Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

Introduction to the
Second Edition

The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states, each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s. … The homogeneous territorial nation could now be seen as a programme that could be realized only by barbarians, or at least by barbarian means.

E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780

Background

To resolve what was called the ‘Jewish question’ – i.e., the reciprocal challenges of Gentile repulsion, or anti-Semitism, and Gentile attraction, or assimilation – the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth century to create an overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state in Palestine.¹ Once the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine through Great Britain’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration,² the main obstacle to realizing its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on the eve of Zionist colonization, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish but Muslim and Christian Arab.³

Across the mainstream Zionist spectrum, it was understood from the outset that Palestine’s indigenous Arab population would not acquiesce in its dispossession. ‘Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine’, Zeev Sternhell observes. ‘If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking … [I]n general both sides understood each other well and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.’ Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) contemptuously dismissed the ‘illusive hopes’ of those who spoke about a “‘mutual misunderstanding” between us and the Arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples.”’ ‘There is no example in history’, David Ben-Gurion declared, succinctly framing the core problem, ‘that a nation opens the gates of its country, not because of necessity … but because the nation which wants to come in has explained its desire to it.’⁴

‘The tragedy of Zionism’, Walter Laqueur wrote in his standard history, ‘was that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map.’ This is not quite right. Rather it was no longer politically tenable to create such spaces: extermination had ceased to be an option of conquest.⁵ Basically the Zionist movement could choose between only two strategic options to achieve its goal: what Benny Morris has labeled ‘the way of South Africa’ – ‘the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority’ – or the ‘the way of transfer’ – ‘you could create a homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out.’⁶

Round One – ‘The Way of Transfer’

In the first round of conquest, the Zionist movement set its sights on ‘the way of transfer’. For all the public rhetoric about wanting to ‘live with the Arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honor and together with them to turn the common homeland into a flourishing land’ (Twelfth Zionist Congress, 1921), the Zionists from early on were in fact bent on expelling them. ‘The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings’, Tom Segev reports. ‘“Disappearing” the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence. … With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer – or its morality.’ The key was to get the timing right. Ben-Gurion, reflecting on the expulsion option in the late 1930s, wrote: ‘What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out – a whole world is lost.’⁷

The goal of ‘disappearing’ the indigenous Arab population points to a virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature: what spurred Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism, in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of Jews, but rather the prospect – very real – of their own expulsion. ‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession’, Morris reasonably concludes, ‘was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism.’ Likewise, in his magisterial study of Palestinian nationalism, Yehoshua Porath suggests that the ‘major factor nourishing’ Arab anti-Semitism ‘was not hatred for the Jews as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine.’ He goes on to argue that, although Arabs initially differentiated between Jews and Zionists, it was ‘inevitable’ that opposition to Zionist settlement would turn into a loathing of all Jews: ‘As immigration increased, so did the Jewish community’s identification with the Zionist movement. … The non-Zionist and anti-Zionist factors became an insignificant minority, and a large measure of sophistication was required to make the older distinction. It was unreasonable to hope that the wider Arab population, and the riotous mob which was part of it, would maintain this distinction.’⁸ It ought also to be remembered that Zionist leaders consistently claimed to be acting on behalf and with the support of ‘world Jewry’, a claim which to many Palestinians seemed increasingly credible, as first non-Zionist Jews in Palestine were marginalized during the Mandate as noted above and, especially after 1967, as non-Zionist Jews around the world became, if not a small minority, certainly an increasingly voiceless one.

From its incipient stirrings in the late nineteenth century through the watershed revolt in the 1930s, Palestinian resistance consistently focused on the twin juggernauts of Zionist conquest: Jewish settlers and Jewish settlements.⁹ Apologetic Zionist writers like Anita Shapira juxtapose benign Jewish settlement against recourse to force.¹⁰ In fact, settlement was force. ‘From the outset, Zionism sought to employ force in order to realize national aspirations’, Yosef Gorny observes. ‘This force consisted primarily of the collective ability to rebuild a national home in Palestine.’ Through settlement the Zionist movement aimed – in Ben-Gurion’s words – ‘to establish a great Jewish fact in this country’ that was irreversible (emphasis in original).¹¹ Moreover, settlement and armed force were in reality seamlessly interwoven as Zionist settlers sought ‘the ideal and perfect fusion between the plow and rifle.’ Moshe Dayan later memorialized that ‘We are a generation of settlers, and without the combat helmet and the barrel of a gun, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house.’¹² The Zionist movement inferred behind Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement a generic (and genetic) anti-Semitism – Jewish settlers ‘being murdered’, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘simply because they were Jews’ – in order to conceal from the outside world and itself the rational and legitimate grievances of the indigenous population.¹³ In the ensuing bloodshed the kith and kin of Zionist martyrs would, like relatives of Palestinian martyrs today, wax proud at these national sacrifices. ‘I am gratified’, the father of a Jewish casualty eulogized, ‘that I was a living witness to such a historical event.’¹⁴

It bears critical notice for what comes later that, from the interwar through early postwar years, Western public opinion was not altogether averse to population transfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) method for resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe’s Jewish press supported in the mid-1930s the transfer of Jews to Madagascar to solve Poland’s ‘Jewish problem’.¹⁵ The main forced transfer between the two world wars was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and approved and supervised by the League of Nations, this brutal displacement of more than 1.5 million people eventually came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent. The British cited it in the late 1930s as a model for resolving the conflict in Palestine. The right-wing Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, taking heart from Nazi demographic experiments in conquered territories (about 1.5 million Poles and Jews were expelled and hundreds of thousands of Germans resettled in their place), exclaimed: ‘The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a good name in the world.’ During the war the Soviet Union also carried out bloody deportations of recalcitrant minorities such as the Volga Germans, Chechen-Ingush and Tatars. Labor Zionists pointed to the ‘positive experience’ of the Greek-Turkish and Soviet expulsions in support of the transfer idea. Recalling the ‘success’ (Churchill) of the Greek–Turkish compulsory transfer, the Allies at the Potsdam Conference (1945) authorized the expulsion of some thirteen million Germans from Central and Eastern Europe (around two million perished in the course of this horrendous uprooting). Even the left-wing British Labour Party advocated in its 1944 platform that the ‘Arabs be encouraged to move out’ of Palestine, as did the humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell, to make way for Zionist settlement.¹⁶

In fact, many in the enlightened West came to view displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine as an inexorable concomitant of civilization’s advance. The identification of Americans with Zionism came easily, since the ‘social order of the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine] was built on the ethos of a frontier society, in which a pioneering-settlement model set the tone’. To account for the ‘almost complete disregard of the Arab case’ by Americans, a prominent British Labour MP, Richard Crossman, explained in the mid-1940s: ‘Zionism after all is merely the attempt by the European Jew to build his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress.’ Contrasting the ‘slovenly’ Arabs with enterprising Jewish settlers who had ‘set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East’, Crossman himself professed in the name of ‘social progress’ support for Zionism. The left-liberal US presidential candidate in 1948, Henry Wallace, compared the Zionist struggle in Palestine with ‘the fight the American colonies carried on in 1776. Just as the British stirred up the Iroquois to fight the colonists, so today they are stirring up the Arabs.’¹⁷

