January 2015
OUR TIME IN THE MIDDLE EAST WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE. As a family, we’d arrived with such enthusiasm.
We’d spent some of our best years in Israel. But during these six years, Sylvie, Jack and I had realised something was very wrong. We’d come to this realisation in different ways and at different times – after all, Jack had spent this time in primary and secondary school, so his experience here had been very different from mine and Sylvie’s. But from our varied lives, we’d each come to the same conclusion: the State of Israel is in deep trouble.
We each felt a disappointment with what we’d found here – a sadness that there was so much suffering and that it showed no sign of stopping. But as a journalist I had a very different perspective: astonishment that the reality of modern Israel goes largely unreported.
What is going on in Israel today is a dramatic story. What is occurring is the extinguishment not just of any chance of a Palestinian State but also of the vision by the international community, as agreed by the United Nations in 1947, to find a sustainable peace through a two-State solution. However, unless you read between the lines or have sources of information outside the mainstream media, you would barely know this.
The other conclusion I’d come to was that the end of a Palestinian State also meant the arrival of a horrible new reality. As Israel approaches the 70th anniversary of its founding, there is a formidable threat confronting it. If not addressed, Israel will not survive in its current form.
As the correspondent for The Australian, I’d had extraordinary access to Israel’s military and political elite. When Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, decided to have a rare media briefing, I was one of 10 foreign journalists invited. At one dinner I was asked to commence proceedings: a daunting task, given there was a former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, sitting opposite me. We’d gathered in the Jerusalem home of a leading lawyer. There were 20 Israelis – lawyers and politicians – and four foreign journalists present.
‘Now that you’ve been here four years, tell us how you see Israel’s future,’ the host asked.
‘To me Israel is like a train,’ I began. ‘It’s one of the best trains I’ve been on. It’s not just the fastest train, but also the quietest. It showcases Israeli technology. Every carriage has wi-fi and each seat has its own TV. The buffet car has magnificent food and wine. But there’s one problem: in two hours this train is going to have a head-on collision, and a lot of people are going to be killed. The collision is going to be with the occupation of the Palestinians. In my opinion no society can keep another people under occupation for 50 years. Unless there’s real change I think this will end in tragedy.’
I stopped.
There was silence. Finally, a woman said: ‘John, I think every person in this room agrees with everything you just said.’
Ehud Olmert then told us how close he’d come to achieving peace with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert stunned Abbas when he walked in with a map of a Palestinian State that he believed he could convince the Israeli public to support. While this is frequently cited in the media, what he went on to tell us debunked the version often quoted by Israeli lobby groups of that famous meeting, that Abbas rejected the peace offer. He said Abbas asked if he could keep the map. ‘Only if you sign it!’ Olmert replied. Abbas said he could not sign a deal as momentous as this without consulting others. Before he could do this, however, Olmert was hit with massive corruption charges and went to jail. The two men never met again. Olmert told all of us at the dinner that night very strongly: ‘Abbas neither accepted nor refused. To say that he rejected that offer is wrong.’
As argued earlier, overwhelming evidence now exists that Israel determined from 1967 that it would aggressively execute its settlement push to make a Palestinian State impossible. Israel has been moving towards an extremist position for many years.
Israeli documents show Golda Meir (1969–1974) could have done a peace deal with Egypt much earlier, while Ariel Sharon (2001–06) saw off two peace attempts: the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and the Geneva Initiative of 2003. Sharon was both a formidable military strategist and a wily politician. As a military commander, he successfully took Israel into Gaza to establish settlements; as Prime Minister he successfully took Israel out of Gaza in 2005.
Withdrawing from Gaza was a political masterstroke. Sharon was able to tell the US that he was committed to withdrawing from ‘the territories’. As one European diplomat explained to me: ‘But what he didn’t add was that at exactly the same time he was massively boosting the number of settlers in the West Bank. This was what was important to Israel – it had no real religious and political connection to Gaza but it did to the West Bank.’ Sharon withdrew 10,000 settlers from Gaza, but was responsible, according to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, for 100,000 new settlers in the West Bank.
The growth in settlements was strongest under Shimon Peres (1995–96) and Ehud Barak (1999–2001) – both Labor Party prime ministers. Until, that is, Benjamin Netanyahu, who proved to be the biggest booster of settlements of any prime minister in terms of financial incentives for people to move there.
