The Secular Dimensions of the Zionist Project in Palestine: A Historical Review
This lecture will present two dimensions that affected most the Zionist movement and later on the state of Israel ever since the late 19th century: geography and demography. The talk will survey the changes in these two dimensions and will claim that the geographical issue has long been resolved and is irrelevant and the main issue in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is demographic.
http://publicsolidarity.de/ilan-pappe-am-16-dezember-2011-in-berlin/
This lecture will present two dimensions that affected most the Zionist movement and later on the state of Israel ever since the late 19th century: geography and demography. The talk will survey the changes in these two dimensions and will claim that the geographical issue has long been resolved and is irrelevant and the main issue in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is demographic.
http://publicsolidarity.de/ilan-pappe-am-16-dezember-2011-in-berlin/
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NewsTranskript
00:30Thank you very much.
00:30Thank you all for attending and coming.
00:33And I want to thank the host for inviting me.
00:38And it's a great pleasure to be here for the first time
00:42and talk to this distinguished audience.
00:45I was asked to reflect on the secular dimensions of Israel,
00:52which is a very vast topic
00:55and definitely would make for a whole course
01:00or series of lectures.
01:01And I will try and condense it into several issues
01:07and topics, which all deserve much more elaboration.
01:11I have to admit that each issue or each chapter
01:16in this theme that I would like to reflect upon,
01:20I think deserves a much wider explanation and analysis.
01:26But I hope to complement some of the issues
01:30by your questions and your comments.
01:36So to see which of the issues which I just start to explore
01:42deserve, at least in your mind,
01:45further extrapolation and expansion.
01:49I'm an historian by profession,
01:52so my main interest would be at the origins
01:55of secularism in Israel.
01:58But if I will have time, depends on my pace of talking,
02:03how tired I am and how energetic I will be,
02:07I will try and say something about Israel
02:10since 1948 and secularism.
02:13And even if I have more time,
02:15I will reflect about the future,
02:18which is anyway a bad idea.
02:19So I don't mind if I don't get there
02:21and we can leave that for the discussion.
02:25It's enough to predict the past.
02:27There's no need to predict the future.
02:32But I really do believe,
02:35because I'm a professional historian,
02:36but I'm also an activist,
02:38that much of what one sees in any phenomenon
02:44and in any attempt to understand a phenomenon,
02:47in this case, what is secularism in Israel,
02:52one learns a lot by focusing on the formative years
02:57of the origins of a phenomenon.
03:00This is true about the situation in Israel
03:02and Palestine in general.
03:04I don't think that you can really understand
03:09what motivates people,
03:11what causes people to act the way that they act,
03:15what blocks certain options from developing.
03:19A lot of it has to do with the formative years
03:22of the situation.
03:24In brackets, I would say,
03:26one of the easiest way of explaining
03:28why the so-called peace process
03:30in place since the 1970s,
03:32on the case of Israel and Palestine,
03:34why it is such a failed and futile attempt
03:38and waste of time and energy
03:40is exactly because it refuses
03:43to take the core issues of the conflict
03:45as a departure point for solving it.
03:48It insists almost like a physician
03:51to continue and talk about the symptoms of the problem
03:54because it feels uneasy
03:56of dealing with the origin of the disease.
03:58And I think some of that reflection
04:02on the general reflection on the peace process
04:05will also come into my reflection on the issue
04:08I was asked to talk about.
04:10I'm trying to be disciplined.
04:12This is Germany,
04:14but I'm not a very disciplined person,
04:16so I do apologize beforehand.
04:22There is a way in summarizing the topic
04:26in one sentence, actually,
04:29the relationship between Zionism and secularism.
04:32I'm sure some of you heard me say it before.
04:35I'm not even sure I originated this statement.
04:39Probably heard it from someone,
04:40but I can't remember who,
04:42which is convenient because then everybody thinks
04:44that I invented that,
04:46which I think it's a good sentence.
04:50The connection between Zionism and secularism
04:52is very much the opposite of the connection
04:54between Zionism and God.
04:57Most Zionists don't believe that God exists,
05:00but they do believe that he promised them Palestine.
05:04I think that gives you a very clear notion
05:07of how Zionism and God interplay
05:11in the last 120 years.
05:16In the academic world,
05:19there are four paradigms competing.
05:24They try to locate the Zionist movement
05:28within this question or within this axis
05:34of ideas between religion, if you want,
05:37on the one hand, and secularism on the other.
05:41The kind of juxtaposition of notions,
05:48such as religion and secularism,
05:51of course, has all kinds of other similar juxtapositions.
05:57It could be modernity versus tradition.
06:00It could be the West versus the rest.
06:03It could be the developing world
06:05versus the developed world.
06:08Secularism, as you know, as an academic concept,
06:13is very much a part of the theory of modernization.
