AN EQUAL RIGHTS CAMPAIGN

Key to the End of Zionism

Ghada Karmi

IN EARLY 2020, when London went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, I enrolled, like many others, in an online course that I could study at home. The subject, “Concepts in Psychoanalysis,” was something that had always interested me. The lecturer was a Jewish South African and, whether by coincidence or not, many of my fellow course students were Jewish, too.

During a session on memory, the lecturer asked for volunteers to put forward their own significant memories for analysis by the class. It so happened that I had earlier given her a copy of my memoir, “In Search of Fatima,” which relates the story of my family’s forced departure from Jerusalem in 1948 and our subsequent life in exile. Presumably because of this, she asked me to contribute a personal memory to the class. I decided to choose the moment in April 1948 when we left Jerusalem for the last time. I was a child, and my memory was of clinging to the garden gate, trying to soothe the much-loved family dog we would have to leave behind as he clambered frantically to be let out. I could have been any child in similar circumstances, and I thought it would come across as poignant and touching.

The lecturer agreed to my choice but, on the day of the class, she phoned me, clearly very agitated, to say that she had been thinking it over and feared my revelations would provoke a political argument in the class. Her course, she insisted, was academic not political, and things might get out of control. At that time, May 2021, dramatic Palestinian uprisings were taking place in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and she was afraid passions would already be inflamed amongst her Jewish audience. None of my efforts to point out that she was the one in control of the class and could stop a discussion that got out of hand succeeded in pacifying her. Her anxiety was that the Jewish members would be upset by my memories because they related to the events of Israel’s creation. A Jewish friend, also on the course, explained to me afterwards that describing my pain and loss could assign the blame to Jews. That, in turn, could suggest that Israel should not have come into existence. What a terrible calamity that would have been, she lamented, depriving Holocaust victims of their only refuge at the time.

Apparently, when the lecturer agreed earlier to my speaking at the session, she had not realized the implications of her decision, and had now panicked. It appeared that the upset that my story might cause a Jewish audience outweighed my own in losing my home and country. She would not change her mind, and I felt that I had no choice but to withdraw my contribution altogether—whereupon she was enormously apologetic and begged me to understand, which left me wondering what exactly it was I had to understand. That Jewish feelings were more important than Palestinian ones?

This small anecdote encapsulates, for me, the essence of the Palestinian predicament with Zionism: how it insists on the primacy of Jewish suffering over that of its victims; how it assumes that Jews have a right to settle in another people’s homeland because they have suffered; and how it promotes the non sequitur of linking Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with Palestine, whose people had in no way been responsible for it. Such arrogant, self-centered notions might have made sense in a context of revenge exacted on an antisemitic Europe, but they made none when exercised against an innocent people who had never harmed Jews as a collective. In order to disguise this flawed logic, it has been necessary to silence the Palestinian version of events from the start, just as, in her own way, our Zionist lecturer saw no alternative but to silence me.

That, essentially, has been the story of my life in exile in England. I grew up suffocated by the assumption of everyone around me that Jews were entitled to Palestine. This view was entrenched in the Britain of the 1950s and, despite a later awareness of Palestinian suffering, it never changed. That a whole population of Palestinians had been ejected from their homeland to make Israel happen, was largely unknown and of no concern to anyone at the time. Our flight from Jerusalem, amidst the violence and disruption of the Jewish takeover of our part of the city in 1948, had been part of a much larger and immensely tragic Palestinian exodus. Yet, in the 1950s and most of the ’60s, Palestinian history formed no part of Israel’s story, and no alternative narrative was given a platform. Our silence was the condition enabling Israel’s credibility.

