What Occupation?
by Efraim Karsh
NO TERM has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than "occupation." For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international media of Israel's supposedly illegitimate presence on Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel's allegedly brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many catchphrases it means different things to different people.
For most Western observers, the term "occupation" describes Israel's control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June 1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of "occupations" dating back to the very creation of Israel on "stolen" land. If you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on London's Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labeled "Occupied Palestine." That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" that is meant to reverse the effects of the "1948 occupation"-i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel's actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today's terrorist attacks were "what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people"-a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.
Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between post-1967 and pre-1967 "occupations." "I come to you today with a heavy heart," she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer, "leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing naqba [catastrophe]":
In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population .... On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties.
This original "occupation"-that is, again, the creation and existence of the state of Israel-was later extended, in Ashrawi's narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:
Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.
Taken together, the charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent-and are plainly intended to be-a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.
IN 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of the area's inhabitants were parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.
Under a League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In 1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain returned the mandate to the League's successor, the United Nations, which in turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.
The state of Israel was thus created by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination-an act, moreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state's midst was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to include, among other areas, the two regions under contest today-namely, Gaza and the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed under international control).
As is well known, the implementation of the UN's partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."
This fact was keenly recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one official observed in mid-December 1947, "it does not appear that Arab Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel], unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as the British withdrawal is completed." A couple of months later, the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that "the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdallah, and the south to Egypt."
THE BRITISH proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank-- which were, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the 1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of "land for peace" as the cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories evacuated by Israel, would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers-Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity "for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem"-a clause that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.
At this time-we are speaking of the late 1960's-- Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. "Moderate" Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a mortal threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez alAssad openly referred to Palestine as "not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria"; there is no reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.
Nor, for that matter, did the populace of the West Bank and Gaza regard itself as a distinct nation. The collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society following the 1948 defeat had shattered an always fragile communal fabric, and the subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian diaspora prevented the crystallization of a national identity. Host Arab regimes actively colluded in discouraging any such sense from arising. Upon occupying the West Bank during the 1948 war, King Abdallah had moved quickly to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan, its residents became Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom's economic, political, and social structures.
For its part, the Egyptian government showed no desire to annex the Gaza Strip but had instead ruled the newly acquired area as an occupied military zone. This did not imply support of Palestinian nationalism, however, or of any sort of collective political awareness among the Palestinians. The local population was kept under tight control, was denied Egyptian citizenship, and was subjected to severe restrictions on travel.
WHAT, THEN, of the period after 1967, when these territories passed into the hands of Israel? Is it the case that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been the victims of the most "varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution" ever devised by the human mind?
At the very least, such a characterization would require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented 20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered, driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the three decades of Israel's control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September 1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasir Arafat's PLO to destroy his monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh) between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO's support for Saddam Hussein's brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada against Israel during the late 1980's.
Such crude comparisons aside, to present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as "systematic oppression" is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first of all, that this occupation did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel's success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of IsraeliEgyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs' "final round" with Israel.
Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted by then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.
Israel's restraint in this sphere-which turned out to be desperately misguided-is only part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.
In the economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan's $1,050, Egypt's $600, Turkey's $1,630, and Tunisia's $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's (one of the betteroff Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians' standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
ALL THIS, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel's hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres. Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political influence in the territories. The publication of proPLO editorials was permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence. Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: "It does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don't build arms factories with it." Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.*
Given the extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel's administrative policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle against the Jewish state. Here Israel's counterinsurgency measures must be given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their standard of living. The fact remains, however, that during the two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little "armed resistance," and most terrorist attacks emanated from outside-from Jordan in the late 1960's, then from Lebanon.
In an effort to cover up this embarrassing circumstance, Fatah, the PLO's largest constituent organization, adopted the slogan that "there is no difference between inside and outside." But there was a difference, and a rather fundamental one. By and large, the residents of the territories wished to get on with their lives and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Israeli rule. Had the West Bank eventually been returned to Jordan, its residents, all of whom had been Jordanian citizens before 1967, might well have reverted to that status. Alternatively, had Israel prevented the spread of the PLO's influence in the territories, a local leadership, better attuned to the real interests and desires of the people and more amenable to peaceful coexistence with Israel, might have emerged.
But these things were not to be. By the mid1970's, the PLO had made itself into the "sole representative of the Palestinian people," and in short order Jordan and Egypt washed their hands of the West Bank and Gaza. Whatever the desires of the people living in the territories, the PLO had vowed from the moment of its founding in the mid1960's-well before the Six-Day war-to pursue its "revolution until victory," that is, until the destruction of the Jewish state. Once its position was secure, it proceeded to do precisely that.
BY THE mid-1990's, thanks to Oslo, the PLO had achieved a firm foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. Its announced purpose was to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood but its real purpose was to do what it knew best-namely, create an extensive terrorist infrastructure and use it against its Israeli "peace partner." At first it did this tacitly, giving a green light to other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; then it operated openly and directly.
But what did all this have to do with Israel's "occupation"? The declaration signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. During this interim period the territories would be administered by a Palestinian Council, to be freely and democratically elected after the withdrawal of Israeli military forces both from the Gaza Strip and from the populated areas of the West Bank.
By May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing Israeli settlements) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, Yasir Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza. On September 28, 1995, despite Arafat's abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the territories now under his control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas with the exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the Palestinian Council were held, and shortly afterward both the Israeli civil administration and military government were dissolved.
The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank's overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing short of revolutionary. At one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of the West Bank's 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60 percent of them-in the Jericho area and in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron-have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent live in towns, villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained "overriding responsibility for security." Some two percent of the West Bank's population-tens of thousands of Palestinians-continue to live in areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the Palestinian Authority maintains "functional jurisdiction."
In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. By no conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from the territories during these years be made to qualify as resistance to foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation.
IF THE stubborn persistence of Palestinian terrorism is not attributable to the continuing occupation, many of the worst outrages against Israeli civilians likewise occurred-contrary to the mantra of Palestinian spokesmen and their apologists-not at moments of breakdown in the Oslo "peace process" but at its high points, when the prospect of Israeli withdrawal appeared brightest and most imminent.
Suicide bombings, for example, were introduced in the atmosphere of euphoria only a few months after the historic Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn: eight people were murdered in April 1994 while riding a bus in the town of Afula. Six months later, 21 Israelis were murdered on a bus in Tel Aviv. In the following year, five bombings took the lives of a further 38 Israelis. During the short-lived government of the dovish Shimon Peres (November 1995-May 1996), after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, 58 Israelis were murdered within the span of one week in three suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Further disproving the standard view is the fact that terrorism was largely curtailed following Benjamin Netanyahu's election in May 1996 and the consequent slowdown in the Oslo process. During Netanyahu's three years in power, some 50 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks-a third of the casualty rate during the Rabin government and a sixth of the casualty rate during Peres's term.
There was a material side to this downturn in terrorism as well. Between 1994 and 1996, the Rabin and Peres governments had imposed repeated closures on the territories in order to stem the tidal wave of terrorism in the wake of the Oslo accords. This had led to a steep drop in the Palestinian economy. With workers unable to get into Israel, unemployment rose sharply, reaching as high as 50 percent in Gaza. The movement of goods between Israel and the territories, as well as between the West Bank and Gaza, was seriously disrupted, slowing exports and discouraging potential private investment.
The economic situation in the territories began to improve during the term of the Netanyahu government, as the steep fall in terrorist attacks led to a corresponding decrease in closures. Real GNP per capita grew by 3.5 percent in 1997, 7.7 percent in 1998, and 3.5 percent in 1999, while unemployment was more than halved. By the beginning of 1999, according to the World Bank, the West Bank and Gaza had fully recovered from the economic decline of the previous years.
Then, in still another turnabout, came Ehud Barak, who in the course of a dizzying six months in late 2000 and early 2001 offered Yasir Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state together with some Israeli territory, and making breathtaking concessions over Israel's capital city of Jerusalem. To this, however, Arafat's response was war. Since its launch, the Palestinian campaign has inflicted thousands of brutal attacks on Israeli civilians-suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, lynching, stonings-murdering more than 500 and wounding some 4,000.
In the entire two decades of Israeli occupation preceding the Oslo accords, some 400 Israelis were murdered; since the conclusion of that "peace" agreement, twice as many have lost their lives in terrorist attacks. If the occupation was the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel's most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation-that is, the withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance-is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first place.
There are limits to Israel's ability to transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long since been reached. To borrow from Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, confidence, and justice. From the birth of the Zionist movement until today, that disposition has remained conspicuously absent from the mind of the Palestinian leadership.
It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the Palestinians' rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of violence. Palestinian terrorism started well before 1967, and continued-and intensified-after the occupation ended in all but name. Rather, what is at fault is the perduring Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was itself an original act of "inhuman occupation" with which compromise of any final kind is beyond the realm of the possible. Until that disposition changes, which is to say until a different leadership arises, the idea of peace in the context of the Arab Middle East will continue to mean little more than the continuation of war by other means.