Netanyahu has now become Israel’s longest serving prime minister. He could bring peace to Israel if he wanted to. From a position of unprecedented strength, Netanyahu could force a solution by defining clear borders for Israel and Palestine. Instead, he has enmeshed the two, meaning that the two partners in perhaps the world’s most abusive marriage have been forced to live in the same house indefinitely. Many people who follow Israeli politics closely know this but an entire industry relies on continuing the fantasy that a two-State solution is still viable.
So who is Benjamin Netanyahu? Over my years in the Middle East I was able to observe him up close. He is the shrewdest politician I have ever seen. He is the great survivor. In the highly factionalised world of Israeli politics, he has always managed to cobble together a new alliance or to do another deal to stay in power. And when the history of the Middle East is written, I have no doubt that he will be recorded as the man who has consigned Israelis and Palestinians to decades of conflict.
To try to understand Netanyahu, I spoke to Israelis who have known and worked with him. This included having lunch with a senior official from the Israeli Foreign Ministry whom I liked and trusted. He not only had regular access to Netanyahu but had also known his family for decades.
I asked him: did he think Netanyahu was serious about peace?
He grinned and said there were two seminal figures in Netanyahu’s life: his brother, Yonatan, and his father, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, and to understand Netanyahu you needed to understand these two influences.
Yonatan Netanyahu led the bold rescue of more than 100 Israeli passengers held hostage by Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. The operation was seen as flawless, except for one Israeli death: Yonatan Netanyahu. My contact told me that it was the death of Yonatan while defending Israelis that motivated Benjamin to enter politics.
The other key to understanding Benjamin was his famous historian father, Benzion (who would die in 2012). The official told me that if Benjamin tried to ‘cross the Rubicon’ to bring peace, he would be halfway across when his father would shout: ‘Bibi, come back!’
The official pointed to an interview Benzion gave Maariv newspaper soon after his son’s re-election in April 2009 that Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to stop Maariv from running. In it, Benzion said the two-State solution was a charade. ‘There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population … there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation.’ When the interviewer suggested that Professor Netanyahu did not like Arabs, he replied: ‘The Bible finds no worse image than that of the man from the desert. Why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases.’
There was no solution, Professor Netanyahu insisted, except for ‘strong military rule’. He said there was ‘valuable experience’ to be gained from how the Turks treated the Arabs during Ottoman rule: ‘The Arabs were so badly beaten, they didn’t dare revolt.’ Asked how the Arabs in Israel should be treated, he said: ‘I think we should speak to the Israeli Arabs in the language they understand and admire – the language of force.’ Benzion said a war with ‘the Arabs’ should include ‘withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more’.
Finally, the reporter asked how much the professor thought he had influenced his son Benjamin. ‘I have a general idea,’ Professor Netanyahu replied. ‘Bibi might aim for the same goals as mine, but he keeps to himself the ways to achieve them, because if he gave expression to them, he would expose his goals.’
When I pointed out to the official that the views of a father could not be assumed for a son, he replied: ‘Indeed – but his father is the man he most admires. Do you think that Benjamin did not absorb many of these views?’
On 4 November 1995, right-wing activist Yigal Amir watched then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin speak to thousands about peace in Tel Aviv. Amir was a 25-year-old Yeshiva student who believed the settlements in the West Bank should continue and who opposed any peace agreement with the Palestinians. When he watched the famous handshake at the White House between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 – the same handshake which so inspired me as a young correspondent in Washington all those years ago – he was devastated. As the New York Times reported, that handshake ‘spelled the end of the world that Yigal Amir believed God had given the Jews’. The paper reported: ‘At the Institute for Higher Torah Studies, where Mr Amir was a diligent, argumentative student, the moment of reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders that was greeted so warmly around the world seemed a catastrophe; the celebration at home [in Israel] obscene … Yigal was in a state worse than depression.’1
That night in Tel Aviv, Yigal Amir watched Yitzhak Rabin talk about peace. Once Rabin had finished speaking, Amir made his way through the crowd, hiding a gun. He then went up to Rabin, pointed the gun at his back and fired three shots, killing both Rabin and the Oslo peace process.
Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar told me Netanyahu was ‘absolutely complicit in incitement against Rabin’. While Rabin was negotiating peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu, then Opposition Leader, campaigned against Oslo. ‘At one rally Netanyahu was filmed on a balcony addressing extremists, many of whom were carrying mock coffins for Rabin and Oslo,’ said Eldar. ‘Standing on that balcony with a coffin – he did everything to destroy [the Oslo peace process].’ Netanyahu addressed another rally at which an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform was held aloft. Shortly afterwards, Rabin was shot dead.