Come 1948, the Zionist movement exploited the ‘revolutionary times’ of the first Arab–Israeli war – much like the Serbs did in Kosovo during the NATO attack – to expel more than 80 per cent of the indigenous population (750,000 Palestinians), and thereby achieve its goal of an overwhelmingly Jewish state, if not yet in the whole of Palestine.¹⁸ Berl Katznelson, known as the ‘conscience’ of the Labor Zionist movement, had maintained that ‘there has never been a colonizing enterprise as typified by justice and honesty toward others as our work here in Eretz Israel.’ In his multi-volume paean to the American settlers’ dispossession of the native population, The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt likewise concluded that ‘no other conquering nation has ever treated savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States’. The recipients of this benefaction would presumably have a different story to tell.¹⁹

Round Two – ‘The Way of South Africa’

The main Arab (and British) fear before and after the 1948 war was that the Zionist movement would use the Jewish state carved out of Palestine as a springboard for further expansion.²⁰ In fact, Zionists pursued from early on a ‘stages’ strategy of conquering Palestine by parts – a strategy it would later vilify the Palestinians for. ‘The Zionist vision could not be fulfilled in one fell swoop’, Ben-Gurion’s official biographer reports, ‘especially the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state. The stage-by-stage approach, dictated by less than favorable circumstances, required the formulation of objectives that appeared to be “concessions”.’ It acquiesced in British and United Nations proposals for the partition of Palestine but only ‘as a stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation’ (Ben-Gurion).²¹ Chief among the Zionist leadership’s regrets in the after-math of the 1948 war was its failure to conquer the whole of Palestine. Come 1967, Israel exploited the ‘revolutionary times’ of the June war to finish the job.²² Sir Martin Gilbert, in his glowing history of Israel, maintained that Zionist leaders from the outset conceived the conquered territories as an undesired ‘burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel’. In a highly acclaimed new study, Six Days of War, Michael Oren suggests that Israel’s territorial conquests ‘came about largely through chance’, ‘the vagaries and momentum of war’: they just happened. A careful review of the historical record, however, suggests that they were just waiting to happen. In light of the Zionist movement’s long-standing territorial imperatives, Sternhell concludes: ‘The role of occupier, which Israel began to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June 1967, was not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realization of Zionism’s major ambitions.’²³

Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people.²⁴ Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, for the first time ‘unequivocally prohibited deportation’ of civilians under occupation (Articles 49, 147).²⁵ Accordingly, after the June war Israel moved to impose the second of its two options mentioned above – apartheid. This proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The ‘Peace Process’

Right after the June war the United Nations deliberated on the modalities for achieving a just and lasting peace. The broad consensus of the General Assembly as well as the Security Council called for Israel’s withdrawal from the Arab territories it occupied during the June war. Security Council Resolution 242 stipulated this basic principle of international law in its preambular paragraph ‘emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’ (emphasis in original).²⁶ At the same time, Resolution 242 called on Arab states to recognize Israel’s right ‘to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of force’. To accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, the international consensus eventually supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once Israel withdrew to its pre-June borders. (Resolution 242 had only referred obliquely to the Palestinians in its call for ‘achieving a just resolution of the refugee problem’.)

Although Defense Minister Moshe Dayan privately acknowledged that Resolution 242 required full withdrawal, Israel officially maintained that it allowed for ‘territorial revision’.²⁷ Israel’s refusal in February 1971 to fully withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt’s offer of a peace treaty led directly to the October 1973 war.²⁸ The basic parameters of Israeli policy regarding Palestinian territory were set out in the late 1960s in the proposal of Yigal Allon, a senior Labor Party official and Cabinet member. The ‘Allon Plan’ called for Israel’s annexation of up to half the West Bank, while Palestinians would be confined to the other half in two unconnected cantons to the north and south. Sasson Sofer notes generally the ‘fertile dualism’ of Israeli diplomacy – one might rather say ‘fertile cynicism’ – of ‘pointing to the uniqueness of the Jewish question in order to obtain legitimacy, and then stressing the normality of Israel’s sovereign existence as a state which should be accorded all the international rights and privileges of a national entity’. In the case at hand Israel demanded, like all sovereign states, full recognition yet also claimed a right, in the name of unique Jewish suffering and despite international law, to territorial conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of the Nazi holocaust played a crucial role in this diplomatic game.²⁹

The United States initially supported the consensus interpretation of Resolution 242, making allowance for only ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’ adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank.³⁰ In heated private exchanges with Israel during the UN-sponsored mediation efforts of Gunnar Jarring in 1968,³¹ American officials stood firm that ‘the words “recognized and secure” meant “security arrangements” and “recognition” of new lines as international boundaries’, and ‘never meant that Israel could extend its territory to [the] West Bank or Suez if this was what it felt its security required’; and that ‘there will never be peace if Israel tries to hold onto large chunks of territory’. Referring to it explicitly by name, the US deplored even the minimalist version of the Allon Plan as ‘a non-starter’ and ‘unacceptable in principle’.³²

The main obstacle to Israel’s annexation of occupied Palestinian territory from the mid-1970s was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state settlement, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction. Pressures mounted on Israel to reach an agreement with the PLO’s ‘compromising approach’. Consequently, in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, where Palestinian leaders were headquartered, to head off what Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv dubbed the PLO’s ‘peace offensive’.³⁵ With the Palestine question diplomatically sidelined after the invasion, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rose up in December 1987 against the occupation in a basically non-violent civil revolt, the intifada. Israel’s brutal repression (compounded by the inept and corrupt leadership of the PLO) eventually resulted in the uprising’s defeat.³⁶ After the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq, and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinian fortunes reached a new nadir. The US and Israel seized on this opportune moment to recruit the already venal and now desperate Palestinian leadership – ‘on the verge of bankruptcy’ and ‘in [a] weakened condition’ (Uri Savir, Israel’s chief negotiator at Oslo) – as surrogates of Israeli power. This was the real meaning of the Oslo Accord signed in September 1993: to create a Palestinian Bantustan by dangling before Arafat and the PLO the perquisites of power and privilege, much like how the British controlled Palestine during the Mandate years through the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, and the Supreme Muslim Council.³⁷ ‘The occupation continued’ after Oslo, a seasoned Israeli observer, Meron Benvenisti, wrote, ‘albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the Palestinian people, represented by their “sole representative,” the PLO.’ And again: ‘It goes without saying that “cooperation” based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization.’ The ‘test’ for Arafat and the PLO, according to Savir, was whether they would ‘us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas and other violent opposition groups’ contesting Israeli apartheid.³⁸

Israel’s settlement policy in the Occupied Territories during the past decade points up the real content of the ‘peace process’ set in motion at Oslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study by B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) entitled Land Grab.³⁹ Due primarily to massive Israeli government subsidies, the Jewish settler population increased from 250,000 to 380,000 during the Oslo years, with settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace under the tenure of Labor’s Ehud Barak than Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Illegal under international law and built on land illegally seized from Palestinians, these settlements now incorporate nearly half the land surface of the West Bank. For all practical purposes they have been annexed to Israel (Israeli law extends not only to Israeli but also non-Israeli Jews residing in the settlements) and are off-limits to Palestinians without special authorization. Fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful Palestinian development. In parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem the only available land for building lies in areas under Israeli jurisdiction, while the water consumption of the 5,000 Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley is equivalent to 75 per cent of the water consumption of all two million Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank. Not one Jewish settlement was dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing units in the settlements increased by more than fifty per cent (excluding East Jerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts occurred not under Netanyahu’s tenure but rather under Barak’s, in the year 2000 – exactly when Barak claims to have ‘left no stone unturned’ in his quest for peace. During the first eighteen months of Prime Minister Sharon’s term of office (beginning early 2001), forty-four new settlements – rebuked by the UN Commission on Human Rights as ‘incendiary and provocative’ – were established in the West Bank.⁴⁰

‘Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality’, the B’Tselem study concludes. ‘This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.’

