March 2, 2007
September 19, 2006
Road maps, prospects of peace, etc. Talk of Olmert and Abbas getting together. Talk of Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas getting together for a unity administration.
It’s all rubbish. A charade. Waste of words, waste of time. It’s scandalous that Western leaders talk as if meaningful deliberations are on the verge of taking place (usually accompanied by some notion of a Palestinian leadership seeing sense or, in the case of Yasser Arafat, dying off), and scandalous that the Western media reproduces and fuels the ritual. Who is fooling whom?
Israel has subordinated a population on ethnic grounds, some for fifty-seven years, some for thirty-nine years. Generations have died and generations have been born. Some have resided in nothing but refugee camps – permanent refugees in no man’s land.
The gap in positions and perceptions is reflected in the evacuation of Gaza in mid 2005. The evacuation of Gaza was a radical step for Israel (and pervasively misinterpreted in the Western media), dependent on Ariel Sharon’s status and his strategic nous, but of minor significance for Palestinian liberation (Barghouti, Al-Ahram, December 2005; A&A, 23 August 2006) because of encompassing restrictions – precisely Sharon’s intent.
Michael Neumann was publishing his The Case Against Israel at the same time as the withdrawal, and his comments are prescient:
Israel still controls the borders, the airspace, the coastline and indeed everything that happens in the Gaza strip. Israel therefore has not ceded any sovereignty over that area. … New and terrible constraints might be imposed on them without warning, negotiation, or even prior notice. … [The Israeli withdrawal] does not in itself represent a substantial step forward.
If a mediator was brought in from another planet, that person might readily say – give the Palestinians their state on the pre-1967 boundaries. 22% is a good bargain. What’s the problem?
* The problem is East Jerusalem. The Palestinians want it as the centre of a viable sovereign state. The Israelis want it for reasons of lebensraum.
* The problem is the greater West Bank. The Israelis want the choice bits. Israel wants to retain the settlements of the bulk of the 400,000 plus Jewish population implanted since 1967 (East Jerusalem as non-negotiable, and the route of the wall through the rest of the West Bank).
Water is the liquid oil, the liquid gold, the currency of occupation. When it comes to the thrust for land per se, it is difficult to discern the relative imperatives of lebensraum and crude mercenary settler colonialism – the two motifs appears to have become neatly fused. They were there from the seventh day of the six-day war.
((In 1969, with the settlement program well on track, then Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan claimed (quoted in Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle):
… from the point of view of the security of the State [the only grounds on which appropriation of land could be conceivably defended under international law], the establishment of the settlements has no great importance. [It was necessary to create] political faits accomplis on the principle … that no place of settlement or agricultural use will be abandoned.
Officials presiding over the appropriation confirmed the conceit (reported in Haaretz in October 1969, quoted by David Hirst in The Gun and the Olive Branch):
We have to use the pretext of security needs and the authority of the military governor as there is no way of driving out the Arabs from their land so long as they refuse to go and accept our compensation [compensation?].
Dayan again in 1969 (quoted in Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle):
… the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel.))
* The problem is the Golan. Were Palestinians to be granted a higher right to the West Bank in toto, the Golan would be up for handing back to the Syrians.
* The problem is the question of the Palestinian’s ‘Right of Return’ to their homeland, including the rights of displaced Arab Israeli citizens. Conceivably the ‘right of return’ question might be separated for the moment from the establishment of a separate state, but such a separation is unacceptable to Israel.
The problem thus is the legitimacy of Israel itself. And the problem behind the problem is that a state created and maintained on the basis of ethnicity (given the unfortunate inheritance of a residue of non-Jews that could not be expelled – at least yet) has no legitimacy.
To acknowledge the obvious is not to wish ‘the Jews into the sea’. Here Neumann’s The Case Against Israel is useful. Neumann as philosopher has a clarity of mind rare in the Israel/Palestine literature. For Neumann, the issue of the moral legitimacy of Israel and its survival are separate issues. One has a responsibility to discredit the first while accepting the second.
In practice, wiping out a powerful state such as the US or Israel would cause even more suffering than letting it survive. … Israel, like any other illegitimate state, does for all practical purposes have the right to exist. … Israel’s existence is tainted, not sacred, but it is projected by the same useful international conventions that allow others, in the name of peace, to retain their ill-gotten gains. Israel’s right to exist … can be distinguished from any right ‘to be born’ or to come into existence.
Unfortunately, perhaps Neumann’s clarity helps us better to comprehend the peculiarities of the beast that is Israel. The broad spectrum of Israeli politics (save for the religious) is well aware of Israel’s lack of legitimacy (even if Israel’s global cheer squad has succumbed to its own propaganda). But it cannot be acknowledged because acknowledgment would demand reconciliation.