[Author note]
EFRAIM KARSH is head of Mediterranean studies at Kings College, University of London. His articles in COMMENTARY include "Israel's War" (April 2002) and "The Palestinians and the `Right of Return"' (May 2001).
just a few titles from a google search of 'isreal rejects peace plan'
'Israel rejects Mideast peace plan'
'Isreal rejects Palestinian Unity govt'
'Saudi Arabia calls on Israel to accept the peace initiative'
'Israel rejects European draft for Middle East peace initiative'
'Israel rejects Mideast peace plan'
'Israel rejects Franco-Spanish peace initiative'
'Israel Rejects Peace Offer'
'Israel Rejects Arab Peace Plan Endorsed at Beirut Arab Summit'
'Livni rejects Arab League's 2002 plan | Jerusalem Post'
at least we can admit both sides are wrong....then there's ppl like you who are heavily biased and want to appear as some innocent victim....maybe if israel didn't keep them under the heel of their boots they wouldn't be so angry?
i would take what you have to say more seriously if you didn't think that googling something and then repeating it without any context whatsoever was a good way of making a point.
i would take what you have to say more seriously if you didn't think that googling something and then repeating it without any context whatsoever was a good way of making a point.
you were acting like it was the palestinians who rejects everything...i showed you to be wrong, israel (not only violates the un and international law) but rejects peace plans all the time
you didn't have anything to say about the rest of it?
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
you were acting like it was the palestinians who rejects everything...i showed you to be wrong, israel (not only violates the un and international law) but rejects peace plans all the time
you didn't have anything to say about the rest of it?
you didn't show me to be wrong. you didn't show anything. you cut and pasted a list of headlines and you didn't put any of them in their proper context. some of the headlines offered clues as to their context, however.
for example, the saudi peace initiative- this "peace initiative" is a non-starter. one of its preconditions is that it stipulates that four and a half million arabs be allowed to live inside israel. any semi-sentient being knows that this is just a euphemism for the demographic liquidation of israel. the geneva initiative is the same way. israel is right to reject such garbage. the authors of these pipe dreams KNOW israel will reject these ideas so they cynically propose them anyway because they know it will make israel look stubborn in the eyes of people who don't care to look at the details.
you didn't show me to be wrong. you didn't show anything. you cut and pasted a list of headlines and you didn't put any of them in their proper context. some of the headlines offered clues as to their context, however.
for example, the saudi peace initiative- this "peace initiative" is a non-starter. one of its preconditions is that it stipulates that four and a half million arabs be allowed to live inside israel. any semi-sentient being knows that this is just a euphemism for the demographic liquidation of israel. the geneva initiative is the same way. israel is right to reject such garbage. the authors of these pipe dreams KNOW israel will reject these ideas so they cynically propose them anyway because they know it will make israel look stubborn in the eyes of people who don't care to look at the details.
but they should accept everything and anything israel decides to bestow upon them? right, got it :rolleyes:
again, you acted like it was the palestinians who just went around rejecting everything israel offered, yeah, they rejected things they didn't like...israel does the same, again you have to have israel up on a higher ground when in reality they look even
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
but they should accept everything and anything israel decides to bestow upon them? right, got it :rolleyes:
again, you acted like it was the palestinians who just went around rejecting everything israel offered, yeah, they rejected things they didn't like...israel does the same, again you have to have israel up on a higher ground when in reality they look even
those of us with memories remember the issues of contention negotiated upon at the last real peace talks, at camp david in july 2000. for me, these various proposals have names other than "everything" and "things".
"things" must look even to you because you're content to see this entire issue in terms of abstractions. makes it easier for you to roll your eyes and talk like you're a paladin of even-handedness, itself. do not confuse this with reality, however. i have cited specific examples, while you have cited headlines detached from their actual subjects. under these circumstances, it's impossible to have an actual discussion with you.
count yourself among the people that don't have a fucking clue what's going on. here's a novel idea: sometimes arabs are actually responsible for their situation. nobody but the arabs rejected every partition plan from the 1920's through the 1940's. nobody but the arab league issued the "3 no's" in the wake of the 6-day war at the khartoum conference of the arab league. (that's no negotiations, no recognition, and no peace with israel.)
nobody but arafat walked away from negotiations in 2000 without so much as a counter-proposal. yet no one thinks there should be any consequences for the arabs. every time there is a war and they don't achieve their goals militarily, they expect to resume negotiations as if nothing had happened.
i see people saying "hamas isn't palestine, hamas is just the extremists" and then they reflexively say that most palestinians want peace. all the while all of the people who always say this never provide a single example from which to infer, a single statistic with which to support, the notion that most palestinians are any less extreme in their rejection of coexistance than hamas.
the problem isn't about settlements or borders, since arabs started attacking jews in the 1920's. (before any land was being 'stolen', so save your breath if you want to find a way to justify, for example, the arabs murdering 60 jewish residents of hebron, a community that existed there uninterrupted for thousands of years until 1929 when they were dragged from their homes and hacked to death by their neighbors).
as long as they want everything, they will have nothing. and as golda meir once said "there will be peace when they love their children more than they hate us."
It is impossible to have a civil dicussion with you and always has been. You choose to be insulting (which I see as a weakness and does absolutely nothing to prove your points) heavily biased, and you completely reject anything anyone has to sat against Israel. It's impossible to get an objective view form you. At least I can admit both sides are wrong and both are causing the problems. Trying to get anywhere with you in these discussions is like talking to a brick wall.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
So in your opinion because Israel can destroy Palestine in a day but chooses not to we should congratulate them on their peace-loving, reserved, and compassionate nature? So Israel does not have a stated purpose of destroying Palestine? So the fact that they have been slowly but surely destroying Palestine and continue to defy international law by continuing the illegal occupation and continued creation of illegal settlements becomes irrelevant. Israel not stating it's intentions means that what we see them doing is a mirage? What fantasy world are you living in?
'There was no effort to conceal the fact that Gaza disengagement was in reality West Bank expansion. The official plan for disengagement stated that Israel will permanently take over major population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel in the West Bank. That was endorsed by the U.S. ambassador, as it had been by the President, breaking sharply with U.S. policy.
Along with the disengagement plan, Israel announced investment of tens of millions of dollars in West Bank settlements. Prime Minister Sharon immediately approved new housing units in the town of Maale Adumim--that's to the east of Jerusalem--the core of the salient that divides the southern from the central Bantustan, to use Benvenisti's term, and also announced other expansion plans.
There is near unanimity that all of this violates international law. The consensus was expressed by U.S. Judge Buergenthal in his separate declaration attached to the World Court judgment, ruling that the separation wall is illegal. In Buergenthal's words, "The Fourth Geneva Convention and International Human Rights Law are applicable to the occupied Palestinian territory and must therefore be fully complied with by Israel. Accordingly, the segments of the wall being built by Israel to protect the settlements are ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law," which happens to mean about 80% of the wall...
Keeping to the diplomatic record, the first -- both sides, of course, rejected 242. The first important step forward was in 1971, when president Sadat of Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. That would have ended the international conflict. Israel rejected the offer, choosing expansion over security. In this case, expansion into the Egyptian Sinai, where General Sharon's forces had driven thousands of farmers into the desert to clear the land for the all-Jewish city of Yamit. The U.S. backed Israel's stand.
Those decisions led to the 1973 war, a near disaster for Israel. The U.S. and Israel then recognized that Egypt could not be dismissed and finally accepted Sadat's 1971 offer at Camp David in 1979. But by then, the agreement included the demand for a Palestinian state, which had reached the international agenda.
In 1976, the major Arab states introduced a resolution to the U.N. Security Council calling for a peace settlement on the international border, based on U.N. 242, but now adding a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories. That's Syria, Egypt, Jordan and every other relevant state. The U.S. vetoed the resolution again in 1980. The General Assembly passed similar resolutions year after year with the United States and Israel opposed.
The matter reached a head in 1988, when the PLO moved from tacit approval to formal acceptance of the two-state consensus. Israel responded with a declaration that there can be no, as they put it, "additional Palestinian state between Jordan and the sea," Jordan already being a Palestinian state -- that's Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir -- and also that the status of the territories must be settled according to Israeli guidelines. The U.S. endorsed Israel's stand. I can only add what I wrote at the time: "It's as if someone were to argue the Jews don't need a second homeland in Israel, because they already have New York."
In May 1997, for the first time, Peres's Labour Party agreed not to rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty in areas excluding major Jewish settlement blocks, that is, the three cantons that were being constructed with U.S. support. The highest rate of post-Oslo settlement was in 2000, the final year of Clinton's term and Prime Minister Barak's.
Maps of the U.S.-Israel proposals at Camp David show a salient, east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and a northern salient virtually dividing the northern from the central canton. I have the maps if you want them. The current map considerably extends these salients and the isolation of East Jerusalem. My maps are from the leading Israeli scholars, Ron Pundak, the Director of the Shimon Peres Center. The crucial issue at Camp David was territorial, not the refugee issue, for which Arafat agreed to a pragmatic solution, as Pundak, the leading scholar, reveals. No Palestinian could accept the cantonization, including the U.S. favorite, Mahmoud Abbas.