After Rabin’s assassination, Haaretz noted that he had been a war hero – the military’s chief of staff during the 1967 Six-Day War, including the triumphant taking of the Western Wall. ‘But Prime Minister and Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin was slain in the wake of systematic incitement led and orchestrated by Netanyahu,’ the paper’s journalist Sefi Rachlevsky wrote. ‘At the height of the incitement and under his direction, Netanyahu managed to turn a Zionist hero into a figure at which thousands and tens of thousands of people shouted “traitor,” with hoarse throats and leaps of hatred and ecstasy. And continued to the conclusion: “With blood and fire, we will oust Rabin.”’2
Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed the Likud leaders – including Netanyahu – for the climate in the lead-up to the assassination. After listening to Netanyahu calling for reconciliation after Rabin’s death, Leah Rabin said: ‘It’s too late. What happened wasn’t a bolt of lightning from the heavens. It grew from the soil, a very particular soil.’3
Just seven months later, Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as their new Prime Minister.
During his first term (1996–99), the US became highly suspicious of him. After Bill Clinton met with Netanyahu in 1996, Clinton adviser Dennis Ross wrote: ‘In the meeting with President Clinton, Netanyahu was nearly insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs. Clinton said “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he required.”’
Netanyahu knew there was one thing that would kill the peace process: settlements. ‘He approved Har Homa, the first new settlement after Oslo,’ Akiva Eldar told me. This happened in 1997. ‘People don’t realise the importance of Har Homa: its purpose was to put a barrier between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. President Clinton gave his word to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that after Oslo was signed he would not allow Netanyahu to build a new settlement, and he even sent Dennis Ross on a secret mission to Netanyahu to tell him not to build Har Homa. But the Israelis said, “We’re not going to stop.” This said to Arafat that you cannot rely on the Americans.’ Netanyahu’s fast-tracking of Har Homa dealt a serious blow to the peace process.
When speaking to the international community, Netanyahu had a mantra: two States for two peoples. But for settlers, in private, he had a different message.
In 2001, two years after he lost the prime ministership, he drove to Ofra, an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian Territories, 20 minutes from his home. The settlers there believed that during his prime ministership he had not done enough for settlements – even though, like every PM before him, he had encouraged ‘the settlement enterprise’ through financial incentives. But for the settlers who want Greater Israel – a complete takeover of the West Bank – enough is never enough. To effect his political comeback, Netanyahu needed to win over the settlers – the most powerful lobby group in Israel.
The reason this meeting is important is that it explains why the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is worsening today. Here were the real thoughts of the man who would return to power and become Israel’s longest-serving PM.
Not realising he was being filmed, he boasted about how as Prime Minister he had sabotaged the 20-year peace process set in place by the Oslo Accords. ‘I know what America is,’ Netanyahu told the settlers. ‘America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get their way [in terms of a two-State solution]. They asked me before the [1996 Israeli] election if I’d honour [the Oslo Accords]. I said I would but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders.’
A key element of Oslo was that Israel would give the Palestinians limited autonomy in certain areas. But to allay Israel’s security concerns, President Clinton had agreed that ‘defined military zones’ would remain under Israeli control. The Oslo process relied on Israel acting in good faith in relation to these zones.
‘Why is that important?’ Netanyahu asked the settlers in his private meeting. ‘Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo Accords. How did we do it? Nobody said what “defined military zones” were. “Defined military zones” are security zones; as far as I’m concerned the entire Jordan Valley is a “defined military zone”. Go argue.’ Then came the punchline. ‘I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords!’
Oslo was meant to be a five-year interim agreement culminating in the creation of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. The Oslo process would then continue for several years, as both sides were required to adhere to ongoing conditions. But as Netanyahu said, he had used ‘defined military zones’ so that land intended for the Palestinian Authority would be under the control of the Israeli Army. Israel has in fact declared more than half of Area C in the West Bank to be ‘defined military zones’.
Washington had never been able to prove that Netanyahu was trying to derail Oslo. Yet the video found its way onto Israeli television.4 It has now been played several times, so Israelis are clear about what Netanyahu thinks of the peace process. Yet they continue to vote for him.
