Since the turn of the century, the Arab states
have come to constitute a zone for Western military intervention without
parallel in the post-Cold War world—US invasion
of Iraq, NATO bombardment
of Libya, US proxies in
Syria, Washington-backed GCC assault
on Yemen. What of their traditional enemy? At the time of the second Intifada,
an essay in these pages surveyed the balance of forces between the two
nationalisms, Zionist and Palestinian, reflected in the naked inequities of the
Oslo Accords. [1] Since then, how much has changed? On the
West Bank, very little. The first Intifada was the rebellion of a new
generation of Palestinians, whose activists came from local universities that
were themselves recent creations. Displacing the compliant notables on whom the
occupiers had relied, they led a three-year wave of popular demonstrations,
strikes, boycotts and punishment of collaborators. The exiled PLO in Tunis was caught by
surprise, and played little part in it. Driven out of its bases in Lebanon, and
defunded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the Gulf War, the organization was
rescued from its weakness by the Oslo accords, which returned it in pomp to bits
of the homeland.
The
Palestinian Authority established in 1994, presented as a milestone in the
struggle for national liberation, was in design a co-production of the West and
of Israel, whose primary function was not to embody but to contain resistance to
Zionism. For the West, a pocket of residual Arab turbulence needed to be tidied
up after the triumph of Operation Desert Storm, to round out the New World
Order. For Israel, the Palestinian Authority would act as a cost-effective
surrogate for the IDF in
blocking the springs of the first Intifada, which had threatened to jeopardize
ongoing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, whose expansion required the more
secure environment that an indigenous paramilitary apparatus could provide.
From the outset, the Palestinian Authority lacked any autonomous means of
subsistence, between 70 and 80 per cent of its revenue coming from Western
subsidies and Israeli transfers. Erected was a parasitic miniature of a rentier
state, detached from a population on which it did not materially depend and
whose needs it could ignore. Far more important, inevitably, were the
requirements of its paymasters.
The
Arafat regime saw the leadership of the uprising as a potential threat and,
once installed in the West Bank, disposed of it. The traditional notables were
brought back into a power structure built around the Fatah apparatus,
parachuted in from Tunis and expanded with the proceeds of collaboration. [2] In the last year before Oslo, when the IDF was still in full military
control, the civil administration in the Occupied Territories numbered 27,000,
nearly all Palestinian. By the new century the pay-roll of the Palestinian
Authority had risen to over 140,000, of whom some 60,000 composed its security
empire. Twelve competing repressive apparatuses—gendarmerie, secret police,
presidential guard, military intelligence, special forces, coast guards and
more—made the West Bank among the most highly policed populations on earth: one
agent per sixteen persons. [3] Trained and equipped by the CIA and Jordan, this bloated
security complex, in which torture is routine, absorbs a third of the budget,
costing more than expenditures on education and health combined. Its sights are
trained not on the occupiers, for which it is no match, but on its compatriots.
Repression
is lacquered with cooption. As in all rentier states, patronage—disbursed or
denied—is critical to the system, not least within the security empire itself. [4] About a fifth of all households depend for
their livelihood on jobs or favours distributed by the regime. Corruption
permeates all rungs of the administration, from mega-embezzlement at
presidential and ministerial levels to petty shake-downs on the street.
According to IMF estimates,
between 1995 and 2000 close to $1 billion ended up in the pockets of Arafat and
his circle, with direct Israeli collusion. [5] Monopoly contracts and trading privileges
were handed out to expatriates, officials taking their cut. Floating on foreign
funds, NGOs became
self-service ATMs for their
managers. Protection rackets and extortion by Fatah gangs are commonplace. [6] The reputation of the judiciary is lower
even than that of the police. In villas around Ramallah a layer of bureaucrats
and businessmen, enriched by theft or contraband (cement even smuggled from
Egypt to help build the Separation Wall for Israel), prospers above a landscape
of penniless labourers and unemployed, after Oslo shut out of migrant jobs
across the border. By the time of the second Intifada, average incomes in the
Occupied Territories had dropped by two-fifths, and the number of the poor had
trebled. [7] The rising of 2001, this time with suicide
bombings, was an explosion of frustration and despair at what had become of the
pretence of an emancipation.
2
In 2002
Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli invasion of the Occupied Territories,
rooted out resistance in camps and townships, destroyed local infrastructure,
and interned Arafat in his bunker for the duration. The security forces of the
Palestinian Authority scarcely budged as theIDF smashed
its way through Judea and Samaria. Arafat, incapable of either filling or
fighting the role cast for him by Israel, expired two years later. Like many an
instrument of alien rule before him, who too had thought to use their users, he
ended discarded by them. [8] The first act of his successor was to
declare the second Intifada officially over. Having secured the West Bank, in
2005 Sharon turned Gaza into an open-air prison by evacuating its miniscule
group of Jewish settlers and redeploying the IDF around it—a move designed, as his aide Dov Weisglass
explained, to ‘supply the amount of formaldehyde needed to ensure there will be
no political process with the Palestinians’ as laid out by the Road Map, the
latest US iteration of
the Oslo Accords. [9] So it would be. To Western dismay, when
elections were finally—after a decade—held for a Palestinian legislature in
2006, the stench of Fatah’s corruption and submission proved too much for
voters. Hamas won a majority of seats, in part as a more principled opponent of
Israel, but mainly as a cleaner party, with a better record of social care for
the population. Western sanctions were imposed on the ensuing government, and with
Western encouragement Abbas readied a coup to restore Fatah to power. Alert to
what was impending, Hamas struck first, expelling Fatah from Gaza in the summer
of 2007, leaving Abbas in control of the West Bank. To entrench him there, a
Donors’ Conference was held in Paris, and an unprecedented flow of
Euro-American money cascaded into Ramallah. Pro forma the
charade of the peace process could then continue, if only—in the absence of any
Palestinian authority with an effective writ across both territories—for
purposes of ideological propriety in Washington and Brussels.
Abbas
has since extended his presidency indefinitely. His police continue to work
hand-in-glove with Shin Bet to hold down popular unrest on the West Bank, in a
more extreme version even than Arafat’s of the ‘Scurrier’ system crafted at
Oslo. [10] In shape and in substance, his government
has done its utmost to comply with American wishes. Under US supervision, the Palestinian
Authority instituted a first-past-the-post electoral system designed to warp
representation in favour of Fatah, before it boomeranged in 2006. At US insistence, the office of Prime
Minister was created for Abbas—not trusting Arafat, Washington wanted a check
on him—and, when he stepped into Arafat’s shoes, was filled by a nominee from
the IMF, Salam Fayyad. At US request, Abbas collaborated in
blocking a UN report
critical of Israeli actions in Gaza. When Olmert, responsible for the
onslaught, was temporarily cleared of charges of corruption, Abbas rushed to
congratulate him. [11]
3
Fayyad,
illegally installed as Prime Minister and touted in the US as ‘the most exciting new idea
in Arab governance ever’ (Thomas Friedman dixit), supplied a veneer
of technocratic development for stepped-up repression and ever more brazen
collaboration with Israel: over 1,200 joint operations in 2009 alone. [12] ‘To all Palestinians other than the tiny
clique who benefit from this arrangement’, writes Saree Makdisi, ‘the sight of
Abbas’s US-trained and
Israeli-armed PA militiamen cooperating with Israeli forces, raiding West
Bank refugee camps, looking for potential sources of resistance to the
occupation—if not taking direct orders from the Israelis—is nothing short of
grotesque.’ [13] Conducted under the carapace of the
special US Security
Coordinator, headed by a three-star American general, the clamp-down helped
release IDF forces to
assail Gaza. While cronies of Arafat and Abbas like billionaire Munib
al-Masri—the Carlos Slim of the West Bank, fortune estimated at a third of
Palestinian GDP—flourish,
the lot of the people of the West Bank under the Occupation, where movement is
controlled by over five hundred road-blocks and daily life subject to thousands
of military regulations, is as wretched as ever. After a dozen years, income
per capita had only just regained its level of 1999. [14]
In
Gaza, meanwhile, ostracized as a terrorist organization by the US and EU for refusing to reject armed
resistance and recognize Israel, Hamas rules a coastal strip whose population,
blockaded and battered by repeated invasion, has been reduced to an abyss of
misery. In the short-run, massive retaliation by the IDF for futile rocket attacks on
Israel—not all its own—have each time left Hamas still erect, raising its
patriotic stock. But in degrading its ability to sustain life for the population
at bearable levels, each invasion has required a harder political hand to
compensate for weaker popular support, driving Hamas towards practices closer
to those of Fatah. [15] Over the enclave as a whole, invigilating
it from air, sea and land, and controlling its supply of water, fuel and
electricity, Israel retains dominion without occupation. Once the Sisi
dictatorship closed the tunnels to Sinai that were its only outlet to the
world, Hamas was cornered. By then too its external leadership, relocating from
Syria to Qatar, was signalling adjustment to Western parameters for Palestine,
hitherto always rejected. With this, the way was clear for a nominal reunification
of the national movement in a pact that allowed Fatah to form a government
theoretically in charge of both territories, in exchange for the release of
funds to pay the salaries of 40,000 Hamas officials in Gaza and the promise of
common elections for a new legislature.[16] To date neither has materialized, Hamas
remaining under Western embargo.
