Part II - An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
Updated September 2002
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. (54) 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." (55)
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 pre-emptive strikes, 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," a writer for 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." (56)
With crucial US backing, Israel is likewise now able to totally flout international conventions - as evidenced by its contemptuous and humiliating treatment 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 policy-makers, and even the dean of Israel's "new historians," (57) Benny Morris, openly contemplate expulsion. Morris, explicitly endorsing expulsion of the Palestinians - "a sick, psychotic people" - in the event of war, further ranted: "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." According to a recent poll conducted by Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 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). (58)
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 Soviet Jewry. 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, Israel's only alternatives are to continue tolerating the terrorist attacks or 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. (59)
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 70 villagers dead (the majority women and children), was compared by American newspapers to Lidice. 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." (60)
Meanwhile, Joan Peters's colossal hoax, From Time Immemorial, which purports that Palestine was deserted before Zionist colonization, (61) was reissued in February 2001 and, touted by American Jewish organizations and periodicals, immediately soared to the top of the Amazon sales rankings, where it remains. 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 fort