Akiva Eldar told me: ‘I think history will look at Netanyahu’s first term as the beginning of the end of the two-State solution. It started when he was taped saying he would destroy Oslo. The turning point was the incitement that led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.’
Shortly after Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the second time – in 2009 – indications emerged that he was yet again running interference with US efforts for peace. In the first eight months of his government, Netanyahu issued tenders for 25,000 units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported in May 2010: ‘Netanyahu is pleased by the fact that the Americans failed, so he said, to twist his arm and that ultimately, in the dual between him and the Obama administration, he was the one who emerged with the upper hand.’5
While defenders of Greater Israel, particularly in countries like the US, Australia and Canada, supported Israel’s obfuscation on the basis that ‘the situation is extremely complex’, for Netanyahu the game was simple. By not sitting down with the Palestinians he was guaranteeing his own re-election – he had already suffered the political trauma of being thrown from office in 1999 – but he needed to give the appearance to the US that he was serious about peace.
As Akiva Eldar said: ‘Netanyahu, when he was second- and third-time prime minister [2009–15], did everything to waste time. He wants history to remember him as the prime minister who saved Israel from the tragedy of a Palestinian State – that he was able to manipulate the entire world to save Israel from Oslo.’
In September 2011, I was one of a group of reporters who flew from Tel Aviv to New York with Netanyahu, for his appearance at the UN in connection with Palestine’s push for membership. I’d rung Netanyahu’s Australian-born press secretary, Mark Regev, and expressed my interest in being part of the media contingent. There were about 35 Israeli journalists on board, and two foreign journalists, including me.
The security was extraordinary. We’d boarded in a special part of Ben-Gurion airport, with massive concrete barriers and dozens of security men surrounding the plane. On board, security men sat every few seats. There were doctors on board and a huge medical kit in the cabin.
Mid-flight Netanyahu came down to the back of the plane with his wife Sara to say hello to us. The Israeli media weren’t won over, though. One of them, Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea, said to me, ‘There are 35 Israeli journalists on this plane and 34 of them don’t trust Netanyahu.’ When I asked him who was the journalist who did not hate Netanayahu, he said: ‘That guy over there,’ pointing at the reporter from Israel Today, US billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s free pro-settlement newspaper.
Many of these journalists would openly describe the Prime Minister in print as a liar or a hypocrite. Their general view was that ‘unless the occupation was dealth with, their children and grandchildren were destined to live in conflict.’ Nahum Barnea’s son was killed in a bombing in Jerusalem that he went to cover as a journalist, not knowing his son had been involved. Barnea and most of his journalistic colleagues believed there had to be a solution.
Sometimes Netanyahu would talk about media bias, but generally he would deal with the problem by going through friendly media such as Israel Today.
Netanyahu knew how to read people and managed to play the United States very well on this visit. After his pitch-perfect speech to the UN, he spoke to Congress and received something like 30 standing ovations.
Israel won a reprieve when Palestine downgraded its membership bid. But fourteen months later Palestine approached the UN seeking non-member status. When Israel tested the strength of its support the result was not good: only eight countries out of 192 voted with Israel. So remote and obscure were some of these countries for the Israeli public – such as Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands – that Benjamin Netanyahu issued ‘talking points’ to his Cabinet to explain where they were.
Someone leaked the Cabinet document to me. It said: ‘These are small island states, situated fairly close to one another in the Pacific Ocean, have very close ties to the US and vote with Israel in the General Assembly.’
A black humour developed among Israel’s diplomats. ‘There’s a joke that if all else fails we have two guaranteed votes: the US and Micronesia,’ one told me.
Immediately following the vote upgrading the status of Palestinians, the Netanyahu Government announced approval for zoning and planning of building work in the E1 zone of the West Bank. With this announcement, Netanyahu crossed another of Washington’s red lines. Only 12 square kilometres in area, the E1 lies between Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim. Settling this area would make a contiguous Palestinian State virtually impossible. Israel quietly began construction in the area. As Israeli website +972 Magazine reported, the development plan included the transfer of the West Bank police headquarters, the construction of at least 3500 residential units and a large commercial centre, and more. The plan made no reference to the local Palestinian population.6
‘The E1 would kill the idea of two States,’ Alon Liel, former head of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told me. ‘The strategic location of the E1 is going to cut Palestine into three geographic units: Gaza, the north West Bank and the south West Bank. This is also playing into the hands of the enemies of Israel who are saying Israel is developing a Bantustan system.’ Liel added: ‘The Israeli Government in its response said: “Who is the international community? We don’t recognise the international community.”’
