Crawling from the Wreckage Read online

  By June 10, 1967, the amount of territory under Israeli control had tripled. Most of it was the empty desert of the Sinai Peninsula, which was returned to Egypt eleven years later in exchange for a peace treaty. The Israeli government also decided in principle in 1967 to give the Golan Heights back to Syria in return for a peace treaty, although that deal has still not happened. But no decision was ever taken to “give back” East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  From the start, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been about demography and land. If Israel was to be a Jewish state, then most of the Palestinian Arab population had to be removed, and that deed was accomplished during the independence war of 1948–49. Some of the Arabs fled and others were driven out, but by the end of the war, the Arab population of the land under Israel’s control, which had been close to a million, was only two hundred thousand.

  As Benny Morris, the doyen of the “new generation” of Israeli historians, put it in the Guardian in 2004: “Pillage [by Jewish fighters] was almost de rigueur, rape was not infrequent, the execution of prisoners of war was fairly routine during the months before April 1948, and small- and medium-scale massacres of Arabs occurred during April, May, July and October to November. Altogether, there were some two dozen cases.” So, by 1949, Israel was an overwhelmingly Jewish state.

  David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, noted in his diary: “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.” We would now call this “ethnic cleansing”—no matter why refugees flee, if you don’t let them return home when the shooting stops, that’s what you are doing—but it was vital to the project of founding a Jewish state in former Palestine. And for twenty years, it worked.

  Before 1967, Israel was militarily insecure but demographically triumphant: 85 percent of the people within its frontiers were Jewish. Then, with the victory of 1967, it showed that it had become militarily unbeatable, a fact confirmed by the last full-scale Arab-Israeli war in 1973. But the conquests of 1967 also revived its old demographic insecurities, for most of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were now back in the same political space as the Jews, that is, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

  Many Israelis saw the danger, and urged that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip be handed back to the Arabs (though almost no one was willing to give back East Jerusalem). A few brave souls even argued that the occupied territories should become the Palestinian state promised in the United Nations resolution of 1948, which partitioned Palestine and created Israel, but most succumbed to the lure of the land.

  Jewish settlement in the West Bank began almost immediately, and now, forty years on, there are 450,000 Jews in former East Jerusalem and the West Bank (plus another 17,000 in the Golan Heights). None of this settlement growth could have happened without the 1967 victory, but it’s also true that the separation of the populations that happened in 1948 has been undone.

  All the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is effectively a single political territory, as Israel ultimately controls all of it. There are now ten million people living in that space, but only a bare majority of them are Jews: 5.5 million, versus 4.5 million Palestinians, and because the Palestinians have a much higher birth rate they will become the majority by 2015.

  This is what Israelis call the “demographic problem,” but it is really a political and territorial problem. If they want to hang on to the land, then they are stuck with the Palestinians who live on it. If Israel is truly democratic and grants all these people the vote it will cease to be a Jewish state. If it chooses to remain Jewish by excluding them, then it is no longer democratic. And yet it cannot bring itself to let the occupied territories go.

  The 1967 victory has brought Israel two generations of military occupation duties, two Palestinian uprisings and a chronic terrorist threat. It has also brought it an existential political threat, because 1967 essentially reunited the Palestine that had been divided in 1948. What if, one day, the Palestinians simply accept that fact?

  Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s prime minister, put it bluntly in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth in 2003. “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘We have been won over. We agree with [extreme right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote.’ The day they do that is the day we lose everything.”

  Now rewind a couple of years, to an event that only makes sense if you understand the dilemma that 1967 created for the Israelis. As a commando leader, as a hero general in the 1973 war, and as a deeply controversial defence minister, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister in 2004, had established a reputation as an efficient and enthusiastic killer of Arabs and the godfather of the settlement movement. So why was he now planning to close down the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and hand the land back to the Palestinians?

  September 16, 2004

  A CURSE ON SHARON

  The way his enemies and even his allies are talking, you’d think that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had suggested giving the country back to the Arabs. In fact, he accused his critics last Wednesday of trying to spark a civil war in Israel, so extreme are their condemnations of his plan to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip by the end of next year.

  Early last week, seventy thousand people, including many members of his own Likud Party, rallied in Jerusalem to denounce him as a “traitor” and a “dictator.” His chief rival within the Likud Party and the government, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has demanded a referendum on Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan. And a settler-rabbi, Yaël Dayan, has announced that he is prepared to put a death curse on Sharon.

  Yaël Dayan has a track record in this matter. He conducted a similar mystical ceremony to put a death curse on then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shortly before he was murdered by an ultra-nationalist Israeli Jew in 1995. The thought of Ariel Sharon being murdered because he is soft on the Arabs boggles the mind, but right now he probably is more at risk of being assassinated by a fanatical Jewish settler than by a suicide bomber from Hamas. Can this be the Sharon we all know and love?