06:18The whole idea that a certain historical development
06:22in Europe improved human society,
06:26and the improvement included, among other things,
06:31separation of church and state, secularization.
06:33It's not the only feature of modernization,
06:35but it's a very important feature
06:38of the project of modernization
06:41in its theoretical abstraction.
06:44And when modernization was, in a way,
06:46exported outside of Europe,
06:50it's like with the magic wand.
06:52Anybody who came in contact with the wand,
06:57the magic wand of modernization became modernized
07:01in different paces, with different successes,
07:04and some people rejected modernization
07:07and became anti-modernization.
07:10Now, if you are not secular,
07:13it meant that you were anti-modernization.
07:15Secularism, for some reason,
07:18reflected your ability to become modern.
07:23It should have gone together with liberalism,
07:26democracy, and other features of political,
07:29social, and moral life,
07:31but as somewhere in the 1960s and the 1970s,
07:37the big theorists of modernization conceded
07:41that it's a bit more of a modular kind of process.
07:45China today can be secular,
07:47but not liberal and not democratic,
07:50and yet to undergo the process of modernization,
07:53for instance.
07:53So it doesn't have to go,
07:55secularism is not an assured formula
07:58for whatever one thinks about modernization,
08:02and maybe Turkey is a good example
08:05for moving out of secularism
08:07and becoming even more modern in many ways.
08:10So there are some big questions, Mark,
08:13about these very dogmatic, static assumptions
08:17about modernization and the place of secularism
08:20inside these modernizations.
08:23And I think this whole debate,
08:24this general debate about modernization
08:27as kind of an overall theory
08:29that explains to us the major changes
08:33in the history of the world in the last 200 years,
08:36within that debate comes also the debate
08:40about how to understand Zionism
08:42and its relationship to secularism.
08:46So as I said, there are four paradigms,
08:48I think, that characterize
08:50the academic, intellectual, theorist, if you want,
08:56debate on Zionism,
08:59and like everything else connected to Israel,
09:01Palestine, and Zionism,
09:03it's never purely academic, thank God.
09:06It's never purely theoretical.
09:08It has an activist side to it,
09:10it has an ideological side to it,
09:12it has a political side to it.
09:14The division is between those who admit
09:16that there is a political and ideological side to this
09:19and those who do not.
09:20The division is not between those who are neutral
09:23and unbiased scientific about it and those who are.
09:28There isn't such a division, that's a fabrication.
09:31What you have is either people who are aware
09:35or admit this kind of uneasy relationship
09:40between activism, ideology, if you want,
09:44and scientific research, on the one hand,
09:46and those who feel that they somehow succeeded
09:50in excluding themselves from external influences
09:53on their work.
09:56The first paradigm is the one that you can still hear
10:00and read about in the mainstream Israeli academia.
10:04This is still the leading paradigm
10:07within Israeli academia, I would say.
10:11Zionism is a secular movement
10:14because it is one of the most successful examples
10:19of the project of modernization altogether.
10:23I mean, that's the belief, that's the contention.
10:25The contention is that the whole project of Zionism
10:31was part of the whole project of modernization.
10:35And whereas there are quite a few unsuccessful examples
10:40of that project, Zionism is one successful project.
10:46And therefore, its success is also manifested
10:51in the way it dealt with the issue of tradition,
10:54religion, and secularism.
10:57One of the leading Israeli historians of Zionism,
11:00Yosef Gorni, or Yossi Gorni, G-O-R-N-Y,
11:03you can read in his book how he begins the book
11:06about Zionism with this declaration.
11:10I'm not quoting it verbatim,
11:12but it's more or less what he says.
11:14This is a great success of modernity.
11:20It's a very interesting assumption
11:23that doesn't have to be easily contradicted
11:28because much of how you decide to engage
11:33with that statement depends on your view
11:36about modernization and modernity.
11:39If you feel very strongly about modernity
11:42as being this successful human progress,
11:46but you feel very uneasy about Zionism in Israel,
11:49of course, then you would like to challenge it
11:52and to say, this is not a modern project
11:54or not a successful project of modernity.
11:57But if you are uneasy about the project of modernity
12:01or westernization altogether,
12:04you may agree with Professor Gorni and say,
12:06yes, you are maybe a successful case study,
12:11but that doesn't mean that this is good,
12:14that this is positive.
12:15So much of it depends on our basic assumptions
12:21when we engage with such a paradigm.
12:23I'll come back to that paradigm in a moment.
12:26The second paradigm is much more,
12:30I would say, esoteric and yet very interesting.
12:34And it had to do with the work of few people inside Israel
12:38and outside Israel who were not particularly informed
12:42in the theoretical world,
12:44but nonetheless created a theoretical model,
12:46I think, without even being aware of it.
12:48They did not approach the issue
12:52because they had a theoretical background or position.
