Israel’s right to exist

Activists from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, a global campaign started by over 150 Palestinian non-governmental organizations, protesting in August, 2014. Nasser Ishtayeh/Press Association. All rights reserved.First a mea culpa. Mary Davis accuses me of
making an ‘incorrect and snide’ assertion that she wrote her first piece to support the Jewish
establishment’s attack on Corbyn. I see how it can be read that way. What I
wrote was “The issue is: just why
Mary Davis is writing this piece now?” and went on to detail the
coordinated, no-holds barred onslaught alleging that antisemitism that has been
taking place. What I meant was that
antisemitism in the Labour Party was a significant issue only because of this
onslaught; and that she was writing her piece only because this misplaced
salience had made it an issue. I did not mean that she was part of that
campaign.

Before getting down to business I should also mention her
rebuttal of my assertion that actual anti-Semitic incidents were relatively
insignificant. She cites
Community Security Trust figures for anti-Semitic incidents running at a total
of 557 in the first 6 months of 2016. For a sense of scale, official figures show the total number of hate crimes
averaged 222,000 per annum over the years 2012-5. I rest that part of my case.

To business.
What ultimately divides our positions on the contentious issue of how
anti-Zionism relates to antisemitism? It does not seem, at least directly, to
be our views on Zionism itself. Mary says that she does not regard herself as a
Zionist, and it is quite a few decades since I did so. And we are both highly
critical about what Israel actually does. Yet it is clear that we do
have grave differences on what can legitimately be done to end these excesses. These
disagreements seem to stem ultimately from what she identifies as “the issue of
the right of the state of Israel to exist”.

The right to exist

This is
treacherous ground. In the present era of witch-finders general in the Labour
Party I could still lose my leadership vote. (I am writing just ahead of the
result being announced.) Many have already lost theirs for less. So forgive me
if I tread warily. To question this ‘right to exist’ is not to toy with
the idea of ejecting the 5 million or so Jewish inhabitants of Israel plus its
illegal settlements into some external dumping ground (or worse). All the same,
don’t forget that this dumping is exactly what happened to those hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians ejected in 1948 who have since been denied their internationally
attested right to return.

The reason
why the claimed ‘right to exist’ is problematic is a question of definition, not
of dematerialisation. States come and go, change their names and their borders,
bifurcate and merge. That’s history for you. We don’t think that Mercia, dead
these 1100 years, has or even had a ‘right to exist’. Coming more up to date
the issue of exactly what is Ireland’s state-ly expression has sparked
both bloody and peaceful struggle, and is not yet definitively resolved.
Yugoslavia wasn’t a state, then it was, and then it wasn’t again, all in the
course of about 70 years. Yugoslavia fractured in bloody fashion, but
Czechoslovakia broke up into component parts by agreement.

There is
nothing in international law that says that states have a right to exist. They
either do or don’t exist, and there are criteria. As you would expect academic
lawyers don’t speak with one voice on this, but (very roughly) to be a state
you need to have a central government, a permanent population, a defined
territory, etc. It helps to have international recognition, but that is
probably not essential.

There are
certain things that states cannot do in international law – attack others,
practice ethnic cleansing or apartheid, things like that. But if a state
violates these rules its transgressions don’t licence violent attacks on it by
other states, and it doesn’t stop being a state.

Israel, the special case

Israel is of
course a special case. As I said in my last piece, Zionism could realise its
ambition of national self-determination in a defined territory only by taking
someone else’s, and on behalf of people not actually living there. That
contradiction between two claims and concepts of legitimacy remains and poisons
the politics of the area. Israel’s supposed ‘right to exist’ is inevitably problematic
if it excludes another co-located nation’s right to the same recognition.

There are
two ways out of this dilemma, but they are both routes that no Israeli
government, and indeed no currently conceivable Israeli government, is willing
to contemplate. One is to allow, encourage and indeed support the formation of
an entirely independent and sovereign Palestine, undominated by Israel, with
control over its own territory, its borders, its policies and its security; and
to end discrimination against those Palestinians who remain within the ‘not-Palestine’
state. (Currently Palestinians living in pre-1967 Israel have very different
rights from Jewish citizens: see here
for example, or here.)

The other
way forward is to construct a unitary state (embracing the entire current
territory and population of Israel and Palestine) in which all citizens are
equal, though certain sectional rights (but not privileges) are protected.
These are conventionally known as the two-state and one-state solutions. To
lance the festering boil either of these solutions would need to accommodate
the right of return of the refugees and their descendants.

What makes
the simple question of whether Israel has the right to exist not so simple is
that under either of these solutions the meaning of ‘Israel’ changes. So,
afterwards, would ‘Israel’ exist?

Would Israel exist, in ‘one-state’?

The
differences are more stark in a one-state solution. With an electorate more or
less numerically balanced between Jews and non-Jews there would need to be a
carefully engineered constitutional framework replete with entrenched
guarantees. For a parallel, think of the power-sharing Northern Ireland
Executive set up to contain and make manageable a fractured political realm.
Who knows what name such a state would be called by. But if it was still to be
called Israel, then it would be a very different Israel. Not the ‘Jewish and
Democratic State’ so often proclaimed by Israel’s current leaders (who ignore
the internal contradiction in their labelling), but a binational state that is
a real democracy.

Where this
argument takes us is that Israel, as currently configured and complete with its
array of discriminatory laws and violent suppression of Palestinian human and
national rights, lacks legitimacy. There is nothing antisemitic in this
statement. There are other forms of nation, under whatever name, and with its
Jewish population firmly in place, that would be accepted I think by most of
those who now campaign for Palestinian rights.

BDS

Mary Davis
deploys the ‘right of Israel to exist’ as the killer argument against the
Boycott movement. BDS, it is claimed, illegitimately challenges this (elusive)
right when it fails to make a distinction between civil society and the state.
In my first contribution to this discussion I pointed out that academic
boycott, her chosen paradigm case, does not in fact target individuals – but I
will avoid repeating that argument. And there is at least an indirect sense in
which boycott does target civil society there.

Israel is
not going to be changed into one of those other possible ‘Israels’ by external
military aggression or internal Palestinian armed revolt. A reduction in the
sale of Jaffa oranges, or even in the diamond trade, still less a reduction in
the number of academic visitors, will not bring the country down.

Its voting
inhabitants will have to decide that this change is better than the
alternative, and find some way of choosing a government that will make that
difficult cross-country trek. So its inhabitants are indeed the ultimate but
indirect target of BDS. The educational campaign that is BDS is actively
transforming the view of Israel in civil society world-wide and, as with South
Africa, this will in time manifest itself in Divestment and Sanctions as well
as Boycott. Only when the actual and impending consequences of the maintenance
of ‘Israel as it is’ is felt by its civil society will it choose a government
that will negotiate its way out of its cul-de-sac.

This is a
long way from antisemitism. It is certainly anti-Zionism. They are not even
nearly the same.