Magid Shihade is a Palestinian academic who was born in the Galilee and currently lives in Ramallah. He teaches graduate courses in the M.A. program of Israeli studies, a graduate course in the International Studies Program, and undergraduate courses on Israeli society in the Anthropology-Sociology Department at Birzeit University in the West Bank. He is the author of Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israel as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Near/Middle Eastern Studies and an M.A. in International/Middle East Studies from the University of Washington, and a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh.
Borders
Ideal preference is a one-state that is democratic and secular. Secular in the sense of separation of church and state. The US, France, Britain, or Germany don’t call themselves a religious state, but we know that Christianity is privileged. We should not replicate this. If Palestine is established, I don’t think it should preference Islam over something else because then it would be hypocritical—if Israel privileges Jews, I don’t want Palestine to privilege Muslims.
However, for me, it doesn’t really matter. One state, two states, three states, five states. The main thing is that people live in equality, and that equality is central to the constitution of that state. Whether fragmented into four or five states, it doesn’t matter. For me, as a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, I want equality in Israel, and I want equality in Palestine as a non-Muslim. I also want Israelis in a Palestinian state to have equal rights. If we think in this way, refugees don’t become an obstacle. Then refugees could come back everywhere. If they want to go back to Galilee, so be it. If they want to come to the West Bank, that’s also fine as long as that place is structured around equal citizenship.
Settlements
I understand the settlers because I think they are very honest. The whole place started with settlements, so what’s the difference between settlements in the West Bank and the Galilee? I see hypocrisy with liberals in Israel. They did the same as the settlers in the West Bank when they first came here. And if you want to use the bible as a claim to the land, as Zionist ideologues and leaders and Israeli leaders did and continue to do, then the West Bank is definitely much more important than the Galilee. There is no mention of Nazareth as a place that is important in Jewish history or religion. Nor is there mention of Akka, Haifa, or Tel Aviv. What exists is what you call Judea and Samaria. So if we think about settlements in that context, the final status has to think about the whole structure. You can’t think about settlements in the West Bank in isolation to settlements in 1948. But definitely, if you want to go with a two-state solution, you can’t have a two-state solution when you have settlements taking over a lot of land in the West Bank because you won’t have a state for Palestinians. If some settlers want to stay and become citizens, why not? As long as they accept sovereignty of Palestine and that they will be accepted as an equal citizen as opposed to the greater status that they have now as settlers. The question is, are settlers willing to do that. Equality is deformed in settler colonialist structures. Equality doesn’t exist despite claims. You always have two levels of existence. The settler lives above the native—with rights and everything.
Security
In all settler colonialist cases, the settler community always feels vulnerable. If you look at the US [as well], security concerns were always those of the settlers. Zionist and Israeli leaders are a community coming from the outside. You have a European body coming into the East—“a strange environment”—and that fact creates an insecurity. To unmake the issue of security, and to overcome it/overpass it one has to see oneself not as an outsider.
Herzl (a Zionist leader) talked about Europe in Asia, Europe against the orient, and civilization against barbarism and backwardness. This discourse doesn’t help in overcoming security. If you look at everything around you as a hostile environment, it doesn’t help and Israelis will never overcome security concerns. If you feel you are part of the neighborhood, then security concerns become less of an issue. All states have security concerns, but if they see themselves in a hostile environment, concerns will become much larger. If geographically it is part of the region, you can’t keep claiming you are different—that you are European and western.
Israel is not insecure military-wise, and this is not a secret. It could easily manage itself militarily with any state in the region, even all states in the region together. So we have to break down the concept of security to think of people. If Jews in Israel and Palestine see themselves as equal, and if they have a sense of neighborly relations with people around them, then security concerns become less of an issue. If you create a just system in Israel and Palestine then automatically you transform yourself from a community which is unjust to Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, etc. to a community that is trying to make connections with neighboring communities and neighboring states. That’s why I think Israeli politics has been all about power and there is a specific ideology and group which is powerful. It is supported from very powerful states, especially the US. For them, politics is about power, not about security. Israel has a self-interest to continue to promote itself as insecure and attacked by neighbors and this discourse is supported by Europe and the US. To overcome this, Israel must rethink its structure as a settler-colonial state, and must depart from its settler colonial ideology—Zionism.
