http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16916
The New
York Review of Bools
Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004
Israel: The Threat from Within
By Henry
Siegman
A recent
front-page New York Times article on Condoleezza Rice's role in
shaping US foreign policy reported that in the spring of 2002, when violence
was escalating between Israel and the Palestinians, President Bush asked the
following of Dr. Rice: Beyond the question of whether the US is "pushing
this party hard enough or that party hard enough," what is the
"fundamental problem" that has defeated all previous peace
initiatives and continues to stand in the way of a political agreement?[1]
Dr. Rice's
answer was that the fundamental problem is Yasser
Arafat— his refusal to act to stop terrorism and the absence of democracy and
accountability in Palestinian political institutions. She concluded,
therefore, that sidelining Yasser Arafat,
democratizing Palestinian institutions, and bringing to the fore a new
Palestinian leadership would improve the prospects of an Israeli–Palestinian
peace agreement. This insight, according to Dr. Rice, countered the
"prevailing wisdom" that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was
"just about land."
Of course,
the conflict has never been just about land, but what has defeated
every previous peace initiative —from the Oslo Accords to the Mitchell
proposals to the Tenet guidelines to the current roadmap—is the struggle over
land. And what has made land the central issue is Israel's
unilateral expansion of Jewish settlements in the West
Bank, an expansion that continues relentlessly even
as Prime Minister Sharon speaks of disengagement, withdrawal, painful
concessions, and the dismantling of settlements.
Israel's
expansion into the West Bank
threatens to preclude a two-state solution, the only outcome that would
resolve the conflict without the disastrous result of ending either Jewish or
Palestinian national existence. The settler movement, which has enjoyed the
patronage of Sharon
from its inception in 1967, has made no secret that it is precisely the
prevention of a Palestinian state in the West Bank
that is its central goal.
While the
physical space taken up by the inhabited areas of the Jewish settlements is
not more than 3 percent of the West Bank,
the municipal borders of these settlements and the infrastructure that supports
them take up about 50 percent of the West Bank.
It is land that under the terms of the Oslo Accords was designated Area C,
considered "government land" when Jordan
occupied the West Bank. Under
the terms of the Oslo Accords, this area—except for military bases in which
the Israeli Defense Force would remain for varying periods of time to deal
with residual security concerns—was to have been returned to the
Palestinians.
The 1947 UN
partition plan that divided Palestine
between the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine allotted roughly 50 percent to
each side. Because of the wars that followed Arab rejection of the UN
resolution, Israel
enlarged its share to 78 percent of pre-1948 Palestine,
annexing over 50 percent more territory than allotted by the UN partition
plan. Following the 1967 war, when the remaining 22 percent of Arab Palestine
came under Israeli occupation, the UN adopted resolutions 242 and 338, which
affirmed the obligation of Arab countries to recog-nize
Israel's legitimacy and its right to live in security, but also insisted on
the inadmissibility of Israel's acquisition of territory in the West Bank and
Gaza as a result of the 1967 war. While these resolutions do not foreclose
the possibility of adjustments to the pre-1967 border to accommodate Israeli
security concerns, nothing in these resolutions suggests that such changes
could be made unilaterally by Israel.
The answer to
President Bush's question to Dr. Rice therefore is that the "fundamental
problem" that has undermined every previous peace initiative is the
notion entertained by Prime Minister Sharon's government, and to a greater or
lesser degree supported by all previous Israeli governments, that the 22
percent of the pre-1948 Palestine Mandate which now constitutes the West Bank
and Gaza remains subject to further surgery by Israel.
The political
damage done by the settlements to the peace process has been ratcheted up
several orders of magnitude by the separation fence. For Palestinians, the
fence confirms Israel's
intention to leave most of its settlements in place and to confine the
Palestinian population within less than half of the West
Bank (i.e., about 10 percent of pre-1948 Palestine).
No amount of verbal acrobatics by Prime Minister Sharon will persuade any
Palestinian that the purpose of this fence, in which Israel, despite its
parlous economic situation, is investing billions of Israeli shekels, is
anything other than the creation of South African– style bantustans
to contain an emerging Arab majority.
According to
current plans, the route followed by the separation fence veers deeply into
the West Bank along its western
border. Sharon
has approved the continuation of the fence to enclose Palestinians along the
eastern (Jordanian) border as well. The effect of the fence, once it is
completed, will be to enlarge Israel's
share of pre-1948 Palestine
from 50 to 90 percent. The remaining 10 percent (about half of today's West
Bank) conforms to Sharon's
definition of a "viable Palestinian state." Palestinians see no
point in engaging in internal debates about compromises they need to make to
achieve a peace agreement with Israel
if such an agreement will yield nothing more than a collection of tiny
fenced-in enclaves under Israeli control.
