PEACE IS WAR: ISRAELI SETTLER-COLONIALISM AND THE
PALESTINIANS
By
Joseph Massad
Reframing
war as a means to peace was and is an integral element of the Zionist project,
writes scholar. "Herzl's dual approach of declaring peaceful
intentions for public consumption behind which he sought to hide Zionism's
violent strategy of conquering the land of the Palestinians... continues to be
the cornerstone of Israeli policy to the present," writes author [AP] Last
Modified: Nov 1- 2013
On the eve of the anniversary of the
Balfour Declaration,
Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad explains how the reframing of the
concepts of peace and war were at the core of the Zionist strategy in
colonising Palestine.
Ever since its colonial project was
set in motion, Zionism has insisted that it seeks to colonise Palestine
"peacefully", indeed that its colonisation of the country will
not only not harm the native population, but that it would be of benefit
to them.
The movement's founder, Theodor
Herzl himself, provided two visions of this future: A fictional, public vision,
advertised in his futurist novel Altneuland, where Palestine would
become a Jewish state allowing coexistence with the native Arabs who would be
happy and grateful for being colonised and civilised by European Jews; and a
secret, logistical and practical strategy to evict the Arab population out of
the country, which he spelled out in his Diaries.
Herzl's dual approach of declaring
peaceful intentions for public consumption behind which he sought to hide
Zionism's violent strategy of conquering the land of the Palestinians would be
adopted wholesale thenceforward and continues to be the cornerstone of Israeli
policy to the present.
WAGING WAR TO ACHIEVE PEACE
Indeed, long before George Orwell
popularised the expression "war is peace” in his 1949 novel, Zionism
understood well that its colonial strategy depended on a deliberate and
insistent confusion of the binary terms "war” and "peace”,
so that each of them hides behind the other as one and the same
strategy: "Peace” will always be the public name of a colonial war,
and "war", once it became necessary and public in the form
of invasions, would be articulated as the principal means to achieve the sought
after "peace”.
Waging war as peace is so
central to Zionist and Israeli propaganda that Israel's 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, which killed 20,000 civilians, was termed "Operation Peace for
Galilee”. War and peace, therefore, are the same means whose only and ultimate
strategic goal is European Jewish colonisation of Palestine and the subjugation
and expulsion of Palestine's native population.
To bring about the expulsion of the
Palestinians and the establishment of the Jewish settler colony, Herzl sought
the patronage of the powers that controlled the fate of Palestine. Whereas his
assiduous efforts to court the Ottomans and persuade them to grant him a
charter failed, the Zionist leadership after him adopted his strategy and
successfully secured the patronage of Britain, which became the master of
Palestine after WWI, as well as Britain's Hashemite clients, whom the British
set up as rulers of Iraq and Transjordan.
The British, themselves, pledged in
their infamous Balfour Declaration, that the European Jewish colonisation of
Palestine would be conducted under their patronage peacefully, in such a manner
"that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. After WWII, the
Zionists successfully secured US support for their colonial project
US SUPPORT
The Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, following Herzl's strategy of
securing the patronage of major world powers articulated the Zionist position
thus:
Zionist
colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native
population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the
protection of a power that is independent of the native population
- behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot
breach. That is our Arab policy; not what it should be, but what it
actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need we, otherwise, of the
Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside
Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration
and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work,
they will find it impossible.
None of this,
however, meant that the Zionists abandoned their public claims that their
"peaceful” colonisation of the country would not be harmful to the
Palestinians while employing, at the same time, the most violent means to evict
the Palestinians off their land. It was, in fact, this public
Zionist commitment to "peace” with the Palestinians, whose land they
sought to conquer, that provoked the ire of Jabotinsky. The Zionist leaders'
assumption that the Palestinians were bribable, that they could be bought, and
that they would accept Jewish domination in exchange for nominal economic
benefits was challenged by Jabotinsky on every count. He declared as early as
1923 that:
Our
peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom
we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be
bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for
cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the
Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have
neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good
psychologists as we are …. We may tell them whatever we like about the
innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed
words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know
what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of
Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their
rolling Prairies.
PITFALLS OF BLIND RACISM
For Jabotinsky, the racism of the Zionist leaders was blinding them to the
pitfalls of their strategy. Understanding that no amount of money, and no
amount of honeyed words have ever convinced a people to hand over their country
to foreign conquerors, he understood that the Palestinians must be defeated
militarily as the precondition to their acquiescence in the Zionist project of
stealing their country. In this regard, he added:
To
imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that [the Palestinians] will voluntarily
consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material
conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion,
which has at [its] bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that
they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be
bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway
system …. There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some
individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of
Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so
jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population
in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being
able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.
