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Round Two: "The way of South Africa"
The main Arab (and British) fear before and after the 1948 war was that the Zionist movement would use as a springboard for further expansion the Jewish state carved out of Palestine. (20) In fact, Zionists pursued from early on a "stages" strategy of conquering Palestine by parts - a strategy it would later vilify the Palestinians for. "The Zionist vision could not be fulfilled in one fell swoop," Ben-Gurion's official biographer reports, "especially the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state. The stage-by-stage approach, dictated by less than favorable circumstances, required the formulation of objectives that appeared to be `concessions.'" It acquiesced in British and United Nations proposals for the partition of Palestine but only "as a stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation" (Ben-Gurion). (21) Chief among the Zionist leadership's regrets in the aftermath of the 1948 war was its failure to conquer the whole of Palestine. Come 1967, Israel exploited the "revolutionary times" of the June war to finish the job. (22) Sir Martin Gilbert, in his glowing history of Israel, maintained that Zionist leaders from the outset conceived the conquered territories as an undesired "burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel." In a highly acclaimed new study, Six Days of War, Michael Oren suggests that Israel's occupation of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza "came about largely through chance," "the vagaries and momentum of war." In light of the Zionist movement's long-standing territorial imperatives, Sternhell more soberly observes: "The role of occupier, which Israel began to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June 1967, was not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realization of Zionism's major ambitions." (23)
Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people. Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, for the first time "unequivocally prohibited deportation" of civilians under occupation (Articles 49, 147). (25) Accordingly Israel moved after the June war to impose the second of its two options mentioned above - apartheid. This proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The "Peace Process"
Right after the June war the United Nations deliberated on the modalities for achieving a just and lasting peace. The broad consensus of the General Assembly as well as the Security Council called for Israel's withdrawal from the Arab territories it occupied during the June war. Security Council Resolution 242 stipulated this basic principle of international law in its preambular paragraph "emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." (emphasis in original) (26) At the same time, Resolution 242 called on Arab states to recognize Israel's right "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of force." To accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, the international consensus eventually provided for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once Israel withdrew to its pre-June borders. (Resolution 242 had only referred obliquely to the Palestinians in its call for "achieving a just resolution of the refugee problem.")
Although Defense Minister Moshe Dayan privately acknowledged that Resolution 242 required full withdrawal, Israel officially maintained that it allowed for "territorial revision." (27) Israel's refusal in February 1971 to fully withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt's offer of a peace treaty led directly to the October 1973 war. (28) The basic parameters of Israeli policy regarding Palestinian territory were set out in the late 1960s in the proposal of Yigal Allon, a senior Labor Party official and Cabinet member. The "Allon Plan" called for Israel's annexation of up to half the West Bank, while Palestinians would be confined to the other half in two unconnected cantons to the north and south. Sasson Sofer notes generally the "fertile dualism" of Israeli diplomacy - one might rather say "fertile cynicism" - of "pointing to the uniqueness of the Jewish question in order to obtain legitimacy, and then stressing the normality of Israel's sovereign existence as a state which should be accorded all the international rights and privileges of a national entity." In the case at hand Israel demanded, like all sovereign states, full recognition yet also claimed a right, in the name of unique Jewish suffering and despite international law, to territorial conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of the Nazi holocaust played a crucial role in this diplomatic game. (29)
The United States initially supported the consensus interpretation of Resolution 242, making allowance for only "minor" and "mutual" adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. (30) In heated private exchanges with Israel during the UN-sponsored mediation efforts of Gunnar Jarring in 1968, (31) American officials stood firm that "the words `recognized and secure' meant `security arrangements' and `recognition' of new lines as international boundaries," and "never meant that Israel could extend its territory to [the] West Bank or Suez if this was what it felt its security required"; and that "there will never be peace if Israel tries to hold onto large chunks of territory." Referring to it explicitly by name, the US deplored even the minimalist version of the Allon Plan as "a non-starter" and "unacceptable in principle." (32)