Of course, Israel's
government has not only the right but the obligation to protect its citizens
against the murderous suicide bombings of Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terrorist groups; a government that
fails to protect its citizens loses its right to govern. As even Yasser Arafat declared recently,[2] Palestinians
have no objection to a separation fence if it is built on Israeli territory.
But no one I know of in Israel's government, including the IDF and the
security services, would deny that a fence whose purpose is the protection of
Israel's citizens would be far more effective if it were constructed along
Israel's pre-1967 border rather than snaking its way around Israeli
settlements deep inside Palestinian territory. The argument that the fence's
intrusions into Palestinian territory are necessary to protect the
settlements establishes a new standard for chutzpah. In effect, Palestinians
are being told that Israel
must steal more Palestinian land to protect Israelis living on previously
stolen Palestinian land.
President
Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have often objected to the current
path of the separation fence and to the continued expansion of settlements.
They have also said that the borders of the new Palestinian state must assure
its viability. But other than their rhetorical exhortations, they have done
nothing that might lead Sharon
to believe that his indifference to their demands will have the slightest
adverse consequences for Israel.
And they have resisted every attempt to get them to define their use of the
term "viable Palestinian state" so that it is understood to require
a return to the pre-1967 border, subject only to changes in that border
agreed to by the parties.
In view of
the American refusal to take a clear position on the illegality of Israel's
unilateral confiscations of Palestinian land and on the emerging cantonization of the West Bank resulting from the path
followed by the separation fence, the implication for Palestinians of Dr.
Rice's comment about the need for reform that will lead to new Palestinian
leadership is that the US expects this new leadership to be more accepting of
Sharon's dismemberment of Palestinian territory. Ironically, this has enabled
Arafat to discredit Palestinians who have opposed his corruption and
authoritarianism by accusing them of collaboration with those who seek to
defeat the Palestinian national enterprise. This has devastated the
Palestinian reform movement as thoroughly as the post–Camp David intifada
devastated the Israeli peace camp.
Unfortunately,
Secretary of State Powell's treatment of the Middle East
peace process in his article in the January–February 2004 issue of Foreign
Affairs can only serve to reinforce Palestinians' fears. The central
point of his article is a rejection of the criticism that President Bush's
foreign policy is "unilateralist by design" and biased toward
preemptive action. Powell cites the Quartet—the US,
Russia,
the EU, and the UN—as well as the Middle East
roadmap as evidence of President Bush's commitment to "partnership"
with America's
friends.[3] They are in
fact poor examples of the Bush administration's respect for the views and
expectations of its allies. The deep sense of frustration and anger felt by America's
Quartet partners over President Bush's unwillingness to enforce the roadmap's
provisions evenhandedly is an open secret.
But it is
Secretary of State Powell's rendering of the failure of the "hopeful
premiership" of Mahmoud Abbas
that is particularly revealing. Powell attributes this failure solely to the
obstructionism of Yasser Arafat. Arafat's
obstructionism was indeed a major reason for Mahmoud
Abbas's downfall. However, it was clear to everyone
from the outset that hopes for Abbas's success were
not based on the expectation that Arafat would cease playing an
obstructionist role; there would have been no need to replace Arafat if he no
longer obstructed progress toward peace. Instead, the expectation was that
improvements in the Palestinian situation that would result from changes in
Israeli policy—changes made possible by Abbas's
rejection of violence and his commitment to reform—would give the new
Palestinian prime minister the credibility he would need in order to prevail
over Arafat. But these changes, advocated even by the IDF and Israel's
intelligence services, were blocked by Sharon.
There is no
hint in Secretary Powell's article of Sharon's
role in the failure of Mahmoud Abbas's
government. There is no reference to Sharon's
continued expansion of settlements, or to the charade of removing outposts
(which serve as embryonic settlements) while their number actually increased.
Nor is there any hint in Powell's ar-ticle of
America's own contribution to Abbas's fall because
of President Bush's failure to "ride herd" on both parties to
secure compliance with the terms of the roadmap, as he had promised at the
launching of this initiative at Aqaba in June 2003.
It is hard to
believe that Secretary Powell's one-sided account represents his view of what
actually happened. Admittedly, it takes some courage to tell the truth in an
election year. But US
officials have always exhorted both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to muster
the courage to tell their respective publics the truth about the price a
peace agreement entails. When it comes to the Middle
East peace process, Washington
has hardly set an example of either courage or truthtelling.
