[NYTr] Apartheid Israel: The Middle East Peace Process Scam

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Riaz K. Tayob - Aug 12, 2007

[and for those who still are locked into their unapologetic racial 
supremicist views, the term apartheid is used in this article by Haggai 
Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of
Defence. -rt]


London Review of Books 29:16 - Aug 16, 2007
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/sieg01_.html

The Middle East Peace Process Scam Henry Siegman

by Henry Siegman

When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June,
they concluded that Hamass violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza  which 
brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the 
Saudis in Mecca in March  had presented the world with a new window of 
opportunity.[*] (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many 
windows of opportunity.) Hamass isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush 
agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the 
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he 
needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas.

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a 
two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their 
determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian 
state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look 
good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is 
illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those
considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is
Palestinian acquiescence in Israels dismemberment of Palestinian
territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to
offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and
will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbass moderation and
justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bushs expectations
of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would
be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a meeting). In his
view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not
exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their
own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian
institution- building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the
Quartets newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason 
that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to 
acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israels 
decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a 
Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic 
control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow  indeed, it 
would insist on  the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that 
Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the 
creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the
majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular
deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David
summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israels interest in a
peace process other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and
international acceptance of the status quo  has been a fiction that has
served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of 
Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former 
IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, is to sear deep into the 
consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people. In his 
reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the 
settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even
he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so- 
called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and 
other parts of the West Bank.

Anyone familiar with Israels relentless confiscations of Palestinian 
territory  based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel 
Sharon  knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the 
West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose 
settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the 
heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with 
the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of 
Palestinian bantustans. Gazas situation shows us what these bantustans 
will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.

Israels disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state 
solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation 
and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet  with the 
EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following 
Washingtons lead  has collaborated with and provided cover for this 
deception by accepting Israels claim that it has been unable to find a 
deserving Palestinian peace partner.

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of 
staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for 
the future as the current reality in the territories. The plan, he 
said, is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must 
remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank. Ten years later, at 
a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: The question is not What is the 
solution? but How do we live without a solution? Geoffrey Aronson, 
who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, 
summarises the situation as follows:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the 
key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens 
and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the 
status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that
generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli
settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the
expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

In an interview in Haaretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to 
the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of 
Sharons diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and 
Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and 
Palestinian statehood in formaldehyde. It is a fiendishly appropriate 
metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead 
bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. 
Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharons unilateral withdrawal 
from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the 
West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israels unilateralism, not to 
set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The 
limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political 
room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is
what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush wrote: In light of new 
realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli 
population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of 
final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the 
armistice lines of 1949.

In a recent interview in Haaretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the 
Quartets representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said 
that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he 
helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and 
had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this,
he told Haaretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security
adviser. Every aspect of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered was
abrogated.

Another recent interview in Haaretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior 
adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more 
revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers
increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to
further the settlers interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme
Courts instructions about the path the so-called security fence should
follow, instead setting a route that will not enable the establishment
of a Palestinian state. Alon told Haaretz that when in 2005 politicians 
signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on 
Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that 
Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For 
Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the 
IDF is carrying out an apartheid policy that is emptying Hebron of 
Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates 
openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two- state solution 
impossible.

A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the 
Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of 
the situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has
rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to Palestinians. The
rest of the territory, including major population centres such as
Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves; movement between them is
restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found
that what remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the
Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the aftermath
of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to the
infrastructure of the territories including a network of highways that
bypass and isolate Palestinian towns  would serve to formalise the de
facto cantonisation of the West Bank.

These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or
cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels  about waiting
for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their
culture, dismantle the infrastructures of terror and halt all violence
and incitement before peace negotiations can begin  seeks to drown out. 
Given the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians  not 
to mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by 
Israel from precisely those countries that one would have expected to 
compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance  nothing will 
change for the better without the US, the EU and other international 
actors finally facing up to what have long been the fundamental 
impediments to peace.

These impediments include the assumption, implicit in Israels 
occupation policy, that if no peace agreement is reached, the default 
setting of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite 
continuation of Israels occupation. If this reading were true, the 
resolution would actually be inviting an occupying power that wishes to 
retain its adversarys territory to do so simply by means of avoiding 
peace talks  which is exactly what Israel has been doing. In fact, the 
introductory statement to Resolution 242 declares that territory cannot 
be acquired by war, implying that if the parties cannot reach
agreement, the occupier must withdraw to the status quo ante: that,
logically, is 242s default setting. Had there been a sincere intention
on Israels part to withdraw from the territories, surely forty years
should have been more than enough time in which to reach an agreement.

Israels contention has long been that since no Palestinian state 
existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which 
Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an
armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a just and
lasting peace that will allow every state in the area [to] live in
security, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice
line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it
ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but 
principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 
1947, which established the Jewish states international legitimacy, 
also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new 
states borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestines Arab 
population on which they were entitled to establish their own state,
and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision.
Resolution 181s affirmation of the right of Palestines Arab population
to national self-determination was based on normative law and the 
democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. 
(At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in 
Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its 
implementation.

In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to
prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel
enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire
territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably
be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but
rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war
of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if adjustments are
to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israels
side of that line, not the Palestinians.

Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has
not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been
the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to
rid themselves of Israels occupation, even when that violence has 
despicably targeted Israels civilian population. It is not to sanction 
the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or 
later, in most situations in which a peoples drive for national 
self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israels 
own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to 
the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that
first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the
upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun bombings
against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the
conflict. While in the past Arabs had sniped at cars and pedestrians
and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few 
bystanders or passengers, now for the first time, massive bombs were 
placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were 
indiscriminately murdered and maimed. Morris notes that this 
innovation soon found Arab imitators.

Underlying Israels efforts to retain the occupied territories is the 
fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied 
territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. 
Israelis see the Palestinian areas as contested territory to which 
they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians,
international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view
that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay
published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The
use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the
territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but
are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection
of a common Israeli view. That the former prime minister Ehud Barak
(now Olmerts defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial
proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israels
generosity, and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is
another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term Palestinian rights
seems not to exist in Israels lexicon.

The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not 
know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin 
Netanyahu, famously complained that Palestinians take and take while 
Israel gives and gives.) That is an indecent charge, since the 
Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the 
PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949
armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim
to more than half the territory that the UNs partition resolution had
assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit
for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that
Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The
notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of
the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is
deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to 
adjustments to the pre- 1967 border that would allow large numbers of 
West Bank settlers  about 70 per cent  to remain within the Jewish 
state, provided they received comparable territory on Israels side of 
the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the
Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a
peace agreement. But the Arab Leagues peace initiative of 2002 leaves
no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return
of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the
overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their
countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.

It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than 
in empty rhetoric) Israels notion that the occupation and the creation 
of facts on the ground can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no 
agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous 
peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts 
will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.

What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security 
Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the 
pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. 
Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The 
default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 
1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israels occupying forces to 
the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 
months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), 
the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The 
Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the 
conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the 
occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist 
Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israels security by 
preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the 
implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.

If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to 
persuade Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the 
pre-1967 situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in 
permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for complicated 
peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a peace process underway. 
The only thing that an envoy such as Blair can do to put the peace 
process back on track is to speak the truth about the real impediment
to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish
state, since Israels only hope of real long-term security is to have a 
successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.

Footnotes

* Rashid Khalidi writes about Hamas and Fatah on p. 31.

[Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, served as
a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006,
and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994.]

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