In a crucial shift beginning under the Nixon-Kissinger administration, however, American policy was realigned with Israel's. (33) Except for Israel and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international community has consistently supported, for the past quarter-century, the "two-state" settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in January 1976 and April 1980 affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and neighboring Arab states. A December 1989 General Assembly resolution along similar lines passed 151-3 (no abstentions), the three negative votes cast by Israel, the United States, and Dominica. (34) Given this record of contempt for world opinion, it's unsurprising that Israel set as a crucial precondition for negotiations that Palestinians "must drop their traditional demand" for "international arbitration" or a "Security Council mechanism." (35) The main obstacle to Israel's annexation of occupied Palestinian territory was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state settlement in the mid-1970s, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organization bent on Israel's destruction. Indeed, pressures mounted on Israel to reach an agreement with the PLO's "compromising approach." Consequently in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, where Palestinian leaders were headquartered, to head off what Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv dubbed the PLO's "peace offensive." (36)
Frustrated at the diplomatic impasse caused by US-Israeli obstructionism, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rose up in December 1987 against the occupation in a basically non-violent civil revolt, the intifada. Israel's brutal repression (compounded by the inept and corrupt leadership of the PLO) eventually resulted in the uprising's defeat. (37) With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq, and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinians suffered yet a further decline in their fortunes. The US and Israel seized on this opportune moment to recruit the already venal and now desperate Palestinian leadership - "on the verge of bankruptcy" and "in [a] weakened condition" (Uri Savir, Israel's chief negotiator at Oslo) - as surrogates of Israeli power. This was the real meaning of the Oslo Accord signed in September 1993: to create a Palestinian Bantustan by dangling before Arafat and the PLO the perquisites of power and privilege, much like how the British controlled Palestine during the Mandate years through the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, and the Supreme Muslim Council. (38) "The occupation continued" after Oslo, a seasoned Israeli observer, Meron Benvenisti, wrote, "albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the Palestinian people, represented by their `sole representative,' the PLO." And again: "It goes without saying that `cooperation' based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization." The "test" for Arafat and the PLO, according to Savir, was whether they would "us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas and other violent opposition groups" contesting Israeli apartheid. (39)
Israel's settlement policy in the Occupied Territories the past decade points up the real content of the "peace process" set in motion at Oslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study by B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) entitled Land Grab. (40) Due primarily to massive Israeli government subsidies, the Jewish settler population increased from 250,000 to 380,000 during the Oslo years, with settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace under the tenure of Labor's Ehud Barak than Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. Illegal under international law and built on land illegally seized from Palestinians, these settlements now incorporate nearly half the land surface of the West Bank. For all practical purposes they have been annexed to Israel (Israeli law extends not only to Israeli but also non-Israeli Jews residing in the settlements) and are off-limits to Palestinians without special authorization. Fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful Palestinian development. In parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem the only available land for building lies in areas under Israeli jurisdiction, while the water consumption of the 5,000 Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley is equivalent to 75% of the water consumption of the entire two million Palestinians inhabitants of the West Bank. Not even one Jewish settlement was dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing units in the settlements increased by more than 50 percent (excluding East Jerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts occurred not under Netanyahu's tenure but rather under Barak's, in the year 2000 - exactly when Barak claims to have "left no stone unturned" in his quest for peace.
"Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality," the B'Tselem study concludes. "This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."
