When Dr. Mira Sucharov spoke about the Israel/Palestine conflict at the Tier building at UM on Oct 29 , there were 14 undergraduate students and a handful of Professors and Daniel Thau Eleff who attended the talk sponsored by the UM Institute for Humanities.Sessional lecturer Itai Zutra did a lot of work in bringing Sucharov here. (As an aside, Zutra’s Hebrew class was cancelled as there are no registrants.)
Sucharov, a Professor at Carleton University in the Department of Political Science is writing a joint memoir with a Palestinian American Law Professor from California, Omar Dajani, who was a senior legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority’s negotiating team.
One of the stories Sucharov told that caught my attention was ‘the clown story. ” The story is that an American Jewish Israeli married a Palestinian and they lived in Ramallah with their children in a kosher home where both Arabic and Hebrew were spoken. A clown came to perform at the kids’ school. At one point during his performance, the clown shouted, “Falasteen baldna, wa al-yahood kalabna” (“Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs.”) After hearing the story, Sucharov told Dajani that what the clown had said was antisemitic and unacceptable, as children should be taught about peace and co-existence. Dajani reacted that Sucharov was ignoring the context—that both the clown and the kids live under a brutal half-century military occupation enforced by Jewish soldiers and imposed by a Jewish state. “It’s totally different from historical antisemitism.” he said. “When there were Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague,” he added, “I don’t think it would have been fair to judge Czechs for calling Russians dogs. Nor would it have been fair to argue that their hatred resulted from a lack of peace education in Czech schools, rather than the Soviet occupation.”
I don’t buy Dajani’s purported explanation.
Haj jAmin al-Husseini, who served as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate and as the acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the time, is documented as leading demonstrations where the chant, "Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs," was used. And that was long before any “half-century” occupation that Dajani referred to as the context for the clown’s remarks. Sucharov should know that and shouldn’t buy Dajani’s purported explanation.
When Sucharov told the clown story, I was also reminded of the fact that in 1937, the British Peel Commission had to decide decided to recommend the creation of two states, one Arab and one Jewish or one bi-national state. When Hajj Min Al Husseini, the Mufri of Jerusalem testified before the Peel Commission he was asked whether the 400, 000 Jews living there could remain in an Arab majority state, and when the Mufti answered that they could not, it became clear to the Peel commission they could not recommend that the Jews live in a bi-national state as the Arab leadership would try to get rid of them. The Jews, therefore, would need their own state as if they were not in control of their own state then the Mufti could use violence against them.
The following is the testimony the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, gave before the commission.
Q: Lord Peel: Since you demand the establishment of a national government in Palestine, what will you do with the 400,000 Jews already living there?
A: Mufti: It will not be the first time that Jews have lived under the aegis of an Arab state. In the past it has been the Arab states which were the more compassionate to them. History shows that, during all periods, the Jews only found rest under the protection of Arab rulers. The East was always a shelter for Jews escaping from European pressure.
Q: Lord Peel: You stated that the number of Jews has increased steeply, so that the number of Arabs, which during the time of the conquest was approximately 90% of the total population, has now dropped to 70%.
A: Mufti: That is correct.
Q: Lord Peel: Notwithstanding this, if you reach agreement with the English, will you be prepared to allow the Jews to remain in the country?
A: Mufti: That is a matter for the government that will be formed to deal with at the appropriate time. Its principle will be justice, and above all else it will concern itself with the interests and benefit of the country.
Q: Lord Peel: Do you think that the Jews will accept this declaration without receiving something more substantial? Such an oral declaration will not convince them.
A: Mufti: Jews living in the other Arab states currently enjoy freedoms and rights.
Q: Lord Peel: Does His Eminence think that this country can assimilate and digest the 400,000 Jews now in the country?
Mufti: No.
Question: Some of them would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful as the case may be?
Mufti: We must leave all this to the future.
The Peel commission could see through the Mufti’s initial evasive answers and realize that a bi-national state was a complete non-starter as the Mufti had no desire to have a large number of Jews in his state of Palestine.
Regarding a solution/future vision to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sucharov suggested that Palestinian refugees and their descendants would be entitled to go back to live as residents of pre-67 Israel, but they would vote for a Palestinian government in Ramallah while Jewish settlers living over the green line could stay but vote for the Israeli Knesset.She referred to this as a two states, living side by side, with freedom of movement and would be in favour of the two states confederating.
In an email following the lecture, she wrote “On the future vision, both Omar and I subscribe to A Land for All: Two States, One Homeland. (The website outlines the vision in detail.)”
Except that if you think about this proposed solution, it means that there would be a potential huge influx of Palestinian refugees into Israel proper, which would mean that Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters would be living everywhere in Israel proper free to carry out as many attacks as they want. It’s the reason why Lord Peel understood that there could be no bi-national state in 1937, but that a Jewish state (however small) would need to be established separate and apart from an Arab Palestinian state.
The idea that the state of Israel could deny hostile Palestinian returnees from entering and residing in Israel proper is not practical given the level of support terror and extremist groups have had and continue to have in Palestinian society. The “clown” story happened in Ramallah where the PA rules not Gaza where Hamas has ruled.
I can not see any government in Israel allowing for such an influx of Palestinian refugees in their midst to completely erode the security of every Jewish Israeli. The conventional two state solution would have a Jewish state and a Palestinian state—and Palestinian refugees and descendants would return to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, not to Israel proper. They’d have to give up the dream of returning to Jaffa or Haifa. And just as Israel has extended citizenship to Arab Israelis, the Palestinians could offer citizenship to Jews living in the West Bank such that there would be a Jewish minority in a Palestinian country.
