by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-05-07
© 2010 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? In Roshomon style, I describe four Israels. The First Israel is the dream Israel, to which no one (some believe) can rightly object, comforting to liberal Jews. The Second Israel is the illegitimate Israel, to which everyone must object (others believe), a frightening bogey especially to militarist Zionists who speak of it constantly in response to BDS. The Third Israel is the Israel of wars and occupation and human-rights violations, with which the Palestinians must grapple, the target of the BDS movement. The fourth Israel is the peaceable kingdom for which the world waits, ever so long, the Israel no longer at war, the Israel that lives at peace with its Palestinian neighbor.

Like anything else more complex than tic-tac-toe, Israel is a social construct. Because of its history and the dreams and nightmares woven around it, however, it is not just one social construct, or even two. There are three principal Israels. A fourth beckons on the horizon.

The First Israel

The First Israel is the dream Israel, beloved of liberal Zionists in the USA, Israel, and elsewhere. The dream is the guilt-free solution to past European anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, a guilt-free place to escape present and future anti-Semitism, a guilt-free home for the Jews who want to live there (non-Israeli believers in the First Israel don’t, for the most part, want to live there), a guilt-free place of artists, authors, scientists (yes and Nobel Prize winners), and water-conserving farmers, a place which came into existence at some slight cost to another people, but, hey, the Palestinians should have been welcomed in 1948 by their Arab brethren. The war of 1948? Israel was attacked by the Arab states! The Palestinian refugees? There are always discomforts and dislocations after wars, and the fact that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 didn’t disappear into the woodwork, as they properly should have, isn’t Israel’s fault. The fact that the Palestinians are still complaining after all these years is certainly not Israel’s fault and is an unfair attack on the legitimacy of the First Israel. Gaza? Shmaza! Israel had a right to fight back against all those rockets! The Goldstone Report? Just legal mumbo-jumbo. Settlements and a Wall in the West Bank? Israel won the war in 1967, and therefore owns the land. It’s just using its own land. Jews have a right to live anywhere in Mandatory Palestine. The Mandate said so. (And, as some say, God said so.) And, always, Israel has a right to its security against the threats and attacks of these people who have no legitimate complaint.

In the First Israel story or “construct”, it is the Palestinians who are somehow illegitimate, not Israel.

The First Israel is a sort of “teddy bear” which liberal Jews carry around with them, of particular use as a comfort toy whenever the news (i.e., vibes of the Third Israel, q.v. below) reaches within their coddled consciousness. Keeping the Third Israel at bay is not so hard, however, as it is the settled policy of the US main stream media (“MSM”) (and especially, and most shamefully, of the New York Times (“NYT”), which hid the Holocaust in the 1940s) to hide unpleasant realities of the Third Israel today. Cherishers of the First Israel largely ignore the actual present in favor of a mythical past.


The Second Israel

The Second Israel is a rather different idea or “construct”, the nightmare of right-wing, human-rights-be-damned Israelis and other Zionists. It is the First Israel turned on its head, the critur that should have been aborted or strangled at birth. It is the idea of an illegitimate creation, born of terrorist rebellion against legitimate authority and aggressive war against an unoffending people by robbers, thieves, monsters!

You might suppose that this Second Israel would be the nightmare of the Palestinians, but they are too busy trying to cope with the Third Israel, to which I will soon turn, to have time to dwell on the Second Israel.

The Second Israel is the bogeyman which Zionists imagine, fear, detest, and have fully internalized, and against which, in a spasm of “denial”, they cry out, as many have been doing during the recent surge of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activity, complaining to the heavens that people are trying to “delegitimize Israel”. The idea of the Second Israel is the flip side of the idea of the First Israel: it is the idea you get by a small change of moral or ethical perspective based on the well-known facts of Israel’s founding, but still largely ignoring the present.

The Second Israel is the delegitimized Israel, the Israel that is and always was illegitimate. A bad seed.

The Zionists recognize this Israel, because the idea that the a country could be created only by expelling the legitimate government, the British, who from 1922 to 1948 were the legitimate government of Mandatory Palestine—by application of terroristic force—is an idea that had to be imagined and accepted and acted upon by the early Zionists. (They see the proposed creation of a New Palestine within Israel/Palestine as a replay of this script, with Palestinian armed national self-assertion seen as “terrorism” threatening themselves.)

The Zionists recognize this Israel, because the idea that a country could be created inside another people’s country by force of arms is an idea that had to be imagined and accepted and acted upon by the early Zionists. (They see the proposed creation of a New Palestine within Israel/Palestine as a replay of this script, but now threatening themselves.)

They recognize this Israel, because the idea that a country could be created by expelling the residents (or most of them) from that people’s own country is an idea that had to be imagined and accepted and acted upon by the early Zionists. (They see the proposed expulsion of the settlers from the West Bank—and the often mentioned “pushing of the Jews into the sea”—as a replay of this script, but with Jews being the proposed expellees.)

There was “no space between” these Zionist ideas and what in other circumstances is called criminality—not a comfortable thought for anyone wedded to the dream of the First Israel, but a commonplace for anyone acquainted with the history of Israel. This is what Israel-apologists mean when they say that “you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs”, a sly suggestion that what happened to the Palestinians was a slight inconvenience and, more importantly, a sly elision of the entire question of whether the omelet should ever have been made in the first place (what with the need to break eggs quite well understood up front).

The Second Israel is not a bogey of believers in the First Israel, for if the thought, “Whatever have we done?” edgily threatens to creep into any mind wedded to the First Israel, it is quickly swept out, a thing unclean, like breadcrumbs before passover.

The Second Israel is not a bogey of believers in the Third Israel, for the horrors imposed by present-day Israel upon Palestinians living in the occupied territories is the reality with which human-rights activists and Palestinians must deal, in the here and now, and it leaves no time for philosophical ruminations about the Second Israel.


The Third Israel

The idea of the Third Israel is the idea of the Israel with which Palestinians and others must live today, the on-going reality as perceived, the Israel of intense oppression of the Palestinian people.

This is not only the perception (or idea or construct) of Palestinians and their most natural colleagues. It is also the idea of increasing numbers of young American Jews, such as these Jews at Brandeis.:

This is where we are today. For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more.

No longer is Israel the country that managed to forge a future for the Jewish people when it was left in tatters after the Holocaust.

* * *

Nor is Israel the place where Jewish cultural creativity is exploding with newfound energy

* * *

No, Israel is none of those things. For many young American Jews, it is only the country of roadblocks and genocide, of a relentless war waged against the Palestinians for no apparent reason.

Jewish settlers have declared a “price-tag” [1]policy, under which they have targeted Palestinians or their property in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening settlements.

In supporting the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine the United States had no thought of embarking upon a policy which would be prejudicial to the interests of the indigenous population of Palestine... We would be firmly opposed to any solution of the Palestine problem which would permit a majority of the population to discriminate against a minority on religious, racial, or other grounds... I am convinced, furthermore, that the responsible Jewish groups and leaders interested in developing the Jewish National Home in Palestine have no intention of expelling now or at a later date the indigenous inhabitants of that country or of using Palestine as a base for aggression against neighbouring Arab States...

No people have suffered more than the Jews during recent years from aggression and intolerance. No people stands more in need of world sympathy and support at the present time. It is therefore inconceivable that responsible Jewish groups or leaders could be contemplating acts of intolerance and aggression against Arabs in Palestine or elsewhere which would be sure to arouse public opinion and to provoke indignation throughout the world.

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