The occupation must end. After spending five days in the West Bank this winter break and seeing it first hand, it is brutally clear to me that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is illegal, unjust and inhumane. I’ve opposed the occupation theoretically and intellectually for a while now. But seeing the immense physical and psychological damage it inflicts on Palestinian lives — seeing the tragedy that is Hebron — seeing the isolating hatred from both sides — is something completely different.
I met Israeli settlers in the settlement suburbs of Ofra and Binyamin who spoke of their deep religious connections to Biblical holy sites in “Judea and Samaria.” They told me that all they want is to “live without fear” of Palestinian terrorism, showing me a bullet hole in their pre-school’s wall as proof.
I met Palestinian leaders of the nonviolent protest movements in the towns of Nabi Saleh and Bil’in, who said that simply to live with dignity is to resist. They spoke about their desire for a third nonviolent intifada, a peaceful mass uprising of Palestinians that would expose the harsh tactics of the Israeli military and force change.
I met with a lawyer from a human rights organization that tracks the violent interrogations and rigged trials of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones. He told me that Israel “is not an apartheid state. It’s much, much worse.” He meant that Israel is no longer simply separating and discriminating against Palestinians — it is actively annexing Palestinian land through settlements. He put it like this, “They are taking the land without the people.”
Colonialism and imperialism are frameworks to use when looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Civil rights are another. As far as I could tell, most of the Palestinians I met saw themselves as oppressed and disenfranchised, but not necessarily as colonial subjects of Israelis. They often spoke of wanting to live normal lives, simple things like the ability to travel without checkpoints and roadblocks, to find employment, to provide decent education and healthcare for their families, to vote. Ideally, they said, they would cast their votes in an independent Palestinian state. But with eroding faith in the peace negotiations, they believed it far more likely that they would be absorbed into an Israeli state. And I’m not sure that Palestinians’ civil rights in a Jewish state, in the form it exists today, would be equal to those of Jewish Israelis.
The status quo cannot continue. It is not sustainable for an increasingly fragmented and destroyed Palestinian society or for Israel if it claims to be a democracy that upholds equality and justice. But what is the way forward? First, we must recognize that Israel is not an evil monolith. It is a nation, it is not going anywhere and it has internal political complexities that have enormous effects on its future.
Israel was founded on Zionism, and Zionism exists on a political spectrum, from leftist and progressive to right wing and conservative. Much of Israeli society was founded on socialist labor Zionism in the form of the Kibbutz Movement. While sometimes painted as white European settlers colonizing Palestinian land, these Chalutzim (or pioneers) saw themselves as building a new future for the scattered and persecuted Jewish people. They were young idealists (like many of us at Tufts) and envisioned a utopian society in which Jews would work the land, live together in nonhierarchical, equal communities and coexist with their Palestinian neighbors.
This idealism didn’t come from nowhere, though. The need to create a new future of the Jewish people came from a past of brutal and constant oppression in Europe. In many ways, Zionism was actually a liberation movement. It was the youth’s quest for emancipation and empowerment of Jewish peoplehood in the wake of the Holocaust. However, the Jews’ history of persecution made it even more crucial for the leftist Zionists to support sharing the land with Palestinians.
As Amos Oz writes in “Under This Blazing Light” (1995), “The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him. And that is justification enough. (Here I must anticipate something I shall return to later: There is a vast moral difference between the drowning man who grasps a plank and makes room for himself by pushing the others who are sitting on it to one side, even by force, and the drowning man who grabs the whole plank for himself and pushes the others into the sea. This is the moral argument that lies behind our repeated agreement in principle to the partition of the land?)”
The kibbutz network disintegrated as Israel transitioned into a capitalistic society, but many aspects of it continued to inform Israeli society. Socialist Labor Zionism gave birth to the Labor party, which dominated Israeli politics through the 1970s and played a large role in Israel’s social welfare policies and Rabin’s bid for peace at the Oslo Accords. In addition, the Histadrut labor union, founded 20 years before the state of Israel by chalutzim in the Third Aliyah, continues to be one of Israel’s most important institutions.12