During the first 18 months of Sharon's term of office, fully 44 new settlements - rebuked by the UN Commission Human Rights as "incendiary and provocative" - were established. (41) As settlements multiply, Israel is corralling West Bank Palestinians into eight fragments of territory each surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must load and unload on the borders "back-to-back"), thereby further devastating an economy in which unemployment already stands above 70 percent in some areas, half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, and one-fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused - according to a USAID report - by transport blockages. "What is truly appalling," a Haaretz writer lamented, "is the blasé way in which the story has been received and handled by the mass media….Where is the public outcry against this attempt to divide the territories and enforce internal passports … [and] humiliate and inconvenience a population that can scarcely earn a living or live a life as it is?" (42)
After seven years of on-again, off-again negotiations and a succession of new interim agreements that managed to rob the Palestinians of the few crumbs thrown from the master's table at Oslo, (43) the moment of truth arrived at Camp David in July 2000. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak delivered Arafat the ultimatum of formally acquiescing in a Bantustan or bearing full responsibility for the collapse of the "peace process." Arafat refused, however, to budge from the international consensus for resolving the conflict. According to Robert Malley, a key American negotiator at Camp David, Arafat continued to hold out for a "Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 borders, living alongside Israel," yet also "accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for one swap of land of 'equal size and value'" - that is, the "minor" and "mutual" border adjustments of the original US position on Resolution 242. Malley's rendering of the Palestinian proposal at Camp David - an offer that was widely dismissed but rarely reported - deserves full quotation: "a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers, the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history, preservation of Israel's demographic balance between Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence." On the other hand, contrary to the myth spun by Barak-Clinton as well as a compliant media, "Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty," a special adviser at the British Foreign Office observed, "while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians." Although accounts of the Barak proposal significantly differ, all knowledgeable observers concur that it "would have meant that territory annexed by Israel would encroach deep inside the Palestinian state" (Malley), dividing the West Bank into multiple, disconnected enclaves, and offering land swaps that were of neither equal size nor equal value. (44)
Consider in this regard Israel's reaction to the March 2002 Saudi peace plan. Crown Prince Abdullah proposed, and all 21 other members of the Arab League approved, a plan making concessions that actually went beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal, it offered not only full recognition but "normal relations with Israel," and called not for the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees but rather only a "just solution" to the refugee problem. A Haaretz commentator noted that the Saudi plan was "surprisingly similar to what Barak claims to have proposed two years ago" at Camp David. Were Israel truly committed to a comprehensive withdrawal in exchange for normalization with the Arab world, the Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement by the Arab League summit ought to have been met with euphoria. In fact, after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was quickly deposited in Orwell's memory hole. (45) Nonetheless, Barak's - and Clinton's - fraud that Palestinians at Camp David rejected a maximally generous Israeli offer provided crucial moral cover for the horrors that ensued.
19. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 173 (Katznelson; for Katznelson's effective support of forced transfer, see p. 176). Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: 1889), vol. 4, p. 54.
20. Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951 (Oxford: 1984), pp. 117, 448, 614. Michael J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945-1948 (Princeton: 1982), pp. 197-8, 201.
21. See I&R, pp. 10-11, 15, 102-3. Teveth, Ben-Gurion, p. 101 (cf. pp. 129, 187-90). For copious evidence that, even in the absence of Arab aggression, the Zionist leadership never intended to respect the 1947 Partition Resolution borders, see Ben-Eliezer, Making, pp. 144, 150-1.
22. For the June war, see I&R, chap. 5.
23. For Zionist territorial imperatives after 1948, see I&R, p. 143. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (New York: 1998), p. 393. Michael Oren, Six Days of War (Oxford: 2002), p. 312. Sternhell, Founding, p. 330.
24. An influential Zionist official during the 1948 expulsion, Yosef Weitz, typically warned after the conquests of the June war of the need to preserve Israel's Jewish character by keeping the "non-Jewish minority limited to 15%" (Nur Masalha, A Land Without A People (London: 1997), p. 79).
25. M. Cherif Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law (Boston: 1999), pp. 312 ("unequivocally"), 322 (see pp. 312-27 for the historical development of international law regarding deportation).
26. See I&R, pp. 144-7.
27. See I&R, pp. 221-2, note 63.
28. See I&R, chap. 6.
29. Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts (Washington: 1987), pp. 14ff. (Allon plan). Sofer, Zionism, p. 385. Finkelstein, Holocaust, pp. 47-8.
