The logical implication of trying to create a
continent neatly divided into coherent territorial States, each inhabited by a
separate ethnically- and linguistically-homogeneous population, was the mass
expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the murderous
reductio ad absurdum of Nationalism in its territorial version, although this
was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s. [skip] The homogeneous territorial
nation could now be seen as a programme that could be realised only by barbarians,
or at least by barbarian means. - E.J. Hobsbawm. NationsAndNationalismSince1780.
Background
To resolve what was called the ‘jewish question’ –
i.e., the reciprocal challenges of gentile expulsion, or antiSemitism, and
gentile attraction, or assimiliation – theZionistMovement sought in the late
nineteenthcentury to create an overwhelmingly, if no homogeneously, jewishState
inPalestain. (1) Once theZionistMovement gained a foothold inPalestain through
GreatBritain’s issuance of theBalfourDeclaration, (2) the main obstacle to
realising its goal was the indigenous arab population. For, on the eve of
zionist colonisation, Palestain was overwhelmingly-not-jewish but muslim and
christian arab. (3)
Across the mainstream zionist spectrum, it was
understood from the outset that Palestain’s indigenous arab population would
not acquiesce in its dispossession. ‘Contrary to the calim that is oftenmade,
Zionism was notblind to the presence of arabs in Palestain’, ZeevSternhell
observes. ‘If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it
was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the
zionist way of thinking [skip] In general both sides understood each other well
and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the expense of the
palestinian arabs.’ MosheShertok (later Sharett) contemtuously dismissed the
‘illusive hopes’ of those who spoke about a “mutual misunderstanding” between
us and the arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of
unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples.” ‘there is no example inHistory’,
DavidBenGurion declared, succintly framing the core problem, ‘that a nation
opens the gates of its country, not because of its necessity [skip] but because
the nation which wants to come in has explained its desire to it.’ (4)
‘The tragedy ofZionism’, WalterLaQuer wrote in his
standardHistory, ‘was that it appeared on the international scene when there
were no longer empty spaces on the worldmap.’ This is not quite right. Rather
it was no longer politicallytenable to create [eyetalicised] such spaces:
extermination had ceased to be an option of conquest. (5) Basically theZionistMovement
could choose between only two strategic options to achieve its goal: what
BennyMorris had labeled ‘the way of southAfrica’ – ‘the establishment of an
apartheidState, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited
native majority’ – or the ‘the way of transfer’ – ‘you could create a
homogenous jewishState or at least aState with an overwhelming jewish majority
by moving or transferring all or most of the arabs out.’ (6)
Round one – ‘The Way of transfer’
In the first round of conquest, theZionistMovement
set its sights on ‘the way of transfer’. For all the publicRhetoric about
wanting to ‘live with the arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honour and
together with them to turn the common homeland into a flourishing land’
(Twelfth Zionist Congress, 1921), the zionist from early on were in fact bent
on expelling them. ‘The idea of transfer had accompanied theZionistMovement
from its very beginnings’, TomSegev reports. ‘ “Disappearing” the arabs lay at
the heart of the zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its
existence. [skip] With few exceptions, none of the zionists disputed the desirability
of forced transfer – or its Morality.’ The key was to get the timing right.
BenGurion, reflecting on the expulsionoption in thelate1930s, wrote, ‘What is
inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at
this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is
not carried out – a whole world is lost.’ (7)
The goal of ‘disappearing’ the indigenous arab
population points to a virtual truism behind beneath a mountain of apologetic
zionist literature: what spurred palestinians’s opposition to Zionism was not
antiSemitism, in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of jews, but
rather the prospect – veryreal – of their own expulsion. ‘The fear of
territorial displacement and dispossession’, Morris reasonably concludes, ‘was
to be the chief motor of arab antagonism to Zionism.’ Likewise, in his
magisterial study of palestinianNationalism, YehoshuaPorath suggests that the
‘major factor nourishing’ arab antiSemitism ‘was not hatred for the jews as such
but opposition to jewish settlement in Palestain.’ He goes on to argue that,
although arabs initiallydifferentiated between jews and zionists, it was
‘inevitable’ that opposition to zionist settlement would turn into a loathing
of all jews: ‘As immigration increased, so did the jewish community’s identification
with theZionistMovement. [skip] the nonzionist and antizionist factors became
an insignificant minority, and a large measure of sophistication was required
to make the older distinction. It was unreasonable to hope that the wider arab
population, and the riotous mob which was part of it, would maintain its
distinction.’ (8) It ought also to be remembered that zionist leaders
consistently claimed to be acting on behalf and with the support of ‘world jewry’,
a claim which to many palestinians seemed increasingly credible, as first
nonzionist jews inPalestain were marginalised during theMandate as noted above
and, especially after1967, as nonzionist jews around the world became, if not a
small minority, certainly an increasingly voiceless one.
From its incipient stirrings in the late
nineteenthcentury through the watershed revolt in the1930s, palestinian
resistance consistently focused on the twin juggernauts of zionist conquest:
jewish settlers and jewish settlements. (9) Apologetic zionist writers like
AnitaShapira juxtapose benign jewish settlement against recourse to force. (10)
In fact, settlement was force. ‘From the outset, Zionism sought to employ force
in order to realise national aspirations’, YosefGorny observes. ‘This force
consisted primarily of the collective ability to rebuild a national home
inPalestain.’ Through settlement the Zionist Movement aimed –
inBenGurion’swords – ‘to establish a !great jewish fact! [eyetalicised] in this
country’ that was irreversible (emphasis in original). (11) Moreover,
settlement and armed force were inReality seamlessly interwoven as zionist
settlers sought ‘the ideal and perfect fusion between the plow and rifle.’
MosheDayan later memorialised that ‘We are a generation of settlers, and
without the combat helmet and the barrel of a gun, we will not be able to plant
a tree or build a house.’ (12) TheZionistMovement inferred behind palestinian
resistance to jewish settlement a generic (and genetic) antiSemitism – jewish
settlers ‘being murdered’, as BenGurion put it, ‘simply because they were jews’
– in order to conceal from the outside world and itself the rational and
legitimate grievances of the indigenous population. (13) In the ensuing
bloodshed the kith and kin of zionist martyrs would, like relatives of
palestinian martyrs today, wax proud at these national sacrifices. ‘I am
gratified’, the father of a jewish casualty eulogised, ‘that I was a living
witness to such a historical event.’ (14)
It bears critical notice for what comes later that,
from the interwar through early postwaryears, western publicopinion was not
altogether averse to populationtransfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) method
for resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe’s jewish press
supported in the mid1930s the transfer of jews to Madagascar to solve Poland’s
‘jewish problem’. (15) The main forced transfer between the twoWorldWars was
effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the TreatyOfLausanne (1923)
and approved and supervised by theLeagueOfNations, this brutal displacement of
more than 1.5 million persons eventually came to be seen by much of
officialEurope as an auspicious precedent. The british cited it in the
late1930s as a model for resolving the conflict inPalestain. The rightwing
zionist leader, VladimirJabotinsky, taking heart from Nazi demographic
experiments in conquered territories (about 1.5 million poles and jews were
expelled and hundreds of thousands of germans resettled in their place),
exclaimed: ‘The world has become accustomed to the idea of massmigrations and
has almost become fond of them. Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given
this idea a good name in the world.’ During the war theSovietUnion also carried
out bloody deportations of recalcitrant minorities such as the volga germans,
checheningush and tatars. Labor zionists pointed to the ‘positive experience’
of the greekturkish and soviet expulsions in support of the transferidea.
Recalling the ‘success’ (Churchill) of the greekturkish compulsory transfer,
the Allies at thePostdamConference (1945) authorised the expulsion of some
thirteen million germans from central- and eastern-Europe (around twomillions
perished in the course of this horrendous uprooting). Even the leftwing
BritishLabourParty advocated in its 1944platform that the ‘arabs be encouraged
to move out’ ofPalestain, as did [] BertrandRussell, to make way for zionist
settlement.
In fact, many in the enlightenedWest came to view
displacement of the indigenous population ofPalestain as an inexorable
concomitant of civilisation’s advance. The identification of americans
withZionism came easily, since the ‘social order of the Yishuv [jewish
community inPalestain] was built on the ethos of a frontier society, in which a
pioneeringsettlementmodel set the tone.’ To account for the almost complete
disregard of the arab case’ by americans, a prominent BritishLabourMP,
RichardCrossman, explained in the mid1940s: ‘Zionism after all is merely the
attempt by the european jew to build his national life on the soil ofPalestain
in much the same way the american settler developed theWest. So the american
will give the jewish settler inPalestain the benefit of the doubt, and regard
the arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress.’
Contrasting the ‘slovenly’ arabs with enterprising jewish settlers who had ‘set
going revolutionary forces in theMiddleEast’, Crossman himself professed in the
name of ‘social progress’ support forZionism. The leftliberal US presidential
candidate in1948, HenryWallace, compared the zionist struggle inPalestain with
‘the fight the american colonies carried on in1776. Just as the british stirred
up the iroquois to fight the colonists, so today they are stirring up the
arabs.’ (17)
Come1948, theZionistMovement exploited the
‘revolutionary times’ of the first arabisraeli war – much like the serbs did
inKosovo during theNATOAttack – to expel more than 80percent of the indigenous
population (750.000 palestinians), and thereby achieve its goal of an
overwhelmingly jewishState, ifnot yet in the whole ofPalestain. (18)
BerlKatznelson, known as the ‘conscience’ of theLabourZionistMovement, had
maintained that ‘there has never been a colonising enterprise as typified by
Justice and honesty toward others as out work here inEretzIsrael.’ In his
multivolume paean to the american settlers’s dispossession of the native
population, TheWinningOfTheWest, TheodoreRoosevelt likewise concluded that ‘no
other conquering nation has ever treated savage owners of the soil with such
generosity as has theUnitedStates’. The recipients of this benefaction would
presumably have a different story to tell. (19)
Round two – ‘The Way of southAfrica’
The main arab (and british) fear before and after
the1948War was that theZionistMovement would use the jewishState carved out
ofPalestain as a springboard for further expansion. (20) In fact, zionists
pursued from early on a ‘stages’ strategy of conqueringPalestain by parts – a
strategy it would later vilify the palestinians for. ‘The zionist vision could
not be fulfilled in one fell swoop’, BenGurion’s official biographer reports,
‘especially the transformation ofPalestain into a jewishState. The stagebystage
approach, dictated by less than favourable circumstances, required the formulation
of objectives that appeared to be “concessions”.’ it acquesced in British and
UnitedNations proposals for the partition ofPalestain but only ‘as a stage
along the path to greater zionist implementation’ (BenGurion). (21) Chief among
the zionist leadership’s regrets in the aftermath of the1948War was its failure
to conquer the whole ofPalestain. Come 1967, Israel exploited the
‘revolutionary times’ of theJuneWar to finish the job. (22) SirMartinGilbert,
in his glowing History ofIsrael, maintained that zionist leaders from the
outset conceived the conquered territories as an undesired ‘burden that was to
weighheavily onIsrael’. In a highlyacclaimed new study, SixDaysOfWar, MichaelOren suggests that
Israel’s territorial conquests ‘came about largely through chance’, ‘the
vagaries and momentum of war’: they just happened. A careful review of the
historical record, however, suggests that they were just waiting to happen.
[eyetalicised] In the light of theZionistMovement’s longstanding territorial
imperatives, Sternhell concludes: ‘The role of conquer, which Israel began to
play only a few months after the lightning victory of june1967, was not the
result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the
outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realisation
of Zionism’s major ambitions.’ (23)
Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying
theWestBank and Gaza as at the dawn of theZionistMovement: it wanted the land
but not the people. (24) Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In
the aftermath of the brutal Naziexperiments with and plans for demographic
engineering, international publicopinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to
forced populationtransfers. The landmark FourthGenevaConvention, ratified
in1949, for the first time ‘unequivocallyprohibited deportation’ of civilians
under occupation (Articles 49, 147). (25) Accordingly, after theJuneWar Israel
moved to impose the second of its twooptions mentioned above – apartheid. This
proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of
theIsraelPalestainconflict.
