Netanyahu removes the veil

Much of the Western reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory has taken the form of dismay.  Unlike his more liberal opponents in the recent elections, Netanyahu has officially declared his opposition to the formation of a Palestinian state and committed himself to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.  Headlines in the U.S. and Europe were quick to warn of a breakdown in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the resulting exacerbation of tensions between Israel and the US and European governments. 

The irony is that Netanyahu’s declared opposition to the peace process actually makes the possibility of a just and lasting peace that much more likely.

Whatever one thinks of its original intentions in the last century, the official narrative of a peace process leading to the formation of an independent Palestinian state has for years been little more than a fiction serving to cover up Israel’s methodical debilitation and impoverishment of the Palestinian people.   The only tangible outcome of three decades of supposed negotiations has been the vast expansion (from around 200,000 in 1991 to well over half a million today) of the population of Jewish settlers illegally colonizing the territory putatively set aside for the formation of a Palestinian state—and the concomitant demolition of the geographical basis for such a state, as Palestinian territory has been broken up into a disconnected archipelago of bits and pieces of land that precludes altogether the possibility of genuine sovereignty.  

Palestinians in the occupied territories are infinitely worse off than they were when negotiations started in the early 1990s.  Those who live as citizens of Israel face many obstacles to the conduct of their everyday lives as reviled second-class citizens of a state that openly and expressly—legally, materially, symbolically and infrastructurally—promotes one ethnicity over all others.  

Not one of any of the conceivable governments that could have emerged from these elections would have altered these basic circumstances.  In all the possible scenarios, Israel would have remained the state of the Jewish people rather than the state of its citizens (of whom a fifth are Muslim and Christian Palestinians) or the state of the population living in the territory it controls (of whom approximately one third were denied the right to vote in the March 17 election).  On the ground, little or nothing would have changed.  Palestinian homes would still be bulldozed to make room for Jewish settlements; Palestinian rights would still be canceled out by Jewish privileges, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. 

The point is that what distinguishes Netanyahu from his liberal Zionist opponents is not the differential treatment of different populations: on that they are firmly in agreement, equally committed to a politics of inequality.  What differentiates them, rather, is that Netanyahu and his allies have in effect thrown off any pretense that they stand for anything but what they stand for, whereas his liberal opponents still cling to the veiling language—for language, mere language, is all it is—of peace and Palestinian statehood. 

There are many terms that one could use to describe a state that treats the populations over whom it rules in starkly different ways, granting rights and privileges to one population that it denies to the other.   Netanyahu’s vulgarity and singular crudeness makes it that much more possible for outside observers—so easily bewitched, it seems, by the liberal language of his electoral opponents—to recognize Israel for what it is: a state committed to stark inequality and brutal differentiation. 

That, in turn, makes it that much more possible for people of good will around the world to continue to mobilize against that regime of inequality, precisely as they once did in the case of South Africa, and to demand that their governments treat such a regime as it ought to be treated: with isolation.  And, just as was the case with South Africa, greater international mobilization will help bring about the transformation of a regime of inequality into one of equality.  For a genuine and lasting peace will come about only when Israelis and Palestinians can live not with one people lording it over the other, but as equals.

Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.”