(13 May 2024) Avi-ram Tzoreff analyses the Israeli-Palestinian situation from a post-colonial perspective and comes to the conclusion that binationalism could be the solution that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to overcome the colonial cycle of violence.
Long before Hamas's brutal attack on October 7th, which left punctured and burned houses, and cities that became ghosted, and long before Israel's brutal violence that turned the Gaza Strip into rubble and two million people to refugees, the home (bayit), its ownership, and its coming destruction (hurban) became common idiomatic phrases in the Israeli political discourse. From minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Force (Otzma Yehudit's) slogan "Who's this house's owner?" (or who's the landlord here? – mi po ba'al ha-bayit) to "Guarding our Shared Home" (Shomrim al ha-bayit ha-meshutaf) that was founded as part of the popular struggle against the judicial reform that was oriented limit the independence of the judicial system. From addressing the government as the hurban's government to framing the struggle as "fighting for home" (nilhamim al ha-bayit) – these were all manifestations of using home\house as a metaphor of political existence, oriented towards confirming its status as a landlord (ba'al bayit), or alternatively promising its maintenance.
Although these various uses differ significantly from each other, one crucial aspect is missing in most of them – the Palestinian home. Neither the Palestinian homes within Israel's recognized borders, which are subjected to ongoing destructions, nor Palestinian homes in the West Bank, subjected to ongoing violence oriented towards their expropriation and expulsion, nor those Palestinian homes subjected to Israel's bombings in Jenin and Gaza – neither of them was part of the home which most of the protesters in the demonstrations against the judicial reform sought to protect. This suppression of the Palestinian home lay at the foundation of the inability of most Israelis to understand the context that led to Hamas's brutal violent attack – an inability that stood at the foundations of a sense of helplessness felt by the citizens of a military powerful state whose force was proved to be meaningless.
In this article I will adhere to the notion of the home as a kind of political existence, as a metaphor for a safe shelter, and rethink how the Palestinian home's persistent presence – the one that was destroyed and Israeli homes were already built upon its ruins, the one that faces an ongoing threat of destruction, and the mass destruction of Palestinian homes in front of our eyes – in political consciousness and practice, is an imperative condition for the creation of this feeling of safe shelter, as an alternative for the Israeli failed security doctrine.
The threat of extermination
For years Israel constructed and identified itself as the Jews' exclusive fortress against any chance of a second extermination (hashmada), a second holocaust. For years, various Arab leaders, such as Gamal Abd al-Nasser or Yasser Arafat, were accused of Nazism and holding a threat of "extermination" as a tool to justify Israeli brutal violence against them, since against the threat of extermination, there is no need to constraint the use of military force. Now, Israeli citizens' and migrant workers' experiences of helplessness and lack of protection, facing Hamas's war crimes, were framed exclusively within this bleeding Jewish history. The Israeli establishment's propaganda that sought to frame Hamas's horrific crimes as deriving from de-contextualized Antisemitism and criminalized those, such as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who explicitly condemned the attack while stating the fact that it "did not occur in a vacuum". This propaganda was used as a tool to justify the Israeli brutal and genocidal violence since October 7th. A violence, that promotes the political program articulated last year by the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, coined "The decisive\subduing plan" (tochnit ha-hakhra'a - hakhra'a) [in Hebrew means both decision or determination and subduing] oriented towards the elimination of the possibility of a national Palestinian existence in Palestine. This instrumental use of the disaster of October 7th was expressed by Smotrich already in the first Israeli government's meeting on the same day, following Hamas's massacre, when he claimed that "we must be cruel now, and should not take the hostages into consideration too much".
