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Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
Ben-Ami, Shlomo
Citation (APA): Ben-Ami, S. (2006). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
I Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict
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Nor were the restrictions on land acquisition an obstacle the Zionists could not overcome. Throughout, the Arabs’ incompetent leadership, their lack of purpose and national cohesion, proved to be a major ally of the Zionist enterprise. White Papers notwithstanding, Arab landowners ready to sell land to the Jews and to betray their own national cause were never in short supply. As no other than King Abdullah of Transjordan observed in his memoirs, ‘The Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in … weeping [about it].’
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The war for Palestine in 1948 was lost by the Arab community ten years before it even began. The Arab Revolt had, of course, an understandable rationale behind it, namely, to force Britain to reverse her policies in favour of the National Home for the Jews, stop immigration and curtail the land acquisition by the Zionists. But the method and the evolution of the Revolt reflected rage and blind despair more than organisation or careful strategy. The result would be a resounding defeat for the Palestinian Arabs that would bring them to the ultimate débâcle of 1948 in a state of fatalistic disarray. The years between the Arab Revolt and the Naqbah of 1948 witnessed the dismemberment of the Palestinian community and the loss of their political autonomy to the extent that when they had to face the challenge of partition and war in 1947–8, they were no longer the masters of their own destiny. By then their cause would be usurped by the neighbouring Arab states. It was not until the emergence of the Fatah movement and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in the mid 1960s that the Palestinians recovered the control of their own cause.
II Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases?
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The paradox of the winter of 1947 was that the Jews, who accepted Resolution 181–the Jewish public acclaimed its endorsement by the UN with genuine outbursts of jubilation–were ready and well deployed to face a war should this be the outcome, and the Arabs, who rejected the Resolution out of hand and made no secret of their intention to subvert it, were not at all prepared for war. Ben-Gurion, who upon his appointment as the ‘defence minister’ of the Jewish Agency in 1946 made it clear that the time had now arrived for ‘a showdown of force, a Jewish military showdown’, had been for some time meticulously preparing for a war he was convinced, at least ever since the Arab Revolt, was inevitable. The Palestinians, who on 1 December 1947 made their views clear when the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike, were totally unprepared and poorly equipped for an armed conflict. Arab society had been crumbling from within ever since the brutal repression of the 1936–9 Revolt. Leaderless and decapitated of their traditional elites, deeply fragmented, respectful and frightened of the Yishuv’s military power, and disorientated as to their real or achievable objectives, the Palestinians approached the imminent conflict and, as it turned out, their second catastrophe in a decade, in a state of disarray and fatalistic despair.
III The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace?
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On moral grounds one could of course convincingly defend the case for the repatriation of refugees. But this was out of the question in a historical and political context, where a clash existed between an emergent Jewish state and its defeated enemies, for whom the repatriation of refugees was one way of hampering the growth and development of the newborn, yet intimidating, state against which they harboured understandable intentions of revanche. At the Lausanne Peace Conference Israel eventually agreed to the repatriation of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, but this was almost by force of habit rejected out of hand by the Arabs as too little. Too little it might have been, but Israel made the offer only with the hope of getting relief from American pressure. The Arabs clearly missed an opportunity to call Israel’s bluff.
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The Israelis might have been tough negotiators, but the dysfunctionality of the Jordanian political system was now the major obstacle to a settlement. A situation was emerging in Jordan where the King’s legitimacy for striking a deal with Israel was being seriously undermined by a supposedly patriotic, pan-Arab, philo-Palestinian and pan-Islamic government. As it turned out, the annexation of the West Bank extended the borders of the Hashemite kingdom but, by Palestinising the kingdom and shifting the emphasis of Jordanian politics to a pan-Arab sensibility towards the plight of the Palestinians, it diminished the King’s power and capacity to continue being the undisputed autocratic leader he had been thus far. On 17 February 1950 the King made a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of his peace strategy with Israel by proposing a non-aggression pact. This was a brilliant move, for it could unleash a dynamic leading to a possible peace deal in the future. It also implicitly meant Israel’s recognition of Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. The agreement could likewise allow Israel to claim her first political breakthrough with an Arab state and a crack in the Arab economic boycott. There were even some provisions in Abdullah’s proposal that could satisfy the Palestinians by opening judicial channels for refugees to reclaim their abandoned property in Israel. The Israeli Cabinet ratified the agreement at its meeting of 22 February, with Foreign Minister Sharett praising the ‘psychological’ importance of the document. But it was again the Jordanians, not the Israelis, who failed to deliver. Abu al-Huda’s government got cold feet and unilaterally changed both the title and the content of the agreement. It was now becoming clear that the Palestinisation of the kingdom and the rift between the King and a no longer docile political class had emerged as an insurmountable obstacle to an Israeli–Jordanian settlement, however modest its provisions. Abdullah could not allow himself the political luxury of being exposed as a yielding king in conflict with a patriotic pan-Arab government.
IV The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel
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It is true that the conflict existed before superpower competition and, as we can see today, it still persists after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the struggle for mastery in the Middle East by the two big powers blocked the possibility of a major peace breakthrough for years. Conspicuously, Egypt’s peace with Israel in 1979 started as a bold bilateral move behind the back of the superpowers. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, the Oslo accords of 1993 between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s peace with Jordan a year later, and the most serious attempts to reach an Israeli–Syrian settlement throughout the 1990s were all possible only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
V The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories
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By pushing Palestine to the forefront of the struggle against the Jewish state, Nasser radically changed the parameters of the conflict. Now it was no longer just a border dispute between sovereign states, and one that was susceptible to a rational solution, but a conflict of an almost mythological nature over the plight of the Palestinians and their ‘inalienable’ rights, where hardly any room for compromise could exist. It is from this perspective that Sadat’s peace initiative, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, needs to be understood. To make peace he needed to extricate Egypt’s conflict with Israel from the paralysing hold of the Palestinian dilemma into which Nasser had locked it and bring it back to the realm of rationality as a solvable border dispute between two sovereign states.
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Lack of superpower guarantees, an almost apocalyptic fear of physical annihilation, the threat of a Nasserite Middle East bent on the destruction of Israel, a fatalistic pessimism as to the chances that the Arab world would ever reconcile itself to the existence of a Jewish state in its midst and the ever-present Holocaust complex, was the context for Ben-Gurion’s quest for a credible nuclear option. The nuclear option could also be seen as a protest against, or an alternative to, America’s reluctance to accord solid and unequivocal conventional guarantees to Israel’s existence and incorporate it into an organic regional alliance. Indeed, there were those in the Israeli political system who wanted to use the Dimona nuclear reactor as a way of pressuring America into securing Israel’s conventional capabilities.
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Ben-Gurion oscillated frantically from a strategy of deterrence to the politics of hysteria. He bombarded world leaders with dramatic appeals for an international commitment to the independence and territorial integrity of all the states in the Middle East. Whatever territorial dreams he might have harboured in the past, he was now a keen champion of the status quo. To him, the territorial phase of Zionism was over and the safety of Israel within the borders of 1949 was his exclusive concern. Only the full demilitarisation of the West Bank and a formal defence treaty with America could set his mind at rest.
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Nor was Jordan spared Israel’s policy of swift and disproportionate retaliations. Such was the case of the Samu Operation in November 1966. After insistently pointing at Damascus as the source of all evil, Israel suddenly and massively retaliated against Jordan in response to a local, relatively minor incident. A typical case of the feebleness of the politicians when confronted with the army’s tendency to dictate the scope and nature of military operations in a way that sometimes created new and unplanned political realities, Samu was a disproportionate operation that stood in stark contradiction to Israel’s official commitment to the stability of Hussein’s regime. Israel publicly humiliated and betrayed an Arab leader so far careful to stay aloof from the war rhetoric and practices of his Syrian neighbours in the north, and pushed him into the fold of the Arab war camp.
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The Arab League summit of January 1964 in Cairo went down in history as the first official all-Arab gathering to call for Arab military preparations in order to create the conditions ‘for the final liquidation of Israel’. The decision to divert the headwaters of the River Jordan in Syria and Lebanon–a United Arab Command was created to protect the project and prepare for war–and create the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under Ahmad al-Shuqayri’s chairmanship were understandably perceived in Israel as part of an overall Arab war strategy against the Jewish state. The task of liberating Palestine from ‘Zionist imperialism’ was reiterated in the Alexandria Arab League summit later that winter, and pledges were made by the League’s members to mobilise their resources against the Zionist enemy.
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King Hussein’s predicament proved to be even more serious than that of Nasser. In his case it was the very existence of his kingdom that was at stake. He did not want to be dragged into war, but was too weak to resist the tide. As much as the supposed threat posed by Israel, it was actually the pressure of Fatah and the PLO that put in jeopardy the stability of the Hashemite kingdom. For the PLO, liberating Palestine also meant overthrowing the Hashemites’ ‘colonialist rule’. The King harboured no illusions as to the ultimate rationale of the PLO’s presence in Jordan, namely, as he explicitly wrote to Nasser, ‘the destruction of Jordan’.
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And when retaliations and verbal threats failed to deter the Syrians, Rabin made it clear that his intention was to provoke the Syrians into an all-out war. In December 1966 he wrote to General Zvi Zamir, Israel’s military attaché in London: ‘an escalation with Syria is not against Israel’s interest, and in my view there is no better time than now for a confrontation with Syria. I prefer to go to war rather than allow this continuous harassment, especially if the Syrians persist in their efforts to facilitate the activity of Fatah on our border.’