30. See I&R, pp. 147-8.
31. For the Jarring mission, see I&R, pp. 151ff.
32. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XX (Washington, DC: 2001), pp. 619, 634-5 ("meant"/"never meant"), 639, 639 ("large chunks"/"non-starter"), 641, 654 ("unacceptable"), 655, 699.
33. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (Boston: 1983), pp. 65-6. For the strategic motives behind this US policy shift and its repercussions for American Jewry, see Finkelstein, Holocaust, chap. 1.
34. For a comprehensive record of lone US vetoes in the Security Council and lone US-Israel negative votes in the General Assembly on the Middle East conflict, see Finkelstein, R&F, pp. 53-7.
35. Uri Savir, The Process (New York: 1998), p. 6.
36. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security (Oxford: 1987), pp. 20 ("compromising"), 70 ("peace offensive"). For further discussion and documentation, see R&F, pp. 44-5.
37. For extensive documentation of Israel's repression, see R&F, chap. 3.
38. Savir, Process, pp. 5, 25. For the precedent of British rule in Palestine, see Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge: 1994), pp. 86, 90-1, and Porath, Emergence, p. 202. The British first implemented indirect rule in its empire after brutally crushing the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Victor Kiernan's commentary on this British strategy could easily serve as an epigraph for the Oslo process: "Rulers of the kind lately vilified as Oriental tyrants were now eulogized as natural leaders of their people. Leaving a third of the country under princely rule could be speciously represented as a concession to Indian feeling; and if, as was increasingly the case, conditions were worse there than in British India, nationalists could be invited to contemplate the consequences of self-government" (The Lords of Human Kind (Boston: 1969), p. 52).
39. Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies (New York: 1995), pp. 218, 232. Savir, Process, p. 147. For detailed analysis of the Oslo Accord, see Norman G. Finkelstein, "Whither the `Peace Process?'" in New Left Review (July/August 1996). For a comprehensive overview of post-Oslo developments, see Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace (London: 1998).
40. May 2002.
41. Daniel Williams, "Settlements Expanding Under Sharon," in Washington Post (31 May 2002). "UN expert says settlements, house demolitions are war crimes," in Haaretz (15 June 2002). Jackson Diehl, "Making a Palestinian state impossible," in Washington Post (23 July 2002).
42. Amira Hass, "Donors are funding cantonization," in Haaretz (22 May 2002). Brian Whitaker, "UN to feed 500,000 needy Palestinians," in Guardian (22 May 2002). Karen DeYoung, "Hezbollah Buildup in Lebanon Cited," in Washington Post (15 June 2002) (unemployment). Justin Huggler, "Palestinians face disaster, warns US government group," in Independent (6 August 2002) (malnutrition). Thomas O'Dwyer, "Nothing Personal: Parts and Apartheid," in Haaretz (24 May 2002) ("appalling").
43. See Norman G. Finkelstein, "Securing Occupation: The Meaning of the Wye River Memorandum," in New Left Review (November/December 1998), and esp. Mouin Rabbani, "A Smorgasbord of Failure," in Roane Carey (ed), The New Intifada (Verso: 2001), chap. 3.
44. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," "Camp David and After: An Exchange - A Reply to Ehud Barak," "Camp David and After - Continued: Robert Malley and Hussein Agha reply," in New York Review of Books (9 August 2001, 13 June 2002, 27 June 2002). (Malley quotes from second article) David Clark, "The brilliant offer Israel never made," in Guardian (10 April 2002) (British diplomat).
