Sixty years of sin

Looking back at the hardships Palestinian Arabs suffered at the hands of the Jewish state as Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary.

in Tel Aviv

IT is the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of statehood for Israel, and the local media are hyperventilating. The occasion is also attracting an inordinate amount of interest outside especially in the West, which behaves as if it were joined at the hip with the Jewish state.

Yet, as the veteran columnist and historian Tom Segev pointed out in Haaretz the day before the anniversary, Israel did not pop out of David Ben-Gurions brow when he made the independence declaration in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948. Israel was right here, though as a much smaller entity with a little over 600,000 Jews it was a mini-state with a system of self-administration and a multi-party parliament, with cities, towns, villages, schools, theatres, shops, publishing houses, galleries and museums, lively cafes, sports and newspapers. Haaretz, the Hebrew-language daily, itself was founded in 1918. There were other broadsheets and a couple of evening tabloids, Yediot Aharonot and Maariv, which are still going strong. The Yishuv (as the Jewish community of Palestine called itself) thought of itself as a fledgling Hebrew rather than Jewish state.

I was 12 years old and clearly remember the occasion Ben-Gurions rather raucous voice coming over the radio, the tension in the air, the expectation of conflict... That night the attacks began. The Arab states, which had rejected the previous years United Nations resolution on the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, launched a more-or-less concerted assault. Jerusalem was encircled by the Arab Legion, and the Jewish part of the city was besieged for several months. In the first part of that war, until the ceasefire, things went badly for the Israelis, but during the lull they received a good deal of help much of it from the Soviet Union, by way of Czechoslovakia and volunteer fighters, and when the battle resumed, Israel had a clear advantage and managed to seize large bits of the country, which the U.N. had assigned to the Arab state of Palestine.

The story of that war the first in a series of six or seven, depending on definition has nourished the Zionist narrative ever since. Israel is still depicted as fighting for survival against great odds, even as it rejects repeated peace proposals from the Arab League. This year, for the first time, the Arab word Nakba made it into the mainstream of the Hebrew media and even into some Western media. It means catastrophe, and it designates the same occasion that Israeli Jews celebrate the creation of Israel and the disaster that it meant for Palestinian Arabs. It began, when the British were still in Palestine, with the massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem, carried out on April 9 by the Jewish terrorist organisation called the Stern Gang.

Some 200 peaceable villagers, including women, children and the aged, were murdered in their homes, and the horror the incident spread through the country prompted thousands of Palestinians to flee; thousands more were driven out by force. More than 300 Arab villages were emptied of their inhabitants and in short order razed and obliterated. At least 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees some fled to Lebanon, some to the West Bank (held by the Jordanians), some to the Gaza Strip (held by Egypt), and many others scattered throughout West Asia. For the next 18 years the small number of Palestinians who clung to their doorposts and could not be driven out lived tightly controlled lives under the military government. That was the Nakba, which has lately found its way into the general narrative, having been suppressed both in Israel and in the Western media and mind for most of the past six decades.

Zionism, declared its leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, had to be ruthless if it were to succeed. After the Second World War, Jewish leaders felt that the genocide perpetrated on the Jews of Europe absolved them from having to show consideration for others. Against the backdrop of what came to be known as the Holocaust and the unimaginable devastation wrought by the World War, the massacre of a few dozen villagers, the mass expulsion of a hostile population of a few hundred thousand civilians across a newly created border, were almost overlooked. The Zionist narrative, with its combination of biblical symbols such as David and Goliath, and the Exodus, the return of Israelites to the Holy Land, and so on dominated the imagery throughout the West. And the West embraced the state of Israel and granted it all kinds of privileges. The massive reparations from West Germany helped Israel build a solid infrastructure, while its population multiplied rapidly with the influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world.

Fast-forward to the 21st century.

It is a Jewish characteristic that you cannot rejoice without doing some wailing on the side. The late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who made peace with Israel, is believed to have said that when the Jews reach heaven they will be sure to hang pictures of hell on the walls. At a Jewish wedding, the bridegroom crushes a glass under his foot to commemorate the fall of the Temple.

Accordingly, the day before Independence Day is Memorial Day, which commemorates all those who fell in the wars fought by Israel since 1948. It is a day drenched in tears and pierced by sirens wailing at a given hour when all vehicles and all pedestrians stand still and remember the dead. All forms of entertainment are prohibited for 24 hours until 8 p.m., when the signal is given to stop mourning and start rejoicing. Fireworks crackle, bands begin to play in public places, grandiose ceremonies open with VIPs intoning pompous phrases, and youngsters wander down the streets spraying shop windows with a sticky foam. The formal occasions are garnished with troupe dancing of the kind still seen in China and North Korea and speeches extolling the achievements of the state.