4
Meanwhile,
the reach of Zion has steadily expanded. On the eve of the Oslo Accords in
1991, there were about 95,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Twenty years
later, there were 350,000. Five years after Israel conquered East Jerusalem,
its Jewish population was still only 9,000. Today it is above 150,000, perhaps
200,000. [17] All told, over half a million Jews now
live in the Occupied Territories. Their implantation has been a deliberate and
sustained enterprise of the state, which has organized, funded and shielded the
flow of settlements to the tune of some $28 billion. [18] Since Oslo, their growth rate has been
more than double that of the population of Israel proper. Contrary to
widespread belief, nothing in the Oslo Accords prohibited them; they are
perfectly legal aspects of the peace process, of whose nature, from the start,
they form the best illustration.
In
design, East Jerusalem and the West Bank constitute two distinct schemes of
settlement. Israel annexed the former in 1967, declaring the undivided city
henceforward its capital. Higher priority meant higher density. Palestinians in
East Jerusalem are now encircled by a fretwork of Jewish neighbourhoods cutting
them off from the West Bank. Since 2014, a Basic Law requires two-thirds of the
Knesset to approve any cession of land by Israel, or a referendum to be held
should there be a majority of less than two-thirds, double-bolting the
annexation of East Jerusalem. In the West Bank, where ratios are less
favourable, the priority is strategic control rather than territorial extent.
There, settlements covering not more than 5 per cent of ‘Judea and Samaria’
exercise municipal authority over two-fifths of it. Linked by a grid of
highways connecting them to Israeli cities, and slicing apart the Palestinian
population, they enjoy special tax breaks and housing subsidies, as well as
preferential allocation of water. [19] Military protection is supplied by the IDF, which continues to administer 60
per cent of the West Bank directly, while a Separation Barrier seals off much
of the rest from Israel. [20] Since its construction, the number of
suicidal incursions from the West Bank has plummeted. As the fiftieth
anniversary of occupation approaches, a stretch of time more than twice as long
as the prior existence of the Jewish state, over the word ‘settlement’ looms
another meaning.
5
In the
new century, Israel has prospered. The injection of a million immigrants from
the former Soviet Union, with average levels of education and skills far above
that of the post-war Ashkenazi arrivals—half of them professionals: teachers,
doctors, scientists, musicians, journalists [21] —has revitalized the economy. Since the
crushing of the second Intifada, it has posted growth rates consistently higher
than comparators in the OECD.
After the longest sustained expansion in the country’s history, from 2003 to
2007, Israel weathered the financial crisis of 2008 better than any of the
economies of Western Europe and North America, and has continued to outperform
them since. With the world’s highest proportion of scientists and engineers,
double that of the US or
Japan, [22] Israel is now the fourth largest hi-tech
arms exporter, at the cutting edge of drones and surveillance. Its ICT sector has led an export
drive, arms and pharmaceuticals not far behind, which—together with flourishing
tourism—has helped keep the current account in the black. The country has no
external debt, for over a decade enjoying a net surplus of foreign assets.
Along with a domestic boom in real estate, construction and retail commerce has
come a swelling tide of investment from abroad, principally American, bringing
in among much else the first R&D operations to be set up overseas by Intel
and Microsoft. [23] Venture capital, private equity and hedge
funds abound. Raising the animal spirits of business yet further, an energy
bonanza lies in store from off-shore gas extraction. Though environmental
resistance has so far blocked drilling for shale oil, the country has abundant
reserves that could make it a petroleum exporter too. Statistically, with a per
capita income of $37,000 in 2014, Israel is now wealthier than Italy or Spain.
Socially,
such success is more skewed than ever, as the neo-liberal turn of the eighties—when
the stabilization plan of 1985 was a landmark—has been given a further radical
thrust. In the policy package of 2003, the Likud–Labour coalition cut corporate
taxes, fired government employees, slashed social benefits and public-sector
wages, privatized state holdings and deregulated financial markets. Two years
later the Bank of Israel was put under Stanley Fischer—American adviser to the
shock therapy of 1985, deputy director of the IMF, and currently vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve—becoming
an international byword for economic discipline. Between 1984 and 2008, public
expenditure as a proportion of GDP fell
40 per cent, while average wages stagnated in the bottom range of OECD performance. [24] Stock prices soared and housing costs
shot up, while spending on health declined and a fifth of the population fell
below the poverty line. Nor, beneath the sheen of hi-tech start-ups and record
exports, is all well in more traditional sectors of the economy, where over
half of all jobs are to be found, and productivity remains low. Here, after the
second Intifada, cheap labour from the Occupied Territories has been replaced
by immigrant workers, legal and illegal, from Thailand, Romania, China, the
Philippines and elsewhere, typically super-exploited in a shadow economy about
twice the size of that in other advanced countries, while among the
second-class Arab citizens of Israel—around 20 per cent of the
population—unemployment is endemically high. [25] At the other pole of this growth model,
wealth is fabulously concentrated among a handful of nouveaux-richetycoons,
the ten largest Israeli conglomerates controlling a third of the stock market,
a pattern no Western bourse can match.
6
Politically,
the revisionist wing of Zionism that first broke Labour’s grip on power in the
late seventies has consolidated its hegemony. While frontal opposition between
the two camps, frequently allied in government, has been rare, a long-term
shift in the balance of forces that each can deploy is clear. In the four
decades since Begin took office, Likud has ruled for over eighteen years,
coalitions of the two headed by Likud or transfuges from it for twelve, and
Labour for six. In this period Netanyahu, the Likud incumbent, is the only
politician to have won three successive elections, and if he completes his
current term, will be within a year of Ben-Gurion for length of time as Prime
Minister of Israel. His ascendancy is, however, more an effect of the crumbling
of Labour than of his own standing. Personification of the neo-liberal turn as
author of the package of 2003, and the most Americanized leader in the
country’s history, he can claim credit for its recent economic report-card. But
since this has also provoked widespread social discontent, with middle-class
demonstrations against the cost of housing and disparities of wealth, it is not
an unambiguous asset. More important has been a tougher stance on security,
product of the greater coherence of a revisionist outlook. In any electoral
contest, this is typically the most sensitive arena, where political resolve
can trump economic misgivings. There Labour, oscillating between imitation and
evasion under a succession of ineffectual leaders, has regularly been worsted
by Netanyahu’s assurance of a strong hand. Last but not least, Likud has been
consistently better at bringing the clerical parties into its cabinets—this too
a logical function of its version of Zionism: with no ex-socialist relics in
the attic, more désinvolte in the pragmatic handling of
religion for political ends.
In
Israel, the stability of the political system has always pivoted on the
co-dependence of Zionism and Judaism. At an everyday level, the cultural
consequence is the paradoxical symbiosis of a benighted clericalism and a
breezy secularism—Orthodox privileges and taboos striating a civil society as uninhibited
as any Nordic free-for-all, without any truly serious conflict between them.
Historically, the conditions of that paradox have been two-fold: negatively,
the lack of any Jewish critiques of Judaism comparable to radical Enlightenment
demolitions of Christianity, once barriers around the ghetto fell, when
emancipated Jewish minds typically joined secular debates in the
still-Christian world, ignoring their own religion; [26] and positively, the need of secular
Zionism for a religious appeal to unify a people lacking any common bonds of
language or geography, and furnish a theological basis for its claims to the
Promised Land. The ensuing clerico-secular hybrid—over-determined by general
traits of any frontier-cum-melting-pot society, always liable to generate a
philistine machismo and lowest-common-denominator popular culture—may have been
deadening for intellectual life, even if the vast critical reserves in the
European Jewish past could never be completely neutralized. But it has been a
stabilizing mechanism in political life, soldering it into seemingly fractious
but substantially fixed forms.
