[R-G] NYR Books: Israel: The Threat from Within

[Tim Murphy]

THE NEW YORK REVEIW OF BOOKS
Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004

Feature

Israel: The Threat from Within

By

Henry Siegman


A recent front-page New York Times article on Condoleezza Rice's role in
shaping US foreign policy reported that in the spring of 2002, when violence
was escalating between Israel and the Palestinians, President Bush asked the
following of Dr. Rice: Beyond the question of whether the US is "pushing
this party hard enough or that party hard enough," what is the "fundamental
problem" that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and continues to
stand in the way of a political agreement?[1]

Dr. Rice's answer was that the fundamental problem is Yasser Arafat— his
refusal to act to stop terrorism and the absence of democracy and
accountability in Palestinian political institutions. She concluded,
therefore, that sidelining Yasser Arafat, democratizing Palestinian
institutions, and bringing to the fore a new Palestinian leadership would
improve the prospects of an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. This
insight, according to Dr. Rice, countered the "prevailing wisdom" that the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict was "just about land."

Of course, the conflict has never been just about land, but what has
defeated every previous peace initiative —from the Oslo Accords to the
Mitchell proposals to the Tenet guidelines to the current roadmap—is the
struggle over land. And what has made land the central issue is Israel's
unilateral expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, an expansion
that continues relentlessly even as Prime Minister Sharon speaks of
disengagement, withdrawal, painful concessions, and the dismantling of
settlements.

Israel's expansion into the West Bank threatens to preclude a two-state
solution, the only outcome that would resolve the conflict without the
disastrous result of ending either Jewish or Palestinian national existence.
The settler movement, which has enjoyed the patronage of Sharon from its
inception in 1967, has made no secret that it is precisely the prevention of
a Palestinian state in the West Bank that is its central goal.

While the physical space taken up by the inhabited areas of the Jewish
settlements is not more than 3 percent of the West Bank, the municipal
borders of these settlements and the infrastructure that supports them take
up about 50 percent of the West Bank. It is land that under the terms of the
Oslo Accords was designated Area C, considered "government land" when Jordan
occupied the West Bank. Un-der the terms of the Oslo Accords, this
area—except for military bases in which the Israeli Defense Force would
remain for varying periods of time to deal with residual security
concerns—was to have been returned to the Palestinians.

The 1947 UN partition plan that divided Palestine between the Jews and the
Arabs of Palestine allotted roughly 50 percent to each side. Because of the
wars that followed Arab rejection of the UN resolution, Israel enlarged its
share to 78 percent of pre-1948 Palestine, annexing over 50 percent more
territory than allotted by the UN partition plan. Following the 1967 war,
when the remaining 22 percent of Arab Palestine came under Israeli
occupation, the UN adopted resolutions 242 and 338, which affirmed the
obligation of Arab countries to recog-nize Israel's legitimacy and its right
to live in security, but also insisted on the inadmissibility of Israel's
acquisition of territory in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the 1967
war. While these resolutions do not foreclose the possibility of adjustments
to the pre-1967 border to accommodate Israeli security concerns, nothing in
these resolutions suggests that such changes could be made unilaterally by
Israel.

The answer to President Bush's question to Dr. Rice therefore is that the
"fundamental problem" that has undermined every previous peace initiative is
the notion entertained by Prime Minister Sharon's government, and to a
greater or lesser degree supported by all previous Israeli governments, that
the 22 percent of the pre-1948 Palestine Mandate which now constitutes the
West Bank and Gaza remains subject to further surgery by Israel.

The political damage done by the settlements to the peace process has been
ratcheted up several orders of magnitude by the separation fence. For
Palestinians, the fence confirms Israel's intention to leave most of its
settlements in place and to confine the Palestinian population within less
than half of the West Bank (i.e., about 10 percent of pre-1948 Palestine).
No amount of verbal acrobatics by Prime Minister Sharon will persuade any
Palestinian that the purpose of this fence, in which Israel, despite its
parlous economic situation, is investing billions of Israeli shekels, is
anything other than the creation of South African– style bantustans to
contain an emerging Arab majority.

According to current plans, the route followed by the separation fence veers
deeply into the West Bank along its western border. Sharon has approved the
continuation of the fence to enclose Palestinians along the eastern
(Jordanian) border as well. The effect of the fence, once it is completed,
will be to enlarge Israel's share of pre-1948 Palestine from 50 to 90
percent. The remaining 10 percent (about half of today's West Bank) conforms
to Sharon's definition of a "viable Palestinian state." Palestinians see no
point in engaging in internal debates about compromises they need to make to
achieve a peace agreement with Israel if such an agreement will yield
nothing more than a collection of tiny fenced-in enclaves under Israeli
control.