The continued escalation of settlement growth made the attempts by the US under John Kerry at peace negotiations virtually impossible. The number of West Bank new settler housing commencements increased by 132 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.
Over my six years in Jerusalem, I watched as the government of Israel – at a critical time in history – sabotaged peace. It was a critical time because it was not too late to form a Palestinian State and because Netanyahu, as someone from the far right, had the credibility with the right wing to deliver a deal.
Yet because Israel has been so successful at running interference with this reality, a perception has been created that it is earnestly chasing peace – if only the Palestinians would come to the party. Without doubt, there have been occasions when the Palestinians have blocked an agreement.
But the power to make an agreement has, mostly, been with the more powerful partner – Israel. They are the occupier. They have the ability to withdraw from the West Bank to allow the creation of a Palestinian State. And any withdrawal would be backed by the fierce – and legitimate – deterrence that comes from being the most powerful military in the Middle East should a new Palestinian State pose any security threat to Israel.
Debate about a Palestinian State has been going on, one way or another, since 1947 when the United Nations created the State of Israel alongside a new Arab State. Netanyahu said, occasionally, that he would be prepared to consider a Palestinian State. Surely, then, the proof of this would be to present a map showing boundaries Israel would accept. Despite all his rhetoric, Netanyahu has never been prepared to present a map to the Palestinians – something that surely someone would do if they were serious about negotiations. Acceptance of the boundaries in the map would, of course, be dependent upon the Palestinians agreeing to various conditions.
As mentioned, the financial support given to settlements by the Netanyahu government has been unprecedented. Investigations by Israeli media have revealed that much of the financial support has been given ‘under the table’ through the World Zionist Organisation, founded by Theodore Herzl at the first Zionist Congress. Forward magazine reported that ‘for decades, the Israeli government, with the tacit consent of diaspora Jewish leaders, has taken one branch of this group, the Settlement Division, and turned it into a covert cash box for bankrolling settlement activity off the government’s own books’.7
Various Israeli politicians have protested about the unaccountability of government spending on settlements. According to official Israeli figures, from 2008 to 2012, spending on settlements increased 1000 per cent. In 2014 alone, it increased by 800 per cent.
It has taken considerable investigation by Israeli politicians to track funding for the settlements, as it comes from several different departments – the interior, agricultural, transport, education, welfare and health ministries. One Knesset member who has been frustrated by the opaque nature of the funding is Elazar Stern, from Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah Party. ‘I’m a member of the finance committee and I’m telling you, I’m being conned,’ he told Reuters. ‘Funds are hidden. Clauses are lumped together so that you vote on an item that is justified and then they slip it in.’
Another member of the Knesset, Stav Shaffir, who sat on the Finance Committee, later said that when she got onto the committee she realised that Israel had two budgets, ‘one budget that has been passed legally on the Knesset floor, another secret budget that is being transferred in the finance committee, secretly, sometimes with no Knesset member even sitting inside and with no supervision on where this money is going’.8
On the election of Netanyahu’s fourth government in 2015, after I’d left the Middle East, the push for Greater Israel would become stronger still.
The ministry Netanyahu chose in 2015 reflected the growing extremism in Israel. As the country moved to a more hardline position, politicians actively paraded their pro-settlement credentials. The new Minister for Justice was Ayelet Shaked, who previously ran a radical right-wing group called My Israel. In 2016, Netanyahu appointed Dani Dayan, a settler leader, to be Israel’s Consul General to New York. Dayan is openly opposed to a two-State solution. He once said: ‘I am willing to commit injustices on behalf of the existence of the Jewish people.’
It’s one thing to encounter racism among ordinary Israelis, but much of it seems to be driven by political figures. According to the Jerusalem Post, Naftali Bennett, a senior minister in Netanyahu’s government, is reported to have said during a debate about terrorism: ‘I killed a lot of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.’ Ben Dahan was appointed to run the Civil Administration (the body which is in charge of the West Bank) despite having said of Palestinians: ‘They are beasts, they are not human.’ Dahan – a rabbi – once told Maariv newspaper: ‘A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.’9 In countries like the US and Australia, such comments would disqualify someone from high office.
