Israel's detached society needing cantonization to survive

http://electronicintifada.net/content/could-cantonizing-palestine-bring-peace/14204

An interesting plan for dividing Israel into provinces was published a few months ago byHaaretz. It suggested a remedy for the fragmentation of Israeli society and its failure to create a melting pot for Jews immigrating to Palestine.

In this article I provide a critique of the pros and cons of this plan and offer an alternative. The scheme, laid out by Carlo Strenger and Judd Yadid in a 7 October 2014 article entitled “How Cantonization can save Israel,” admits that Israel’s leaders failed “to impose a monolithic ideological and cultural hegemony on the country’s population.” The Ultra-Orthodox Jews, for example, were not “converted into card-carrying Zionists.” Tel Aviv residents will not “put up with marriage laws” with a foreign and invasive nature.

Strenger and Yadid find that the answer to “the country’s myriad identities” is to quarantine “the feuding peoples of Israel” into several different provinces with different regional powers with which they would exercise the life they are used to, according to their cultural and religious values. Or perhaps, more practically, they could continue to live as they did in their mother countries before they emigrated to Palestine, ranging from ghettos in Eastern Europe to affluent neighborhoods in London.

If this looks like a stark admission of the failure of “in-gathering of the exiles,” Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin was not mincing words when he declared at a conference on racism and hatred in Jerusalem last October that “Israel is a sick society with an illness that demands treatment.”

The lack of homogeneity in Israel is not surprising; the Jewish immigrants came to Palestine from 110 countries and they spoke more than eighty languages and dialects. Many of them continued their traditional ways, even though they learned modern Hebrew and their youth joined the army. The army was supposed to be the perfect melting pot for forging unity among immigrants against a common enemy, the Arabs, among whom they found themselves when they settled in Palestine. The conflicting backgrounds and diverse origins of the Israelis have been the subject of many studies. There are dozens of books, almost all by Jewish authors, on the fragmentation of the Israeli society, the failure of the melting pot, the ideological and economic bankruptcy of the kibbutz, the crises of “Israeli” identity, the founding myths of Israel, the invention of the Jewish people and the “Land of Israel,” the meaning of “post-Zionism,” the military character of Israel, the exploitation of the Holocaust and the mythical narrative of Israel’s birth and the attending denial of the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.[1]

Dividing Israel to save it

This cantonization scheme is probably the first time that a Zionist proposal is made to separate the diverse groups geographically and legally at the “province” level. It probably aspires to resemble the Canadian provincial system with the obvious difference that the proposed Israeli provinces are tiny slivers of land, more like a British borough than the vast regions of Canada. Even so, the scheme represents optimism that present-day Israel, excluding the West Bank and Gaza, but including occupied East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights, can be divided into twelve provinces (see Map 1 below).

Map 1: Proposed division of present-day Israel into ten Jewish and two Arab provinces, showing total Jewish and Arab populations.

 (Salman Abu Sitta)

Carmel province on the coastal plain, also seen on the same map, is designed to drown the large Palestinian presence in the Little Triangle with a population of 350,000 in 55 villages among one million Jews.[2]

This is the population that Israel’s foreign minister, the racist Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova and leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu, wants to expel from their homeland under the guise of a land swap. Gideon Biger, a Russian and a political geographer at Tel Aviv University, is his planner for ethnic cleansing. The junior author of the scheme, Judd Yadid, South African-born and Australia-raised, works at Tel Aviv University, where he wrote his master’s thesis under Biger.

In summary, this Zionist cantonization scheme would, if implemented, allow 99 percent of Jews to live in ten Jewish provinces which account for 95 percent of Israel’s area where they can enact their own regional laws in education, health, religion, culture, language and the like. With them would live 58 percent (835,000) of Palestinian citizens of Israel under purely Jewish laws without any influence on their own affairs.

Only 42 percent of Palestinians (600,000) would live in Palestinian areas (five percent of Israel’s area), where they could run their own local affairs, with fewer than one percent of Jews.

In other words, the majority of Palestinians in Israel today would remain under the shadow of Jewish rule even for their normal civil rights. Palestinians who are twenty percent of the citizenry in Israel are to be incarcerated in two percent of Israel in Galilee and three percent in the south.

The cantonization scheme therefore fails to achieve its stated objective: to diffuse the animosity between the various components of Jewish society in Israel hailing from a hundred different backgrounds. Moreover it will further marginalize the Palestinian citizens and strengthen Israeli policies of racism and apartheid. It will arrest their development and confine them to ghettos. Deprived of their agricultural land, financial support and democratic laws, they will be reduced to cheap labor in Israeli factories.

Coming at a time when the occupied West Bank has effectively been converted into several hundred cantons where Palestinians are confined by checkpoints and walls, while 650,000 Israeli settlers, many of them armed, control two thirds of it, it is clear that the cantonization plan would be the last step in the complete destruction of Palestine.

The inevitable result would be to intensify the Palestinian struggle for freedom and against Israeli policies of racism and apartheid.