Such
stability has, of course, its deepest source in standing dispositions to union
sacrée against external danger. Nothing binds the community tighter
than fear of losing what it has made of what it has taken. The Arab world,
however domesticated, has yet to underwrite the conquests of 1948 and 1967, and
Palestinian anger, however impotent, yet to be snuffed out. Measured against
potential retribution from this quarter, internal griefs have little weight. In
such conditions, the pervasive corruption of public life, exceeding even the
already high levels in theEU or US, occasions more indifference than
indignation. Rife in the corporate world, whose billionaires are Israeli
counterparts of Russian oligarchs, it extends across virtually the whole
political spectrum. Successive financial or sexual scandals have engulfed virtually
every prominent figure on the public stage, from Rabin, Peres, Sharon,
Netanyahu, Ramon through to the latest cases of Olmert and Katsav: a Prime
Minister convicted of bribery and a President of rape. [27] The widespread contempt felt for the
current political class is not, however, any threat to it. The political system
might seem to have lost so much popular respect that it must be ripe for
change, but the imperatives of security ensure that no deviant outlook has any
electoral space, so it is not at risk. Since virtually everyone agrees on the
sufferings and rights of the Jews, voters can afford to despise the petty
misdoings of their rulers, who all follow the same policies anyway. Arguably
there is no other political culture that combines such dismissive cynicism with
such reflex conformism.
7
Over
the same period, alterations in international settings have been less
favourable for Israel. In America there has been a decline in the taboo, still
powerful at the turn of the century, on criticism of the Jewish state or
allusion to the power of the Zionist lobby in Washington. [28] The appearance in 2006 of the first
full-dress critical study of the latter, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
was a watershed. Within the Jewish community itself, divisions have opened up
between liberals hankering for Labour in J-Street, and conservative admirers of
Likud in AIPAC, still far
the more powerful organization. In the younger generation of Jews in America,
as among their contemporaries generally, religious beliefs have declined,
though weakening of fervour for Israel seems to have induced growing
indifference rather than anxiety or indignation at what has become of the
Promised Land. [29] Such shifts in Jewish sentiment find
reflection in twitches of unease in mainstream opinion, where sporadic
questioning of particular actions by Tel Aviv, if invariably hedged, has become
more acceptable in the media.
At a
diplomatic level, the White House remains officially committed to the creation
of some kind of Palestinian state, as since the Oslo Accords, remonstrating for
the record at the expansion of settlements on the West Bank, while blocking any
moves critical of its ally at the UN.
The Obama Administration has seen no substantive change in this stance, as
distinct from intermittent rhetorical adjustment. But for the first time since
1956, a serious policy clash has developed between the United States and
Israel, not over Palestine, but Iran. Both powers are determined to prevent
Teheran acquiring any capability that would end Israel’s monopoly of nuclear
weapons in the region. At US insistence,
crippling UN sanctions
were imposed on Iran in 2006 to force it to abandon any such ambition, and
under their pressure Teheran was by 2014 suing for terms to get them lifted.
Over the outlines of a deal it reached with Washington, counter-signed by
London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Beijing, the American and Israeli regimes
fell out in the spring of 2015. Obama insisted that sanctions had done their
work, bringing to power a government in Teheran willing to dismantle its
putative deterrent, while Netanyahu questioned the extent of its surrender,
demanding sanctions be allowed to finish off Iranian pretensions more
unconditionally and irrevocably—a dispute inflamed by the intervention of each
in the domestic politics of the other, Netanyahu urging a Republican-controlled
Congress to defy a Democratic President, Obama making no secret of his wish to
be rid of Netanyahu, and lamenting his re-election.
In this
conflict, short of a domestic upset overtaking its Iranian partner, American
will is certain to prevail. Likud apprehensions are no match for the higher
interests of reintegrating the Islamic Republic into the fold of the
international community, as understood and led by the United States. Tel Aviv
will adjust to the change, and the quarrel will pass. But the dispute has
loosened the political connexion between the two states in ways that will
probably persist, even as the economic and military bedrock of their special
relationship remains. Not merely does the USsupply Israel with an official $3 billion a year—in
reality, perhaps over $4 billion—in different forms of aid, plus an array of
further lucrative financial privileges reserved for it alone. [30]Since 2008 it must by law provide Israel
with a ‘qualitative military edge’ over all other forces, actual or potential,
in the Middle East. In the autumn of 2011, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State
for Political and Military Affairs spelt out the vital importance of QME, and the current regime’s pledge
not just to maintain but to enhance it. [31]
8
The
battlefield guarantee is automatic and untouchable. Israeli freedom to do what
it likes on the West Bank is another matter. There, discomfort with the status
quo has risen on both sides of the Atlantic, but not in equal measure. European
capitals face a set of constraints that differ from those in Washington. For
governments of the EU,
general diplomatic solidarity with the US is
asine qua non of a responsible foreign policy, and European guilt
at the Judeocide ensures ideological commitment to Israel. But the absence of
any Jewish community in Europe with a political, cultural and economic power
comparable to that in America, and the presence of far larger numbers of
immigrants of Arab and Muslim origin, form a context for considerations of the
Near East distinct from calculations in the United States.
In the
European political class, an embrace of Israel can be found as ardent as any in
America, to the point of treating the country as an honorary member of the EU, or indeed calling for it to be
admitted outright to the Union. Javier Solana, High Representative for Common
Foreign and Security Policy, could tell Haaretz: ‘There is no other
country outside the European continent that has the type of relationship that
Israel has with the European Union. Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the
European Union without being a member of its institutions.’ For the Foreign
Affairs spokesman of the SPD,
the de facto should become de jure: ‘I really wish
Israel becomes a full member of the European Union.’ Such Spanish and German
voices from the Centre Left find Italian amplification on the Centre Right,
Berlusconi—then Prime Minister—urging the same cause: ‘Italy will support
Israeli membership of the EU.’
For her part, contemplating progressive inclusion of her country in the
European project, Tzipi Livni—then Foreign Minister—could exclaim: ‘The sky is
the limit.’ [32] Hopes of this kind are not in principle
out of order. In its dealings with Turkey and Cyprus, Brussels has taken
military occupation and ethnic cleansing in its stride: why quibble over the
West Bank or Gaza? Human rights are what the Union defends, not ancient
grievances.
But
though the EU would not
cease to be true to itself were it to induct Israel into the Union, there is no
chance that it will do so. Public opinion can be set aside where economic
discipline is at stake: austerity brooks no ballot-box. Palestine is another
matter, at once far less significant and more combustible. Not only does the
political class have reason to be nervous of immigrant reaction to daily
exactions by Israel, but native electorates and media have become increasingly
critical of them. Operation Defensive Shield (West Bank 2002), Operation Cast
Lead (Gaza 2008–09), Operation Protective Edge (Gaza 2014) have marked the
stages of a change in popular feeling. By wide margins, apprehension and
revulsion have come to predominate. Even before Protective Edge, BBC polls in 2012 showed that
negative views of Israel were held by 65 per cent of the population in France,
68 per cent in Britain, 69 per cent in Germany and 74 per cent in Spain. After
Protective Edge, two thirds of British respondents held Israel guilty of war
crimes in Gaza. At establishment level, such attitudes have little echo. Not a
single government in any major European country was willing to endorse the UN Report on Cast Lead. Germany,
Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia voted with the
United States to reject it; France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and
Finland abstained. Still, the gulf between officials and opinions may not be
easy to sustain.
9
To be
politically effective, however, opinion needs to be organized. There a second
gap opens up. The one campaign against the status quo with a real edge is the
Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement launched in Palestine in 2005. Inspired
by South African example, its aim has been to oblige corporations, universities
and other institutions to put Israel under economic quarantine, so long as it
continues to hold down the Occupied Territories and deny its citizens equal
rights. After a decade of actions, its practical impact has been close to zero.
This is partly because, for obvious reasons—culture notionally more sensitive
to ethical appeals than capital—its most favourable targets are universities,
but only in the United States do these have large investments in the Israeli
economy; in Europe, they are typically funded by the state. Among the American
young, disenchantment with Israel has grown, too—over half of
under-30-year-olds reproved the latest blitz on Gaza—and BDS campaigners in the States have
fought valiantly for disinvestment on their campuses. So far only one tiny New
England college has made any gesture towards them. In Europe,
boycott—principally academic—has been more significant a demand, but has not
got much beyond a few resolutions of purely symbolic moment.