This is an occasion for swelling smugness, and whatever modesty and self-awareness exist in the crevices of this society are drowned in the noise of chest-thumping self-congratulation. This year, however, even the gullible citizens, who dutifully hung the blue-and-white flags from their windows and car aerials, reacted ironically to the statements made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert There is a moral gulf between us and our enemies and the Speaker of the Knesset (Israels parliament) Dalia Itzik We deserve a peaceful life amid the malodorous scandals enveloping much of the leadership.

The former Minister of Finance has just been convicted of grand theft, former President Moshe Katsav is accused of rape and sexual assault, questions hang in the air about the wealth acquired by Defence Minister Ehud Barak, and a major scandal is brewing around Olmert.

The Attorney-General, concerned for the tender feelings of Israeli citizens, imposed a gag on the Olmert story until after the celebrations. The scam erupted in headlines the following morning Olmert is under investigation on suspicion of receiving huge bribes during his tenure as the Mayor of Jerusalem (1993-2003). If elections are held, he is most likely to be succeeded by Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, a total hawk and a bosom-buddy of Americas neoconservatives.

Older Israelis keep looking back with nostalgia upon the early days of the state, remembering the simple life when Cabinet Ministers went to work by bus, the naive faith in the moral fibre of their society, the satisfaction of saving the remnants of European Jewry and receiving the immigrants from the Arab countries whose position was made difficult by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the boundless belief in our just cause and radiant future. Israeli songs Hava Nagila, Laila laila were popular in the hangouts of the Western guitar-playing youth and every summer that excellent Israeli invention (now defunct), the kibbutzim (cooperative communities), attracted thousands of volunteers (they came even from India).

The image of the plucky little state was still undented, though mostly in the West. Although the Bandung Conference in 1955 exposed a different image, the quiet grief and misery of the Palestinian Arab population was generally hidden behind the standard phraseology, while a handful of Arab collaborators in the Knesset and other public bodies created a false image of democracy and equality.

But the seeds of todays horrors were already there, burgeoning in the dark. They erupted in 1956, when Israel went to war against Egypt, arm-in-arm with Britain and France, hoping to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser and seize the nationalised Suez Canal. While this was going on, Israeli soldiers massacred Arab villagers in Kafr Kassem, in the heart of Israel, when they returned from their fields after curfew. A court martial found the killers guilty, but the penalty they paid was risible and underlined the fact that Arab lives were without value.

Fast-forward again to 2008. In order to celebrate in peace and security whether the occasion is a Jewish holiday like Passover or an Israeli national one the occupied territories are locked down. Not that they enjoy much mobility at the best of time with scores of checkpoints, walls and fences cutting across their lands and roads for the exclusive use of Israelis.

As Naomi Klein put it in her recent book The Shock Doctrine, Israel itself is a gated community. Enjoying a high standard of living, though with a large and growing income gap (GINI Index 39.2 worse than Japan [25], better than Brazil [57]), it prides itself on being a Western nation and would like nothing better than to be admitted as a member of the European Union. It already enjoys a privileged status in European sports and takes part in the Eurovision contest, but it dreams of complete acceptance. Aside from the fact that it is physically in West Asia, there are other, no less problematic, obstacles to this ambition. The E.U. could not possibly accept a state that classifies its citizens according to their ethnicity and/or religion; lacks civil marriage, divorce and burial; and is by definition a religious community as much as a state. But these facts do not impinge on the Israeli imagination, as expressed by most of its leading intellectuals and writers.

Protected militarily by the strongest armed forces in West Asia, with a variety of weapons of mass destruction; protected politically by the worlds number one superpower, which uses its veto power in the U.N. Security Council time after time (39 to date) to shelter its protg from the consequences of its actions; protected by a powerful lobby in the U.S. and similar, if less potent, pressure groups in most Western countries; rejoicing in a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping many parts of the world, Israel is still riding high. It is unembarrassed by the fact that neo-Nazi and other far-right racist-nationalist groups are courting it, just as it shrugs off the awkward fact that Christian Zionism its great ally in the U.S. expects all non-converted Jews to perish in the Second Coming.

Zionism has come a long way since the days when it took its first modest paces in Palestine, still under Ottoman rule. It has come a long way since it achieved its goal of establishing a state that would be a safe haven for persecuted Jews and claimed it had no other ambitions. Today, this gated community on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean is a cross between Club Med and an American base, with a thick admixture of Jewish self-righteousness a form of moral blindness.