'Palestinians and Israelis will live or die together'

PETER DEMANT*

Making the cities of Campinas and
Jericho in the West Bank – act in itself positive
and with modest potential to mobilize
resources for the development of Arab Palestinian society – was unfortunately used to spread semi-truths and lies about the Israel-Palestine conflict. João Maurício da Rosa, the journalist who covered the event, evidently did not have enough information to relativize the propaganda given by some of the participants at the Unicamp international symposium. (The columnist refers to the article “The boys with slings”, from the December edition). Several errors require correction, but I will highlight just three: the supposed asymmetry of forces; the accusation of destruction of Palestinian heritage; and the question of Palestinian antiquity.

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Imbalance of forces:
reality or appearance?

Opposing the 'stone boys' as an 'innocent' expression of the Palestinian popular revolt against a brutal Israeli oppressor, petty enough to dress his own soldiers (boys barely bigger than the Palestinian ones) in bulletproof vests, is naive and untrue. historic. As David reminded Goliath, stones can kill; Furthermore, Palestinians do not just use stones, a symbol of the 'non-violent' nature of their resistance.

They use (like the Israelis) every method at their disposal in fighting for their own cause. Today Palestinian mortars and suicide bombers launched against Israeli civilians are more in evidence than stones. The current Israeli military superiority, only quantitative, is a consequence of previous developments that forced the Israelis to maintain a military surplus in order to survive. What differentiates the Palestinian struggle from many others is that a non-negligible minority of Palestinians not only fights for an independent state alongside Israel but openly proclaims its intention to destroy it. With all its material and military superiority, Israel will not have security without a more unanimous desire for coexistence on the part of the Arabs.

But as Muhammad Barka, Arab representative in the Knesset, well notes: Palestinians also need progressive Israelis to advance their interests. While most Israelis are not convinced of the peaceful intentions of their Palestinian neighbors, they cannot be expected to give up their military resources. In reality, we do not have a strong but unfair opponent oppressing a weak but fair one – an image that both sides like to project on the international stage. We have an interdependence where each constrains the strengths of the other.

Destruction of heritage
Palestinian: ethnocide or genocide?

Historian José Arbex emphasizes the destruction committed by Israel against the economic and cultural heritage of the Palestinians, both in the demolition of terrorists' homes and uprooting olive trees, as well as in changing the names of places and other attempts to forget the existence of the Palestinians. Arbex quotes general and politician Moshe Dayan in 1969: “We came to this country that was already inhabited by Arabs (…) Jewish cities were built in place of Arab cities. (…) not only did the (old) geography books disappear, but also the Arab cities”. The quote is correct, but used out of context.

Arbex mixes the massive (and mutual!) destructions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine under British Mandate, before and during Israel's independence in 1948, with the more recent and much more restricted ones carried out by Israel since its occupation of the Palestinian territories. in 1967. Dayan spoke of the previous period, urged Israeli soldiers to mentally arm themselves against Arab hostility, and tried to convince them that there was no alternative to the sword. In fact, hostility (which he considered eternal) still existed uniformly in 1969. No Arab country was then open to the idea of ​​peace with Israel – even in exchange for the territories occupied shortly before. The Arab side still insisted on the disappearance of the State of Israel. Not even the Palestinians accepted the partition indicated in 1947 by the UN: two independent states, one for the Jews and the other for them. Thus the occupation perpetuated itself, uniting occupier and occupied in a cycle of violence. Israel committed regrettable brutalities (material and immaterial) against the Palestinian population in the course of its prolonged occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (which, incidentally, is not 90.000 but 7.000 km2 – the equivalent of Greater São Paulo). However, the Zionist attempt to symbolically take over and impose its own national character on the country it considers its own – no less authentically than the Palestinians – (renaming places, archaeological research, literature, settlements, etc.) does not in itself constitute a case unique or worse than others. Attempts to obliterate indigenous cultures and superimpose the (supposedly superior) culture of the conqueror are quite common in history and are found in all colonizations, not only that of Zionists and white Europeans but even that of the Arabs themselves. Many Palestinian place names are adaptations of antecedent biblical Hebrew villages: thus Gilo became Jala, Bethlehem (Bethlehem) became Bet Lahm, and Jericho became Ariha.

This equivalence would be ridiculous if it were not dangerous, because it is part of an attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel by diminishing (and even denying) the terrible persecution of the Jews in the Second World War: persecution that proved the need to secure a place and a sovereignty that would allow Jews to defend themselves against future anti-Semitic aggression. The new State of Israel not only established a new Jewish society, but attempted to demonstrate its cultural continuity with the ancient Jewish presence in the region. The challenge for both Israelis and Palestinians is to internalize that both peoples have roots and rights there.

Who went there first?

Palestinian propaganda – copying the Zionists’ strategy – tends to build an ancient history for its own people. Claims such as those by Jordanian bishop Atallah Hana that Jericho and Jerusalem are ancient Palestinian cities or even that Jesus was Palestinian (this at a time when progressive Christians emphasize His Jewishness!) are part of an attempt to expropriate today's Jews of its history, thus deflating one of the Zionist arguments.

Palestinian propaganda, which sometimes even claims Moses as the Palestinian leader and sometimes traces its genealogy to the Canaanites, enemies of the ancient Hebrews, becomes entangled in contradictions. If David and Jesus were Palestinians, then probably Dayan, Sharon and most contemporary Jews are Palestinians too! This may be partially true, since the ancestry of both Palestinians and Jews in the world is in reality extremely mixed, as a result of countless invasions, migrations, mixed marriages, etc. Attempts to 'steal history' are found on both sides, but they have a boomerang effect: whether the biological ancestors of one or the other side already lived, dozens of generations ago, on that piece of land that is now so coveted, it is less relevant than the undeniable fact that their nationalist demands are of much more recent origin. The collective right of any nation over a specific territory cannot be based on the merely biological continuity of its presence. A search for a common positive heritage – experiences of peaceful coexistence as Prof. Mohamed Habib – are a better preparation for future Israeli-Palestinian coexistence than such attempts at delegitimization.

The report contains more errors than I can correct here. 'Intifada' does not mean revolt, but volcanic tremor; the West Bank territories A, B and C were not designed as a prison for the Palestinians, but as a temporary solution during the peace process, freely negotiated between the sides in 1995; Sharon never 'commanded' the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, but he was accused (and convicted by an Israeli court) of letting Lebanese Christian Arabs allied with Israel commit this massacre. It would, in fact, be easy to prepare a list of Arab atrocities against Jews to parallel the unilateral list released at the Unicamp symposium – as easy as it is useless for the cause of rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians. It is true that Palestinians suffer from discrimination in other 'brother' Arab countries; It is false to attribute it to the “democratic tendency” of the Palestinians, and it is false to contrast this imaginary tendency with the 'totalitarian' nature of Israel. In reality, Israel – far from being totalitarian – is an incomplete and extremely chaotic democracy, while the (unconvincing) Palestinian attempts to democratize reflect, first and foremost, the involuntary influence of the Israeli model…

Serious injustices have been committed by Israel since its establishment until today. However, the Jewish state does not have a monopoly on injustice, nor is its right to existence affected by its imperfections. Aside from the factual errors, the moral issues surrounding the conflict are a little more complex than the article makes one think. Palestinians and Israelis are condemned to live or die together. Palestinians, and their supporters, will achieve more through building bridges of understanding than through sterile propaganda and demonization of others.

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To be continued ...