"Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle" by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, London: Pluto Press, 2004 (Chapter 6, Part 5)

A Post-Zionist Discourse

by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh
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There are three fundamental questions facing all of us: What kind of world do we want? How do we get there? What will we be doing when we get there? Yet, most people are so busy with their with daily lives (from work to school to activism or whatever) to really reflect deeply on these three questions.

Let us take the example of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? We demonstrate, we write letters to the editor, we do teach-ins, we do civil disobedience, and some of us do violent resistance. But how many of us took time to imagine the future and put our actions today in that context. Such time-out is difficult to come by especially when one is under the gun (physically or metaphorically) and Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed and are being killed and oppressed daily. Bear with me on this exercise.

Let us say the year is 2014 and the Palestinian refugees are allowed back to their homes and lands and stirrings of a pluralistic democratic nation is evolving in the area. What would this be like? Will there be enough economic resources to make the people (Jews, Christians, Muslims) living there prosper? What can we do to prepare for this eventuality? Will this be the end of conflict in that part of the world? What of jobs and economies? Will it be based on tourism, high tech, agriculture, combination, etc?

First, let me make it clear: the future has a way of sneaking up on people so fixated by looking at the past. The atrocities we see today ranging from mass killings, land confiscation, uprooting trees, building apartheid walls, violent oppression and desperate acts. All these things not-withstanding,the intensification of all this violence is actually a predictor of an accelerated phase towards the inevitable solution. In South Africa the worst violence and the maximum despair occurred just before the Apartheid regime collapsed. The night always gets darkest before the dawn. The change in South Africa, just like the toppling of the Berlin Wall was hardly expected events when they occurred. They were not expected even by those most intimately connected to the conflicts. So it is in the struggle about Zionism. You talk to people with varied perspectives but you hear echoes of these other conflicts. You hear things like the wall, the extrajudicial executions (200 in the past three years), and the suicide bombings are acts of desperation and deep hatred.

But in reality, hatred always has rational explanations. I am a geneticist and I can assure you there are no human genes for hatred or violence. Educational and other life experiences shape people. The drive to make a state for a particular religious minority gathered from throughout the world in a land already inhabited by others put us where we are. Basically the discourse that failed is one based on the assumption that you fight the chauvinistic narrow nationalism resulting in discrimination against Jews (or other minorities) in their own countries by creating another chauvinistic narrow nationalist ideology. This discourse basically resulted in nurturing many forms of racism (many times feeding off of each other). These forms of racism included anti-Jewish feelings (otherwise known as anti-Semitism) and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim feelings (most visible in both Christian and Jewish Zionism). Many Israelis and many Palestinians now see the impracticality of solutions based on discredited concepts of “separate and unequalâ€