45. For text of the Saudi plan, see Guardian (28 March 2002); for its revision on the "right of return," see Suzanne Goldenberg, "Arab leaders reach agreement by fudging refugee question," in Guardian, 29 March 2002. Aviv Lavie, "So what if the Arabs want to make peace?" in Haaretz (5 April 2002). For insightful commentary, see Uri Avnery, "How to Torpedo the Saudis" (4 March 2002) at www.counterpunch.org/avnerysaudis.html.
www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php
The main Arab (and British) fear before and after the 1948 war was that the Zionist movement would use as a springboard for further expansion the Jewish state carved out of Palestine. (20) In fact, Zionists pursued from early on a "stages" strategy of conquering Palestine by parts - a strategy it would later vilify the Palestinians for. "The Zionist vision could not be fulfilled in one fell swoop," Ben-Gurion's official biographer reports, "especially the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state. The stage-by-stage approach, dictated by less than favorable circumstances, required the formulation of objectives that appeared to be `concessions.'" It acquiesced in British and United Nations proposals for the partition of Palestine but only "as a stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation" (Ben-Gurion). (21) Chief among the Zionist leadership's regrets in the aftermath of the 1948 war was its failure to conquer the whole of Palestine. Come 1967, Israel exploited the "revolutionary times" of the June war to finish the job. (22) Sir Martin Gilbert, in his glowing history of Israel, maintained that Zionist leaders from the outset conceived the conquered territories as an undesired "burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel." In a highly acclaimed new study, Six Days of War, Michael Oren suggests that Israel's occupation of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza "came about largely through chance," "the vagaries and momentum of war." In light of the Zionist movement's long-standing territorial imperatives, Sternhell more soberly observes: "The role of occupier, which Israel began to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June 1967, was not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realization of Zionism's major ambitions." (23)
Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people. Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, for the first time "unequivocally prohibited deportation" of civilians under occupation (Articles 49, 147). (25) Accordingly Israel moved after the June war to impose the second of its two options mentioned above - apartheid. This proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The "Peace Process"
Right after the June war the United Nations deliberated on the modalities for achieving a just and lasting peace. The broad consensus of the General Assembly as well as the Security Council called for Israel's withdrawal from the Arab territories it occupied during the June war. Security Council Resolution 242 stipulated this basic principle of international law in its preambular paragraph "emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." (emphasis in original) (26) At the same time, Resolution 242 called on Arab states to recognize Israel's right "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of force." To accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, the international consensus eventually provided for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once Israel withdrew to its pre-June borders. (Resolution 242 had only referred obliquely to the Palestinians in its call for "achieving a just resolution of the refugee problem.")
Although Defense Minister Moshe Dayan privately acknowledged that Resolution 242 required full withdrawal, Israel officially maintained that it allowed for "territorial revision." (27) Israel's refusal in February 1971 to fully withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt's offer of a peace treaty led directly to the October 1973 war. (28) The basic parameters of Israeli policy regarding Palestinian territory were set out in the late 1960s in the proposal of Yigal Allon, a senior Labor Party official and Cabinet member. The "Allon Plan" called for Israel's annexation of up to half the West Bank, while Palestinians would be confined to the other half in two unconnected cantons to the north and south. Sasson Sofer notes generally the "fertile dualism" of Israeli diplomacy - one might rather say "fertile cynicism" - of "pointing to the uniqueness of the Jewish question in order to obtain legitimacy, and then stressing the normality of Israel's sovereign existence as a state which should be accorded all the international rights and privileges of a national entity." In the case at hand Israel demanded, like all sovereign states, full recognition yet also claimed a right, in the name of unique Jewish suffering and despite international law, to territorial conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of the Nazi holocaust played a crucial role in this diplomatic game. (29)
The United States initially supported the consensus interpretation of Resolution 242, making allowance for only "minor" and "mutual" adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. (30) In heated private exchanges with Israel during the UN-sponsored mediation efforts of Gunnar Jarring in 1968, (31) American officials stood firm that "the words `recognized and secure' meant `security arrangements' and `recognition' of new lines as international boundaries," and "never meant that Israel could extend its territory to [the] West Bank or Suez if this was what it felt its security required"; and that "there will never be peace if Israel tries to hold onto large chunks of territory." Referring to it explicitly by name, the US deplored even the minimalist version of the Allon Plan as "a non-starter" and "unacceptable in principle." (32)
