Jonathan Cook replies....

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1/4/2007

12/29/2006

Jonathan Cook replies:

There are several typical lines of apologia for Israel expressed here that I have dealt with many times before in my articles and in the lengthy introduction to my book Blood and Religion. Taking the points, briefly, paragraph by paragraph:

Para 1: The suggestion is that Israel's being a state for the Jews is no different from France being a state for the French. That is transparent nonsense, as should be clear the moment we consider whether there is a difference between Germany defining itself as a state for the Germans or a state for the Aryans, or South Africa defining itself as a state for South Africans or a state for the Afrikaners. A state for the Jews is an ethnic state, an entirely different kind of state from France, Britain, the U.S. or most countries we define as democracies.

Para 2: There are a couple of obvious problems with this historical line of reasoning. First, the "Jewish" state proposed by the UN in 1947 would have had a Jewish majority of only a few tens of thousand; even with discriminatory immigration legislation such as the current Law of Return, the "Jewish" state would have had a Palestinian majority within a decade or two because of far higher Palestinian birth rates. So what is the basis for Amir assuming that the UN wanted to guarantee a Jewish state in perpetuity? Second, whatever the UN intended (and, as shown above, I think that is not as clear as Amir would wish) it cannot be used as the basis today for denying groups of Israel's citizens the right to campaign legitimately to redefine the nature of their regime. A decision taken in 1947 cannot be binding on the current population, including Israel's Arab citizens, and used to prevent them from demanding that their state be reformed from what it currently is – an ethnocracy, or democracy only for Jews – into a liberal democracy. The fact that the majority are happy with their ethnic privileges at the moment does not mean they will always be the majority or that that they will always be happy with the arrangement. Political systems change for the better, as we saw in South Africa, and decisions taken more than half a century ago should not be cited as a reason to prevent such changes.

Para 3: If Israel's Jewishness was reflected only in the use of cultural symbols (flags, anthems etc.) that belong to the majority, that might not be much of an issue. (Nonetheless, it should be noted that these symbols are not healthy in a body politic that is shared by two national groups. These symbols are ethnically loaded: i.e. they are designed to exclude from representation those citizens who do not belong to the national majority.) But, of course, Israel's Jewishness is not just about the flag, language and anthem, as Amir well knows.

Para 4: Israel's discrimination is not of the kind practiced in most societies, nor is it justified on security grounds. Why does Israel need to exclude its Palestinian citizens from the 93 per cent of the land that has been nationalized and is held in trust for world Jewry rather than Israeli citizens? Why does Israel make it almost impossible for Palestinian citizens to get a house building permit? Why does Israel keep Arab municipalities massively under-funded? And so on, ad infinitum. The example Amir cites proves exactly the opposite of what he claims. Palestinians do not have a separate education system so that they can have cultural autonomy, as he implies. If that were the case, the separate system would have to be equally funded (instead of Arab children receiving a fifth of the money spent on Jewish children), and its curriculum would have to be under the control of the Palestinian community and not of the domestic security service, the Shin Bet, and the government. Instead the separate system has been created to help maintain the state's Jewishness: keeping Arab citizens uneducated, marginal and poor; developing a network of collaborators in the Arab community; preventing Arab children from learning about their history and developing their Palestinian identity; and preventing Jews and Arabs from developing friendships at school before they learn to be racist or fearful.

Para 5: Amir seems to be saying it is justifiable to ban marriages based on Palestinians' being Arabs or Palestinians, without any check on whether they actually pose a security threat to Israel. If we take this argument seriously, then equally it could have been argued that German Jews should have been abandoned to their fate rather than allowed to seek sanctuary in Britain and the U.S., which were at war with Nazi Germany. Blanket discrimination based on people's ethnicity is never justified; we should refer to it by its proper name: racism.

Para 6: A revealing comparison Amir implicitly draws between Nazi Germany and Israel as types of ethnic nation states.

Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State

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Why my reporting is different

I have chosen to position myself in the region in two ways - one professional, the other geographical - that distinguish me from colleagues. This approach gives me greater freedom to reflect on the true nature of the conflict and provides me with fresh insight into its root causes.

Professionally, I am one of the few journalists regularly writing about the region who work as an independent freelancer. I choose the issues I wish to cover, so I am not constrained by the ‘treadmill’ of the mainstream media, which require an endless flow of instant copy and analysis. I am also not tied to the mainstream agenda, which gives disproportionate coverage to the concerns of the powerful, in this case the Israeli and American positions - in the US media to a degree that makes much of their Israel/Palestine reporting implausible. I also rarely accept commissions, restricting myself to topics that I consider to be the most revealing about the conflict.

Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ - a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.

Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.

From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism's appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its colonial agenda.