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Nor was the restless General spared Ben-Gurion’s ire. From his seclusion in the Negev desert, the Old Man had been following the evolving crisis with awe. Precisely because he shared the military’s assessment that the closure of the Straits threatened to vitiate all the achievements of the Sinai Campaign and could soon turn into a question of ‘national survival’–this was Rabin’s expression–Ben-Gurion saw all his old fears coming true: Israel was now surrounded by an all-Arab coalition aggressively supported by the Soviet Union, without being able to rely on an alliance with, or security guarantees from, a Western superpower.
VI Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment
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There is, of course, much reason to doubt whether, even if formalised as an official peace proposal, the Arabs would have accepted the government’s peace guidelines as the platform for a full-fledged peace agreement with Israel. Israel’s shortcomings notwithstanding, the Arabs were by all accounts not yet ready for such a deal. The proof is that a more unequivocal American overture along the same lines as the Israeli Cabinet’s decision would soon be turned down by the Arabs and their Soviet patrons.
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And it was only when this euphemism was embedded in the language of a UN Security Council Resolution that Israel was ready to endorse it. The constructive ambiguity of the November 1967 Security Council Resolution Number 242, which called for peace based on the restitution of ‘territories’ instead of ‘the territories’, allowed Israel to claim that the borders would have to be modified on all fronts as a condition for peace and gave manoeuvring space to her post-war diplomacy. Resolution 242 was the result of the need to find a formula that would reconcile Israel’s unrealistic expectation to have full peace for less than all the territories, and the Arabs’ drive for a full restitution of land in exchange for a watered-down state of non-belligerency.
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Neither of the parties to the conflict was especially happy with Resolution 242’ s oblique and foggy formulas, least of all the Palestinians, whose problem was reduced in the Resolution to that of the humanitarian plight of refugees. The PLO’s outright rejection of 242 was an additional manifestation by the Palestinians that their struggle would from now on be independent of the Arabs’ diplomatic strategy. The Palestinians were about to disengage from the status of a tool in the hands of the Arab states to that of an independent subject in the history of the Middle East. As from the Palestinian débâcle of 1936–9 and later the 1948 Naqbah, the Palestinians had lost their independence as a national movement. They disappeared from the regional arena as autonomous players. The 1967 war, the defeat of the Arab armies with their consequent loss of a credible military option in the foreseeable future, and the relegation by Resolution 242 of the Palestinian problem to the margins of peacemaking in the region, signalled the beginning of a new phase in the history of Palestinian nationalism.
VII Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’
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Begin was thus positioning himself as the most eloquent and committed exponent of what could perhaps be defined as the ‘capsule theory’, namely the drive to reach a settlement with the surrounding Arab states that would ‘capsulate’, as it were, the West Bank and with it the Palestinian problem in an environment of binding peace agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. This, Begin believed, would allow Israel to exercise her full control of Eretz-Israel, yet deny the Palestinians the possibility of again triggering an all-Arab war against her.
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Sadat did not believe that a Soviet–American co-sponsorship of the peace process would bear the political fruits he wanted. He could see his fears vindicated already in a joint declaration of the superpowers that, to his dismay, endorsed the Israeli interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 when it spoke of ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in 1967’. And as to Begin, he was not yet ready to digest the concept of ‘the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’, one of the central premises upon which the Geneva Conference was to be convened.
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One lesson and legacy of Sadat’s initiative is that in highly protracted conflicts where deep emotions and historical hatred are involved, when almost every conceivable diplomatic formula has been tried, the shock of a visionary, generous and imaginative step is likely to open new and untold paths to peace. For the major problem in the Arab–Israeli conflict, as in many other intricate collisions throughout history, has always been the incapacity or unwillingness of leaders to conduct a peace policy that is not supported by what looked at the time like the legitimate, and frequently paralysing, consensus prevailing in their respective societies and polities. Leaders, more frequently than not, act as the hostages of the socio-political environment that produces them instead of shaping it. Anwar Sadat gained a privileged place in history and achieved immortality the moment he fled from the comfortable prison of inertia, and from the pseudo-solidarity and hollow rhetorical cohesion of Arab summits.
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Very few in the Arab world had much love for Arafat or for the PLO, ‘the cancer in our midst’, as King Hassan of Morocco defined it in his December meeting with Dayan and Tuhami. Years later this author would personally hear from the King, in his meeting with him in his Rabat palace in January 1993, similar harsh descriptions of Arafat and the PLO, an organisation he then confided to me had outlived its historical role and was becoming an obstacle to peace that needed to be dismantled. The King also related to me the advice he had given to Arafat’s deputy, Abu-Mazen, that the PLO should disband and allow the local Palestinian leadership in the territories to assume the responsibility for dealing directly with Israel. When I later reported my conversation with the King to Prime Minister Rabin he could not conceal his embarrassment, for it was precisely at that time that an Israeli team was negotiating in Oslo with a PLO delegation what later became known as the Oslo accords.
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Sadat had no higher regard for Arafat and the PLO than King Hassan. His weariness with the Palestinians exploded into open rage when in February 1978 the chief editor of Al-Ahram and a personal friend of the President, Yusuf al-Sibai, was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian squad, admittedly belonging to Abu Nidal’s splinter group, not to the PLO. To Sadat this was one more proof that Egypt was mortgaging its future for the sake of a people–‘pygmies’ and ‘hired killers’, as he put it to Israel’s Defence Minister Ezer Weizmann–who did not deserve Egypt’s sacrifices.
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But it took the almost Messianic commitment of President Carter and the most assertive and robust involvement of the United States to save the process from collapse and to force the parties to shoulder the formidable price of peace. ‘None of us believe we have much of a chance to succeed,’ confided Carter to his advisers when he invited the parties to the Camp David presidential retreat for a peace summit.
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It was Menachem Begin, not a left-wing radical, who subscribed at Camp David to such non-Jabotinskian concepts as these: ‘a recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements’, ‘the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects’ and ‘the Palestinians will participate in the determination of their own future’. Moreover, not only did Begin agree to discuss the return to the territories of the displaced Palestinians who left the West Bank during the Six Day War, but he also consented to reopen the 1948 chapter, that is, to negotiate ‘the resolution of the 1948 refugee problem’. And if all this were not enough, Begin succumbed to Carter’s pressure and agreed to ‘Resolution 242 in all its parts’, thus implicitly also endorsing the Resolution’s preamble about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’, and its possible applicability to other Arab fronts as well.
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It was a capital sin that the Palestinians should have rejected such a golden opportunity to join the Camp David process at a time when the West Bank was still practically free of Israeli settlements. This was a major missed opportunity by the Palestinian leadership. What was proposed to the Palestinians at Camp David, to use Oslo terms, was to turn the whole of the West Bank into Area B, that is, an area of Palestinian administrative rule and Israeli responsibility for security. Today, twenty-five years after Camp David and twelve years into the Oslo process, the Palestinians have hardly 20 per cent of the West Bank as Area B.
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In the aftermath of the Camp David accords, the Palestinians failed to do what they wisely did in 1988, namely call Israel’s bluff and join the peace process before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had created an irreversible reality.
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At Camp David he fought for every word in the text. That the Palestinians did not call his bluff and instead engaged in a struggle against what Arafat himself called ‘the Camp David conspiracy’ only facilitated the putting into practice of Begin’s grand designs on the West Bank.
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Menachem Begin did not make life easier for the American President now desperately shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem. The Israeli Prime Minister did not have insurmountable opposition at home. But he, or rather his conscience, was his own opposition. In order to calm it down he now had to prove that he, who had betrayed his pledge not to dismantle settlements, would not allow this to become a precedent for the West Bank. He would enhance the building of new settlements in Judaea and Samaria and he would block any possibility of the Palestinian autonomy ushering in a Palestinian state.
VIII The Road to Madrid
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Begin would not bargain over Judaea and Samaria. But Israeli rejectionism, as was frequently the case throughout the Arab–Israeli conflict, when not triggered by the Palestinians in the first place was certainly encouraged by them. The National Guidance Committee, a council of Palestinian notables in the territories, was created with one exclusive purpose, that of undermining and boycotting the autonomy talks, whatever their final objective might have been. The narrow window of opportunity that existed in 1967 for Israel to reach a deal with a local Palestinian leadership was now closed and sealed. In 1967, with Israel’s stunning victory still fresh in their mind and with the PLO still too weak to dictate the Palestinian agenda in the occupied territories, the local Palestinian leadership was eager to engage in peace talks with Israel. But Israel then preferred the politics of confusion and ambiguity. Now, thirteen years later, the PLO held the unchallenged monopoly of Palestinian politics and there was no chance whatever that any local leadership would be allowed to negotiate with Israel a watered-down autonomy plan, or any peace plan for that matter.