12:56They were actually concrete researcher on the ground,
12:59but out of their work, you can understand
13:01how they feel about the relation
13:03between secularism and religion in the case of Israel.
13:08And a very good example,
13:09and I'm sure you've heard the name of this,
13:12is Israel Shachak, the late Israel Shachak,
13:15a professor of chemistry who was an activist,
13:20the president of the Israeli League of Human Rights,
13:25someone who already in the early 50s
13:29criticized the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians
13:34and the Arabs from within.
13:36And it was quite a lonely voice
13:38before Abba joined in the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s.
13:42I don't know if you heard the name,
13:43but he wrote several books on the topic.
13:48And at the time, his book looked, as I said, very esoteric,
13:52very kind of out of the main stream.
13:58I think people are rereading his books now
14:01because a lot of what's happening on the ground
14:05gives a lot of credits to what he wrote.
14:08It happens in history when someone is sort of coming
14:12a bit too early with ideas
14:14that sound quite queer and strange.
14:18And then with time, you come back.
14:20His idea is, and that's a very touchy subject,
14:23and I think that's one of the reasons
14:24not many people followed him.
14:27He looked at Zionism as an aberration of Judaism.
14:32In other words, what Yosef Gorni
14:37or the mainstream Zionist academia in Israel
14:41would see as a successful implementation
14:44of the project of modernization,
14:47he would see as, first of all,
14:49an internal development within Jewish history,
14:52much more isolated from the development of modernization,
14:56and he would see it as a reduction of a very rich,
15:01a very comprehensive value system that was condensed,
15:08that was sort of squeezed into a kit of tools
15:12in order to implement a political project.
15:16And in the process, he claimed, like in any other religion,
15:20because a religion is a sea of possibilities,
15:24of interpretation, of viewing the world,
15:28the things that were chosen out of the huge reservoir
15:33of Jewish religion and tradition
15:36were the worst aspects of Judaism.
15:39He claimed every religion can be treated in such a way.
15:43You can politicize any monotheistic,
15:46and not just monotheistic religion.
15:48You can politicize a religion if you want to employ it
15:53for the sake of a political project.
15:56And then what you get is a kind of an abuse
16:00of the religion itself, not just a project
16:04which is valued as negative or positive.
16:08In one of his book on Jewish religion,
16:11he tried to show, in almost an academic way,
16:16although he was much more intuitive,
16:17it doesn't matter, it's still a very interesting work,
16:20to read which precepts of Judaism
16:25were used in order to justify the takeover of Palestine,
16:32the mistreatment of Palestinians throughout the years
16:36until the time he wrote his book.
16:40So that's a paradigm, you can see it now coming back.
16:44It comes back because there are kind of a multifarious ways
16:51of expressing your Judaism in the modern world
16:55in the 21st century, and people are coming back
16:58to this relationship between Zionism and Judaism.
17:04And history is important because then you remember
17:07how the Jewish Orthodox world received Zionism
17:11when it just appeared.
17:12You remember probably the stories of the Zionist leaders
17:15going to the big rabbis of the day
17:17trying to get blessing for the idea,
17:19and they were totally rejected as sacrilegious and so on.
17:24So that's another paradigm.
17:26I would say that the appropriate sort of academic paradigm
17:30for this is between theology and political science,
17:36if there is such a thing.
17:37So maybe sociology of religion is the right term for this.
17:43A third paradigm is the one that wants to fuse together
17:51the project of Zionism from a religious point of view
17:55and locate it within not just one religion, Judaism,
18:00but within two religions,
18:03Protestant Christianity and Judaism.
18:08The last example of this approach is maybe you've heard
18:11of Shlomo Zan's book, The Invention of the Jewish People.
18:14I don't know if it was, I'm sure it was translated
18:16to German.
18:17Yes, yes it was.
18:18It was, it was.
18:21But he's just, he's the last one in the series of people
18:25who were looking into it,
18:29and that is a very interesting topic
18:32which can be dealt within the two sides of the chronology,
18:36the very, very beginning of Zionism and Zionism today,
18:42not just as a Jewish project,
18:44but as an evangelical Protestant project,
18:49and it has two sides to it.
18:50It has an historical side, and it has a current side,
18:54this idea of Zionism as being not just a Jewish project,
18:58in fact, being much more of a Protestant project
19:01than a Jewish project.
19:02I'm not sure it will go well in Israel
19:06if you try to sort of discuss it openly,
19:10but I think it's very important to discuss it.
19:14I think it tells you a lot about what happened and happens.
19:18In the first side of the paradigm, the origins,
19:22you have sort of a pre-Zionist Christian Protestant movement
19:27even before the Jews of Europe think about Zionism
19:33as a solution to their problem.
19:36Around the 1820s, before any Zionist text
19:41appears as a Jewish text,
19:43you have Zionism appearing as an evangelical text.
19:48I'm sure you understand the connection.