As Jewish settlements expand, Israel has begun corralling West Bank Palestinians into eight fragments of territory, each surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must load and unload on the borders ‘back-to-back’), thereby further devastating an economy in which roughly one-third of the population is unemployed, half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, and one-fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused – according to US, UN and European relief agencies – by Israeli restrictions on transporting food. ‘What is truly appalling’, a Haaretz writer lamented, ‘is the blase way in which the story has been received and handled by the mass media. … Where is the public outcry against this attempt to divide the territories and enforce internal passports … [and] humiliate and inconvenience a population that can scarcely earn a living or live a life as it is?’⁴¹

After seven years of on-again, off-again negotiations and a succession of new interim agreements that managed to rob the Palestinians of the few crumbs thrown from the master’s table at Oslo,⁴² the moment of truth arrived at Camp David in July 2000. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak delivered Arafat the ultimatum of formally acquiescing in a Bantustan or bearing full responsibility for the collapse of the ‘peace process’. Arafat refused, however, to budge from the international consensus for resolving the conflict. According to Robert Malley, a key American negotiator at Camp David, Arafat continued to hold out for a ‘Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 borders, living alongside Israel’, yet also ‘accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for one swap of land of “equal size and value”’ – that is, the ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’ border adjustments of the original US position on Resolution 242. Malley’s rendering of the Palestinian proposal at Camp David – an offer that was widely dismissed but rarely reported – deserves full quotation: ‘a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers, the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city’s history, preservation of Israel’s demographic balance between Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence.’ On the other hand, contrary to the myth spun by Barak-Clinton as well as a compliant media, ‘Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty’, a special adviser at the British Foreign Office observed, ‘while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians.’ Although accounts of the Barak proposal significantly differ, all knowledgeable observers concur that it ‘would have meant that territory annexed by Israel would encroach deep inside the Palestinian state’ (Malley), dividing the West Bank into multiple, disconnected enclaves, and offering land swaps that were of neither equal size nor equal value.⁴³

Consider in this regard Israel’s reaction to the March 2002 Saudi peace plan. Crown Prince Abdullah proposed, and all twenty-one other members of the Arab League approved, a plan making concessions that actually went beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal, it offered not only full recognition but ‘normal relations with Israel’, and called not for the ‘right of return’ of Palestinian refugees but rather only a ‘just solution’ to the refugee problem. A Haaretz commentator noted that the Saudi plan was ‘surprisingly similar to what Barak claims to have proposed two years ago’ at Camp David. Were Israel truly committed to a comprehensive withdrawal in exchange for normalization with the Arab world, the Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement by the Arab League summit ought to have been met with euphoria. In fact, after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was quickly deposited in Orwell’s memory hole. When the Bush administration subsequently made passing reference to the Saudi plan in a draft ‘road map’ for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict, Israeli officials loudly protested.⁴⁴ Nonetheless, Barak’s – and Clinton’s – fraud that Palestinians at Camp David rejected a maximally generous Israeli offer provided crucial moral cover for the horrors that ensued.

Learning from the Nazi Holocaust

In September 2000, Palestinians embarked on a second intifada against Israeli rule. In the ‘warped thinking’ of Israelis since Oslo, Haaretz journalist Amira Hass wrote soon after the renewed resistance,

the Palestinians would accept a situation of coexistence in which they were on an unequal footing vis-à-vis the Israelis and in which they were ranked as persons who were entitled to less, much less, than the Jews. However, in the end the Palestinians were not willing to live with this arrangement. The new intifada … is a final attempt to thrust a mirror in the face of Israelis and to tell them: ‘Take a good look at yourselves and see how racist you have become.’

Meanwhile, Israel, having failed in the carrot policy it initiated at Oslo, reached for the big stick. Two preconditions had to be met, however, before Israel could bring to bear its overwhelming military superiority: a ‘green light’ from the US and a sufficient pretext. Already in summer 2001, the authoritative Jane’s Information Group reported that Israel had completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of the Occupied Territories. But the US vetoed the plan and Europe made equally plain its opposition. After 11 September, however, the US came on board. Sharon’s goal of crushing the Palestinians basically fit in with the US administration’s goal of exploiting the World Trade Center atrocity to eliminate the last remnants of Arab resistance to total US domination – or, in Robert Fisk’s succinct formulation, ‘to bring the Arabs back under our firm control, to ensure their loyalty’. Through sheer exertion of will and despite a monumentally incompetent leadership, Palestinians have proven to be the most resilient and recalcitrant popular force in the Arab world. Bringing them to their knees would deal a devastating psychological blow throughout the region.⁴⁵

With a green light from the US, all Israel now needed was the pretext. Predictably, it escalated the assassinations of Palestinian leaders following each lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks. ‘After the destruction of the houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued to act with restraint’, Shulamit Aloni of Israel’s Meretz party observed. ‘Sharon and his army minister, apparently fearing that they would have to return to the negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated Raed Karmi. They knew that there would be a response, and that we would pay the price in the blood of citizens.’⁴⁶ In fact, it was plainly the case that Israel desperately sought this sanguinary response. Once the Palestinian terrorist attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to declare war and proceed to beat the basically defenseless civilian Palestinian population into submission.

Only the willfully blind could miss noticing that Israel’s March-April invasion of the West Bank, ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, was largely a replay of the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. To crush the Palestinians’ goal of an independent state alongside Israel – the PLO’s ‘peace offensive’ – Israel laid plans in September 1981 to invade Lebanon. In order to launch the invasion, however, it needed the green light from the Reagan administration and a pretext. Much to its chagrin and despite multiple provocations, Israel was unable to elicit a Palestinian attack on its northern border. It accordingly escalated the air assaults on southern Lebanon and after a particularly murderous attack that left two hundred civilians dead (including sixty occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital), the PLO finally retaliated, killing one Israeli. With this key pretext in hand and a green light now forthcoming from the Reagan administration, Israel invaded. Using the same slogan of ‘rooting out Palestinian terror’, Israel proceeded to massacre a defenseless population, killing some 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese between June and September 1982, almost all civilians. One might note by comparison that, as of May 2002, the official Israeli figure for Jews ‘who gave their lives for the creation and security of the Jewish State’ – that is, the total number of Jews who perished in (mostly) wartime combat or in terrorist attacks from the dawn of the Zionist movement 120 years ago until the present day – comes to 21,182.⁴⁷