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it is important to note that the fundamentalist officer who assassinated Sadat during a military parade on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war, did not do it because of Sadat’s peace with Israel but because of his Western tendencies; the assassin did not once mention Israel during his trial
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Begin’s intention was to signal through his move on the Golan the limits of the peace process, namely that Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai should not be seen by her neighbours as a precedent for other fronts. By pulling out from Sinai, Begin intimated, Israel had fulfilled the territorial aspects of Resolution 242 and no more withdrawals could be contemplated in future peace deals. From now on it would have to be ‘peace for peace’, not ‘peace for land’. Likewise, the annexation of the Golan was Begin’s way of testing the commitment of Egypt’s new President, Hosni Mubarak, to Israel’s concept of a separate peace.
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The political void created by the collapse of the London agreement–and now also by the evaporation of the Shultz initiative and the threat that the Intifada posed to the stability, and perhaps even to the very existence, of the Hashemite kingdom–encouraged King Hussein to take a dramatic step. He cancelled the Act of Annexation of the West Bank to Jordan and cut all administrative links to the West Bank. His attempts so far to reconcile Jordan’s historical claims to the West Bank, his commitment to the Arab consensus on the predominant role of the PLO, and his search for a settlement with Israel was an exercise in diplomatic juggling that was no longer sustainable. He left the stage to the PLO and in one stroke eliminated for ever the so-called Jordanian option from the diplomacy of peace. From now on, if the PLO wanted the territories back it had to change its policies and come to terms directly with Israel and the United States. Jordan would no longer serve as a diplomatic buffer or bridge.
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In the Intifada, as Amos Elon succinctly put it, the Palestinians discovered the power of their weakness and the Israelis the weakness of their power. The PLO was also in dire straits. Like Israel, it was taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising. It suddenly realised that the real showdown with Israel was taking a totally different course from that preached and executed for years by an organisation of professional revolutionaries and terrorists. It was an irony of history that the biggest revolt by the Palestinians since the 1930s had begun without PLO direction. Its supremacy was now being effectively undermined by grass-roots revolutionary committees and a non-PLO United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) that emerged throughout the territories and succeeded in establishing areas of Palestinian self-rule in different parts of the occupied lands. The PLO was also challenged by the dramatic surge of Islamic fundamentalist organisations like Hamas and Jihad, especially in Gaza.
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In a declaration of Palestinian independence the Palestinian National Council (PNC) accepted the existence of the State of Israel and endorsed ‘all relevant UN Resolutions’, paradoxically including two mutually exclusive Resolutions, namely 242 and 181.
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Yasser Arafat’s and the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was certainly a major strategic blunder of the Palestinian leadership. Once again, as so often in the past, one could watch with stupor and bewilderment the self-defeating nature of Palestinian nationalism. The PLO’s failure to join a coalition based on the same key principle on which the Palestinians had built their case–a principle that was, moreover, embedded in SCR 242, about the ‘inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force’–was a sad display of political stupidity which, moreover, morally spoiled the Palestinian case. This was how Arafat misunderstood and misrepresented to his people the coalition’s war to undo the Iraqi aggression against another Arab country: These are days of glory and pride and steadfastness of our Arab nation…. The real aim of the treacherous American aggression is not to enforce compliance with UN resolutions but to destroy Palestine and the Arab nation and make way for three million Russian Jews in a greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.
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But the Americans would not let him sleep for long. Without prior consultation with Israel and to Shamir’s dismay, they summoned the parties immediately after the conference to bilateral talks in Washington. The Prime Minister was forced against his will and judgement to send his delegations to the American capital, but this did not mean that he had any intention of budging from his known positions. The talks were a sheer waste of time, and the gap between the parties was simply unbridgeable. Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai was the implementation of SCR 242 and Israel would not execute any additional withdrawals on the other fronts.
IX Oslo: The Glory and the Agony
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At that momentous crossroads, Arafat and the PLO misjudged the post-Cold War opportunities and failed to appreciate the far-reaching shift in the structure of international relations at the end of the Cold War. By supporting Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait they isolated themselves from the international and Arab worlds, especially from their wealthy patrons in the Gulf States, and lost their major sources of income without which, rhetoric apart, the PLO simply could not exist. Arafat’s miscalculations were of historic proportions, and they brought the Palestinian cause to the verge of financial and political bankruptcy. How could he not realise that by supporting the occupation of Kuwait he was morally spoiling his case, based since 1967 on the principle inherent in Security Council Resolution 242 about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by force’? Arafat’s miscalculation in supporting Saddam Hussein can only be compared with the Mufti’s colossal blunder in throwing in his lot with Nazi Germany in World War Two. The crisis of the PLO boosted the chances of their rivals in the territories, especially the Islamic organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suffered no financial problems. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia continued to lavish budgets and gifts on them.
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Arafat’s strategy was based on permanent negotiations, the desired outcome of which was never clear to him, nor was he ever able to spell it out so that the Israelis could weigh the final price they would have to pay to reach the end of the conflict. Arafat never managed, nor did he ever try, to convey to the Israelis that he had a sense of the finality of the conflict. Terror, including that perpetrated by Hamas, was to him a strategic weapon he used to soften the resistance of the Israelis. The Oslo accords had made available to him the conditions for waging a total war against Israel, and he would use them at the proper moment. At a Palestinian meeting in the West Bank town of Nablus in January 1996, just before an unprecedented wave of suicide terrorism brought about Shimon Peres’s electoral defeat to Benjamin Netanyahu, Nabil Shaath, a close associate of Arafat, explained the deeper meaning of Oslo from the PLO’s perspective. If the terms of the Palestinians for a settlement with Israel were not accepted, he said, We shall return to violence. But this time this will be done with 30,000 Palestinian soldiers at our disposal and while we control a territory of our own, and enjoy freedom and liberty … If we reach a dead end, we will resume the war and struggle exactly as we did forty years ago.
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Hardly had the ink on the agreements dried when a Palestinian opposition of Islamic and secular Rejectionists, some from within Fatah itself, started to work against them. In his rush to sideline the local leadership and stem the upsurge of Hamas, Arafat, his critics would say, agreed to turn the PLO from a national movement into the sheriff of a small, destitute ghetto in Gaza. Hamas and Jihad lost no time in unleashing a campaign of terror in the hope that this would lead to the radicalisation of Israeli public opinion and, consequently, to a shift to the right, which they expected would undermine and cripple Rabin’s peace policies. On the very eve of the signing of the DOP, three Israeli soldiers were slaughtered by a Hamas squad in Gaza. Suicide terrorism was not the invention of the second Intifada. It had already started in the euphoric days of Oslo. The day after the DOP was signed, on 14 September 1993, a Palestinian terrorist blew himself up in an Israeli police station in Gaza. But the bad omens for the future of Oslo did not come only from the Islamic opposition. On 11 May 1994, a week after he had signed the Cairo agreement establishing the modalities for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho and a few days before he himself returned to an ecstatic reception in Gaza, Arafat called, in a speech behind closed doors in Johannesburg, for a Jihad to recover Jerusalem. He went to the extreme of comparing Oslo with the Prophet’s tactical Hudaybiyya agreement of AD 625 with the Qurayish tribe, an expedient peace that could be broken when the circumstances would warrant it. Though he liked to position himself as a Palestinian Mandela, or as the leader of a modern secular movement of national liberation, Arafat remained essentially loyal to his youth as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as such, his real hero and model was the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Huseini, as he himself recognised in an interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Kuds of 2 August 2002.
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As it turned out, the Johannesburg speech was not an isolated incident where Arafat simply got carried away. He uttered similar notions on other occasions. One such was a speech in Gaza’s al-Azhar University on the day celebrating the ascension of the Prophet to heaven, where he spoke again of Hudaybiyya as a ‘despised peace’. On another occasion, a meeting with an Arab audience in Stockholm as quoted by Yedidia Atlas from the Norwegian newspaper Dagen, Arafat presented the right of return and the demographic weapon as his way to subvert the spirit of the Oslo accords: ‘We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. … We will make life unbearable for the Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.’ 1 This was to be Arafat’s mode of behaviour throughout the Oslo years. His was always the language of battle and Jihad. ‘We stand by our oath to pursue the battle,’ he promised in his speech at al-Azhar, where he also embraced the memory of Izzedin al-Qassam, the icon of Hamas’s struggle against the ‘Zionist entity’. He would never convey a clear message of peace and reconciliation to the Israeli public. A born master of double talk, he always preferred the language of ambiguities. Throughout his life as a terrorist and guerrilla leader, Arafat avoided an open confrontation with his rivals in the movement. He preferred to co-opt them. Holding the national movement together at all costs, shunning clear-cut divisive decisions, forever looking for leadership through consensus even when this meant not curbing the terrorist activities of those he had pledged to discipline in the Oslo accords–such was his disastrous and eventually self-defeating way of government throughout. An autocrat with no interest whatever in a modicum of good government or in policies of welfare and economic development, he was unable to create the necessary popular, democratic legitimacy for cracking down on Hamas.
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A few days before he was gunned down, on 28 September 1995, Oslo II, an agreement practically ending Israel’s coercive control over the Palestinians, was signed in Washington.