In a crucial shift beginning under the Nixon-Kissinger administration, however, American policy was realigned with Israel's. (33) Except for Israel and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international community has consistently supported, for the past quarter-century, the "two-state" settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in January 1976 and April 1980 affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and neighboring Arab states. A December 1989 General Assembly resolution along similar lines passed 151-3 (no abstentions), the three negative votes cast by Israel, the United States, and Dominica. (34) Given this record of contempt for world opinion, it's unsurprising that Israel set as a crucial precondition for negotiations that Palestinians "must drop their traditional demand" for "international arbitration" or a "Security Council mechanism." (35) The main obstacle to Israel's annexation of occupied Palestinian territory was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state settlement in the mid-1970s, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organization bent on Israel's destruction. Indeed, pressures mounted on Israel to reach an agreement with the PLO's "compromising approach." Consequently in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, where Palestinian leaders were headquartered, to head off what Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv dubbed the PLO's "peace offensive." (36)
Frustrated at the diplomatic impasse caused by US-Israeli obstructionism, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rose up in December 1987 against the occupation in a basically non-violent civil revolt, the intifada. Israel's brutal repression (compounded by the inept and corrupt leadership of the PLO) eventually resulted in the uprising's defeat. (37) With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq, and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinians suffered yet a further decline in their fortunes. The US and Israel seized on this opportune moment to recruit the already venal and now desperate Palestinian leadership - "on the verge of bankruptcy" and "in [a] weakened condition" (Uri Savir, Israel's chief negotiator at Oslo) - as surrogates of Israeli power. This was the real meaning of the Oslo Accord signed in September 1993: to create a Palestinian Bantustan by dangling before Arafat and the PLO the perquisites of power and privilege, much like how the British controlled Palestine during the Mandate years through the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, and the Supreme Muslim Council. (38) "The occupation continued" after Oslo, a seasoned Israeli observer, Meron Benvenisti, wrote, "albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the Palestinian people, represented by their `sole representative,' the PLO." And again: "It goes without saying that `cooperation' based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization." The "test" for Arafat and the PLO, according to Savir, was whether they would "us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas and other violent opposition groups" contesting Israeli apartheid. (39)
Israel's settlement policy in the Occupied Territories the past decade points up the real content of the "peace process" set in motion at Oslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study by B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) entitled Land Grab. (40) Due primarily to massive Israeli government subsidies, the Jewish settler population increased from 250,000 to 380,000 during the Oslo years, with settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace under the tenure of Labor's Ehud Barak than Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. Illegal under international law and built on land illegally seized from Palestinians, these settlements now incorporate nearly half the land surface of the West Bank. For all practical purposes they have been annexed to Israel (Israeli law extends not only to Israeli but also non-Israeli Jews residing in the settlements) and are off-limits to Palestinians without special authorization. Fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful Palestinian development. In parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem the only available land for building lies in areas under Israeli jurisdiction, while the water consumption of the 5,000 Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley is equivalent to 75% of the water consumption of the entire two million Palestinians inhabitants of the West Bank. Not even one Jewish settlement was dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing units in the settlements increased by more than 50 percent (excluding East Jerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts occurred not under Netanyahu's tenure but rather under Barak's, in the year 2000 - exactly when Barak claims to have "left no stone unturned" in his quest for peace.
"Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality," the B'Tselem study concludes. "This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."