To repress Palestinian resistance, a senior Israeli officer in early 2002 urged the army to ‘analyze and internalize the lessons of … how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto’. Judging by Israeli carnage in the West Bank culminating in Operation Defensive Shield … the targeting of Palestinian ambulances⁴⁸ and medical personnel, the targeting of journalists, the killing of Palestinian children ‘for sport’ (Chris Hedges, New York Times former Cairo bureau chief), the rounding up, handcuffing and blindfolding of Palestinian males between the ages of fifteen and fifty, and affixing of numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity, medical treatment and burial to the Palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate air assaults on some Palestinian neighborhoods, the systematic use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes with the occupants huddled inside … it appears that the Israeli army followed the officer’s advice. When the offensive, supported by fully 90 per cent of Israelis, was finally over, 500 Palestinians were dead (including more than seventy children) and 1,500 wounded, more than 8,000 Palestinians detained in mass round-ups had been subjected to ill-treatment (and sometimes torture), more than 3,000 dwellings were demolished (sometimes with the residents still inside) leaving over 13,000 Palestinians homeless, while the already devastated Palestinian economy suffered more than $350 million in direct property losses.⁴⁹

The climax of Operation Defensive Shield was the Israeli siege in early April of Jenin refugee camp. A Palestinian militant told Amnesty International that the decision to resist was ‘made by the community’ against the background of an Israeli incursion the month before that had met little resistance: ‘And otherwise, where would we go? The Israelis had put a cordon around the town; we had no choice. We had nowhere else to fight.’ Human rights organizations consistently found that in the course of the siege ‘Israeli forces committed serious violations of humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes’ (Human Rights Watch) and ‘the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] carried out actions which violate international human rights and humanitarian law; some of these actions amount to … war crimes’ (Amnesty International). Some 4,000 Palestinians, nearly a third of the camp’s population, were rendered homeless in ‘destruction [that] extended well beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued’ (HRW); indeed, ‘in one appalling and extensive operation, the IDF demolished, destroyed by explosives, or flattened by army bulldozers, a large residential area of Jenin refugee camp, much of it after the fighting had apparently ended’ (Amnesty). Some fifty-four Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians.⁵⁰ Typical of the documented Israeli atrocities in Jenin were these: a ‘thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man was killed when the IDF bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home’; a ‘fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man … was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp … even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair’; ‘IDF soldiers forced a sixty-five-year-old woman to stand on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle of a helicopter battle’ (HRW). Israeli authorities apparently didn’t initiate ‘proper investigations’ in any of the ‘unlawful killings’, giving rise to fears that the IDF has been given ‘a carte blanche to continue’ (Amnesty). ‘Though the IDF offensive against Nablus in April 2002 has not received the attention of Jenin’, Amnesty further found, ‘there were more Palestinians casualties (80) and fewer Israeli soldiers killed (four)’, and a comparable pattern of human rights violations and war crimes as well as the complete or partial razing of ‘religious and historical sites … in what frequently appeared to be wanton destruction without military necessity’. In one grisly case, IDF soldiers repeatedly beat with their rifles, pummeled and flipped, and shoved off a truck and down stairs, a ‘twenty-five year-old … paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair’ (Amnesty). The IDF would later explain that the killing of a ‘large number’ of civilians has ‘deterrent value’ (senior IDF officer), and allowed for the killing of unarmed teenage boys on the grounds that they are ‘people of an age to be fighters’. It’s only a flea’s hop to the Nazi justification for killing Jewish children on the grounds that otherwise ‘a generation of avengers filled with hatred [will] grow up’.⁵¹

Recalling that Israel, ‘frequently supported by the United States’, has ‘blocked all attempts to end human rights violations and install a system of international protection in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, Amnesty International called on ‘the international community and, in particular, the United States government to immediately stop the sale or transfer of weaponry that are used to commit human rights violations to Israeli forces’.

It wasn’t only human rights organizations that criticized Operation Defensive Shield. Ehud Barak, for example, registered dissent: according to the former Prime Minister, Sharon should have acted ‘more forcefully’. In the meantime, dismissing criticism of Israeli atrocities as driven by anti-Semitism, Holocaust Industry CEO Elie Wiesel lent unconditional support to Israel – ‘Israel didn’t do anything except it reacted. … Whatever Israel has done is the only thing that Israel could have done. … I don’t think Israel is violating the human rights charter. … War has its own rules’ – and went on to stress the ‘great pain and anguish’ endured by Israeli soldiers as they did what ‘they have to do’.⁵² Boasting that he ‘left them a football stadium’, one of Wiesel’s agonized Israeli soldiers operating a bulldozer in Jenin later recounted in an interview: ‘I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officers … to let me knock it all down, from top to bottom. To level everything. … For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. … I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew that they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried forty or fifty people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down. … I had plenty of satisfaction. I really enjoyed it.’ A B’Tselem investigation in Ramallah found that, typically, at ‘the Ministry of Education, not only was the computer network taken, so were overhead projectors and video players. Other equipment, including televisions and file cabinets full of records, such as student transcripts, were simply destroyed. … Hard disks were taken from civil society organizations that had invested years of work and millions of dollars to compile this material.’ ‘It was simply unbelievable’, one young conscript recalled, ‘people simply made an effort to both destroy and rob. … The sergeant major would bring a truck and load up. It was done openly.’ ‘The total picture’, B’Tselem concluded, ‘is one of a vengeful assault on all symbols of Palestinian society and Palestinian identity. This is combined with what can only be described as hooliganism: the result of thousands of teenage boys and young men in uniform allowed to run wild in Palestinian cities with no accountability for their actions.’ Haaretz reported that Israeli soldiers occupying Ramallah ‘destroyed children’s paintings’ in the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, and ‘urinated and defecated everywhere’ in the building, even ‘managing to defecate into a photocopier’ – no doubt with ‘great pain and anguish’. It seems that this has become an IDF rite of passage: during Israel’s occupation of Beirut in 1982, soldiers similarly defecated in Palestinian cultural and medical institutions.⁵³

In July 2002, Israel moved quickly to avert yet another political catastrophe. With assistance from European diplomats, militant Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, reached a preliminary accord to suspend all attacks inside Israel, perhaps paving the way for a return to the negotiating table. Just ninety minutes before it was to be announced, however, Israeli leaders – fully apprised of the imminent – declaration … ordered an F-16 to drop a one-tonne bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood in Gaza, killing, alongside a Hamas leader, eleven children and five others, and injuring 140. Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and Palestinian terrorist attacks resumed with a vengeance. ‘What is the wisdom here?’ a Meretz party leader asked the Knesset. ‘At the very moment that it appeared that we were on the brink of a chance for reaching something of a cease-fire, or diplomatic activity, we always go back to this experience – just when there is a period of calm, we liquidate.’ Yet, having headed off another dastardly Palestinian ‘peace offensive’, the murderous assault made perfect sense. Small wonder Sharon hailed it as ‘one of our greatest successes’. And ‘once again’ in October 2002 ‘an outburst of violence’ ended ‘a period of relative calm in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, the Christian Science Monitor reported, as Israel killed fourteen Palestinians and wounded more than a hundred (mostly civilians) in Gaza. ‘The main Palestinian political faction, Fatah, was abstaining from terrorist attacks inside Israel and … officials of the Palestinian authority were attempting to persuade militant Palestinian groups to do the same’, it continued. The Israeli attack ‘appeared to extinguish this initiative’s chances for success’ and ‘may add credibility to assertions by Palestinians and others that Israel intentionally stokes the conflict’. European Union representative Javier Solana rued that the assault would undermine the Palestinians’ new undertaking to ‘distance themselves from violence’ – which is presumably why the Israeli army commander in Gaza concluded that ‘The operation was definitely successful from our point of view.’⁵⁴ Scoring a major victory on a related front, the Israeli government blocked Israeli peace activists in August 2002 from linking up with 700 of their Palestinian counterparts in Bethlehem. Reporting from Bethlehem, Amira Hass observed that many Palestinians were endeavoring to ‘open a pubic debate aimed at reducing Palestinian support for attacks inside Israel, without waiting for a change in Israeli policy’. The joint demonstration, she continued, ‘was an example of that type of effort. It was an effort that failed, foiled by the Israeli authorities’.⁵⁵