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Israel’s annexationist policies further undermined Arafat’s legitimacy for making concessions and reinforced his instinct that he could not be seen as openly collaborating with the Israelis in fighting terrorism. This, in its turn, limited Rabin’s capacity to move forward in the process. Caught between the terror of the fundamentalists, Arafat’s passivity, and the inevitable ascendancy of the peace sceptics and the Israeli far right, Rabin was marching to his political demise. The frivolous oxymoron coined by Peres that the Israelis killed in terrorist attacks–between 1993 and 1996 about 300 Israelis were assassinated by suicide squads–were the ‘victims of peace’ was utterly rejected by the public. Terrorism undermined the legitimacy and the moral foundations of the peace process. Neither Arafat nor Rabin was now in a position to give the other the minimum required to keep Oslo alive. When Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic as a traitor who sold out Eretz-Israel, he was already severely crippled politically by a series of devastating suicide terrorist attacks, notably in Tel Aviv and Beit Lid, and by Arafat’s failure to face the enemies of peace in his own camp.
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Netanyahu’s victory was bad news for the peace process which, admittedly, was in very poor health when he inherited it. But conspicuously, two Arab leaders, Mubarak and Hussein, did not exactly mourn the defeat of Peres. Peres’ persistent belief in a ‘warm’ peace and a ‘New Middle East’ of economic integration–he even launched the bizarre idea of having Israel join the Arab League–was anathema to Mubarak. He preferred a more controlled, slower, perhaps even reasonably tense peace with Israel, better suited to his domestic concerns and his regional aspirations. As to King Hussein, he was so taken aback by Peres’s moves towards a quick deal with Syria and so worried that Oslo under his leadership might usher in a Palestinian state that would not respect Jordan’s domestic and regional concerns that he even ventured to make public his preference for Netanyahu.
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Paradoxically, Assad was indirectly responsible for the Oslo agreement. It was the failure of his Syrian enterprise that brought Rabin to the White House lawn in Washington for his historic handshake with Arafat. It was precisely when the Oslo agreement was almost ready in early August 1993 that Rabin made his last and most dramatic attempt to stick to the capsule theory and to reach a deal with Assad. He conveyed to him a hypothetical readiness to accept Syria’s territorial claims if Syria would in turn accept Israel’s demands on security and normalisation. Assad’s disheartening response–he utterly rejected Israel’s concept of ‘normalisation’, and insisted on symmetrical and reciprocal security arrangements that would also affect the Israeli side of the new border–prompted Rabin to give the green light to the completion of the Oslo accords later that month. Israel’s chief negotiator with Assad’s men, Itamar Rabinovich, later recalled how Rabin expounded his rationale to Secretary of State Warren Christopher: ‘If Assad were to come forward and an Israeli–Syrian deal were to be made, then this would be supplemented by a small Palestinian deal. If Assad’s response is disappointing, there would be no Israeli–Syrian breakthrough, so then there would be a major Israeli–Palestinian agreement.’
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The hysteria in Jordan was such that the moment he knew of the Oslo accord, the King ordered the closure of the bridges linking the West and the East Banks for fear of a mass exodus of Palestinians that would end up subverting the Jordanian state. The May 1994 Israeli–PLO economic agreement was an additional threat to Hussein, who now saw his kingdom’s economic ties with the West Bank seriously undermined. To the King a common Israeli–Palestinian economic space meant unemployment and political instability in Jordan.
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Arafat’s handshake with Rabin was the alibi and legitimisation that Hussein had been looking for ever since he ascended the throne, in order openly to pursue the legacy of his grandfather’s peace policy with Israel. Now it was no longer the Jordanian option at the expense of the Palestinians, as both Israel and Jordan wanted it in the past, but a desperate rush to save Jordan’s interests and perhaps its very existence as an independent Bedouin kingdom, at a moment when the Palestinian option was picked up by Israel. It became vital for Hussein to make peace with Israel if he wanted to make sure that his nemesis, Arafat, would not have an exclusive say about the future of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
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It is an interesting reflection on the nature of the peace process as it developed in the Rabin years that, notwithstanding the high degree of commitment of the Clinton administration to the process, whatever was achieved–Oslo and the peace with Jordan–was done bilaterally with very little, if any, American involvement. The Americans were throughout sceptical that Hussein would dare to depart from his traditional policy of sitting on the fence. They did not realise how imperative the Oslo agreement made Jordan’s necessity to reach a settlement with Israel. Clearly, however, a much needed debt relief that the Clinton administration offered as a lure to the King if he made peace with Israel was a crucially important bonus that Hussein could not afford the luxury of ignoring.
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Netanyahu stalled the peace process with the Palestinians, exhibited an indifferent attitude towards Jordan’s economic expectations and even irresponsibly humiliated the King by taking the liberty of allowing an attempt–abortive, as it turned out–by the Mossad against the life of a Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, in Amman in broad daylight.
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Arafat ruled over one of the most expensive power machines in the world and certainly one that was utterly disproportionate to the ridiculously small slices of territory it was supposed to govern.
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Rabin, who in his inaugural speech at the Casablanca economic summit lashed out against Arafat in the most extreme and harshest terms for daring to challenge Israel’s monopoly over Jerusalem, would have by no means agreed–as indeed his widow was to ascertain when she later in her turn criticised Ehud Barak’s excessive concessions at Camp David–to the kind of compromises that the Barak government was ready to make on Jerusalem and on the other core issues of the conflict.
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Probably one of the deficiencies of the Oslo accord–at the same time the reason for its initial success–was that it started as an agreement on the lowest common denominator possible in Israeli society: the idea of getting rid of Gaza did not entail any national trauma.
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Both Arafat and the Israeli leadership would still have to break in a more profound and dramatic way the internal consensus in their respective societies. Arafat would have to fight the extremist organisations in a more frontal and resolute way, and he would have to make concessions on refugees and other sensitive issues he was clearly unwilling to contemplate. As to Israel, she would have to conceive solutions on settlements and Jerusalem no relevant Israeli leader, including Rabin, had ever dreamed he would have to envisage.
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The truth of the matter was, moreover, that by the time Rabin was murdered the peace process was, for all practical purposes, in a state of political coma. Rampant Palestinian terrorism, an uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and Israel’s practice of reprisals in the form of closures and collective punishment had already brought the process to a stalemate.
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Israel has no foreign policy, as Henry Kissinger used to say, it only has domestic political constraints.
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By signing the Wye agreement that gave the Palestinians additional land in Judaea and Samaria (13 per cent of it) Netanyahu sealed his political fate and saw his coalition rapidly melting away.
X The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence
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Assad was a tough negotiator, but one whose conditions for a settlement were clear and well known. With Syria it was essentially a territorial dispute, a ‘real estate’ affair. In the case of Arafat and the Palestinians the conditions for a settlement were never clearly enunciated, nor was the dispute an exclusively territorial one.
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A proof of the surprising determination of the Sphinx of Damascus to strike a deal with Israel was the dramatic gesture, which he had never agreed to make to Rabin, of sending his Foreign Minister to direct negotiations with Barak even before receiving from him an unequivocal commitment to Rabin’s deposit. But instead of seizing the opportunity and assuming the inevitable price for peace, Barak risked losing a vital asset, Assad’s trust, and avoided making the necessary commitment on the border. He conveyed to the Americans and the Syrians a sense of urgency, but at the moment of truth and decision he got cold feet and engaged in tactical manoeuvres with the hope of wresting a better deal from Assad.
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Shepardstown peace conference
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There might have been a chance for a peace deal with Assad in December 1999 and January 2000 on terms that were not at all easy for the Israeli public to accept. But when in early February Barak finally signalled, in a Cabinet meeting, his readiness for a settlement based on the 4 June 1967 lines, it was already too late. A terminally sick man, Assad had by then lost interest. His priority now was managing the succession of his son, not the agonising complexities of a peace deal with Israel.
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Clinton–Assad Geneva summit
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The Syrian track ended with no deal, but with a twofold legacy that Arafat was both forced and happy to embrace. Assad taught him that it was perfectly possible to say ‘no’ to America, and even publicly humiliate her President, without paying a price, and that, regardless of the ambiguities of the Oslo agreement, the 1967 borders were sacrosanct and therefore needed to be a categorical requirement in any future peace negotiations with Israel. Peace, Assad taught the Palestinians about to start their negotiations with Israel for a final settlement, needs to be based on one unyielding condition: full and unequivocal withdrawal from the occupied territories.
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Addressing the Camp David summit, as some commentators do, separately from the entire negotiating process–that is, independently of the negotiations that were conducted for many subsequent months in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Bolling air base on the outskirts of the American capital, where on 23 December 2000 President Clinton presented his final parameters for a settlement, and finally Taba–distorts, of course, the picture as to what exactly were the proposals that Arafat refused to accept. To his last day, the Palestinian leader was still reluctant to acknowledge the real nature of the deal he was offered, and he obstinately kept repeating that he had no option but to reject the ridiculous map of enclaves and ‘Bantustans’ that was presented to him by an American–Israeli conspiracy.
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Israel also contemplated the risk that Palestinian belligerency might be expressed in the future as part of an all-out confrontation by an Arab or Islamic coalition against the Jewish state. The demilitarisation of the future Palestinian state had therefore been, throughout, a standard, primary Israeli requirement.
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‘And as to the swaps,’ he said to the President, ‘I trust you and I accept your judgement. You decide.’ Arafat later reversed his position, but this moment in the summit clearly reflected his view of the peace process as not being about a mundane bargaining over real estate. Land mattered to him far less than emotional, legendary and Islamic values such as Jerusalem, the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif for the Muslims), and the core of the Palestinian national ethos, namely refugees.
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As it turned out, Arafat’s ‘deposit’ became the deathtrap in which the summit was eventually consumed.