Many politicians openly flaunted their racism. In Upper Nazareth, a traditional Christian area, Israeli councillors made their views of Arabs clear – with impunity. Councillor Zeev Hartman, when asked his wish for Israeli Independence Day, said he wanted ‘all the Arabs to disappear’.10 The Mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso, said that since the establishment of Israel, ‘racially-pure kibbutzim without a single Arab member and an army that protects a certain racial strain have been established, as have political parties that proudly bear racist names such as “Habayit HaYehudi” [“Jewish Home”]. Even our national anthem ignores the existence of the Arab minority – in other words, the people Ben-Gurion did not manage to expel in the 1948 war. If not for all that “racism”, it’s doubtful we could live here, and doubtful that we could live at all.’11
The new public mood was reflected in political slogans. Said journalist Akiva Eldar: ‘The slogans of the 1990s were that only the Likud [Party] could make peace. Now peace is not on the cards any more. The average Israeli would like to wake up in the morning and find out that there are no Palestinians around, including Israeli Palestinians. For the average Israeli, a Palestinian is a terrorist until proven otherwise.’
In 1991, fresh from high school, journalist Gil Yaron left Germany and moved to Israel to work as a journalist. He wanted to live where he was ‘self understood’ as a Jewish person. But Yaron told me, ‘I think … [Israel] is moving in a very problematic direction.’ Language that was once used on ‘the outer rims of the political spectrum’ had become mainstream. He pointed to the way Arabic had been downgraded and how Benjamin Netanyahu had told Israeli Arabs ‘if you don’t like it here, you can go to Gaza’. Yaron said: ‘That used to be the talk of the extreme right, it should not be a sentence from the Prime Minister.’
Award-winning Norwegian journalist Sidsel Wold had been a great supporter of Israel. She lived on a kibbutz for three years and came to love the country. She learnt Hebrew and began converting to Judaism. In 2007 she became correspondent for Norway’s NRK because ‘I wanted to show a more positive side of Israel and Israelis’. However, what she saw changed her mind. ‘After living in Jerusalem for five years one gets a very different picture, unfortunately a negative one,’ she told me. ‘But that is also because Israel has changed. There is no ideology, no idealism like in the 1980s, the solidarity has gone. What I see is the beginning of another apartheid state, with a different system than South Africa but with segregation.’ She came to the view that ‘Israel’s greatest enemy is its own politics, its occupation and its arrogance.’
I arrived in Israel having been exposed to all the myths pushed by Israel’s lobby groups. One myth was that inside Israel there had been a fierce debate about the future of the country. Living in Israel, I quickly realised it was untrue. Veteran Agence France Presse bureau chief Philippe Agret agreed: ‘Even the left are united behind Zionism … All of them are Zionists. Today a lot of Israelis are driven by fear. If not indifferent, they condone what’s happening in the occupied territories, and the discrimination within Israel.’
The dominant Israeli viewpoint today is that Israel is now ‘managing a problem’ in much the same way that a police force manages a troublesome neighbourhood. Most Israelis have moved on from seeking any change. They’re comfortable with the status quo. They take some international criticism, but it’s not great enough to deter them from Greater Israel. This is a term usually heard from visiting foreign ministers.’ Most Israelis can get on with their lives and not even have to think about the conflict; the Israeli Army manages that for them. People living in Tel Aviv never need to think about the settlements – they happen ‘out there’.
Over lunch in Jerusalem in late 2014, towards the end of my posting, I asked an Israeli official – one of my contacts – whether Israel had in fact won the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He smiled, as if he were surprised it had taken me so long to figure it all out. ‘It depends what you mean by won,’ he said. ‘If by won you mean that we are in total control of the West Bank, then yes, we have won. The debate at senior levels of our government now is what comes next – do we cede back some of the territory for a Palestinian State, or do we decide we are going to hold on to it permanently and make it part of Israel?’
But the ‘victory’ that Israelis believe they have won is, in my view, corrosive. It is changing the character of Israel. The continuation of the settlement enterprise confirms that many Israelis now believe it is a right for 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on land that is not within their recognised borders. The values upon which Israel was founded are being violated on a daily basis.
The mood in Israel is hardening. One reason for this was the Second Intifada (2000–05). While the previous 40 years of the conflict had occurred mainly in the West Bank, the Second Intifada brought violence into Israel. Many Palestinians engaged in attacks on civilian targets. Suicide bombers hit bus stops and cafés. In my view this was unforgivable.
