Review of "A Modest Proposal...to solve the Palestine-Israel Conflict" by Karl Sabbagh

This was sitting around for ages, and I thought I'd really better read it. And I started out wanting to like it. It's an argument in favour of a One State Solution, with some elaboration as to how aspects of it might work. These days I am mildly in favour of a one state solution, largely because I can't see how the two state solution which I once supported might ever come about, or how it would work if it did. I feel much the same way about a one state solution. Not every conflict is a puzzle that has a solution if only you can find it. But I can sort of see a way in which Israel and the territories it occupies might evolve into a single democratic state, through a civil rights movement and a democracy movement that was not focused on nationalism. 

So I was predisposed to like the book. But the more I read, the less I liked it. Sabbagh comes from a Palestinian nationalist perspective. He admits that there might once have been antisemitism, and that the Holocaust was a bad thing, but moves swiftly on from that to how it wasn't the Palestinians fault and why should they have to suffer for it? So he is great at recognising the extent to which Zionism was a colonialist program which could not have been realised without the support of British imperialism, but he is wilfully blind as to where the impetus for it came. Without antisemitism there would have been no Zionism, or it would have been a weird little footnote in history. 

He talks about the countries that the Jewish immigrants to Palestine came from, but only in the abstract. There is no sense that these were countries that practised increasingly severe discrimination against Jews, or that there was any reason why long-established Jewish communities no longer felt at home in them. He writes about the unwillingness of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine to give up the citizenship of the countries from which they had come and accept Palestine citizenship, as if this proves something about their colonialist and exclusionary intention. Well, maybe it does - but it was happening in a context in which the possession of the right piece of paper might mean the difference between life and death for many uprooted Jews. Perhaps it wasn't so unreasonable to not trust to the bureaucratic kindness of British colonial administration, or to the welcome of an Arab community that had made it very clear that it didn't want any Jewish immigrants.

There's lots more partial history. Like I said, I know that the Zionists really did intend to take over the whole of Palestine, and that they really did plan for there to be fewer Arabs there - perhaps no Arabs at all, despite what they said for outside consumption. But it's not necessary to pretend that this was the realisation of an American-British imperial plot. The British did not support the Partition resolution at the UN and abstained on the final vote. And he doesn't mention at all the extent to which the USSR, and its satellites in Eastern Europe, and the Communist parties in Europe, the middle east and elsewhere all supported partition and the creation of Israel. 

He suggests that the Jews all left the Arab countries in the early 1950s because they were tricked into it by Zionists. It's true and well documented there were Israeli false flag operations in some Arab countries. It's not true or even plausible that Jews in Iraq led happy integrated lives until this happened - the antisemitism in Iraq is well documented too. You have to be deeply embedded in an Arab nationalist viewpoint to find this sort of thing convincing.

The emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel is a much more complex and nuanced business, with efforts by the Moroccan government to persuade Jews to stay and to return - nothing similar in Iraq or other countries, and limited success despite the miserable racist experience that the Moroccan Jews had when they arrived in Israel and for years afterward.

There's a lot in the book about how the principles of Palestinian return would be applied and paid for, but very little about how a one-state solution would work. What languages would be used in schools and in the civil service, for example? Would there be any institutions in place to ensure that one community did not dominate another? It would have been really good to have had some examples of where such things have worked out well - the way that the Swedish minority is treated in Finland comes to mind. It's not hard to think of examples where it hasn't worked out well, which I think places a special duty on those who do advocate a one-state solution. 

I suppose I think, in a not very well worked out way, that it's possible that Israel - racist as it is - could evolve into a democratic state. This would be uneven. Some things would be harder to change than others...some of those things - the name of the country, the flag, etc, have enormous symbolic significance, to Jews and to Palestinians. Maybe there are other things to focus on in the medium term, as a part of a struggle to bring democracy and maybe even socialism to the region. It's taken us a hundred years to get to here, with nationalism and counter-nationalism. Perhaps with a perspective of where we want to get to in the next hundred years we could start to see some positive change in our lifetimes, rather than the poisonous waiting game that both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism play in the belief that time is on their side.