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Refugeeism, Jerusalem and Islamic values more than land and real estate were the insurmountable obstacles that prevented an agreement at Camp David and later at Taba.
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Akram Hania, one of Arafat’s closest men at Camp David, put it this way: ‘At Camp David we intended to make the Israelis face the tribunal of history, face the victims of their crime and sin. Israel wanted to silence for ever the voice of the witnesses to the crime and erase the proof of the Naqbah.’
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In a long meeting I had with him in Nablus through the night of 25 June 2000, that is, a fortnight before Camp David, he was careful to remind me, when our conversation moved to the chapter on Jerusalem, of the Umar Treaty of AD 638, signed between the Khalif Umar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Byzantine Patriarch Sopronius, where, so Arafat instructed me, the conditions of the capitulation of the Christians included a prohibition on the Jews living in Jerusalem. Arafat’s ambition to emulate Umar el-Kutab was no mere anecdote.
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‘Instead of repeatedly rejecting the Israelis’ proposals, make counter proposals,’ Clinton would tell the Palestinians at Camp David. Rob Malley, in the analysis of the summit he co-authored with Hussein Agha, repeated this remark: ‘Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own.’
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To my remark in the speech that Israel had come to the limits of her capacity for compromise with the Palestinians, the ambassador rightly and cunningly responded, ‘Why should we believe you when everybody remembers that you started your voyage into the Palestinian question with Golda Meir denying that a Palestinian people existed at all, and at Camp David you agreed to give away the bulk of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state and divide Jerusalem? These certainly cannot be the outer limits of your concessions.’
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We made enormous progress at the secret channel in Stockholm between Abu-Ala and Hassan Asfour on the Palestinian side and myself and Gilead Sher on the Israeli side. But the exposure of the channel by the Palestinians themselves–as part of an internal political struggle within the Palestinian camp, Abu-Mazen’s people leaked the talks to Al-Hayat–destroyed any possibility for further progress. The channel stopped because it was not producing any longer. Exposed by his political rivals back home, who leaked imaginary details about his ‘irresponsible’ concessions, Abu-Ala quickly retreated to the safety of old, unyielding positions.
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And if this were not enough, by 15 May, the day of the Naqbah, the Palestinians, with Arafat’s connivance (he ignored advance warnings by both Israelis and Secretary Madeleine Albright), unleashed throughout the territories days of violent disturbances that ended in the inevitable clashes with Israel’s security forces.
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From the moment the Swedish channel was dissolved it became clear that Arafat’s insistence that the summit be ‘better prepared’ was just a euphemism which meant that Israel should come closer to his positions under the threat of war without him having to budge from them.
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Elusive, non-committal, the master of double talk, Arafat turned the negotiations with him, to use Lloyd George’s description of a similar occasion with De Valera, into a futile exercise of ‘trying to pick up Mercury with a fork’.
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It is therefore unfair to claim, as Rob Malley and Hussein Agha did in their New York Review of Books article, that Barak’s all-or-nothing approach was a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation. If this is true, the blame should clearly be shared with Arafat. But the truth of the matter is that at key moments at Camp David, when it was clear that a final settlement was impossible to reach, both the Israelis and the Americans tried fall-back plans for interim or partial settlements that were rejected out of hand by the Palestinians.
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America was not there, as some Palestinians might have thought, just to deliver Israel to a passive and rejectionist Arab side that was unwilling to engage in a serious negotiating process, nor would Israel allow herself to be delivered unconditionally. By failing to advance clear proposals and counter-proposals, that is, by refusing to engage in a real negotiating dynamic, the Palestinians deprived the Americans of the vital tools they needed to be able to put pressure on the Israelis. The President and his team could never ascertain whether the Palestinians were at all serious and genuine in their commitment to reach a settlement. As the President repeatedly told Arafat, he was not expecting him to agree to US or Israeli proposals, but he was counting on him to offer something, to produce a new idea that he could take back to Barak in order to convince him to make more concessions. ‘I need something to tell him,’ he implored. ‘So far I have nothing.’
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Arafat preferred to die as a defeated hero who did not give in, like Nasser, than be slain as a man of peace like Sadat.
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To no avail. Arafat would not budge from his position and would not agree to a qualified Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount–he was offered in the site a ‘sovereign custodianship’ that was free of any Israeli interference–or to anything that was not the unequivocal partition of the city. He was offered a capital in Arab Jerusalem (not just Abu-Dis, as all kinds of non-official back channels had suggested in the past) that would include some Palestinian quarters under full Palestinian sovereignty and the others under a more qualified Palestinian sovereignty. Arafat demanded the sovereignty of three-quarters of the Old City and rejected out of hand any bridging ideas such as a special regime, which I had the opportunity to defend throughout the summit, or the President’s proposal, accepted by the Israelis, to divide the holy basin into two equal parts, the Christian and Muslim quarters to the Palestinians and the Jewish and Armenian quarters to the Israelis.
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Members of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David used to say to their Israeli counterparts that Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the issues that more than any others wrecked the summit and prevented an agreement, were ‘Arafat’s personal obsession’, which they did not necessarily share.
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Saladin,
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‘Alissra Day’)
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Hence Arafat would not accept a solution to the Palestinian problem that was strictly temporal and exclusively political. It needed to include, for example, the full and unconditional sovereignty over the holy places, first and foremost the Haram al-Sharif, where the Dome of the Rock is the architectural expression of Islam as a religion that supersedes and is superior to all other religions. The Jews’ claim to a sovereign right in the Temple Mount on the basis of historical and religious links to the site was, as far as he was concerned, to be utterly excluded.
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At Camp David Arafat destroyed with his own hands the unique, even intimate, relationship that he had developed with the American administration in recent years. I personally had the opportunity to warn Mr Arafat, in the course of a meeting at his residence at Camp David, where I came, together with General Amnon Shahak, to make up for Barak’s obstinate refusal to meet the Palestinian leader.
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Nabil Amr, a minister in Arafat’s Cabinet, was courageous enough to spell out his criticism in an article in Al-Hayat-el-Jadida, a mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority, two years into the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that is, when it was becoming tragically clear that Arafat’s abandonment of the political path had brought about the destruction of the very backbone of Palestinian society: Didn’t we dance when we heard of the failure of the Camp David talks? Didn’t we destroy the pictures of President Clinton who so boldly presented us with proposals for a Palestinian state with border modifications? We are not being honest, for today, after two years of bloodshed we ask exactly that which we then rejected. … How many times did we agree to compromises, which we later rejected in order to miss them later on? And we were never willing to draw the lessons from our behaviour. … And then, when the solution was no longer available, we travelled the world in order to plead with the international community for what we had just rejected. But then we learnt the hard way that in the span of time between our rejection and our acceptance the world has changed and left us behind. … We clearly failed to rise up to the challenge of history.
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But the Israeli leader nevertheless left the summit a different man, one who had the courage to depart from his old archaic beliefs. Arafat, however, would confine himself to rejecting American and Israeli proposals without ever advancing his own counter-proposals. Unlike both Begin and Sadat, Arafat acted throughout the summit more like a politician than a statesman bent on looking for a solution and seeking a historical breakthrough. Sadat in Camp David I and Barak in Camp David II were more restless, far more creative.
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Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizmann and Aharon Barak would always look for new ideas and possible compromises. And when the moment of truth arrived and Begin was required to take an agonising decision on the settlements in northern Sinai, he received a vitally crucial telephone call from the most hawkish of his ministers back home, Ariel Sharon, which encouraged him to dismantle them. The only telephone calls Ehud Barak would receive from Israel during the summit were those with the disheartening news about the disintegration of his coalition and the collapse of his home front.
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‘I don’t even know what is exactly my mandate in these negotiations,’ the Israelis were once told by Saab Erakat, the Palestinian chief negotiator at the summit.
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Carter had a bulldog-like persistence about him that was absent in Clinton’s performance. Clinton did not lack Carter’s Messianic zeal; but he lacked his capacity to intimidate, nor were he and his team capable of employing the kind of brutal manipulative tactics that the Nixon–Kissinger team had used in launching the peace process in the aftermath of the 1973 war, or those that would be used by the Bush–Baker tandem in the diplomatic arm twisting leading to the Madrid Conference in 1991. At Camp David, America looked like a diminished and humbled superpower, unable to assert its will.
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As early as 4 March 2000 Marwan Barghouti, the head of the Fatah militias (‘ Tanzim’) in Ramallah and a future leader of the Intifada, could not have been more specific when he made it clear to a Palestinian newspaper, Akhbar-el-Khalil, that: Whoever thinks it is possible to resolve issues such as the refugees, Jerusalem, the settlements and the borders through negotiations is under a delusion. On these issues, we have to wage a campaign on the ground alongside the negotiations. I mean armed confrontation. We need dozens of campaigns like the Al-Aqsa Tunnel Campaign.
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But it was Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in June 2000 that served as a major incentive for the Palestinian Intifada.
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The same evening and in the same city, Nablus, driven and inspired by the example of the Hezbollah, Arafat would say to a grand gathering of Fatah youth, ‘We are fighting for our land and we are prepared to erase the peace process and restart the armed struggle.’ ‘I am a general who never lost a battle,’ he told me at the same meeting in Nablus, where I tried to convince him of the need to go to a negotiating summit at Camp David. He rejected the possibility that anybody, even the President of the United States, would expect him to engage in negotiations. ‘I am a decision maker, not a negotiator,’ he told me. In retrospect, I am not sure he was a decision maker either.
