{"id":2506,"date":"2017-04-03T01:18:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-02T23:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2506"},"modified":"2017-04-03T11:37:21","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T09:37:21","slug":"my-offer-to-owen-jones-a-tour-of-nazareth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2017-04-03\/my-offer-to-owen-jones-a-tour-of-nazareth\/","title":{"rendered":"My offer to Owen Jones: A tour of Nazareth"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an interview<\/a> with the Jewish Chronicle at the weekend, Owen Jones announced that he would soon be making his first trip to Israel to see friends and would take the opportunity to visit the occupied Palestinian territories. Let us hope\u00a0Jones makes every effort during his stay to get the full story of what has happened and is happening to the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

That will mean doing more than just visiting the occupied territories \u2013 and then hearing his liberal Zionist friends decry what goes on there as the fault of the Israeli right wing. They will assure\u00a0him that, when (sic) the Israeli Labour party returns\u00a0to power, all the horrors he has seen will come to an end. They will tell him, not that he has\u00a0witnessed just a few\u00a0symptoms of\u00a0problems inherent in Zionism, but that\u00a0the occupation is\u00a0the extent of the problem and it should be blamed\u00a0on\u00a0Benjamin Netanyahu and the settlers.<\/p>\n

That is a deception \u2013 one liberal Zionists have been using to keep British Labour activists like Jones docile for decades. He has a duty to dig much deeper. That\u00a0will upset his friends, but he must ignore their\u00a0protests\u00a0if he really cares about justice for the Palestinians and about getting to the truth.<\/p>\n

After all, it was Labour Zionists \u2013 those who are today represented in the UK by the Jewish Labour Movement (to which he gave a memorial lecture last night) \u2013 who set up the original settlements in the occupied territories\u00a0after\u00a01967 and established\u00a0the blueprint for creeping annexation and ethnic cleansing\u00a0there. The model of permanent occupation was created not by Netanyahu, but by Generals Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon of the Israeli Labour party, the same party that continues to maintain its close ties to Britain’s Labour party.<\/p>\n

If Jones doubts that Labour Zionism caused the problems that have led many people today to regard Israel as pariah state, he can ask Israeli historian Ilan Pappe for an early copy of his forthcoming book The Biggest Prison on Earth.<\/p>\n

Pappe, of course, set out very clearly in his earlier The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine how Labour leaders like David Ben Gurion planned from the outset to expel the Palestinians to create a Jewish state. In the new book,\u00a0Pappe explains the connections between those events and today’s\u00a0occupation.<\/p>\n

After the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the Israeli Labour leadership\u00a0created and refined an oppressive two-decade military regime for the fragments\u00a0of the Palestinian people who managed to remain inside the new Jewish state’s borders. Finally in 1952, Israel \u2013\u00a0very reluctantly and under international pressure \u2013 made these Palestinians nominal citizens.<\/p>\n

It was during\u00a0this\u00a0military government over its own (Palestinian) citizens that Israeli Labour party leaders began formulating how they would\u00a0expand their rule into the occupied territories and seize all of historic Palestine. When they engineered a chance to conquer\u00a0the territories in 1967, the military government inside Israel was simply\u00a0exported wholesale into the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n

If Jones\u00a0really wants to understand what has been\u00a0taking place since the beginnings of Zionism, not just the start of the occupation, he must\u00a0visit a Palestinian community inside<\/em> Israel. The very best place to do that is Nazareth, the only Palestinian city to survive 1948 as a Palestinian city. The city’s exemption was an accident \u2013 the\u00a0commander sent to expel Nazareth’s\u00a0population disobeyed<\/a>\u00a0orders, fearful of the international repercussions. That mistake forced\u00a0Israel to create the neighbouring Jewish city of Upper Nazareth, the flagship of Ben Gurion’s Judaisation of the Galilee campaign. The relations between these two cities starkly illustrate what Zionism always sought to achieve.<\/p>\n

The occupation is simply one facet of a much wider Zionist process of Judaisation, a facet\u00a0that Israel can excuse by claiming security concerns. Inside Israel, the true goals of Zionism cannot be so easily obscured.<\/p>\n

If Jones\u00a0believes Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, as he appears to, he needs to see how Israeli\u00a0“democracy” plays out for the one in five Israelis who are Palestinian.<\/p>\n

Here are a few key\u00a0questions he needs to answer on his trip. What does citizenship mean for 1.7 million Palestinians when the state defines itself as Jewish? Can a state be Jewish and democratic, any more than it can be Islamic and democratic or white and democratic? Why do hundreds of communities in Israel specifically bar Palestinian citizens from living in them? How comfortable would he feel if hundreds of British communities banned black Britons from residing\u00a0in them?\u00a0Why is the state education system in Israel strictly segregated using\u00a0ethnic criteria, whatever the views of parents?\u00a0Why has the state de-recognised dozens of Palestinian communities that pre-date Israel’s creation, making their inhabitants criminals in the eyes of the state?<\/p>\n

Jones can see the evidence<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0answer those questions only inside<\/em> Israel, and only<\/em> in a Palestinian community like Nazareth.<\/p>\n

Here is my offer. I will spend a day with him making a tour of Nazareth, as well as Upper Nazareth and the destroyed village of Saffuriya, which has been reinvented as\u00a0an exclusive Jewish farming community called Tzipori. I will show him the evidence so he can assess it for himself. I will also arrange meetings with local people on any issue that interests him.<\/p>\n

Here are two videos that may help as primers for such a\u00a0tour:<\/p>\n