State Within A State
Unlike Yasir Arafat's periodic declarations, Salam Fayyad's announcements that his government is preparing the institutions of statehood, irrespective of negotiations with Israel, should be taken seriously--and welcomed. As I argue in a forthcoming article in October's Harper's, Fayyad is no mere technocrat. He represents, and is organizing, precisely the business and professional class that can bring off his vision.Palestinians, too, can create facts. Ironically, Fayyad's political strategy mirrors historic Zionism's success.
It has become a settled wisdom (viz., our president, the day after his Cairo speech) that Israel's founding was a kind of answer to the holocaust, or to put it another way, that were it not for the holocaust, Israel would not have come into being. There is half of a truth here: just go back and read Andrei Gromyko's speech to the UN in support of the 1947 partition resolution.
But the bigger half is that the Zionist colonists, led by Ben-Gurion's Histadrut, had created a state within the British Mandate state back during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s: economically and culturally vibrant, and largely self-reliant. Were it not for the holocaust, the state may not have arisen in 1948, but it would have arisen all the more certainly. Indeed, Hitler wound up murdering its most avid cadres: among the millions of Polish Jews who died in the death camps, hundreds of thousands were sophisticated and devoted Zionists.
Palestine's natural leaders, too, have the means to achieve independence and earn international recognition, though (as my article will show) the occupation administration seems to be doing what it can to frustrate them. I've talked to everyone from the head of the Palestine Investment Fund to the CEO of Palestine's leading software house. It is hard to spend time with these people, some of whom have become friends over the years, and then hear reflexive Israeli government doubts about whether the peace process has a partner--something you hear much less from Israel business people, by the way. More soon.
This analogy doesn't work. Here is what is left out which made the zionist strategy of "state within a state" work but won't work for Palestinians.
1. For most of the 20 interwar years the British authorities were very lenient towards the "state within the state". There were many reasons, racism towards arabs, Christian Zionism, wingnuttery (e.g. Ord Wingate), lower administrative costs because of Jewish self-rule, and most significantly, the British were more afraid of Arab nationalism and supported the Jews as a counterbalance.
In contrast, Israeli policy in the West bank and Gaza is what Sara Roy calls "de-development," intentional economic destruction.
2. Economic development under early Zionism was collectivist and depended on strong political control of the economy through the Histadrut, guaranteeing investor profitability in return for political support for the nationalists. The model of development fostered on Palestinians by the US and the EU is in contrast neo-liberal, imposing fragmentation and systematically severing the ties between politically legitimate bodies and economic development. Salam Fayyad is a political nobody, with no popular legitimacy, appointed because the US likes him. The government he leads is widely seen as corrupt and out of touch, because it is, and that is not by chance but because of millions of dollars spent to make it corrupt. A "state within a state" depends on political legitimacy even more than a real state, and the economic development model designed by the US has the opposite effect.
3. WW-II provided a massive impetus for economic development based on war profiteering, which greatly increased the concentration of political power of the nationalists because of the way the economy was structured. Large economic powerhouses such as Discount Bank and Klal were only capitalized thanks to the war.
4. Most crucially. The British lost the war. They survived, barely, but their pre-war empire was no longer viable and there was no money to restore it. WW-II thus created a power vaccum that the "state within a state" was able to fill.
Unless you explain your plan for beating down Israel until it loses the taste for power in the same way, this road you are sketching leads nowhere.
August 26, 2009 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
To me the most important point is that Fayyad is conditioning the Palestinians and the world to think past the Occupation.
He is right to act unilaterally. He must act unilaterially everyday. He must use every non-violent means (particularly the Europoean media) to erase the colonial mindset that Israel's approval is a necessit. The Palestinians need to excrete all the poison of the Zionist occupation from their minds as a prerequisite to building a state. Fayyad wants to create a Palestinian inevitablility. A Palestine that is not defined by Zionims. And he's right to do so.
Strip the Israelis of the "normality" of the Occupation and the death rattle of the Occupation will begin. The only Zionist friends the Palestinians want or need are those who recognize the manifest necessity of Palestinian freedom and independence from Zionism.
August 26, 2009 7:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is what happens when you press submit instead of preview. What I meant was:
To me the most important point is that Fayyad is conditioning the Palestinians and the world to think past the Occupation.
He is right to act unilaterally. He must act unilaterially everyday. He must use every non-violent means (particularly the European media) to erase the colonial mindset that Israel's approval is a necessity. The Palestinians need to excrete all the poison of the Zionist occupation from their minds as a prerequisite to building a state. Fayyad wants to create a Palestinian inevitablility. A Palestine that is not defined by Zionism. And he's right to do so.
Strip the Israelis of the "normality" of the Occupation and the death rattle of the Occupation will begin. The only Zionist friends the Palestinians want or need are those who recognize the manifest necessity of Palestinian freedom and independence from Zionism.
August 26, 2009 7:16 PM | Reply | Permalink