Smotrich's phrase is not detached from an older Zionist tradition – which while facing the need to determine between either rescuing Jews while paying any price needed or manifesting sovereignty, preferred the latter. According to this tradition, rescuing which did not depend on sovereignty was considered a sign of weakness, while performing sovereignty was considered to be an act of rescue. The Zionist movement saw the promotion of the Biltmore plan in 1942 – articulating the goal of achieving total sovereignty in the whole region of mandatory Palestine – as the exclusive political aspiration that must be enhanced during the years of the holocaust as the exclusive opportunity of rescue. At the end of October 1942, David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister depicted it with the clear messianic words: "The disaster of millions is also a power of salvation of millions […] and the Zionist interest is to cast this enormous Jewish tragedy into huge patterns of salvation". This instrumentalization of the Jewish disaster is the one that stood at the foundations of the justification of the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba in 1948. It justified taking over the land and cleansing most of its indigenous population to establish a sovereign state for the former catastrophe's refugees. To enable this act of casting the Jewish disaster in "huge patterns of salvation", there was a need for de-contextualization – the disinformation regarding the expulsions and the cleansings, turning the temporary location of the indigenous population outside the artificial boundaries of their land into a permanent verdict, to enable the possibility of preventing return. This was a home that was built upon the ruins of another people's homes, and its whole logic of existence was to maintain the destruction and turn the hurban into a permanent situation.
The Gaza Strip emerged as a permanent reminder of the existence of Israel as a home which lies on ruins – an existence that heralds the fact it faces an ongoing threat, an ongoing desire to rebuild the homes from the ashes. This home, whose foundation is always unstable, cannot maintain itself but through the persistence of violent maintenance, as a resistance to the aspiration to return, as a permanent aspiration, which was expressed by Nathan Zach, one of the prominent figures in Israeli Hebrew poetry – "to be a master of your own home".
This aspiration is the one that was transformed into Otzma Yehudit's signposts, "Who is this house's owner" in the 2022 elections. This transformation manifested the desire of Jews from subjugated ethnic and class groups, and other settler elites, to take their own share in the fruits of the settler society. The demand to be a "landlord" meant to gain legitimacy to violence in these regions was friction between the settler society – whose homes were built upon rubble – to the indigenous society, who adhered to the ruined land.
The colonial situation is one that imposes itself on any group that participates in it – besieged, occupied and occupiers, citizens and subjects, Palestinians, and Jews – all are thrown side by side. As though they were in a play, they act according to the roles written for them, while they do not notice the abyss on whose edges this play is placing them. Hamas's mass massacre, that manifested a total de-humanization of the settler society, was reflected in the Israeli eyes-rolling, in what the sociologist Yagil Levy termed as "de-humanization by disregard". A policy of an ongoing and strengthening lockdown since 1991, which expressed the suppression, and denial of this sad strip; The policy that harmed the nutrition, which was calculated to the level of the calory, which made the strip into a place unfit for habitation; Forging diplomatic ties with regional powers who were prepared to throw the Palestinians under the wheels of the galloping carriage of normalization – all these have remained outside the scope of the Israeli eyes that were rolling up to the sky.
But is there any way out of this colonial theatre?
The anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani argued that the reasons for the persistence of extreme violence in post-colonial states also following the withdrawal of the colonial authorities, derived from the fact that resistance movements adopted the colonial modes of governance and imagination of political community. Therefore, the emergence of nation-states within the geographical and political boundaries that were drawn by colonial powers cannot be considered an act of de-colonization. It rather continues the colonial logic and ensures the persistence of the colonial logic.
Mamdani pointed to the common tendency to treat incidences of extreme violence through the frameworks of crime. The most prominent example for this is, according to him, the policy of de-Nazification adopted by the Allies following the Second World War. De-Nazification was expressed by the accusation of German individuals in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the articulation of a collective German guilt of committing genocide, but it did not relate to Nazism as a political project aspiring to create a homogenous and purified nation-state, which was actually been realized. Therefore, both the US – which was also established through ongoing acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide – and post-war Germany recognize and negate genocide as the crime of all crimes, but do not challenge its political results – the purified nation-state. In other words, de-Nazification is a punishment-centered mode which prevents the possibility of a political transformation, that challenges the political structures that enable the recurrence of incidents of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Against this approach, Mamdani posited the need to analyze extreme violence from a political perspective, to understand the aspirations these violent acts mean to fulfill, and the political frameworks that enable them, and from this point of view – to seek ways to change this framework. The understanding of the settler-colonial dynamics inherent in the Palestinian-Israeli circle of violence is crucial in order to find a way out of it. De-colonization, Mamdani argues, is created from the recognition of this violent dynamics, and considering the whole participants in the colonial theatre – both settlers and indigenous, as "survivors" of the colonial situation. As the professor of Jurisprudence, Raef Zreik has already argued in his critique of Mamdani, one should also take into consideration the meanings of the different positions of both groups of survivors, and the aspirations that develop from them. While the indigenous seeks equality, compensation, and historical justice, the settler seeks a political horizon, and paradoxically in need of recognition. In other words, the settler needs a political imagination that will help him to overcome the total identification of being and being colonial.