19:50On both sides of the Atlantic,
19:52you have something which is called Christian Zionism
19:55in the early 19th century.
19:57You have people who believe
19:59that the return of the Jews to Palestine
20:02is part of the divine scheme
20:06that will include the second coming of the Messiah,
20:09the resurrection of the dead,
20:12and apocalyptic kind of vision
20:17in which the return of the Jews would be an indicator,
20:22a very important indicator,
20:24that the world is reaching that particular moment
20:28from an evangelical Protestant point of view.
20:33Now, it was not just a Protestant point of view by itself.
20:39It seems from the research,
20:41and this research has to be continued,
20:43it's very important to continue this research,
20:47shows that at the moment of decision-making
20:50in the Zionist movement,
20:52the very end of the 19th century
20:55and the beginning of the 20th century,
20:59where some people who were very central
21:03in the Zionist movement realized
21:06that their noble desire to save the Jews of Europe
21:10and to reinvent, if you want,
21:12Judaism as a national movement,
21:14they realized that these two projects,
21:16if you want to implement them in Palestine,
21:19you will run into trouble
21:21because there are already people living on the land.
21:24And because of that,
21:26other options were surveyed at the time,
21:30as you probably know.
21:31The most known of that is Uganda,
21:34which was the most serious one from a Zionist point of view.
21:37But not only Uganda, Argentina, Azerbaijan,
21:43a very nice, I just saw it the other day,
21:45a nice island near Niagara Falls,
21:50and there were other places.
21:53And it turns out that,
21:58especially in Britain,
22:02Protestant circles exerted strong pressure
22:06on the Zionist movement not to give up on Palestine
22:11because they wanted to see
22:13the divine scheme being implemented.
22:16So that's the historical issue.
22:17It's very interesting to look at Zionism
22:19as an evangelical project.
22:22It would make life much more interesting
22:25and would explain a lot what happens today.
22:28Now, of course, the other side
22:30of the chronological spectrum
22:32is the impossible and yet very strong alliance
22:37between Christian Zionists in the United States
22:41and not only the United States, in Europe as well,
22:44and the Zionist movement.
22:46I say impossible because Christian Zionism
22:50developed in the last 100 years,
22:53and at least its vision for the Jews
22:57in the final scheme is very clear nowadays.
23:00It wasn't clear maybe 100 years ago,
23:04but now it's very clear that in this final kind of scenario
23:08that they have, when the Messiah would come
23:13for the second time and the resurrection of the dead,
23:17the Jews will have to convert to Christianity
23:19or be shish kebab in hell.
23:22Now, why do you want to have an alliance
23:25with people who regard you as food for their picnic?
23:29They don't want to invite you for the food.
23:31They want to regard you as food for the picnic.
23:33It's beyond my comprehension,
23:35but politics has seen stranger alliances coming into effect.
23:40But I think it brings back in a very weird way
23:46alliances that current Israel,
23:50with its inability to sustain international legitimacy,
23:56would have to keep because what else would be left?
24:01I know we can still rely on Germany,
24:04but this also will change, I promise you.
24:06So they will have to, apart from Germany and Austria
24:10and Christian Zionists, they will have serious problems
24:13in finding serious allies in justifying their policies
24:18and even the nature of the state.
24:22Now, the last and very interesting paradigm
24:26for judging Zionists' connection with secularism
24:31and religion is the paradigm of settler colonialism.
24:36You are all familiar, I'm sure,
24:38with the paradigm of colonialism.
24:41The paradigm of colonialism is very historical.
24:43It's a very closed paradigm.
24:45In other words, when you talk about colonialist projects,
24:49you usually imagine something that is already behind you.
24:52There's a certain period,
24:55there is a certain genre of literature
24:58that is connected to it,
25:00and there is a certain narrative
25:01which we are all familiar with.
25:03There's colonialism, there's anti-colonialism,
25:05there's liberation, and there's also post-colonialism
25:09and neo-colonialism, as we know.
25:12Settler colonialism was, in a way, invented as a paradigm,
25:17and you know, I don't know if you know,
25:18but there's already two, three journals
25:20of settler colonialist studies
25:22because a certain colonialist project did not really end.
25:28They just substituted the old colonialist means
25:32of exploiting the native people
25:35with different kind of methods,
25:37sometimes masquerading as democracies even, and so on.
25:42I'm not sure how valid or invalid this paradigm is.
25:45It doesn't matter for me for this talk.
25:48What matters to me is that
25:51it produced some very interesting works.
25:55The last one I'm thinking of is by a colleague of mine
25:59from the University of California, from UCLA,
26:04by the name of Gabi Peterberg,
26:06a book called The Returns of Zionism,
26:08where he analyzes Zionism today
26:12as a settler colonialist project.