Clinton -- we don't have to debate it, because Clinton recognized that Palestinian objections had validity, and in December 2000 proposed his parameters, which went some way toward satisfying Palestinian rights. In Clinton's words, "Barak and Arafat had both accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations."
The reservations were addressed at a high level meeting in Taba, which made considerable progress and might have led to a settlement, but Israel called them off. That one week at Taba is the only break in 30 years of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. High-level informal negotiations continued, leading to the Geneva Accord of December of 2002, welcomed by virtually the entire world, rejected by Israel, dismissed by Washington. That could have been the basis for a just peace. It still can. By then, however, Bush-Sharon bulldozers were demolishing any basis for it.
Every sane Israeli hawk understood that it was absurd for Israel to leave 8,000 settlers in Gaza, protected by a large part of the army, while taking over scarce water resources and arable land. The same conclusion was to withdraw from Gaza while expanding through the West Bank, and that will continue as long as Washington insists on marching on the road to catastrophe by rejecting minimal Palestinian rights. I'm quoting the warning of the four former heads of Israel's Shin Bet Security Service. "There are clear alternatives, and if that march to catastrophe continues, we will have only ourselves to blame."
tell hamas to recognize Israel and we will all hold hands around the world and sing "we are the world"
Man, all this talk about who bombed what when and how. It's all pointless.
We have to ask oursleves what would drive us to suicide bomb a bus. Once we've answered that question, we know what's driving the conflict.
I'd say that Russia invading our country, destroying our government and taking all of our land and sovereignty would be sufficient reason for many people to take up arms.
I argue that, perhaps the only viable solution is for Israel to move somewhere else. You can say "nah fuck that, we have a right to this land" but the arabs are just going to say the same thing and conflict will never be resolved.
Personally, I think Israel/Palestine sucks geographically. It's a horrible piece of the world. Historically it's full of lies and violence. If I owned it, I'd evacuate and turn it into a crater.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Ex-Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon
Government Policies 'Create Hatred,' Israeli Newspaper Is Told
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A01
JERUSALEM, Nov. 14 -- Four former chiefs of Israel's powerful domestic security service said in an interview published Friday that the government's actions and policies during the three-year-old Palestinian uprising have gravely damaged the country and its people.
The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one called the immoral treatment of Palestinians.
"We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully," said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until 1986. "Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."
The statements to Israel's largest-circulation Hebrew-language daily newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, added to recent public criticism of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by Israeli political, military and civic leaders for his failure to stop terrorism or negotiate peace as the uprising enters its fourth year.
Members of the Sharon government said they would not comment directly on the statements.
"I don't want to add more fuel to this," said a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "These, of all people, should have known this is the worst time to conduct public debate on these issues."
The official said creating the image that "Israel is falling apart at the seams" could prompt Palestinian organizations to "intensify terrorist activity."
The former security chiefs said they agreed to the two-hour interview -- the first time the four have ever sat down together -- out of "serious concern for the condition of the state of Israel," according to Carmi Gillon, who ran Shin Bet in 1995 and 1996.
Maj. Gen. Ami Ayalon, who headed the agency from 1996 until 2000 and is co-author of a peace petition signed by tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, said: "We are taking sure and measured steps to a point where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people."
Shin Bet is Israel's dominant domestic security and intelligence service, with primary responsibility for the country's anti-terrorism efforts. It often plans and directs armed forces operations that support its own activities, including raids into Palestinian towns and villages in search of alleged terrorists, assassinations of suspected militants and interrogation of suspects. The current Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, is one of Sharon's most trusted and influential advisers, according to administration officials.
The four former Shin Bet leaders said they recognized the contradictions between some of their actions as security chiefs and their opinions today.
"Why is it that everyone -- [Shin Bet] directors, chief of staff, former security personnel -- after a long service in security organizations become the advocates of reconciliation with the Palestinians? Because they were there." said Yaakov Perry, whose term as security chief between 1988 and 1995 covered the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. "We know the material, the people in the field, and surprisingly, both sides."
The security chiefs denounced virtually every major military and political tactic of the Sharon administration, adding their voices to the dissent in Israel against the prime minister's handling of a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 Palestinians and nearly 900 Israelis and foreigners.
In recent weeks, the country's top general has criticized Sharon's clampdown on Palestinians in the West Bank; active and reserve Air Force pilots have publicly declared the military's use of missiles and bombs to kill militants in civilian neighborhoods to be "immoral"; activists have initiated independent peace proposals; and opinion polls have indicated that faith in Sharon is plummeting.
Perry said the country is "going in the direction of decline, nearly a catastrophe" in almost every area -- economic, political, social and security. "If something doesn't happen here, we will continue to live by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud and we will continue to destroy ourselves," he said.
The four men said Israel should be prepared to initiate a peace process unilaterally rather than wait for the Palestinians to bring a halt to terrorism, which is Sharon's overriding prerequisite for negotiations.
"As of today, we are preoccupied with preventing terror," Gillon said. "Why? Because this is the condition for making political progress. And this is a mistake."
"You are wrong if you think that this is a mistake," interjected Shalom. "It is not a mistake. It is an excuse -- an excuse for doing nothing."
The group was particularly critical of Sharon's attempt to sideline Arafat and declare him "irrelevant" -- also a key tenet of President Bush's Middle East policy.
"It was the mother of all errors with regard to Arafat," said Shalom, who has worked as an international business consultant since leaving the government. "We cannot determine who will have the greatest influence over there. So let us look at the Palestinians' political map, and it is a fact that nothing can happen without Arafat."
Israel should "stop talking about a partner already and do what is good for us," said Perry, now a bank chairman and businessman. "What is good for us is to be able to protect ourselves in the most effective manner . . . to waste fewer troops on guarding hilltops and settlements and three goats and eight cowboys."
The former security chiefs said the Jewish settlements that have proliferated across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are among the greatest obstacles to peace. "Sharon has often talked about the fact that we will be required to make painful compromises," Perry said, "and there are no painful compromises except for evacuating settlements."
Several of the chiefs also condemned the 400-mile fence and barrier complex Israel is erecting around the heart of the West Bank. Sharon has said the fence is needed to stop terrorists from infiltrating Israel. However, its path veers deep into the West Bank in several places.
"It creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel," Shalom said. "The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended."
Alluding to South Africa's former system of racial separation known as apartheid, he added: "The Palestinians are arguing, 'You wanted two states, and instead you are closing us up in a South African reality.' Therefore, the more we support the fence, they lose their dream and hope for an independent Palestinian state."
Ayalon, who is chairman of an irrigation systems company, said he considered much of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories "immoral, some of it patently immoral."
"Terror is not thwarted with bombs or helicopters," said Shalom, who asked rhetorically: "Why does this increase terror? Because it is overt, because it carries an element of vindictiveness."
"The problem, as of today, is that the political agenda has become solely a security agenda," said Gillon, who has also served as an ambassador. "It only deals with the question of how to prevent the next terror attack, not the question of how it is at all possible to pull ourselves out of the mess that we are in today."
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
actually, the u.s gave millions and millions of dollars to the palestinian people so taht they could build schools, hospitals, etc, where did that money go you ask? well, their long time leader, arafat, stole it to create palaces for himself, the palestinians were kept in poverty by their own leader, while he lead a life of luxury.
Please provide just one shred of evidence to support your fantasy. I won't hold my breath because I know for a fact that everything you've said above is complete bollocks. Still, whilst you're searching for the non-existent evidence you may surprise yourself and actually learn something about the truth of the situation over there.
count yourself among the people that don't have a fucking clue what's going on.
I suppose you'll be wishing that she gets cancer next? Seems you really are incapable of reasoned debate whenever someone on this board challenges your invented, self-serving fantasy of the history of the Israel-Palestine issue. You should have been permanently banned ages ago.
i can be the first to tell you that you and the fearsome british media, aka hezbollah's PR wing, don't have the first clue what happened on the ground, and your childish gloating is nauseating. it exposes your croccodile tears for arab civilians for the lie that it is. you're just a hopelessly ignorant bigot who revels in the misery of peope you've never even met. please get cancer soon.
The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to confrontation, driving home the importance of a diplomatic settlement. In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which expressed a broad international consensus on the general terms for a settlement. The current agreement is based entirely on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses it). Article I of the 1993 draft agreement, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations," specifies that "the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; no other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus resolving a central issue in the controversy in accord with US-Israeli demands.
UN 242 "emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security." It calls for "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." It calls for an agreement among states; Palestinian rights are mentioned only in the call for "a just settlement of the refugee problem," left unspecified. UN 242 is therefore thoroughly rejectionist, if we understand the concept of rejectionism in nonracist terms: as denial of the right to national self-determination of one or the other of the two contending parties in the former Palestine.