But
though it has so far been materially ineffectual, the outlook behind BDS is feared by Israel and its
European protectors. Brussels has sought to cover its back with
requirements—naturally, ‘non-binding’—that products from the Occupied
Territories be labelled as such. Germany has opposed these, and they have yet
to be laid down. Strasburg and various national parliaments have voted ‘in
principle’ to recognize Abbas’s spectral authority as a Palestinian state; only
Sweden has actually done so. As defence of Israel come-what-may looks
increasingly tricky, theEU has
urged Tel Aviv more strongly than the US to
proceed with the Road Map, to relieve it of domestic embarrassment. Though such
departures from tradition have so far been mild and reluctant, the dangers of
an emergent mood in Europe less hospitable to Zionism are not underestimated in
Israel. BDS may have
few victories to its credit in the Anglosphere. But in Israel fear of it has
struck home. In 2011 the Knesset passed a law punishing anyone calling for a
boycott with liability to suit for a tort and withdrawal of state benefits. The
majority for the bill was narrow, but the anxiety behind it is wider. In the
idiom of alarm now current in the nation’s establishment, could Israel be
losing its legitimacy abroad? Against that risk, safeguards need to be
redoubled. The title of a leading think-tank study is telling: Building
a Political Firewall against Israel’s Delegitimation. [33]
10
Diplomatically,
the potential for further discord is clear. So long as Likud is in charge,
Israel is less welcome than in the past. Offsetting this decline in
Western—particularly European, in lesser measure American—support, however, has
been a rise in the strength of Israel’s position in the Middle East. Two
changes have shaped this. On the one hand, rapid economic growth means the
Israeli state is now much more self-sufficient than in the past. Since 2007
non-military aid from Washington has been phased out. Even with defence
expenditure running at some 7 per cent ofGDP,
well above the level in the US,
Israel has a current-account surplus Washington could only envy. Along with
this increased capacity to resist economic pressures has come a decrease in the
strategic pressures around it. The balance-sheet of the American occupation of
Iraq and the aftermath of the Arab Spring has left it in a stronger position
than at any time since the Six Day War. In Egypt the Sisi dictatorship is a
closer ally even than was the Mubarak regime, shutting down Gaza more
completely as an extension of its repression of the Muslim Brotherhood at home.
Jordan remains a staunch partner, untouched by domestic unrest. South Lebanon
is patrolled byUN troops—commanders:
French, Italian, Spanish—providing a glacis against attacks by
Hezbollah. In Syria the Assad regime, Israel’s most irreconcilable adversary,
is a shadow of its former self, shattered by uprisings armed and funded by
proxies for the US. Further
out, the undeclared Kurdish state in Northern Iraq is a cordial ally, welcoming
Israeli intelligence agents, military advisers and business operatives. Across
the region the conflict raging between Shi’a and Sunni forces, which allows
America to play off one against the other as with the Sino-Soviet split during
the Cold War, divides and distracts the faithful, eliminating any possibility
of a concerted front against what was once commonly stigmatized as a new
Crusader state. Iran remains the distant bogey. But faced with this common foe,
Saudi Arabia and Israel increasingly see eye to eye, the far enemy offering
Zionism another nearby friend. The Middle Eastern scene could, of course, shift
in unexpected ways. But for the time being, Israel has rarely been safer.
11
From
the beginning, no-one saw more clearly the nature of the Oslo Accords than
Edward Said. Before his death he started to speak of a bi-national state, not
as a programme but as a regulative idea—the only long-term prospect for peace
in Palestine, however utopian it might seem in the short-run. In the decade and
a half since, the number of voices making the same proposal, at greater length
and with much greater specification, has multiplied. What in the inter-war
period was a minority line of thinking in the Yishuv, extinguished in 1948, has
become a significant strand in Palestinian opinion, with some echoes in Israel.
The expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the construction
of the Separation Wall, the insulation of Gaza, the scission between Fatah and
Hamas, the futility of Arab representation within Israel, have leached
credibility, however weak, from the Road Map. Some months into the Second
Intifada, the first incisive argument by a Palestinian for a one-state solution
appeared in early December 2001, in an article by Lama Abu-Odeh in the Boston
Review—to this day, one of the most lucid and eloquent statements of the
case. In the summer of 2002 it was succeeded by a powerful and more pointedly
political piece from Ghada Karmi in the Lebanese journal Al-Adab.
Three years later, the first book-length advocacy came with The
One-State Solution from the American scholar Virginia Tilley, further
developed in an effective rejoinder to a left-wing critic from Israel. [34]
Thereafter
the dikes opened. In 2006 appeared the Palestinian-American Ali Abunimah’s One
Country, in grace of style and inspiration of outlook the single book
closest to Said’s own work. In 2007 Joel Kovel published a blistering attack on
the conventions of Jewish nationalism inOvercoming Zionism: Creating a
Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. In 2008 Said’s nephew Saree
Makdisi produced what remains the best documented, most moving of all reports
on the condition of the Occupied Territories, Palestine Inside Out,
which ends with its own case for a single state. In 2012 two works by Israelis
and a third with Israeli and Palestinian contributors appeared within a few
months of each other: The One-State Condition by Ariella
Azoulay and Adi Ophir, Beyond the Two-State Solution by Yehouda
Shenhav and After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine,
edited by Anthony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor. In 2013, Rashid Khalidi’s Brokers
of Deceit called for the self-dissolution of the Palestinian Authority
and shift to a struggle for full democratic rights in a single state, while the
volume edited by Hani Faris, The Failure of the Two-State Solution,
brought together the most comprehensive set of reflections and proposals on a
one-state agenda to date, from some twenty contributors. Ripostes to this
literature have not been slow in coming, from both Israeli and Palestinian
sides. In 2009, Benny Morris produced One State, Two States, Hussein
Ibish What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?; in 2012, Asher
Susser Israel, Jordan and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative; in
2014, a group of Israeli and Palestinian insiders collaborated on One
Land, Two States, under Swedish guidance. A new intellectual landscape has
begun to emerge, one in which Olmert himself could warn of the dangers to
Israel of increased discussion of a single state in the Promised Land.
The
forms envisaged for such a state vary across the literature proposing it, from
a unitary democracy with equal civil and political rights for all, to a
bi-national federation along Belgian lines, to a confederation of ethnic
cantons. But the general case they make rests on a set of common observations
and arguments. Across the West Bank, not to speak of East Jerusalem, the grid
of Jewish logistics and pattern of Jewish settlements have sunk too deep to be
reversible: Israeli expansion has effectively destroyed the possibility of a
second state nested within Zion. If it were ever to take shape, the second
state offered Palestinians since Oslo could only be a dependency of the first,
lacking geographical contiguity, economic viability or the rudiments of genuine
political sovereignty: not an independent structure, but an outhouse of Israel.
But since even the delivery of that is perpetually postponed, it would be
better to turn the tables on the oppressor, and demand a single state in which
at least there would be demographic parity between the two. As a political
banner under which to fight, civil rights—so the argument goes—have a
more powerful international appeal than national liberation. If Israel is
impregnable to ethnic attack, it is vulnerable to democratic pressure.
12
If the
‘two-state notion is essentially a code word’—Joel Kovel’s description—for ‘the
continued aggrandizement of the Jewish state, along with a more or less
negligible “other state” on an ever shrinking fragment of land’, [35] what is to be said of the idea of a
one-state solution, as sketched to date? In the strength of its solidarity with
the Palestinians and the clarity of its vision of what the two-state solution
actually means, it marks a critical advance in the growth of opposition,
bi-national and international, to the Zionist state. The best measure of its
impact is the official reaction to it. Over a decade ago, at the first hint
of—even a merely tactical—interest in it by a functionary of the Palestinian
Authority, Secretary of State Powell announced that theUS road map to the two-state solution was ‘the only game
in town’. [36] The initial Israeli jeer was that one
‘might as well call for a Palestinian state on the moon’. Soon enough, however,
Olmert was expressing the fear that Palestinians might move ‘from an Algerian
paradigm to a South African one, from a struggle against “occupation” in their
parlance, to a struggle for one-man one-vote. That is of course, a much cleaner
struggle, a much more popular struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful
one.’ Urging his compatriots to wrap up a deal with the Palestinian Authority
as quickly as possible, he told them: ‘If the day comes when the two-state
solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting
rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’ [37] The warning on the one side was as
tactical as the hint on the other, each concerned to shore up a domestic
position. But that any one-state solution would mean the end of Zionism and of
its creature in the West Bank is plain to both parties.
Fortunately
however, they agree, its practicability is zero, since neither Jews nor
Palestinians have the slightest wish for it: the passionate commitment of each
to belief in their own state and their own faith is an insurmountable barrier
to their union in a single political structure. The element of realism in this
argument is beyond doubt. But the barrier is less symmetrical than it assumes.