26:15Settler colonialist project means, in many ways,
26:19an ongoing struggle to take over a land
26:25from its indigenous native population
26:28without succeeding in completing the project,
26:31and therefore, you have the conflict.
26:33If you want, coming back to what I said
26:36about the peace process, for instance,
26:37the peace process since the 1970s
26:39refuses to adopt this paradigm
26:42because the Israelis would object, of course,
26:45to be viewed as a settler colonialist movement,
26:48and therefore, they would not allow the peace process,
26:51for instance, to be a process of decolonization,
26:54as it was in South Africa.
26:56So if, in many ways, if the process in Israel and Palestine
27:00is not about decolonization, there will not be peace
27:03and not be a reconciliation in this respect.
27:06Anything else is just a waste of time and energy,
27:09as we have, I don't have to say this.
27:11This is very clear.
27:12But for our talk tonight,
27:16what is so magnetic about settler colonialist paradigms
27:20is that it doesn't really matter
27:23whether the ideology motivating the settlers,
27:28motivating the colonization of the place
27:31is religious or secular.
27:34It sees, actually, the debate about Zionism,
27:36whether it is a religious movement or a secular movement,
27:39is very secondary.
27:41Because, as you probably know,
27:44colonialists can even be,
27:45and we know it from the case of Palestine,
27:47can be communists as well.
27:49From the colonized perspective,
27:53if you have a boot on,
27:54if the colonizer has a boot on the colonized face,
27:58and whether he holds the Quran, the Bible, or Karl Marx,
28:03usually to the colonized, it doesn't matter,
28:06because what matters is the boot,
28:08not the book that he's holding in the hand.
28:12The Israeli Communist Party,
28:13it took them 55 years to understand that,
28:16that if they come and colonize under the name of Marxism,
28:20and someone else comes and colonizes
28:22under the name of the Bible,
28:24from the Palestinian perspective,
28:26this is not a particularly interesting debate.
28:30And I think that's, for me,
28:32the great value of settler-colonialist paradigm,
28:35that it puts the focus on the oppression,
28:40on the dispossession, on the colonization as an act,
28:45and is far less interested in the ideological origins
28:49of that oppression.
28:50Because, and that's also typical
28:53to settler-colonialist literature,
28:55some of the motivation, some of the impulses
29:00that moved people to settle in someone else's land
29:04are quite humane, are quite noble, are quite understandable.
29:10People were actually victims.
29:13And through the process of settler-colonialism
29:17became victimizers.
29:19So the process, and this you can read
29:22in the post-colonialist literature,
29:26the process of the victims becoming victimizers
29:30is something that we learn
29:33from the settler-colonialist paradigm.
29:35And there, the question of the real nature of Zionism
29:40in terms of religion and secularism become less important.
29:48Between those four paradigms,
29:49I think what we come up with is the following,
29:52that, and we may have a deep,
29:55I hope we have enough time to have a proper debate, yeah.
30:00We may have a good discussion here about it.
30:04I think that there is a media hype,
30:07sometimes there's also an academic hype,
30:09about religion and secularism in Israel as central issues.
30:15I don't think they are.
30:16They're really not.
30:17I mean, that's my own take out of these four paradigms.
30:20That's what I'm taking from there.
30:21I really think the issue or the basic condition
30:26that informs the realities is the colonialist condition,
30:31not the condition of religion versus religion.
30:34I don't think the conflict is between Islam and Judaism
30:37or between Islam and Christianity and Judaism.
30:39In Palestine, I'm talking.
30:41I don't think so.
30:42I know there's a vast literature that insists
30:45that this is the nature of the conflict.
30:48It became very popular after 9-11
30:50portraying the conflict in Palestine as a conflict,
30:53a religious conflict.
30:54I don't agree.
30:55I don't think it is a religious conflict.
30:58I think it's a conflict between settlers
31:00and people who don't want to be settled or colonized.
31:04Secondly, I do agree,
31:06and I think that's an interesting story,
31:09which does not inform the general condition
31:12of the situation in Israel and Palestine,
31:14that any religious movement
31:18that tried to reinvent itself in the late 19th century
31:23as a national secular movement
31:26has created problems which are insoluble.
31:31They're not easy.
31:32Secular Christianity, secular Judaism, secular Islam,
31:36even from the language, from the linguistic perspective,
31:40sound quite bizarre.
31:42In reality, it's even worse.
31:44It doesn't work.
31:46It doesn't work that much.
31:47Of course, it works on a daily basis
31:50because people are,
31:51I remember I was a member of the Israeli Communist Party,
31:54and I always remember that in Ramadan,
31:57during the Politburo discussion,
32:00we lost the Muslim members of the Politburo
32:02because they went to pray in the Israeli Communist Party.
32:06So I know that people know how to navigate
32:09between religion and even the most religious secularism
32:14in place.
32:16On an individual basis,
32:18there is no limit to how you can settle contradictions.