During the first 18 months of Sharon's term of office, fully 44 new settlements - rebuked by the UN Commission Human Rights as "incendiary and provocative" - were established. (41) As settlements multiply, Israel is corralling West Bank Palestinians into eight fragments of territory each surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must load and unload on the borders "back-to-back"), thereby further devastating an economy in which unemployment already stands above 70 percent in some areas, half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, and one-fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused - according to a USAID report - by transport blockages. "What is truly appalling," a Haaretz writer lamented, "is the blasé way in which the story has been received and handled by the mass media….Where is the public outcry against this attempt to divide the territories and enforce internal passports … [and] humiliate and inconvenience a population that can scarcely earn a living or live a life as it is?" (42)
After seven years of on-again, off-again negotiations and a succession of new interim agreements that managed to rob the Palestinians of the few crumbs thrown from the master's table at Oslo, (43) the moment of truth arrived at Camp David in July 2000. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak delivered Arafat the ultimatum of formally acquiescing in a Bantustan or bearing full responsibility for the collapse of the "peace process." Arafat refused, however, to budge from the international consensus for resolving the conflict. According to Robert Malley, a key American negotiator at Camp David, Arafat continued to hold out for a "Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 borders, living alongside Israel," yet also "accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for one swap of land of 'equal size and value'" - that is, the "minor" and "mutual" border adjustments of the original US position on Resolution 242. Malley's rendering of the Palestinian proposal at Camp David - an offer that was widely dismissed but rarely reported - deserves full quotation: "a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers, the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history, preservation of Israel's demographic balance between Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence." On the other hand, contrary to the myth spun by Barak-Clinton as well as a compliant media, "Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty," a special adviser at the British Foreign Office observed, "while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians." Although accounts of the Barak proposal significantly differ, all knowledgeable observers concur that it "would have meant that territory annexed by Israel would encroach deep inside the Palestinian state" (Malley), dividing the West Bank into multiple, disconnected enclaves, and offering land swaps that were of neither equal size nor equal value. (44)
Consider in this regard Israel's reaction to the March 2002 Saudi peace plan. Crown Prince Abdullah proposed, and all 21 other members of the Arab League approved, a plan making concessions that actually went beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal, it offered not only full recognition but "normal relations with Israel," and called not for the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees but rather only a "just solution" to the refugee problem. A Haaretz commentator noted that the Saudi plan was "surprisingly similar to what Barak claims to have proposed two years ago" at Camp David. Were Israel truly committed to a comprehensive withdrawal in exchange for normalization with the Arab world, the Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement by the Arab League summit ought to have been met with euphoria. In fact, after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was quickly deposited in Orwell's memory hole. (45) Nonetheless, Barak's - and Clinton's - fraud that Palestinians at Camp David rejected a maximally generous Israeli offer provided crucial moral cover for the horrors that ensued.
19. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 173 (Katznelson; for Katznelson's effective support of forced transfer, see p. 176). Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: 1889), vol. 4, p. 54.
20. Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951 (Oxford: 1984), pp. 117, 448, 614. Michael J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945-1948 (Princeton: 1982), pp. 197-8, 201.
21. See I&R, pp. 10-11, 15, 102-3. Teveth, Ben-Gurion, p. 101 (cf. pp. 129, 187-90). For copious evidence that, even in the absence of Arab aggression, the Zionist leadership never intended to respect the 1947 Partition Resolution borders, see Ben-Eliezer, Making, pp. 144, 150-1.
22. For the June war, see I&R, chap. 5.
23. For Zionist territorial imperatives after 1948, see I&R, p. 143. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (New York: 1998), p. 393. Michael Oren, Six Days of War (Oxford: 2002), p. 312. Sternhell, Founding, p. 330.
24. An influential Zionist official during the 1948 expulsion, Yosef Weitz, typically warned after the conquests of the June war of the need to preserve Israel's Jewish character by keeping the "non-Jewish minority limited to 15%" (Nur Masalha, A Land Without A People (London: 1997), p. 79).
25. M. Cherif Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law (Boston: 1999), pp. 312 ("unequivocally"), 322 (see pp. 312-27 for the historical development of international law regarding deportation).
26. See I&R, pp. 144-7.
27. See I&R, pp. 221-2, note 63.
28. See I&R, chap. 6.
29. Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts (Washington: 1987), pp. 14ff. (Allon plan). Sofer, Zionism, p. 385. Finkelstein, Holocaust, pp. 47-8.