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And, most important, rather than controlling or stemming the tide of a spontaneous uprising he preferred to ride on it, thus practically turning it into official policy. It was he who had encouraged the outburst of violence on the Naqbah Day of May 2000, thus undermining the Swedish secret channel of negotiations, and he later gave more than one indication that he would welcome a return to armed struggle if Camp David failed.
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Mamduh Nufal, an adviser of his, quoted him to this effect in the Nouvel Observateur of 1 March 2001. His Minister of Posts and Communications, Imad Faluji, declared in a speech in a refugee camp in south Lebanon that the Intifada against Israel was carefully planned after the failed Camp David talks in July 2000 ‘by request of President Yasser Arafat, who predicted the outbreak of the Intifada as a complementary stage to the Palestinian steadfastness in the negotiations, and not as a specific protest against Sharon’s visit to Al-Haram Al-Quds. … The Palestinian Authority instructed the political forces and factions to run all materials of the Intifada.’
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He gave an implicit green light to the uprising by doing what he frequently liked to do in such conditions: he left the country in the very first days of the Intifada in order not to have to assume responsibility. Only through the Intifada could he restore his and the Palestinians’ international standing that had been so seriously eroded by the worldwide perception after the Camp David summit–a perception strongly enhanced by Clinton’s finger-wagging at Arafat as chiefly responsible for the collapse of the summit–of an Israeli government ready for a far-reaching compromise facing obstinate Palestinian rejectionism. Arafat knew that Palestinian casualties played in his favour in world opinion and helped increase the international pressure on Israel.
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The Israelis were left to assume the worst about Palestinian intentions, such as that they had never really intended to reach a settlement and that Oslo was for the Palestinians nothing but a strategic ploy aimed at doing away with the State of Israel altogether. Which is why opinion polls showed that two years into the Intifada only 20 per cent of Israelis believed that not even a signed peace agreement with the Palestinians would bring with it the end of violence and conflict.
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As it turned out, the Intifada could not usher in a negotiated settlement precisely because, lacking attainable objectives, it raised the expectations of the Palestinians to unrealistic heights. Not an Israeli negotiator, but Hani al-Hassan, an old-time associate of Arafat, was forced to acknowledge that not only was the Intifada devoid of clear strategic objectives, it also raised the expectations of the Palestinian masses to such heights that it became impossible for their own leaders to meet. The Intifada, he wrote, ‘obliges our negotiators to raise the level of demands in the negotiations’ in a way that made it out of the question for Israel to accept them.
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Arguably, since he always identified the cause of his people with his own person as the embodiment of their national will, he believed that safeguarding the interests of the PLO and his own personal rule was tantamount to promoting the national cause.
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Although there were plenty of indications that he had been for some time pushing for a shift of strategy from negotiations to violence, he probably did not initiate the uprising with specific orders.
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Again, as in the first Intifada, leading the uprising was for Arafat a move of political survival, not the insight of a statesman with a clear strategic objective.
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–A Palestinian sovereign state on 97 per cent of the West Bank and a safe passage, in the running of which Israel should not interfere, that would link the Gaza Strip, all of which, clean of Jewish settlements, would be also part of the Palestinian state, to the West Bank. Additional assets within Israel–such as docks in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa–could be used by the Palestinians so as to wrap up a deal that for all practical purposes could be tantamount to 100 per cent territory. Needless to say, the Jordan Valley, the mythological strategic asset sanctified by generations of Israeli generals, would be gradually handed over to full Palestinian sovereignty.–Jerusalem would be divided to create two capitals, Jerusalem and Al-Quds, along ethnic lines. What is Jewish would be Israeli and what is Arab would be Palestinian.–The Palestinians would have full and unconditional sovereignty on the Temple Mount, that is, Haram al-Sharif. Israel would retain her sovereignty on the Western Wall and a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies in the depths of the Mount.–With regard to refugees, it was stated that the Palestinians would have the right ‘to return to historical Palestine’ but with ‘no explicit right of return to the State of Israel’. They could be admitted to Israel in limited numbers and on the basis of humanitarian considerations, but Israel would retain her sovereign right of admission. Refugees could be settled, of course, in unlimited numbers not only in the Palestinian state, but also in those areas within Israel that would be handed over to the Palestinians in the framework of land swaps (the Palestinians were supposed to receive an Israeli territory equivalent to 3 per cent of the surface of the West Bank). In addition, a multibillion-dollar fund would be put together to finance a comprehensive international effort of compensation and resettlement that would be put in place.
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Clinton’s peace plan, 2000–In matters of security the President endorsed the Palestinians’ rejection of the concept of a completely ‘demilitarised state’ and proposed instead the concept of a ‘non-militarised state’ whose weaponry would have to be negotiated with Israel. A multinational force would be deployed along the Jordan Valley to replace the IDF. (The President recognised the need of the Israeli air force to co-ordinate with the Palestinians the use of their air space, as well as the IDF’s necessity to have three advance warning stations for a period of time.)
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The Israeli government met the deadline. Our decision, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada, in the midst of sweeping opposition on the part of the army–it was almost tantamount to a coup d’état that the Chief of Staff, General Mofaz, should have gone public to criticise the government’s endorsement of the parameters as an ‘existential threat to Israel’–and strong reservations from the opposition and public opinion, was a daring decision of a government (then already a minority government) of peace that stretched itself to the outer limits of its legitimacy in order to endorse positions its opponents labelled as suicidal, and as being an affront to Jewish values and history. But Arafat lingered. He refused to respond. As usual, he resumed his journeys throughout the world as if he were the travelling Emperor Hadrian, in the hope of evading any decision: another meeting with Mubarak, one more trip to Ben-Ali, another trip to Jordan, a further meeting of the Arab foreign ministers, dozens of calls from world leaders from the President of China to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg urging the Palestinian leader to seize this last opportunity, to grab the historic moment.
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Both the Saudi and the Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan and Nabil Fahmi, who came to encourage Arafat, in the name of their respective governments, to accept the President’s parameters as a last opportunity for peace that should not be missed, were dismayed at the behaviour of the Palestinian leader. And so was the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. He was said to be shocked that Arafat had wasted such an opportunity and that he had lied about the President’s offer on Jerusalem. Arafat’s rejection of the peace parameters was a ‘crime’ not only against the Palestinians but against the entire region, concluded the Saudi ambassador in a long interview published in the New Yorker on 24 March 2002.
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Barak’s attitude to Taba was genuinely expressed on two occasions. One was when he allowed me to open, in Taba, a secret channel with Abu-Ala in order to explore freely the possibility of bridging the gaps and come to a last-moment breakthrough. The second occasion was when he made a radical shift in his position and virtually agreed to the concept of equal swaps of land.
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Israel proposed in Taba physically to dismantle, or hand over to the Palestinians for the use of returning refugees, more than one hundred settlements. But those that formed coherent blocs adjacent to the 1967 line were supposed to remain as such under Israel’s sovereignty. However, as the maps that the Palestinians produced at Taba showed, our interlocutors totally rejected the very concept of blocs and referred to the settlements more as isolated outposts that would have to be linked separately from each other to Israel. Israel could not accept such an approach for it contradicted her entire peace strategy, and the Palestinians not only knew it but have always accepted it. All the back-track channels, either official or freelance, ever conducted by Israelis and Palestinians before Taba and after, were based on the acceptance by the Palestinians of the principle of settlement blocs.
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The Palestinians’ lack of interest in a deal in Taba was made patently clear when Yossi Sarid, probably the most emblematic ‘dove’ of Israeli politics and now a member of the Israeli delegation, proposed a Solomonic solution to the differences still pending between the parties on Jerusalem: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Old City and the holy belt leading from the Old City to the Mount of Olives. Had the Palestinians agreed to stick to the letter and the spirit of the Clinton parameters there should have been no reason for such differences to exist, but Mr Sarid thought nevertheless that an attempt should be made to reach a compromise by going the extra mile towards meeting the reservations of the Palestinians. ‘Let us split the burden between us,’ he suggested; ‘two of the four issues pending will be solved according to your position, and two according to ours, which is, as you know, respectful of the Clinton parameters.’ But to no avail. The Palestinians remained unimpressed.
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Mythologies apart, Taba did not allow an agreement, not because of the fact that the Israelis’ qualitative political time was a desperately diminishing asset, but because the Palestinians treated the parameters as non-committal, and insisted on changing and challenging them on each and every point.
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One needs to recall in this context that Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996 amid a virulent campaign against the illegitimacy of the suicidal Oslo accords, but was eventually forced to endorse them once in office.