For the political establishments of both sides, of course, it is absolute: they
are not going to make a suicide pact. The same holds true for the overwhelming
majority of the Jewish community, for whom Israel is their fortress. It is not,
however, necessarily true of the Palestinian masses, for whom abandonment of
the hope of a separate state for integration into Israel could become
preferable to indefinite asphyxiation in the status quo. Under Abbas, where the
Palestinian Authority has twice ranked lower than any other Arab government in
freedom of the press—Said’s works were banned by Arafat—censorship and
intimidation make reliable assessments of public opinion difficult. But that
civil society has not yet been thoroughly coopted or crushed, nor the
universities brought to heel, seems clear; and filtered through them are signs
of increasing disillusion with the official objectives of the PLO. [38]
It is
no surprise, then, that first off the mark in book-length denunciation of the
one-state solution should be the party that has most immediate reason to fear
it, the Fatah regime in the West Bank, whose front organization in the United
States, the American Task Force on Palestine, was ‘proud to present’ Hussein
Ibish’s refutation of it in early 2006. [39] After listing and rejecting successive
arguments in favour of a single state—naturally, without so much as mentioning
the disgust with the police regime of the Palestinian Authority prompting
them—Ibish explained what was really required: ‘Most significantly,
Palestinians need a robust, professional and independent security service in
order to maintain law and order in Palestinian society, meet international and
Israeli expectations regarding security, and prevent the rise of militia
groups, private armies andad hoc militants.’ [40] On the Israeli side Asher Susser, picking
up Ibish’s ‘valuable work’, was at pains to discount the notion that BDS, not even of much moment in South
Africa, could be of serious effect in the globalized world of today. But
however unrealistic, ‘the one-state idea has become a choice vehicle of
political warfare against Israel and the Zionist project. It does not seek Israeli
acquiescence but collective submission, to be brought about by the coercion of
the international community as the natural corollary of Israel’s total
delegitimization.’ As such, it had ‘unquestionably eroded the legitimacy of
both Israel and the two-state solution’ and ‘played an instrumental role in
Israel’s gradual isolation, similar in some ways to the pariah status once
reserved for apartheid South Africa’. [41] Israelis would ignore its corrosive
effects at their peril.
But is
that risk best scotched by simple repetition of the truth that ‘we all know
what a solution looks like’, as outlined by Clinton and narrowly missed at
Taba? By 2014, ‘a group of outstanding Israeli and Palestinian academics and
experts, many with close ties to leaders on their respective sides’, veterans
of the peace process and its ‘highly secret channels both before and after the
Oslo negotiations’, had come to feel that in the unhappy event the Road Map did
not come to fruition, something more imaginative was required. [42] To revive credibility in the two-state
solution, an alternative implementation of it could be envisaged: not by a
partition of territory but a duplication of function, with parallel Israeli and
Palestinian states operating in the same space, each with its own sovereignty. One
Land, Two States outlines a much more detailed and complex
scheme—Swedish helpmeets filling in institutional particulars—than any
one-state proposal so far, the better to meet Zionist abhorrence of these. In
preserving Israel intact alongside a Palestinian shadow of it, the ‘Parallel
State Project’ ring-fences it against dangers of delegitimation. To be parallel
is not, of course, to be equal. The best way to address deep-seated fears about
such a solution, one contribution explains, is ‘to maintain a clear asymmetry
of power’. Taking only questions of security, ‘in all possible configurations
the Israeli side would insist on maintaining some military advantage.’ [43]
13
The
two-state solution, on which the Obama Administration continues to insist, has
never enjoyed more than reluctant lip-service in the revisionist camp in
Israel, as a tactical concession to diplomatic force majeure. One
consequence of the evacuation of Gaza has been to free bolder spirits to
contemplate putting it to rest altogether. In 2014 Caroline Glick, deputy
managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and lecturer for the IDF, published The Israeli
Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, proposing
straightforward annexation of Judea and Samaria, making them an integral part
of Israel, like East Jerusalem, to round out the natural frontiers of
contemporary Zionism. Fears that this would threaten Jewish predominance in
Israel were unfounded, based on inflated statistics for the Arab population
produced by West Bank agencies. Closing down the Palestinian Authority, which
the Arab states were in no position to help, would lift an economic burden from
the US, giving it reason to
welcome the change. The only real difficulty would be European reaction. But EU sanctions, should they
materialize, would not be the end of the world: Israel was already diversifying
its partners in trade, and the economic future lay with Asia, whose major
powers were investing in Israeli infrastructure and buying Israeli arms without
worrying about Ramallah. [44]
For
more cautious spirits this is too sanguine a scenario, depending on amateur
projections that Jews would still comprise two-thirds of the population of
Israel after absorption of the West Bank, which find no support in the work of
the country’s leading demographic authority, Sergio DellaPergola. [45] A more tough-minded view of the dilemmas
facing Israel comes from Benny Morris, the distinguished historian who
pioneered demolition of the official mythology that Palestine was emptied of 80
per cent of its Arab population in 1947–48 by flight, and for over a decade was
a central figure in critical re-examination of the construction of Israel,
before rallying to the Zionist mainstream at the turn of the century and
becoming one of the most extreme security hawks in the country. [46] In his second phase, Morris has given
voice to much crude anti-Arab sentiment. But even as his politics have changed,
the historical intelligence which once allowed him to break so many patriotic
taboos has not deserted him. Now in the service of a cause that once reviled
him, a cool ability to call a spade a spade remains.
Morris’s One
State, Two States offers a historical overview of each of these ideas
within the two communities. No significant Arab opinion has ever accepted a
bi-national solution for Palestine. Current talk of one secular, democratic
state in the country is no more than a cover for the aim of repossessing all of
it, by weight of numerical superiority to come. On the Jewish side, by
contrast, there were tiny minorities in the Yishuv that argued for a
bi-national state in Palestine, a few isolated voices lasting down to
independence. But these were of no political importance. Mainstream Zionism
sought a mono-ethnic Jewish state from the start, originally stretching from
Transjordan to the Mediterranean and up into southern Lebanon, then scaled back
to the British mandate in Palestine. Its leaders knew their goal required
expulsion of Arabs, and had no qualms about ‘transfer’—ethnic cleansing. But
since they could not hope to persuade the British to hand over the whole of
Palestine to them, they accepted the Peel Commission’s proposal of a partition
as a tactical step to gain a Piedmont, as Ben-Gurion put it, from which to
extend Jewish power throughout the land. [47] The war of 1947–48 gave Zionism its
opportunity, clearing most of the country of its Arab population. But in the
hour of victory, Ben-Gurion’s nerve failed him: instead of annexing and
cleansing the West Bank, too, he made the mistake of allowing it to fester as
an allogenous pocket within Israel, and once the chance to clean it out was missed—it
could only come again in the event of another major war—most Jews have come to
accept that a Palestinian state of some sort could in the end be erected there. [48]
The
idea that this history could be undone by the creation in the twenty-first
century of a bi-national state was pure fantasy. Religious conflict alone
precluded any such thing. The one-state solution was a pipe-dream. Only a
two-state solution was on the table. But how realistic was even that? ‘The very
shape and smallness of the Land of Israel/Palestine—about fifty miles from east
to west—makes its division into two states a practical nightmare and well-nigh
unthinkable.’ Not only that. ‘The division of historic Mandatory Palestine as
proposed, of 79 per cent for the Jews and 21 for the Palestinian Arabs, cannot
fail to leave the Arabs, all Arabs, with a deep sense of injustice, affront and
humiliation and a legitimate perception that a state consisting of the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank is simply not viable, politically and economically.’
Why then should Palestinians not proceed just as Zionists had done, taking what
they were given simply as a way-station for what they wanted? Such a state,
‘driven by objective economic, demographic and political factors, would
inevitably seek more territory and try to expand’—at Israel’s expense.[49] The logic of a two-state solution was
thus bleak: it was a recipe for perpetual turmoil. Only if that expansion could
be diverted into Jordan was there any hope that the creation of a second state
might have an outcome safe for Israel, though it was a faint one, which would
certainly be resisted in arms by the Hashemite monarchy.
14
Precautions
against any such dynamic are, of course, built into Israeli conceptions of a
two-state solution. The Palestinian entity on offer is not an independent state
in the lands yet to be occupied by Israel before 1967, as they were then. Gaza
indicates why there will be no significant withdrawal of settlements from the
West Bank, let alone East Jerusalem. To relocate 8,000 settlers from Gaza to
Israel cost the Jewish state 2 per cent of its GDP. [50] A comparable removal of the 350,000
entrenched in the West Bank would consume 80 per cent of GDP; with East Jerusalem 120 per cent.
In any second state, they are there to stay. Gaza also offers a foretaste of
the matrix of Jewish control over what would become of the West Bank, even
withoutIDF garrisons and
checkpoints. After rebuffing any idea of a one-state solution, Asher Susser
does not beat about the bush in laying down what the two-state solution he
champions has always entailed: ‘The Palestinian state that the Israelis were
willing to endorse was never a fully sovereign and independent member of the
family of nations, but an emasculated, demilitarized and supervised entity,
with Israeli control of its airspace and possibly of its borders too, and some
element of Israeli and/or foreign military presence as well.’ [51] Such is the imperative of his subtitle.
Among two-staters, Susser is a dove.