My understanding of Palestine’s modern history was shaped by this experience. Israel’s legitimacy as a member of the community of nations was so firmly implanted into Western consciousness it was impossible to dislodge, even from those who knew the truth. We stuck to the conviction of our undying right to our homeland—one day, we said, our country would be free, and it would be returned to us. In those early days we did not think of this natural right in the context of “liberation”: the foreign settlers who had taken over our country were seen as more like thieves and outlaws, to be evicted to wherever they had come from as soon as possible. Our ire was focused on Britain as the treacherous colonizing power that had given Palestine to these people. However, this view could not hold out against a changing reality. The outlaws of earlier times morphed into a State admired and cherished by the West. The late 1960s saw Israel celebrated as a heroic victor over three Arab states which, together, could not defeat this “plucky little State.” The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 which brought about this Arab defeat also led to the loss of the rest of Palestine. Israel expanded its colonial rule to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, where its hold was rapidly consolidated by building Jewish settler colonies in these territories.

It was in this environment that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) became established and was coming into its own. Created in 1964 to liberate the homeland, as its name clarified, its effect on us was profound. It changed the language of struggle against Israel, making it one of anti-colonial liberation and part of the other national liberation struggles. The PLO came to support all progressive and revolutionary movements, such as those in Cuba, Nicaragua, Namibia and South Africa. This dimension influenced our understanding of the national struggle and gave those of us in exile an aim and a role in it. After all, the PLO had sprung up out of exile, its leaders and fighters were in exile, and it held out the promise of regaining the homeland and ending that exile. In those years, the PLO’s existence was a marvel for us, a symbolic homeland to which we could belong while waiting for the true liberation. It is hard to overestimate its importance as a foundation of our renaissance, and a beacon of hope for the prospects of regaining Palestine. Its ambitious bid to represent the whole of the Palestinian community through its 740-member “parliament-in-exile,” the Palestine National Council, was a balm to the soul of a battered and fragmented people.

My political activism and that of many others were nurtured by the PLO’s existence, the breadth of meaning it gave to our ubiquitous struggle and how it must be fought in every arena. Despite this euphoria, I was not blind to the PLO’s shortcomings and the limitations of its ability to achieve its ambitions. The chances of success for any liberation movement were poor under the conditions the Palestinians had to operate in, fighting against Israel from outside Palestine, and forced to contend with a range of unreliable Arab states which might betray them. At the same time, though, I felt released from the impotence of having to watch my compatriots fighting and dying in Palestine, while unable to help them from afar. The PLO showed me the way to join the struggle.

Though Fatah’s first military operation against Israel in 1965 reaffirmed the Palestinian right to resistance through armed struggle, it was never the only or the most successful path to liberation. This took many forms: political, diplomatic and cultural. In the late 1960s and ’70s, the PLO developed a governing structure and established an array of civil society institutions and professional unions. It reflected at once the aspiration to create a State, even though in exile, and a wished-for return to some semblance of Palestinian life as it had been before 1948.

Given the power imbalance with Israel and the global consensus to maintain it, these were wild aspirations at that time. Nonetheless, the PLO, as an idea just as much as a concrete reality, succeeded in inspiring the majority of Palestinians. It was a call to arms that they could not resist, and it galvanized them and the growing number of their supporters into action. I remember the dizzying excitement of feeling that I was sharing in a great enterprise, as if our efforts really would achieve Palestine’s liberation, and I saw myself as a warrior in this endeavor. But what did liberating Palestine mean when I did not live there or even in its vicinity?

This became the spur to the realization that literature and storytelling, poetry and art, films and plays and the media, could become weapons equal—or even superior—to any on the field of battle. In the pro-Israel environment of the England I grew up in, I saw my work of liberation as a battle using these means to change hearts and minds and bend them towards our cause. The early 1970s saw a ferment of Palestine activism, commencing with Free Palestine, a small organization, which briefly wrote and spoke about the Palestine cause. In 1972, a number of us founded Palestine Medical Aid, the first medical charity of its kind in Britain later to become Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). In the company of a few colleagues, I started Palestine Action, (not to be confused with the group of the same name currently active in Britain) a year later. It was the first political organization for Palestine dedicated to lobbying the British government and British public opinion. We used the conventional methods of letter-writing to influential people, demonstrations, media appearances and newspaper advertising. We met the Foreign Secretary at the time, Alex Douglas-Home, along with other junior members of government, and wrote to the Queen, gratified to receive some positive responses.