Of course, Israel's government has not only the right but the obligation to
protect its citizens against the murderous suicide bombings of Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terrorist groups; a government that
fails to protect its citizens loses its right to govern. As even Yasser
Arafat declared recently,[2] Palestinians have no objection to a separation
fence if it is built on Israeli territory. But no one I know of in Israel's
government, including the IDF and the security services, would deny that a
fence whose purpose is the protection of Israel's citizens would be far more
effective if it were constructed along Israel's pre-1967 border rather than
snaking its way around Israeli settlements deep inside Palestinian
territory. The argument that the fence's intrusions into Palestinian
territory are necessary to protect the settlements establishes a new
standard for chutzpah. In effect, Palestinians are being told that Israel
must steal more Palestinian land to protect Israelis living on previously
stolen Palestinian land.

President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have often objected to
the current path of the separation fence and to the continued expansion of
settlements. They have also said that the borders of the new Palestinian
state must assure its viability. But other than their rhetorical
exhortations, they have done nothing that might lead Sharon to believe that
his indifference to their demands will have the slightest adverse
consequences for Israel. And they have resisted every attempt to get them to
define their use of the term "viable Palestinian state" so that it is
understood to require a return to the pre-1967 border, subject only to
changes in that border agreed to by the parties.

In view of the American refusal to take a clear position on the illegality
of Israel's unilateral confiscations of Palestinian land and on the emerging
cantonization of the West Bank resulting from the path followed by the
separation fence, the implication for Palestinians of Dr. Rice's comment
about the need for reform that will lead to new Palestinian leadership is
that the US expects this new leadership to be more accepting of Sharon's
dismemberment of Palestinian territory. Ironically, this has enabled Arafat
to discredit Palestinians who have opposed his corruption and
authoritarianism by accusing them of collaboration with those who seek to
defeat the Palestinian national enterprise. This has devastated the
Palestinian reform movement as thoroughly as the post–Camp David intifada
devastated the Israeli peace camp.

Unfortunately, Secretary of State Powell's treatment of the Middle East
peace process in his article in the January–February 2004 issue of Foreign
Affairs can only serve to reinforce Palestinians' fears. The central point
of his article is a rejection of the criticism that President Bush's foreign
policy is "unilateralist by design" and biased toward preemptive action.
Powell cites the Quartet—the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN—as well as the
Middle East roadmap as evidence of President Bush's commitment to
"partnership" with America's friends.[3] They are in fact poor examples of
the Bush administration's respect for the views and expectations of its
allies. The deep sense of frustration and anger felt by America's Quartet
partners over President Bush's unwillingness to enforce the roadmap's
provisions evenhandedly is an open secret.

But it is Secretary of State Powell's rendering of the failure of the
"hopeful premiership" of Mahmoud Abbas that is particularly revealing.
Powell attributes this failure solely to the obstructionism of Yasser
Arafat. Arafat's obstructionism was indeed a major reason for Mahmoud
Abbas's downfall. However, it was clear to everyone from the outset that
hopes for Abbas's success were not based on the expectation that Arafat
would cease playing an obstructionist role; there would have been no need to
replace Arafat if he no longer obstructed progress toward peace. Instead,
the expectation was that improvements in the Palestinian situation that
would result from changes in Israeli policy—changes made possible by Abbas's
rejection of violence and his commitment to reform—would give the new
Palestinian prime minister the credibility he would need in order to prevail
over Arafat. But these changes, advocated even by the IDF and Israel's
intelligence services, were blocked by Sharon.

There is no hint in Secretary Powell's article of Sharon's role in the
failure of Mahmoud Abbas's government. There is no reference to Sharon's
continued expansion of settlements, or to the charade of removing outposts
(which serve as embryonic settlements) while their number actually
increased. Nor is there any hint in Powell's ar-ticle of America's own
contribution to Abbas's fall because of President Bush's failure to "ride
herd" on both parties to secure compliance with the terms of the roadmap, as
he had promised at the launching of this initiative at Aqaba in June 2003.

It is hard to believe that Secretary Powell's one-sided account represents
his view of what actually happened. Admittedly, it takes some courage to
tell the truth in an election year. But US officials have always exhorted
both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to muster the courage to tell their
respective publics the truth about the price a peace agreement entails. When
it comes to the Middle East peace process, Washington has hardly set an
example of either courage or truthtelling.

