An interview with Israeli Historian SHLOMO SAND

“I am not ‘for’ a binational state but we have no other solution”

In his fascinating work which has just been published in Le Seuil, the historian Shlomo Sand raises the question of a two-state solution and returns to the genesis of Zionism to try to see more clearly and to hope despite all this crazy violence . 

Interview By Vincent Remy

To imagine, at the height of current violence, that Israelis and Palestinians could one day live side by side, within a binational state, seems like a crazy utopia. However, as the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand highlights in his new work, Two Peoples for One State?, this is what many Jewish intellectuals settled in Palestine, from the end of the 19th century and until the creation of Israel in 1948, ardently wished. 

Many Zionist thinkers feared that an exclusive Jewish state in a land populated predominantly by Arabs would lead to endless conflict. None wanted “a two-state solution”, which the entanglement of populations now seems to make impossible. Would there be no other perspective than confinement, repression, displacement, expulsion? Rereading the history of Zionism, with Shlomo Sand, gives hope.

Written before the massacres perpetrated by Hamas and the bombing of Gaza, would your book be different if you wrote it today?

From my introduction, I wrote that, due to the growing alliance between religion and radical nationalism, on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, we were condemned to experience catastrophes. An English publishing house asked me to add a more optimistic afterword! Certainly, no one could envisage the incredible shock of October 7, this savagery of Hamas. I am also distressed by the thousands of Palestinian civilians we are killing in Gaza. But Ariel Sharon [co-founder of Likud, an Israeli right-wing party, and who was a minister several times, until leading the government between 2001 and 2006, editor's note] was the first builder of Hamas, which he saw as a counterweight to 'PLO. He did everything, like Benyamin Netanyahu, to promote its emergence. I add that in Israel everyone knows that Yahya Sinouar, the little Stalin of Hamas, is the child of a family from Ashkelon, who took refuge in the Khan Younes camp in 1948. Abdessalam Yassine, founder of Hamas, was born near Ashkelon, also pushed with his family to Gaza by Israel. To refuse to see that 60% of Gazans came from the places where we Israelis now live is to be blind. We cannot understand October 7 without knowing History.

But to contextualize is not to excuse?

I oppose the theses of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon which justify the violence of the oppressed. Because violence creates new reasons for oppression. Worse, all the national liberation movements that have used it have become oppressive. I have no illusions about Hamas. But we are currently the oppressors. I refuse the term genocide in Gaza, but we are killing women and children by the thousands, and this is not the first time. Above all, we are waging this war without having the slightest political project.

You talk about Israelis as colonizers. Isn't this a provocation?

The first Zionists were all aware of being Zionists! A century ago, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founding father of the Zionist right, recognized that the arrival of Jews in Palestine was akin to a colonial enterprise and that it was logical that the Arabs would violently oppose it. The wandering people had to impose themselves by force by erecting a “wall of steel”. Jabotinsky, like his heir Menachem Begin, was more honest than the Zionist left. At the time, the Zionist myth of origins, according to which Jews returned to the land of their ancestors, did not excite many people. Until 1924, when two million Jews from Eastern Europe had emigrated to America, only 65,000 had chosen Palestine [the State of Israel would not be created until twenty-four years later, Editor's note]. The Jews were also wise enough to know that it was not very intelligent to come to the Middle East. It was the closure of the North American border to Jews (Immigration Act of 1924), then the Nazi laws of Nuremberg in 1935 which led to immigration. Europe vomited us, the Jews, onto the Arabs of Palestine. And we pay for it, with blood on both sides.

However, you show, among the pioneers of Zionism, strong pacifist currents.