Our aim in all this was to put the Palestine issue on the political map in Britain and counter the Zionist narrative that had taken hold of the British public. In 1974, the first PLO representative to the UK, Said Hammami, was appointed as part of a Palestinian diplomatic effort to solidify the Palestine cause internationally. This development boosted our work and, ultimately, superseded it. Palestine Action went on being active until the end of the 1970s, when it finally petered out. Not long afterwards, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was established, to be followed by other British solidarity groups, and the trend towards organized Palestinian support in Britain was established. Together with others, I became active in writing opinion pieces for the press and publishing books and research studies. Edward Said’s highly influential The Question of Palestine was released in 1979, and his writings continued to promote the case effectively until his death in 2003, and beyond.

Two important literary genres that came later, and should have appeared far earlier, were the memoir and the novel. Nothing is more calculated to open the eyes and reach the hearts of people than a personal account and an imaginative tale that conveys the Palestinian experience. Such books had long been published in the Arab world, but unless translated, they were inaccessible to the Western reader. In the context of liberation, personal histories and stories were best written in European languages and, in view of the role they played in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the English language of Britain and the US was particularly important. In these literary and artistic endeavors, we sought to synchronize our efforts with the political and military actions on the ground to make the struggle more effective.

These days the Palestinian experience, conveyed in literature, theater and film, has become increasingly familiar in the West. However, the liberation we strove for, and the point of the exercise, is no closer, perhaps even further away. The reality today is that Israel is in colonial control of the whole of historic Palestine. In this space, the Palestinians are either second-class Israeli citizens, or non-citizens without rights in the post-1967 territories. The latter are doubly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, which is subservient to the colonial power and is ordered to police Palestinian lives and oppose any resistance against their oppression. How can liberation happen under such conditions, and what does it mean? The two-state solution, touted for decades as the best way forward for Israel and the Palestinians, would not constitute liberation, even if it ever were to happen. The 22 percent of Palestine that would make up the Palestinian state, as offered by this solution, is no substitute for the freedom of the whole country. Partly because of this, though mostly by conviction, many have turned to the one-state solution as the route to liberation: the creation of a democratic, equal society for Palestinians and Jews.

The aim of replacing the colonialist, apartheid State of Israel with a democracy with equal rights for all is not new and was first proposed by the PLO in 1969. In a remarkably forward-looking vision, given the circumstances at the time, Fatah had put forward its idea of “the Palestine of tomorrow,” a progressive, democratic, non-sectarian state where all would have equal rights. It acknowledged, for the first time, the physical presence in Palestine of a Jewish community that included not just native Palestinian Jews, but also settlers who had to be accommodated in the new state with justice and equality. The proposal rejected the idea of a Palestinian ministate, for example in Gaza and the West Bank, which would merely amount to a Bantustan; and equally rejected a binational state that could replicate Lebanon’s failed confessional arrangement. In the non-sectarian state, the PLO envisioned that the Palestinian Right of Return would be fulfilled, with other migrations to come later, and instituted according to an agreed state policy.

The democratic state proposal was not welcomed by most Palestinians. For many, it meant an acceptance of the Zionist invader in Palestine, and an intolerable concession to the enemy. Others feared exploitation and domination in a single state by the more technologically advanced Jews; still others feared the new state would form a legitimized bridgehead for Jewish economic penetration into the Arab world and, most importantly, the proposal threatened to weaken the Palestinian fighting spirit and quash resistance. Similar fears are still present today and used to oppose the proponents of the one-state solution. Nevertheless, the idea has caught on amongst many Palestinians and in public opinion at large, where it is no longer seen as a utopian dream of a few oddballs and idealists. Many groups and individuals have adopted the unitary, democratic state idea and have been striving to make it happen. Their progress is slow, but unforeseen events could accelerate it, especially given the current wave of unprecedented popular support for Palestine in Europe, the US and among American Jews.