Expulsion Redux

The Oslo process was premised on finding a credible Palestinian leadership to cloak Israeli apartheid: a Nelson Mandela to act the part of a Chief Buthelezi.⁵⁶ Camp David signaled the defeat of this strategy: Arafat refused – or, due to popular resistance, wasn’t able – to play the assigned role. Without such a legitimizing Palestinian facade, the reality of Israeli apartheid stands fully exposed and subject to the same withering criticism as its South African precursor. ‘If Palestinians were black, Israel would be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States’, the London Observer editorialized after the outbreak of the new intifada. ‘Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-proclaimed “bantustans”, with “whites” monopolizing the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa’s white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel’s treatment of Israeli Arabs – flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education – would be recognized as scandalous too.’ Mainstream figures across the political spectrum, from President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Laureate, Desmond. Tutu, have since issued similar denunciations. ‘I have been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land’, Tutu declared. ‘It reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.’⁵⁷

But paradoxically, whereas apartheid is no longer a tenable Israeli option, expulsion once again may be. Israel adopted the apartheid strategy after new precedents in international law and public opinion barred ethnic expulsions. In recent times, however, there has been a dramatic loosening of such juridical and moral constraints. Especially since September 11, the US has even ceased honoring international law in the breach, but rather effectively declared it null and void. Unlike its 1991 devastation of Iraq, the US’s assault on Afghanistan was launched without any direct UN sanction – not because it couldn’t get such a sanction but because it wanted to make the point of not needing one. Unlike its use in the past of covert operations and legitimizing facades, like the Nicaraguan Contras, to overthrow nettlesome foreign governments, the US now brazenly talks about ‘regime change’. And in proclaiming the doctrine of preventive war, the Bush administration has dealt a ‘mortal blow’ to Article 51 of the UN charter prohibiting armed attack except in the face of an imminent threat. ‘Since Bush came to office’, the London Guardian observes, ‘the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years.’

It has scuppered the biological weapons convention while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty. It has permitted CIA hit squads to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. It has sabotaged the small arms treaty, undermined the international criminal court, refused to sign the climate change protocol and, last month, sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture so that it can keep foreign observers out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Even its preparedness to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN Security Council is a defiance of international law far graver than Saddam Hussein.⁵⁸

With crucial US backing, Israel is likewise now able to totally flout international conventions – as evidenced by its contemptuous and humiliating treatment in April 2002 of the UN’s fact-finding mission on Jenin, and its shredding of the Oslo accord with the reoccupation of Palestinian-administered areas in the West Bank. Influential Israeli policymakers like infrastructure minister Effi Eitam and former leftwing stalwarts like author A.B. Yehoshua openly advocate transfer, while former commander of the Air Force Eitan Ben Eliahu urges the necessity to ‘thin out the number of Arabs here’. ‘Every day that goes by’, Amira Hass warns, ‘the preachers of transfer feel ever more confident about raising their “permanent solution” in the Israeli public.’ Israeli military correspondent Ze’ev Schiff points to the settlers’ ‘stealing and confiscating of Palestinian food’ (justified by Israel’s former chief rabbi on the grounds that ‘the fruit from the trees planted by Gentiles on land inherited by the people of Israel does not belong to the Gentiles’) as ‘laying the groundwork for Transfer’, and Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein likewise observes that ‘The settlers can always claim that they shoot at olive harvesters because the peasants are actually scouts meant to help prepare terror attacks – but the clear truth is that it’s really a preparation for transfer.’ Nearly one-half of Israelis support expulsion of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, and nearly one-third support expulsion of Israeli Palestinians (three-fifths support ‘encouraging’ Israeli Palestinians to leave), while bumper stickers around Jerusalem urge the government to ‘Deport the [expletives]’.⁵⁹

The dean of Israel’s ‘new historians’,⁶⁰ Benny Morris, explicitly justifies expulsion of the Palestinians not only in the event of a regional war but in the name of Lebensraum: ‘This land is so small that there isn’t room for two peoples. In fifty or a hundred years, there will only be one state between the sea and the Jordan. That state must be Israel.’ This insight is of a piece with many of his recent pronouncements. According to Morris, the Zionist settlers had the right to expel Arabs from their homes in 1948 because ‘they started shooting’. Early American settlers similarly maintained that ‘We … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations … destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby … their cleared grounds … shall be inhabited by us.’ Or, is it legitimate to expel in time of war but illegitimate to exterminate? Morris claims that Ben-Gurion’s ‘terrible mistake in 1948’ was that he didn’t ‘complete the job’ and expel ‘one hundred percent’ of the Palestinian Arabs; that Israeli Palestinians now constitute an ‘existential danger’ and a ‘time bomb’; and that ideally ‘the Arabs will leave’ – exactly how he doesn’t say except that ‘this will become a strategic problem for the security forces’. Morris professes that as an historian his only concern is truth. Indeed, finding evidence of yet more ‘massacres’ of Arabs in 1948 ‘makes me happy’. What would one say of a German historian who expresses glee that he uncovered evidence of yet more gas chambers?

The Palestinians, according to Morris, are ‘a sick, psychotic people’. They refuse to acknowledge that ‘Jews have a just claim to Palestine’ and that ‘Zionism was/is a just enterprise’. Yet, Morris further states that this ‘just claim’ couldn’t be redeemed and this ‘just enterprise’ realized without expelling the Palestinian Arabs: ‘a removing of a population was needed. Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established.’ Such an ‘inevitable’ expulsion wasn’t, however, ‘morally defective. … I morally accept the erection of the Jewish state.’ This must mean that Palestinians are a ‘sick, psychotic people’ because they refuse to acknowledge that their expulsion wasn’t ‘morally defective’: that it was morally just. In one remarkably disingenuous interview Morris denied statements of his already in print and went on to wax eloquent on the immorality of expulsion: ‘I regard the notion of expelling a whole population as immoral and unjust and [it] will cause a grievous amount of suffering.’ But if expulsion is ‘immoral and unjust’; and expulsion of the Palestinians was ‘inevitable’ in creating a Jewish state; how can Zionism be moral and just?