With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the contending states of the region over the next few years, though their interpretations differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel rejected full withdrawal.
The phrase "withdrawal from territories" has been a particular bone of contention. In most of the world (including Europe), it has been understood to imply Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied during the war, with at most minor -- and mutual -- adjustments. At first, that was also Washington's interpretation. UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg informed King Hussein of Jordan that the US insisted that "there must be a mutuality in adjustments," a classified State Department history observes: to both Israel and the Arab states, "U.S. officials emphasized that any territorial adjustments would be limited in nature and would not, of necessity, be detrimental to the Arab states"; there would be at most "minor reciprocal border rectifications" with no "substantial withdrawing of the [pre-war] map." It was on this understanding, explicitly conveyed by US government mediators, that the Arab states accepted the resolution, and the US itself unequivocally held to this interpretation until 1971. In those years, Israel was alone among major actors in rejecting this interpretation of the document.
The disagreements over interpretation came to a head in February 1971, when UN mediator Gunnar Jarring presented a proposal to Egypt and Israel that called for full peace between them in return for full Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory. Egyptian President Sadat accepted the proposal. Sadat's acceptance of Jarring's "famous" peace proposal was a "bombshell," Prime Minister Rabin recalls in his memoirs, a "milestone." While officially welcoming Egypt's expression "of its readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel," the government of Israel rejected the agreement, stating that "Israel will not withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines. The reasoning was explained by Haim Bar-Lev of the governing Labor Party: "I think that we could obtain a peace settlement on the basis of the earlier [pre-June 1967] borders. If I were persuaded that this is the maximum that we might obtain, I would say: agreed. But I think that it is not the maximum. I think that if we continue to hold out, we will obtain more."
The crucial question was how Washington would react. The Jarring-Sadat agreement was consistent with official US policy. There was, however, a conflict between the State Department and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who was then engaged in a campaign to undermine and displace Secretary of State Rogers, as he was soon to do.
Kissinger insisted that the US must insist upon "stalemate": no diplomacy, no negotiations. His position prevailed, and Sadat's peace offer was rejected.[/b]
Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in rejecting the standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN 242. The basic cause for the misery and suffering that followed is their conviction, which has proven to be correct, that "if we continue to hold out, we will obtain more."
The isolation of the US and Israel became still more marked by the mid-1970s, when the terms of the international consensus shifted to include a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thus departing from earlier rejectionism. In January 1976, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a settlement in terms of UN 242, with this amendment. The US veto, repeated later, excluded the Security Council from the diplomacy. The General Assembly continued to pass near-unanimous resolutions in similar terms (the US and Israel opposed); a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The US also blocked initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The last of the regular UN resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf conflict, in December 1990 (144-2).
Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the rejectionist camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the Islamic world, justly termed "extremist." The conclusions being unacceptable, the facts have been "vetoed" along with numerous peace initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole together with Sadat's "famous milestone" and much else that is inconvenient.
those of us with memories remember the issues of contention negotiated upon at the last real peace talks, at camp david in july 2000.
Blinded by the Truth
Noam Chomsky
Al-Ahram Weekly, November 2-8, 2000
After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli-occupied territories, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including 30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of force available.
Barak's plan was not given in detail, but the outlines are familiar: they conform to the "final status map" presented by the US-Israel as the basis for the Camp David negotiations that collapsed in July. This plan, extending US-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier years, called for cantonisation of the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967, with mechanisms to ensure that usable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority (PA), playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the most obvious analogue. In the West Bank, a northern canton is to include Nablus and other Palestinian cities, a central canton is based in Ramallah, and a southern canton in Bethlehem; Jericho is to remain isolated. Palestinians would be effectively cut off from Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian life. Similar arrangements are likely in Gaza, with Israel keeping the southern coastal region and a small settlement at Netzarim (the site of many of the recent atrocities), which is hardly more than an excuse for a large military presence and roads splitting the Strip below Gaza City.
These proposals formalise the vast settlement and construction programmes that Israel has been conducting, thanks to munificent US aid, with increasing energy since the US was able to implement its version of the "peace process" after the Gulf War. The goal of the negotiations was to secure official PA adherence to this project. Two months after they collapsed, the current phase of violence began. Tensions, always high, were raised when the Barak government authorised a visit by Ariel Sharon with 1,000 police to the Muslim religious sites (Al-Aqsa) on a Thursday (28 September). Sharon is the very symbol of Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going back to 1953. Sharon's announced purpose was to demonstrate "Jewish sovereignty" over the Al-Aqsa compound, but as the veteran correspondent Graham Usher points out, the "Al-Aqsa Intifada," as Palestinians call it, was not initiated by Sharon's visit; rather, by the massive and intimidating police and military presence that Barak introduced the following day, the day of prayers. Predictably, that led to clashes as thousands of people streamed out of the mosque, leaving seven Palestinians dead and 200 wounded.
Whatever Barak's purpose, there could hardly have been a more efficient way to set the stage for the shocking atrocities of the following weeks. The same can be said about the failed negotiations, which focused on Jerusalem, a condition observed strictly by US commentary. Possibly Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling was exaggerating when he wrote that a solution to this problem "could have been reached in five minutes," but he is right to say that "by any diplomatic logic [it] should have been the easiest issue to solve (Ha'aretz, 4 October).
It is understandable that Clinton-Barak should want to suppress what they are doing in the occupied territories, which is far more important. Why did Arafat agree? Perhaps because he recognises that the leadership of the Arab states regard the Palestinians as a nuisance, and have little problem with the Bantustan-style settlement, but cannot overlook administration of the religious sites, fearing the reaction of their own populations. Nothing could be better calculated to set off a confrontation with religious overtones -- the most ominous kind, as centuries of experience reveal. The primary innovation of Barak's new plan is that the US-Israeli demands are to be imposed by direct force instead of coercive diplomacy, and in a harsher form, to punish the victims who refused to concede politely. The outlines are in basic accord with policies established informally in 1968 (the Allon Plan), and variants that have been proposed since by both political groupings (the Sharon Plan, the Labour government plans, and others). It is important to recall that the policies have not only been proposed, but implemented, with the support of the US. That support has been decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that followed, culminating in the "Oslo process."
Since all of this has been effectively vetoed from history in the US, it takes a little work to discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded. As noted, Barak's plan is a particularly harsh version of familiar US-Israeli rejectionism. It calls for terminating electricity, water, telecommunications, and other services that are doled out in meagre rations to the Palestinian population, who are now under virtual siege. It should be recalled that independent development was ruthlessly barred by the military regime from 1967, leaving the people in destitution and dependency, a process that has worsened considerably during the US-run "Oslo process." One reason is the "closures" regularly instituted, most brutally by the more dovish Labour-based governments. As discussed by another outstanding journalist, Amira Hass, this policy was initiated by the Rabin government "years before Hamas had planned suicide attacks, [and] has been perfected over the years, especially since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority." An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control, closure has been accompanied by the importation of an essential commodity to replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian labour on which much of the economy relies: hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from around the world, many of them victims of the "neoliberal reforms" of the recent years of "globalisation." Surviving in misery and without rights, they are regularly described as a virtual slave labour force in the Israeli press...
The current Barak proposal is to extend this programme, reducing still further the prospects even for mere survival for the Palestinians. A major barrier to the programme is the opposition of the Israeli business community, which relies on a captive Palestinian market for some $2.5 billion in annual exports, and has "forged links with Palestinian security officials" and Arafat's "economic adviser, enabling them to carve out monopolies with official PA consent" (Financial Times, 22 October; also New York Times, same day). They have also hoped to set up industrial zones in the territories, transferring pollution and exploiting a cheap labour force in maquiladora-style installations owned by Israeli enterprises and the Palestinian elite, who are enriching themselves in the time-honoured fashion. Barak's new proposals appear to be more of a warning than a plan, though they are a natural extension of what has come before. Insofar as they are implemented, they would extend the project of "invisible transfer" that has been underway for many years, and that makes more sense than outright "ethnic cleansing" (as we call the process when carried out by official enemies). People compelled to abandon hope and offered no opportunities for meaningful existence will drift elsewhere, if they have any chance to do so.
The plans, which have roots in traditional goals of the Zionist movement from its origins (across the ideological spectrum), were articulated in internal discussion by Israeli government Arabists in 1948 while outright ethnic cleansing was underway: their expectation was that the refugees "would be crushed" and "die," while "most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries." Current plans, whether imposed by coercive diplomacy or outright force, have similar goals. They are not unrealistic if they can rely on the world-dominant power and its intellectual classes. The current situation is described accurately by Amira Hass, in Israel's most prestigious daily (Ha'aretz, 18 October). Seven years after the Declaration of Principles in September 1993 -- which foretold this outcome for anyone who chose to see -- "Israel has security and administrative control" of most of the West Bank and 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip. It has been able "to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the West Bank, and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews only. During these days of strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can see how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000 Jews have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands. The blood bath that has been going on for three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of lying and deception, just as the first Intifada was the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation."
