srael has entered into an Orwellian world of inbred
perceptions and unanalyzed assumptions. These appear to make sense from inside
Israeli society (and the Zionist community worldwide as well), but from the
outside seem to be out of touch with reality. The inside “reality” is dominated
by the obsessive concept of fortress Israel–that is Israel against the
world. This mental paradigm, which ascribes all criticism of Israeli behavior
to eternal anti-Semitism, is assimilated from childhood, taught to you by your
family and your teachers at school. It is a belief commonly shared, and thus
reinforced, by your neighbors, your coworkers, the newspapers, television and radio,
and those with whom you do your military service (some of the army induction
ceremonies are held at site of the 73 BCE mass suicide of Jewish Zealots at
Masada). It is a constant part of your consciousness and defines patriotic
thought.
Nonetheless, the belief in fortress Israel is
fraught with Orwellian contradictions. Here are some of the things this
paradigm teaches (as against what reality looks like from outside of Israel
and the Zionist perspective): the Palestinian Arabs are eternal enemies and
want to push the Jews into the sea (even though it is the Palestinians who
are being slowly but surely pushed into bantustans behind a ghetto like
“separation” wall). Given half a chance the Palestinians can accomplish
this new holocaust with the help of allied Arab hordes (even though Israel
is among the strongest military powers on the globe, is allied to the world’s
only superpower, and has never lost a war). The Palestinians, both inside
and outside Israel proper, are ersatz Nazis (even though, for hundreds of
years before the rise of Zionism, they lived peacefully with their Jewish
neighbors and only turned hostile when the Zionists started appropriating
Palestine under the protection of British imperialism). Arafat is the devil
incarnate and also as Prime Minister Sharon likes to put it, “the greatest
obstacle to peace” (even though, since 1988, he has tried repeatedly to make
peace with the Jewish state. All these efforts have been replaced in the
Israeli collective memory by Arafat’s refusal to accept the treaty offered at
Camp David II. Israeli rejection of all previous Palestinian efforts at peace
have been forgotten). Israel is just a little place with “fragile” borders
(which since 1947 have repeatedly expanded just as David Ben Gurion,
speaking at the time of the founding of Israel, predicted they would). Only
war can bring Israel peace (Which characterizes the thinking and policies of
the present Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, a man who is generally
recognized outside of Israel and the U.S. to be a war criminal.)
These beliefs approach the strength of a religious
doctrine in Israel. They also restrict the range of thought, and narrow the
possibilities for action for many Israelis and other Zionists. Most have also
shown an inability to critically examine Israel’s behavior and how it has
evolved from this siege mentality. They have held fast to a selective use of
history in order to support the fortress Israel paradigm and its corollaries.
As a consequence of this closed mindedness, those who, for a variety of
reasons, do break free of the nationally sanctified blinkers and publicly
contradict accepted doctrine are seen as heretics or traitors and risk social
isolation and the ruination of their careers, and sometimes worse. One can see
this clearly in the case of tenured Israeli professors who publicly oppose the
occupation. Academics like Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, are periodically
harassed by their university administration by being brought up on disciplinary
charges for alleged seditious activity. They are denied promotion. Their
graduate students have found it hard to get jobs, so now few will work with
such professors. Untenured professors are reluctant to take a public stand
against government policies because they are more vulnerable and could lose
their positions. And finally, Jews outside of Israel who publicly criticize the
Israeli government and the Zionist ideology are accused of being “self-hating
Jews.” Nonetheless, so horrid is Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians that
the number of such Jews, best exemplified by the “refuseniks” is slowly
increasing both in Israel and abroad.
Behind the wall of fortress Israel, most Israeli Jews are
scared and depressed. Popular feelings are affected by a constant concern for
personal and family safety. Israelis tend to look over their your shoulders and
worry about riding the bus or going to a restaurant. Britain’s Daily
Telegraph (September 30, 2003) has reported on the poll conducted by the
Israeli Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth. The report concludes that
“Israelis are in a state of open despair about their country’s future.” 73 percent of Israelis do not think that their children will have a better future
Under these conditions one can ask why the Israelis simply do not negotiate a
just peace with the Palestinians? Give them their state on the 22 percent of
Palestine on the other side of the 1967 border (the Green Line). This is an
offer the vast majority of Palestinians will readily accept. Also, such a move
would very likely make an ally of a Palestinian government which, predictably,
would go to great lengths to control anyone whose actions would threaten to
bring the IDF back across the border. Just such a scenario was described to
this author as the basis for peace by Yasir Arafat in June of 2003. This is
also the arrangement Israel has with the Jordanians who control their border
with Israel quite effectively. And, in a quiet way, the same arrangement
prevails with the Syrians and the Egyptians.
