To the Editors:
Bernard Avishai’s review of my Peace in the Middle East? (NYR, January 23) is a melange of truths, half-truths, and serious misrepresentations. He gives few explicit references. Thus it is not easy to see on what he bases his judgments and criticisms, though it is easy enough to show that the latter are groundless.
Avishai objects to my views on two specific matters: socialist binationalism and the problem of democracy in a Jewish State. Consider the first. According to him, “Short of ‘socialist binationalism’ even peace itself seems, for Chomsky, hardly worth a great deal of effort.” Thus I “would have us reject…the prospect, however risky, of two independent, self-developing states in historic Palestine” (I take it that he means cis-Jordan) and I “neglect to add that this would still be a substantial improvement.” I “denigrate” all practical steps, and seem “only perfunctorily concerned about the lives of real people” because of my abstract commitment to socialist binationalism. He suspects further that I am “unsympathetic to those who need and cherish their national culture, and worse, who act politically to preserve it.” I demand that citizens should be “the culturally neuter ‘internationalists’ of [my] socialist utopia,” a utopia described in a passage that he cites with several crucial omissions. To these “abstract” views he counterposes his own belief that “perhaps if peace ever comes, Chomsky’s suggestions for transnational economic arrangements and greater cultural understanding and contacts will become irresistible.”
Now to the facts. The position that Avishai counterposes to mine is the one that I put forth throughout (except that I never say that the suggestions will become “irresistible”). The position that he attributes to me is one that I reject, explicitly and repeatedly. In the Introduction, I discuss sympathetically the views of those marginal groups that have “sought a way out of the impasse through recognition of Palestinian rights,” citing Siah’s call for a two-state settlement in cis-Jordan. I point out that the only short-range hope for peace lies in such a solution, though it will be an ugly one, for reasons I explain. I note that this settlement will realize fears expressed long ago by Zionist leaders who warned that such a Jewish State would “be nothing but a new Montenegro or Lithuania” (to update the reference, we might say “a new Cyprus or Ulster”), and I express the hope that “after the experience of building and living in new Montenegros and Lithuanias, Jews and Arabs may turn to a better way,” based on classical Zionist principles of parity and non-domination.
I then outline the “socialist utopia” to which Avishai alludes, emphasizing that in it “Each people will have the right to participate in self-governing national institutions” and that “the right of return” will be granted to “Jews who wish to find their place in this national homeland” (as to Palestinians); Avishai’s quote omits these sentences, crucially, for had he included them he could not have gone on to speculate on my lack of sympathy for nationalism or its political expression, or my “casual attitude” toward the needs of Russian refugees. I then explain that this is only a “dim prospect,” presupposing the development of socialist movements in the region and “an international socialist movement that does not now exist,” but that “it is important to keep that hope alive….” Elsewhere, I cite a socialist Zionist journal in Israel which observes (1969) that even a long-range program of binationalism may make Jews and Arabs “readier to yield the short-range concessions that more immediate agreements will demand”—a point often overlooked.
In essays written before October 1973, I praised the efforts of groups supporting a two-state solution, while noting that “their program is unrealistic,” because “unless great power pressure is employed—an unlikely as well as ugly prospect—the argument against withdrawal will always be persuasive within Israel.” As events demonstrated, this assessment was accurate. I therefore proposed, as a dim but no less realistic prospect, that the Israeli left press for some form of federalism, with such initial steps as permitting free political expression and organization in the occupied areas, moves toward political parity and economic equality in two self-governing regions, etc. This approach, I argued, offered the basis for a long-term settlement more just and responsive to real needs of Jews and Arabs, while maximizing security. By October 1973, these opportunities had been lost; it is interesting that now, when they are meaningless, such proposals are being made by Israeli Ministers. What stood in the way of any such attempt was a simple fact that Avishai never properly recognizes: the commitment of the Israeli government to Jewish dominance throughout the region, including much of the occupied territories.
I will not try to argue the substantive points here. Comparing Avishai’s version with the facts, it is clear that the picture he gives is false in every essential respect. It is interesting that similar distortions have appeared in virtually every review by an American (or in this case, Canadian) Zionist, but in no foreign (including Israeli) review that I have seen.
On one point Avishai is correct: I did “denigrate” the Rogers plan. Since he does not say why, let me fill the gap: The Rogers plan “excluded the Palestinian Arabs, and in this sense was unjust. This injustice should be rectified.” Avishai takes my “denigration” of the Rogers plan to indicate that I am concerned only with abstract utopias. The actual reference shows something quite different. If Avishai really disagrees with my assessment of the Rogers plan, as his remarks indicate, he should explain himself, since such disagreement implies that he opposes the two-state settlement that he seems to support. This settlement would serve to rectify the injustice in the Rogers plan that led to my “denigration” of it, to the extent that justice can be attained in the foreseeable future.