The settlement and construction programmes continue, with US support, whoever may be in office. On 18 August, Ha'aretz noted that two governments -- Rabin and Barak -- had declared that settlement was "frozen," in accord with the dovish image preferred in the US and by much of the Israeli left. They made use of the "freezing" to intensify settlement, including economic inducements for the secular population, automatic grants for ultra-religious settlers, and other devices, which can be carried out with little protest while "the lesser of two evils" happens to be making the decisions, a pattern hardly unfamiliar elsewhere. "There is freezing and there is reality," the report observes caustically. The reality is that settlement in the occupied territories has grown over four times as fast as in Israeli population centres, continuing -- perhaps accelerating -- under Barak. Settlement brings with it large infrastructure projects designed to integrate much of the region within Israel, while leaving Palestinians isolated, apart from "Palestinian roads" that are travelled at one's peril. Another journalist with an outstanding record, Danny Rubinstein, points out that "readers of the Palestinian papers get the impression (and rightly so) that activity in the settlements never stops. Israel is constantly building, expanding and reinforcing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is always grabbing homes and lands in areas beyond the 1967 lines -- and of course, this is all at the expense of the Palestinians, in order to limit them, push them into a corner and then out. In other words, the goal is to eventually dispossess them of their homeland and their capital, Jerusalem" (Ha'aretz, 23 October).
Readers of the Israeli press, Rubinstein continues, are largely shielded from the unwelcome facts, though not entirely so. In the US, it is far more important for the population to be kept in ignorance, for obvious reasons: the economic and military programmes rely crucially on US support, which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known. To illustrate, on 3 October, after a week of bitter fighting and killing, the defence correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade," an agreement with the US to provide Israel with 35 Blackhawk military helicopters and spare parts at a cost of $525 million, along with jet fuel, following the purchase shortly before of patrol aircraft and Apache attack helicopters. These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in the US inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. It would be unfair to say that those providing the gifts cannot discover the fact. In a database search, David Peterson found that they were reported in the Raleigh (North Carolina) press. The sale of military helicopters was condemned by Amnesty International (19 October), because these "US-supplied helicopters have been used to violate the human rights of Palestinians and Arab Israelis during the recent conflict in the region." Surely that was anticipated, barring advanced cretinism.
Israel has been condemned internationally (the US abstaining) for "excessive use of force," in a "disproportionate reaction" to Palestinian violence. That includes even rare condemnations by the International Committee of the Red Cross, specifically, for attacks on at least 18 Red Cross ambulances (NYT, 4 October). Israel's response is that it is being unfairly singled out for criticism. The response is entirely accurate. Israel is employing official US doctrine, known here as "the Powell doctrine," though it is of far more ancient vintage, tracing back centuries: Use massive force in response to any perceived threat. Official Israeli doctrine allows "the full use of weapons against anyone who endangers lives and especially at anyone who shoots at our forces or at Israelis" (Israeli military legal adviser Daniel Reisner, FT, 6 October). Full use of force by a modern army includes tanks, helicopter gunships, sharpshooters aiming at civilians (often children), etc. US weapons sales "do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't be used against civilians," a Pentagon official said; he "acknowledged however that anti-tank missiles and attack helicopters are not traditionally considered tools for crowd control" -- except by those powerful enough to get away with it, under the protective wings of the reigning superpower. "We cannot second-guess an Israeli commander who calls in a Cobra (helicopter) gunship because his troops are under attack," another US official said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 3 October). Accordingly, such killing machines must be provided in an unceasing flow.
It is not surprising that a US client state should adopt standard US military doctrine, which has left a toll too awesome to record, including in very recent years. The US and Israel are, of course, not alone in adopting this doctrine, and it is sometimes even condemned: namely, when adopted by enemies targeted for destruction. A recent example is the response of Serbia when its territory (as the US insists it is) was attacked by Albanian-based guerrillas, killing Serb police and civilians and abducting civilians (including Albanians) with the openly-announced intent of eliciting a "disproportionate response" that would arouse Western indignation, then NATO military attack. Very rich documentation from US, NATO, and other Western sources is now available, most of it produced in an effort to justify the bombing. Assuming these sources to be credible, we find that the Serbian response -- while doubtless "disproportionate" and criminal, as alleged -- does not compare with the standard resort to the same doctrine by the US and its clients, Israel included.
In the mainstream British press, we can at last read that "If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States [which is not accurate, unfortunately]. Its development and settlement of the West Bank 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 self-administered 'bantustans', with 'whites' monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs -- flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending -- would be recognised as scandalous too" (Observer, Guardian, 15 October).
Such conclusions will come as no surprise to those whose vision has not been constrained by the doctrinal blinders imposed for many years. It remains a major task to remove them in the most important country. That is a prerequisite to any constructive reaction to the mounting chaos and destruction, terrible enough before our eyes, and with long-term implications that are not pleasant to contemplate.
Comments
by Efraim Karsh
NO TERM has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than "occupation." For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international media of Israel's supposedly illegitimate presence on Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel's allegedly brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many catchphrases it means different things to different people.
For most Western observers, the term "occupation" describes Israel's control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June 1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of "occupations" dating back to the very creation of Israel on "stolen" land. If you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on London's Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labeled "Occupied Palestine." That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" that is meant to reverse the effects of the "1948 occupation"-i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel's actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today's terrorist attacks were "what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people"-a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.
Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between post-1967 and pre-1967 "occupations." "I come to you today with a heavy heart," she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer, "leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing naqba [catastrophe]":
In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population .... On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties.
This original "occupation"-that is, again, the creation and existence of the state of Israel-was later extended, in Ashrawi's narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:
Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.
Taken together, the charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent-and are plainly intended to be-a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.
IN 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of the area's inhabitants were parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.
Under a League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In 1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain returned the mandate to the League's successor, the United Nations, which in turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.
The state of Israel was thus created by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination-an act, moreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state's midst was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to include, among other areas, the two regions under contest today-namely, Gaza and the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed under international control).
As is well known, the implementation of the UN's partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."
This fact was keenly recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one official observed in mid-December 1947, "it does not appear that Arab Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel], unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as the British withdrawal is completed." A couple of months later, the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that "the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdallah, and the south to Egypt."
THE BRITISH proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank-- which were, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the 1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of "land for peace" as the cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories evacuated by Israel, would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers-Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity "for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem"-a clause that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.
At this time-we are speaking of the late 1960's-- Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. "Moderate" Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a mortal threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez alAssad openly referred to Palestine as "not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria"; there is no reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.
Nor, for that matter, did the populace of the West Bank and Gaza regard itself as a distinct nation. The collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society following the 1948 defeat had shattered an always fragile communal fabric, and the subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian diaspora prevented the crystallization of a national identity. Host Arab regimes actively colluded in discouraging any such sense from arising. Upon occupying the West Bank during the 1948 war, King Abdallah had moved quickly to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan, its residents became Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom's economic, political, and social structures.
For its part, the Egyptian government showed no desire to annex the Gaza Strip but had instead ruled the newly acquired area as an occupied military zone. This did not imply support of Palestinian nationalism, however, or of any sort of collective political awareness among the Palestinians. The local population was kept under tight control, was denied Egyptian citizenship, and was subjected to severe restrictions on travel.
(cont'd)
Most antizionists are antisemites
At the very least, such a characterization would require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented 20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered, driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the three decades of Israel's control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September 1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasir Arafat's PLO to destroy his monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh) between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO's support for Saddam Hussein's brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada against Israel during the late 1980's.
Such crude comparisons aside, to present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as "systematic oppression" is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first of all, that this occupation did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel's success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of IsraeliEgyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs' "final round" with Israel.
Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted by then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.
Israel's restraint in this sphere-which turned out to be desperately misguided-is only part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.
In the economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan's $1,050, Egypt's $600, Turkey's $1,630, and Tunisia's $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's (one of the betteroff Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians' standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
ALL THIS, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel's hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres. Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political influence in the territories. The publication of proPLO editorials was permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence. Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: "It does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don't build arms factories with it." Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.*
Given the extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel's administrative policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle against the Jewish state. Here Israel's counterinsurgency measures must be given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their standard of living. The fact remains, however, that during the two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little "armed resistance," and most terrorist attacks emanated from outside-from Jordan in the late 1960's, then from Lebanon.
Most antizionists are antisemites
But these things were not to be. By the mid1970's, the PLO had made itself into the "sole representative of the Palestinian people," and in short order Jordan and Egypt washed their hands of the West Bank and Gaza. Whatever the desires of the people living in the territories, the PLO had vowed from the moment of its founding in the mid1960's-well before the Six-Day war-to pursue its "revolution until victory," that is, until the destruction of the Jewish state. Once its position was secure, it proceeded to do precisely that.
BY THE mid-1990's, thanks to Oslo, the PLO had achieved a firm foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. Its announced purpose was to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood but its real purpose was to do what it knew best-namely, create an extensive terrorist infrastructure and use it against its Israeli "peace partner." At first it did this tacitly, giving a green light to other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; then it operated openly and directly.
