The purpose of Israel’s current offensive in the Gaza
Strip is to protect the status quo – with itself in control of the illegally
occupied Palestinian territories. In 2005, it carried out a unilateral
disengagement from Gaza, but under international law it is still the occupying
power because it controls access by land, sea and air. In 2007 Israel imposed
an economic blockade, cutting the Gaza Strip off from the West Bank and from
the rest of the world. A blockade is a form of collective punishment proscribed
by international law.
The death toll is a grim reflection of the asymmetry
of the conflict. In the past fortnight, the Palestinians have suffered over 220
fatalities, 80% of whom were civilians; in Israel, only one man was killed by a
rocket fired from Gaza. Israel claims that its assault is an act of
self-defence to put an end to the Hamas rocket attacks against its civilians.
Hamas claims it is engaged in legitimate resistance to Israel’s military
occupation. The chain of action and reaction is endless. But the underlying
cause of the violence is Israeli colonialism.
Israel’s spectacular victory in the June 1967 war was
followed by an occupation of Arab lands that was supposed to be temporary but
which, with the exception of the Sinai Peninsula, is now well into its
fifth decade. For the Palestinians, Israel’s coercive rule has been a
catastrophe at every level and a tragic sequel to the bigger catastrophe, the
Nakba in Arabic, of 1948. But as the title of this new book suggests, the
victory has also been a curse for the victors: it has transformed a small,
united and predominantly socialist society into a colonial empire.
Gershom Gorenberg called his book on the birth of the
Israeli settlements in the occupied territories in the first decade after the
guns fell silent The Accidental Empire. Israel’s postwar policy was
indeed muddled, but the end result was one of the most prolonged military
occupations of modern times. Within its original borders, Israel had been
a democracy, however flawed. Greater Israel, on the other hand, is an ethnocracy,
a country in which one ethnic group rules over another. There is another word
to describe this situation, a word Israelis do not like to hear: apartheid.
Ahron
Bregman is an Israeli scholar with impeccable liberal credentials who
teaches in the department of war studies at King’s College London. He served in
the Israeli army for six years, but left Israel because of the occupation and
because of the military’s violent suppression of the first intifada. He is the
author of four books on Israel and its conflict with the Arabs. Two of these – The
Fifty Years War and Elusive Peace – accompanied BBC television
series that drew on in-depth and remarkably candid interviews with key
players from Israel, the Arab world and the US. Full use is made of that
earlier oral history in the present book; it is supplemented by additional
interviews.
Bregman has also enjoyed unparalleled access to
high-level sources that enabled him to quote directly from top‑secret memos,
letters, and intelligence reports that are unlikely ever to be made public.
These include information obtained by Israeli agents from tapping the
phones of President Bill Clinton, Syrian diplomats and Palestinian negotiators.
There is also a top‑secret memo from the Shabak, Israel’s
general security service, suggesting that a dead Yasser Arafat would
benefit Israel.
In Bregman’s reading, the zigzags in Israel’s
approach to the occupied territories resulted from two opposing impulses. On
the one hand, there was the de facto annexation of the conquered lands by
constructing large-scale Jewish settlements and an elaborate infrastructure to
serve them. On the other hand, there was the occasional desire to trade land
for peace, at least in relation to some of the territories. Israeli governments
sometimes pursued both objectives simultaneously. From today’s perspective,
however, it is obvious that the appetite for land is far more powerful than the
thirst for peace. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, personifies
the triumph of land-grabbing over peace-making.
Bregman’s account of the conflict born of the cursed
victory is intelligent, informative and rich in telling details. His primary
focus is on Israel; on the Palestinian side of this tragic story he is less
well-informed. But he does deploy first-hand testimonies to show what it is
like to be at the receiving end of the occupation with its trigger-happy
soldiers, torture of Arab prisoners, systematic abuse of human rights, curfews
and blockades. He also notes that a major feature of the occupation is the
recruitment of an army of informers and collaborators as well as the insidious
effect of this practice on Palestinian society.
