Zionism’s Colonial Enterprise Is Doomed, but…
In one Israeli Jews come to their senses and accept that their best and actually only hope for a future with security and peace is the One State solution – a single, democratic state in which all of its citizens, Jews and Arabs, would have equal civil and political rights. (One of my anti-Zionist Jewish friends with a sense of humour said it could be called Palestein). In theory it could happen. In practise I fear it won’t because it would amount to the de-Zionization of Palestine; and I can’t see Zionism agreeing to that.
In the other foreseeable end-game scenario, the action starts with the final ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That happens when Israel’s leaders conclude that they cannot break the will of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians and force them to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table – a few Bantustans on 40% or thereabouts of the West Bank. When they come to that conclusion, Israel’s leaders invent a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan or wherever.
In terms of defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation, that would buy the Zionist state some time, but how much time and to what end?
An Israel that resorted to a final round of ethnic cleansing would become a pariah state like no other. The anti-Israel outrage of citizens of all faiths and none around the world would be such that the governments of the major powers, including the one in Washington D.C., would be obliged to punish the Zionist state with boycott, sanctions and divestment.
Then what? How would Zionism’s in-Israel leaders respond?
I think it’s more than possible, even probable, that, feeling themselves backed into a corner with no acceptable escape route, they would launch their nuclear missiles in a defiant farewell gesture and take the region down with them.
For those readers who believe that such a scenario is unthinkable, I recall in my book what was said to me by Golda Meir, in a filmed interview for the BBC’s Panorama program, when she was Israel’s prime minister.
At a point I interrupted her to say: “Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you’re saying… You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”
Without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need, Golda replied, “Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying.“
After that interview was transmitted, The Times of London, then a seriously good newspaper (not the Murdoch-owned, pro-Zionist paper it is today), replaced its lead editorial with one quoting what Golda had said to me. That replacement editorial ended with a short statement of the paper’s own opinion. “We had better believe her.”
If instead of saying to Golda “if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield” I had said “if ever Israel was put under real pressure by the whole of the international community to do what it did not want to do”, I’m sure her answer would have been the same.
According to Roger Tucker in a recent article for Dissident Voice, an Armageddon ending to the story of Zionism’s colonial enterprise is not inevitable. Under the headline The One State Solution Sounds Like a Good Idea, but…, he wrote (my emphasis added):
“What is it that most Israelis actually want. Not surprisingly, we find that they want what people everywhere want, security and stability, peace, to be respected if not loved, to be free of constant fear and anxiety, to have the sense that their children will have the opportunity to live normal, productive and happy lives. All surveys have been consistent in this respect. None of these things are possible as long as the Israelis stick with political Zionism, and the Israelis, deep down, know this. They may be temporarily deluded, even collectively insane, driven by the howling winds of paranoia, arrogance and bloody-minded defiance… but they aren’t actually stupid, and the madness cannot last.”
In my view the matter of whether Israelis are stupid or not misses the point. What they are was summed up to me by the best and the brightest of Israel’s Directors of Military Intelligence, Major General Shlomo Gazit.
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