TALK PEACE, WALK WAR
Hence for Jabotinsky the proper and correct way to secure the Palestinians'
acquiescence is to obliterate any possibility that they could ever stop the
colonisation of their country or reverse it once it had been achieved. This
will be carried out first by securing an imperial sponsor for the establishment
of the Jewish settler colony and by creating, what he called, an "iron
wall” defended by a Zionist army, which the Palestinians could not breach. Only
then, he surmised, would the Palestinians be ready for a peaceful settlement
with their colonial conquerors:
This
does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What
is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is
the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in
return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a
rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such
a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of
us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they
drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is "Never!” And the
leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a
proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect
them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab
displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity ….
And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give
them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace,
like good neighbours.
Jabotinsky's views would guide all branches of the Zionist movement after
him, not least the dominant Labour Zionism, led by David Ben-Gurion.
Like Herzl, Ben-Gurion would advocate peace with the Palestinians publicly,
claiming that the interests of the colonists and the natives were not
contradictory, while strategically planning war against the Palestinians in the
meetings of the Zionist leadership. However, it would be the logic of
Jabotinsky's arguments that would guide him.
In 1936, amid the Great Palestinian Revolt against Zionist colonisation and
British occupation, Ben-Gurion declared: "It is not in order to establish
peace in the country that we need an agreement. Peace is indeed a vital matter
for us. It is impossible to build a country in a permanent state of war, but
peace for us is a means. The end is the complete and full realisation of
Zionism. Only for that do we need an agreement.”
Echoing Jabotinsky,
Ben-Gurion
understood that a "comprehensive” peace agreement with the Palestinians
was inconceivable in the 1930s, when the Jewish colonists remained an armed and
bellicose minority in the land of the Palestinians. He concluded:
"For only after total despair on the
part of the Arabs, despair that will come not only from the failure of
disturbances and the attempt at rebellion, but also as a consequence of our
growth in the country, may the Arabs possibly acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz
Israel.”
CAPITULATION, ONE STATE AT A TIME
Elaborating on the idea that
peace is war, Ben-Gurion explained
clearly to his fellow Zionists that any peace agreement with an Arab party must
be designed to formalise their capitulation to Zionist colonisation. This he
declared as early as 1949, following the military triumph of the Zionists and
their establishment of the settler-colony: "Egypt … is a big state. If we
could arrive at the conclusion of peace with it - it would be a tremendous
conquest for us.” Israeli scholar Avi Shlaim has documented much of this
in his book
The Iron Wall.
That "conquest” would have to wait thirty years, but when it was
realised through the Camp David Accords with Anwar Sadat in 1978, it formalised
Egypt's recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish settler-colony, the denial
of Palestinian sovereignty or rights, except in some deferred "autonomy”
plan, and Egypt's acquiescence in never re-establishing its sovereignty over
the Sinai peninsula, which Israel would return to Egyptian partial control
without sovereignty.
The "conquest” of Egypt, of which Ben-Gurion spoke in 1949, was
completed at Camp David. At the time, the Palestinians, represented by the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had not yet come around formally to
accepting that the colonisation of their country was irreversible and continued
to seek its liberation from European Jewish colonialism.
As the idea of peace as a means to establish more colonial conquests
continued to be entrenched in Zionist considerations, it would be pursued
alongside formal war even after Camp David, as evidenced by the multiple
invasions of Lebanon in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and in the new century. These wars
would be waged explicitly as part of Israel's pursuit of "peace” to
achieve its colonial aims.
The US convening of the 1991 "peace conference” in Madrid, to which
they invited Israel and all the Arab protagonists, excluding the PLO, would not
inaugurate a new phase in Israeli strategy as much as formalise its new
approach since 1977 - namely concluding "peace” deals with Arab and
Palestinian leaders who, in the words of Jabotinsky, had "given up hope”,
capitulated completely to Jewish colonialism, and promised not only
not to
resist Israel but to help it along, while continuing the war against those
Arabs and Palestinians who continued to resist Zionism's colonial logic.
--------------
This is part one of a two-part series. Part two will be published on
Saturday, November 2.
Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual
history at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of 'The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question'.