32:23You can be a secular religious person.
32:25You can be anything you want.
32:27I mean, you can be two genders at one go,
32:29if you want, or three, even, I understand.
32:32So I mean, so there's no limit on a personal level
32:35to what you want.
32:36I'm talking about informing,
32:39injecting these personal solutions into social systems,
32:45into cultural system, into political system,
32:48if that's possible.
32:50Or you need a different kind of paradigm
32:53which creates a different kind of dialogue
32:56between religious and non-religious people,
32:58secular and non-secular people.
33:00So on this basis, on the more general basis
33:04of the relationship between secular and religious groups,
33:09there is an internal Jewish issue here,
33:13which in Israel we used to call it,
33:15as a problem, who is a Jew,
33:16which is a famous kind of debate
33:20that continues to affect Israeli life.
33:25But if you connect,
33:26and that's an issue of secularism versus tradition.
33:30That's a question on the general public sphere
33:34whether there is a possibility to reinvent Judaism
33:39as ethnicity or as a national group.
33:42And when you reinvent it as nationalism and ethnicity,
33:45it becomes secular.
33:46It doesn't remain a religious phenomenon.
33:49But if you tie in the internal,
33:52very interesting and very intriguing Jewish debate
33:56inside Israel of who they are
33:59because of the historical circumstances
34:01they brought them into Palestine
34:02and developed them as a distinct Jewish groups,
34:05if you want, different from other Jewish groups.
34:08But if you tie it in to the settler-colonialist situation,
34:13you come back to my metaphor of the colonizer
34:16having the boot on the face of the colonized.
34:20This internal debate is not only irrelevant in one way
34:24to the general situation in Israel and Palestine,
34:27it even is employed and exploited
34:31to make the situation worse.
34:33What do I mean by this?
34:35From a religious perspective, as you know,
34:37like in any collective identity and religion,
34:40like nationalism, like any kind of attempt
34:43to define ourselves on an individual basis
34:46is a question of collective identity.
34:50And we know that we know who we are
34:52by knowing who we are not.
34:54I know I'm a Christian because I know I'm not Jewish
34:57and I'm not Muslim.
34:58So it will be very difficult to know that I'm a Christian
35:01if there were not any, the other wasn't there, right?
35:05So for Jews to know that they were Jews was very easy.
35:08They were in Europe or in the Arab world,
35:10depends where they were.
35:11So there were either other not Christians or not Muslims.
35:15And both the two other religion
35:17actually also define very well
35:19the relationship between the two religions
35:24in the two cases respectively.
35:26But when Judaism reinvented itself,
35:29planted itself in Palestine
35:31and grew up as an ethnic Jewish group in Palestine,
35:36the question of who was a Jew from this perspective,
35:41a Jew is someone who's not an Arab,
35:44which is very interesting
35:45because a lot of the Jews are Arabs, as you know.
35:49In 1951, Israel began to import
35:53one million Arabs who were Jews.
35:57And this was a great problem for the Zionist movement,
36:02that moment, because the basic self-image
36:06of secular Zionism in Israel,
36:09the basic image was, as I said, the project of modernity,
36:13which included secularism, democracy,
36:16but more than anything else, included a Western image.
36:20You were part of Europe.
36:22Forget about the geography, doesn't matter.
36:25Although geographically you are located in the Arab world,
36:27in the midst of the Muslim world, you are not there.
36:31It's an optical illusion.
36:33You're actually in Europe.
36:34If you just cross the street, you are in Berlin.
36:38Definitely my mother thought so,
36:40because she came from here,
36:41that if you cross the street in Mont Carmel,
36:43you get to Berlin.
36:45And she never saw anything else in Asia around her.
36:48Now, coming back to the real issue,
36:51the identity of the Arab Jews was an issue,
36:58and the only way of resolving it,
37:01as some of the great critical works
37:03produced in Israel in recent years
37:05have shown by Ella Shochat, Yehuda Shanav,
37:08Sami Shalom Shetri to mention,
37:10but few of these Israeli Arab Jews.
37:15Israel had to de-Arabize these Jews.
37:18How do you de-Arabize Arabs?
37:21You ask them to get rid of their Arabic accent.
37:23You ask them to get rid of their Arab names.
37:27You ask them to get rid of their Arab behavior.
37:30But most important than anything else,
37:33in order to be accepted as modern people,
37:36they have to show antagonism towards Arabs.
37:40And that was very well exploited
37:42by the right wing in Israel, which was anti-Arab,
37:45the European anti-Arab ideological movement.
37:48They exploited it very well in 1977,
37:51because they had no chance of getting to power in Israel,
37:53which was controlled by the Socialist Labor Party,
37:56but they understood very well that all these Jews
37:59who came from North Africa and Iraq and other places
38:04understood that the ticket for normality
38:07in Israeli society was to display
38:09very strong anti-Arab feelings.