Yet the Israelis insist that allowing the Palestinians a
state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip is impossible and mortally
dangerous as well. How do they know? The Orwellian political language that
dominates their “closed information environment” tells them so.
Remember, such an environment binds one to internal references only. These
references become inbred and self-serving so that one’s major sources of
information function like sycophants telling one only what supports and
rationalizes one’s actions. Information that undermines or contradicts a
priori points of view remain unseen, unheard, or are magically
reinterpreted to fit the set parameters in one’s mind.
This closed information environment has led most Israeli
(and diaspora) Jews to believe that :
1. It is the Palestinians do not want
peace
The Israelis make two claims for this assertion. First
they point out that the Palestinians have a long history of attacks against
Israelis. The second point is that Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s supposed
“generous offer” at Camp David II in 2000.
The Israelis reject the Palestinian claim that the
intifadas (the word means to “shake off”) are episodes of resistance against
Israel’s aggression and occupation. They point out that Palestinian attacks
pre-date 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This was the
position taken in December of 2002 by Major General Isaac Ben-Israel at a Tel
Aviv University discussion in which the author participated. Because there was
violence prior to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there must be
violence if Israel withdraws from the territories It should be noted, however,
most of the cross border incidents, particularly in the ten years following
1948, involved Palestinians who were simply seeking to return to their homes.
According to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim hundreds of these unarmed
Palestinians were shot down by the Israelis. Statistically the number of
Palestinian armed attacks on Israel before 1967 was low and relatively
infrequent, and reflected the slow Palestinian recovery from the shock of the
Nakba (or 1948 catastrophe). The Jewish Virtual Library (a Zionist source)
lists only 27 Israeli fatalities as a result of Palestinian attacks between
1958 and 1966. In the same period Israeli retaliatory raids into Jordanian and
Egyptian territory killed many hundreds of people. Nonetheless, from the
Israeli point of view, these pre-1967 attacks were not a response to anything
the Zionists did, but rather the expression of an undying a priori desire to
destroy the Jewish state. Unfortunately, this line of thinking requires a
negation of the history of Zionist goals and behavior, and an assumption that
past Palestinian behavior will continue indefinitely into the future.
Israelis and other Zionists simply take it for granted that,
from 1917 onward, the history of the occupation of Israel proper (that is the
78 percent of Palestine that is Israel behind the Green Line) was benign and
any Zionist military action associated with it was purely defensive. In
reality, as any number of Israeli historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi
Shlaim, etc.) have shown, large Jewish immigration under the protection of
British imperialism initiated the displacement of Palestinians. Palestinian
resentment of and reaction to this process was natural and led to resistance
that began as early in the 1920s. In truth all Zionist history in Palestine is
the history of occupation which has been and is offensive rather than defensive
in nature.
However, today the situation is not the same as it was in
the 1920s or in 1948. In 1988 the PLO recognized the state of Israel within its
1967 borders. This constituted a supreme compromise in that by this recognition
they voluntarily forfeited 78 percent of their historic homeland and restricted
their claims to the remaining 22 percent that make up the West Bank, including
East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. It is the refusal of Israel to seriously
respond to this recognition and the sacrifice it represents, and cease its
occupation of Palestine beyond the Green Line, that has led to a new level of
violent resistance on the part of the Palestinians.
Of course the Israelis do not believe they have failed to
respond. They believe that in the year 2000, at Camp David II, Ehud Barak put
forth a “generous offer.” This belief has taken on mythic proportions
not only in Israel but throughout the world’s Jewish communities and in the
United States as well. It now stands as an excellent example of political
language restricting the range of thought and thus resulting in mass self-deception
within a closed information environment. According to the Zionist story, this
“generous” offer gave the Palestinians the Gaza Strip and almost the entire
West Bank. Instead of accepting this deal the Palestinians, under the
leadership of Yasir Arafat, rejected it and launched the on going and deadly
Second Intifada (2000 to the present).
