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The Middle East Peace Process Scam | |
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Editor's Note:
Henry Seigman has been writing on the Middle East for many
years. This is over 3000 words, so let's get right to it.
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The Middle East Peace Process Scam
By Henry Siegman
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 honour-
able 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 un-
realistic 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 'carry-
ing 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.
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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 pre-
ponderance 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 agree-
ment, 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. Accord-
ing 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.
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