Jerusalem
There should be equal access and equal residency rights. If Jews want to live in Jerusalem, that’s fine. If non-religious people want to live there, so be it. There shouldn’t be a privilege of one group over another. Everyone should have access to it. For some, it has religious meaning. For me, it doesn’t matter. Jews, Muslims, and Christians from anywhere should have equal access all the time. No state should limit that since the meaning of religious places are beyond the state. If we think of Jerusalem, wherever people live (Palestinian state, one state, two states), as long as they are equal to resources and life, then it doesn’t matter. Jews should be able to pray wherever they want—including at the Temple Mount—just like anywhere else. Muslims the same. Christians the same. And those who are not religious should have equal residency.
Refugees
As a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, I want equality in Israel and I want equality in Palestine as a non-Muslim. I also want Israelis in a Palestinian state to have equal rights. If we think in this way, refugees don’t become an obstacle, and the refugees could come back everywhere. If they want to go back to Galilee, so be it. If they want to come to the West Bank, that’s also fine as long as that place is structured around equal citizenship.
Narrative
I think the critique of narratives and the idea of two sides with two points is very legitimate, because each question has many sides—not just two sides. There are many Palestinian views, not just one. There are many Israeli views, not just one. There is the global Jewish community, the global general community. It is a global issue and an international question.
Zionism claimed to represent all Jews in the world (U.S., Canada, Asia, Africa). Also, to many people in the world, Palestine was and is a point of interest culturally, politically, and geopolitically as it links Asia and Africa. That is why Britain focused on taking over the Mandate—for economic and military reasons.
I hear all kinds of views. For me, when we look at any political issue we need to step aside and look at how we would define it. So, how would we define Israel/Palestine?
To understand what is happening, we need to have a framework of the political structure here. It is a settler colonialist state, and settler colonialist states like the US, Canada, Australia, etc. have a certain dynamic. With each place, some part of religion was used to justify and give a meaning to that enterprise. In Israel/Palestine, the religious attachment of Jews was used, but other claims of attachment with a specific mission were also used. These other claims were either mandated by god or part of modern European ethos. People claimed even in the US that they were creating the new Israel and they have a new mission to create the city on the hill and save the land from the destruction/neglect of the pagans. However, all these things are secondary. The main thing is you have a community from the outside claiming a 2,000-year connection. There were Jews in this region for the past 2,000 years, but they never claimed a mission to create a state. So you have a community coming from the outside, like in South Africa, with all kinds of religious discourse coming to claim the land.
When settlers come, by default, locals have to disappear. This is done by killing, deportation, or isolating them into certain locations. So, you need more land to be empty and less locals to be there. The form in which that happens is not so important, although there are many details in the case of Israel and Palestine in which Israel was taking as much land as possible and kicking out as many as possible to make room for the settlers. Separation becomes central in a settler colonialist state. This occurs socially, economically, and legally. You have certain laws for locals, and certain laws for settlers. Settlers live among themselves and natives can come to work, but they can’t come to live and mix. In the case of Israel, that was the ethos of Zionism—as much labor as possible should be Jewish rather than Arab. And, if not possible, then you have immigration. In the case of Israel, after European immigration dried up, they brought Jewish immigrants from the Arab region. When that was not enough to replace Palestinian labor, Israel brought in migrant labor from Asia and Africa (Thailand, Philippines, Ethiopia, others).
In the case of 1948 you had laws favoring Jews (not only in Palestine but any place in the world.). There are many more legal privileges for Jews than for local Arabs, especially around questions of citizenship and immigration. There are also privileges around work, loans for housing, and loans for education. They are not framed in the sense of directly favoring Jews but around the question of service in the army (military) which the local Arabs didn’t/don’t do. You also have things that are not completely official and not stated in the laws, but practiced by the state. This includes land confiscation of only Arab properties. Confiscation hardly ever happens to Jewish properties. Much land in Israel is under the supervision of and owned by the Jewish Agency. By law it prohibits the sale of land to non-Jews, even though it was taken in 1948 by force and given by the Israeli government to the agency so the Israeli government could escape racist laws by having it be managed by a transnational organization. You see in 1948 that Arab villages and towns were separated from Jewish cities and towns. Today, even in the models of mixed towns (Jaffa, Haifa, Acre), you have Arab neighborhoods and the Jews live in the rest of the city. Separation is critical in settler colonial cases, so this is close to apartheid. There is separation of financial privileges, legal issues, housing grants, educational grants, and budgets for local councils. These are admitted by the Israeli government officials who say “it exists but we will try to fix it,” but do nothing to change it. In 1948 we got citizenship, but only in name. In practice it is not a full citizenship because someone from outside the state can have more rights than you. You, from Buffalo, NY, will have more rights than me automatically. You don’t see that in other situations. It is specific to the Israeli case.