  Relax, he hasn’t really gone soft on us. He’s just not as totally blind to inconvenient realities as the more extremist Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. In the West Bank, which is more than one-third as large as Israel itself and close to the most densely settled areas of that country, the 230,000 Jewish settlers are more than one-tenth of the total population and effectively control about half the land. With few exceptions, their settlements are relatively easy to protect from the hostile Palestinian majority around them.

  The Gaza Strip is different. It is a tiny, mostly barren strip of land, right on the Egyptian border and far from Israel’s main population centres, packed tight with 1.3 million Palestinians whose parents or grandparents fled or were driven from their homes farther north in Israel proper in 1948. Amid them live only eight thousand Jewish settlers—but those settlers control one-third of the land, and require an approximately equal number of Israeli soldiers to guard them from the Palestinians who surround them.

  The Gaza settlements make no economic or military sense, and while many of the Jewish settlers there are driven by a religious vision, the secular Israeli governments that authorized the enclaves probably always saw them as bargaining chips in some potential future deal with the Palestinians. Sharon is certainly using them as bargaining chips, though he has no intention of making a deal with the Palestinians.

  Sharon’s strategy aims to separate Israelis from Palestinians as much as possible, while still retaining almost all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and carving the Palestinian areas up into enclaves separated by Israeli-patrolled roads and military checkpoints. The Gaza pullout will save Israel money and troops while also letting Sharon throw the world a bone: look, Israel is withdrawing voluntarily from some settlements. But about 96 percent of the Jewish settler population,
up in the West Bank, will remain where it is.

  Asked last week about what would happen after the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon replied: “Israel will continue its war on terrorism, and will stay in the territories that will remain.” Still, the furious arguments in Israel over the Gaza withdrawal serve to divert foreign attention from all that, and make Sharon appear to be a beleaguered moderate assailed by wild-eyed fanatics. If Yaël Dayan hadn’t volunteered to put a death curse on him, Sharon would gladly have paid him to do it.

  It is vintage Sharon: brilliant tactics, but not even a hint of strategic vision. Sharon was the main political patron of the settlers from the start, and though he does not share their religious fanaticism he retains a deep emotional attachment to the territories they have settled. Now he has turned the more extremist settlers against him, but he still wants to keep almost all of the land. The problem is that this means no deal with the Palestinians, and a future of endless war.

  The late Yitzhak Rabin was at least as tough a general and as dedicated to Israel as Ariel Sharon, but he was a great deal wiser. He thought long-term, and understood that the day must eventually come when Israel no longer enjoys all its current strategic advantages. It was therefore necessary for Israel’s survival to reach a lasting settlement with the Palestinians before it lost the upper hand.

  Sharon and his allies deny that a deal is possible because “there is nobody to negotiate with,” and by now they have managed to discredit or kill most of their potential Palestinian negotiating partners. The truth is they don’t really want a deal anyway. They are unwilling to contemplate the sacrifices that it would require, and have no coherent vision beyond endless military occupation of the territories and an endless war on the consequent terrorism.

  Journalists did not get to “know” Ariel Sharon, but I had dealings with him. He was a bully and a blowhard, qualities that served him well.

  I did get to know Yitzhak Rabin a bit, and I found him serious, wise and altogether admirable. Israel lost its best chance to make a lasting peace when he was murdered.

  As for Yasser Arafat, he ended up as self-caricature, and intellectually he was just not up to the task he had set himself. Nevertheless, he did leave two major accomplishments behind.

  October 29, 2004

  ARAFAT’S LEGACY

  Yasser Arafat isn’t dead yet. The “blood disorder” that forced him to desert his besieged headquarters in Ramallah and fly to Paris for medical treatment may not kill him, but he is probably never going home again, and his long reign as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian people is certainly over. So it is time to write his political obituary, if not his personal one.

  Frantic speculation has already begun about who will succeed him, but it’s unlikely that any single successor will command the support and respect that Arafat enjoyed in the deeply divided Palestinian community at home and in exile. The notion that a new Palestinian leader might be able to reopen peace talks with Israel is built on the myth that they only failed because of Arafat’s stubborn personality. His career seems to be ending in failure—and yet he did achieve something.

  He should have died at least ten years ago, of course. It would have been better for his reputation, for he never had the skills to run a proto-state like the Palestinian Authority: even as “President” of the PA, he remained at heart a guerrilla chieftain who ruled through cronies and relatives, co-opted his opponents with bribes of one sort or another, and never failed to appoint at least two rivals to any position of power.

