09/06/07 "LBR" -- - When
Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in
June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah
from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national
unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March –
had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.[*]
(Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of
opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush
agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to
the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the
credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order
to prevail over Hamas.
Both Bush and Olmert have
spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution
to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their
determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a
Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm
for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation
that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian
moderates will never prevail over those considered
extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is
Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of
Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his
government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be
rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only
confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation
and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are
Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the
conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn
(it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view,
all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not
exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state
of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on
Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the
tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.
In fact, all previous peace
initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush
nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge.
That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s
decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the
emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective
military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure,
Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the
creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians
could call a state, but only in order to prevent the
creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would
be the majority.
The Middle East peace
process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern
diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of
2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a
peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining
Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo –
has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide
cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land
and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF
chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the
consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated
people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and
his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been
the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a
return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon
Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and
other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with
Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory –
based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel
Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement
enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza,
the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by
the international community as the heroic achievement of a
man newly committed to an honourable peace with the
Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series
of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what
these bantustans will look like if their residents do not
behave as Israel wants.
Israel’s disingenuous
commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is
precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation
and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet
– with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia
obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated
with and provided cover for this deception by accepting
Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving
Palestinian peace partner.
Just one year after the 1967
war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the
time was minister of defence, described his plan for the
future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The
plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What
exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the
West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv,
Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but
“How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who
has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings,
summarises the situation as follows:
Living without a
solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the
key to maximising the benefits of conquest while
minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal
annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however,
disguised a programme of expansion that generations of
Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli
settlement, the dynamic transformation of the
territories and the expansion of effective Israeli
sovereignty to the Jordan River.
In an interview in
Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the
then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic
goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of
the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would
place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in
‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor:
formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead
bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are
still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s
unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of
several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain
US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a
precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The
limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the
political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West
Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon,
Bush wrote: ‘In light of new realities on the ground,
including already existing major Israeli population centres,
it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status
negotiations will be a full and complete return to the
armistice lines of 1949.’
In a recent interview in
Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s
representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said
that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the
agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a
vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha’aretz,
was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser.
‘Every aspect’ of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered ‘was
abrogated’.
Another recent interview in
Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior
adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even
more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior
officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working
clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF,
Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about
the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead
‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a
Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in
2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians
to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the
territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked
on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For
Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According
to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that
is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the
Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers
in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.
A new UN map of the West
Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the
situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has
rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to
Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including major
population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into
enclaves; movement between them is restricted by 450
roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found that what
remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the
Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the
aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now
underway to the infrastructure of the territories –
including a network of highways that bypass and isolate
Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto
cantonisation of the West Bank.
These are the realities on
the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical blather in
Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for
Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their
culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt
all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can
begin – seeks to drown out. Given the vast power imbalance
between Israel and the Palestinians – not to mention the
vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel
from precisely those countries that one would have expected
to compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance –
nothing will change for the better without the US, the EU
and other international actors finally facing up to what
have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.
These impediments include
the assumption, implicit in Israel’s occupation policy, that
if no peace agreement is reached, the ‘default setting’ of
UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite
continuation of Israel’s occupation. If this reading were
true, the resolution would actually be inviting an occupying
power that wishes to retain its adversary’s territory to do
so simply by means of avoiding peace talks – which is
exactly what Israel has been doing. In fact, the
introductory statement to Resolution 242 declares that
territory cannot be acquired by war, implying that if the
parties cannot reach agreement, the occupier must withdraw
to the status quo ante: that, logically, is 242’s default
setting. Had there been a sincere intention on Israel’s part
to withdraw from the territories, surely forty years should
have been more than enough time in which to reach an
agreement.
Israel’s contention has long
been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967
war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can
withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an
armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a
‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the
area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be
allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or
unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the
occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons,
but principally because UN General Assembly Partition
Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s
international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining
Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the
equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population
on which they were entitled to establish their own state,
and it mapped the borders of that territory with great
precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of
Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination
was based on normative law and the democratic principles
that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the
time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in
Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays
in its implementation.
In the course of a war
launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the
implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel
enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to
acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now
cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian
territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the
territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is
allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are
to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made
on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to
resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a
dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been
the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their
struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when
that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian
population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to
observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most
situations in which a people’s drive for national
self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power.
Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was
no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in
this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted
civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that
the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of
Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a
new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had
‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a
grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or
passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were
placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were
indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that
‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
Underlying Israel’s efforts
to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has
never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory,
despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation.
Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory
to which they have claims no less compelling than the
Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions
notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for
the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the
front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002.
The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to
describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed
only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party
stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view.
That the former prime minister Ehud Barak (now Olmert’s
defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial
proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of
Israel’s ‘generosity’, and never as an acknowledgment of
Palestinian rights, is another example of this mindset.
Indeed, the term ‘Palestinian rights’ seems not to exist in
Israel’s lexicon.
The problem is not, as
Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to
compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and
take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent
charge, since the Palestinians made much the most
far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally
accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice
border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim
to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition
resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have
never received any credit for this wrenching concession,
made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a
right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that
further border adjustments should be made at the expense of
the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the
Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably
so.
Nonetheless, the
Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments
to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of
West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within
the Jewish state, provided they received comparable
territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected
this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a
right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement.
But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no
doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic
return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by
Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the
new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in
other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the
international community to reject (other than in empty
rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the
creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so
long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel,
that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the
efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the
same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a
breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a
resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the
pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the
parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international
recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242,
reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution,
is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967
border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12
months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take
longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security
Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms
for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an
international force to enter the occupied territories to
help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in
building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by
preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee
the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.
If the US and its allies
were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade Israel that
it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967
situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in
permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for
complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a
peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as
Blair can do to put the peace process back on track is to
speak the truth about the real impediment to peace. This
would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state,
since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to
have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.