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The weakness of the Barak government was of course due in great part to its own political blunders. But Arafat should also have wondered whether he would ever be able to reach an agreement with a ‘strong’ Israeli government when he so much excelled in weakening and eventually destroying his peace partners. Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life when he went for a dramatic breakthrough while Palestinian terrorism continued unabated, exposing him to Jewish extremists. In 1996 Shimon Peres was defeated amid an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide terror. And Ehud Barak suffered the greatest electoral débâcle in Israel’s political history because the voters saw the Intifada as Arafat’s counter-proposal to his peace initiative. To weaken and undermine Israeli left-wing governments, as he consistently did, and then refuse to make an agreement with them because they were ‘weak’ is a pattern that might keep the Palestinians in a permanent impasse. Ariel Sharon’s policies of scorched earth in the territories have been proof for Arafat that he who sows a wind ends by reaping a whirlwind. Arafat was a victim of his own illusions. He had a tendency to attribute to himself characteristics of a brilliant strategist and distinguished military man, ‘a general who never lost a war’, as he liked to introduce himself. But the truth is that as a strategist, of all people he proved his failure again and again. He always pushed his luck to the point where he lost all his achievements and what appeared to be a chance for reasonable victory ultimately became a disgraceful defeat. With Arafat, brinkmanship had no brakes; it was the art of bringing both his people and the Israelis to the edge of the abyss and beyond.
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Zionism, at least up to 1948, would never have functioned this way when faced with what is always and inevitably an imperfect settlement. It always acted with its back to the wall, which is why it was blessed with the capacity for pragmatic decision making. There are two essential reasons that can explain the pragmatic wisdom of Zionism at decisive crossroads. One is the fact that, in contrast to the anti-Semitic cliché about ‘Jewish power’, Zionism was always the national movement of a weak Jewish people lacking support, a persecuted people decimated by holocaust and genocide, a people that in case of failure at the time of taking a decision might be annihilated. The Palestinians, the presumed weak side of the conflict, never acted out of lack of choice as Zionism did. Until 1948 the Zionists certainly excelled in their capacity to mobilise international support and market their case. The Palestinians, however, stumbled on every road block, avoided no mistake and displayed no savoir faire in the field of diplomacy and public relations. They always seemed to take the wrong option.
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After the Six Day War, however, the balance of forces in the war on public opinion clearly changed. Rarely–if ever–is history familiar with a similar case of a disparity between the high degree of international support enjoyed by a national movement and the poor results of such a support. In fact, after that war the overwhelming international support for the Palestinian cause almost became a handicap to the degree that it could be said that the Palestinians very nearly ‘suffered’ from an excess. At every junction of historical decision making, the international community gave them–and this is certainly true with regard to the Arab world–the sense that they were entitled to expect more and could therefore avoid a decision. The international pampering of the national Palestinian movement is unparalleled in modern history and, no less important, was at vital crossroads of the conflict an obstacle to a settlement. For it was frequently interpreted by the Palestinian leadership as an implicit encouragement to persist in its almost built-in incapacity to take decisions and find instead satisfaction in Israel’s decline into the position of a state put in the dock of the tribunal of international opinion.
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The history of the Jews’ modern national movement, again mainly up until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, had been characterised by realistic responses to objective historical conditions. The Palestinians have consistently fought for the solutions of yesterday, those they had rejected a generation or two earlier.
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A major reason for his incapacity to reach a reasonable compromise with Israel was precisely that the Palestinian Authority under his leadership was unwilling to develop a positive ethos of democracy, civil society, economic development and education. Instead, an old-style autocracy based on a negative ethos of confrontation was created. National cohesion was built around constituent values of radical ‘Palestinianism’, ‘refugeeism’ and Islam that left no room for compromise.
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Peace for Arafat, if it were to respond to vital Israeli requirements, could automatically mean a civil war. In fact, Fatah understood that particular dilemma only too well, by explicitly admitting that that was exactly the reason they had rejected the Clinton parameters. To them, as they put it when trying to explain their rejection on the organisation’s website, ‘the parameters [were] the biggest trick’ and one that meant moving the conflict from a Palestinian–Israeli dispute to ‘an internal Palestinian–Palestinian conflict that will destroy the Intifada’.
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The loose control of politicians over the army is a built-in weakness and inconsistency in Israel’s political system.
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Sharm el Sheikh international summit of early October,
XI The Politics of Doomsday
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With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the principle of compromise was now gone, the middle ground had been fatally wounded, and the so-called peace camp in Israel had been severely diminished and morally undermined by Arafat’s rejection of its peace platform.
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Zionism’s major strategic success to date was that it forced its enemies to agree to make peace; but it could not force the terms of peace on them.
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Such was the case with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when an entire nation followed him into an adventure that all were led to believe was inevitable, the last resort. His gamble ended by sinking Israel into a quagmire of blood, bereavement and destruction for more than eighteen years. And such was the situation when he embarked on an initiative to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip that he himself had created in the first place. He was directly responsible for the calamitous network of settlements spread throughout the territories and in the midst of the dispossessed Palestinian population.
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Sharon is the first prime minister since Oslo who did not aspire to solve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, something that in his own twisted and tortuous way even Netanyahu had tried to do with the Hebron and the Wye agreements.
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But Labour preferred to go, without any soul searching, from being part of the most daring political voyage since Oslo–the voyage we undertook as a government–to battling over portfolios in the Sharon government, which, in advance, assumed that the Barak team, as Mr Peres himself had claimed, ‘went too far in its concessions’. The Labour Party turned its back on its own political audacity while in office and now endorsed the groundless political assumption of Ariel Sharon that the volcanic eruption of rage among the Palestinians could be calmed down by another interim settlement.
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And in any case he regarded Hamas’s violence as a major strategic tool of the Palestinian cause he would not undermine, so long as it did not directly challenge his personal rule.
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shelling of the Altalena,
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Abu-Mazen acknowledged that for an orderly Palestinian national movement to inspire vital international trust there should be, as he put it in a speech to the Palestinian parliament upon assuming the office of prime minister, ‘one authority, one law and one democratic and national decision that applies to us all’.
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The government is incapable of responding to the popular yearnings for peace. For, regardless of party loyalties and according to most studies, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would support a peace settlement that is based on the Clinton parameters–two states, withdrawal from territories, massive dismantling of settlements, two capitals in Jerusalem–but they trust neither their political system nor, of course, the Palestinian leadership to come to an accommodation on that basis. Which may explain the results of a poll conducted in 2002 by the Steinmetz Centre for Peace at Tel Aviv University indicating that, convinced of the incapacity of their political system to produce solutions, 67 per cent of Israeli Jews would support an American effort to recruit an international alliance that would coax the parties into endorsing such a settlement.
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ABC–‘Anything But Clinton’–seemed to have been President Bush’s attitude to the legacy of the Clinton administration on most domestic and international issues. This was particularly the case with the Israeli–Palestinian track. Probably nothing expresses better this change of attitude than Colin Powell’s instruction to the officials in the State Department, as soon as the new administration took over in January 2001, no longer to make use of the term ‘peace process’.
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Democracy is not a project one devises and implements with rigid timetables; democracy is a process and the Arab world will have to go through it with hardly any short cuts. For short cuts may lead to abrupt transitions from the secular dictatorships now prevailing throughout the entire Arab world to Islamic democracies.
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It would be dangerously naïve to believe that the exercise of power and the capacity to intimidate are unnecessary. But they will always need to be backed by reasonable compromises, to be reached through diplomacy and negotiations.
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road map
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Daily Israeli incursions into the Hamas strongholds in Gaza with their appalling toll of civilian casualties, the targeted killing of Hamas leaders from Sheikh Yassin to his successor at the head of the movement, Abd-el-Aziz Rantisi, and Palestinian terrorist suicide attacks against the civilian population in Israel were all the reflection of a macabre alliance between two sides for which a ceasefire would have meant facing political choices they were unwilling or unable to make.
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The Palestinian case is one more reminder of an important fallacy to which Mr Bush has subscribed. The real, and certainly the immediate, choice in the Arab world is not between dictatorship and democracy but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy.
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Neither Israelis nor Palestinians even started to implement the road map’s most primary provisions. The Palestinians did not crack down on terrorism and the Israelis dragged their feet when it came to removing the so-called ‘illegal’ outposts, let alone when addressing the need to stop the expansion of the ‘legal’ settlements. The fatal symmetry between terrorism and settlements that was born with the Oslo accords and was eventually to wreck them was the same that subverted the road map from the first moment.
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The road map, just like Oslo, thus became a standing invitation for the parties to dictate the nature of the final deal through unilateral acts, such as the expansion of settlements by the Israelis and the wild campaign of suicide terrorism and armed uprising by the Palestinians.
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It is inconceivable that the Palestinians would agree to repeat the experience if the parameters of the final settlement were not agreed upon in advance.
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A ‘temporary state’ could not, in any case, offer the popular legitimacy needed for an uncompromising war on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Such legitimacy can emerge only if and when the Palestinians are convinced that Islamic terrorism is no longer a response to Israel’s strategy of occupation but an obstacle that needs to be removed on the way to a final settlement with dignity.
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Sharon’s hidden agenda, which he has been harbouring for years, remains unchanged. The sterilisation of the Palestinian national movement, which he has always seen as a major strategic, even existential, threat to Israel, and the confinement of a Palestinian homeland within scattered enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements, strategic military areas and a network of bypass roads for the exclusive use of the Israeli occupier, remain, in broad lines, his grand design.
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For many years Damascus has been host to a plethora of terrorist organisations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah. And during the war in Iraq there were indications that not only did the Syrians facilitate the passage of Arab volunteers to Iraq, but they also transferred military equipment from their territory to Saddam’s forces. In a deliberate disregard of America’s request, Damascus refused to seal her border with Iraq. If this were not enough, ‘Tishrin’, the Syrian regime’s mouthpiece, asked that the International Criminal Court should judge the American leaders ‘as war criminals, equal in rank to the Nazi war criminals’.
