab villages. Moreover, many Arabs (though not all) are highered as “untaxed employees” by small, private Israeli businesses to help in manual tasks like painting homes or maintaining a garden. Too often, the untaxed Arabs (like illegal workers) end up being exploited. And because they don’t serve in the army, the Arabs are seen as a security threat.

If there is to be coexistence within Israel between Jew and Arab, there needs to be a compromise so that all the citizens of the state share the same rights and the same responsibilities. But judging by 4 documents published by the Arab leadership in Israel (Adalla, the Monitoring Committee, and others), they propose full and equal rights as Israeli citizens but refuse any cumpolsory army service or equivalent civil service. Many Jews, as well as smaller minorities like Druze and Charkasses and Bahais, view these proposals as creating a “priveleged” Arab class. These proposals, like the status quo, is not a way to coexist.

As for physical separation, this solution has been shown to work in plenty of other troubled areas. For example, Germans were separated from Czechs and Poles after WWII and these days they get along fine. Separation also worked better in Yugoslavia than coexistence – imagine if Yugoslavia was still one country today, there would still be internal chaos and quite possibly ethnic cleansing. Countries in the Middle East faired no better at co-existence, just look at Lebanon.

In my opinion, for a just peace to occur, the Israeli and Palestinian populations need to be physically separated for at least 10 years, with 95 % of the Jews in Israel and 95 % of the Palestinians (including those in Israel proper) in the Palestinian state. Unfortunately I don’t know how to achieve such a solution without major population exchages on both sides, or cantons inside the other’s territories. But brainstorming ideas is what this exchange is for.

PS – yeshar koach Ray, I agree with every point you made in this discussion and want to compliment you on your clear, articulate, and above all realistic line of thinking.

You say you are looking for peace, but how many articles or comments have I read by you in which you suggest that the Americans and Israelis should work to eliminate Hamas from the Palestinian society and government? How do you suggest they do that? With peace? With war? What absurd notion of peace requires war? Can that happen? What gross violence which has been exacted on the Palestinians–violence with bombs, missiles, embargoes–in the name of peace and security!

And then you talk about analyzing “our own” faults, and not just “the enemy.” You have a problem here, which even I, the “extremist” in your words, am not guilty of: you still define “us” as “the Arabs” and “the enemy” as “Israel.” You are wrong. Look at Bil`in, Israelis & Palestinians struggling together. That is real cooperation–just because you can have lunch & drinks and make jokes with an Israeli does not mean you’ve made peace. This is not about Arabs vs Jews or Israelis vs Palestinians; there are many Arabs and Palestinians who are just as complicit in the apartheid system as the Israelis executing it: and there are Israelis more genuinely involved in the struggle than some Palestinians.

You speak about peace, about looking forward, and about struggle, and yet ultimately everything you say, all your analyses, are grounded in supposedly unsurmountable divisions between Palestinians & Israelis and Arabs & Jews, and nothing proves this so well as the absurd generalizations you made in the first paragraph of this comment about “the Arabs.” This is an old idea: if you want to move forward, move beyond this.

In truth, achieving goals comes through not analyzing your enemy’s faults, but through analyzing your own. It’s fundamental to success of any campaign at any level. We need to understand the enemy and those we face, but we need to understand ourselves even more. We don’t. We just point to 1948 and say, “We have a just cause and that’s good enough for me.” It might be good enough for the extremists who exploit Palestinian suffering to create their jobs and their own employment industry — imagine how many people will be out of jobs when peace finally does arrive — but it’s not good enough for Palestinians who recognize that we are where we are at in a large part because we have people who shout with emotion and only act when it is convenient to them.

Winning requires long range planning, intelligence and strategy, not “Hey, I’m mad today. Let’s have a protest tomorrow.”

Just my thoughts and thank you for your comments.

Ray Hanania
http://www.ArabWritersGroup.com

Thanks for reading,

OneVoice Activist

Second, PeacefulVanguard, you talk about the petition’s call for rights for “one group” only. Is there a Palestinian regime running the daily lives of Israelis without giving them a say in their own governance (because no matter what you say, the relationship that the state of Israel has to the Palestinians at the moment is one of governance, oppressive as it is)? If there is, then please show it to me. If there ever is, then we can start organizing to oppose that and to recognize the rights of oppressed Israelis. Until then, though, this misguided talk about “rights for all people” is absurd, and is a meaningless distraction. Were those struggling against the racist South African regime expected to say that they were fighting for the rights of the whites? Your position is absurd and, if even well intentioned, ridiculously naive and insensitive to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

PeacefulVanguard, you champion this One Voice movement, as if it is a “movement” and not just a silly PR party in Tel Aviv. But let me see you supporting the real movement of one voice for Palestinians and Israelis, which is taking place in Bil`in, between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. This is real cooperation; this is real coming together. And it is actually political. They are actually doing something. The One Voice people seem to be acting as if their actions occur in a vacuum and as if refusing to address every pertinent political grievance the Palestinians have is a way of “connecting” and “building understanding.” These things are important–but if you separate them from the political context, they are totally worthless, and will give us nothing.