38:12So the Likud exploited it to win the elections in 1977.
38:17So you de-Arabize the Arab Jews
38:20because the new definition of a Jew
38:22is someone who is not an Arab.
38:24And much of the secular, much of the secular energy
38:30in Israel, in the legal frame, in the educational realm,
38:38in the political reality, is meant,
38:42what was directed, still is directed,
38:47in creating Jewish exclusivity.
38:50You can do it by having a semi-apartheid state
38:53that gives rights only to Jews and not to Arabs.
38:56You can do it by creating gated communities of Jews.
39:00There are many, many ways.
39:01In fact, you become so hysterical at one point
39:05that you bring Christians, as long as they're not Arabs.
39:09These are all the Jews who came from the ex-Soviet Union,
39:12and I see them every Sunday praying
39:15in the Orthodox church next to my house.
39:18This was very important in order to re-Judaize Israel.
39:25You can be a Christian, that's okay,
39:27as long as you're not Arab.
39:31And it's a successful project, unfortunately.
39:34It is a successful project,
39:36although I do think it's thin.
39:38I believe it can be cracked,
39:40and I'll say something very shortly about it.
39:48The very tragic issue was that,
39:52in order for the internal issue,
39:56the unresolved issue of religion and secularism
40:00within the Jewish community,
40:01in order to make it possible to survive in the public realm,
40:09this almost impossible idea of a secular Jew,
40:12again, the only thing you could do
40:16in order to make it stick, because it's not logic,
40:19it cannot work, really,
40:21was to cement it with the anti-Arab position.
40:27Mainly, what we see in Israel is a movement
40:31led by rabbis, mainly from Arab origin,
40:35from Arab origin,
40:37who have turned the secular and liberal,
40:41very sophisticated way of excluding the Arabs
40:46into a religious precept, into religious dogma.
40:50So, you come back to Yisrael Shachak,
40:52that's why people re-read Yisrael Shachak.
40:54They found a way of turning the Bible,
40:58the halacha, the Jewish religion,
41:02as the main justification for racism
41:05towards the Arabs in Israel, which is very different.
41:09I'll give you just one example.
41:10I have another five minutes?
41:11Yes. Five minutes, enough.
41:13I'll give you a very good example,
41:16which will illustrate the difference.
41:18Again, I'm coming back to the point
41:20that I'm not tired, I'm tired,
41:21but I'm not tired to repeat, again and again,
41:24that from the colonized, oppressed point of view,
41:26it didn't matter, it really doesn't matter.
41:29It doesn't matter, but it does matter
41:31from the oppressor's point of view.
41:34The liberal, secular way of excluding Jews
41:37is very typical in Israel,
41:40in using the discourse of the army service.
41:43If you don't want to employ an Arab waiter,
41:46you don't want to employ an Arab worker,
41:48you say that you are looking for people
41:50after the military service.
41:52This is a known code in Israel for not employing Arabs.
41:56What the rabbis do, they don't use liberal, secular discourse.
42:01They say, we are not employing Arabs
42:03because we are religious, Orthodox Jews,
42:06so we are not employing Arabs,
42:07and Arabs shouldn't be employed
42:10according to our religious understanding.
42:14Now, you would have thought that this would embarrass
42:18the liberal, Zionist, secular camp.
42:23On one level, it does.
42:25On one level, it does,
42:26and there is a kind of a contra-attempt
42:29by liberal, Zionist NGOs,
42:32known personalities, political parties
42:36to try and block it.
42:38It's very unpleasant to hear
42:41your own hidden racist ideas
42:44being articulated so clearly, right?
42:48But on the other hand, they're not totally against it
42:52because in practice, they also don't want,
42:56as the author A.B. Oshua said,
42:58to live in proximity to Arabs,
43:02but they cover it with a different discourse,
43:05the discourse of modernity.
43:07So it's not really a cultural war
43:12about the attitude towards the Arabs.
43:15It is a cultural war about
43:19what Tel Aviv is allowed to do at night
43:22or not to do at night.
43:23This is, you know, this is now used, actually,
43:28by the defenders of Israel
43:32as the main, probably the last ammunition
43:37against the war of legitimization.
43:38I don't know if you've read the article in New York Times
43:41how gay rights in Israel are now what women's rights
43:44used to be in the colonialist period.
43:46In the colonialist period, women, feminist activists,
43:50were recruited by a colonialist movement
43:54to justify colonizing areas
43:56in order to bring equality to women.
43:59Exactly, exactly.
44:01Now, the same is being done with gay rights in Israel,
44:06and there was a very critical and good article about it
44:08in the New York Times.
44:09I don't remember who, what's the name of the writer,
44:12but if you look for it, you will find it.
44:16So, the issue of secularism is now, in many ways,
44:22downsized, and with this, I will end.