That a
Palestinian Authority along these lines, granted the paraphernalia of embassies
and re-labelled a Palestinian State, would be little more than a couple of
Bantustans has long been obvious; it is the principal reason why advocacy of
one-state solutions has spread. Israel took an early interest in South Africa’s
invention of these statelets—it was the only country in the world where
Bophuthatswana had a diplomatic mission—and behind closed doors their example
has informed official thinking ever since. In a telling passage, Abunimah
contrasts ‘the courage and principle of Mandela, who preferred to stay in prison
rather than grant legitimacy to the Bantustans’ when the apartheid regime
offered to release him if he would recognize and relocate to the Transkei, with
‘the desperate, foolish, self-serving decision of Yasser Arafat to accept
Israel’s conditions as a tin-pot ruler of a Transkei by the Mediterranean.’ [52] Just there, however, lies the explosive
contradiction in Israel’s designs for a Palestinian protectorate. The tighter
its system of insurance against any real sovereignty, the less credibility the
regime installed by it will have, and the more probable popular risings against
it would be. The domestication of a collaborator elite risks the combustion of a
humiliated anger at it. The safety-catches are liable to become boomerangs. The
stronger the precautions taken in setting up a second state, the greater the
provocations to revolt against it.
A
one-state solution would not be subject to this dialectic. But it has its own
hidden reefs, little broached in the proposals set out for it so far. It aims
to overcome the original division of the country in 1948, rather than just the
occupations of 1967. But most of the literature it has produced avoids not the fact,
but the consequences of that division: the enormity of the plunder seized by
the conqueror, and the scale of the exile that the conquest created. [53] In 1947, Jews owned 8 per cent of the
land in what is today Israel. They now control 93 per cent—Arabs, 3.5 per cent. [54] Two independent estimates reckon the
value of the property the Zionist state confiscated from the Palestinian
population and associated losses at just under $300 billion, in 2008–09 prices. [55] Nearly half the population even of the
Occupied Territories themselves are registered refugees—just under 2 million,
out of the 5 million on UN rolls.
The number of stateless exiles is 2.5 million. The number of refugees living in
camps is 1.5 million. What is to happen to this property and these people in
the political system of a single state? In tip-toeing past the issue that is at
the root of the conflict between the two communities in the former Mandate, the
one-state—a fortiori parallel-state—literature signals tacit
acceptance that reparations and return will be no more than symbolic, at best.
In so doing, it rejoins the two-state solution in blindness to the
improbability that the staggering inequality between Palestinians and Jews,
founded on ruthless dispossession of one party by the other, would not be a
continual, burning source of anger—held at bay, at gun-point, along the border
between two states; haunting the streets and cities of a single state, every
monument of wealth and privilege a daily reminder of original theft. In
Morris’s ability to see, and state, this prospect lies his advantage.
15
Improbability
is not certainty. The dictum attributed to General Moshe Ya’alon, former IDF Chief of Staff and Defence
Minister in charge of Protective Edge is apocryphal (he has made many an actual
statement that is more incendiary), but its diffusion expresses a sense, on all
sides, that such is the wager—outspoken in the Revisionist, unspoken in the
Labour Israeli establishment: ‘The Palestinians must be made to understand in
the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.’
Seventy years of expulsion and occupation is a long time. With another twenty
or thirty, would not conclusive fatigue and resignation set in? The evidence is
ambiguous. The blitz into Lebanon and the defeat of the first Intifada brought
the PLO to heel at
Oslo. The crushing of the second Intifada yielded Abbas and Fayyad. Cast Lead
converted Hamas to the Green Line. Each time the blow reduced the pretensions
of resistance. But each time it also displaced it. Once the PLO was out of action in Lebanon,
revolt beyond its control broke out on the West Bank. Once the impotence of the
Palestinian Authority became clear, there was a second and more radical
rebellion in the West Bank. Once Abbas was lowered into place, Hamas swept to
electoral victory. Once Hamas began to temporize in Gaza, Islamic Jihad gained
strength. East Jerusalem could be the next flash-point. [56] Has the cumulative effect of the
displacements ended by lowering the net capacity for resistance? It is too
early to say. But it is unlikely that the cycle of repression and resurgence
has ceased to revolve.
Fear of
it is, of course, the driving force behind Western attempts to corral the
Israeli political class into conceding a two-state settlement along Clinton
lines. These have always found a response in the Labour camp of
Zionism—congenitally more deferential to imperial requirements, first British
and then American, than the more independent-minded Revisionist tradition—and
need a return of it to office as more than a subordinate partner in a Likud
coalition to come to fruition. The US and EU have pinned their colours to a
two-state solution so publicly that it would be difficult for either to haul
them down, and in that sense some version of Clinton-minus remains the most
likely proximate outcome. But so long as the Middle East continues to be a
battle-ground of sectarian conflicts within Islam, there is no pressing urgency
for Western movement towards it. The US has
leverage in Tel Aviv, but risks little by deferral. [57] The EUrisks some disquiet, but has little leverage. For the time
being, the Occupied Territories can rejoin Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus in
the memory-limbo of the West.
16
Where
does all this now leave the Palestinian struggle for liberation? It is
difficult to think of any national movement that has suffered from such ruinous
leadership. Once British imperialism had broken the great Palestinian rising of
1936–37, whose repression required more troops than any other colonial revolt
between the wars, the Yishuv reaped the inheritance of an easy upper hand in
the Mandate, which an assortment of ill-led and under-equipped Arab armies was
in no position to offset. The Nakba was so swift and catastrophic that no
Palestinian political organization of any kind existed for over a decade after
it. The PLO itself,
which came sixteen years later, was in origin less a national initiative than a
construct of Egyptian diplomacy, put together by the Arab League. Objectively,
the conditions for building a strong movement with a coherent strategy were
thus exceptionally difficult from the start. But they would be fatally
compounded by the delusions and incompetence of Fatah and Arafat’s leadership
of it. For a quarter of a century, the official aim of the PLO was to recover the whole
territory of the Mandate by force of arms, making an end to Zionism, when it
was perfectly clear—American protection alone ruling it out—that there was not
the remotest possibility of achieving that. When this finally dawned on Fatah,
and the Palestinian National Council accepted the principle of two states,
fantasy maximalism capsized into ignominious minimalism, Arafat receiving a
Nobel Prize for agreeing to put up with hope of a fifth of the country of
which, till the day before yesterday, he had claimed the whole; and that merely
as a vague promise, for a down payment of 3 per cent of it, and the trinket of
a title as President. Since then, even the withered stump on offer at Oslo has
been whittled down. [58]
Instead
of claiming the totality of the land, and settling for a remnant, the demand
should always have been an equitable distribution of it between its two
peoples. The Partition Plan of 1947, fruit of a rigged enquiry, rammed through
by the US with bribes
and blackmail at the UN, was
a caricature of this from the start: with 32 per cent of the population, Jews
were awarded 55 per cent of the land and 80 per cent of the coastline; Arabs,
with 68 per cent of the population, were allocated 45 per cent of the land. A
year later, Israel had seized 78 per of the land, to which it added the rest of
Jerusalem in 1967. [59] In the years since, the ratios between
the two communities have fluctuated, but with heavy Jewish immigration and high
Palestinian birth-rates have ended in the rough parity at which they stand
today—Jews leading Palestinians by a dwindling margin, Palestinians soon to
overtake them. Had the PLO based
its struggle on the bedrock enormity of the disproportion between territory and
demography, and campaigned internationally for equality of comparable
resources, it would have put the Zionist state on the defensive. How could such
spoliation ever have been justified? It is too late for that today. Instead, we
have the spectacle of even highly enlightened Israelis informing the world they
have never questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s appropriation of four-fifths
of the country and, give or take a few adjustments, think Clinton’s mite
offered to Palestinians quite a good deal—with scarcely a murmur to the
contrary from Ramallah.
17
In this
scenery, the demand for one state is now the best Palestinian option available.