The ‘Peaceprocess’
Right after theJuneWar theUnitedNations deliberated
on the modalities for achieving a Just and lasting peace. The broad consensus
of theGeneralAssembly as well as theSecurityCountil called for Israel’s
withdrawal for the arab territories it occupied during theJuneWar.
SecurityCountilResolution242 stipulated the basic principle ofInternationalLaw
in its preambular paragraph ‘emphasising [eyetalicised] the inadmissibility of
the acquisition of territory by war’ (emphasis in original). (26) At the same
time, Resolution242 called on arabStates to recognise Israel’s right ‘to live
in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from threats and acts of force’.
To accomodate palestinian national aspirations, the international consensus
eventually supported the creation of a palestinianState in theWestBank and Gaza
once Israel withdrew to its preJuneborders. (Resolution242 had only referred
obliquely to the palestinians in its call for ‘achieving a Just resolution of
the refugeeproblem’.)
Although DefenseMinisterMosheDayan privatelyacknowledged
that Resolution242 required full withdrawal, Israel officiallymaintained that it
allowed for ‘territorial revision’. (27) Israel’s refusal in feburary1971 to
fullywithdraw from theSinai in exchange for Egypt’s offer of a peacetreaty leddirectly
to theOctober1973War. (28) The basic parameters of israeli policy regarding
palestinian territory were set out in the late1960s in the proposal ofYigalAllon,
a senior LabourPartyofficial and Cabinetmember. The‘AllonPlan’ called for
Israel’sannexation of up to half theWestBank, while palestinians would be
confined to the other half in two unconnected cantons to the north and south.
SassonSofer notes generally the ‘fertile dualism’ of israeli diplomacy – one
might rather say ‘fertile cynicism’ – of ‘pointing to the uniqueness of jewish
question in order to obtain legitimacy, and then stressing the normality of Israel’s
sovereign existence as aState which should be accorded all the international
rights and privileges of a national entity’. In the case at hand Israel
demanded, like all sovereign States, full recognition yet also claimed a right,
in the name of unique jewish suffering and despite InternationalLaw, to
territorial conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of theNaziHolocaust played
a crucial role in this diplomatic game. (29)
TheUnitedStates initiallysupported the consensus
interpretation ofResolution242, making allowance for only ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’
adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and Jordaniancontrolled
WestBank. (30) In heated private exchange with Israel during theUNsponsored
mediation efforts ofGunnarJarring in1968, (31) american officials stood firm
that ‘the words “recognised and secure” meant “security arrangements” and
“recognition” of new lines as international boundaries’, and ‘never meant that
Israel could extend its territory to [the] WestBank or Suez if this was what it
felt its security required’; and that ‘there will never be peace if Israel
tries to hold onto large chunks of territory’. Referring to it explicitly by
name, theUS deplored even the minimalist version of theAllonPlan as ‘a
nonstarter’ and ‘unacceptable in principle’. (32)
In a crucial shift beginning under
theNixonKissingeradministration, however, american policy was realigned
withIsrael’s. (33) Except for Israel and theUnitedStates (and occasionally aUS
clientState), the international community has supported, for the past quartercentury,
the ‘twoState’settlement: that is, the full Israel withdrawal/full arab
recognition formula as well as the creation of a palestinianState
alongsideIsrael. TheUnitedStates alone cast the lone veto
ofSecurityCouncilResolutions in1976 and 1980 affirming the twoStatesettlement
that were endorsed by thePalestineLiberationOrganisation (PLO) and neighbouring
arabStates. A 1989 GeneralAssembly resolution along similar lines passed 151-3
(Israel, US and Dominica). Despite the historic geopolitical changes in the
past decade, the international consensus has reamined remarkably stable.
A 2002 GeneralAssemblyresolution (‘Peaceful
settlement of the question ofPalestain’) affirming Israel’sright to ‘secure and
recognised borders’ in theWestBank and Gaza passed 160-4 (Israel,
MarshallIslands, FederatedStates ofMicronesia, US).
The 2002 UNvotingrecord on virtually every resolution
bearing on theIsraelPalestinian (and –Syrian) conflict was similarlylopsided.
In theUNThirdCommittee the vote was 156-3 (Israel, MarshallIslands,
US) regarding ‘the right of the palestinian people to selfdetermination’,
while in theFourthCommittee the vote was 148-1
(Israel) regarding ‘Assistance to palestinian refugees’,
147-4 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, US)
regarding ‘the right of the palestinian people to selfdetermination’,
while in theFourthCommittee the vote was 148-1
(Israel) regarding ‘Assistance to palestinian refugees’, 147-4 (Israel,
MarshallIslands, Micronesia, US) regarding ‘Persons displaced as a result of
theJune1967War’,
147-5 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, Nauru,
US) regarding ‘Operations of theUnitedNationsRelief and WorksAgencyForPalestainRefugees’,
147-4 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, US)
regarding ‘Palestain refugees’ properties and their revenues’,
145-5 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, Nauru,
US) regarding ‘Applicability of the GenevaConvention [skip] to theOccupiedPalestinianTerritory’,
145-6 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, Tuvalu,
US) regarding ‘Israeli settlements in theOccupiedTerritories’,
141-5 (Israel, MarshallIslands, Micronesia, Nauru,
US) regarding ‘israeli practices affecting theHumanRights of the palestinian
people’,
and 144-1 (Israel) regarding ‘The
occupiedSyrianGolan.’
Responding to the syrian charge that ‘Israel stood
isolated’ in the international community Israel’sambassador rejoined that ‘to
the right’ it had truth and ‘to the left, Justice’, and he did not call that
isolation. Indeed, he left out Nauru, Tuvalu, Micronesia, and
theMarshallIslands. This record is often adduced as proof of theUN’sbias
againstIsrael. In fact the exact reverse is true. A careful study byMarcWeller
of theUniversityOfCambridge comparingIsrael and theOccupiedTerritories with
similar situation inBosnia and herzegovnia, Kosovo, eastTimor, occupiedKuwait
and Iraq, and Rwanda found that Israel has enjoyed a ‘virtual immunity’ from
enforcementmeasures such as an armsembargo and economic sanctions
typicallyadopted by theUN against memberStates condemned for identical
violations ofInternationalLaw. Given its conflict with the ‘entire
worldcommunity’, Israel has unsurprisinglyset as a crucial precondition for
negotiations that palestinians ‘must drop their traditional demand’ for
‘international arbitration’ or a ‘SecurityCouncilMechanism’. (34)
The main obstacle to Israel’sannexation of occupied
palestinian territory from the mid1970s was thePLO. Having endorsed the
twoStatesettlement, it could no longer be dismised as simply a terrorist
organisation bent on Israel’sdestruction. Pressures mounted onIsrael to reach
an agreement with thePLO’s ‘compromising approach’. Consequently, in june1982
Israel invadedLebanon, where palestinian leaders were headquartered, to head
off what israeli strategic analyst AvnerYaniv dubbed thePLO’s ‘peaceoffensive’.
(35) With thePalestainquestion diplomaticalysidelined after the invasion,
WestBank and Gaza palestinians rose up in december1987 against the occupation
in a basically nonviolent civil revolt, the intifada. Israel’s brutal
repression (compounded by the inept and corrupt leadership of thePLO) eventuallyresulted
in the uprising’s defeat. (36) After the implosion of theSovietUnion, the
destruction ofIraq, and the suspension of funding from theGulfStates,
palestinian fortunes reached a new nadir. TheUS and Israel seized on this
opportune moment to recruit the already venla and now desperate palestinian
leadership – ‘on the verge of bankruptcy’ and ‘in [a] weakened condition’
(UriSavir, Israel’s chief negotiator atOslo) – as surrogates of israeli power.
This was the real meaning of theOsloAccord signed in september1993: to create a
palestinian Bantustan by
dangling before-Arafat and -thePLO the perquisites of power and privilege, much
like how the british controlledPalestain during theMandateyears through
theMufti ofJerusalem, AminAlHusayni, and theSupremeMuslimCouncil. (37) 'The
occupation continued’ afterOslo, a seasoned israeli observer, MeronBenvenisti,
wrote, ‘albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the palestinian
people, represented by their “sole representative,” thePLO.’ And again: ‘It
goes without saying that “cooperation” based on the current power relationship
is no more than permanent israeli domination in disguise, and that palestinian
selfrule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanisation.’ The ‘test’ forArafat and thePLO, according
toSavir, was whether they would ‘us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas
and other violent opposition groups’ contesting israeli apartheid. (38)
Israel’s settlement policy in theOccupiedTerritories
during the past decade points up the real content of the ‘peaceprocess’ set in
motion atOslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study byB’Tselem
(IsraelInformationCenter forHumanRights in theOccupiedTerritories) entitled
LandGrab. (39) Due primarily to massive israeliGovernment subsidies, the jewish
settlerpopulation increased from 250.000 to 380.000 during theOsloyears, with
settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace under the tenure of
Labour’sEhudBarak than Likud’sBenjaminNetanyahu. Illegal underInternationalLaw
and built on land illegallyseized from palestinians, these settlements now
incorporate nearlyhalf the land surface of theWestBank. For all practical
purposes they have been annexed toIsrael (IsraeliLaw extends not only to
israeli but also nonisraeli jews residing in the settlements) and are offlimits
to palestinians without special authorisation. Fragmenting theWestBank into
disconneted and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful palestinian
development. In parts of theWestBank and eastJerusalem theonly available land
for building lies in areas under israeli jurisdiction, while the
waterconsumption of the 5.000 jewish settlers in theJordanValley is equivalent
to 75percent of the waterconsumption of all twomillions palestinian inhabitants
of theWestBank. Not one jewish settlement was dismantled during theOsloyears, while
the number of new housingunits in the settlements increased by more than fiftypercent
(excluding eastJerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts
occured not under Netanyahu’s tenure but rather underBarak’s, in the year 2000
– exactly when Barak claims to have ‘left no stone unturned’ in his quest for
peace. During the first eighteenmonths ofPrimeMinisterSharon’s term of office
(beginning early 2001), fortyfour new settlements – rebuked by
theUNCommissionOnHumanRights as ‘incendiary and provocative’ – were established
in theWestBank. (40)
‘Israel has created in theOccupitedTerritories a
regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems ofLaw
in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality’,
theB’Tselem study concludes. ‘This regime is theonlyone of this kind in the
world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as
theApartheidregime in southAfrica.’
As jewish settlements expand, Israel has begun
corrallingWestBankpalestinians into eightfragments of territory, each
surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them
(trucks must load and unload on the borders ‘backtoback’), thereby further devastating
anEconomy in which rougly onethird of the population is unemployed, half the
population lives below the povertyline of 2USD per day, and onefifth of
children under five suffer from malnutrition largelycaused – according to US,
UN and european reliefagencies – by israeli restriction on transporting food.
‘What is truly appalling’, a Haa-retz writer lamented, ‘is the blasé way in
which the story has been received and handled by the massMedia [skip] Where is
the public outcry against this attempt to divide the territories and enforce
internal passports [skip] [and] humiliate and inconvenience a population that
can scarcely earn a living or live a life as it is?’ (41)
After sevenyears of onagain, offagain negotiations
and a succession of new interim agreements that managed to rob the palestinians
of the few crumbs thrown from the master’s table atOslo, (42) the moment of
truth arrived atCampDavid in july2000. PresidentClinton and PrimeMinisterBarak
deliveredArafat the ultimatum of formallyacquiescing in aBantustan or bearing
full responsibility for the collapse of the ‘peaceprocess’. Arafat refused,
however, to budge from the international consensus for resolving the conflict.