In the US, Indian reservations have sovereignty, but not full sovereignty since the US can override it. You have some kind of sovereignty over local affairs, but even over local affairs the state could intervene and take over local sovereignty. This is how settler states treat native communities (as dependent subjects) if they remained, but they better disappear according to the logic of settler colonialism which Israel, informed by Zionism, is.
BDS
The aim of BDS is to work with the public. If the Israeli state feels very secure and supported by the US and Europe, it will not change. This campaign wants to transform public opinion where it is possible, and to have people put pressure on their own governments (in Europe and the US) that hopefully will translate into pressure on Israel. Or, at least so Israel can see that it can’t keep the status quo of claiming insecurity while constantly building settlements, attacking Gaza, and arresting people in the West Bank. Everyday, 5-15 people are arrested in the West Bank. Israel is ignoring UN resolutions, while Israel claims its right to exist off of a UN resolution. BDS is an attempt to create discussion, and over time to create a form of global pressure on Israel indirectly or directly so they see that business as usual isn’t going to continue. This is why Israel sees BDS as one of the main threats. The Herzilya conference, an annual event where politicians and academics come to discuss the main challenges for Israeli security, listed BDS as number three. The claim is that BDS is trying to delegitimize Israel. Of course this is kind of a broad accusation, because it isn’t about delegitimizing, but about ending certain structures of apartheid.
Its calls are:
1) Ending hierarchy between Jews and non-Jews—legal, economic, political and cultural.
2) Ending occupation beyond the 1967 border in line with UN resolutions.
3) Also in line with UN resolutions, the right of refugees to return, or compensation if they desire. This is all in line with UN resolutions which made Israel legitimate in the first place.
The partition plan was a UN resolution—not built up from the moon. You can see it has spread in the last five years in many parts of Europe and the US. Economically, companies have been pulling out of settlements. There has been also a steady increase in the number of artists pulling out of participation in cultural events in Israel. Academic institutions also adopted resolutions of BDS which created more open space for discussions. The main boycott was in place before 1948 by the Zionist community against Palestinian businesses and neighbors. My family lives in the Galilee. Anytime anything happens in the region, Jews boycott Palestinians—they stop going to restaurants and business. So why is it ok for Israelis and Zionists, but not ok for Palestinians or those who are in alliance or in solidarity with Palestinians.
Apartheid
Separation becomes central in a settler colonialist state. This occurs socially, economically, and legally. You have certain laws for locals, and certain laws for settlers. Settlers live among themselves and natives can come to work, but they can’t come to live and mix. In the case of Israel, that was the ethos of Zionism—as much labor as possible should be Jewish rather than Arab. And, if not possible, then you have immigration. In the case of Israel, after European immigration dried up, they brought Jewish immigrants from the Arab region. When that was not enough to replace Palestinian labor, Israel brought in migrant labor from Asia and Africa (Thailand, Philippines, Ethiopia, others).
In the case of 1948 you had laws favoring Jews (not only in Palestine but any place in the world.). There are many more legal privileges for Jews than for local Arabs, especially around questions of citizenship and immigration. There are also privileges around work, loans for housing, and loans for education. They are not framed in the sense of directly favoring Jews but around the question of service in the army (military) which the local Arabs didn’t/don’t do. You also have things that are not completely official and not stated in the laws, but practiced by the state. This includes land confiscation of only Arab properties. Confiscation hardly ever happens to Jewish properties. Much land in Israel is under the supervision of and owned by the Jewish Agency. By law it prohibits the sale of land to non-Jews, even though it was taken in 1948 by force and given by the Israeli government to the agency so the Israeli government could escape racist laws by having it be managed by a transnational organization. You see in 1948 that Arab villages and towns were separated from Jewish cities and towns. Today, even in the models of mixed towns (Jaffa, Haifa, Acre), you have Arab neighborhoods and the Jews live in the rest of the city. Separation is critical in settler colonial cases, so this is close to apartheid. There is separation of financial privileges, legal issues, housing grants, educational grants, and budgets for local councils. These are admitted by the Israeli government officials who say “it exists but we will try to fix it,” but do nothing to change it. In 1948 we got citizenship, but only in name. In practice it is not a full citizenship because someone from outside the state can have more rights than you. You, from Buffalo, NY, will have more rights than me automatically. You don’t see that in other situations. It is specific to the Israeli case.