Summary
The state Sayegh consistently calls the Zionist settler-state: the political embodiment of Zionist colonialism, created in 1948 after thirty years of British shelter and thereafter sustained by the United States, characterised in his account by racism, addiction to violence and territorial expansion, and an alien body in the Middle East.
Details
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The alliance concluded in 1917 between British imperialism and Zionist colonialism paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist settler-state in 1948 (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.212).
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In the mid-forties Zionist colonisation, sheltered and nursed for thirty years by British imperialism, found a more powerful and more militant supporter in the United States to see it through the struggle for outright statehood (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.8 / printed p.213).
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Sayegh quotes its veteran Prime Minister, sourced to David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p.489, that the State of Israel is part of the Middle East only in geography and part of world Jewry in its dynamism, creation and growth (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.8 / printed p.213).
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Apart from its link with imperialism and its status as a total stranger to the Middle East, the settler-state is characterised chiefly by its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern, its addiction to violence, and its expansionist stance (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).
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The remnants of Palestine’s Arabs who have continued to live in the settler-state since 1948 face confiscation of lands and homes under drastic laws of 1948-1953 and statutory discrimination in citizenship under the Nationality Law (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12-13 / printed p.217-218).
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For the Zionist settler-state, in Sayegh’s closing formula for section III.C, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.221).
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In Said: Israel itself, as well as its supporters, has tried to efface the Palestinian in words and actions, because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians; merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.17 / printed p.xvi).
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Said’s Israel legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine at the moment it declared itself a state in 1948, and the transformation of Palestine which resulted in Israel cost approximately 780,000 Arab Palestinians dispossessed and displaced in that year (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.35, p.44 / printed p.14, p.23).
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In Said, Chapter Two II and Chapter Three: after 1948 the Arabs who stayed were ruled by a military government until 1966 and by the Emergency Defense Regulations thereafter, with absentee-property and land laws expropriating their land; since 1967 approximately a million more Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza have been ruled under occupation, with over ninety settlements since 1967 and approximately 17,000 Arab houses blown up (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.124-128 / printed p.103-107).
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The Koenig Report of 1976, quoted at length, is Said’s most unguarded example of the separate government for Arabs (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.128-131 / printed p.107-110).
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In Chapter Three, some Israelis after 1967 faced the Palestinian problem as central for the first time, while official phrases continued to deny the Palestinians: Golda Meir (no Palestinians, 1969), Yitzhak Rabin (so-called Palestinians), and Menachem Begin (the Arabs of Eretz Israel) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.158-160 / printed p.137-139).
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In Said, Chapter Four II-IV: by the end of 1978 Israel had seventy-seven settlements on the West Bank alone and had confiscated approximately 27 percent of the land, with Gush Emunim as the settler vanguard and approximately 30 percent of Israel’s water supply coming from the West Bank; the military governor’s powers and, as Zeev Schiff foresaw, the security apparatus were to continue under the autonomy indefinitely (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.228-233 / printed p.207-212).
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Said also records that Israel has still not scrapped its official division of its own population into Jews and non-Jews, is helping South Africa with its nuclear program, and has not signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.255-256 / printed p.234-235).
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Said’s two certainties at the book’s close: the Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.256 / printed p.235).
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In Makdisi, what happens in the occupied territories is the extension of what happens inside Israel itself: the state defines itself as the Jewish state and establishes a juridical distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship”, recognising 140 “nationalities” but no Israeli nationality — the High Court ruled in 1972 that “there is no such thing as an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people” — so Jewish noncitizens enjoy rights denied to the state’s own non-Jewish citizens, and most discrimination runs on nationality rather than citizenship (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.198-199).
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More than twenty Basic Laws and other legislation explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews; Palestinian citizens are barred from land held by the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, which are mandated to benefit “Jewish nationals” exclusively, and about 10 percent of Palestinian Israelis live in Unrecognized villages the state does not officially recognise (PDF p.199-202).
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Israel is not, in Makdisi’s account, a secular state: there is no civil marriage, and the Orthodox rabbinate’s monopoly over personal status extends to conversion and the “Who is a Jew?” debate (PDF p.202-204).
Related pages
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Racism, Territorial Expansion, Eretz Israel, Gush Emunim, Arik Sharon, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Jewish National Fund