According toRobertMalley, a key american negotiator atCampDavid, Arafat
continued to hold out for a ‘palestinianState based on theJune4.1967borders,
living alongsideIsrael’, yet also ‘accepted the notion of israeli annexation
ofWestbankterritory to accomodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for
one swap of land of “equal size and value” ’ – that is, the ‘minor’ and
‘mutual’ borderadjustments of the original USposition onResolution242. Malley’s
rendering of the palestinian proposal atCampDavid – an offer that was
widelydismissed but rarelyreported – deserves full quotation: ‘aStateOfIsrael
incorporating some land captured in1967 and including a verylarge majority of
its settlers, the largest jewishJerusalem in the city’s History, preservation
of Israel’s demographic balance between jews and arabs; security guaranteed by a
USled international presence.’ On the other hand, contrary to the myth spun
byBarakClinton as well as a compliantMedia, ‘Barak offered the trappings of
palestinian sovereignty’, a special advisor at theBritishForeignOffice observed,
‘while prepetuating the subjugation of the palestinians.’ Although accounts of
theBarakproposal significantlydiffer, all knowledgeable observers concur that
it ‘would have meant that territory annexed byIsrael would encroach deep inside
the palestinianState’ (Malley), dividing theWestBank into multiple,
disconnected enclaves, and offering landswaps that were of neither equal size
nor equal value. (43)
Consider in this regard Israel’sreaction to the
march2002 Saudipeaceplan. CrownPrinceAbdullah proposed, and all twentyone other
members of theArabLeague approved, a plan making concessions that actually went
beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full israeli withdrawal,
it offered not only full recognition but ‘normal relations withIsrael’, and
called not for the ‘right of return’ of palestinian refugees but rather only a
‘Just solution’ to the refugeeproblem. A Haa-retz commentator noted that
theSaudiplan was ‘surprisingly similar to what Barak claims to have proposed
twoyearsago’ atCampDavid. Were Israel trulycommitted to a comprehensive
withdrawal in exchange for normalisation with the arab world, theSaudiplan and
its unanimous endorsement by theArabLeague summit ought to have been met with
euphoria. In fact, after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was
quicklydeposited inOrwell’smemoryhole. When theBushadministration
subsequentlymade passing reference to theSaudiplan in a draft ‘roadmap’ for
settling theIsraelPalestainconflict, israeli officials loudlyprotested. (44)
Nonetheless, Barak’s – and Clinton’s – fraud that palestinians atCampDavid
rejected a maximallygenerous israeli offer provided crucial Moralcover for the
horrors that ensued.
Learning from theNaziHolocaust
In september2000, palestinians embarked on a second
intifada against israeli rule. In the ‘warped thinking’ of israelis sinceOslo,
Haaretz journalist AmiraHaas wrote soon after the renewed resistence,
the palestinians would accept a situation of
coexistence in which they were on un equal footing vis-Ã -vis the israelis and
in which they were ranked as persons who were entitled to less, much less, than
the jews. However, in the end the palestinians were notwilling to live with
this arrangement. The new intifada [skip] is a final attempt to thrust a minor
in the face of israelis and to tell them: ‘Take a good look at yourselves and
see how racist you have become.’
Meanwhile, Israel, having failed in the carrotpolicy
it initiated atOslo, reached for the big stick. Twopreconditions had to be met,
however, before Israel could bring to bear its overwhelming military
superiority: a ‘greenlight’ from theUS and a sufficient pretext. Already in
summer2001, the authoritative Jane’sInformationGroup reported that Israel had
completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of theOccupiedTerritories.
But theUS vetoed the plan and Europe made equallyplain its opposition. After[SeptemberElevenAttack],
however, theUS came on board. Sharon’sgoal of crushing the palestinians
basically fit in with theUS eliminate the last remnants of arab resistance to
total USdomination – or, in RobertFisk’s succint formulation, ‘to bring the
arabs back under our firm control, to ensure their loyalty’. Through sheer
exertion of will and despite a monumentallyincompetent leadership, palestinians
have proven to be the most resilient and recalcitrant popular force in
theArabworld. Bringing them to their knees would deal a devastating
psychological blow throughout the region. (45)
With a greenlight from theUS, all Israel now needed
was the pretext. Predictably, it escalated the assissinations of palestinian
leaders following each lull in palestinian terrorist attacks. ‘After the
destruction of the houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the palestinians continued to
act with the houses restraint’, ShulamitAloni ofIsrael’s Meretzparty observed.
‘Sharon and his Armyminister, apparently fearing that they would have to return
to the negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated
RaedKarmi. They knew that there would be a response, and that we would pay the
price in the blood of citiznes.’ (46) In fact, it was plainly the case that
Israel desperatelysought this sanguinary response. Once the palestinian
terrorist attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to declare war
and proceed to beat the basicallydefenseless civilian palestinian population
into submission.
Only the willfullyblind could miss noticing that
Israel’s march.april.invasion of theWestBank, ‘OperationDefenselessShield’, was
largely a replay of theJune1982Invasion ofLebanon. To crush the palestinians’s
goal of an independentState alongsideIsrael – thePLO’s ‘peaceoffensive’ –
Israel laid plans in september1981 to invadeLebanon. In order to launch the
invasion, however, it needed the greenlight from theReaganadministration and a
pretext. Much to its chagrin and despite multiple provocations, Israel was
unable to elicit a palestinian attack on its northern border. It
accordinglyescalated the airassaults on southernLebanon and after a
particularlymurderous attack that left twohundredscivilians dead (including
sixtyoccupants of a palestinian children’shospital), thePLO finallyretaliated,
killing oneisraeli. With this keypretext in hand and a greenlight now
forthcoming from theReganadministration, Israel invaded. Using thesameslogan of
‘rooting out palestinian terror’, Israel proceeded to massacre a defenseless
population, killing some 20.000 palestinians and lebanese between june and
september 1982, almost all civilians. One might note by comparison that, as of
may2002, the official israeli figure for jews ‘who gave their lives for the
creation and security of the jewishState’ – that is, the total number of jews
who perished in (mostly) wartime combat or in terrorist attacks from the dawn
of theZionistMovement 120 years ago until the presnt day – comes to 21.182.
(47)
To repress palestinian resistance, a senior israeli
officer in early2002 urged theArmy to ‘analyse and internalise the lessons of
[skip] how the germanArmy fought in theWarsawGhetto’. Judging by israeli
carnage in theWestBank culminating inOperationDefensiveShield – the targeting
of palestinian ambulances (48) and medical personnel, the targeting of
journalists, the killing of palestinian children ‘for sport’ (ChrisHedges,
NewYorkTimes formerCairobureauchief), the rounding up, handcuffing and
blindfolding of palestinian males between the ages of fifteen and fifty, and
affixing the numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of palestinian
detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity, medical treatment and burail
to the palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate airassaults on some
palestinian neighbourhoods, the systematic use of palestinian civilians as
humanshields, the bulldozing of palestinian homes with the occupants huddled
inside – it appears that the israeliArmy followed the officer’sadvice. When the
offensive, supported by fully 90percent of israelis, was finally over, 500
palestinians were dead (including more than seventychildren) and 1.500 wounded,
more than 8.000 palestinian detained in mass roundups had been subjected to
illtreatment (and sometimes torture), more than 3.000 dwellings were demolished
(sometimes with the residents still inside) leaving over 13.000 palestinians
homeless, while the already devastated palestinianEconomy suffered more than
350millionsUSD in direct propertylosses. (49)
The climax ofOperationDefensiveShield was the israeli
siege in earlyapril ofJeninrefugeecamp. A palestinian militant
toldAmnestyInternational that the decision to resist was ‘made by the
community’ against the background of an israeli incursion the month before that
had met little resistance: ‘And otherwise, where would we go? The israelis had
put a cordon around the town; we had no choice. We had nowhere else to fight.’
HumanRightsorganisations consistentlyfound that in the course of the siege
‘israeli forces committed serious violations of humanatarianLaw, some amounting
prima facie to warcrime’ (HumanRightsWatch) and ‘theIDF [IsraelDefenseForces]
carried out actions which violated internationalHumanRights and
humanatarianLaw; some of these actions amount to [skip] warcrimes’
(AmnestyInternational). Some 4.000 palestinians, nearly a third of the
camp’spopulation, were rendered homeless in ‘desturction [that] extended well
beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters, and was
vastlydisproportionate to the military objectives pursued (HRW); indeed, ‘in
one appalling and extensive operation, theIDF demolished, destroyed by
explosives, or flattened byArmybulldozers, a large residential area ofJeninrefugeecamp,
much of it after the fighting had apparently ended’ (Amnesty). Some fiftyfour
palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. (50) Typical of the documented
israeli atrocities inJenin were these: a ‘thirtysevenyearold paralysed man was
killed when theIDF bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his
relatives the time to remove him from the home’; a ‘fiftysevenyearold
wheelchairbound man [skip] was shot and run over by a tank on a major road
outside the camp [skip] even though he had a whiteflag attached to his
wheelchair’; ‘IDFsoldiers forced a sixtyfiveyearold woman to stand on a rooftop
in front of an IDFposition in the middle of a helicopterbattle (HRW). Israeli
authorities apparently didn’t initiate ‘proper investigations’ in any of the
‘unlawful killing’, giving rise to fears that theIDF has been given ‘a carte
blanche to continue’ (Amnesty). ‘Though theIDFoffensive againstNablus in
april2002 has not received the attention ofJenin’, Amnesty further found,
‘there were more palestinians casualties (80) and fewe israeli soldiers killed
(four)’, and a comparable pattern ofHumanRightsviolations and warcrimes as well
as the complete or partial razing of ‘religious and historical sites [skip] in
what frequentlyappeared to be wanton destruction without military necessity’.
In one grisly case, IDFsoldiers repeatedlybeat with their rifles, pummeled and
flipped, and shoved off a truck and down stairs, a ‘twentyfiveyearold [skip]
paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair’ (Amnesty). TheIDF
would later explain that the killing of a ‘large number’ of civilians has
‘deterrent value’ (senior IDFofficer), and allowed for the killing of unarmed
teenage boys on the grounds that they are ‘people of an age to be fighters’.
It’s only a flea’s hop to theNazijustification for killing jewish children on
the ground that otherwise ‘a generation of avengers filled with hatred [will]
grow up’. (51)
Recalling that Israel, ‘frequentlysupported by
theUnitedStates’, has ‘blocked all attempts to endHumanRightsviolations and
install a system of international protection inIsrael and
theOccupiedTerritories’, AmnestyInternational called on ‘the international
community and, in particular, theUnitedStatesGovernment to immediatelystop the
sale or transfer of weaponry that are used to commitHumanRightsviolations to
israeli forces.’
It wasn’t only HumanRightsorganisations that
criticisedOperationDefensiveShield. EhudBarak, for example, registered dissent:
according to the formerPrimeMinister, Sharon should have acted
‘moreforcefully’. In the meantime, HolocaustIndustryCEO ElieWiesel lent
unconditional support toIsrael – ‘Israel didn’t do anything except it reacted [skip] Whatever Israel has
done is theonlything that Israel could have done [skip] I don’t think Israel is
violating theHumanRightsCharter [skip] War has its own rules’ – and went on to
stress the ‘great pain and anguish’ endured by israeli soldiers as they did
what ‘they have to do.’ (52) Boasting that the ‘left them a
footballstadium’, one of Wiesel’s agonised israeli soldiers operating a
bulldozer inJenin later recounted in an interview: ‘I wanted to destroy
everything. I begged the officers [skip] to let me knock it all down, from top
to bottom. To level everything. [skip] For threedays, I just destroyed and
destroyed. [skip] I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew
that they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked
down a house, you buried forty or fifty people for generations. If I am sorry
for anything, it is for not teating the whole camp down. [skip] I had plenty of
satisfaction. I reallyenjoyed it.’ A B’Tseleminvestigation inRammallah found
that, typically, at ‘theMinistryOfEducation, not only was the computernetwork
taken, so were overhead projectors and videoplayers. Other equipment, including
televisions and filecabinets full of records, such as studenttranscripts, were
simplydestroyed. [skip] Harddisks were taken from civil society organisations
that had invested years of work and millionsUSD to compile this material.’ ‘It
was simplyunbelievable’, one young conscript recalled, ‘people simplymade an
effort to both destroy and rob. [skip] The sergeant major would bring a truck
and load up. It was doneopenly.’ ‘The total picture’, B’Tselem concluded, ‘is one
of a vengeful assault on all symbols of palestinian society and palestinian
identity. This is combined with what can only be described as hooliganism: the
result of thousands of teenage boys and young men in uniform allowed to run
wild in palestinian cities with no accountability for their actions.’ Haaretz
reported that israeli soldiers occupying Ramallah ‘destroyed
children’spaintings’ in the palestinianMinistryOfCulture, and ‘urinated and
defecated everywhere’ in the building, even ‘managing to defecate into a
photocopier’ – no doubt with ‘great pain and anguish’. It seems that this has
become an IDFrite of passage: during Israel’soccupation ofBeirut in1982,
soldiers similarlydefecated in palestinian cultural and medical institutions.