But what did all this have to do with Israel's "occupation"? The declaration signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. During this interim period the territories would be administered by a Palestinian Council, to be freely and democratically elected after the withdrawal of Israeli military forces both from the Gaza Strip and from the populated areas of the West Bank.
By May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing Israeli settlements) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, Yasir Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza. On September 28, 1995, despite Arafat's abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the territories now under his control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas with the exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the Palestinian Council were held, and shortly afterward both the Israeli civil administration and military government were dissolved.
The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank's overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing short of revolutionary. At one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of the West Bank's 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60 percent of them-in the Jericho area and in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron-have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent live in towns, villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained "overriding responsibility for security." Some two percent of the West Bank's population-tens of thousands of Palestinians-continue to live in areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the Palestinian Authority maintains "functional jurisdiction."
In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. By no conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from the territories during these years be made to qualify as resistance to foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation.
IF THE stubborn persistence of Palestinian terrorism is not attributable to the continuing occupation, many of the worst outrages against Israeli civilians likewise occurred-contrary to the mantra of Palestinian spokesmen and their apologists-not at moments of breakdown in the Oslo "peace process" but at its high points, when the prospect of Israeli withdrawal appeared brightest and most imminent.
Suicide bombings, for example, were introduced in the atmosphere of euphoria only a few months after the historic Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn: eight people were murdered in April 1994 while riding a bus in the town of Afula. Six months later, 21 Israelis were murdered on a bus in Tel Aviv. In the following year, five bombings took the lives of a further 38 Israelis. During the short-lived government of the dovish Shimon Peres (November 1995-May 1996), after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, 58 Israelis were murdered within the span of one week in three suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Further disproving the standard view is the fact that terrorism was largely curtailed following Benjamin Netanyahu's election in May 1996 and the consequent slowdown in the Oslo process. During Netanyahu's three years in power, some 50 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks-a third of the casualty rate during the Rabin government and a sixth of the casualty rate during Peres's term.
There was a material side to this downturn in terrorism as well. Between 1994 and 1996, the Rabin and Peres governments had imposed repeated closures on the territories in order to stem the tidal wave of terrorism in the wake of the Oslo accords. This had led to a steep drop in the Palestinian economy. With workers unable to get into Israel, unemployment rose sharply, reaching as high as 50 percent in Gaza. The movement of goods between Israel and the territories, as well as between the West Bank and Gaza, was seriously disrupted, slowing exports and discouraging potential private investment.
The economic situation in the territories began to improve during the term of the Netanyahu government, as the steep fall in terrorist attacks led to a corresponding decrease in closures. Real GNP per capita grew by 3.5 percent in 1997, 7.7 percent in 1998, and 3.5 percent in 1999, while unemployment was more than halved. By the beginning of 1999, according to the World Bank, the West Bank and Gaza had fully recovered from the economic decline of the previous years.
Then, in still another turnabout, came Ehud Barak, who in the course of a dizzying six months in late 2000 and early 2001 offered Yasir Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state together with some Israeli territory, and making breathtaking concessions over Israel's capital city of Jerusalem. To this, however, Arafat's response was war. Since its launch, the Palestinian campaign has inflicted thousands of brutal attacks on Israeli civilians-suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, lynching, stonings-murdering more than 500 and wounding some 4,000.
In the entire two decades of Israeli occupation preceding the Oslo accords, some 400 Israelis were murdered; since the conclusion of that "peace" agreement, twice as many have lost their lives in terrorist attacks. If the occupation was the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel's most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation-that is, the withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance-is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first place.
There are limits to Israel's ability to transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long since been reached. To borrow from Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, confidence, and justice. From the birth of the Zionist movement until today, that disposition has remained conspicuously absent from the mind of the Palestinian leadership.
It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the Palestinians' rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of violence. Palestinian terrorism started well before 1967, and continued-and intensified-after the occupation ended in all but name. Rather, what is at fault is the perduring Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was itself an original act of "inhuman occupation" with which compromise of any final kind is beyond the realm of the possible. Until that disposition changes, which is to say until a different leadership arises, the idea of peace in the context of the Arab Middle East will continue to mean little more than the continuation of war by other means.
[Author note]
EFRAIM KARSH is head of Mediterranean studies at Kings College, University of London. His articles in COMMENTARY include "Israel's War" (April 2002) and "The Palestinians and the `Right of Return"' (May 2001).
Most antizionists are antisemites
i would take what you have to say more seriously if you didn't think that googling something and then repeating it without any context whatsoever was a good way of making a point.
Most antizionists are antisemites
you were acting like it was the palestinians who rejects everything...i showed you to be wrong, israel (not only violates the un and international law) but rejects peace plans all the time
you didn't have anything to say about the rest of it?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
you didn't show me to be wrong. you didn't show anything. you cut and pasted a list of headlines and you didn't put any of them in their proper context. some of the headlines offered clues as to their context, however.
for example, the saudi peace initiative- this "peace initiative" is a non-starter. one of its preconditions is that it stipulates that four and a half million arabs be allowed to live inside israel. any semi-sentient being knows that this is just a euphemism for the demographic liquidation of israel. the geneva initiative is the same way. israel is right to reject such garbage. the authors of these pipe dreams KNOW israel will reject these ideas so they cynically propose them anyway because they know it will make israel look stubborn in the eyes of people who don't care to look at the details.
Most antizionists are antisemites
but they should accept everything and anything israel decides to bestow upon them? right, got it :rolleyes:
again, you acted like it was the palestinians who just went around rejecting everything israel offered, yeah, they rejected things they didn't like...israel does the same, again you have to have israel up on a higher ground when in reality they look even
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
those of us with memories remember the issues of contention negotiated upon at the last real peace talks, at camp david in july 2000. for me, these various proposals have names other than "everything" and "things".
"things" must look even to you because you're content to see this entire issue in terms of abstractions. makes it easier for you to roll your eyes and talk like you're a paladin of even-handedness, itself. do not confuse this with reality, however. i have cited specific examples, while you have cited headlines detached from their actual subjects. under these circumstances, it's impossible to have an actual discussion with you.
Most antizionists are antisemites
http://forums.pearljam.com/showpost.php?p=4265066&postcount=33
It is impossible to have a civil dicussion with you and always has been. You choose to be insulting (which I see as a weakness and does absolutely nothing to prove your points) heavily biased, and you completely reject anything anyone has to sat against Israel. It's impossible to get an objective view form you. At least I can admit both sides are wrong and both are causing the problems. Trying to get anywhere with you in these discussions is like talking to a brick wall.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
tell hamas to recognize Israel and we will all hold hands around the world and sing "we are the world"
We have to ask oursleves what would drive us to suicide bomb a bus. Once we've answered that question, we know what's driving the conflict.
I'd say that Russia invading our country, destroying our government and taking all of our land and sovereignty would be sufficient reason for many people to take up arms.
I argue that, perhaps the only viable solution is for Israel to move somewhere else. You can say "nah fuck that, we have a right to this land" but the arabs are just going to say the same thing and conflict will never be resolved.
Personally, I think Israel/Palestine sucks geographically. It's a horrible piece of the world. Historically it's full of lies and violence. If I owned it, I'd evacuate and turn it into a crater.
Ex-Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon
Government Policies 'Create Hatred,' Israeli Newspaper Is Told
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A01
JERUSALEM, Nov. 14 -- Four former chiefs of Israel's powerful domestic security service said in an interview published Friday that the government's actions and policies during the three-year-old Palestinian uprising have gravely damaged the country and its people.
The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one called the immoral treatment of Palestinians.
"We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully," said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until 1986. "Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."
The statements to Israel's largest-circulation Hebrew-language daily newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, added to recent public criticism of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by Israeli political, military and civic leaders for his failure to stop terrorism or negotiate peace as the uprising enters its fourth year.
Members of the Sharon government said they would not comment directly on the statements.
"I don't want to add more fuel to this," said a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "These, of all people, should have known this is the worst time to conduct public debate on these issues."
The official said creating the image that "Israel is falling apart at the seams" could prompt Palestinian organizations to "intensify terrorist activity."
The former security chiefs said they agreed to the two-hour interview -- the first time the four have ever sat down together -- out of "serious concern for the condition of the state of Israel," according to Carmi Gillon, who ran Shin Bet in 1995 and 1996.
Maj. Gen. Ami Ayalon, who headed the agency from 1996 until 2000 and is co-author of a peace petition signed by tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, said: "We are taking sure and measured steps to a point where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people."
Shin Bet is Israel's dominant domestic security and intelligence service, with primary responsibility for the country's anti-terrorism efforts. It often plans and directs armed forces operations that support its own activities, including raids into Palestinian towns and villages in search of alleged terrorists, assassinations of suspected militants and interrogation of suspects. The current Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, is one of Sharon's most trusted and influential advisers, according to administration officials.
The four former Shin Bet leaders said they recognized the contradictions between some of their actions as security chiefs and their opinions today.
