Excusing ethnic cleansing: Liberal Zionists, Israel and the Nakba
Jonathan Freedland
The following year, Freedland published ‘Jacob’s Gift‘, a highly personal meditation on fatherhood, Jewishness, and Zionism, among other things, including a continuation of his argument advanced in the previous essay. Here too, Freedland admits that “Zionism was realized at a very great cost”, with Palestinians experiencing “flight, expulsion and dispossession, the emptying of 400 villages and the creation of around 700,000 refugees.”
So how exactly does Freedland justify, to himself as much as others, the massacres and ethnic cleansing he today condemns when they occur in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East? In ‘Jacob’s Gift’, Freedland observes that “some Zionists” appeal to a “chronology of ancient claims” – an unconvincing rhetorical displacement given that he goes on to state that Jews “had a right to come back to [Palestine]”.
But Freedland does not, however much he believes in it himself, base his argument on a narrative of Jewish exile and return. Rather, in both the 2004 essay and his book, Freedland reaches for an analogy credited to Amos Oz, of a “drowning man reaching for a piece of driftwood”, who is “allowed to grab it, even to make another man budge up to share it”. The Jews of “the mid-twentieth century”, claims Freedland, had “the right…of the drowning man”.
According to Freedland, this “parable” is no less than “Israel’s ultimate moral defence” – and yet it is profoundly flawed. Just like another analogy beloved by both Oz and Freedland, of the married couple in need of a divorce, the driftwood picture obscures the settler colonial history of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Decades of settlement and incremental displacement, culminating in a long-foreseen wave of ethnic cleansing, disappear behind the smoke and mirrors of an alluring fable that promises a resolution of contradictions it cannot deliver.
The Palestinians were not asked, or even forced, “to share a plank of driftwood”. What sort of ‘price’ would that be, anyway? Rather, Palestinian communities were destroyed, children separated from their siblings, schools blown up, villagers gunned down in the homes – and, crucially, until this very day, millions remain excluded from their homeland simply because they are not Jewish.
The second element of Freedland’s argument is where he suggests ways in which Israel can approach the Nakba today. “Israel”, he wrote in his 2004 essay, “should make amends – through compensation, restitution, and commemoration”. He adds: “let Palestinians remember what they see as the naqba, the catastrophe, their way”. It is unclear why Palestinians need this permission, and given what comes next, it seems less like a concession and more of a limitation: remember, yes – but never return.
Freedland believes that “Israel and the Jews should have that reckoning with our recent past” but that there is no need “to renounce Zionism itself.” In ‘Jacob’s Gift’, Freedland phrases it similarly, suggesting that “the Jewish people ought to confront the reality of 1948”. He then cites the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau by way of illustration, writing that it was “only after Jacob has faced up to his own conduct…wrestling with his own conscience” that his name changed to Israel. “The meaning is clear”, Freedland says. “Israel could not be Israel until he had scrutinized his soul.”
A reckoning with the past, confronting reality, conscience-wrestling, and soul-scrutinizing. Not once does Freedland suggest that Palestinian refugees should actually be allowed to return home, or that a political system based on racial privilege and exclusion should be replaced by a genuine democracy. In his (unsurprisingly) adulatory review of Ari Shavit’s new book, Freedland states that “much of what Palestinians demand is precisely the acknowledgement that in 1948 they did indeed suffer a nakba”. Well, yes, the “admission” is important – but no, that does not constitute “much” of what Palestinians demand. Palestinians have not fought for seven decades for a therapeutic hug, but for return and decolonisation.
For a long time, Freedland and other liberal Zionists were not required to justify their support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. But times are changing. Instructively, Shavit’s book was promoted by the Israeli embassy in London – not, one suspects, because of its much-publicised description of the ethnic cleansing of Lydda, but because Shavit defends Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, Lydda and all.
Freedland, like other Zionists of different political persuasions, have charged Palestine solidarity campaigners with ‘singling out’ Israel for attack (not an accusation they normally have the temerity to level at Palestinians themselves). In fact, it is Zionists, and liberals in particular, who are guilty of an exceptionalism that excuses past ethnic cleansing and justifies eternal ethnocracy – and Palestinians continue to pay the price.
Below: In this 1975 photo Fathiyeh Sattari, a worried Palestinian mother talks to a doctor about her underweight child, Hassan, who is being treated at a Rafah health center run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Photo by G.Nehmeh, UNRWA Photo Archives