(53)
In july2002, Israel movedquickly to avert yet another
political catastrophe. With assistance from european diplomats, militant
palestinian organisations, including Hamas, reached a preliminary accord to
suspend all attacks insideIsrael, perhaps paving the way for a return to the
negotiating table. Just ninetyminutes before it was to be announced, however,
israeli leaders – fullyapprised of the imminent declaration – ordered anF16 to
drop a onetonnebomb on a denselypopulated civilian neighbourhood inGaza,
killing, alongside aHamasleader, elevenchildren and five others, and injuring
140. Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and palestinian terrorist
attacks resumed with a vengeance. ‘What is the wisdom here?’ a
Meretzpartyleader asked theKnesset. ‘At the verymoment that it appeared that we
were on the brink of a chance for reaching something of a ceasefire, or
diplomatic activity, we alwaysgo back to this experience – just when there is a
period of calm, we liquidate.’ Yet, having headed off another dastardly palestinian
‘peaceoffensive’, the murderous assault made perfect sense. Small wonder Sharon
hailed it as ‘one of our greatest successes’. And ‘once again’ in october2002
‘an outburst of violence’ ended ‘a period of relative calm in
theIsraelPalestainconflict’, theChristianScienceMonitor reported, as Israel
killed fourteenpalestinians and wounded more than onehundred (mostly civilians)
inGaza. ‘The main palestinian politicalfaction, Fatah, was abstaining from
terrorist attacks insideIsrael and [skip] officials of the palestinian
authority were attempting to persuade militant palestinian groups to do the
same.’, it continued. The israeli attack ‘appeared to extinguish this
initiative’s chances for success’ and ‘may add credibility to assertions by
palestinians and others that Israel intentionallystokes the conflict.’
EuropeanUnionrepresentative JavierSolana rued that the assault would undermine
the palestinians’s new undertaking to ‘distance themselves from violence’ –
which is presumably why the israeliArmycommander inGaza concluded that ‘The
operation was definitelysuccesful from our point of view.’ (54) Scoring a major
victory on a related front, the israeliGovernment blocked israeli
peaceactivists in august2002 from linking up with 700 of their palestinian
counterparts inBethlehem. Reporting fromBethlehem, AmiraHass observed that many
palestinians were endeavoring to ‘open a public debate aimed at reducing
palestinian support for attacks insideIsrael, without waiting for a change in
israeli policy.’ The joint demonstration, she continued, ‘was an example of
that type of effort. It was an effor that failed, foiled by the israeli
authorities.’ (55)
Expulsion redux
TheOsloprocess was premised on finding a credible
palestinian leadership to cloak israeli apartheid: aNelsonMandela to act the
part of aChiefButhelezi. (56) CampDavid signaled the defeat of this strategy:
Arafat refsued – or, due to popular resistance, wasn’t able – to play the
assigned role. Without such a legitimising palestinian façade, theReality of
israeli apartheid stand fullyexposed and subject to thesame withering criticism
as it southafrican precursor. ‘If palestinians were black, Israel would be a
pariahState subject to economic sanctions led by theUnitedStates’,
theLondonObserver editorialised after the outbreak of thew intifada. ‘Its
development and settlement of theWestBank would be seen as a system of
apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny
fraction of its own country, in selfproclaimed “bantustans”, with “whites”
monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the
blackpopulation was allowed into southAfrica’s whiteareas in disgracefully
underresourced townships, so Israel’streatment of israeli arabs – flagrantly
discriminating against them in housing and Education – would be recognised as
scandalous too.’ Mainstream figures across the politicalspectrum,
fromPresidentCarter’s NationalSecurityAdvisor, ZbigniewBrzezinski, to
southAfrica’s anglicanArchibishop and NobelLaureate, DesmundTutu, have since
issued similar denunciations. ‘I have been very deeply distressed in my visit
to theHolyLand’, Tutu declared. ‘It reminded me so much of what happened to us
blacks in southAfrica. I have seen the humiliation of the palestinians at
checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young whitepoliceofficers
prevented us from moving about.’ (57)
But paradoxically, whereas apartheid is no longer a
tenable israeli option, expulsion once again may be. Israel adopted the
apartheid strategy after new precedents inInternationalLaw and publicopinion
barred ethnic expulsions. In recent times, however, there has been a dramatic
loosening of such juridical and Moral constraints. Especially
since[SeptemberElevenAttack], theUS has even ceased honouringInternationalLaw
in the breach, but rather effectivelydeclared it null and void. Unlike its 1991
devastation ofIraq, theUS’sassault onAfghanistan was launched without any
direct UNsanction – not because it couldn’t get such a sanction but because it
wanted to make the point of not needing one. Unlike its use in the past of
covert operations and legitimising façades, like the nicaraguanContras, to
overthrow nettlesome foreignGovernments, theUS now brazenly talks about
‘regimechange’. And in proclaiming the doctrine of preventive war,
theBushadministration has dealt ‘a Moralblow’ toArticle51 of theUNCharter
prohibiting armed attack except in the face of an imminent threat. ‘Since Bush
came to office’, theLondonGuardian observes, ‘theUnitedStatesGovernment has
torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UNconventions than the
rest of the world has in 20years.’
‘It has scuppered the biological weapons convention
while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has
refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors fullacess to its laboratories, and
has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections inIraq. It has ripped up
the antiballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the
nucleartestbantreaty. It has permitted CIAhitsquads to recommence cover
operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign
heads ofState. It has sabotaged the small armstreaty, undermined
theInterntionalCriminalCourt, refused to sign the climatechangeprotocol and,
last month, sought to immobilise theUNconvention against torture so that it can
keep foreign observers out of its prisoncamp inGuantanamoBay. Even its
preparedness to go to war withIraq without a mandate from theUNSecurityCountil
is a defiance ofInternationalLaw far graver thanSaddamHussein.’ (58)
With crucial USbacking, Israel is likewise now able
to totallyflout international conventions – as evidenced by its contemptuous
and humiliating treatment in april2002 of theUN’s factfinding mission onJenin,
and its shredding of theOsloaccord with the reoccupation of
palestinianadministered areas in theWestBank. Influential israeli policymakers
like infrastructureminister EffiEitam and former leftwing stalwarts like author
ABYehoshua openlyadovcate transfer, while former commander of theAirForce
EitanBenEliahu urges the necessity to ‘thin out the number of arabs here’.
‘Every day that goes by’, AmiraHaas warns, ‘the preachers of transfer feel ever
moreconfident about raising their “permanent solution” in the israeli public.’
Israeli military correspondent Ze’evSchiff points to the settlers’s ‘stealing
and confiscating of palestinian food’ (justified by Israel’s former chief rabbi
on the grounds that ‘the fruit from the trees planted by gentiles on land
inherited by the people ofIsrael does not belong to the gentiles’) as ‘laying
the groundwork forTransfer’, and israeli journalist DannyRubinstein likewise
observes that ‘The settlers can always claim that they shoot at olive
harvesters because the peasants are actually scouts meant to help prepare
terror attacks – but the clear truth is that it’s really a preparation for transfer.’
Nearly onehalf of israelis support expulsion ofWestBank and Gaza palestinians,
and nearly onethird support expulsion of israeli palestinians (threefifths
support ‘encouraging’ israeli palestinians to leave), while bumperstickers
aroundJerusalem urge theGovernment to ‘Deport the [expletives]’. (59)
The dean of Israel’s ‘new historians’, (60)
BennyMorris, explicitlyjustifies expulsion of the palestinians not only in the
eveno f a regional war but in the name ofLebensraum: ‘This land is so small
that there isn’t room for twopersons. In fifty or a hundredyears, there will be
only oneState between the sea and theJordan. That State must be Israel.’ This
insight is of a piece with many of his recent pronouncements. According
toMorris, the zionist settlers had the right to expel arabs from their homes
in1948 because ‘they started shooting’. Early american settlers
similarlymaintained that ‘We [skip] may now by right ofWarre, and law ofNations
[skip] destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby [skip] their cleared
grounds [skip] shall be inhabited by us.’ Or is it legitimate to expel in time
of war but illegitimate to exterminate? Morris claims that BenGurion’s
‘terrible mistake in1948’ was that he didn’t ‘complete the job’ and expel
‘onehundredpercent’ of the palestinian arabs; that israeli palestinians now
constitute an ‘external danger’ and a ‘timebomb’; and that ideally ‘the arabs
will leave’ – exactly how he doesn’t say except that ‘this will become a
strategic problem for the security forces’. Morris professes that as an
historian his only concern is truth. Indeed, finding evidence of yet more
‘massacres’ of arabs in1948 ‘makes me happy’. What would one say of a german
historian who expresses glee that he uncovered evidence of yet moregaschambers?
The palestinians, according toMorris, are ‘a sick,
psychotic people’. They refuse to acknowledge that ‘jews have a claim
toPalestain’ and that ‘Zionism was/is a Just enterprise.’ Yet, Morris further
states that this ‘Just claim’ couldn’t be rendered and this ‘Just enterprise’
realised without expelling the palestinian arabs: ‘a removing of a population
was needed. Without a populationexpulsion, a jewishState would not have been
established.’ Such an ‘inevitable’ expulsion wasn’t, however, ‘Morallydefective
[skip] I Morallyaccept the erection of the jewishState.’ This must mean that
palestinians are a ‘sick, psychotic people’ because they refuse to acknowledge
that their expulsion wasn’t ‘Morallydefective’: that it was MorallyJust. In one
remarkablydisingenuous interview Morris denied statements of his already in
print and went on to wax eloquent on the Immorality of expulsion: ‘I regard the
notion of expelling a whole population as Immoral and Unjust and [it] will
cause a grievous amount of suffering.’ But if expulsion is ‘Immoral and
Unjust’; and expulsion of the palestinians was ‘inevitable’ in creating a
jewishState; how can Zionism be Moral and Just?