"Why is it that everyone -- [Shin Bet] directors, chief of staff, former security personnel -- after a long service in security organizations become the advocates of reconciliation with the Palestinians? Because they were there." said Yaakov Perry, whose term as security chief between 1988 and 1995 covered the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. "We know the material, the people in the field, and surprisingly, both sides."
The security chiefs denounced virtually every major military and political tactic of the Sharon administration, adding their voices to the dissent in Israel against the prime minister's handling of a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 Palestinians and nearly 900 Israelis and foreigners.
In recent weeks, the country's top general has criticized Sharon's clampdown on Palestinians in the West Bank; active and reserve Air Force pilots have publicly declared the military's use of missiles and bombs to kill militants in civilian neighborhoods to be "immoral"; activists have initiated independent peace proposals; and opinion polls have indicated that faith in Sharon is plummeting.
Perry said the country is "going in the direction of decline, nearly a catastrophe" in almost every area -- economic, political, social and security. "If something doesn't happen here, we will continue to live by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud and we will continue to destroy ourselves," he said.
The four men said Israel should be prepared to initiate a peace process unilaterally rather than wait for the Palestinians to bring a halt to terrorism, which is Sharon's overriding prerequisite for negotiations.
"As of today, we are preoccupied with preventing terror," Gillon said. "Why? Because this is the condition for making political progress. And this is a mistake."
"You are wrong if you think that this is a mistake," interjected Shalom. "It is not a mistake. It is an excuse -- an excuse for doing nothing."
The group was particularly critical of Sharon's attempt to sideline Arafat and declare him "irrelevant" -- also a key tenet of President Bush's Middle East policy.
"It was the mother of all errors with regard to Arafat," said Shalom, who has worked as an international business consultant since leaving the government. "We cannot determine who will have the greatest influence over there. So let us look at the Palestinians' political map, and it is a fact that nothing can happen without Arafat."
Israel should "stop talking about a partner already and do what is good for us," said Perry, now a bank chairman and businessman. "What is good for us is to be able to protect ourselves in the most effective manner . . . to waste fewer troops on guarding hilltops and settlements and three goats and eight cowboys."
The former security chiefs said the Jewish settlements that have proliferated across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are among the greatest obstacles to peace. "Sharon has often talked about the fact that we will be required to make painful compromises," Perry said, "and there are no painful compromises except for evacuating settlements."
Several of the chiefs also condemned the 400-mile fence and barrier complex Israel is erecting around the heart of the West Bank. Sharon has said the fence is needed to stop terrorists from infiltrating Israel. However, its path veers deep into the West Bank in several places.
"It creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel," Shalom said. "The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended."
Alluding to South Africa's former system of racial separation known as apartheid, he added: "The Palestinians are arguing, 'You wanted two states, and instead you are closing us up in a South African reality.' Therefore, the more we support the fence, they lose their dream and hope for an independent Palestinian state."
Ayalon, who is chairman of an irrigation systems company, said he considered much of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories "immoral, some of it patently immoral."
"Terror is not thwarted with bombs or helicopters," said Shalom, who asked rhetorically: "Why does this increase terror? Because it is overt, because it carries an element of vindictiveness."
"The problem, as of today, is that the political agenda has become solely a security agenda," said Gillon, who has also served as an ambassador. "It only deals with the question of how to prevent the next terror attack, not the question of how it is at all possible to pull ourselves out of the mess that we are in today."
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Please provide just one shred of evidence to support your fantasy. I won't hold my breath because I know for a fact that everything you've said above is complete bollocks. Still, whilst you're searching for the non-existent evidence you may surprise yourself and actually learn something about the truth of the situation over there.
Arafat lived a life of luxury did he?
Inside Arafat's compound of rubble
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1902566.stm
Arafat's base in 'desperate' shape
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/04/12/usat-ramallah.htm
Pictures of Arafats life of luxury..
http://electronicintifada.net/artman/uploads/eacompound6_001.gif
http://lmno4p.org/images/articles/arafat_compound_cleanup.jpg
[url=ttp://www.onlineathens.com/images/092102/israel.jpg]ttp://www.onlineathens.com/images/092102/israel.jpg[/url]
http://www.scaredsacred.org/arafatruin1.jpg
I suppose you'll be wishing that she gets cancer next? Seems you really are incapable of reasoned debate whenever someone on this board challenges your invented, self-serving fantasy of the history of the Israel-Palestine issue. You should have been permanently banned ages ago.
08-15-2006, 01:14 PM
Nobody should have to recognize Israel until Israel vows to end terrorism, and abides by international law by ending the illegal occupation.
The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to confrontation, driving home the importance of a diplomatic settlement. In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which expressed a broad international consensus on the general terms for a settlement. The current agreement is based entirely on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses it). Article I of the 1993 draft agreement, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations," specifies that "the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; no other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus resolving a central issue in the controversy in accord with US-Israeli demands.
UN 242 "emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security." It calls for "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." It calls for an agreement among states; Palestinian rights are mentioned only in the call for "a just settlement of the refugee problem," left unspecified. UN 242 is therefore thoroughly rejectionist, if we understand the concept of rejectionism in nonracist terms: as denial of the right to national self-determination of one or the other of the two contending parties in the former Palestine.
With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the contending states of the region over the next few years, though their interpretations differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel rejected full withdrawal.
The phrase "withdrawal from territories" has been a particular bone of contention. In most of the world (including Europe), it has been understood to imply Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied during the war, with at most minor -- and mutual -- adjustments. At first, that was also Washington's interpretation. UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg informed King Hussein of Jordan that the US insisted that "there must be a mutuality in adjustments," a classified State Department history observes: to both Israel and the Arab states, "U.S. officials emphasized that any territorial adjustments would be limited in nature and would not, of necessity, be detrimental to the Arab states"; there would be at most "minor reciprocal border rectifications" with no "substantial withdrawing of the [pre-war] map." It was on this understanding, explicitly conveyed by US government mediators, that the Arab states accepted the resolution, and the US itself unequivocally held to this interpretation until 1971. In those years, Israel was alone among major actors in rejecting this interpretation of the document.
The disagreements over interpretation came to a head in February 1971, when UN mediator Gunnar Jarring presented a proposal to Egypt and Israel that called for full peace between them in return for full Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory. Egyptian President Sadat accepted the proposal. Sadat's acceptance of Jarring's "famous" peace proposal was a "bombshell," Prime Minister Rabin recalls in his memoirs, a "milestone." While officially welcoming Egypt's expression "of its readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel," the government of Israel rejected the agreement, stating that "Israel will not withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines. The reasoning was explained by Haim Bar-Lev of the governing Labor Party: "I think that we could obtain a peace settlement on the basis of the earlier [pre-June 1967] borders. If I were persuaded that this is the maximum that we might obtain, I would say: agreed. But I think that it is not the maximum. I think that if we continue to hold out, we will obtain more."
The crucial question was how Washington would react. The Jarring-Sadat agreement was consistent with official US policy. There was, however, a conflict between the State Department and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who was then engaged in a campaign to undermine and displace Secretary of State Rogers, as he was soon to do.
Kissinger insisted that the US must insist upon "stalemate": no diplomacy, no negotiations. His position prevailed, and Sadat's peace offer was rejected.[/b]
Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in rejecting the standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN 242. The basic cause for the misery and suffering that followed is their conviction, which has proven to be correct, that "if we continue to hold out, we will obtain more."
The isolation of the US and Israel became still more marked by the mid-1970s, when the terms of the international consensus shifted to include a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thus departing from earlier rejectionism. In January 1976, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a settlement in terms of UN 242, with this amendment. The US veto, repeated later, excluded the Security Council from the diplomacy. The General Assembly continued to pass near-unanimous resolutions in similar terms (the US and Israel opposed); a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The US also blocked initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The last of the regular UN resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf conflict, in December 1990 (144-2).
Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the rejectionist camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the Islamic world, justly termed "extremist." The conclusions being unacceptable, the facts have been "vetoed" along with numerous peace initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole together with Sadat's "famous milestone" and much else that is inconvenient.
Blinded by the Truth
Noam Chomsky
Al-Ahram Weekly, November 2-8, 2000
After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli-occupied territories, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including 30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of force available.
Barak's plan was not given in detail, but the outlines are familiar: they conform to the "final status map" presented by the US-Israel as the basis for the Camp David negotiations that collapsed in July. This plan, extending US-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier years, called for cantonisation of the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967, with mechanisms to ensure that usable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority (PA), playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the most obvious analogue. In the West Bank, a northern canton is to include Nablus and other Palestinian cities, a central canton is based in Ramallah, and a southern canton in Bethlehem; Jericho is to remain isolated. Palestinians would be effectively cut off from Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian life. Similar arrangements are likely in Gaza, with Israel keeping the southern coastal region and a small settlement at Netzarim (the site of many of the recent atrocities), which is hardly more than an excuse for a large military presence and roads splitting the Strip below Gaza City.