The most dramatic evidence that territory remains the fundamental issue in
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the recent statement—in Ha'aretz and
other Israeli papers on January 9—by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of
Hamas in Gaza, and repeated by Hamas's Abdel Aziz Rantisi and the Islamic
Jihad's Nafiz Azzam, that their organizations are ready to postpone
indefinitely their "military" operations in return for an Israeli withdrawal
to its pre-1967 borders. This change in policy, which relegates the recovery
of all of Palestine to an indefinite future, was not linked by these
organizations to the return of refugees, to claims to Jerusalem, or to other
issues concerning a permanent status agreement between Israel and Palestine;
it was linked only to the territorial issue.

Yassin's statement will be seen by many as meaningless, since it leaves
Hamas free to revert to its previous position at any time. But this reaction
ignores not only the unique religious context within which Hamas operates
but the essential nature of all religious cultures that claim divine
sanction for their beliefs. For Hamas to abandon what it has maintained is a
divinely ordained obligation to recover all of Palestine is to bring into
question its very identity, which it defines as its obedience to God's
immutable will. It must therefore resort to theological fictions, i.e.,
relegating this obligation to future history, in order to be able to claim
it has not compromised its orthodoxy.

This way of reconciling contradictions that often exist between the
requirements of orthodox religious doctrine believed to be divinely
ordained, and therefore unchangeable, and the exigencies of contemporary
life is entirely familiar to practically all religious systems based on
fidelity to a divinely revealed scripture, literally understood. For
example, Orthodox Judaism affirms that the sacrificial rites (the
slaughtering of animals and the ritual sprinkling of their blood) performed
by the ancient Israelites in the Jerusalem temple are divinely ordained. In
order to deal with the conflict aroused between a return to such a mode of
religious worship, for which Orthodox Jews pray daily, and changing cultural
sensibilities, Orthodox Judaism, not unlike the Islamic Hamas, has postponed
a return to the rite of animal sacrifices to future history and messianic
times. (An opinion by the great twelfth-century scholar and philosopher
Maimonides that sacrifices would be abolished in messianic times, because
prayer is a higher form of worship than animal sacrifice, nearly led to his
excommunication, and was therefore retracted.)

In any event, Palestinian recognition of Israel's legitimacy is an issue for
the Palestinian Authority, the body officially representing the Palestinian
people, not Hamas. The government of Israel would similarly reject out of
hand a Palestinian demand that the settler movement renounce its claims to
the West Bank and Gaza as a condition for a peace agreement with Israel.
Israel would insist that the settler movement's ideology is irrelevant as
long as Israel's government accepts the legitimacy of Palestinian national
sovereignty within mutually agreed borders. There is no reason why the same
criteria should not apply to the Palestinian Authority.

Whatever one's conclusions about the significance of Hamas's and Islamic
Jihad's willingness to suspend indefinitely their terrorist operations in
return for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, this change
in rhetoric underscores the importance of territory for all Palestinians.
Therefore, if the US is to persuade Palestinians to take the difficult
measures required to end terrorism and to reform their political
institutions, Washington will have to be far clearer than it has been about
its commitment to a Palestinian state whose territory will diverge from the
pre-1967 lines only by agreement between the parties. A peace initiative
that falls short of this kind of precision by the US about where it stands
on the territorial issue has no chance of breaking the current impasse.

Many in Israel and in the West may believe Palestinian fears of their
eventual confinement in a collection of bantustans to be irrational, or
simply a ruse to discredit Sharon's government. But the plausibility of
those fears could not have been confirmed more dramatically, or more
shockingly, than by what Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian of
Israel's War of Independence, recently said in an astonishing interview in
Ha'aretz on January 9, 2004.

According to Benny Morris, recently declassified documents in the archives
of the IDF reveal that in 1947, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders
concluded that a Jewish state could not come into being in the territory
assigned to Jews by the UN without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians....
In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational
orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel
them and destroy the villages themselves.

This resulted in "far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously
thought," including "many cases of rape [that] ended in murder" and
executions of Palestinians who were lined up against a wall and shot (in
Operation Hiram).

The dismantling of Palestinian society, the destruction of Palestinian towns
and villages, and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians were not unavoidable
consequences of the war declared on the emerging Jewish state by Arab
countries. Rather, as Morris repeatedly confirms, it was a deliberate and
planned operation intended to "cleanse" (the term used in the declassified
documents) those parts of Palestine assigned to the Jews as a necessary
pre-condition for the emergence of a Jewish state.

