Part I - An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
Updated September 2002
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 only choose between 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 hatred of Jews but rather the prospect - very real - of their 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)
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) 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 before World War II 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 13 million Germans from Central and Eastern Europe (around 2 million perished in the course of this horrendous uprooting). Even the left-wing British Labor 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 Labor 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 U.S. 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 percent 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 multivolume 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 as a springboard for further expansion the Jewish state carved out of Palestine. (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 aftermath 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 occupation of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza "came about largely through chance," "the vagaries and momentum of war." In light of the Zionist movement's long-standing territorial imperatives, Sternhell more soberly observes: "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. 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 Israel moved after the June war 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 provided for 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)
In a crucial shift beginning under the Nixon-Kissinger administration, however, American policy was realigned with Israel's. (33) Except for Israel and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international community has consistently supported, for the past quarter-century, the "two-state" settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in January 1976 and April 1980 affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and neighboring Arab states. A December 1989 General Assembly resolution along similar lines passed 151-3 (no abstentions), the three negative votes cast by Israel, the United States, and Dominica. (34) Given this record of contempt for world opinion, it's unsurprising that Israel set as a crucial precondition for negotiations that Palestinians "must drop their traditional demand" for "international arbitration" or a "Security Council mechanism." (35) The main obstacle to Israel's annexation of occupied Palestinian territory was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state settlement in the mid-1970s, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organization bent on Israel's destruction. Indeed, 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." (36)
Frustrated at the diplomatic impasse caused by US-Israeli obstructionism, 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. (37) With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq, and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinians suffered yet a further decline in their fortunes. 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. (38) "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. (39)
Israel's settlement policy in the Occupied Territories 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. (40) 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% of the water consumption of the entire two million Palestinians inhabitants of the West Bank. Not even one Jewish settlement was dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing units in the settlements increased by more than 50 percent (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.
"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."
During the first 18 months of Sharon's term of office, fully 44 new settlements - rebuked by the UN Commission Human Rights as "incendiary and provocative" - were established. (41) As settlements multiply, Israel is 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 unemployment already stands above 70 percent in some areas, 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 a USAID report - by transport blockages. "What is truly appalling," a Ha'aretz writer lamented, "is the blas