Prime Minister Sharon ‘merely responds, usually with great restraint’, Morris stated, and in Operation Defensive Shield ‘no army has ever been more discriminating and gone to such lengths to avoid inflicting civilian casualties’ and accordingly the final tally was merely ‘two or three hundred deaths, mostly of Palestinian gunmen, and the destruction of several dozen homes’. It seems otherwise only because ‘Western journalists’ give credence to the ‘never-ending torrent of Palestinian mendacity’ and in particular to Arafat and the Palestinian Authority – a ‘kingdom of mendacity’ unlike ‘straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials’. Putting to one side Sharon’s own record on truth-telling, it bears notice that the most damning reportage on Israeli human rights violations typically comes not from Western but Israeli journalists; that all the major human rights reports on Operation Defensive Shield flatly contradict Morris’s account of what happened; that Amnesty International found that virtually every official Israeli claim regarding its conduct during Operation Defensive Shield proved to be a flagrant lie; and that if Sharon shows ‘great restraint’ it’s cause for wonder that – according to Israeli polls – ‘everyone loves Arik’ because he ‘beats’ Palestinians ‘to a pulp’. On the other hand, Morris’s inference that ‘someone like Barak, coming from the left with the credit as someone coming from the peace camp, would have had a much easier time using the IDF much more liberally’ is probably true – but this says much more about the brutality of Barak (and hypocrisy of the ‘peace camp’) than it does about the restraint of Sharon. With smug satisfaction Morris goes on to observe that once Sharon deployed the requisite force, ‘Palestinians learned some lessons’ and ‘major acts of terrorism’ ceased: ‘So, force does appear to work, at least in the short term.’ Indeed, the very short term – the day after his interview a suicide-bomber blew up a bus.⁶¹

Apart from mainstream Israeli support for expulsion, there’s yet another cause for alarm. Throughout its history the Zionist movement has wagered against daunting odds. Victory always seemed beyond reach. ‘The State of Israel owes its existence’, Yael Zerubavel writes, ‘to the very ethos that raises ideological commitment beyond realistic calculations.’ Indeed, at each crucial juncture a ‘miracle’ – this word constantly recurs in Zionist historiography – saved it: the ‘miracle’ of the Balfour Declaration (Ben-Gurion); the ‘miracle’ of the Partition Resolution (Chaim Weizmann); the ‘miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks’ in the 1948 war (Weizmann, referring to the Arab flight); the ‘miracle’ of the June 1967 war; the ‘miracle’ of massive immigration of Soviet Jewry to Israel. A close reading of the documentary record shows, however, that these weren’t really miracles. Rather, in each instance the Zionists maximally exploited a slender historical opportunity – ‘revolutionary times’ – by a comprehensive marshalling of their material and human assets. September 11 may yet prove to be another such occasion. The world has granted – or, has been coerced into granting – the US a kind of grace period to openly carry on like a lawless state. This means for Israel a window of opportunity to resolve the Palestine question, once and for all: it’s a ‘miracle’ waiting to happen. Short of a full withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, Israel’s only alternatives are to continue tolerating the terrorist attacks or to expel the Palestinians. One is hard-pressed to imagine, however, that Israel will absorb these attacks indefinitely. Their relentlessness might also temper the ensuing international condemnation of an expulsion.⁶²

Should Israel attempt expulsion, it can probably count on support from powerful sectors in American life. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and House Majority Leader Dick Armey sponsored a resolution supporting Israel’s claim to the whole of ‘Judea and Samaria’, while Armey explicitly upheld that ‘the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there’. Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma intoned that ‘the most important reason’ the US ought to support Israel was that ‘God said so. … Look it up in the book of Genesis. … In Genesis 13:14–17. … This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.’ When Senator Hillary Clinton, a liberal Democrat from New York, visited Israel earlier this year, she was hosted and embraced by Benny Elon, leader of Moledet, a party officially committed to ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. Turning to organized American Jewry, the picture becomes yet bleaker. A respected Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader, Nathan Lewin, called for the execution of family members of Palestinian suicide bombers. Reproaching critics of Lewin, prominent Harvard University Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz and national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman deemed Lewin’s proposal a ‘legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism’. In what might be termed the ‘Lidice gambit’, Dershowitz himself recommended a ‘new response to Palestinian terrorism’: the ‘automatic destruction’ of a Palestinian village after each terrorist attack (as well as the legalization of the torture of terrorist suspects). Dershowitz’s proposal, however, lacks novelty. Israel pursued this strategy of murderous reprisals against Arab civilians in the early 1950s. A massacre perpetrated in 1953 by Ariel Sharon at the village of Qibya, which left some seventy villagers dead (the majority women and children), was compared by American newspapers to Lidice. Lewin and Dershowitz have teamed up to promote a new Washington-based National Institute for Judaic Law that will illuminate the Jewish roots of ‘our legal system in America’. To judge by their interpretation of Jewish law, it’s a wonder they didn’t recommend that Timothy McVeigh’s family be executed and his hometown obliterated. Inspired by Dershowitz, a group of former Israeli military officers and settlers supported by a pro-Israel charity in New York posted on its website this ingenious proposal to facilitate ‘transfer’: ‘Israel issues a warning that, in a response to any terrorist attack, she will immediately completely level an Arab village, randomly chosen by a computer from a published list. … The use of a computer to select the place of the Israeli response will put the Arabs and the Jews on a level footing. The Jews do not know where the terrorists will strike, and the Arabs will not know which one of their villages or settlements will be erased in retaliation. The word “erased” very precisely reflects the force of Israel’s response.’⁶³

Meanwhile, Joan Peters’s colossal hoax, From Time Immemorial, which purports that Palestine was practically empty before Zionist colonization,⁶⁴ was reissued in February 2001 and, touted by American Jewish organizations and periodicals, immediately soared to the top of the Amazon sales rankings. After having disappeared into the night following the exposure of her fraud, Peters is now ‘back in high demand for speaking engagements’ and is getting (according to her) ‘an amazingly wonderful, overwhelmingly positive response from audiences’. Alongside her forte, ‘What Palestinian Land?’, Peters’s range of scholarly expertise has broadened to include ‘Worldwide Islamic Jihad’, ‘Terrorism’, and ‘Religious Persecution by Muslims’. Christian fundamentalists rallying behind the demand for expulsion point to the Peters thesis for support, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson maintaining, for example, that ‘the Palestinians are really Arabs who moved there a few decades ago. Their claim to that land really does not go back very far such as it is.’ A documentary film based on From Time Immemorial is currently in the planning stages. With priceless irony, it’s entitled ‘The Myth’.⁶⁵ The Zionist investment in Peters’s preposterous claim constitutes, incidentally, a backhanded admission that, had Palestine been inhabited (which it plainly was), the Zionist enterprise was morally indefensible.