2. Arafat
is the one who is responsible for this rejection and the subsequent
violence.
While Israelis believe they are willing to make peace
through “historic compromises,” there is, in their view, no “partner” on the
Palestinian side to negotiate with. Yasir Arafat, a man who is shut up in two
buildings in Ramallah, amidst acres of rubble, his communications monitored and
his travel restricted, is responsible for on-going terror and, according to the
Israeli novelist and political pundit Eyal Megged, “employs tactics that remind
us of Hitler.”
Essentially what one has here is an alternate history which,
is accepted by the majority in Israel and also by the present U.S. government.
In the summer of 2002 National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice stated on
national television that “Arafat is somebody who...failed to lead when he had a
chance....Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, gave him a terrific
opportunity to lead. And what did he get in return? Arafat started the second
Intifada instead and rejected that offered hand of friendship.” Unfortunately,
both the Israelis and Ms Rice are wrong about their facts. The “generous offer”
has been disproved by both American and Israeli experts. For instance, among
others, Robert Malley, President Clinton’s advisor on Israeli-Arab affairs who
was at Camp David II; Ron Pundak, Director of the Peres Center for Peace;
Professor Jeff Halper (Ben Gurion University); Uri Avnery, head of Gush Shalom,
Israel’s foremost peace organization; and finally Ehud Barak himself has twice
(in the New York Times of May 24, 2001 and in the Israeli Hebrew
newspaper Yediot Ahronoth of August 29, 2003) denied that his offer was
anywhere near “generous.”
What did Barak really offer? According to the above
reports his offer gave the Palestinians a little over 80 percent of the West
Bank carved into nearly discontinuous cantons. The Israeli government would
have controlled all the Palestinian borders (none of which would touch on
another Arab state), it would have controlled the air space above the
Palestinian territory, most of the major aquifers, retained sovereignty over
East Jerusalem, maintained almost all Israeli settlements and access roads,
controlled immigration into the Palestinian “state,” and retained the Jordan
Valley through an indefinite “long term lease.” This is an offer that no
Israeli would ever accept. However, most Israelis and Americans do not know
these details and believe instead in the myth of generosity.
Unfortunately, what is true is not as important
as what one thinks is true. Believing that the Palestinians rejected a
generous peace at Camp David II, and opted instead for the violence of the
Second Intifada, the Israelis now look to other ways to achieve security. How
this is to be done is dictated by their Orwellian Weltanschauung. Thus:
1. You insist on Palestinian elimination of militancy while
systematically destroying the Palestinian Authority’s police capabilities.
The Israeli army attacks Palestinian police in uniform on sight and most police
facilities have been destroyed. Simultaneously the Israeli government demands
that what is left of the Palestinian Authority direct whatever security forces
they still have to the job of “fighting terrorism” which are code words for
defending Israeli borders and settlers. Given the position of the Palestinians
as an oppressed people facing illegal colonization, this is amounts to a demand
for the Palestinian authority to take it upon itself to eliminate Palestinian
resistance to Israeli occupation.
Within this scenario Palestinian
resistance to land confiscations, home demolitions, and settlement activities
become offensive actions, and the invasion of towns and villages by Israeli
tanks and helicopter gunships becomes defensive action.
2. You build a “Security Wall” to separate yourself from
the bulk of the Palestinians. However, you do not do this along the 1967 Green
Line which most of the world recognizes as the de facto border between
Israel and Palestine. Rather you build this barrier deep inside of the
Palestinian West Bank. Its construction thus facilitates ongoing land
confiscations. You build it so as to confine the Palestinians into a series of
walled off areas of concentration. De facto, this transforms the
“security wall” into a “ghetto wall.” Those West Bank Palestinians who find
themselves on the Israeli side of the wall are to eventually be transferred
into the Palestinian ghettos. This will produce future peace and security
for Israelis in the same way that prisons prevent crime.
3. And you enforce a harsh collective punishment
on the Palestinians, entailing draconian curfews, roadblocks and checkpoints,
“security” sweeps leading to mass arrests, house demolitions, denial of access
to medical facilities, mass shut down of education, and the “legal” use of
torture, etc. until they “come to their senses” and negotiate peace on
“acceptable terms.” This tactic at once brutalizes the Palestinians and
Israelis as well. As the Israelis visit violence and destruction on their
Palestinian victims, there own levels of domestic violence—spousal and child
abuse, violence in schools, road rage, and violent crime—have gone up.
Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Hebrew University and a
member of Checkpoint Watch, attributes this downward spiral of Israeli society
and culture to the fact that “a military discourse has taken over in Israel.”
Within the context of this militarized society who can best achieve peace and
security? It continues to be the case that a majority of Israelis believe it is
Ariel Sharon (a general who made his reputation based upon his personal
brutality) and his right-wing coalition. This seems to be so not despite
the fact that these politicians are ideologically committed to retaining the
West Bank and Gaza Strip (and also the Golan Heights), but because they
are determined to continue the occupation.
This would seem, from an outside perspective, to
be yet another Orwellian proposition-- that is, the road to peace lay through
demanding the right of permanent occupation. Yet this notion does not appear to
be contradictory to most Israelis. Among the reasons for this is that Zionist
perceptions of reality deny the true nature and consequences for the Palestinians
of 37 years of colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Indeed, for a
long time the Israelis refused to even entertain the word occupation for what
they were doing. As the Israeli writer David Grossman explained in an interview
with Bill Moyers in March of 2002, “there was a whole machinery of fabricating
names to the situation, there was a whole narrative that in a way used words
not to describe reality but rather to camouflage it, to protect us the Israelis
from the harshness of what we are doing.” This is what the Israel Lawyer Leah
Tsemel calls the “laundering of language.” In Hebrew “occupation” became
“release” or “salvation,” while “colonizing” became “peaceful settlement” and
“killing” became “targeting.” Orwell would have recognize this use of
“political language” without much trouble.
Another Zionist trick of the mind is to assign the blame
for any negative consequences arising out the occupation to the Palestinians
themselves. For instance in an August 2002 editorial in the Israeli newspaper,
the Jerusalem Post, the common assertion was made that “...the Palestinians’
current malaise is no one’s fault but their own, considering that they started
and are continuing the war that is exacting from them such a hefty price.” That
the “war” is actually resistance against colonial occupation is lost on the
Jerusalem Post editors.
In Israeli eyes the occupation is a warranted defensive
action driven by a pervasive national fear and suspicion of Palestinians as
terrorists. It should be noted that to most Israelis, and Americans too, the
terrorist is the essential Palestinian. Each Palestinian whether man, woman, or
child is just a body potentially encased in dynamite. The Israelis point to
Occupied Palestine as the place from which suicide bombers come and thus they
feel they must “control” these lands. That the occupation and its
accompanying colonizing policy are in fact the sources of suicide bombings and
overall Palestinian violence is simply not accepted by most Israelis. Instead,
they ascribe these actions to Muslim religious fanaticism. This came out
clearly in a January 2002 interview by the author and others with Ben El
Eliazar, the former Israeli Defense Minister. Ben El Eliazar described
how he would go and interrogate prisoners suspected of being failed suicide
bombers. “If you interrogate them long enough you can see the religious
fanaticism surface.” His interrogations may well result in self-deception. Push
long enough and hard enough and you can get a prisoner to tell you anything, particularly
what they soon realize you want to hear
There are other ways in which the Israelis manage to
promote the occupation, arguably the source of their insecurity , as a source
of security. Here is how the Likud leader and member of the Knesset, Yuval
Steinwitz conceptualized the situation to the author in December 2002: the
occupation is necessary because it alone can give Israel, “this little land
with impossible borders” defensive depth. According to Steinwitz Israel is a
“great regional power” that is at the same time “fragile” enough to be
destroyed by the Palestinian terrorists allied to the Egyptians. This is a
variation on the notion that the Israel is in perpetual danger of being “kicked
into the sea.” One can locate the origins of this fear in the Holocaust and
understand how deep rooted it is, but it nonetheless defies reality. There is
no military intelligence service outside of Israel who believes this myth. No
military engagement (including those in 1947-1948) has ever come close to suggesting
this scenario was or is possible. Yet the myth is pervasive in Israel and among
the Jewish diaspora community as well. So, acting on what you believe is real
(not, in this case, what is in fact real) you justify colonial occupation, the
brutal destruction of Palestinian society, and the slow by sure ethnic
cleansing of Occupied Palestine of its non-Jewish population (all of
which is overtly offensive and brutally aggressive in nature) in
the name of needing “defensive depth.”