The most
dramatic evidence that territory remains the fundamental issue in the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the recent statement—in Ha'aretz
and other Israeli papers on January 9—by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and repeated by Hamas's
Abdel Aziz Rantisi and
the Islamic Jihad's Nafiz Azzam,
that their organizations are ready to postpone indefinitely their
"military" operations in return for an Israeli withdrawal to its
pre-1967 borders. This change in policy, which relegates the recovery of all
of Palestine
to an indefinite future, was not linked by these organizations to the return
of refugees, to claims to Jerusalem,
or to other issues concerning a permanent status agreement between Israel
and Palestine;
it was linked only to the territorial issue.
Yassin's statement will be seen by many as meaningless,
since it leaves Hamas free to revert to its
previous position at any time. But this reaction ignores not only the unique
religious context within which Hamas operates but
the essential nature of all religious cultures that claim divine sanction for
their beliefs. For Hamas to abandon what it has
maintained is a divinely ordained obligation to recover all of Palestine is
to bring into question its very identity, which it defines as its obedience
to God's immutable will. It must therefore resort to theological fictions,
i.e., relegating this obligation to future history, in order to be able to
claim it has not compromised its orthodoxy.
This way of
reconciling contradictions that often exist between the requirements of
orthodox religious doctrine believed to be divinely ordained, and therefore unchangeable, and the exigencies of contemporary life is
entirely familiar to practically all religious systems based on fidelity to a
divinely revealed scripture, literally understood. For example, Orthodox
Judaism affirms that the sacrificial rites (the slaughtering of animals and
the ritual sprinkling of their blood) performed by the ancient Israelites in
the Jerusalem
temple are divinely ordained. In order to deal with the conflict aroused
between a return to such a mode of religious worship, for which Orthodox Jews
pray daily, and changing cultural sensibilities, Orthodox Judaism, not unlike
the Islamic Hamas, has postponed a return to the
rite of animal sacrifices to future history and messianic times. (An opinion
by the great twelfth-century scholar and philosopher Maimonides
that sacrifices would be abolished in messianic times, because prayer is a
higher form of worship than animal sacrifice, nearly led to his excommunication,
and was therefore retracted.)
In any event,
Palestinian recognition of Israel's
legitimacy is an issue for the Palestinian Authority, the body officially
representing the Palestinian people, not Hamas. The
government of Israel
would similarly reject out of hand a Palestinian demand that the settler
movement renounce its claims to the West Bank
and Gaza
as a condition for a peace agreement with Israel.
Israel
would insist that the settler movement's ideology is irrelevant as long as Israel's
government accepts the legitimacy of Palestinian national sovereignty within
mutually agreed borders. There is no reason why the same criteria should not
apply to the Palestinian Authority.
Whatever
one's conclusions about the significance of Hamas's
and Islamic Jihad's willingness to suspend indefinitely their terrorist
operations in return for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and
Gaza, this change in rhetoric underscores the importance of territory for all
Palestinians. Therefore, if the US
is to persuade Palestinians to take the difficult measures required to end
terrorism and to reform their political institutions, Washington
will have to be far clearer than it has been about its commitment to a
Palestinian state whose territory will diverge from the pre-1967 lines only
by agreement between the parties. A peace initiative that falls short of this
kind of precision by the US
about where it stands on the territorial issue has no chance of breaking the
current impasse.
Many in Israel
and in the West may believe Palestinian fears of their eventual confinement
in a collection of bantustans to be irrational, or
simply a ruse to discredit Sharon's
government. But the plausibility of those fears could not have been confirmed
more dramatically, or more shockingly, than by what Benny Morris, a leading
Israeli historian of Israel's
War of Independence, recently said in an astonishing interview in Ha'aretz on January 9, 2004.
According to
Benny Morris, recently declassified documents in the archives of the IDF reveal
that in 1947, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders concluded that a Jewish
state could not come into being in the territory assigned to Jews by the UN
without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians.... In the
months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were
given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the
villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
This resulted
in "far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously
thought," including "many cases of rape [that] ended in
murder" and executions of Palestinians who were lined up against a wall
and shot (in Operation Hiram).
The
dismantling of Palestinian society, the destruction of Palestinian towns and
villages, and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians were not unavoidable
consequences of the war declared on the emerging Jewish state by Arab
countries. Rather, as Morris repeatedly confirms, it was a deliberate and
planned operation intended to "cleanse" (the term used in the
declassified documents) those parts of Palestine
assigned to the Jews as a necessary pre-condition for the emergence of a
Jewish state.
