No peace for Israel without justice for the Palestinians: Jewish state must come to terms with demographics by Saree Makdisi

No peace for Israel without justice for the Palestinians: Jewish state must come to terms with demographics by Saree Makdisi

 

What is happening in Gaza is an expression of Israel's political vision [Zionism].

Israeli politicians speak openly of that vision (indeed, the current Israeli government won recent elections with a pledge to fulfill it): the consolidation of a state with a Jewish majority in a land in which barely half the population is actually Jewish.

There is no way to implement such a program without violence. That was the case in 1948, when half of Palestine's non-Jewish population was driven into flight - never to be allowed to return - in order for a Jewish state to be created on what had been Palestinians' land. And it is the case today, as Israel seeks to forcibly isolate the land's remaining non-Jewish population into barren islands cut off from each other and the rest of the world.

Gaza is only one of these islands. The others are in the West Bank which, with Gaza and east Jerusalem, are what remained of Palestine after it was dismembered in 1948 - only to be captured by Israel in 1967.

Jerusalem is already off limits to most Palestinians. Israel has broken the West Bank into three separate cantons. A grid of roadblocks further fragments each canton internally. Israel's separation barrier only adds to the fragmentation, as do a road network barred to Palestinians - and a sprawling array of illegal Jewish settlements - whose annexation to Israel, while bypassing areas of indigenous, non-Jewish population, is Israel's objective.

Israel claims to hold the Palestinian "government" accountable for the raid on its Gaza outpost. But this archipelago of besieged territories does not - and it will never - amount to a "state." It is designed to be a collection of open-air holding cells for the land's non-Jewish population: spaces to detain them, isolate them from health-care, educational and infrastructural services, deny them access to land, resources and markets, until they either die or simply give up and go away. Gaza's suffocation over the past year illustrates this perfectly.

Each departing Palestinian will be triumphantly checked off the tally by Israeli demographers like Arnon Sofer who, anxiously monitoring what they unabashedly call the "demographic threat" to their country, obsessively calculate ratios of Jews to non-Jews.  To read full article see: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4048204.html