Avishai’s most severe criticism is that I accept “the most uncompromising territorial claims of Jewish and Arab nationalists” as having “equal moral validity.” He deplores my failure to “dismiss the brutal demands of Arab and Jewish extremists.” To substantiate this charge, he adduces his second direct citation (the last, apart from a few phrases), namely, my remark that “Palestinian Arabs and Israelis have equal rights in the whole territory of Mandate Palestine.” It is, he states, “unworthy” of my talents to try so to reconcile the “inflated moral claims” of Arafat and “the Likud demagogue Menahem Begin.” Again, there is a crucial omission. The remark he quotes appears in a lengthy quotation from a well-known supporter of the Siah two-state program cited earlier. As I point out, this principle is put forth “as a ‘moral point of reference,’ which implies no specific practical steps, but which might serve as a framework for the adjudication of claims and the outline of a long-range program.” As the remainder of the discussion explains, the suggested “adjudication” (on the part of Siah, at least) is a two-state solution, and the “long-range program” might be one of the several that I discuss.
Again we see a striking pattern of misrepresentation. The principle in question does not derive from Arafat or Likud or other “Arab and Jewish extremists,” but from an advocate of a two-state solution in cis-Jordan, an Israeli leftist. The principle implies none of the consequences that Avishai proceeds to draw from it; rather, as I make explicit, it implies no specific consequences. Avishai never mentions that the principle in question derives from a position on the political spectrum about as far as can be imagined from those where he locates it.
Consider now Avishai’s second objection, the matter of democracy in a Jewish State. Avishai finds my argument “casuistic.” Reducing it to essentials, it is as follows: “If a state [with non-Jewish citizens] is Jewish in certain respects, then in these respects it is not democratic…. If the respects are marginal and merely symbolic…the departure from democratic principle is not serious. If the respects are significant, the problem is correspondingly severe. The problems of achieving democratic goals in a multinational or multi-ethnic society are not trivial ones. It is pointless to pretend that they do not exist” (emphasis added).
To this “casuistic syllogism” Avishai responds that “Israel can be a democratic state to the extent that it impartially and strongly guarantees civil liberties for all of its citizens,” etc.; exactly the point I explicitly made. He claims that in my view, “if the state is to have a Jewish character, it simply has to discriminate against Arabs,” that I “denigrate…the very possibility of democratic values in Israel”—outright falsehoods, as this quote, and many others, show clearly. Since he offers no evidence whatsoever for his allegations, I will discuss them no further.
Since we apparently agree on the point of logic, I turn to the question of fact: how significant are the “respects” in which the state is Jewish, hence discriminatory? Avishai agrees that these respects are significant. He cites a few examples: “discriminatory institutions and practices”; exclusion of non-Jews “from the lands owned by the Jewish National Fund and from access to the funds of the Jewish Agency,” so that “some of the most desirable lands in Israel are closed to Arab farmers and home builders”; expropriation of Arab land for Jewish settlement; “Israeli laws of censorship and preventive detention…[which]…have been particularly hard on dissident Arabs.” But, Avishai concludes, “The ‘Jewishness’ of Israeli society…is beside the point for democrats.”
I find this conclusion remarkable. Suppose that these observations were to hold (as indeed they often do) of a White State with Black citizens, a Christian State with Jewish citizens, an Arab State with non-Arab citizens, a Malay State with Chinese citizens, etc. In such cases, everyone, including Avishai I am sure, would regard the matter as very much to the point “for democrats.”
The “Jewishness” of Israel resides in discriminatory institutions and practices such as the ones that Avishai cites. He agrees that “these discriminatory practices” have not “been seriously challenged by Jewish democrats.” Furthermore, they are expressed in the basic legal structure of the state as well as its virtually unchallenged ideology. As the Courts have held, Israel is not the state of its citizens. Rather, “The State of Israel was established and recognised as the State of the Jews…this is the sovereign State of the Jewish people” (Eichmann Trial Judgment); and as the Courts have held in other cases that I cite, there is no Israeli nation apart from the Jewish people, in Israel and the Diaspora. Avishai too notes that “legally and administratively there can be no such person as a ‘real Israeli.’ ” There are, then, discriminatory institutions and practices, no serious challenge to them, and a legal doctrine that serves to justify them. But all of this “is beside the point for democrats”; “Israel is a Jewish state in that it is a democracy dominated by Jews”—thus, we may conclude, just as England is a Christian state, a democracy dominated by Christians.
