Re: W.E.B Dubois and Palestine

Khaldoun, I got this from the SGSU list, did you send it to WSN too???

on 10/21/00 11:03 PM, Khaldoun Samman at KSamman@AOL.COM wrote:

> 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

********************************
Carina A. Bandhauer
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Sociology
Binghamton University
State University of New York
Binghamton NY  13902-6000

Home:      (607) 723-0837
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Email:     br00162@binghamton.edu
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