W.E.B Dubois and Palestine

Greetings,

First let me say that I am pleased to see in recent days a lively discussion 
on the topic of Palestine.  I felt that I needed to intervene at this point 
of the discussion with a few thoughts of my own, with the hope of adding a 
few words on the possible outcome of the recent conflict.  I will initially 
give a historical reading of the establishment of Israel and the present 
conflict and then turn to some reflections on some of the thoughts expressed 
by R. Hutchin on this LISTSERV. 

It seems quite evident now that the Oslo Peace Process is no longer 
considered legitimate by many Palestinians.  Many have known for quite a 
while now, way before the renewed Intifada as exemplified by not only well 
known figures like Said and Ashrawi, but by Palestinians on the street, that 
the evolution of the talks were set up to disempower Palestinians and to 
create an apartheid like system where the latter would be turned into a 
depressed population to be used and manipulated by the Israelis.  This has, 
after all, been the project of colonizing the region from the very first days 
of Zionist settlements.  If you look at the organizing ideas of Zionists 
stretching from the days before 1948 like Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann to 
the post 1948 period of Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin, and Barak you will see a 
continuous pattern of turning the Palestinians into a class of servitude 
labor.

But alongside this development is the crucial phase of the extension of the 
world market into the region and the imposition of a political and 
administrative state at the hands of the British stretching from the late 
nineteenth century to the period of the establishment of Israel.  ZIONISM 
CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD OUTSIDE OF THIS CONTEXT.  Indeed, we would not have even 
known these established Zionist figures if it weren't for this British 
intervention.  Not to undermine the prevalent view of the significance of the 
Holocaust on the establishment of Israel, without this initial period of the 
expanding reach of Europe there would have been no established political and 
institutional means to create an Israeli State after the defeat of Germany in 
1945.  What was important here was the fact that a small sector of European 
Jews many decades earlier were given an Imperial vantagepoint that allowed 
them the opportunity to envision the possibility of radically reshaping 
Jewish Messianic beliefs to accommodate this already preexisting colonialist 
enterprise.  Hence, Zionism as we have come to know it today has internalized 
this system all too well and has made it central to its appropriation of 
Palestinian land and labor.  As a progressive Jewish Doctoral student at 
Binghamton University has reminded me time and time again, the whole concept 
of Zionism relied on this trajectory, starting first with the British and 
then later continuing under the US.

But this colonization was semi-unique in that it was finally to be settled by 
a population that was initially seen by white Europeans as "oriental" 
themselves, that of course being the Jews.  Even though the colonization 
process was begun by a Protestant people, it soon was handed over to a 
European minority that looked and smelled like nothing European (according to 
many Christians).  Remember, Britain was a Protestant colonizer and already 
had established from the days of the Reformation its own brand of Zionism, 
and it would be this same religious discourse that Jews like Herzl would 
latch unto in creating their Zionist State.  In the end they secularized it 
and turned it into a socialist/nationalist project which anchored Jewish 
Labor as progressively modern and Arab labor as primitive and precapitalist.  
They also hoped that in the process of acting like a European colonizer and 
establishing a State like that found in Europe would help to uplift their 
status out of the "oriental" category and into the "occidental."  This theme 
clearly runs from the very inception of Zionism in the nineteenth century 
right up to the present day.

It was through this political play that Zionist could rationalize building up 
settlements that had the ironic twist of socialist like Kibbutz and the 
simultaneous violent process of bulldozing Palestinian/Arab villages.  
According to these early settlers, Zionists are there to build a great 
society that the backward Palestinian Peasants and Bedouins were unable to 
fulfill.  Of course, Zionism today has changed much since the establishment 
of Israel and has become more religious in tone.  Socialism has been dropped 
from the program and replaced by a very new Orthodox variant.  The tone and 
internal logic of Zionism, however, has remained the same: Jews have the 
right to the land because it has been given to them through some great 
Promise.  They are, after all, the Chosen People.  Both religious and secular 
Zionists, in their own unique ways, agree on this point, and that is why both 
the Likud and Labour Party have both indeed followed the same policy of a 
hawkish like policy to undermine Palestinian aspirations.

So how can this recounting of history help us in thinking about the future 
scenario of the conflict you may ask?  First, it leaves little hope for some 
grand alliance between Palestinian workers and Jewish workers.  That strategy 
was killed many years earlier by Labor Zionists themselves, and there is no 
chance of expecting Jewish working class settlers anytime too soon allowing 
Palestinians to rise to the same level as them.  Indeed, in direct negation 
of R. Hutchin's earlier email, these right wing Jewish settlers, not the 
Palestinians, will be the first to protest any such attempts.  One would do 
themselves a great favor to read W.E.B Dubois Reconstruction in understanding 
why these Jewish Settlers would be totally opposed to this.  In my view, the 
chapters on the black and white workers are quite relevant for understanding 
present day Palestine.  Who would I blame this failure on?  Will, just like I 
wouldn't blame the Slave's for the White workers resistance to the "freeing" 
of Slave's, nor would I blame the Palestinians for the failure of not 
accommodating a political project that is based on some vague notions of 
class interests.  Enter R. Hutchins comment:
  
"... there might be an 11th hour chance that a strategy of
non-violent resistance with the aim of Palestinian rights as workers 
and citizens in a unified secular state could still work.  But I doubt it.  I
guess it's just what the post-modern cynics call a metanarrative pipedream, 
premised as it is on common class interests...  It does no good to blame this 
entirely on Israel.  If the Palestinians cannot come up with anything better 
than inchoate rage and riots, backed by threats of war by Arab dictators, 
then I guess this is the outcome."

I doubt it also but for very different reasons.  It is not because 
Palestinians have failed to recognize their class location because of some 
overwhelming desire to play like good nationalists, but because the Jewish 
settlers and the Jewish working class of Israel has too much vested interest 
in the Zionist project and would do everything at all cost to prevent 
Palestinians from gaining any "rights as workers and citizens in a secular 
state."  That is why it could not work in the near future.

But there is one thing that I do share with R. Hutchin.  I am increasingly 
becoming convinced that a two state solution is no longer a feasible 
alternative.  I say this with some of hesitation, because there are many 
Palestinians fighting as we speak to do precisely this and who are being 
slaughtered by Israel and its working class Settlers.  But I think that 
sooner or later the idea of a one-state solution will have to be seriously 
considered.  Said is correct when he argues that Palestinians and Jews are 
much too intertwined throughout both the Occupied territories and Israel.  To 
think that somehow they can be clearly separated into two states is absurd 
under this scenario.  Of course, the Israeli State will try to push 
Palestinians into ghetto's and isolate them from the Jewish Settlements 
through a whole array of complicated highways and bridges and checkpoints, 
but the contradiction between Israel's need for cheap Labour and other 
resources with this apartheid like structure will prove to be inefficient in 
the long run.  Sooner or later that scenario will prove to be ineffective and 
inefficient for even the most Hawkish sector of the Israeli ruling class.  
Reform will hence be inevitable.

But even more serious will be the fact that there is a large Palestinian 
Israeli population within Israel that must have access to their brethren in 
these ghetto's.  Without access to their Palestinian colleagues in the 
Occupied territories, their shops and economy would be in essence destroyed, 
for it is highly dependent on both the consuming and laboring input of those 
Palestinians who reside in these same ghettos.  So, if Israel continues in 
this direction of further closing off the Palestinians in the occupied 
territories from the Israeli Arabs you can be sure to see the latter taking 
up the issue of a one-state solution with full force.

There is more I can say on the future of the conflict but I will await for 
some replies.

Khaldoun Samman