We especially know the majority thought, which goes from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, that of the socialist, secular, atheist Zionists. And warriors. To my great surprise, I discovered many other sensitivities, supported by all kinds of movements and parties. All of whom, however, stood out as bearers of an ethic: we arrive in this new country to reside there in the company of its inhabitants, not to replace them. Among them, many believers. A pioneer of spiritual Zionism, Ahad Ha'am, born near Kyiv and died in Tel Aviv in 1927, wanted to create a spiritual center that would save Judaism from assimilation and revive the Hebrew language. But he demanded “caution and respect” towards the Arabs. Four years later, during the clashes with the Arabs, Judah Leon Magnes (founder in 1925 of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) continued to express pacifist positions, like Martin Buber. He went to Washington in 1948 to convince President Wilson not to create a Jewish state. In this, he joined Hannah Arendt who wanted a binational state, otherwise, she said, there would be a war every ten years.

Much of the Zionist intelligentsia, including Ben-Gurion, believed, for example, that the inhabitants of Palestine were descendants of the Hebrews.

Were their ideas in the minority?

Not all their ideas. Much of the Zionist intelligentsia, including Ben-Gurion, believed, for example, that the inhabitants of Palestine were descendants of the Hebrews. Arthur Ruppin, founder of the Brit Shalom movement, also said that the Arabs “two thousand years ago were called Jews” and thought that we would achieve a cultural understanding with them, “better than with Europe”. As for the linguist Yitzhak Epstein, he insisted that, in his school, Jewish immigrants also learn the Arabic language – which today few Israeli Jews, including me, master. Bilingualism gives strength to Israeli Arabs, who all speak Hebrew, and I hope that they will be the vanguard that unifies the two populations, since they have already established a linguistic bridge. However, even in Haifa, where Jews and Arabs live together, Arabs do not feel quite belonging to a state that does not define itself as Israeli, but as a Jewish state. Which means that this state belongs more to the Jews of Paris than to my Arab colleagues in Haifa. If we do not understand this injustice, we do not understand the conflict.

From the moment some Jews speak of them as a racial people, European anti-Semitism has won.

Are you no longer for the two-state solution?

Eight hundred and fifty thousand Israelis, and among them six ministers, live in the West Bank, and these people will not be torn from the place where they live. Two million Arabs are integrated into Israel. I don't see how we can be separated. I am for a kind of federation as advocated by Menachem Begin. People on the left bristle at the name of Begin, even though he is less extremist than Netanyahu! In his speech before the Knesset in 1977, he declared that Israel, in order not to become Rhodesia (which practiced radical apartheid), had to integrate the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, offering them the possibility of acquiring nationality. Israeli, and even land in Israel. It did not aim for a binational state, but a democratic one, which would lead to an “original cultural mix”. This proposal aroused fear from the Israeli right and rejection from the left.

The Israelis no longer want this solution…

Israeli national consciousness is not republican, as in France, with universalist bases, it is ethnocentric. However, Zionist nationalism is incapable of defining a Jewish people, with a common origin other than religion. So some persist in looking for Jewish genes, an absurd thing when we know, for example, that an entire kingdom in southern Arabia, Himyar, present-day Yemen, converted to Judaism in the 5th century. If you drive through Israel, you can see that we are all very different! For a national consciousness to be born, it was necessary to create this myth of exile and dispersed people. From the moment some Jews speak of them as a racial people, European anti-Semitism has won.

There is no future here for my grandchildren without the Palestinians.

Isn’t the refusal of a binational solution primarily dictated by fear?

I am willing to admit that the mental basis of nationalism is fear, the enemy of equality and rapprochement, but it also sometimes pushes people to look for solutions. How can we think that we will keep the Palestinian refugees of 1948 forever in an enclave like Gaza? Until now, there was contempt among Israeli Jews for the Palestinians, because of their weakness. This contempt was so deep that it prevented any compromise. I understand that it shocks, but violence creates a form of respect. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who came from the Russian Empire, understood that only force was respected. For my part, I am not “for” a binational state, I say that we have no other solution. There is no future here for my grandchildren without the Palestinians. So I am for a federation, a confederation, whatever. Remember that the peaceful Swiss, before the Confederal State of 1848, were tearing each other apart! We must fight against Hamas, but give hope to those who agree to live alongside us. We must recognize the tragedy of 1948, and partially correct the injustice suffered. It is a painful process but we have no choice.

Source: TÉLÉRAMA