Binationalism as a way out
This political imagination, I suggest, can be found in the long-negated tradition of binationalism, which, from our current perspective, can be considered counter-Zionist. First and foremost, members of the binational movements from the mandatory period – who advocated the formation of a joint Jewish-Arab political framework and criticized the ongoing Zionist reliance upon the colonial authorities – turned sharply against the hegemonic Zionist instrumentalization of the disaster and juxtaposed against it a clear demand for rescuing Jews while paying any price needed. Against the secular messianic Zionist motivation to "cast this enormous Jewish tragedy into huge patterns of salvation" (Ben Gurion), in the shape of a cleansed Jewish ethno-national state, they juxtaposed the act of rescue which is not "plus a Zionist act", but an act of rescue in and of itself. That is to say, they demanded to not take into consideration the fact that various acts of rescue might harm Zionist aspirations in Palestine, and to not subjugate the issue of rescuing Jews to the question of its implications on the Zionist project in Palestine. In other words, they juxtaposed Zionism as seeking a safe shelter for Jews against Zionism as a stronghold.
The other side of binationalism is the fact that it is the total opposite of the de-humanization of neglect, of the illusion of the security of a home relying upon ruins. It is rather the close listening to Palestinian voices, to Palestinians' desires and aspirations, and their political demands. Therefore, it is the understanding that the reliance on colonial powers and settler-colonial practices persistently plant the seeds of destruction, and the hopelessness in oppressing the violence of the indigenous by military force.
In the end, binationalism is the recognition of the artificiality of the geographical separation of Gaza from Majdal – Ashkelon, of Gaza from Be'er-Sheva and Be'er Sheva from al-Khalil-Hebron. It is the ability to rethink the geographical space and the political reality outside the current bisected geography, that was an integral part of its cleansing. Following the Palestinian Nakba, members of the binational movements voiced the demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees and turned against Israel's regional antagonistic policies. Binationalism means therefore to reconsider Gaza as Palestine in a grape-shell, as the story of hurban, of destruction, from which the unstable home that is named Israel was established. It is the perspective which can see the whole land – Palestine-Eretz Yisrael – as one and unified entity.
In order to realize the possibility to imagine binationalism as alternative, the settler seeks generosity that he has no legitimacy to demand – although it seems necessary for any possibility to imagine a sustainable future – on behalf of the indigenous. This is a paradoxical need, on the oppressed behalf, to be the one to articulate for his oppressor the picture of the political community that they can share as equals. This is not a suggestion for "shared lives" under the umbrella of the colonial situation, which invites the indigenous to renounce his aspiration for liberation. It is rather the understanding that the indigenous is the one who can suggest, as part of his program for liberation, shared existence as an alternative to the colonial structure.
Walking beyond the settler\native logic can be reflected in another transformation – becoming a house-member (in Hebrew ben or bat-bayit). Against the notion of the home's "master", "owner" or "landlord", the home as a space which can invite those who in the beginning were outside reflects a different political logic. This language challenges both the violent penetration of the settler into the home and the European romantic logic of autochthonous existence in the land that negates the possibility to enter the house, which stood at the foundations of ethno-national states. By rethinking home, beyond the colonial logic, we can rethink it as a binational safe shelter.