Salvation for Palestinians and Israelis lies in one another

The two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now dead. Israel's military incursions, Hamas's feeble rocket attacks and the failure of imagination among the leadership on both sides of this political divide have essentially left us with the carcass of a single state with two Bantustans - one more compliant in the West Bank and the other more belligerent in Gaza.

This is an unstable equilibrium. Every two years a spark, like the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teenagers, prompts a new round of Israeli bombings and incursions. Hamas reacts by firing hundreds of rockets into Israel to demonstrate its defiance.

Some Israeli citizens are killed. But hundreds of Palestinians - mostly women and children - die and thousands are injured in an act of collective ethnic punishment. Religious leaders such as the chief rabbi in South Africa and some of his Muslim counterparts either defend or vow revenge on this grotesque act of murder. As these theologians of death claim to speak for their heterogeneous communities, the world looks on helpless.

There will be the platitudes of condemnation from governments, the hypocritical calls for restraint from the US and the UK, the more exacting demands to expel the ambassador and isolate Israel by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions global campaign and human rights movement.

There will also be the defence of Israel by its friends on the grounds that it is merely defending itself. This was essentially the message of Israel's ambassador to South Africa, Arthur Lenk, when he was interviewed on eNCA this week.

But he was essentially being duplicitous. He conveniently forgot to mention that in the aftermath of the tragic kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers, Israel, in defiance of an earlier peace accord, killed 10 and arrested 350 Palestinians associated with Hamas in the West Bank, even though Hamas denied involvement in the kidnappings.

But even if this had not been the case and Hamas had attacked without provocation, can one truly defend Israel's collective ethnic punishment? Is it legitimate to murder American or British citizens simply because of the atrocities perpetrated by a Bush, Cheney or Blair? Of course not.

Neither is it legitimate to murder people of Jewish descent simply because of the atrocity of three Israeli settlers who burned alive a Palestinian teenager.

If such ethnic collective punishment is not legitimate, why is it acceptable to bomb Gaza and make innocent women and children pay for the crimes of others? By all means, find the murderers and prosecute them. But how can the act of collective ethnic punishment be justified?

While this happens, the rest of us look on. We have been here before and we have that sinking realisation that we will be here again. We are collectively mired in an endless cycle of state violence and murder that has no end in sight. Israel will destroy a significant chunk of the military infrastructure of Hamas. When enough Palestinians die, an uneasy peace will be agreed.

Hamas will then rearm. Israel will bolster its military capacities and get a new infusion of military equipment from the US. In about two years, another spark will ignite a new round of military incursions and bombings and the cycle of violence and the murder of Palestinians will begin again.

This is, of course, all done in the interests of ensuring that Israel remains a Jewish state. This ethnic state agenda is inspired by memories of the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered in an agenda of ethnic cleansing. The consequence has been a collective psyche of victimhood.

The overriding goal of this collective psyche is to ensure that the experience of genocide is never repeated. This is not to be done by establishing the political foundation for a common humanity, but by establishing an ethnic state with military prowess and a nuclear capacity that would contain any would-be aggressor by the simple prospect of the collective annihilation of humanity itself.

This is, to quote the title of Mahmood Mamdani's study of the Rwandan genocide, "when victims become killers".

Yet all this guarantees is a temporary uneasy peace and a continual cycle of violence. This is because this project requires in its essence the denial to the other inside your borders what you demand for yourself. It is also out of step with the integrative impulses of our world and the liberal predispositions that modernist Israelis - as opposed to the crazy religious fundamentalists and most of the settlers - aspire to.

But there is, of course, an alternative, most recently pioneered by the Afrikaner community in South Africa. They too were victims. They too have memories of murder, rape, starvation and concentration camps in the Anglo-Boer War. They too established a project of an ethnic state with military prowess and a nuclear capacity to ensure that they were never, ever subjected to those atrocities again. They too confronted the uneasy peace and the continuous cycle of violence because the ethnic project entailed the denial to the other inside their border what they demanded for themselves.

Yet they had the courage to break out of this cycle of violence and their ethnic project by opening themselves to the prospect of a post-apartheid South Africa. Of course, they did so because of the collective mobilisation of South Africans and the solidarity actions of the outside world. But it also required political courage and political imagination.

In this act, Afrikaners sought their collective defence from the repeat of the Anglo-Boer War in the project of a common humanity. It has not been easy and tensions still remain. There are debates on how to construct this common humanity while retaining our linguistic and cultural identities. We still struggle in terms of how to simultaneously be Afrikaner, South African, African and human.

Yet, despite our differences and tensions, we all collectively know that we are on a better political path today than we have ever been. We recognise that our path to a nonracial political community is more compatible with the integrative impulses of humanity and our contemporary world, and it is precisely in this that our common security resides.

This is where the real failure of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies. There has been no leap in political imagination in the collective psyche of Israelis and Palestinians. Fuelled by right-wing politicians and ethnic religious elites, the majority on both sides are mired in a politics of fear and ethnic statehood.

Those voices of rationality who counsel for a political path to a common humanity are marginalised in Israel. The outside world, particularly the friends of Israel such as the US and UK, are either constrained by the guilt of past actions or omissions, or by geopolitical considerations of the day, from speaking truth to local Israeli political power.

If Israel and Palestine truly want peace, then they need to transcend the collective psyche of victimhood and find solace in the project of a common humanity. In this, Israel would do well to politically emulate South Africa.

Habib is vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand