No Such Thing As Liberal Zionism

Just look at these numbers.

1. This table [1] shows the population of Palestine when Zionists first arrived to pioneer their Jewish state.

 

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The year of the first Zionist immigration was 1299 (Muslim calendar), or 1881/2 of the Common Era.  You can read for yourself that at that time there were 462,465 people living in Palestine: 403,795 Muslims; 43,659 Christians, and 15,011 Jews. 

How are you going to build a Jewish state in a land where the preexisting population is just 3.3 per cent Jewish, except by dispossessing those 96.7 per cent of the population that happen to have the “wrong” ethnic-religious origin? If Zionism could only ever be achieved through denying self-determination to the indigenous, majority population, what exactly is "liberal" about that?

2. This map [2], based on land ownership statistics compiled by the British government in Palestine, summarizes the respective holdings of the Arab and Jewish communities in 1945. 

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It shows that the Jewish population of Palestine legally owned less than 7% of the land at that time.

How can you establish a Jewish state in a place where such a small fraction of the land is in Jewish hands, except by taking over that large proportion of the land that belongs to non-Jews? If Zionism could be achieved only by taking Palestinian land from its legal owners because from an ethnic-religious perspective they happen to be the wrong sort of people, what exactly is "liberal" about that?

3. This table [3] shows the population of the two states that the UN proposed to create by partitioning Palestine - against the will of most of its people - in 1947. Despite large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine under the British Mandate - again, against the will of a large majority of its existing population - Palestinian Arabs still comprised about two-thirds of the population of Palestine.

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Even after drawing generous boundaries to ensure that the influence of Palestine's Jewish minority population is amplified by gathering almost all of the Jewish population into a single polity, the Palestinians' overwhelming numerical advantage means that the UN's "Jewish Palestine" is demographically not a Jewish state, but a bi-national state.  It is called "the Jewish state" because it contains the overwhelming majority of Palestine's Jews, not because an overwhelming majority of its inhabitants are Jewish. Even worse from the Zionist perspective, Jewish Palestine is not only a bi-national state, but a bi-national state whose large Arab minority is guaranteed equal treatment under the terms of the partition.

Under those circumstances, how can you have the "Jewish state" that Zionism envisaged? David Ben-Gurion said you couldn't, because "There are 40% [actually 45% - ed.] non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all of its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty... Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state." He also knew what kind of "severity and distinctness" was required to render 80% of the population Jewish, specifying that the Arab population "can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them" [4].

If the only way to establish a dominant Jewish majority among a Palestinian population that remains stubbornly diverse is by expelling en masse those people with the "wrong" ethnic-religious background, what exactly is "liberal" about that?

4. This table [5] shows the population of Israel and the Occupied Territories in 2004, based on figures provided by the U.S. State Department's annual country report on human rights practices.

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It suggests that despite the exclusion of millions of Palestinian refugees, whom Israel continues to refuse to allow home, Palestinian Arabs once again outnumber Jewish Israelis in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Two-thirds of these Palestinians live as disenfranchised subjects of the Israeli government that rules over them [6], because allowing them voting rights equal to those enjoyed by Jewish residents of Israel and the Occupied Territories would democratically and non-violently end the Zionist experiment in Palestine.

If the only way to maintain a Jewish state is by exiling millions of Palestinians for generation after generation, and keeping millions more disenfranchised in walled enclaves in the Occupied Territories where they can be massively bombed into compliance should they resist their collective exclusion from equal participation in governing their own homeland, in what sense is this "liberal"?

There is not - and never was - any "liberal" way to create a Jewish state in a land so overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim. There is no Jewish state in Palestine without perpetrating the decidedly illiberal practices of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, disenfranchisement and de-development against the Muslim and Christian majority.

There is no other way to do it. Just look at the numbers. 

Footnotes:

[1] Source: The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and The Mandate (Ch 1, Table 1.4D) by Prof Justin McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1990).

[2] Source: PalestineRemembered.com - Palestinian And Zionist Land Ownership Per District as of 1945.

[3] Source: The UN Information System on the Question of Palestine - Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem.

[4] Source: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, via Turn The World Upside Down.

[5] Source: Electronic Intifada, Palestinian population exceeds Jewish population says U.S. government; based on The U.S. State Department Annual Country Report On Human Rights Practices (Israel and the Occupied Territories), Feb 28 2005. 

[6] "The only democracy in the Middle East"™ !