Sylvie and I came to realise how crucial the Second Intifada was to understanding the Israeli mindset. Talking to Israelis helped us realise how many families had been touched. Our landlord, Avi, told us how it ended his relationships with Palestinians; this situation was common. I realised there was a major disconnect between the high importance that Israelis place on the Second Intifada and the low importance given to it by many journalists.
The Second Intifada largely wiped out the centre and left in Israel, and the whole country veered to the right. It gave political momentum to the national religious movement, which argues that the decision of the United Nations in 1947 to create a Palestinian State was irrelevant.
The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1991, was confronting; the Second Intifada was dreadful. And if the next round of violence comes it will almost certainly be far worse than the last.
Within Israel, more and more security experts are realising that there is something their country can do to address the violence: end the occupation. More than 200 key national security figures in Israel and the US have posted comments on the site of the New York-based Israel Policy Forum (IPF),12 urging Israel to change direction. Yuval Diskin, a former head of Shin Bet, wrote: ‘The unsolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict represents an existential threat. We need to reach an agreement before we reach “a point of no return” in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a point from which we will not be able to return to the option of the “two states for two people.”’ Shabtai Shavit, a former head of Mossad, wrote: ‘Some values are more sacred than land. Peace, which is the life and soul of true democracy, is more important than land.’
Many of the former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet – who understand both Israel’s strength as well as the consequences of not finding a resolution – have urged their country to agree to a Palestinian State. It is the politicians, not the security experts, who are resisting.
The Israeli media has grown louder in its warnings. Even Israel Today has expressed concerns. Columnist Dan Margalit referred to ‘the last remnants of Israel’s good name in the democratic world’.
Warnings have also been heard from some Israeli politicians. Former President Shimon Peres warned: ‘We’re galloping at full speed toward a situation where Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state.’ Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: ‘We don’t have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against “occupation”, in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.’13
Arnon Soffer, an academic from Haifa University, has advised several Israeli governments about the ‘demographic threat’ of the Palestinians. ‘When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,’ he told the Jerusalem Post. ‘Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.’
Israel is losing many of its most loyal friends. Over our six years in Israel, we watched international support for the country deteriorate. In his second and third terms, Benjamin Netanyahu crystallised in the minds of many the idea that Israel was no longer interested in a two-State solution. In November 2011, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who had been one of Netanyahu’s confidants, was caught telling President Obama that Netanyahu was a ‘liar’. In October 2014, Richard Ottaway, the Conservative chairman of the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee, explained his reasons for abandoning support for Israel: ‘Looking back over the last 20 years, I realise now Israel has slowly been drifting away from world public opinion.’14
Strangely, outsiders recognise the coming crisis better than many Israelis. The country has been immersed in so many conflicts for so long that its public now finds it difficult to make objective assessments. Jewish diaspora communities have been told for so long that everything is fine that they do not realise the coming dangers.
Prominent British lawyer David Middleburgh warned that diaspora Jews have a duty to visit the Palestinian Territories to understand the problem. ‘If we do nothing, can we complain if we awake one day and Israel has sleepwalked into the status of a pariah country?’ he asked.15
The New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren said: ‘I don’t think [Netanyahu] has a real plan to deal with the pariah issue. I think his basic feeling is to avoid. This problem is not solvable, he thinks, because the way to solving it through a road map is unacceptable to him. The way he would like to solve it with the [Israeli] military staying in place is obviously unacceptable to the Palestinians, so let’s keep going and make sure they [the Israelis] don’t get blown up today.’
I asked Rudoren for her thoughts on the conflict generally:
I actually don’t think it is more complicated than I thought. I think it’s less soluble than I thought. I think the outsiders’ understanding of this situation is basically like two peoples with reasonable claims to the same place trying to figure out some sort of way to split it up. There are a few nutty issues like what do you do with Jerusalem and the refugees but they should be figure-out-able and what’s taken so long? But I think the more you get into it the more you understand the hatred, the racism, the distrust, the invisibility of one to the other, the deeply held belief that each set of people wants to destroy the other’s right to exist as a people, as a nation-State, all those things make what should be a fairly simple, straightforward project – all the work has already been done on the maps etc – makes it really complicated. This question – is there really a will to resolve it?