The
incredulous interviewer asks Morris, "Ben-Gurion was a 'transferist'?" Morris replies, "Of
course." He adds, "Ben-Gurion was right. Without the uprooting of
the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here." Indeed,
Morris faults Ben-Gurion for limiting the "cleansing" to the 1948
armistice line. "Even though [Ben-Gurion] understood the demographic
issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority,
he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered." Morris
believes that it is only a question of time before Israel
will have to complete the job begun in 1947 by "cleansing" the
entire West Bank as well.
The
interviewer asked Morris whether he was not justifying war crimes. Morris
replied that the necessity and nobility of the Jewish people's return to
their patrimony justified what the Jewish forces did. "There are
circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.... The need to
establish this [Jewish] state in this place overcame the injustice that was
done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
Morris and
those in Israel who agree with him presumably reject what President Bush said
in a speech before the UN on November 10, 2001, outlining his war on terror,
that "no national aspiration, no remembered wrong, can ever justify the
deliberate murder of the innocent." But the question they must answer
then is why the necessity and nobility of the Palestinians' return to their
patrimony do not justify the suicide bombings of Hamas.
Is it a crime for Palestinians to believe that their national cause is no
less noble or less compelling than the Jewish one?
If Morris's
account of the declassified IDF documents is confirmed, then the Palestinian
narrative of their 1948 nakba (disaster) is
true, and Israel's
counternarrative is not. It should hardly come as a
surprise that even Palestinians who accept the impossibility of a return of
Palestinian refugees to Israel
insist that a peace agreement with Israel
must at least include an Israeli acknowledgment of responsibility for the
Palestinian tragedy. Anyone reading the Morris interview would find it
difficult to disagree.
The early
history of the State of Israel is not unique. Other countries have chapters
in their history of which they should be deeply ashamed. And it must also be
stated that Morris's shocking revelations of death and destruction
deliberately inflicted on the Arabs of Palestine do not justify Palestinian
terrorism against Israel's
civilian population. But Morris's account points to the sorry fact that there
is not much that distinguishes how Jews behaved in 1948 in their struggle to
achieve statehood from Palestinian behavior today. At the very least, this
sobering truth should lead to a shedding of the moral smugness of too many
Israelis and to a reexamination of their demonization
of the Palestinian national cause.
The
implication of the above for the territorial issue is that it would be
irrational for Palestinians not to believe that the goal of Sharon's
fence is anything other than their confinement in a series of bantustans, if not a prelude to a second
"transfer," which Morris insists in this interview is inevitable.
It is
extremely unlikely that the US
will reengage seriously in the peace process and press for the implementation
of the roadmap, or finally take a clear position on the territorial issue
prior to the forthcoming presidential election, or anytime soon thereafter.
It is therefore hard to imagine what will prevent a descent into chaos in the
occupied territories, where the writ of the Palestinian Authority is giving
way to the anarchy of criminal gangs and of local warlords. The complete
collapse of the Palestinian Authority, which may be imminent, would very
probably rule out the two-state option, for there would be no central
authority capable of delivering a Palestinian commitment to—much less the
implementation of—the terms of any Israeli–Palestinian peace accord. Unless
Israelis are willing to preserve their majority status by imposing a South
African–style apartheid regime, or to complete the transfer begun in 1948, as
Morris believes they will— policies one hopes a majority of Israelis will
never accept—it is only a matter of time before the emerging majority of
Arabs in Greater Israel will reshape the country's national identity. That
would be a tragedy of historic proportions for the Zionist enterprise and for
the Jewish people.
What will
make the tragedy doubly painful is that it will be happening at a time when
changes in the Arab world and beyond (i.e. the Saudi initiative of 2002, the
removal of Saddam Hussein, Syrian isolation, Libya's amazing opening to
Israel and removal of its WMD program, and the opening of Iran's nuclear
facilities to international inspection) are removing virtually every
strategic security threat that for so long endangered Israel's existence.
That existence is now threatened by the greed of the settlers and the
political blindness of Israel's
leaders.
—January 28, 2004
Notes
[1] See Elisabeth Bumiller, "A Partner in Shaping an Assertive Foreign
Policy," The New York Times, January 7, 2004.
[2] The New York
Times, December 11, 2003.
[3] In its first phase,
the roadmap requires that Palestinians unconditionally cease violence,
institute political reforms, appoint a prime minister, draft a Palestinian
constitution, and hold elections. Israel
is required to withdraw from areas occupied since the beginning of the
intifada in September 2000, dismantle settlements built since Ariel Sharon
took office in March 2001, and freeze all other settlement activity. The
second phase of the roadmap calls for an international conference to initiate
negotiations that would establish an "independent Palestinian state with
provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty." The third and final
phase, involving a second international conference, envisions an end to the
occupation and the subsequent establishment of an "independent,
democratic, and viable Palestine"
at an undefined point in 2005.
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