Maintaining that Sharon ‘has always harbored a very clear plan – nothing less than to rid Israel of the Palestinians’, respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has posited two alternative pretexts for expulsion. (1) The diversion of a global crisis such as an ‘American attack on Iraq’. In this regard it bears recalling that in 1989 Benjamin Netanyahu urged the Israeli government to exploit politically favorable circumstances like the Tiananmen massacre to carry out ‘large-scale’ expulsions when the ‘damage to Israel would have been relatively small’. (2) A spectacular terrorist attack that ‘killed hundreds’. Apart from the regrettably real prospect that Palestinians (or others claiming to act in their support) might commit such an atrocity, judging from the historical record it’s plainly not beyond possibility that Sharon would provoke it. Although ‘some believe that the international community will not permit such an ethnic cleansing’, van Creveld plausibly concludes, ‘I would not count on it. If Sharon decides to go ahead, the only country that can stop him is the United States. The US, however, regards itself as being at war with parts of the Muslim world that have supported Osama bin Laden. America will not necessarily object to that world being taught a lesson.’ The main US fear is that expulsion would trigger a reaction in the ‘Arab street’ toppling its client regimes. But twice before, on the eve of the assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan, elite American opinion harbored a similar fear. In both cases it proved unfounded. The Bush administration might try its luck again in the expectation that the ‘Arab street’ is a chimera. Meron Benvenisti conjured, in the pages of Haaretz, this nightmare scenario: ‘An American assault on Iraq against Arab and world opposition, and an Israeli involvement, even if only symbolic, leads to the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan. Israel then executes the old “Jordanian option” – expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the Jordan River.’ Pointing up the likelihood in Israel’s current state of ‘moral dissolution’ of a war-time expulsion (‘there has never been a better opportunity’), he concludes that ‘Nobody should be allowed to say they weren’t warned.’ ‘If the US attacks Iraq and during that attack there is a mega-terrorist incident in Israel’, former Shin Beth chief Ami Ayalon similarly warns, ‘then Ariel Sharon could exploit the outbreak of rage in the Israeli public to conduct a mass transfer of Palestinians.’ It’s also possible that Israel will execute a large-scale internal transfer from West Bank villages to townships, or deport several thousand key local functionaries, leaving the Palestinian population even more leaderless than it already is. Jane’s Information Group, taking note of the ‘growing concern’ that Sharon will exploit a US attack on Iraq to ‘driv[e] out large numbers of Palestinians from the West Bank into neighboring Jordan’, reports that already since the outbreak of the new intifada ‘as many as 200,000 Palestinians, fleeing from the violence or the economic misery’ have entered Jordan.⁶⁶

The question remains – what would it take to effect a full Israeli withdrawal and avert this catastrophe? ‘The basic tendency of Israeli policy and people’, observes the perceptive Israeli writer Boas Evron, ‘is to solve problems by means of force and to see force as the be-all and end-all, rather than trying diplomatic and political solutions’, and to view borders with neighboring Arab states as ‘nothing but a function of power relations’. Likewise, Ze’ev Sternhell argues that a Zionist tenet is ‘never giving up a position or a territory unless one is compelled by superior force’. In this regard it also bears keeping in mind what van Creveld calls ‘the unique position’ occupied by the military and martial values in Israeli society: ‘It is comparable, if at all, only to the status the armed forces held in Germany from 1871 until 1945.’ (The ‘greatest compliment that anyone could receive was that he was a “fighter”’ and ‘the highest praise one could bestow on anything was to say that it was “like a military operation.”’⁶⁷) The reasonable inference is that Israel will withdraw from the Occupied Territories only if Palestinians (and their supporters) can summon sufficient force to change the calculus of costs for Israel: that is, making the price of occupation too high. The historical record sustains this hypothesis. Israel has withdrawn from occupied territory on three occasions: the Egyptian Sinai in 1957 after Eisenhower’s ultimatum, Sinai in 1979 after Egypt’s unexpectedly impressive showing in the October 1973 war, and Lebanon in 1985 and 2000 after the losses inflicted by the Lebanese resistance. In addition, it seems that Israeli ruling elites seriously contemplated withdrawal during the initial years of the first intifada (1987–9) due to the international and domestic costs inflicted on Israel by the Palestinian revolt.

Neither a conventional nor a guerrilla war seems a viable Palestinian option. Terrorism – apart from being morally reprehensible (if unsurprising) – will probably not budge Israel and if at all, will move it rightwards. Israeli elites accept civilian casualties as a necessary, if regrettable, price of power. They pay heed only when the Israeli military suffers losses or its deterrent capacity is undermined. Consider in this regard Sternhell’s assessment of the impact on Israel of the new intifada:

The number of Israeli civilian casualties in the past year is far greater than the number of soldiers who have been killed or wounded. When all is said and done, the army is waging a deluxe war: it is bombing and shelling defenseless cities and villages, and that situation is convenient for both the army and the settlers. They are well aware that if the army were to sustain casualties on the same scale as occurred in Lebanon, we would now be on our way out of the territories. We perceive the death of civilians in shooting attacks or at the hands of crazed suicide bombers in the heart of our cities, including the extinction of whole families, as a decree of fate or as a kind of act of nature. However, the death of soldiers immediately poses the critical questions: What are the goals of the war? For what end are the soldiers being killed? Who sent them to their death? As long as the conscript troops do not pay too heavily, as long as the reservists are not called up in massive numbers to protect and defend the occupation, the question of ‘why’ does not dictate the national agenda.⁶⁸

Ample historical evidence – from indiscriminate bombing by Germany and the Allies during World War II to indiscriminate US bombing of Vietnam – likewise attests that Israel’s civilian population is unlikely to succumb to terrorism. Jewish terrorism no doubt catalyzed the British decision to terminate the Mandate in 1947, but the fundamental reason was Britain’s financial insolvency after the war. In the Israeli case, the evidence suggests that ‘when an external threat intensifies while, at the same time, there is a sense that all parts of society are exposed to that danger, a feeling of common fate emerges and the level of internal criticism declines’: rather than plummeting in the face of terrorist attacks ‘national morale’ surges as the society closes ranks.⁶⁹

In many respects, the current Palestinian resort to terrorism bears uncanny resemblance to the Zionist terror campaign after World War II against the British occupation. Although officially denouncing anti-British terrorism, Ben-Gurion and the Zionist authority he headed, the Jewish Agency, didn’t cooperate with the British in apprehending terrorist suspects or even in calling upon the Jewish community to respect the law. On the one hand Ben-Gurion maintained that on principle he couldn’t assist enforcing an unjust occupation. ‘Without in the least condoning the acts committed’, he wrote to British officials, ‘the Executive considers the policy at present by the Mandatory Government … to be primarily responsible for the tragic situation which has developed in Palestine. The Executive cannot agree that it can in fairness be called upon to appear in the invidious position of assisting in the enforcement of that policy’ On the other hand Ben-Gurion pleaded that he had lost control over the Jewish community, which no longer accepted occupation. A contemporary British assessment concluded that Zionist officials had fomented Jewish terrorism but also that they could no longer put a stop to it: ‘By their incitement of the Yishuv through constant anti-British and anti-Government propaganda, they have so inflamed Jewish young men and women that terrorist organizations have received a fillip both in recruits and sympathy. Now the Jewish Agency find themselves no longer able to draw back without losing their authority over the Jewish community, and are being forced to greater lengths of extremism. The extent to which they cooperate with the terrorist organization is in some doubt. … There is, however, some evidence that they have pre-knowledge of most incidents which have taken place.’ Later revelations confirmed this cooperation. For example, the Jewish Agency publicly deplored the major terrorist attack on the King David Hotel killing some ninety people, although it had approved in advance targeting the hotel. The official Zionist condemnation, one historian has written, ‘contained more than a smattering of hypocrisy and opportunism’.⁷⁰