Despite this growing popular acceptance, however, there is currently no formal support for the one-state solution in any country. No state or political institution has adopted it and, even though it has gained increasing recognition in the last two decades, it has attained nowhere near the international consensus reached over the two-state solution. Meanwhile, Israel will not remain idle in expanding its colonizing project, stealing more Palestinian land and expelling more Palestinians. Parallel to this, it will be working overtime to reverse its negative image in the world, using every ruse and straining every muscle to counter the push from the other side. The fight between the parties was always unequal, and the odds are still tipped in Israel’s favor.

So, what is to be done? If we agree that full liberation can only come about with the creation of an equitable, inclusive democracy in place of the current Zionist, apartheid state that is Israel, then the only question to be answered is, “How can it be brought about?” Israel today is de facto one state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It has a population of 6.6 million Israeli Jews with citizenship and full rights, 1.8 million Israeli Palestinians with citizenship and partial rights, and 4.7 million Palestinians with no citizenship and no rights. So far, Israel has managed to maintain this inequitable arrangement, even to normalize it, for more than 50 years, evading international conventions and violating human rights norms. No world power or international body has been able, or willing, to end this blatant inequity—or looks likely to. In the absence of such intervention, it is the victims themselves who must find a way to end it.

Imagine, therefore, if the disenfranchised Palestinians of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza were now to pose this challenge to Israel: we reject your rule over us while giving us no rights. Either you withdraw from our territory, or you give us citizenship equal with the others over whom you rule. Imagine further that, when Israel refuses to withdraw and ignores the challenge, as it will, these Palestinians do not back down but demand Israeli citizenship. At the same time, they mount a huge campaign of civil disobedience to accompany their demand if Israel refuses, and publicize their case to the world, exposing to public gaze the reality of their situation and Israel’s ugly conduct towards them. Then the Palestinian Diaspora, and all who support Palestine, come out in solidarity with their compatriots’ demands, creating a two-pronged campaign, coordinated between the inside and the outside, much as the anti-apartheid movement campaigned to assist the internal South African struggle. The ubiquitous, disparate activities promoting Palestine, with each individual and group starting up their own initiatives and dispersing their energies, then begin to unite towards this one end.

Staying with this project, let us now imagine that Palestinians can be persuaded to adopt the equal rights strategy, recognizing that no other has helped them so far, and put their shoulders to the wheel. Suppose, as a result, the strategy is finally implemented and they acquire Israeli citizenship. Their gains would be considerable: they would stay on their own land by right, to live in dignity and security; the whole of historic Palestine would become available to them once more; and their displaced compatriots could look forward to returning home, once a representative parliament is enabled to pass laws permitting it. Above all, their call for equal rights will get to the heart of Zionist ideology predicated on Jewish majority rule and Jewish exclusivity. If all Palestinians become citizens, Israel’s demography will irrevocably alter towards pluralism, and so bring Zionism to an end.

Had this been a chess game, the strategy I have outlined above would mean checkmate for Israel. In the real world, however, it is most unlikely to happen. The task is too hard, with a Palestinian population still hoping for their own state, in spite of all the evidence, and a Palestinian intelligentsia persuaded to go along with the favored international position on two states they believe it will deliver. They will not unite behind a different strategy while this illusion lasts. Nurturing the hope of independence for Palestinians, while doing nothing to abort Israeli colonization of Palestinian land, is another crime in the list of the many committed against the Palestinian people.

An equal rights campaign, putting forward a simple, straightforward message the whole world can understand, would cut through the prevarication and obfuscation shrouding the Palestinian struggle today. It does not negate but, on the contrary, may potentiate, the current unitary state initiatives, and is potentially the fastest and most direct route to attaining what Palestinians passionately wish for: the end of Zionism and the liberation of their country.