And Ray, your overwhelming sense of pessimism always disturbs me. You always consider that holding Israel accountable for its actions regrading the Palestinians is “rejectionism.” You think there is no hope for the just, democratic cause of the Palestinians to have equal rights with their Israeli neighbors, and with the 1948 Arabs to have equal rights with their Jewish neighbors in Israel. Theirs is a just cause, and no dosage of perverse “realism” will change that. The very nature of it being a just cause is what makes its success possible in the long run. You are looking for expediency; imagine if African Americans had settled with the 13th and 14th Amendments! Why do you support a system of separation between Palestinians and Israelis, rather than one of integration and coexistence? Coexistence to you seems to mean two countries next to each other–this is an awfully simplistic idea of coexistence. Real coexistence is the coexistence that was there before 1948: between literal neighbors on the same street, not vague neighbors on a geography map.

Returning to PeacefulVanguard: you said something about the illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (which you refer to as Judea and Samaria, as if they belong to Israel); I don’t think the West Bank and Gaza should be void of a Jewish population. I think Arabs and Jews should be free to live where they like anywhere in the countries known as the “Arab world,” and more specifically, anywhere in historical Palestine. You condemn this call for expulsion of the settlers, who live in splendor and luxury while within eye distance Palestinians starve, as if it is unjust–and as if Israel would allow Palestinians to return to land that they actually lived on within the 48 borders!! The sheer hypocrisy of your positions is startling and telling… the peace you are a vanguard for is terribly superficial.

I understand your points but we have to be better than our enemy. I have been to Jerusalem 8 times int he past three years and I am watching in horror as the Palestinian identity in that city is being erased, slowly, steadily and methodically …

The peace process did not fail because the Israeli offers stunk, but because extremists destroyed the peace process on both sides. Every time the Palestinians were about to achieve a milestone in peace with the Israelis under Arafat, Hamas used suicide bombings to destroy the peace process. And the Israeli extremists and terrorists responded, too … they murdered Yitzhak Rabin, their own prime minister to prevent peace with the Palestinians, that is how sinister the Israeli terrorist movement is …

The two-state solution is the only solution … but that means we have to be realistic and accept realistic goals … we cannot expect Palestinian refugees to return to their original pre-1948 homes and lands even though they have a legal internationall sound and justified right to do so. It is legal but not realistic. It ain’t going to happen. So why lie to the refugees. Tell them the truth. We can fight to get them an apology, reecognition finally of their suffering and compensation and new homes in a new Palestine State.

Palestinians must be more principled and more moral than the Israelis. We have to out-principle the Israelis and out-moral the Israelis. Every time the Israeli extremists and terrorists do something, we respond exactly the way we are expected to respond, with a hotheaded response that is neither productive nor strategic. We respond with our anger and emotion and that is the WOST way to respond to anything, unless the sole goal is to make yourself feel good that we avenged or got revenge.

I don’t want revenge. I want to preserve what’s left of Palestine. We were almost there, but Arafat knew he could not convince Palestinians to accept compromise on the right of return and the Israelis knew that and Ehud Barak was treacherous in his phony dealings with Arafat at Camp David. (They NEVER met face to face to negotiate and that was because Barak and Dennis Ross — a true Zionist — prevented it and used it as a means of trying to impose a solution on Arafat) … but we Palestinians responded with anger when a terrorist named Ariel Sharon pushed our button on the Haram al-Ash Sharif and we responded exactly the was he expected us to respond. We got angry, threw stones and gave the Israelis every excuse they wanted to back away from a deal they never intended to follow through on …

We are our worst enemies and until we become smart, strategic and view this not as an emotional issue but as a business deal using our intelligence not emotions, we will NEVER achieve a Palestinian state of any kind.

Now, some of us are happy dying knowing that we rejected everything and refused to give Israel WHAT ISRAEL ALREADY HAS … we thing that by refusing to recognize Israel in reality and fully that somehow we are hurting Israel. The truth is, most Israelis are living their dream … not so perfect … but their dream nonetheless and we are helping … and Palestinians are living their nightmare.

We should wake up and do something … or keep dreaming, keep yelling keep rejecting and keep saying it’s all Israel’s fault.

It’s just as much our fault.

Ray hanania
http://www.ArabWritersGroup.com

Tamara, what’s up, who ever said you are a Jew-hater or warmonger? I may disagree with some of your ideas about how the region can move beyond the current quagmire, but that doesn’t mean I think you hate people or desire war, come on. If we can at least agree that our hearts are in the right place, then we can have a mature discussion about tactics and strategy, which of course will include some difficult discussions. But the process of dialogue is good because it builds trust and understanding. It’s ridiculous for you to say it’s pointless to respond to my comments. Nobody here is trying to cram their ideas down anyone’s throat. Everything is up for discussion. I think it’s obvious we are both capable of showing each other respect even when we disagree, so why not … face to face, eye to eye, as equals, nothing more, nothing less.

Murad, why don’t you tell me what I said that offends you. I’m open minded, and my intention here is just to be honest about my views toward cultivating a real and deep coexistence, it certainly is not to offend anyone, so why don’t you try talking to me instead of about me?