The incredulous interviewer asks Morris, "Ben-Gurion was a 'transferist'?"
Morris replies, "Of course." He adds, "Ben-Gurion was right. Without the
uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."
Indeed, Morris faults Ben-Gurion for limiting the "cleansing" to the 1948
armistice line. "Even though [Ben-Gurion] understood the demographic issue
and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he
got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered." Morris believes that
it is only a question of time before Israel will have to complete the job
begun in 1947 by "cleansing" the entire West Bank as well.

The interviewer asked Morris whether he was not justifying war crimes.
Morris replied that the necessity and nobility of the Jewish people's return
to their patrimony justified what the Jewish forces did. "There are
circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.... The need to
establish this [Jewish] state in this place overcame the injustice that was
done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."

Morris and those in Israel who agree with him presumably reject what
President Bush said in a speech before the UN on November 10, 2001,
outlining his war on terror, that "no national aspiration, no remembered
wrong, can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent." But the
question they must answer then is why the necessity and nobility of the
Palestinians' return to their patrimony do not justify the suicide bombings
of Hamas. Is it a crime for Palestinians to believe that their national
cause is no less noble or less compelling than the Jewish one?

If Morris's account of the declassified IDF documents is confirmed, then the
Palestinian narrative of their 1948 nakba (disaster) is true, and Israel's
counternarrative is not. It should hardly come as a surprise that even
Palestinians who accept the impossibility of a return of Palestinian
refugees to Israel insist that a peace agreement with Israel must at least
include an Israeli acknowledgment of responsibility for the Palestinian
tragedy. Anyone reading the Morris interview would find it difficult to
disagree.

The early history of the State of Israel is not unique. Other countries have
chapters in their history of which they should be deeply ashamed. And it
must also be stated that Morris's shocking revelations of death and
destruction deliberately inflicted on the Arabs of Palestine do not justify
Palestinian terrorism against Israel's civilian population. But Morris's
account points to the sorry fact that there is not much that distinguishes
how Jews behaved in 1948 in their struggle to achieve statehood from
Palestinian behavior today. At the very least, this sobering truth should
lead to a shedding of the moral smugness of too many Israelis and to a
reexamination of their demonization of the Palestinian national cause.

The implication of the above for the territorial issue is that it would be
irrational for Palestinians not to believe that the goal of Sharon's fence
is anything other than their confinement in a series of bantustans, if not a
prelude to a second "transfer," which Morris insists in this interview is
inevitable.

It is extremely unlikely that the US will reengage seriously in the peace
process and press for the implementation of the roadmap, or finally take a
clear position on the territorial issue prior to the forthcoming
presidential election, or anytime soon thereafter. It is therefore hard to
imagine what will prevent a descent into chaos in the occupied territories,
where the writ of the Palestinian Authority is giving way to the anarchy of
criminal gangs and of local warlords. The complete collapse of the
Palestinian Authority, which may be imminent, would very probably rule out
the two-state option, for there would be no central authority capable of
delivering a Palestinian commitment to—much less the implementation of—the
terms of any Israeli–Palestinian peace accord. Unless Israelis are willing
to preserve their majority status by imposing a South African–style
apartheid regime, or to complete the transfer begun in 1948, as Morris
believes they will— policies one hopes a majority of Israelis will never
accept—it is only a matter of time before the emerging majority of Arabs in
Greater Israel will reshape the country's national identity. That would be a
tragedy of historic proportions for the Zionist enterprise and for the
Jewish people.

What will make the tragedy doubly painful is that it will be happening at a
time when changes in the Arab world and beyond (i.e. the Saudi initiative of
2002, the removal of Saddam Hussein, Syrian isolation, Libya's amazing
opening to Israel and removal of its WMD program, and the opening of Iran's
nuclear facilities to international inspection) are removing virtually every
strategic security threat that for so long endangered Israel's existence.
That existence is now threatened by the greed of the settlers and the
political blindness of Israel's leaders.

January 28, 2004

Notes:

[1] See Elisabeth Bumiller, "A Partner in Shaping an Assertive Foreign
Policy," The New York Times, January 7, 2004.

[2] The New York Times, December 11, 2003.

[3] In its first phase, the roadmap requires that Palestinians
unconditionally cease violence, institute political reforms, appoint a prime
minister, draft a Palestinian constitution, and hold elections. Israel is
required to withdraw from areas occupied since the beginning of the intifada
in September 2000, dismantle settlements built since Ariel Sharon took
office in March 2001, and freeze all other settlement activity. The second
phase of the roadmap calls for an international conference to initiate
negotiations that would establish an "independent Palestinian state with
provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty." The third and final
phase, involving a second international conference, envisions an end to the
occupation and the subsequent establishment of an "independent, democratic,
and viable Palestine" at an undefined point in 2005.

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