The Israelis and their supporters have other
rationalizations for occupation. There is the biblically based claim
that “Judea and Samaria” are “covenant lands,” that is lands given to the Jews
by God. This, of course, is a matter of faith and not provable fact. Many
people take the bible, where this covenant is to be found, as the word of God.
However, this too is faith and not provable fact. Nonetheless, such
faith put forth as fact allows some Israelis to see the indigenous population
as “strangers in the land” and Jewish folks from Brooklyn as rightful
inhabitants. This leads to more tricks of the mind. For instance, Carolyn
Glick, the Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Post told this author and others
that the removal of the West Bank colonies would constitute the “ethnic cleansing
of Judea and Samaria.”
Whether it is for imagined military reasons (which
entails a denial that occupation is the source of their insecurity), or faith
based religious reasons (which entails exoneration from responsibility for
brutal actions because they are doing the work of God), the majority of
Israelis have come to the conclusion that there is no alternative to a hard
line, right wing government which can only conceptualize a peace treaty that
ghettoizes, economically emasculates, and subordinates any eventual Palestinian
political entity. And even then most Israelis do not believe such a treaty will
lead to real peace, not because it fails to satisfy Palestinian needs, but
because the Palestinians are all anti-Semites who will forever want to destroy
all of Israel.
Palestine
Palestine is a land of deep despair, growing poverty, and
pervasive insecurity. In a slow but sure fashion the Israelis are reducing the
Palestinians to an impoverished cheap labor pool within ghetto-like areas of
concentration. Here is how they are doing it.
1. The ancestral lands of the Palestinians are being
confiscated: 78 percent of Palestine was taken in 1948. According to Israel’s
Central Bureau of Statistics the over 1 million Israeli Palestinians who now
live in Israel proper (behind the Green Line) make up 20 percent of the
country’s population (and 40 percent of Israel’s population growth rate) are
confined to 3 percent of the land. And, this 3 percent is subject to continuing
periodic and unpredictable confiscations. Israel’s Palestinian communities are
not allowed to geographically expand. In 1967 the Israelis took over the
remaining 22 percent of Palestine (now designated the Occupied Territories) and
immediately began a colonization program that is illegal under international
law. To date they have confiscated some 40 percent of this remaining 22 percent
of Palestine and now operate over 200 colonies which hold nearly 400,000
illegal residents. They are continuing to expand these “settlements” through
the continuous confiscation of land in Occupied Palestine (that is beyond the
Green Line). This means that the Palestinians, both within and without of
Israel proper, are being relentlessly ghettoized into smaller and smaller
areas.
2. Besides the land, the people in Occupied Palestine are
experiencing the destruction of their property on a daily basis. According to
B’Tselem, Israel’s own civil rights organization, hundreds of thousands of
olive and other fruit trees have been and continue to be destroyed; hundreds of
water wells have been sealed (90 percent of all the water resources of Occupied
Palestine is now reserved for exclusive use by the occupier); according to the
Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions about 11,000 Palestinian homes have
been demolished since 1967; the population is subjected to periodic
indiscriminate artillery shelling and automatic weapons fire; American made jet
planes and helicopters discharge high explosive missiles and bombs in crowded
civilian areas. Some of these bombs and missiles are made of depleted uranium
infused metals. All of this is illegal under international law as promulgated
in the Hague Conventions of 1907 and 1987, and the 4th Geneva
Convention.
3. Palestinians have seen their rights of free movement,
free association, access to education, access to medical care, ability to
transport and market goods (most of which rights are guaranteed by the
Declaration of Universal Human Rights adopted by the United Nations after World
War II) severely restricted by the creation of some 480 checkpoints and
roadblocks. Most of these are not placed between Israel and Palestinian towns
and villages, but rather between Palestinian locales. These checkpoints, the
purpose of which seems to be harassment rather than security, attack the most
basic personal rights. The most tragic example of this is the resulting
collapse of the Palestinian medical system. According to Human Rights Watch,
Israeli soldiers purposely harass and sometimes target for injury or death
Palestinian doctors and medical personnel. Checkpoints prevent ambulances from
getting to hospitals or the residences of ill people and they prevent pregnant
women about to give birth from going to hospitals. The soldiers at the
checkpoints do not prevent these things all the time, but rather they do so in
an unpredictable, random fashion that heightens the sense of uncertainty and
vulnerability of the Palestinian population. I asked Benjamin Ben Eliazer, the
former Defense Minister, about this practice in the January of 2002 interview
mentioned above. He asserted that the Palestinians use ambulances to transport
weapons and “wanted criminals.” When I pointed out to him that there was a
qualitative difference between stopping an ambulance and searching it for
weapons or wanted individuals and stopping an ambulance until the patient
inside it died, he became sullen and said that he did not need any help from me
when it came to security. Since their tactics have left the Israelis
continuously insecure, this is a questionable claim. At the very least the
Israelis need help in maintaining a basic level of humanity. As a result of the
policies just described the rate of death from curable diseases is on the rise
among West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians, and vaccination and preventive
medicine is almost non-existent.