That it should be dismissed with such vehemence by Zionist and Scurrier
spokesmen alike is evidence enough of that. It will remain an idea, rather than
a programme, so long as it sidesteps the issues of reparation and return, which
will not be resolved by fobbing off the fleeced with gestures of symbolic
rather than material restitution, nor dumping refugees into the reservations of
Oslo rather than allowing them to go where their families came from. [60] But above all, of course, what a
one-state agenda requires is an organized movement giving shape to a
reconstruction of the future as a struggle for democracy. By definition, it
must encompass all three sections of the Palestinian population under Israeli
control, currently cut off from each other—not to speak of the diaspora. No
such thing is at present conceivable. But it makes sense to ask: what would it
in principle involve? On the West Bank, Khalidi—echoed by others—has called for
a self-dissolution of the Palestinian Authority, to which Israel has
sub-contracted policing of parts of the West Bank. [61] For that to occur a third Intifada would
be needed, a popular rising against the repressive Fatah regime, rallying its
less infected cadres against it. In Gaza, probity and discipline are values
critical for any movement of the oppressed; but has the fate of its parent
organization in Egypt yet taught Hamas the costs of putting religion before
democracy, not least for the faithful themselves? Last but not least, in Israel
itself the Palestinian community gains nothing from impotent representation in
the Knesset, whose ostracized Arab parties merely legitimize a system that ignores
them. The most effective political boycott would start there, abandoning the
Knesset for an Aventine assembly based on its own Arab elections, to bring home
to the world—and to Israelis themselves—just how far from any democratic
equality the Zionist construct has always been, and to offer a positive example
of free debate and representation to the Occupied Territories. [62]
If a
unitary Palestinian movement for democracy is a condition of a single state at
any point in the future, the obstacles to one are plain, and at present
insurmountable. They include not just the resistance of gendarmes and torturers
in Ramallah, bigots in Gaza, placemen in Jerusalem and the hostility of the
West and of Israel. For it is also as true today as in the past that without a
revolutionary transformation of the surrounding Arab landscape, bringing an end
to its suffocating universe of feudal autocracy and military tyranny, client
regimes and rentier states, which religious wars now cross-cut but do not
alter, the chances of emancipation in Palestine are small. There are two
reasons for that. In the absence of any framing or corresponding move towards
more democratic political structures in the leading Arab countries, Palestinian
experience with them in isolation is bound to be weakened. When the Palestinian
elections in 2006 were cashiered by the US, EU and Israel, there was no
countervailing Arab support for the government they produced. An island of
Palestinian democracy of any kind, preamble to a single state or otherwise, is
unlikely in a sea of despotism. Nor will Israel ever yield its positions of
strength until it is confronted with a real threat in the Middle East, which
can only come when the region is no longer a zone on whose corruption and
submission Washington can rely. Only then, faced with an Arab solidarity in
control of its own natural resources and strategic emplacements, would the
United States have reason to oblige its alter ego to come to
terms.
[2] See Glenn Robinson, Building a
Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution, Bloomington and Indianapolis
1997, pp. 174–200; ‘The Palestinians’, in Mark Gasiorowski, ed., The
Governments and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Boulder, CO 2013, pp. 362–3. A defence
analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, Robinson is the outstanding authority
on his subject. Without apparently realizing how damaging the analogy would be,
another study of the Palestinian Authority has compared the arrival of Arafat’s
Tunisian entourage in the West Bank to the KMT’s installation in Taiwan after its defeat in the Chinese
Civil War, famously followed by decades of ruthless repression of local
society: see Jamil Hilal and Mushtaq Husain Khan, ‘State Formation under the PNA’, in Mushtaq Husain Khan, ed., State
Formation in Palestine: Visibility and Governance During a Social
Transformation, London 2004, p. 93.
[3] For particulars: Gal Luft, ‘The
Palestinian Security Services: Between Police and Army’, Middle East
Review of International Affairs, June 1999, pp. 47–63; Rex Brynen,
‘Palestine: Building Neither Peace Nor State’, in Charles Call and Vanessa
Wyeth, eds, Building States to Build Peace, Boulder, CO 2008, pp. 228–9; Yezid Sayigh, Policing
the People, Building the State: Authoritarian Transformation in the West Bank
and Gaza, Carnegie Middle East Centre, February 2011, p. 13.
[4] For the logic of political rent, and
particulars of its operation, summed up in the bitter epigram in Gaza: ‘We had
Funding Fathers, not Founding Fathers’, see Nubar Hovsepian, Palestinian
State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity,
Newcastle 2008, pp. 49–50, 64–83, 189.
[5] IMF, West
Bank and Gaza: Economic Performance and Reform under Conflict Conditions,
2003, p. 91.
[6] See Khan, ed., State Formation
in Palestine, pp. 98–108, 180–3, 201, 230–2, whose contributors gallantly
seek silver linings for economic development in this morass.
[8] Ghada Karmi, by no means a hostile witness,
concluded sadly: ‘He displayed an unseemly eagerness to accept every crumb that
fell from Israel’s high table’, believing that ‘the only way to achieve
Palestinian aims was to hoodwink it into entering a process which, despite
itself, would end in a Palestinian state’, and ‘paid the ultimate price for his
naivety’: Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine,
London 2007, p. 144.
[10] For the origin and currency of the
coinage ‘scurrier’, see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab
World, New York, 2014 edition, p. 600.
[11] Moved perhaps by personal as well as
political fellow-feeling: rumour puts the fortunes of his own family in nine
figures.
[12] For particulars, see Nathan Thrall, ‘Our
Man in Palestine’, New York Review of Books, 14 October 2010: ‘The
head of the Palestinian National Security Forces told the Israelis, “We have a
common enemy”, and the chief of Palestinian military intelligence said, “We are
taking care of every Hamas institution in accordance with your instructions”.’
[14] ‘In large part the result of a recycling
of aid rather than the development of real productive capacity’: Economist
Intelligence Unit Report, Palestinian Territories, 25 April 2015,
p. 13.
[15] For a sober assessment, see Yezid
Sayigh, ‘We Serve the People’: Hamas Policing in Gaza, Brandeis
University, Crown Centre for Middle East Studies, Paper No. 5, April 2011, pp.
106–17.
[16] A PA-loyal
analysis of the background and upshot of the pact can be found in Hussein
Ibish, ‘Indispensable but Elusive: Palestinian National Reunification’, Middle
East Policy, Fall 2014, pp. 31–46; for a corrective see Nathan Thrall,
‘Hamas’s Chances’, London Review of Books, 21 August 2014.
[18] Paul Rivlin, The Israeli Economy
from the Foundation of the State through the 21st Century, Cambridge 2011,
p. 149.
[19] Bernard Wasserstein, Israelis
and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop?, New Haven 2008, p. 92.
[20] For an analysis of the Barrier, and of
the ‘Security Perimeter’ locking down the Jordan Valley, see Jan de Jong’s
contribution to Mahdi Abdul Hadi, ed., Palestinian-Israeli Impasse:
Exploring Alternative Solutions to the Palestine–Israel Conflict, Jerusalem
2005, pp. 329–33.
[21] Howard Sachar, A History of
Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, New York 2007, p. 1081.
[24] Rivlin, The Israeli Economy,
p. 61; ‘The Next Generation: A Special Report on Israel’, Economist,
5 April 2008, p. 8; Taub Centre, State of the Nation Report 2014:
Society, Economy and Policy in Israel, pp. 194–5.
[25] For the switch to migrant labour, see
Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple
Citizenship, Cambridge 2002, pp. 323–9. For Adriana Kemp and Rebeca
Raijman, ‘Israel ranks among the individual countries who rely most heavily on
foreign labour’: see their ‘Bringing in State Regulations, Private Brokers and
Local Employers: A Meso-Level Analysis of Labour Trafficking in Israel’, International
Migration Review, Fall 2014, pp. 604–42. Since the 90s, the poverty rate of
the Arab population has risen to about half of all families: Ilan Peleg and Dov
Waxman, Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within, Cambridge 2011,
p. 35.
[26] Israel Shahak was a notable late
exception: see Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three
Thousand Years, London 2008, passim.
[27] For an eloquent expression of disgust at
the current political class, see Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Israel in Winter’, The
National Interest, March–April 2015, pp. 48–56.
[28] In 2006, a leading study could still
argue it ‘beggared belief’ that American Jews, a mere six million, could
determine the policy of a nation of two hundred and eighty million people, the
special relationship between the two countries—hallmarks: ‘transparency,
informality, generality, reciprocity, exclusivity, reliability and
durability’—being founded on the values of a common democratic political
culture: Elizabeth Stephens, US Policy
Towards Israel, Brighton 2006, pp. 7–8, 253, 255–6. The naiveté of
such arithmetic would soon be dispelled, not least within the ranks of the
local community itself. As the loyalist Peter Beinart has noted: ‘In the last
two decades Jews have served as Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury,
National Security Adviser, House Majority leader and White House Chief of
Staff, and have held the presidencies of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Of the
last six editors of the New York Times, four have been Jews. On the
Supreme Court, Jews currently outnumber Protestants three to zero’, adding
‘Privately, American Jews revel in Jewish power. But publicly, we avoid
discussing it for fear of feeding anti-Semitic myths’: The Crisis of
Zionism, New York 2012, p. 5.
[30] For the full range of direct and
indirect US assistance
to Israel, as of 2007, see Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, New York
2007, pp. 26–32.