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The Israelis and the Americans knew throughout that he actively supported Hezbollah attacks against Israel, but Assad would never admit it publicly.
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Until very recently, the Syrian regime seemed to be engaged in a double strategy that did not preclude an accommodation with Washington. If Bashar was doing everything to irritate the Americans, he was at the same time showing bursts of co-operation that signalled to them that he could be a valuable ally for the US in the region. In the aftermath of 9/ 11 the Syrians helped locate and even arrest key figures in Al-Qaeda. It was the Syrians who arrested Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a German citizen of Syrian descent, who had recruited Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/ 11 hijackers. The Syrians co-operated in additional ways with the American war against terror, seemingly even helping to foil an Al-Qaeda-planned attack on American forces in the Gulf. And there was, of course, also Syria’s vital vote for Security Council Resolution 1441 that allowed the US a much needed diplomatic achievement on the way to its onslaught on the Iraqi regime.
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The Syrians were clearly taken aback by the way both Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush brushed aside their call for the resumption of negotiations for a settlement with Israel. There even seem to be indications, as Israel’s former military Chief of Staff General Yaalon has hinted recently, of their readiness for a deal based on the international border, rather than on the 1967 lines that Hafez al-Assad so adamantly insisted upon to the extent of making impossible a settlement with Israel.
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But neither on the Palestinian front nor in the Syrian track was this philosophy being vindicated. Both Israel and America were clearly hesitant to seize the opportunity created by the neutralisation, even if temporary and still precarious, of the strategic threats in the outer Middle East in order to pacify the inner Middle East. On the contrary, they seemed to be overlooking them.
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Nor is his dilemma an easy one. He knows he cannot tackle and absorb two major political earthquakes at one time, one that would emanate from his disengagement plan from Gaza and another that would inevitably emerge from the pull-out from the Golan. A coalition of the Golan settlers with those of Gaza and the West Bank is a politically lethal alliance that had already contributed to doom Rabin’s peace efforts. Ever the tactician, rather than the bold visionary statesman, Ariel Sharon prefers not to tempt fate or to court political disaster.
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Israel’s march of folly in the occupied territories represented by her absurdly adventurist policy of settlements has created a reality on the ground that can no longer be solved only through traditional diplomatic means.
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In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict the possibility of peace without agony was missed years ago. From now on nobody can spare the parties their Calvary. Both Palestinians and Israelis rightly earned it with their political short-sightedness and sometimes sheer human stupidity.
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General Yaalon provided proof of a political resourcefulness of sorts. But by trying to rescue from oblivion such an anachronistic, and indeed obsolete, concept as the capsule doctrine, he displayed his failure to understand the most fundamental lessons of history. National movements that cannot be suppressed by military means cannot be obliterated by simply ignoring them, or by changing the identity of the occupier.
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track II plans such as Geneva,
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The fate of any Israeli leader who has tried to withdraw from the territories, either through an agreement like Rabin and Barak, or in a violent way, like Sharon, has been to face political defeat and in Rabin’s case even assassination. Israeli politics defy the rule that stability and equilibrium are only maintained by pedalling the bicycle. It is precisely by pedalling, moving and initiating that a leader paves the way for his political demise. Rabin, Peres and Barak were defeated because they tried to break the old, paralysing inertia of war and conflict.
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What is refreshing, though, is that Sharon, the unscrupulous and ruthless man of action, has finally realised the limits of force. No one who knew his personal and political history would have imagined him delivering a speech like the one he gave on the day the Knesset approved his plan. Addressing the settlers, those whom he had spoiled and cultivated for years, he said, You have developed among you a dangerous Messianic spirit. We have no chance to survive in this part of the world that has no mercy for the weak if we persist in this path. I have learnt from my own experience that the sword alone offers no solution. We do not want to rule over millions of Palestinians who multiply every year. Israel will not survive as a democratic state if she continues being a society that occupies another nation. The withdrawal from Gaza will open the gates of a new reality.
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There can be little doubt that Hamas, the dominant power in Gaza, would claim–as Hezbollah did in Lebanon–that Israel’s pull-out represents a victory for its campaign and a vindication of suicide terrorism. If Hamas is allowed to become the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, this could usher in the establishment of a mini-Taliban state at permanent war against Israel.
XII Conclusions
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The army has also opposed most of the political breakthroughs in Israel’s history. Chief of Staff General ‘Motta’ Gur misread Sadat’s peace initiative and was against it; his successor in 2000, General Shaul Mofaz, fiercely opposed Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon as well as the Clinton Peace Parameters, and more recently the army again resisted the Gaza disengagement, which had to be practically imposed on it by the Prime Minister.
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More important, however, the history of peacemaking between Israel and her Arab neighbours showed that it was the change of mind of the hawks and the shift in their positions, not the preaching of the doves, that allowed Israel to exploit chances of peace at vital crossroads.
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It was Abba Eban who said that the Palestinian leadership never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. In the aftermath of the 1967 war this could just as well be said of Israel’s leaders who rejected one after another Sadat’s peace overtures. Neither in 1948 nor in 1967 was Israel subjected to irresistible international pressure to relinquish her territorial gains because her victory was perceived as the result of a legitimate war of self-defence.
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Sadat laid down the fundamental truths of any Arab–Israeli peace in the future: Israel cannot expect to have both territories and peace; but nor can the Arabs get away with their territories, as Nasser expected, without offering full peace and recognition to the Jewish state.
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This persistent attempt to turn back the clock of history lies at the root of many of the misfortunes that have befallen the peoples of the region. But, eventually, it was the Arab side that led the strategic shift from war to political accommodation.
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PLO’s 1988 Algiers declaration.
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‘The best of enemies’ since at least 1946, Israel and Jordan would nevertheless only come to a peace agreement in 1994, and even then only because Israel had reached an accommodation with the Palestinians through the Oslo accords.
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The Middle East is a cemetery of missed opportunities.
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Three times in their history the Palestinians were offered statehood–in 1937, in 1947 and through the Clinton parameters in 2000–and three times they have rejected it.
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The Israeli Left is bound to admit that its policy of fighting terrorism and negotiating peace at the same time was a resounding failure, and that it was Ariel Sharon’s ruthless crackdown on Palestinian terrorism that brought the Palestinians to their knees and forced even Hamas to plead for a truce. But the Right was, and continues to be, equally wrong in its far-fetched assumptions about the price of peace and its capacity to impose it on the Palestinians.
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The Arabs of Jerusalem, and maybe even those of the State of Israel proper, might be asked in a future final settlement to vote in the Palestinian state without the territories they live in being part of the State of Palestine, just as the settlers throughout the West Bank could remain in their settlements, be citizens of the State of Israel and vote in the elections for the Israeli parliament. Sharon, who is so surprisingly sanguine in allowing the Palestinians of Jerusalem to vote, may believe that this is the best way to reconcile his demographic worries with his territorial ambitions.
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special Security Council resolution that will view the plan as the authoritative international interpretation of Resolution 242 on the Palestinian issue.
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An orderly Palestinian polity is crucial if it is to meet Israel’s elementary security requirements.
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It is vital that the Israelis realise that no change in the international system, however radical, will spare them hard and painful choices.
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Internationally legitimised borders will offer Israel more deterrence power than F-16 raids on terrorist targets that end up killing innocent civilians without deterring the terrorists.
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But, as the United States has learned the hard way in Iraq, this is an era where power without legitimacy only breeds chaos, and military supremacy without legitimate international consent for the use of force does not offer security.
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But the past is frequently the enemy of the future, and nothing in the Arab past has prepared them for the idea of a Jewish sovereign state in their midst.
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Israel even managed to force the entire Arab world, and the international community as well, to accept the legitimacy of the 1948 borders even though these went far beyond the borders that were approved for the Jewish state in 1947.
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accepts that the territorial phase of Zionism has come to its end, Zionism’s victory can still be finally sealed.
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This should serve as a lesson to the Palestinians and their leaders who throughout their history have preferred the dangerous inertia of national myths and unrealistic dreams, rather than choosing a wise and prudent political course.
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Democracy is the key for Arab leaders to be able to end the historically destructive pattern of government whereby they were constantly forced to placate and control an ‘Arab street’ which they had themselves incited with bellicose rhetoric against the Jewish state and its American ‘imperialist’ patrons. It was when trapped in that insoluble conundrum of their own making that the Arab leaders manoeuvred themselves against their own will into the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six Day War.
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But forcing Israel’s Arab enemies to accept her existence and make peace with her is one thing; imposing on them the territorial terms of a settlement is quite another. Demography and territory, the two pillars of the Zionist enterprise, cannot be reconciled unless Israel abandons her territorial ambitions and departs from the unrealistic, and morally corrupting, dream of possessing the biblical lands of Eretz-Israel.
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‘Transfer’ and ‘separation’ were, one should recall, important concepts that were advocated from the early days of the Zionist enterprise.
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Israel’s leaders and her civil society bear a heavy responsibility to conceive bold and generous solutions precisely because of the high ideals upon which the Jewish state was built, and because of the noble values of Jewish civilisation that cannot be reconciled with the denial of the natural right of an occupied people to a life of freedom and dignity.