In addition to the checkpoints, draconian curfews which
keep the entire populations of cities and towns under forced house arrest for
weeks on end contribute to the breakdown of medical care, education, and
employment. (According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency reports
unemployment in the Occupied Territories now stands over 65 percent and more
than half the population lives in poverty.)
It bears repeating that much of this harassment and
destruction occurs in a random and arbitrary fashion. One does not know if one
can get through a checkpoint to go to school or work. If one gets through, one
does not know if one can return home again through the same checkpoint. One
does not know when the curfews will come. One can be arrested anytime for any
reason. It is a Kafkaesque world wherein one cannot predict the
consequences of one’s daily behavior.
Under these circumstances, 90 percent of Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories see no hope in their future without international
intervention. Yet intervention is consistently blocked by the United States
which vetoes any UN resolution that seeks the creation of such a policy. It is
because they are not “balanced” says the U.S. State Department, but this is
ridiculous in the face of Israel’s brutal behavior. The U.S. uses its veto to
protect Israel because Zionist interest groups have such powerful influence
with the American government and political parties. In any case, the Israeli
government is adamantly against such intervention and would resist it by force.
As a consequence there is no choice for the Palestinians but to continue their
resistance to Israeli occupation, for to concede defeat would mean to acquiesce
in the death of Palestinian society and culture.
When it comes to resistance, it is historically the case
that the violence of the oppressed usually rises to the level of the violence
of the oppressor. That is what has happened in Palestine. The Israeli
occupation constitutes 37 years of institutionalized terror which has just about
destroyed the economic, social, and political lives of all Palestinians under
Israeli rule. Civil society and its infrastructure are nearly gone. Civilian
deaths due to direct military action and indirect consequences of Israeli
colonial policies now (November 2003) stands at just over 2700 people (compared
to about 800 Israelis). Palestinian civilian injuries due to Israeli action
stand at over 47,000. Resistance is all that remains.
This brings us to the issue of suicide bombings. The
context for understanding this tactic is the occupation itself. The
consequences of the occupation do not discriminate between men and women,
adults and children. Confiscations impact them all, home demolitions displace
them all, curfews confine them all, Israeli violence targets them all. This is
the truth. The author has seem much of this with his own eyes. Americans and
many Israelis may not believe it, but their disbelief does not change the
Palestinian reality. That reality produces deep despair, feelings of humiliation
and unavoidable hatred. It is from this context that the bombers come. Their
tactic is the reverse coin of Israel’s own practices and not the product of
some innate religious fanaticism.
It is this despair and rage, and not religious
fanaticism, that also leads to popular support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
They are supported so widely not because they are Islamic fundamentalists, but
because, in an atmosphere of despair, they serve the needs of the rapidly
growing numbers of poor and they resist the Israelis. Give the Palestinians
back their hope of a just settlement by moving concretely toward the
satisfaction of their basic demands, and the support for Hamas and Islamic
Jihad will diminish. This is not mere conjecture. Right after the Oslo Accords
were signed, and despite their serious flaws, there was much hope for peace
among the Palestinians. As a consequence support for groups like Hamas fell to
under 10 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza. By the middle of
2003, in an atmosphere of near hopelessness that still prevails, polls taken by
the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that support for
Hamas and Islamic Jihad stood at 58 percent.
Any Hope?
It is important to realize that most ordinary people on
both sides say they want many of the same things: normal lives, security for
themselves and their families, acceptance by the other side. And while the
majority of Israelis, and a number of Palestinians cannot get past perceptual
barriers dominated by fear, suspicion, and anxiety there are factors that can,
at least in theory, result in movement toward real peace if given a chance to
come to the fore.