He is at his best when dealing with the diplomacy
surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially in 1999-2000 when Ehud Barak
was prime minister. Barak was a former chief of staff, and his country’s most
highly decorated soldier, but he was no diplomat. In a curious inversion of
Clausewitz’s famous dictum, he regarded diplomacy as the pursuit of war by
other means. For Barak, Syria was a major military threat to Israel whereas the
Palestinians were not. By making peace with Syria, Barak hoped to change the
entire strategic landscape of the region and to leave the Palestinian Authority
so weak and isolated that it would have no alternative but to accept his paltry
terms.
A peace deal with Syria was indeed possible but it
carried a price tag: complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, which
left the Syrians with access to the north-eastern shore of Lake Tiberias. A
meeting between Barak and the Syrian foreign minister under American patronage
at Shepherdstown, in January 2000, collapsed when Barak refused to pay that
price. Despite this failure, Barak persuaded Clinton to do his bidding at a
make-or-break summit with President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva two months later.
It was a fool’s errand. Once again Barak got cold feet, fearing the electoral
consequences of withdrawal from the Golan Heights. On the morning of the
meeting, he gave Clinton a script that insisted on Israeli sovereignty over a
400-metre-wide strip of land between Syria and the lake. So the summit was
doomed before it even started and themuch-vaunted breakthrough turned into a
spectacular setback. Clinton discovered to his cost that there was
no sweet-talking Hafez al-Assad.
Having implicated the US president in two entirely
predictable failures on the Syrian track, Barak belatedly and grudgingly turned
his attention to the Palestinian track, to “the other woman”. Once again, he
prevailed on the US president to embark on a make-or-break summit, and
once again the president tended to behave not as an honest broker but as Israel’s
lawyer. Arafat warned Clinton that the positions of the two sides were too far
apart, that more time was needed to prepare the ground, and that failure at the
top would make matters worse. Clinton urged Arafat to come anyway and promised
that, in the event of failure, there would be no finger-pointing.
The summit convened at Camp David on 11 July 2000; it
lasted 14 days. Honouring a secret pledge, the American peace processors did
not present to the Palestinian delegation any papers without consulting the
Israelis first. The first American paper tabled at Camp David had Israel’s
fingerprints all over it and only served to confirm Arafat’s suspicion that the
whole summit was an Israeli-American ruse to trap him. His suspicions were not
eased by Barak’s refusal to meet with him face-to-face to negotiate
over the “final status” issues: borders, security, the right of return of
the 1948 refugees, and Jerusalem.
The sticking point was Jerusalem. Arafat insisted, as
he had done all along, on Palestinian sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple
Mount) in the Old City of Jerusalem. Barak’s rejection of Palestinian
sovereignty over the Muslim Noble Sanctuary sealed the fate of the summit.
Violating his pledge to Arafat, Clinton immediately blamed him for the failure.
Although Arafat contributed to the diplomatic deadlock by his aggressively
passive posture, the additional evidence unearthed by Bregman confirms the view
I have long held – that the two principal reasons for the collapse of the
summit were Barak’s intransigence and Clinton’s mismanagement.
In the heady days after the resounding victory in the
six-day war, Israel’s spokesmen used to boast that theirs was a liberal
occupation. But a liberal occupation is a contradiction in terms, like a
quadrilateral triangle. The occupation turned Israel into a colonial power and
colonialism has the habit of brutalising not only the occupied but the
occupier as well. Some colonial powers, such as the British in India and the
French in the Levant, learned the value of building schools and providing other
amenities for the colonised. Israel, by contrast, never really thought it had
any duty to protect the people under its rule or to improve the quality of
their lives.
Bregman describes Israel as “a heavy‑handed and
brutal occupier”. He regards the four decades of occupation chronicled in
this book as a black mark on Israeli, and indeed, Jewish history. He finds it
depressing that a people that has suffered such unspeakable tragedies of its
own can behave so cruelly towards another. The only sign of hope in this
otherwise bleak picture is that the occupation may carry within
it the seeds of its own demise. By forcing the Palestinians to live in
squalor, Bregman concludes, Israel has “hardened those under its power, making
them more determined to put an end to the occupation, by violent means if
necessary, and live a life of dignity and freedom”.
Avi Shlaim’s Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals,
Revisions, Refutations is published by Verso. To order Cursed
Victory for £20 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333
6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
No comments:
Post a Comment