These proposals formalise the vast settlement and construction programmes that Israel has been conducting, thanks to munificent US aid, with increasing energy since the US was able to implement its version of the "peace process" after the Gulf War. The goal of the negotiations was to secure official PA adherence to this project. Two months after they collapsed, the current phase of violence began. Tensions, always high, were raised when the Barak government authorised a visit by Ariel Sharon with 1,000 police to the Muslim religious sites (Al-Aqsa) on a Thursday (28 September). Sharon is the very symbol of Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going back to 1953. Sharon's announced purpose was to demonstrate "Jewish sovereignty" over the Al-Aqsa compound, but as the veteran correspondent Graham Usher points out, the "Al-Aqsa Intifada," as Palestinians call it, was not initiated by Sharon's visit; rather, by the massive and intimidating police and military presence that Barak introduced the following day, the day of prayers. Predictably, that led to clashes as thousands of people streamed out of the mosque, leaving seven Palestinians dead and 200 wounded.
Whatever Barak's purpose, there could hardly have been a more efficient way to set the stage for the shocking atrocities of the following weeks. The same can be said about the failed negotiations, which focused on Jerusalem, a condition observed strictly by US commentary. Possibly Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling was exaggerating when he wrote that a solution to this problem "could have been reached in five minutes," but he is right to say that "by any diplomatic logic [it] should have been the easiest issue to solve (Ha'aretz, 4 October).
It is understandable that Clinton-Barak should want to suppress what they are doing in the occupied territories, which is far more important. Why did Arafat agree? Perhaps because he recognises that the leadership of the Arab states regard the Palestinians as a nuisance, and have little problem with the Bantustan-style settlement, but cannot overlook administration of the religious sites, fearing the reaction of their own populations. Nothing could be better calculated to set off a confrontation with religious overtones -- the most ominous kind, as centuries of experience reveal. The primary innovation of Barak's new plan is that the US-Israeli demands are to be imposed by direct force instead of coercive diplomacy, and in a harsher form, to punish the victims who refused to concede politely. The outlines are in basic accord with policies established informally in 1968 (the Allon Plan), and variants that have been proposed since by both political groupings (the Sharon Plan, the Labour government plans, and others). It is important to recall that the policies have not only been proposed, but implemented, with the support of the US. That support has been decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that followed, culminating in the "Oslo process."
Since all of this has been effectively vetoed from history in the US, it takes a little work to discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded. As noted, Barak's plan is a particularly harsh version of familiar US-Israeli rejectionism. It calls for terminating electricity, water, telecommunications, and other services that are doled out in meagre rations to the Palestinian population, who are now under virtual siege. It should be recalled that independent development was ruthlessly barred by the military regime from 1967, leaving the people in destitution and dependency, a process that has worsened considerably during the US-run "Oslo process." One reason is the "closures" regularly instituted, most brutally by the more dovish Labour-based governments. As discussed by another outstanding journalist, Amira Hass, this policy was initiated by the Rabin government "years before Hamas had planned suicide attacks, [and] has been perfected over the years, especially since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority." An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control, closure has been accompanied by the importation of an essential commodity to replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian labour on which much of the economy relies: hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from around the world, many of them victims of the "neoliberal reforms" of the recent years of "globalisation." Surviving in misery and without rights, they are regularly described as a virtual slave labour force in the Israeli press...
The plans, which have roots in traditional goals of the Zionist movement from its origins (across the ideological spectrum), were articulated in internal discussion by Israeli government Arabists in 1948 while outright ethnic cleansing was underway: their expectation was that the refugees "would be crushed" and "die," while "most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries." Current plans, whether imposed by coercive diplomacy or outright force, have similar goals. They are not unrealistic if they can rely on the world-dominant power and its intellectual classes. The current situation is described accurately by Amira Hass, in Israel's most prestigious daily (Ha'aretz, 18 October). Seven years after the Declaration of Principles in September 1993 -- which foretold this outcome for anyone who chose to see -- "Israel has security and administrative control" of most of the West Bank and 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip. It has been able "to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the West Bank, and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews only. During these days of strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can see how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000 Jews have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands. The blood bath that has been going on for three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of lying and deception, just as the first Intifada was the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation."
The settlement and construction programmes continue, with US support, whoever may be in office. On 18 August, Ha'aretz noted that two governments -- Rabin and Barak -- had declared that settlement was "frozen," in accord with the dovish image preferred in the US and by much of the Israeli left. They made use of the "freezing" to intensify settlement, including economic inducements for the secular population, automatic grants for ultra-religious settlers, and other devices, which can be carried out with little protest while "the lesser of two evils" happens to be making the decisions, a pattern hardly unfamiliar elsewhere. "There is freezing and there is reality," the report observes caustically. The reality is that settlement in the occupied territories has grown over four times as fast as in Israeli population centres, continuing -- perhaps accelerating -- under Barak. Settlement brings with it large infrastructure projects designed to integrate much of the region within Israel, while leaving Palestinians isolated, apart from "Palestinian roads" that are travelled at one's peril. Another journalist with an outstanding record, Danny Rubinstein, points out that "readers of the Palestinian papers get the impression (and rightly so) that activity in the settlements never stops. Israel is constantly building, expanding and reinforcing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is always grabbing homes and lands in areas beyond the 1967 lines -- and of course, this is all at the expense of the Palestinians, in order to limit them, push them into a corner and then out. In other words, the goal is to eventually dispossess them of their homeland and their capital, Jerusalem" (Ha'aretz, 23 October).
Readers of the Israeli press, Rubinstein continues, are largely shielded from the unwelcome facts, though not entirely so. In the US, it is far more important for the population to be kept in ignorance, for obvious reasons: the economic and military programmes rely crucially on US support, which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known. To illustrate, on 3 October, after a week of bitter fighting and killing, the defence correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade," an agreement with the US to provide Israel with 35 Blackhawk military helicopters and spare parts at a cost of $525 million, along with jet fuel, following the purchase shortly before of patrol aircraft and Apache attack helicopters. These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in the US inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. It would be unfair to say that those providing the gifts cannot discover the fact. In a database search, David Peterson found that they were reported in the Raleigh (North Carolina) press. The sale of military helicopters was condemned by Amnesty International (19 October), because these "US-supplied helicopters have been used to violate the human rights of Palestinians and Arab Israelis during the recent conflict in the region." Surely that was anticipated, barring advanced cretinism.
Israel has been condemned internationally (the US abstaining) for "excessive use of force," in a "disproportionate reaction" to Palestinian violence. That includes even rare condemnations by the International Committee of the Red Cross, specifically, for attacks on at least 18 Red Cross ambulances (NYT, 4 October). Israel's response is that it is being unfairly singled out for criticism. The response is entirely accurate. Israel is employing official US doctrine, known here as "the Powell doctrine," though it is of far more ancient vintage, tracing back centuries: Use massive force in response to any perceived threat. Official Israeli doctrine allows "the full use of weapons against anyone who endangers lives and especially at anyone who shoots at our forces or at Israelis" (Israeli military legal adviser Daniel Reisner, FT, 6 October). Full use of force by a modern army includes tanks, helicopter gunships, sharpshooters aiming at civilians (often children), etc. US weapons sales "do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't be used against civilians," a Pentagon official said; he "acknowledged however that anti-tank missiles and attack helicopters are not traditionally considered tools for crowd control" -- except by those powerful enough to get away with it, under the protective wings of the reigning superpower. "We cannot second-guess an Israeli commander who calls in a Cobra (helicopter) gunship because his troops are under attack," another US official said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 3 October). Accordingly, such killing machines must be provided in an unceasing flow.
It is not surprising that a US client state should adopt standard US military doctrine, which has left a toll too awesome to record, including in very recent years. The US and Israel are, of course, not alone in adopting this doctrine, and it is sometimes even condemned: namely, when adopted by enemies targeted for destruction. A recent example is the response of Serbia when its territory (as the US insists it is) was attacked by Albanian-based guerrillas, killing Serb police and civilians and abducting civilians (including Albanians) with the openly-announced intent of eliciting a "disproportionate response" that would arouse Western indignation, then NATO military attack. Very rich documentation from US, NATO, and other Western sources is now available, most of it produced in an effort to justify the bombing. Assuming these sources to be credible, we find that the Serbian response -- while doubtless "disproportionate" and criminal, as alleged -- does not compare with the standard resort to the same doctrine by the US and its clients, Israel included.
In the mainstream British press, we can at last read that "If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States [which is not accurate, unfortunately]. Its development and settlement of the West Bank 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 self-administered 'bantustans', with 'whites' monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs -- flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending -- would be recognised as scandalous too" (Observer, Guardian, 15 October).
Such conclusions will come as no surprise to those whose vision has not been constrained by the doctrinal blinders imposed for many years. It remains a major task to remove them in the most important country. That is a prerequisite to any constructive reaction to the mounting chaos and destruction, terrible enough before our eyes, and with long-term implications that are not pleasant to contemplate.