30. See I&R, pp. 147-8.
31. For the Jarring mission, see I&R, pp. 151ff.
32. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XX (Washington, DC: 2001), pp. 619, 634-5 ("meant"/"never meant"), 639, 639 ("large chunks"/"non-starter"), 641, 654 ("unacceptable"), 655, 699.
33. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (Boston: 1983), pp. 65-6. For the strategic motives behind this US policy shift and its repercussions for American Jewry, see Finkelstein, Holocaust, chap. 1.
34. For a comprehensive record of lone US vetoes in the Security Council and lone US-Israel negative votes in the General Assembly on the Middle East conflict, see Finkelstein, R&F, pp. 53-7.
35. Uri Savir, The Process (New York: 1998), p. 6.
36. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security (Oxford: 1987), pp. 20 ("compromising"), 70 ("peace offensive"). For further discussion and documentation, see R&F, pp. 44-5.
37. For extensive documentation of Israel's repression, see R&F, chap. 3.
38. Savir, Process, pp. 5, 25. For the precedent of British rule in Palestine, see Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge: 1994), pp. 86, 90-1, and Porath, Emergence, p. 202. The British first implemented indirect rule in its empire after brutally crushing the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Victor Kiernan's commentary on this British strategy could easily serve as an epigraph for the Oslo process: "Rulers of the kind lately vilified as Oriental tyrants were now eulogized as natural leaders of their people. Leaving a third of the country under princely rule could be speciously represented as a concession to Indian feeling; and if, as was increasingly the case, conditions were worse there than in British India, nationalists could be invited to contemplate the consequences of self-government" (The Lords of Human Kind (Boston: 1969), p. 52).
39. Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies (New York: 1995), pp. 218, 232. Savir, Process, p. 147. For detailed analysis of the Oslo Accord, see Norman G. Finkelstein, "Whither the `Peace Process?'" in New Left Review (July/August 1996). For a comprehensive overview of post-Oslo developments, see Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace (London: 1998).
40. May 2002.
41. Daniel Williams, "Settlements Expanding Under Sharon," in Washington Post (31 May 2002). "UN expert says settlements, house demolitions are war crimes," in Haaretz (15 June 2002). Jackson Diehl, "Making a Palestinian state impossible," in Washington Post (23 July 2002).
42. Amira Hass, "Donors are funding cantonization," in Haaretz (22 May 2002). Brian Whitaker, "UN to feed 500,000 needy Palestinians," in Guardian (22 May 2002). Karen DeYoung, "Hezbollah Buildup in Lebanon Cited," in Washington Post (15 June 2002) (unemployment). Justin Huggler, "Palestinians face disaster, warns US government group," in Independent (6 August 2002) (malnutrition). Thomas O'Dwyer, "Nothing Personal: Parts and Apartheid," in Haaretz (24 May 2002) ("appalling").
43. See Norman G. Finkelstein, "Securing Occupation: The Meaning of the Wye River Memorandum," in New Left Review (November/December 1998), and esp. Mouin Rabbani, "A Smorgasbord of Failure," in Roane Carey (ed), The New Intifada (Verso: 2001), chap. 3.
44. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," "Camp David and After: An Exchange - A Reply to Ehud Barak," "Camp David and After - Continued: Robert Malley and Hussein Agha reply," in New York Review of Books (9 August 2001, 13 June 2002, 27 June 2002). (Malley quotes from second article) David Clark, "The brilliant offer Israel never made," in Guardian (10 April 2002) (British diplomat).
45. For text of the Saudi plan, see Guardian (28 March 2002); for its revision on the "right of return," see Suzanne Goldenberg, "Arab leaders reach agreement by fudging refugee question," in Guardian, 29 March 2002. Aviv Lavie, "So what if the Arabs want to make peace?" in Haaretz (5 April 2002). For insightful commentary, see Uri Avnery, "How to Torpedo the Saudis" (4 March 2002) at www.counterpunch.org/avnerysaudis.html.
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