  His death then would also have been better for peace in the region, for a more astute Palestinian leader might just have pulled off a final peace agreement at the Camp David talks with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2000. It was already late in the game. The 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat’s partner for peace in the Oslo Accords, and the subsequent delaying tactics of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996–99, used up most of the available political time and patience, but a more flexible and imaginative man than Arafat might just have managed it.

  Arafat was too cautious, and so the Camp David deal failed. A month later, Ariel Sharon, guarded by hundreds of Israeli soldiers and snipers, marched onto the square in front of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem with the manifest intention of provoking a violent Palestinian response. The Palestinians threw rocks, the snipers opened fire, and that triggered the intifada, just as Sharon (and maybe Barak, too, by that time) intended. Four years later, all the peace plans lie in ruins and nothing awaits the Palestinians and the Israelis but endless violence.

  So what did Arafat do right? Just two things, but they were big. First, he broke the hold of Arab governments who tried to control the Palestinian resistance movements for their own purposes. Then, even more importantly, he made the whole world acknowledge the existence of the Palestinian nation. He did that, for the most part, by successful acts of terrorism.

  When Arafat created the Fatah guerrilla movement in 1959, the Palestinian refugees who had fled or been driven from their homes in 1948, in what is now Israel, were known simply as “refugees”: stateless Arabs who could theoretically be “resettled” anywhere. Arab governments resisted this definition, but in the West it was universal. Arafat changed all that.

  The key event in his life was the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where most of the 1948 “refugees” had ended up. In response to that disaster, Arafat took his guerrilla movement, Fatah, into the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1968, became the PLO‘s leader the following year, and launched the campaign of international terrorism that made him famous.

  It was universally condemned in the West, and all the authorities vowed that terrorism would never succeed, but by the time Arafat called off the campaign in 1989 he had achieved his goal. The world no longer talked about “refugees”; it talked about “Palestinians,” and giving them that name implicitly recognized their right to a particular territory. The result: American and Israeli recognition of Arafat as a valid negotiating partner, the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the peace negotiations that took up most of the 1990s.

  The peace negotiations failed, and Arafat bears a share of the blame (though only a share). As he departs from power and perhaps from the land of the living, the future of the Palestinians and the Israelis has rarely looked grimmer. But the history of the future is just as long as the history of the past; we just don’t know it yet. There is still hope, and the historians of the future may be kinder to Yasser Arafat than the judgment of his contemporaries.

  Yasser Arafat died in November 2004, and Mahmoud Abbas replaced him as head of the PLO and president of the Palestinian National Authority. Like any change of personnel or circumstances in the claustrophobic Israeli-Palestinian relationship, this led to an outburst of optimism about the “peace process.” It didn’t last long.

  July 17, 2005

  ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: THE END OF THE “CALM”

  Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called for a “period of calm” when he took over the late Yasser Arafat’s job in January, and for a while some people allowed themselves to believe that peace was within reach. But that delusion depended on the belief that Arafat had been the main obstacle to a permanent peace agreement, and it is now melting in the summer sun.

  “This calm is dissolving,” said General Dan Halutz, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, last Friday. Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman of the radical Hamas movement that rejects a permanent peace deal with Israel, sort of agreed: “The calm is blowing away in the wind, and the Zionist enemy is responsible for that.” But the truth is that neither Halutz’s political superiors nor al-Masri’s expected the calm to last.

  Israel would prefer the Palestinians to remain quiet, of course, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategy does not include serious negotiations with them. He is instead going for an imposed peace that leaves all the main Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank under Israeli control, and last August, he
got official U.S. support for that policy.

  Sharon is building a “security fence” along the border between Israel and the West Bank—but cutting deep into the Palestinian territories in a number of places to include the major Jewish settlement areas—that translates that policy into a de facto new border for Israel. He is expanding Jewish settlements around predominantly Arab East Jerusalem to cut it off from the West Bank and to eliminate the possibility that it could ever serve as the capital of a Palestinian state. And Washington has promised to put no pressure on him for concessions to the Palestinians until he completes the “disengagement,” the unilateral withdrawal of some 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip that is due to begin next month.

  In reality, as Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, explained last October, the disengagement process is intended to supply “the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians … When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda … all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

  Sharon spoke bluntly about his strategy to the Knesset in April: “I am doing everything I can to preserve as much [of the West Bank settlements] as I can.” He is succeeding: by the time the Gaza withdrawal is complete, so should be the wall that cuts through the West Bank and defines the new de facto border between Israel and the occupied territories. But since Palestinians understand all this, they have concluded that Mahmoud Abbas’s gamble that a “period of calm” would lead to genuine peace negotiations with Israel has failed.