The Israeli Right has always been clearer and more open on this than has Labor. Here is Menahem Begin in 1969, answering a question regarding ‘recognition of the existence of a Palestinian people’ at Ein Haroresh, a Mapam (left Zionist) Kibbutz. The quote is reproduced in Ariel Bober’s 1972 (Trotskyist) The Other Israel:
My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of ‘Palestine’, you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came. Only if it is the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in Ein Hahoresh and in Deganiyah B. If it is not your country, your fatherland, the country of your ancestors and of your sons, then what are you doing here? You came to another people’s homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land ...
Ergo, a Palestinian state, no matter how small, is a recognition of Palestine, belonging ‘to a people who lived here before [they] came’.
From the ‘other’ side of politics, Yitzhak Rabin had this to say after he lost office in 1977 to Begin. From his ‘The Risks of Peace’ (1979?) in The Rabin Memoirs:
The first [of three basic options for solving the Palestinian problem], advocated by the Palestinian extremists (basically the PLO) is to create a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. … [Such a state will surely] be ruled by the most extreme faction in the Palestinian political spectrum – the PLO. …
Although Labor and the Likud differ in their views on the solution to the Palestinian question, we both opposed in the strongest terms the creation of a Palestinian ‘mini-state’ in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Rabin claimed that a Palestinian state as a thin edge of the wedge - it would be merely a first phase in the achievement of a ‘secular democratic Palestine, to be built on the ruins of the State of Israel’. Rabin’s proposed solution was to take the best bits of the West Bank and hand over the rest and the Palestinian population to Jordan, which he claimed was big enough to handle the Palestinian refugees and, moreover, ‘was ready to accept such an approach’.
Rabin again:
I would venture to say that [the Palestinian question] is probably one of the most befogged issues on the international agenda today. Since I have already stated that I do not accept the notion of autonomy as a basis for the ultimate solution … this is probably as good a place as any to dispel some of the fog, take a hard look at the facts, and explore what I believe to be the only feasible answer to this very complex and painful issue. [Jordan to the rescue, as above]
As I see it, there is really no ideal solution to the Palestinian problem. A terrible human tragedy has taken place, and we believe that it was created by the Arab countries in 1947-49, when they rejected the United Nations’ partition plan and continued to (some are still struggling) against the very existence of the State of Israel.
Some ‘hard look at the facts’! What did the United Nations partition plan have to do with the Israel under his feet?
It is instructive to confront with what indifference Rabin conceived of the Palestinian population. They are as dangerous animals in the zoo, not human, to be organised for Israel’s convenience - 'I do not accept the notion of autonomy ...'. They are also conceived of as an internal problem, of no concern to the world.
Rabin’s aloof language of dismissal was little different in substance from Moshe Dayan’s blunter language to a meeting in September 1967 (quoted in Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle). He urged instruction to the Arabs:
… we have no solution, and you shall continue to live like dogs – and whoever prefers may leave …
Is it surprising that the Palestinians see things differently? Robert Malley, a Clinton Middle East bureaucrat, is a sympathetic observer. Malley has a telling paragraph on the psychology of Hamas (in the 21 September issue of the New York Review of Books);
The Islamists are determined to alter the rules of a game that, in the recent period at least, they see as having been fundamentally rigged. In their eyes, Israel is the occupier, holds prisoners, engages in large-scale military operations, and yet Palestinians are asked to behave, demonstrate their worthiness, and offer political compromise. The conflict, they argue, began in 1948, when Palestinians were uprooted and an alien entity came into being; today, it has been reduced to a mundane territorial dispute in which acts of resistance are condemned as unacceptable violations of the status quo and Israeli concessions as laudable gestures of statesmanship. Out of fear of greater Israeli military power, Palestinians are advised to hold their fire; to gain international support, they are asked to soothe and seduce the West. What, Hamas asks, has all that gotten them?
… Hamas's message is that it is not afraid or in a hurry; that if it is prevented from governing or otherwise bears the brunt of attacks, it can hit back; that if Israeli attacks threaten to bring the PA down—an increasingly plausible possibility—Hamas can survive without it; and that it will gain notice through steadfastness rather than eagerness to please. Acceptance of the three conditions of the Quartet has no place in this worldview, nor indeed do any political concessions aimed solely at demonstrating good will. Instead, Hamas will try to govern, but at the same time insist on reestablishing a new balance of power and, as it sees it, restoring a sense of mutuality and dignity.
A pervasive divide: two contrary public stances on 1948; ‘live like dogs’ versus ‘dignity’; the West demands self-abnegation versus a natural refusal to comply. Inhumanity versus humanity. Equals impasse.
So the Israelis have a two-fold profound opposition to a Palestinian state. They want the land for its own sake. And they want to obliterate the past. The two are integrally related. They also want the land to obliterate the past. Go back to the Begin enunciation in 1969.
The subjugation of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories is the cost of the legitimation of the Jewish state.
There is no force of any magnitude against the latter; ergo, there is no force of any magnitude against the former.
What are the prospects of a Palestinian state? A betting person would have to conclude that the odds are not discernibly different from zero. There will never be a Palestinian state?
Source: Alert and Alarmed