‘What was intolerable – and what was in fact being done – was to attempt to have it both ways’, a sympathetic British Labour MP on the scene observed, ‘to claim constitutional rights for the Jewish Agency as a loyal collaborator with the mandatory, and simultaneously to organize sabotage and resistance.’ While Ben-Gurion sought ‘to remain within the letter of the law as chairman of the agency’ by officially condemning terrorism, he also ‘tolerate[d] terror as a method of bringing pressure on the administration’. Zionist leaders acquiesced in the deadly attacks for another reason as well, according to the British MP. Jewish terrorism was ‘winning popular support’ as ‘perfectly decent Jews in Palestine cannot help somehow admiring the terrorists and even assisting them when they seek refuge in their houses’. Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency had to ‘condone terrorism’ in order to ‘prevent a swing of public opinion’ to extreme Zionist parties and against themselves. The only means to fight Jewish terrorism, the British MP concluded, was ‘to remove the legitimate grievances of every Jew in Palestine’, and to ‘state objectively … the historical causes for the growth of this beastly phenomenon in a decent people’. Were the British to do this they could ‘rely on the support of moderate elements in suppressing terrorism, and I believe that the majority of the population would turn against the extremists’. If, however, the British ignored the reasons behind Jewish support for terrorism and simply demanded ‘the replacement of the Jewish Agency by another organization and the disarming’ of the Jewish resistance, the MP warned, it ‘would merely provoke the Jews into a fanatical support of the extremists’.⁷¹

When the British imposed martial law in retaliation for multiple Zionist terrorist attacks (‘The bestialities practiced by the Nazis could go no further’, the staid Times of London would later editorialize), Ben-Gurion passionately condemned the draconian measures for both inflicting collective punishment on the Jewish people and effectively hindering the struggle against terrorism. If only for its current resonance, this denunciation deserves extended quotation:

Two hundred and fifty thousand Jews of Tel Aviv and suburbs, core of country’s social and industrial life, and thirty thousands of Jews in Jerusalem, mostly working-class quarters, isolated from all normal contact with outside world, facing complete breakdown of mechanism civilized life apart from food supplies and skeleton medical service. Industry crippled, trade paralyzed, unemployment threatening to become catastrophic. Industrial raw materials cannot enter, goods manufactured with available stock cannot be marketed outside. Workers cut off from places of work, children from schools. These restrictions have not affected terrorists nor stopped their outrages but instead have increased resentment of hard-hit population, created fertile soil for terrorist propaganda, frustrating community’s attempt to combat terrorism by itself. Martial Law absolutely futile and senseless unless really meant to punish whole community, ruin its economy and destroy the foundations of the Jewish National Home.⁷²

It also merits recalling, however, that although Jewish terrorist attacks (nearly twenty per month) left hundreds of British dead and wounded, the British ‘never deliberately fired into crowds’, and ‘a Jewish large-scale massacre never took place and entire Jewish settlements were not demolished with explosives’. The reason behind this relative British restraint, according to van Creveld, was ‘British recognition that Jews constituted a “semi-European” race.’ By contrast, Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israel the lethal fate of non-Europeans.⁷³

A non-violent Palestinian civil revolt creatively building on the lessons of the first intifada and synchronized with international – in particular, American – pressure probably holds out the most promise in the current crisis. It could bog down and neutralize Israel’s army. Among Israel’s chief worries during the first intifada was the IDF’s loss of morale and élan as it sought to violently quell a civilian population, and the army’s diminishing capacity to fight a ‘real war’ as it trained for and engaged in ‘police-type operations’ (emphasis in original).⁷⁴ A reservoir of Palestinian support for such a strategy of civil disobedience perhaps already exists.⁷⁵ Should a Palestinian leadership successfully harness this constituency, there are reasonable grounds for hoping that its message will resonate among many Israelis. The refusenik movement among Israeli conscripts has prompted a national debate and, although registering massive support for Sharon’s brutal repression, Israelis have supported in roughly equal numbers withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.⁷⁶

The US will impose on Israelis a full withdrawal only when its vital interests are at stake or public pressure compels it to do so. Such pressures may yet be exerted. Support for Israel among ordinary as well as ‘influential’ Americans has markedly declined.⁷⁷ Modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign in the 1980s, a movement on American college campuses calling for divestment from Israel is gathering momentum. In an unusual intervention Harvard University President Lawrence Summers labeled this new divestment campaign anti-Semitic ‘in effect’. Yet, if the divestment campaign targeting South Africa wasn’t anti-white ‘in effect’, why is a divestment campaign targeting an occupation that ‘is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of … the Apartheid regime in South Africa’ (B’Tselem), and that ‘is guilty of apartheid policies’ (Ami Ayalon, former Israeli head of the Shin Bet) anti-Semitic ‘in effect’? Curiously, Summers has not been similarly moved to criticize a member of his own faculty urging the ‘automatic destruction’ of Palestinian villages. Lending his moral stature to the new divestment campaign, Archbishop Tutu exhorted ‘average citizens to again rise to the occasion, since the obstacles to a renewed movement are surpassed only by its moral urgency.’⁷⁸ In fact, Europeans are contemplating a spectrum of actions from consumer boycotts to arms embargoes, while scores of courageous international volunteers (including many Jews) have journeyed to the Occupied Territories to shield Palestinian civilians from attack and publicize Israeli atrocities. Israel’s apologists like Wiesel deplore these initiatives as evidence of a resurgent anti-Semitism. Disparaging similar allegations after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the respected Israeli academician Uriel Tal responded: ‘The bitter cries about anti-Semitism which allegedly raises again its head all over the world serve to cover up the fact that what is disintegrating in the world is Israel’s position, not Jewry’s. The charges of anti-Semitism only aim to inflame the Israeli public, to inculcate hatred and fanaticism, to cultivate paranoid obsession as if the whole world is persecuting us and that all other peoples in the world are contaminated while only we are pure and untarnished.’ To be sure, world Jewry’s position will disintegrate if it doesn’t publicly dissociate from Israel’s crimes. In a passionate denunciation of current Israeli policy for ‘staining the Star of David with blood’, a prominent Jewish parliamentarian and former British shadow Foreign Secretary lamented that ‘the Jewish people … are now symbolized throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra–Shatila camp and now involved in killing Palestinians once again’.⁷⁹

‘Every morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding’, the insightful Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reflected this past year. ‘There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.’⁸⁰ Apart from being a moral abomination, expulsion of the Palestinians can set off a chain reaction in the Arab world that will make September 11 look like a pink tea. But it’s yet within our grasp to seize these fraught times and achieve a just and lasting peace for Israel and Palestine.

This edition of Image and Reality includes a new chapter on the ‘peace process’ and an appendix critically analyzing a recent study of the June 1967 war. In addition to those acknowledged in the first edition of this study, I would like to thank Michael Alvarez, Mouin Rabbani, Jennifer Loewenstein and Shifra Stern for their assistance.

Norman G. Finkelstein
December 2002

Introduction to the Second Edition

Introduction to the
Second Edition