PrimeMinisterSharon ‘merelyresponds, usually with
great restraint’, Morris stated, and inOperationDefensiveShield ‘no Army has
ever been morediscriminating and gone to such lengths to avoid inflicting
civilian casualties’ and accordingly the final tally was merely
‘twoorthreehundreds deaths, mostly of palestinian gunmen, and the destruction
of several dozen homes’. It seems otherwise only because ‘western journalists’
give credence to the ‘neverending torrent of palestinian mendacity’ and in
particular toArafat and thePalestinianAuthority – a ‘kingdom of mendacity’
unlike ‘straight, or far less mendacious, israeli officials’. Putting to one
side Sharon’s own record on truthtelling, it bears notice that themostdamning
reportage on israeliHumanRightsviolations typicallycomes not from western but
israeli journalists; that all the major HumanRightsreports onOperationDefensiveShield
flatlycontradict Morris’saccount of what happened; that AmnestyInternational
found that virtuallyevery official israeli claim regarding its conduct
duringOperationDefensiveShield proved to be a flagrant lie; and that if Sharon
shows ‘great restraint’ it’s cause for wonder that – according to israeli polls
– ‘everyone loves Arik’ because he ‘beats’ palestinians ‘to a pulp’. On the
other hand, Morris’sinference that ‘someone likeBarak, coming from the left
with the credit as someone coming from the peacecamp, would have had a much
easier time using theIDF much more liberally’ is probablytrue – but this says
muchmore about the brutality ofBarak (and hypocrisy of the ‘peacecamp’) than it
does about the restraint ofSharon. With smug satisfaction Morris goes on to
observe that once Sharon deployed the requisite force, ‘palestinians learned
some lessons’ and ‘major acts ofTerrorism’ ceased: ‘So, force does appear to
work, at least in the short term.’ Indeed, the very[eyetalicised]short term –
the day after his interview a suicidebomber blew up a bus. (61)
Apart from mainstream israeli support for expulsion,
there’s yet another cause for alarm. Throughout its History theZionistMovement
has wagered against daunting odds. Victory alwaysseemed beyond reach. ‘TheStateOfIsrael
owes its existence’, YaelZerubavel writes, ‘to the very ethos that raises
ideological commitment beyond realistic calculations.’ Indeed, at each crucial
juncture a ‘miracle’ – this word constantlyrecurs in zionist historiography –
saved it: the ‘miracle’ of theBalfourDeclaration (BenGurion); the ‘miracle’ of
thePartitionResolution (ChaimWeizmann); the ‘miraculous simplification of
Israel’s tasks’ in the1948War (Weizmann, referring to the arab flight); the
‘miracle’ of theJune1967War; the ‘miracle’ of massive immigration ofSovietjewry
toIsrael. A close reading of the documentary record shows, however, that these
weren’t really miracles. Rather, in each instance the zionists
maximallyexploited a slender historical opportunity – ‘revolutionary times’ –
by a comprehensive marshalling of their material and human assets.
[SeptemberElevenAttack] may yet prove to be another such occasion. The world
has granted – or, has been coerced into granting – theUS a kind of grace period
to openlycarry on like a lawlessState. This means forIsrael a window of
opportunity to resolve thePalestainquestion, once and for all: it’s a ‘miracle’
waiting to happen. Short of a full withdrawal from theOccupiedTerritories,
Israel’s only alternatives are to continue tolerating the terrorist attacks or
to expel the palestinians. One is hardpressed to imagine, however, that Israel
will absorb these attacks indefinitely. Their relentlessness might also temper
the ensuing international condemnation of an expulsion. (62)
Should Israel attempt expulsion, it can probablycount
on support from powerful sectors in american life. HouseMajorityWhip TomDeLay
and HouseMajorityLeader DickArmey sponsored a resolution supporting Israel'’
claim to the whole of ‘Judea and Samaria’, while Armey explicitlyupheld that
‘the palestinians who are now living on theWestBank should get out of there’.
Senator James-M-Inhofe ofOK intoned that ‘themostimportant reason’ theUS ought
to support Israel was that ‘god said so. [skip] Look it up in the book ofGenesis.
[skip] InGenesis 13:14-17. [skip] This is not a politicalbattle at all. It is a
contest over whether or not the word of god is true.’ When
SenatorHilaryClinton, a liberal democrat fromNY, visitedIsrael earlier this
year, she was hosted and embraced byBennyElon, leader ofMoledet, a party
officiallycommitted to ‘transferring’ the palestinians. Turning to organised
american jewry, the picture becomes yet bleaker. A respected
Washing[DC]attorney and jewish communal leader, NathanLewin, called for the
execution of familymembers of palestinian suicidebombers. Reproaching critics
ofLewin, prominent HarvardU LawSchool professor AlanDershowitz and national
director ofAntiDefamationLeague AbrahamFoxman deemed Lewin’s proposal a
‘legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stoppingTerrorism’. In what might be
termed the ‘Lidice gambit’, Dershowitz himself recommended a ‘new response to
palestinianTerrorism’: the ‘automatic destruction’ of a palestinian village
after each terrorist attack (as well as the legalisation of the torture of
terrorist suspects). Dershowitz’s proposal, however, lacks novelty. Israel
pursued this strategy of murderous reprisals against arab civilians in the
early1950s. A massacre perpetrated in1953 byArielSharon at the village ofQibya,
which left some seventyvillagers dead (the majority women and children), was
compared by american newspapers toLidice. Lewin and Dershowitz have teamed up
to promote a new Washington[DC]based NationalInjusticeForJudaicLaw that will
illuminate jewish roots of ‘our legalsystem inAmerica’. To judge by their
interpretation of jewishLaw, it’s a wonder they didn’t recommend that
TimothyMcVeigh’s family be executed and his hometown obliterated. Inspired
byDershowitz, a group of former israeli military officers and settlers supported
by a proIsrael-charity inNY posted on its website this ingenious proposal to
facilitate ‘transfer’: ‘Israel issues a warning that, in a response to any
terrorist attack, she will immediately completely level an arab village,
randomlychosen by a computer from a published list. [skip] The use of a
computer to select the place of the israeli response will put the arabs and the
jews on a levelfooting. The jews do not know where the terrorists will strike,
and the arabs will not know which one of their villages or settlements will be
erased in retaliation. The word “erased” veryprecisely reflects the force of
Israel’s response’. (63)
Meanwhile, JoanPeter’s colossal hoax,
FromTimeImmemorial, which purports that Palestain was practicallyempty before
zionist colonisation, (64) was reissued in february2001 and, touted by american
jewish organisations and periodicals, immediatelysoared to the top of
theAmazonsalesrankings. After having disappeared into the night following the
exposure of her fraud, Peter is now ‘back in high demand for speaking
engagements’ and is getting (according to her) ‘an amazinglywonderful,
overwhelminglypositive response from audiences’. Alongside her forte, ‘What
Palestinian Land?’, Peters’s range of scholarly expertise has broadened to
include ‘WorldWide Islamid Jihad’, ‘Terrorism’, and ‘Religious Persecution by
Muslims’. Christian fundamentalists rallying behind the demand for expulsion
point to thePetersthesis for support, ChristianCoalitionfounder PatRobertson
maintaining, for example, that ‘the palestinians are really arabs who moved
there a few decades ago. Their claim to that land really does not go back
veryfar such as it is.’ A documentaryfilm based onFromTimeImmemorial is
currently in the planning stages. With priceless irony, it’s entitled ‘The
Myth’. (65) The zionist investment in Peters’s preposterous claim constitutes,
incidentally, a backhanded admission that, had Palestain been inhabited (which
it plainly was), the zionist enterprise was Morallyindefensible.
Maintaining that Sharon ‘has always harboured a
veryclear plan – nothing less than to ridIsrael of the palestinians’, respected
israeli military historian MartinVanCreveld has posited two alternative
pretexts for expulsion. (I) The diversion of a global crisis such as an
‘american attack onIraq’. In this regard it bears recalling that in1989
BenjaminNetanyahu urged the israeliGovernment to exploit politicallyfavourable
circumstances like theTianamenMassacre to carry out ‘largescale’ expulsions
when the ‘damage toIsrael would have been relativelysmall’. (2) A spectacular
terrorist attack that ‘killed hundreds’. Apart from the regrettablyreal
prospect that palestinians (or others claiming to act in their support) might
commite such an atrocity, judging from the historical record it’s plainly not
beyond possibility that Sharon would provoke it. Although ‘some believe that
the international community will not permit such an ethnic cleansing’,
vanCreveld plausiblyconcludes, ‘I would not count on it. If Sharon decides to
go ahead, theonlycountry that can stop him is theUnitedStates. TheUS, however,
regards itself as being at war with parts of theMuslimworld that have
supportedOsamaBinLaden. America will not necessarily object to that world being
taught a lesson.’ the main USfear is that expulsion would trigger a reaction in
the ‘Arab street’ toppling its clientregimes. But twice before, on the eve of
the assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan, elite american opinion harboured a
similar fear. In both cases it proved unfounded. TheBushadministration might
try its luck again in the expectation that the ‘Arabstreet’ is a chimera.
MeronBenvenisti conjured, in the pages ofHaaretz, the nightmarescenario: ‘An
american assault onIraq against arab and world opposition, and an israeli
involvement, even if only symbolic, leads to the collapse of theHashemiteregime
inJordan. Israel then executes the old “Jordanian option” – expelling hundreds
of thousands of palestinians across theJordanRiver.’ Pointing up the likelihood
in Israel’s current state of ‘Moraldissolution’ of a wartimeexpulsion (‘there
has never been a better opportunity’), he concludes that ‘Nobody should be
allowed to say they weren’t warned.’ ‘If theUS attacks Iraq and during that
attack there is a megaterrorist incident inIsrael’, formerShinBethchief
AmiAyalon similarlywarns, ‘then ArielSharon could exploit the outbreak of rage
in the israeli public to conduct a mass transfer of palestinians.’ It’s also
possible that Israel will execute a largescale internal transfer
fromWestBankvillages to townships, or deport several thousands key local
functionaries, leaving the palestinian population even more leaderless than it
already is. Jane’sInformationGroup, taking note of the ‘growing concern’ that
Sharon will exploit a USattack onIraq to ‘driv[e] out large numbers of
palestinians from theWestBank into neighbouringJordan’, reports that already
since the outbreak of the new intifada ‘as many as 200.000 palestinians,
fleeing from the violence or the economic misery’ have enteredJordan. (66)
The question remains – what would it take to effect a
full israeli withdrawal and avert this catastrophe? ‘The basic tendency of
israeli policy and people’, observes the perceptive israeli writer BoasEvron,
‘is to solve problems by means of force and to see force as the be-all and
end-all, rather than trying diplomatic- and political-solutions’, and to view
borders with neighbouring arabsStates as ‘nothing but a function of
powerrelations’. Likewise, Ze’evSternhell argues that a zionist tenet is ‘never
giving up a position or a territory unless one is compelled by superior force’.
In this regard it also bears keeping in mind what vanCreveld calls ‘the unique
position’ occupied by the military and martial values in israeli society: ‘It
is comparable, if at all, only to the status the armed forces held inGermany
from1871 until1945.’ (The ‘greatest compliment that anyone could receive was
that he was a “fighter” and ‘the highest praise one could bestow on anything
was to say that it was “like a military operation.” ’ (67) ) The reasonable
inference is that Israel will withdraw from theOccupiedTerritories only if
palestinians (and their supporters) can summon sufficient force to change the
calculus of costs forIsrael: that is, making the price of occupation too high.
The historical record sustains this hypothesis. Israel has withdrawn from
occupied territory on threeoccasions: the egyptianSinai in1957 after
Eisenhower’sultimatum, Sinai in1979 afterEgypt’s unexpectedly impressive
showing in theOctober1973War, and Lebanon in1985 and 2000 after the losses
inflicted by the lebanese resistance. In addition, it seems that israeli ruling
elites seriouslycontemplated withdrawal during the initial years of
thefirstintifada (1987-9) due to the international and domestic costs inflicted
onIsrael by the palestinian revolt.