German journalist Gil Yaron told me:
The occupation is not only hazardous but dangerous to Israel, though I can think that it could be fatal, because it endangers Israel’s connection to the Western world. It’s becoming worse by the day and because of what it does to Israeli society, that lawless vacuum in which ideological organisations act with impunity, which teach generation after generation of Israelis [in the army in the West Bank] how to solve problems with violence … and they take this knowledge and bring it back home to Israel and it is affecting our society back here. The anti-democratic trends that we have in Israel I think are in part as a consequence of the occupation and at the same time I belong to the school who fervently believes that this problem is unsolvable in the foreseeable future because I do not think that the maximum concessions that both sides are willing to make will satisfy either side.
Within Israel there is an inherent contradiction. Israeli land expert Dror Etkes told me: ‘How do you on the one hand keep the narrative you tell yourself – that you are a democracy, that you are a villa in the jungle, that you are a place which differs from the entire area around it – and on the other hand you are pleasing the most tribal and territorial and chauvinist and nationalist and violent needs or interests of your own society. Israel is not willing to give up either one of these desires.’
Over six years, the thing that most surprised me about Israel was that it is two totally different things: a triumph and a tragedy.
It is a triumph because of what it has achieved in the first seven decades of its life. Israel rose from the Holocaust to become a State three years later. It became a dynamic economy and was able to defend itself against any threat. It revived Hebrew, turned a desert into a bread basket and became a dream for Jews.
It is a tragedy because that dream is being destroyed by a greed for more land.
By 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for a total of 11 years. After four terms of Netanyahu the settlement enterprise was so firmly entrenched that a Palestinian State was virtually no longer viable.
It seemed the Oslo peace process could not survive Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe that more than any other leader, he has been responsible for consigning Israel to long-term war.
It’s now highly unlikely that there will be a peaceful resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. As the occupation passed its 50th year in 2017, an indefinite future of violence set in. The Israeli public has been so inculcated, for so long, to believe that they cannot make peace with Palestinians – the savages – that peace would now be almost impossible. As Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis of Palestinians: ‘They murder – we build.’
Netanyahu has killed off the two-State solution. A Palestinian State is dead before it has been born. As far as the majority of Israelis are concerned, they have won the conflict with the Palestinians. And in a military sense they have. Because this is the world’s slowest war, the international community has, largely, grown tired of it. Because, on average, there are one or two Palestinians killed every week (excluding wars with Gaza), they rarely make the headlines; they are ‘the norm’. Virtually no media outlet in the world will run a story about the deaths of one or two Palestinians.
In 1989, towards the end of apartheid, I met a South African diplomat in Sydney who told me that the aim of his government was to maintain an ‘acceptable’ level of violence between the white and black populations. Incidents such as the notorious 1976 Soweto massacre were not acceptable. But in daily life, with a hostile black community, there would always be some violence; the aim was to ensure that it did not cause South Africa problems internationally.
Israel has reached a similar situation. As long as, on average, only one or two Palestinians a week are killed, the world can live with it. But maintaining an ‘acceptable’ level of international criticism does not solve the underlying problem.
The occupation of 2.9 million Palestinians cannot go on forever – especially when that number becomes 4 or 5 million. Unlike the South African regime, which ultimately was brought down by economic sanctions, Israel has shown that it can sustain a long international campaign. But what it cannot sustain is the cancer growing from within: a cancer that one day will be fatal if not cut out. The internet and mobile phones are destroying Israel’s ability to manage its message by hasbara.
The editorial board of the New York Times has written about ‘increased talk among Israelis of the “one-state solution”, in which Israel subsumes the West Bank formally while incorporating the Palestinian population or somehow shifting the Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. The likeliest outcome, given the growth rate of the Arab population, is that Israel would be confronted with a miserable choice: to give up being a Jewish state – or to give up being a democratic state by denying full voting rights to Palestinians.’
And so, after 50 years of occupation, the reality has come to this. That Israel is faced with ‘a miserable choice’. But many would argue that the Palestinians no longer have a choice, miserable or not.
Benjamin Netanyahu has, finally, got what he wished for. Israel’s hundreds of settlements and outposts are firmly entrenched. A Palestinian State is now almost physically impossible. This is victory for Netanyahu and his political base, the Likud Party, with its nationalist–religious core.
But in coming years, there will be tragic consequences of Netanyahu’s sacrifice of peace on the altar of Greater Israel. It will be unthinkable tragedy.
Israel is a country steeped in military tradition. In many militaries around the world the term ‘Code Red’ means a state of high alert and imminent danger. After six years of living in Israel, I have come to a very clear, but regrettable, view: Israel, Code Red.