http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0830-01.htm
The End of Apartheid, Redux
A Peace Plan for Post-Israeli Palestine
By Ted Rall
Published on Thursday, August 30, 2001 by Ted Rall
DAYTON, Ohio -- The trouble with Israel is that nobody -- least of all
the Israelis -- knows what it is. Is it a theocracy or a secular
state? Is it a parliamentary democracy or a police state? Is it the
military occupation of local Arab lands by ex-pat Europeans or the
settlement of peaceful colonists in a previously barren land? Israel
is all, and none, of these things. And while it's worth noting that
this is what happens when countries are designed by committee, casting
blame does nothing to address a grim state of affairs -- a vicious
cycle of retribution for grievances both real and imagined.
When statesmen and diplomats debate Middle East peace, the elephant in
the room is Israel's fundamental founding flaw. On the one hand, it's
a Jewish state, its citizenship granted to any Jew regardless of birth
nationality. But neither Israel's biggest backer -- that would be us
-- nor many of the secular Jews who fought the British during the '40s
wished to see an Israel ruled by rabbinical law. Following the example
of postwar Europe, Israel became a parliamentary democracy.
It's been a demographic war ever since. As the population growth of
Palestinian Arabs continues to outpace that of Jewish families, it's
obvious that true democracy will lead to Israel joining the Arab
world, with Jews living as a beleaguered minority. Successive Israeli
governments have employed various means of combating the demographic
threat, most notably refusing Arabs living in Lebanese refugee camps
the right to return to the homes they fled in 1948.
A democracy without equal voting rights is no democracy at all.
Similarly, few Jewish Israelis want to convert the place into the
Talmud equivalent of Taliban-run Afghanistan. The only way to
deradicalize the vast majority of Palestinians is to fully enfranchise
them into the current Israeli system. But won't numerically dominant
Muslims immediately use their newfound political majority status to
oppress Jews? Wouldn't genocide necessarily follow?
Not if recent history is any guide. The closest analogy to Israel, a
modern second-world state run by an ethnic minority, was apartheid-era
South Africa. (It was also Israel's closest military ally.) After
decades of political repression, violent acts of terrorism and status
as a global pariah, white South Africans got sick of the whole thing
and turned over power to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.
White rightists, and not a few foreign observers, warned that South
Africa's long-repressed black majority would rise up and murder their
former oppressors, but no such thing happened. Most whites remained in
the country. They became a minority in parliament, but the
socioeconomic order stayed in place: Black people are still poor,
white people well-off. To be sure, there have been some isolated
incidents of violence and retribution, but nothing close to the
wholesale slaughter expected by so many cynics.
A truly democratic Israel would likely undergo a similar process. A
tiny minority of Jews remembered for extreme right-wing behavior --
settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, for example -- might be
well-advised to relocate after the advent of a Palestinian majority
government. But for the most part, Arabs are like people anywhere --
they're far more interested in earning a living than waging jihad. The
only reason so many are throwing rocks at Israeli troops is because
they feel hopelessly disenfranchised under what they consider a form
of apartheid. Remove that injustice, and they'll be too busy enjoying
their commutes to jobs no longer cut off by army checkpoints to worry
about getting even.
More to the point, Palestinians know that huge numbers of Jews oppose
their government's extremism, just as many whites opposed apartheid in
South Africa. It's this common ground that will lay the groundwork for
peace in what is today Israel.
Of course, there is another alternative. The Israelis could
systematically execute and/or deport every single Arab now living
within their borders. This would perfectly resolve the battle over
demographics. It might not make for such a great democracy, though.
Ted Rall, 38, is a syndicated cartoonist and columnist for Universal
Press Syndicate.
Copyright 2001 Ted Rall