Neither a conventional nor a guerillawar seems a
viable palestinian option. Terrorism – apart from being Morallyreprehensible
(if unsurprising) – will probably not budgeIsrael and if at all, will move it
rightwards. Israeli elites accept civilian casualties as a necessary, if
regrettable, price of power. They pay heed only when the israeli military
suffers losses or its deterrent capacity is undermined. Consider in this regard
Sternhell’s assessment of the impact onIsrael of the new intifada:
The number of israeli civilian casualties in the past
year is far greater than the number of soldiers who have been killed or
wounded. When all is said and done, theArmy is waging a deluxe war: it is
bombing and shelling defenseless cities and villages, and that situation is
convenient for both theArmy and the settlers. They are well aware that if
theArmy were to sustain casualties on thesamescale as occured inLebanon, we
would now be on our way out of the territories. We perceive the death of
civilians in shooting attacks or at the hands of crazed suicidebombers in the
heart of our cities, including the extinction of whole families, as a decree of
fate or as a kind of act ofNature. However, the death of soldiers immediatelyposes
the critical questions: What are the goals of war? For what end are the
soldiers being killed? Who sent them to their death? As long as the conscript
tropps do not paytooheavily, as long as the reservists are notcalled up in
massive numbers to protect and defend the occupation, the question of ‘why’
does not dictate the national agenda. (68)
Ample historical evidence – from indiscriminate
bombing byGermany and theAllies duringWorldWarTwo to indiscriminate USbombing
ofVietnam – likewise attests that Israel’s civilianpopulation is unlikely to
succumb toTerrorism. JewishTerrorism no doubt catalysed theBritishdecision to
terminate theMandate in1947, but the fundamental reason was Britain’s financial
insolvency after the war. In the israeli case, the evidence suggests that ‘when
an external threat intensifies while, at the same time, a feeling of common
fate emerges and the level of internal criticism declines’: rather than
plummeting in the face of terrorist attacks ‘national morale’ surges as the society
closes ranks. (69)
In many respects, the current palestinian resort
toTerrorism bears uncanny resemblance to the zionist terrorcampaign
afterWorldWarTwo against the british occupation. Although officially denouncing
antibritishTerrorism, BenGurion and the zionist authority he headed,
theJewishAgency, didn’t cooperate with the british in apprehending terrorist
suspects or even in calling upon the jewish community to respect theLaw. On the
one hand, BenGurion maintained that on principle he couldn’t assist enforcing
an Unjust occupation. ‘Without in the least condoning the acts committed’, he
wrote to british officials, ‘theExecutive considers the policy at present by
theMandatoryGovernment [skip] to be primarily responsible for the tragic
situation which has developed inPalestain. TheExecutive cannot agree that it
can in fairness be called upon to appear in the invidious position of assisting
in the enforcement of that policy.’ On the other hand BenGurion pleaded that he
had lost control over the jewish community, which no longer accepted
occupation. A contemporary british assessment concluded that zionist officials
had fomented jewishTerrorism but also that they could no longer put a stop to
it: ‘By their incitement of theYishuv
through constant antibritish- and antiGovernment-propaganda, they have so
inflamed jewish young men and women that terrorist organisations have received
a fillip both in recruits and sympathy. Now theJewishAgency find themselves no
longer able to draw back without losing their authority over the jewish
community, and are being forced to greater lengths ofExtremism. The extent to
which they cooperate with the terrorist organisation is in some doubt. [skip]
There is, however, some evidence that they have preKnowledge of most incidents which
have taken place.’ Later revelations confirmed this cooperation. For example,
theJewishAgency publiclydeplored the major terrorist attack on
theKingDavidHotel killing some ninetypersons, although it had approved in
advance targeting the hotel. The official zionist condemnation, one historian
have written, ‘contained more than a smattering of hypocrisy and Opportunism’.
(70)
‘What was intolerable – and what was in fact being
done – was to attempt to have it both ways’, a sympathetic BritishLabourMP on the
scene observed, ‘to claim constitutional rights for theJewishAgency as a loyal
collaborator with the mandatory, and simultaneously to organise sabotage and
resistance.’ While BenGurion sought ‘to remain within the letter of theLaw as
chairman of the agency’ by officiallycondemningTerrorism, he also ‘tolerate[d]
terror as a method of bringing pressure on the administration’. Zionist leaders
acquiesced in the deadly attacks for another reason as well, according to
theBritishMP. JewishTerrorism was ‘winning popular support’ as ‘perfectlydecent
jews inPalestain cannot help somehow admiring the terrorists and even assisting
them when they seek refuge in their houses.’ BenGurion and theJewishAgency had
to ‘condoneTerrorism’ in order to ‘prevent a swing of publicopinion’ to extreme
zionist parties and against themselves. Theonlymeans to fight jewishTerrorism, theBritishMP
concluded, was ‘to remove the legitimate grievances of every jew inPalestain’,
and to stateobjectively [skip] the historical causes for the growth of this
beastly phenomenon in a decent people.’ Were the british to do this they could
‘rely on the support of moderate elements in suppressingTerrorism, and I
believe that the majority of the population would turn against the extremists’.
If, however, the british ignored the reasons behind jewish support forTerrorism
and simplydemanded ‘the replacement of theJewishAgency by another organisation
and the disarming’ of the jewish resistance, theMP warned, it ‘would
merelyprovoke the jews into a fanatical support of the extremists’. (71)
When the british imposed martialLaw in retaliation
for multiple zionist terrorist attacks (‘The bestialities practiced by the
nazis could go no further’, the said Times ofLondon would later editorialise),
BenGurion passionatelycondemned the draconian measures for both inflicting
collective punishment on the jewish people and effectivelyhindering the
struggle againstTerrorism. If only for its current resonance, this denunciation
deserves extended quotation:
Twohundredsandfifty thousands jews ofTelAviv and
suburbs, core of country’s social and industrial life, and thirtythousands of
jews inJerusalem, mostly workingclass quarters, isolated from all normal
contact with outside world, facing complete breakdown of mechanism civilised
life apart from foodsupplies and skeleton medical service. Industry crippled,
trade paralysed, unemployment threatening to become catastrophic. Industrial
raw materials cannot enter, goods manufactured with available stock cannot be
marketed outside. Workers cut off from places of work, children from schools.
These restrictions have not affected terrorists nor stopped their outrages but
instead have increased resentment of hardhit population, created fertile soil
for terrorist propaganda, frustrating community’s attempt to combatTerrorism by
itself. MartialLaw absolutelyfutile and senseless unless really meant to punish
whole community, ruin its Economy and destroy the foundations of
theJewishNationalHome. (72)
It also merits recalling, however, that although
jewish terrorist attacks (nearly twenty per month) left hundreds of british
dead and wounded, the british ‘never deliberatelyfired into crowds’, and a
‘jewish largescale massacre never took place and entire jewish settlements were
not demolished with explosives’. The reason behind this relative british
restraint, according to vanCreveld, was ‘british recognition that jews
constituted a “semieuropean” race.’ By contrast, palestinians suffer at the
hands ofIsrael the lethal fate of noneuropeans. (73)
A nonviolent palestinian civil revolt creativelybuilding
on the lessons of thefirstintifada and synchronised with international – in
particular, american – pressure probablyholds out themostpromise in the current
crisis. It could bog down and neutralise Israel’s Army. Among Israel’s chief
worries during thefirstintifada was theIDF’s loss of morale and élan as it
sought to violentlyquell a civilian population, and theArmy’s disminishing
capacity to fight a ‘real war’ as it
trained for and engaged in ‘policetype operations’ (emphasis in original). (74)
A reservoir of palestinian support for such a strategy of civil disobedience
perhaps alreadyexists. (75) Should a palestinian leadership successfullyharness
this constituency, there are reasonable grounds for hoping that its message
will resonate among many israelis. The refusenik movement among israeli
conscripts has prompted a national debate and, although registering massive
support for Sharon’s brutal repression, israelis have supported in roughlyequal
numbers withdrawal from theWestBank and Gaza. (76)
TheUS will impose on israelis a full withdrawal only
when its vital interests are at stake or public pressure compels it to do so.
Such pressures may yet be exerted. Support forIsrael among ordinary as well as
‘influential’ americans has markedlydeclined. (77) Modeled on the antiapartheid
divestmentcampaign in the1980s, a movement on american collegecampuses calling
for divestment fromIsrael is gathering momentum. In an unusual intervention
HarvardUniversitypresident LawrenceSummers labeled this new divestmentcampaign
antisemitic ‘in effect’. Yet, if the divestmentcampaign targeting southAfrica wasn’t
antiwhite ‘in effect’, why is a divestmentcampaign targeting an occupation that
‘is theonly one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of [skip] the
aparthied regime in southAfrica’ (B’Tselem), and that ‘is guilty of apartheid
policies’ (AmiAyalon, former israeli head of theShinBet) antisemitic ‘in
effect’? Curiously, Summers has not been similarlymoved to criticise a member
of his own faculty urging the ‘automatic destruction’ of palestinian villages. Lending
his Moralstature to the new divestmentcampaign, ArchbishopTutu exhorted
‘average citizens to again rise to the occasion, since the obstacles to a
renewed movement are surpassed only by its Moralurgency.’ (78) In fact,
europeans are contemplating a spectrum of actions from consumerboycotts to
armsembargoes, while scores of courageous international volunteers (including
many jews) have journeyed to theOccupiedTerritories to shield palestinian
civilians from attack and publicise israeli atrocities. Israel’sapologists
likeWiesel deplore these initiatives as evidence of a resurgent antiSemitism.
Disparaging similar allegations after Israel’s 1982invasion ofLebanon, the
respected israeli academian UrielTal responded: ‘The bitter cries about
antiSemitism whcih allegedly raises again its head all over the world is
Israel’sposition, not jewry’s. The charge of antiSemitism only aim to inflame
the israeli public, to inculcate hatred and Fanaticism, to cultivate paranoid
obsession as if the whole world is persecuting us and that all other peoples in
the world are contaminated while onlywe are pure and untarnished.’ To be sure,
world-jewry’s position will disintegrate if it doesn’t publiclydissociate from
Israel’scrimes. In a passionate denunciation of current israeli policy for
‘staining theStarOfDavid with blood’, a prominent jewish parliamentarian and
former british shadow ForeignSecretary lamented that ‘the jewish people [skip]
are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully ArielSharon, a
warcriminal implicated in the murder of palestinians in theSabraShatilacamp and
now involved in killing palestinians once again’. (79)
‘Every morning now, I awake beside theMediterranean
inBeirut with a feeling of great foreboding’, the insight
MiddleEastcorrespondent RobertRisk reflected this past year. ‘There is a
firestorm coming. And we are blissfullyignoring its arrival; indeed, we are
provoking it.’ (80) Apart from being a Moralabomination, expulsion of the
palestinians can set off a chainreaction in the arab world that will make
[SeptemberElevenAttack] look like a pinktea. But it’s yet within our grasp to
seize these fraught times and achieve a Just and lasting peace for-Israel and
–Palestain.
This edition of ImageAndReality includes a new
chapter on the ‘peaceprocess’ and an appendix criticallyanalysing a recent
study of theJune1967War. In addition to shoe acknowleged in thefirstedition of
this study, I would like to thank MichaelAlvarez, MouinRabbani,
JenniferLoewenstein and ShifraStern for their assistance.
NormanGFinkelstein
december2002
1.
See pp.7-12 in this volume. The envisioned
Jewish State would tolerate an Arab minority of no more than 15 per cent (Simha
Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York: 1987), p. 104).
2.
For the crucial politicalrepercussions on
theZionistMovement of its reliance onGreatBritain, cf. this volume, pp. 16-20.
3.
See Chap.2 in this volume.
4.
Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel
(Princeton: 1998), pp. 43-4. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: 1999),
p. 91 (Shertok). Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: 1979), p.
143 (Ben-Gurion). For further discussion and documentation, cf. this volume,
pp. 98-110.
5.
Walter LaQueur, A History of Zionism (New York:
1976), p.597 (for discussion, cf. this volume, p.233, note 13). Outright
annexation of conquered territory had also ceased to be a political option –
which crucially accounts for Great Britain’s decision to issue the Balfour
Declaration (cf. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine (New Brunswick, NJ:
1992), esp. pp. 175, 188-9, 288).
6.
Benny Morris, ‘Revisiting the Palestinian exodus
of 1948’, in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestain
(Cambridge: 2001), pp. 39-40.
7.
Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the
Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (Frank Cass: 1974), p.147
(Congress). Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: 2001), pp. 404-5; cf.
pp. 403, 406-7, 508. Morris, ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus’, p. 42
(Ben-Gurion); for timing, cf. also Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the
Palestinian Arabs (Oxford: 1985), p. 35. For further discussion and
documentation of Zionist expulsion plans, cf. this volume, pp. 16, 103-4, and
esp. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 139-44, 168-9.
8.
Morris, Righteous Victims, p.37. Porath,
Emergence, pp. 59, 62.
9.
Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism
(Berkeley: 1976), p. 40. Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian National Movement:
From Riots to Rebellion (London: 1970), pp. 91-2, 165-6, 297.
10.
See Chap. 4 in this volume.
11.
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948
(Oxford: 1987), p. 176; for detailed analysis of Gorny’s study, cf. this
volume, Chap. I. Teventh, Ben-Gurion, p. 155.
12.
Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli
Militarism (Bloomington: 1998), p. 89 (‘fusion’) (cf. p. 62). Martin Gilbert,
Israel: A History (New York: 1998), p. 312 (Dayan). For discussion, cf. this
volume, p. 106.
13.
David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders
(New York: 1973), p. 3. (For Ben-Gurion’s private recognition of the real
motives behind Arab attacks, cf. this volume, pp. 108, 110.) Norman G.
Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (New York: 2000), pp. 49-53, 62-3.
14.
Segev, One Palestine, p. 182.
15.
Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews,
vol. I (New York: 1997), p. 219. On related settlement schemes, cf. Michael J.
Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (London: 1985), pp. 236, 249-51, and Philippe
Burrin, Hitler and the Jews (New York: 1989), pp. 59-61.
16.
For population transfers from interwar through
postwar period, cf. Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers,
1939-1945 (New York: 1946), and Postwar Population Transfers in Europe,
1945-1955 (Philadelphia: 1962), Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (London:
1977), Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: 1996), Norman M.
Naimark, Fires of Hatred (Cambridge: 2001). Segev, One Palestine, pp. 406-7
(Jabotinsky) (cf. also Gorny, Zionism, pp. 270-1). See this volume, p. 103 for
‘positive experience’. Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington:
1992), pp. 157-61 (Labour Party). Bertrand Russell, ‘The Role of the Jewish
State in Helping to Create a Better World’ (1943), reprinted in Zionism (1981).
Calling just before his death in 1970 for ‘an Israeli withdrawal from all the
territories occupied in June 1967’, Russell, in a change of heart, particularly
deplored the fate of the Palestinians: ‘No people anywhere in the world would
accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the
people of Palestine to accept a punishment nobody else would tolerate?’
(Spokesman, no. 2 (Nottingham: April 1970), excerpted in Ronald Clark, The Life
of Bertrand Russell (New York: 1975), p. 638).
17.
Sasson Sofer, Zionism and the Foundations of
Israeli Diplomacy (Cambridge: 1998), p. 367 (‘social order’). Richard Crossman,
Palestine Mission (London: 1947), pp. 33, 152, 167. Kenneth Ray Bain, The March
to Zion (London: 1979), p. 35 (Wallace) (cf. pp. 34-6 for Americans’s
identification of Zionist settlement with American West). For a detailed
comparison between Zionist and American conquests, cf. this volume, pp. 89-98,
and esp. Norman Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (Minn.: 1996), pp.
104-21 (hereafter R&F).
18.
See Chap. 3 in this volume; for further evidence
supporting the argument in this chapter, cf. Laila Parsons, ‘The Druze and the
birth of Israel’, in Rogan and Shlaim, War, chap. 3, and Ben-Eliezer, Making,
pp. 170-81. For comparisons recently evoked by mainstream Israelis with the
Serb expulsion, cf. Finkelstein, Holocaust, pp. 70-1.
19.
Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 173 (Katznelson;
for Katznelson’s effective support of forced transfer, cf. p. 176). Theodore
Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: 1889), vol. 4., p. 54.
20.
Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the
Middle East, 1945-1951 (Oxford: 1984), pp. 117, 448, 614. Michael J. Cohen,
Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945-1948 (Princeton: 1982), pp. 197-8, 201.
21.
See pp. 10-11, 15, 102-3 in this volume. Teveth,
Ben-Gurion, p. 101 (cf. pp. 129, 187-90). For copious evidence that, even in
the absence of Arab aggression, the Zionist leadership never intended to
respect the 1947 Partition Resolution borders, cf. Ben-Eliezer, Making, pp.
144, 150-1.
22.
For the June War, cf. this volume, Chap. 5.
23.
For Zionist territorial imperatives after 1948, cf.
this volume, p. 143. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (New York: 1998), p.
393. Michael Oren, Six Days of War (Oxford: 2002), p. 312. Sternhell, Founding,
p. 330. For a critical view of Oren’s study, cf. Appendix to this volume, ‘Abba
Eban With Footnotes’, pp. 184-98.
24.
An influential Zionist official during the 1948
expulsion, Yosef Weitz, typically warned after the conquests of the June war of
the need to preserve Israel’s Jewish character by keeping the ‘non-Jewish
minority limited to 15%’ (Nur Masalha, A Land Without A People (London: 1997),
p. 79).
25.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity in
International Criminal Law (Boston: 1999), pp. 312 (‘unequivocaly’), 332 (cf.
pp. 312-27 for the historical development of international law regarding
deportation).
26.
See pp. 144-7 in this volume.
27.
See p. 257, note 63 in this volume.
28.
See Chap. 6 in this volume.
29.
Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts (Washington:
1987), pp. 14ff. (Allon Plan). Sofer, Zionism, p. 385. Finkelstein, Holocaust,
pp. 47-8.
30.
See pp. 147-8 in this volume.
31.
For the Jarring mission, cf. this volume, pp.
151ff.
32.
Foreign Relations of the United States,
1964-1968, Volume XX (Washington, DC: 2001), pp. 619, 634-5 (‘meant’/ ‘never
meant’), 639, 639 (‘large chunks’/ ‘non-starter’), 641, 654 (‘unacceptable’),
655, 699.
33.
Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (Boston:
1983), pp. 65-6. For the strategic motives behind this US policy shift and its
repercussions for American Jewry, cf. Finkelstein, Holocaust, chap. I.
34.
For a comprehensive record through 1990 of lone
US vetoes in the Security Council and lone US-Israel negative roots in the
General Assembly on the Middle East conflict, cf. Finkelstein, R&F, pp.
53-7. For the 2002 General Assembly resolution ‘Peaceful settlement...’
(A/57/L. 37), cf. www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2002/ga10111.doc.htm; for Syrian
and Israeli ambassadors, cf. www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2002/gaspd255.doc.htm.
Marc Weller and Dr. Barbara Metzger, ‘Double Standards’ (Negotiations Affairs
Department, Plaestin Liberation Organisation: 24 September 2002). Uri Savir,
The Process (New York: 1998), p. 6 (‘must stop’).
35.
Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security (New York:
1998), p. 20 (‘compromising’), p. 70 (‘peace offensive’). For further
discussion and documentation, cf. R&F, pp. 44-5.
36.
For extensive documentation of Israel’s
repression, cf. R&F, chap. 3.
37.
Savir, Process, pp. 5, 25. For the precedent of
British rule in Palestine, cf. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians:
The Making of a People (Cambridge: 1994), pp. 86, 90-1, and Porath, Emergence,
p. 202. The British first implemented indirect rule in its Empire after
brutally crushing the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Victor Kiernan’s commentary on this
British strategy could easily serve as an epigraph for the Oslo process:
‘Rulers of the kind lately vilified as Oriental tyrants were not eulogised as
natural leaders of their people. Leaving a third of the country under princely
rule could be speciously represented as a concession to Indian feeling; and if,
as was increasingly the case, conditions were worse there than in British
India, nationalists could be invited to contemplate the consequences of
self-Government’ (The Lords of Human Kind (Boston: 1969), p. 52).
38.
Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies (New York:
1995), pp. 218, 232. Savir, Process, p. 147. For detailed analysis of the Oslo
Accord, cf. Chap. 7 in this volume, pp. 172-183. For a comprehensive overview
of post-Oslo developments, cf. Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace (London:
1998).
39.
May 2002.
40.
Daniel Williams, ‘Settlements expanding under
Sharon’, in Washington Post (31 May 2002). ‘UN expert says settlements, house
demolitions are war crimes’, in Haaretz (15 June 2002). Jackson Diehl, ‘Making
a Palestinian state impossible’, in Washington Post (23 July 2002).
41.
Amira Hass, ‘Donors are funding cantonisation’
in Haaretz (22 May 2002). Brian Whitaker, ‘UN to feed 500.000 needy
Palestinians’, in Guardian (22 May 2002). Report on UNCTAD’s Assistance to the
Palestinian People (UNCTAD secretariat: 26 July 2002) (unemployment, poverty
line). Justin Huggler, ‘Palestinians face disaster, warns US government group’,
in Independent (6 August 2002) (malnutrition). Judy Dempsey, ‘Israel blocking
aid, says Brussels’, in Financial Times (30 October 2002). ‘Palestinian
children “malnourished”’, in BBC (18 November 2002), at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2489985.stm. Thomas O’Dwyer, ‘Nothing
Personal: Parts and Partheid’, in Haaretz (24 May 2002) (‘appalling’). The UNCTAD
report gives the Palestinian Authority generally high marks for its handling of
theEconomy, and stresses that the dysfunctions ‘arise from the legacy of 35
years of occupation and distorted economic relations with Israel and isolation
from regional and global markets, much more than from the experience of its
limited, and by design, provisional, interim period of self-government
arrangements’ (pp. 8, 9).
42.
See Norman G. Finkelstein, ‘Securing Occupation:
The Meaning of the Wye River Memorandum’, in New Left Review (November/December
1998), and esp. Mouin Rabbani, ‘A Smorgasbord of Failure’, in Roane Carey
(ed.), The New Intifada (Verso: 2001), chap. 3.
43.
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, ‘Camp David: The
Tragedy of Errors’, ‘Camp David and After: An Exchange – A Reply to Ehud
Barak’, ‘Camp David and After – Continued: Robert Malley and Hussein Agha
Reply’, in New York Review of Books (9 August 2001, 13 June 2002, 27 June
2002). (Malley quotes from second article) David Clark, ‘The brilliant offer
Israel never made’, in Guardian (10 April 2002) (British diplomat).
44.
For the text of the Saudi plan, cf. Guardian (28
March 2002); for its revision on the ‘right of return’, cf. Suzanne Goldenberg,
‘Arab leaders reach agreement by fudging refugee question’, in Guardian (29
March 2002). Aviv Lavie, ‘So what if the Arabs want to make peace?’, in Haaretz
(5 April 2002). Uzi Benziman, ‘Distorting the map’, in Haaretz (27 October
2002) (‘road map’). For insightful commentary, cf. Uri Avnery, ‘How to torpedo
the Saudis’ (4 March 2002) at www.counterpunch.org/avnerysaudis.html.
45.
Amira Hass, ‘The mirror does not lie’, in
Haaretz (1 November 2000). Jane’s Foreign Report (12 July 2001). Robert Risk,
‘One year on: a view from the Middle East’ in Independent (11 September 2002).
Fisk rightly points to the imperial order imposed on the Arab world by the
British and French after World War I as the relevant precedent.
46.
Shulamit Aloni, ‘You can continue with the
liquidations’, in Yediot Aharonot (18 January 2002); cf. Tanya Reinhart, ‘Evil
unleashed’ (19 December 2001) at www.zmag.org.
47.
For background to Lebanon war, cf. R&F, pp.
44-5 and sources cited. Official israeli figure at
www.ou.org/yerushalayim/yomhazikaron/default.htm.
48.
Israel claimed that Palestinian ambulances had
been misused to ferry around terrorists and suicide belts. In fact, there was
only one alleged case of such misuse and, according to Amnesty International,
‘several suspicious circumstances’ suggest that even it was staged by the IDF
(Amnesty International, ‘Shielded from scrutiny: IDF violations in Jenin and
Nablus’ (November 2002); cf. Larry Derfner, ‘Bad war, bad medicine’, in
Jerusalem Post (8 November 2002)).
