Colonialism or something else? A comment on Rafael Reuveny's analysis.

• Author: Sharkansky, Ira
• Position: CONTROVERSY - Critical essay

The conflict between Palestine and Israel has been long and frustrating, with no end in sight. Rafael Reuveny (2008) has employed the model of colonialism to describe its history and predict its end. His article is rich and occasionally convoluted. He protects himself at several points from a charge of historical determinism, but his analysis does not take account of important elements that point in other directions.

Reuveny's use of the term colonialism is one symptom of an ideological posture insufficiently open to developments that are troubling to his analysis. It is one of the ugliest words available to judge a country's history, and therefore it tilts the analysis heavily toward Israel's fault. It is like Jimmy Carter's use of the term apartheid in the title of a book about Palestine published in 2006. Although Carter writes that Israel does not practice apartheid toward its own citizens, his prominent use of the word makes clear how he is judging the country.

Like what may still be a majority of Israelis, I yearn for agreements that will enable the Israeli and Palestinian states to live in peace alongside one another. Unlike Reuveny, however, I put much of the onus for years of failure on Palestinian rejection. Now, even more than in the past, that rejection finds strength in the ascendance of an aggressive form of Islam. Religious constraints make it difficult, if not impossible, for Palestinians to accept anything Israel is likely to offer. With Western capitals also nervous about Islam and perhaps more inclined to understand Israel, continued Palestinian rejection will cause the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to go on for a long time.

Reuveny calls Israel the last colonialist. One can quarrel with the designation, however, given the status of Chechnya and other enclaves in Russia, Tahiti and other French colonial remnants, as well as Gibraltar and some other British spots.

In the fuzzy ideology of colonialism, Israel also has a place as a colony of the United States. The implications of that status are numerous and beyond Reuveny's article or this comment. However, if 9/11 has locked the United States into an antiterror mode, Israel's repression of Palestinian violence may continue indefinitely with at least tacit support from Washington.

Among the routes to decolonization that Reuveny perceives is a civil war between Israelis who want to rid themselves of the Palestinian colony and Israelis committed to continued occupation...