44:24It's downsized in Israel into a struggle
44:30on the nature of the gated community,
44:34not the core issue, not the core issue,
44:37on the gated community,
44:39and therefore, it's a very virtual,
44:42irrelevant, to my mind, kind of discussion.
44:46It's not irrelevant to the people who are involved in it.
44:48Of course, they take it very seriously,
44:51but it is irrelevant because, for instance,
44:55it's not connected at all to a very alive
45:00and important and an ongoing discussion
45:04in the Arab world about tradition and modernity,
45:07about secularism and religion.
45:09This, the Israelis will never allow themselves
45:12to be involved in, on multiculturalism in the Arab world.
45:16That's why they fear the Arab springs, so-called.
45:21They fear it because this is the wake-up call
45:24that would make them understand
45:26that they are in the Middle East and not in Europe,
45:29for good or for worse, for good or for worse,
45:31and I think that the whole issue, to sum it up,
45:37I would say that the future of Israel
45:40is sort of lying there between two paradigms
45:46that both are very difficult to digest
45:50and probably they're not worth much
45:52because this is my, I want to end
45:54on a futuristic sentence.
45:56Don't take it too seriously
45:57because nobody knows what's going to happen,
45:59but it gives you kind of, you locate yourself, I think,
46:02in a discussion when you do this.
46:05One possibility is to integrate the issue of religion
46:10and secularism, modernity, and tradition
46:13into the area's agenda.
46:16You become part of the area's problems,
46:19you become part of the area's solutions,
46:22whatever history will take the area to.
46:26You cannot be different.
46:28Again, I don't know.
46:29I hope it will be resolved nicely or not, I don't know,
46:32but you have to be part of it or go away.
46:35There's nothing for you to do there
46:35if you're not interested in it, right?
46:37Now, if you do that, you have to change the regime in Israel.
46:41You cannot remain a Jewish ethnic racist state
46:45and claim that you are the only democracy in the Middle East.
46:47That doesn't work.
46:48So you have to collapse in a way
46:50which nobody does voluntarily, nobody likes to do.
46:54Nobody likes to give up privileges,
46:57but it may happen anyway, whether you like it or not.
47:00It can happen to you anyway.
47:01Or you do it voluntarily,
47:03as Huffley was done in South Africa.
47:06You can have, there is a model of sort of disarming yourself
47:11from a racist ideology by yourself.
47:14Not, of course, because you wanted to,
47:16but because you, at the right historical moment,
47:18you say, I can't maintain it anymore.
47:21So I'm building another regime with all the risks
47:23and all the problems that it brings.
47:24It's not an assured, successful formula.
47:27The other one, which I'm afraid is more likely to happen,
47:30at least in the near future,
47:32is you give up the project of modernity, again,
47:38because it doesn't work.
47:39The world doesn't buy it anymore.
47:40So you're not a paragon of modernity.
47:43Apart from some Christian scientists,
47:45I don't think anyone in their right mind,
47:47when they will ask us, BA students,
47:49to write, give us good examples
47:51of where liberal democracies are particularly successful.
47:55My guess is that Israel will not be among the first 55.
47:59But I may be wrong.
48:01I don't know.
48:02So that doesn't work anymore.
48:05So you don't use it anymore as an excuse.
48:07It's not an ammunition.
48:08You use antisemitism.
48:09That's always better.
48:11You use every one of antisemitism,
48:13and you ally yourself to those who want to barbecue you
48:16in hell, the Christian Zionists,
48:17and you hope that somewhere between a paranoia
48:19from antisemitism and crazy Christian Zionists
48:22who can even have a president in the White House,
48:24you'll be secure on top of 250 nuclear weapons.
48:29It's not a great idea for security.
48:31I wouldn't sell it as an insurance agent,
48:33but somehow it works with some progressive,
48:36open-minded Jews and Germans.
48:37I don't know why.
48:38I have my own suspicions why it does.
48:42Now, instead of that,
48:44you'll have a very tough ethnic identity of Israel.
48:49We can see the new legislation
48:50in the Israeli parliament pushing towards it,
48:53where secularism and religion
48:56would find an easy common language
48:59because the anti-Arab nature would become so explicit.
49:04Would this include a compromise
49:05between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,
49:07namely Tel Aviv being the paragon of secularism,
49:11Jerusalem the paragon of religiosity?
49:14I don't know.
49:14Maybe it will work.
49:15Maybe it will work for a while.
49:18I don't think this is something
49:20either the Palestinians will tolerate.
49:22I don't think this is something
49:23the Arab world will tolerate.
49:24I'm sure this is something
49:25the Muslim world will not tolerate.
49:28And maybe even the West at one point will stop tolerating.
49:33And then we'll have to go back to the first model,
49:36but after a lot of people have suffered.
49:38So I hope there are shortcuts in history.
49:40I'm not sure about it, but I think I'll end here.