49.
Amir Oren, ‘At the gates of Yassergrad’, in
Haaretz (25 January 2002), and Uzi Benzimin, ‘Immoral imperative’, in Haaretz
(1 February 2002) (Israeli officer). Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us
Meaning (New York: 2002), p. 94; cf. his article, ‘A Gaza Diary’, in Harper’s
(October 2001). Jessia Montell, ‘Operation Defense Shield: the propaganda and
the reality’, at www.btselem.org (90 per cent). Guardian (2 August 2002)
(wounded). Amnesty International, ‘Shielded from Scrutiny’ (November 2002)
(wounded). Amnesty International, ‘Shielded from Scrutiny’ (November 2002)
(Statistics). Report on UNCTAD’s Assistance (property damage). Hedge’s
experience merits extended quotation: ‘I had seen children shot in other
conflicts I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and
Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb
snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement
in Sarajevo – but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a
trap and murder them for sport.’
50.
Recalling reports while Jenin was under siege
that Israel had committed a ‘massacre’ Amnesty writes: ‘During the fighting
Palestinian residents and Palestinian and foreign journalists and others
outside the camp saw hundreds of missiles being fired into the houses of the
camp from Apache helicopters flying sortie after sortie. The sight of the
firepower being thrown at Jenin refugee camp led those who witnessed the air
raids, including military experts and the media, to believe that scores, at
least, of Palestinians had been killed. The tight cordon round the refugee camp
and the main hospital [skip] meant that the outside world had no means of
knowing what was going on inside the refugee camp. [skip] It was in these
circumstances that stories of a “massacre” spread. Even the IDF leadership
appeared unclear as to how many Palestinians had died; General Ron Kitrey said
that hundreds had died in Jenin before correcting himself a few hours later
saying that hundreds had died or been wounded’ (Amnesty International,
‘Shielded from Scrutiny’).
51.
Human Rights Watch, ‘Jenin: IDF Military
Operations’ (May 2002). Amnesty International, ‘Shielded from Scrutiny’. For
Nablus and elsewhere, cf. Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Across West Bank, daily
tragedies go unseen’, in Guardian (27 April 2002), and Edward Cody, ‘Unnoticed
Nablus may have taken West Bank’s worst hit’, in Washington Post (21 May 2002).
Reuven Pedatzur, ‘The wrong way to fight terrorism’, in Haaretz (11 December
2002) (‘deterrent’, ‘fighter’). For Nazi justification, cf. this volume, p.
107.
52.
‘Camp David and After: An Exchange – An
interview with Ehud Barak’, in New York Review of Books (13 June 2002) (Barak).
For Wiesel, cf. Megan Goldin, Reuters (11 April 2002), Greer Fay Cushman,
‘Wiesel: World doesn’t understand threat of suicide bombers,’ in Jerusalem Post
(12 April 2002), CNN (14 April 2002), Caroline B. Glick, ‘We must not let the
hater define us’, in Jerusalem Post (19 April 2002). Wiesel subsequently served
as a major cheerleader for a US attack on Iraq: ‘I am for intervention. [skip]
I think the choice is simple’ – especially if the bombs aren’t dropping on your
head (‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ (9 October 2002)); cf. Elie Wiesel, ‘War is not
the only option,’ in Observer (22 December 2002).
53.
Tsadok Yeheskeli, ‘I made them a stadium in the
middle of the camp’, in Yediot Aharonot (31 May 2002). Montell, ‘Operation
Defensive Shield’ (B’Tselem). Amira Haas, ‘Someone even managed to defecate
into the photocopier’, in Haaretz (6 May 2002). Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, pp.
298-9 (Beirut).
54.
Justin Huggler, ‘Ten killed in Israel air strike
on home of Hamas chief’, in Independent (23 July 2002). Uli Schmetzer, ‘Israeli
strike kills at least 12 in Gaza’, in Chicago Tribune (23 July 2002). Bradley Burston,
‘Background/Shehada ‘hit’ sends shockwaves back to Israel’, in Haaretz (24 July
2002) (Meretz leader). Akiva Eldar, ‘How to cease from a cease-fire’, in
Haaretz (25 July 2002). Gideon Samet, ‘It’s a horror story, period’, in Haaretz
(26 July 2002). Graham Usher, ‘Sharon accused of shattering ceafire’, in
Guardian (27 July 2002). Akiva Eldar, ‘If there’s smoke, there’s no
cease-fire’, in Haaretz (30 July 2002). ‘Letter for an American editor’, in
Haaretz (30 July 2002) (text of planned public statement). Cameron Barr,
‘Israel stokes a cooling conflict’, in Christian Science Monitor (8 October
2002). Amos Harel and Aluf Benn, ‘Full Gaza invasion is “just a matter of
time”, Israel says’, in Haaretz (8 October 2002). For crucial background and
subsequent developments in the July attack, cf. Mouin Rabbani’s typically
brilliant analysis, ‘The Costs of Chaos in Palestine’, at www.merip.org.
55.
Amira Haas, ‘Making life difficult for the
Palestinian peace camp’, in Haaretz (14 August 2002).
56.
Chap. 7 in this volume, pp.172-183.
57.
‘Israel must end the hatred now’, in Observer
(15 October 2000). Haroon Siddiqui, ‘Tutu likens Israeli across to apartheid’,
in Toronto Star (16 May 2002) (Brzezinski). Desmond Tutu, ‘Apartheid in the
Holy Land’, in Guardian (29 April 2002).
58.
Jonathan Steele, ‘The Bush doctrine makes
nonsense of the charter’, in Guardian (6 June 2002) (‘mortal blow’). George
Monibot, ‘The logic of empire’, in Guardian (5 August 2002); for the US
‘developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate
international treaties on biological and chemical warfare’, cf. also Julian
Borger, ‘US weapons secrets exposed’, in Guardian (29 October 2002). The US has
displayed equal ruthlessness on the economic front, New York Times economic
affairs columnist, Paul Krugman, observing, e.g., that the steel tariffs
imposed by the Bush administration ‘demonstrate an unprecedented contempt for
international rules’ (‘America the Scofflaw’ (24 May 2002)).
59.
‘Many Israelis content to see Palestinians go’,
in Chicago Sun-Times (14 March 2002). Ari Shavit, ‘Waiting for the sign’, in
Haaretz (22 March 2002). Tom Segev, ‘A black flag hangs over the idea of
transfer’, in Haaretz (5 April 2002). Gil Hoffman, ‘Fight on the right’, in
Jerusalem Post (10 May 2002). Lily Galili, ‘A Jewish demographic state’, in
Haaretz (28 June 2002). Boaz Evron, ‘Demography as the enemy of Democracy’, in
Haaretz (11 September 2002). Henry Siegman, ‘Sharon’s real purpose is to create
foreigners’, in International Herald Tribune (25 September 2002).
60.
For the ‘new historians’, cf. this volume, Chap.
3.
61.
‘Interview with Benny Morris’, by Baudouin Loos
at http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Loos/morris2001 (25 February 2001)
(‘mistake’, ‘complete’, ‘hundred’, ‘bomb’).
62.
Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots (Chicago: 1995),
p. 183; cf. p. 14. Teveth, Ben-Gurion, p. 36 (Balfour ‘miracle’).
63.
‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’, Transcript (1
May 2002) AT www.adc.org/action/2002/02May2002.htm (DeLay and Armey).
64.
See Chap. 2 in this volume.
65.
Quoted phrases and information about film
project come from ‘The Rehabilitation of Joan Peters: Discredited Author Finds
a New Audience’, in the Rittenhouse Review (19 June 2002) at
http://rittenhouse.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_ritenhouse_archive.html. For Peter’s
webpage, cf. www.israelunitycoalition.com/Speakers_Bureau/j_peters.htm. For
propagation of the Peters myth by Canadian Jewish organisations, cf. Myron
Love, ‘Arab journalist puts lie to Palestinian claims’, in Canadian Jewish News
(21 Feburary 2002). For the Christian Coalition and Pat Robertson, cf.
‘Christians Hail Rightists’s Call to Oust Arabs’, in Forward (18 October 2002).
66.
‘Sharon’s plan is to drive Palestinians across
the Jordan’, in Sunday Telegraph, 28 April 2002 (Creveld). Menachem Shalev,
‘Netanyahu recommends large-scale expulsions’, in Jerusalem Post (19 November
1989). Meron Benvenisti, ‘Preemptive warnings of fantastic scenarios’, in
Haaretz (15 August 2002). Rubinstein, ‘The tangible fear of transfer.’ ‘Sharon
embarks on ethnic cleansing’, in Jane’s Foreign Report (24 October 2002).
67.
Boas Evron, Jewish State Or Israeli Nation?
(Bloomington, IN: 1995), pp. 169, 237. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 331.
Martin van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive (New York: 1998), pp. 123-5, 154.
68.
Zeev Sternhell, ‘Balata has fallen’, in Haaretz
(8 March 2002).
69.
Cohen, Palestine, pp. 247, 249. Lewis, British
Empire, pp. 467, 476. Prof. Ephraim Yaar
and Dr. Tamar Hermann, ‘The Peace Index’, in Haaretz (8 October 2002). For
contrary indications, suggesting that Israelis would make significant
additional concessions if ‘the solution will end terror’, cf. Akiva Eldar,
‘Winner takes out the garbage’, in Haaretz (8 October 2002).
70.
Cohen, Palestine, pp. 69, 79, 90-1, 230, 238-9.
For further discussion, including American Jewish support for the Zionist
terror campaign, cf. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (London: 1977),
pp. 108-23.
71.
Crossman, Palestine, pp. 129, 169-70, 178-81.
72.
Cohen, Palestine, p. 239, 245 (Times editorial).
73.
van Creveld, Sword, pp. 57-61.
74.
van Creveld, Sword, pp. 361-2.
75.
Edward Said, ‘A New Current in Palestine’, in
Nation (4 February 2002).
76.
For more on the refusenik movement and dissident
Israelis, cf. Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin (eds), The Other Israel (New
York: 2002); for insightful commentary on the Israeli public’s roughly equal
support (60-70 percent) for ‘Sharon and an “iron-fist” policy’ as well as ‘for
immediate unilateral evacuation of most the territories and most of the
settlements’, cf. Tanya Reinhart, ‘The Israeli Elections’ (2 December 2002), at
www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-12/02reinhart.cfm ; cf. Yoel Marcus, ‘Good
morning to the victor’, in Haaretz (29 November 2002).
77.
Janine Zacharia, ‘Poll shows Americans’ support
for Israel in decline’, in Jerusalem Post (13 June 2002). Nathan Guttman,
‘Israel’s struggle for hearts and minds’, in Haaretz (2 December 2002).
78.
Alisa Solomon, ‘Stop American Billions for
Jewish Bombs’, in Village Voice (26 December 2001). Liza Featherstone, ‘The
Mideast War Breaks Out on Campus’, in Nation (17 June 2002). Karen W. Arenson,
‘Harvard President Sees Rise in Anti-Semitism on Campus’, in New York Times (21
September 2002). Tracy Wilkinson, ‘Israeli Hawk Considers Run at a Wounded
Dove’, in Los Angeles Times (Ayalon). Desmond Tutu, ‘Build moral pressure to
end the occupation’, in International Herald Tribune (14 June 2002), and
Desmond and Tutu and Ian Urbina, ‘Against Israeli Apartheid’, in Nation (15
July 2002).
79.
Evron, Jewish State, p. 96 (Tal). Nicholas Watt,
‘MP accuses Sharon of “barbarism”’, in Guardian (17 April 2002).
80.
Robert Fisk, ‘There is a firestorm coming, and
it is being provoked by Mr. Bush’, in Independent (25 May 2002).
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