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When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they
concluded that Hamas's violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought
down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in
Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new 'window of
opportunity'.[*] (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows
of opportunity.) Hamas's isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would
allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian
people in order to prevail over Hamas.
Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a
two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their
determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian
state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good.
That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory.
Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists,
since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in
Israel's dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and
his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas
no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of
Abbas's moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are
Bush's expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently
announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a
'meeting'). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely,
if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their
own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian
institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the
Quartet's newly appointed envoy.
In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that
neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That
reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel's decision-making elites
that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which
denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be
sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a
number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only
in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians
would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in
modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and
actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process – other than
for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the
status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover
for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose
goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, is 'to sear
deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated
people'. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for
the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he
did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called
Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts
of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel's relentless confiscations of Palestinian
territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel
Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West
Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements
was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic
achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the
Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian
bantustans. Gaza's situation shows us what these bantustans will look like
if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.
Israel's disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution
is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and
dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the
UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington's lead – has
collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting
Israel's claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace
partner.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff
who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future
as 'the current reality in the territories'. 'The plan,' he said, 'is being
implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent
arrangement in the West Bank.' Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv,
Dayan said: 'The question is not "What is the solution?" but "How do we live
without a solution?"' Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement
enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:
Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key
to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and
dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo,
however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli
leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic
transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli
sovereignty to the Jordan River.
In an interview in Ha'aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the
then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon's
diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for
Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian
statehood in 'formaldehyde'. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor:
formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and
sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains
that the purpose of Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the
dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US
acceptance of Israel's unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual
withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to
provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in
the West Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush
wrote: 'In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing
major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the
outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to
the armistice lines of 1949.'
In a recent interview in Ha'aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet's
representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and
the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005
between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza
into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha'aretz, was Elliott
Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. 'Every aspect' of the
agreement Wolfensohn had brokered 'was abrogated'.
Another recent interview in Ha'aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior
adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing.
Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves
settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers' interests. The
IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court's instructions about the path the
so-called security fence should follow, instead 'setting a route that will
not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state'. Alon told Ha'aretz
that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to
ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the
deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers
instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to
Alon, the IDF is 'carrying out an apartheid policy' that is emptying Hebron
of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates
openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution
impossible.
A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination
of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the situation.
Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has rendered 40 per cent of the
territory off limits to Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including
major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves;
movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned
checkpoints. The UN found that what remains is an area very similar to that
set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in
the aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to
the infrastructure of the territories – including a network of highways that
bypass and isolate Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto
cantonisation of the West Bank.
These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical
blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for
Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture,
dismantle the 'infrastructures of terror' and halt all violence and
incitement before peace negotiations can begin – seeks to drown out. Given
the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – not to
mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel from
precisely those countries that one would have expected to compensate
diplomatically for the military imbalance – nothing will change for the
better without the US, the EU and other international actors finally facing
up to what have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.
These impediments include the assumption, implicit in Israel's occupation
policy, that if no peace agreement is reached, the 'default setting' of UN
Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite continuation of Israel's
occupation. If this reading were true, the resolution would actually be
inviting an occupying power that wishes to retain its adversary's territory
to do so simply by means of avoiding peace talks – which is exactly what
Israel has been doing. In fact, the introductory statement to Resolution 242
declares that territory cannot be acquired by war, implying that if the
parties cannot reach agreement, the occupier must withdraw to the status quo
ante: that, logically, is 242's default setting. Had there been a sincere
intention on Israel's part to withdraw from the territories, surely forty
years should have been more than enough time in which to reach an agreement.
Israel's contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed
before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can
withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line.
Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a 'just and lasting peace' that
will allow 'every state in the area [to] live in security', Israel holds
that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or
unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a
specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General
Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish
state's international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian
territory outside the new state's borders as the equally legitimate
patrimony of Palestine's Arab population on which they were entitled to
establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with
great precision. Resolution 181's affirmation of the right of Palestine's
Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law
and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority
population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in
Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its
implementation.
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the
implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory
by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war,
then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian
territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it
acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the
very least, if 'adjustments' are to be made to the 1949 armistice line,
these should be made on Israel's side of that line, not the Palestinians'.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not
been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the
violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid
themselves of Israel's occupation, even when that violence has despicably
targeted Israel's civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of
civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most
situations in which a people's drive for national self-determination is
frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel's own struggle for national
independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in
this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous
Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 'triggered
a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new
dimension to the conflict.' While in the past Arabs had 'sniped at cars and
pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a
few bystanders or passengers', now 'for the first time, massive bombs were
placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately
murdered and maimed.' Morris notes that 'this "innovation" soon found Arab
imitators.'
Underlying Israel's efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact
that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory,
despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the
Palestinian areas as 'contested' territory to which they have claims no less
compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions
notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by
Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times
on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to
describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the
Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a
reflection of a common Israeli view. That the former prime minister Ehud
Barak (now Olmert's defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial
proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israel's
'generosity', and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is
another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term 'Palestinian rights' seems
not to exist in Israel's lexicon.
The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know
how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
famously complained that 'Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and
gives.') That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the
most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the
legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession,
Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN's
partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never
received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel
agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine.
The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of
the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply
offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments
to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers
– about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they
received comparable territory on Israel's side of the border. Barak rejected
this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return
was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League's peace
initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal
and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel,
with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state,
their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive
them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in
empty rhetoric) Israel's notion that the occupation and the creation of
'facts on the ground' can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no
agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace
initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet
the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council
of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967
situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral
measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting
of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire
resolution, is a return by Israel's occupying forces to the pre-1967 border.
3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the
implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default
setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will
then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an
international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the
rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure
Israel's security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and
oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.
If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade
Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967 situation
except by agreement with the Palestinians in permanent status negotiations,
there would be no need for complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators
to get a peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as Blair
can do to put the peace process back on track is to speak the truth about
the real impediment to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to
the Jewish state, since Israel's only hope of real long-term security is to
have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.
Footnotes
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Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, served as a
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was
head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994.
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