1. The vast majority of Palestinians know (even if the
Israelis do not) that they cannot destroy the Israeli state.
2. Most Palestinians in the Occupied Palestine are
willing to negotiate compromise solutions to all issues (including the
controversial issue of the “right of return”) except their right to a viable
state occupying roughly the 22 percent of Palestine beyond Israel’s 1967
borders. For the Palestinians, this is the sine qua non of a just peace. This
is not a new stance on the part of the Palestinians or their leaders. Here is a
list of peace initiatives that the Palestinians have welcomed (and various Israeli
governments have rejected): The Rogers Plan (1969); The Scranton Mission on
behalf of President Nixon (1970); Sadat’s land for peace mutual recognition
proposal (1971); Carter’s call for a Geneva international conference (1977);
Saudi King Fahd’s peace offer (1981); The Reagan Plan (1982); The Shultz Plan
(1988); The Baker Plan (1989); A continuation of the Taba negotiations (2001);
The Saudi Peace proposal on behalf of the Arab League (2002); The unofficial
Geneva peace initiative of November/December 2003. And, of course, in 1993
Arafat signed the Oslo Accords which unraveled after Yitzhak Rabin’s
assassination (November 1995) and the subsequent return to power of the Likud
party
To the extent that the Israelis block the possibility of
a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian leaders and intellectuals put forth the
idea of a one state solution. That is, the acceptance of one state from “the
sea to the river” with the struggle then directed toward bringing about equal
rights for all citizens. This would of necessity negate the idea of a “Jewish
state.” I do not believe this is the preference of most Palestinians but it may
be made inevitable by the short sighted policies of the Zionist movement.
3. The recent Geneva Initiative (November/December 2003)
is at least a sign that Israelis and Palestinians can work together to come to
a settlement. It certainly is not the end game for it fails to give adequate
attention to the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees who have rights under
international law. If this initiative is to be seriously pursued negotiators
need, at the very least, to improve the water rights package, and add onto the
initiative an Israeli acceptance of responsibility for the Palestinian refugee
problem plus a pledge of compensation. It is to be noted that the Geneva
initiative has been endorsed by Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. It
has, however, been attacked by the Sharon government as a traitorous act.
4. On the Israeli side there are a growing number of
influential military men (such as Amram Mitzna and Ami Aylon), who have
credibility with the Israeli public, and understand that continuing the
occupation will not bring security and normality, but rather a continuing
brutalization of Israeli society. There is also a very small, but growing,
number of resisters both within and without the army who refuse to cooperate
with the Israeli government’s occupation policies.
The problem is that while those who are ready to take
risks for peace appear to be a majority on the Palestinian side, they are as
yet a minority on the Israeli side. In the end what we have is a
horrible process of physical and emotional destruction that can only be
overcome by a psychological leap–and that mostly among Israelis. They must come
to a realization that the occupation is the source of Israeli insecurity and
only by giving it up can there be security and normality. If you will, only
through peace with the Palestinians, can Israel be a safe haven for Jews.
Whether the Israelis can achieve this level of awareness while in the grips of
an historically rooted, paralyzing fear and anxiety (played upon by a Likud
government and right-wing factions which are determined to stay in “Judea and
Samaria” forever) remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it is their occupation.
It is they who have brought to life the nightmare worlds of Orwell and Kafka.
If things are to change, it is they who must wake up.
Notes
1. Here are some additional Orwellian notions and
behaviors described to this author by the individuals noted:
exaggeration.
However, in Israel the influence of “political language” has reached a unique
level of intensity. Increasingly, many Israelis live in a “closed information
environment” wherein an insidious Orwellian “newspeak” (a language of
propaganda aimed at creating ideologically determined boundaries for thought),
shapes thinking and perception relative to the Palestinians. This is just not
true of your average citizen manipulated by mendacious politicians and a
censured press. In Israel, as in Orwell’s novel 1984, society’s leaders
are as shaped by the prevailing “political language” as those they rule. Thus,
descriptions of Palestinians by Israeli leaders range from “there are no such
things as Palestinians” (Prime Minister Golda Maier, June 15, 1969), to “beasts
walking on two legs” (Prime Minister Menahim Begin, June 25, 1982), to “drugged
cockroaches in a bottle” (Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff, April 14, 1983), to
“people who do not belong to our continent, 
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