[31] ‘The cornerstone of America’s security
commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help
Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This is Israel’s ability to
counter and defeat credible military threats from any individual state,
coalition of states, or non-state actor, while sustaining minimal damages or
casualties’, the Assistant Secretary explained. ‘The Obama Administration is
proud to carry on the legacy of robust US security
assistance for Israel. Indeed, we are carrying this legacy to new heights at a
time when Israel needs our support to address the multifaceted threats it
faces.’ Remarks by Andrew Shapiro to the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, 4 November 2011.
[32] For the above pronouncements, see David
Cronin, Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation,
London 2011, p. 2; Sharon Pardo and Joel Peters, Uneasy Neighbours:
Israel and the European Union, Lanham 2010, pp. 75, 69. In May of this
year, a self-described ’European Eminent Persons Group’ [sic], composed
of assorted worthies all now safely retired, expressed their indignation at the
re-election of Netanyahu, calling for firm measures against Israel of which
they had never breathed a word while in office. Predictably enough, Solana was
among them.
[33] See Noura Erakat, ‘BDS in the USA, 2001–2010’, in Audrea Lim, ed., The
Case for Sanctions, London–New York 2012, pp. 95–7.
[34] See Yoav Peled, ‘Zionist Realities’ and
Virginia Tilley, ‘The Secular Solution’, NLR 38,
March–April 2006, pp. 21–57. In 2003, Tony Judt had caused a stir in American
Jewish circles in renouncing a Zionist past for a bi-national future in
Palestine, no details provided, since ‘the just and possible solution’ of
handing back 22 per cent of the country to Palestinians, minus a few
settlements—he had been a champion of the Oslo Accords—was regrettably no
longer viable: ‘Israel: The Alternative’, New York Review of Books,
2 November 2003. Perhaps sensing the weakness of this contribution, Judt did
not persist with it, omitting the article from the essays he collected in Reappraisals five
years later.
[35] Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism:
Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, London–Toronto
2007, p. 216.
[36] See Tamar Hermann, ‘The Bi-National Idea
in Israel/Palestine: Past and Present’, Nations and Nationalism,
vol. 11, no. 3, 2005, pp. 381–2.
[37] Haaretz, 29 November 2007. In the
same interview, Olmert straightforwardly described ‘the Jewish organizations’
as ‘our power base in America’.
[38] For the possible extent of Palestinian
support for a single state, see the Bir-Zeit poll cited by Makdisi: Palestine
Inside Out, pp. 282, 347, and the soundings reported in Faris, ed., The
Failure of the Two-State Solution, pp. 8, 239, 291. Given ideological
controls in the Occupied Territories—which school textbooks essentially
identify with Palestine, scarcely mentioning refugees—reliable data are
probably out of reach.
[39] ‘The subject-matter could not be more
timely and significant, particularly given the vigorous re-engagement of the
United States government under the leadership of President Barack Obama in the
quest for an end-of-conflict agreement between Israel and the Palestinians’, a
pursuit that is ‘essential to the American national interest’: preface to
Ibish, What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the
Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal,
Washington DC 2006, p.
5.
[41] Susser, Israel, Jordan and
Palestine: The Two-State Imperative, Waltham, MA 2012, pp. 144, 224.
[42] Mark LeVine and Matthias Mossberg, eds, One
Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, Berkeley–Los
Angeles 2014, p. xiii.
[43] Nimrod Hurvitz and Dror Zeevi, ‘Security
Strategy for the Parallel States Project: An Israeli Perspective’, in LeVine
and Mossberg, eds, One Land, Two States, pp. 72, 77.
[44] Caroline Glick, The Israeli
Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, New York 2014, pp.
122–35, 259–60, 228–34.
[45] See DellaPergola, ‘Demography in
Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects, Policy Implications’, IUSSPXXIV General Population
Conference, Salvador de Bahia, August 2001, p. 17. A decade later,
he would explain: ‘If people ask when Jews will lose their majority, then it’s
already happened. If one combines the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip
and West Bank, includes foreign workers and refugees, whose numbers have grown
rapidly in recent years, and omits Israelis who made aliya under
the Law of Return but are not recognized as Jews by the Interior Ministry, then
Jews are slightly less than 50 per cent of the population’: Jerusalem
Post, 26 November 2010. For the vagaries of the sources on which Glick
relies, see Ian Lustick, ‘What Counts is the Counting: Statistical Manipulation
as a Solution to Israel’s “Demographic Problem”’, Middle East Journal,
Spring 2013, pp. 185–205.
[46] In the summer of 2014, criticizing the
inadequacy of Protective Edge, Morris called for Israel to strike a ‘killer
blow’ at Gaza, with a full-scale IDF reoccupation
of the enclave to wipe out Hamas and crush all resistance in it. ‘We Must
Defeat Hamas—Next Time’, Haaretz, 30 July 2014.
[49] Morris, One State, Two States,
pp. 177, 195–6. Morris’s conviction of Palestinian arrière-penséeslike
those of Ben-Gurion is not wrong. Even such a pillar of official two-state
doctrines as Salim Tamari can be found writing: ‘A truncated state enshrined in
a peace treaty would leave considerable latitude for continued struggle aimed
at consolidating its territorial domain and achieving substantial sovereignty.’
Nasser Abufarha is blunter. Many Palestinians who support the call for a state in
the West Bank and Gaza, he writes, regard it as ‘a first step towards the total
liberation of Palestine’, adding with caustic accuracy: ‘That is not to say
this is the real intention of the Palestinian leadership; far from it, the only
real programme of this leadership is the programme to maintain its leadership.’
See, respectively, ‘The Dubious Lure of Bi-Nationalism’ (Tamari) and
‘Alternative Palestinian Agenda’ (Abufarha), in Hadi, ed.,Palestinian-Israeli
Impasse: Exploring Alternative Solutions to the Palestine–Israel Conflict, pp.
70, 152.
[50] Rivlin, The Israeli Economy,
p. 245. The average settler received compensation of over $200,000: Shir Hever, The
Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation,
London 2010, p. 71.
[52] Ali Abunimah, One Country: A
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, New York 2006, pp.
145–6.
[53] For a rare exception, see Ian Lustick,
‘Thinking about the Futures of Palestine with the Pasts of Others’, in Hadi,
ed., Palestinian-Israeli Impasse, p. 214: ‘The fact that
establishing one state and one legal jurisdiction over the entire country would
open up to radical challenge the wholesale transfer of Arab and public land
inside the Green Line into Jewish hands is an immense roadblock on the way to
ever getting the Israelis to agree to take the one-state solution seriously.’
[54] Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy,
Philadelphia 2006, p. 58; for the mechanisms of post-conquest Judaization of
land in Israel, pp. 137–40.
[55] See Rex Brynen and Roula E-Rifai, eds, Compensation
to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace,
London 2013, pp. 10, 132–69. Both estimates come from economists with aUN background: Thierry Senechal
and Leila Halal, ‘The Value of 1948 Palestinian Refugee Material Damages’ and
Atef Kubursi, ‘Palestinian Refugee Losses in 1948’. For a rare Israeli willing
to entertain the subject, the ‘maximum feasible’ compensation for all the
Palestinian dispossessed would be in the range of $15 billion, mainly from
Western sources: Ruth Klimov, ‘Reparations and Rehabilitation of Palestinian
Refugees’, in Eyal Benvenisti, Chaim Gans and Sari Hanafi, eds, Israel
and the Palestinian Refugees, Heidelberg 2007, p. 342. At Taba, negotiators
for Tel Aviv mooted a gingerly $3–5 billion from Zionist pockets for five
million Palestinian refugees. As noted, the Knesset would lavish $1 billion on
relocating a grand total of 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza.
[56] See Nathan Thrall, ‘Rage in Jerusalem’, London
Review of Books, 4 December 2014, who reports that ‘more than a thousand
Palestinians in Jerusalem, most of them minors, have been detained since
July—four times the total arrests in East Jerusalem for security-related
offences between 2000 and 2008, a period that includes the Second Intifada.’
[57] ‘The potential benefits of creating a
small, poor and strategically inconsequential Palestinian State are tiny when
compared with the domestic costs of heavily pressuring a close ally wielding
significant regional and US domestic
political power’, writes Nathan Thrall, in the most acute analysis of American
policy towards Israel, from Clinton to Obama: ‘Israel and the US: the Delusions of Our Diplomacy’, New
York Review of Books, 9 October 2014. In their combination of clear-eyed
criticism and level-headed realism, Thrall’s reports from and on Israel have
consistently been outstanding.
[58] Around 2003 a Palestinian friend wrote
to Gershon Shafir: ‘The United Nations partition plan said to the Palestinians
you are going to have 47 of the 100 per cent that was originally yours. The
1993 Oslo agreement said to the Palestinians: you are going to have 22 of the
100 per cent that was originally yours. Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” to the
Palestinians in 2000 said: we are going to give you 80 per cent of the 22 per
cent of the 100 per cent of the land that was originally yours. