Thoughts From Inside
As Palestinians inside and outside Israel pause in memory of May 15, 1948 the day of Israel's independence and an official marking of Palestinian dispersal and loss, the Palestine Report 's Charmaine Seitz spoke with Israeli MK Azmi Bishara, of the Arab Coalition Party, on where Arab-Israelis find themselves 50 years later.
PR: From your perspective as an Israeli legislator, how are Arab-Israelis dealing with the coinciding fifty-year anniversary of the state and the Palestinian Nakba?
Bishara: The Arabs in Israel have never dealt with it, actually. They should have, but haven't in the past. The 15th of May in the past was not a day to mark the Nakba. It was just a day for some to suppress their memory. And others, fewer people, tried to show solidarity with Israel by putting the Israeli flag on their cars.
We noticed the cultural political danger in this voluntary demonstration of loyalty to Israel and I think we were right in that because it was for a time a sign of an Israelization process with no options available because Israel is still the state of the Jews. National identity cannot be sustained without national memory.
We did not become Palestinians under Israel; we were Palestinians before 1948 and something happened in 1948 which was the ruin of the Palestinian national project. Lately, there is a little more awakening to that, subjectively by our cultural work in the villages everywhere " each week in another village for this memory. For the last fifty years, the political parties that were there, that were active in the cultural minority, did not have the political-cultural position that we have.
For example, the Communist party, which was for the partition plan and which accused the Arab regimes for the catastrophe of the Palestinians because they would not accept the partition plan, looked at May 15 as Independence Day, not as a Nakba day, at least in its newspapers.
[The commemoration of this day] makes a very important political point. The Palestinian tragedy did not start with 1967, but with 1948. And this tragedy is not cured yet; this tragedy is not closed. Second, you can't fight for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza if you do not force Israel to recognize the fact that the injustice was in 1948. Because no Israeli will understand the Palestinian position of the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in the borders of 1967 as a compromise if he does not understand that the injustice began in 1948. The historical memory here is not only cultural, it is also political.
PR: What is your family's historical memory of 1948?
Bishara: We are not different than most of the Palestinians, [in remembering it] as a tragedy, not only in the history of Palestine, but in their own personal histories. We were raised on these stories of what happened in 1948, of what was before 1948. And the events
themselves in 1948, the refugees...I am not going to make it here an emotional event, but a lot of stories struck me: the way many in the village left to Beirut and the way that my father tried to get some of them back to the village, in very dangerous ways through very dangerous borders.
In our family, my father was a Communist and we agreed to the partition plan, and he was persecuted not only by the Israelis, but also by the Arabs who came to this country. Personally, I do not agree with that position. I do not think that the Arabs could share their land and their economic property like that.
PR: I know that you recently went to Syria and that the Israeli government is giving you a difficult time for traveling there. Could you tell us about that and about your meetings with George Habash?
Bishara: Well, I met with practically all of the Palestinian leaders who are in Damascus, not only George Habash. We talked about the Palestinian issue, the problems of the Palestinians in Lebanon, the Oslo Accords and what should be the strategy of the Palestinian opposition.
The most important thing here is that the Palestinian opposition should try to start a democratic bloc in the Occupied Territories, which can be critical of Oslo, but which understands itself totally as a part of the system and society here and wants to change things. And this should be a democratic bloc that is organized as an opposition in the West Bank and Gaza. The center should move there.
Although I was against Oslo, I believe that they should have participated in the elections of the Legislative Council. Our suggestion was at this time that the Palestinian opposition, if it wants to be politicand make a position, to build this political bloc and try to strive from the small differences between them. Not one young Palestinian understands them now " between the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, the Communist Party and others. If you try to criticize the Palestinian Authority, the first question you are asked is "What is the alternative?" " and you don't have any. The slogan of "Down with Oslo" is passe; it is anachronistic now.
These kind of visits are normal in my view that we are part of the Arab nation and the Palestinian people. Here, they tried to open the fight that this is a visit without authorization to an enemy land. The government will open an investigation and they have the choice of canceling my immunity and making a report, which is not as easy as it looks like. It will be very strange for a country which claims to want peace with [Syria] to try a parliament member who tried to visit that country.
PR: Where in your view, is the peace process right now? Do you have any sense of what Prime Minister Netanyahu's next step will be, especially after he tried to bring Molodet into the government?
Bishara: This peace process as it looks like now has not one principle in common between the two parties. There is not one principle that they both agree to and that the negotiations are supposed to be an implementation of. The negotiations are to implement principals. You do not negotiate principles in negotiations.
Israel does not accept the principle of statehood, the solution of the refugee issue, the withdrawal. Nothing is accepted and that is why what regulates the negotiations is not any kind of justice or legal principles; what regulates the negotiations is the balance of power. Palestinians either reject or they do not reject.
PR: Do you predict that things could get any better with the next prime ministerial election?
Bishara: I do not know. I am afraid, and this should be clear, that the coalition of right-wing and religious people in this country is a genuine one, a strategic one, and a deep one, and not just a tactical and opportunist coalition. I detect a dangerous process happening in Israeli society of changing the whole political discourse in the direction of national religious discourse and this is already catching the holiest parts of the old elite of the army, the police, the universities, the foreign ministry.
I cannot see the period of Netanyahu as just a phase. I see it as an expression of something real happening in Israeli society in the direction of a fascist bloc. And if nothing happens in the near future for real pressure from outside " Palestinian Arab group or America, whatever " and a real activity of a peace democratic bloc inside the country, if this does not happen, then the natural direction will be for the right to grow stronger and stronger.
So you cannot just wait for Netanyahu, like it happened in the first year of his government where the Arabs just were waiting for a crisis of Netanyahu that would bring him down. This will not happen at all. He is an expression of something real in Israeli society and if you do not oppose it on the level of the street, of the public, of the politics, and of the foreign politics, it will continue. And we will have again a right-winger next round. Even more right wing than [Netanyahu] is now.
PR: Does your party or the Arab parties have a strategy to do this?
Bishara: We are not the people who control the Israeli public at all. What we can do is we can share, we can join and we can vote no confidence against this government, but we cannot be the leaders of public opinion in Israel. The peace movement in Israel should lead in that, and the Arabs should have a strategy to show Israel that the Netanyahu policy costs Israel a price.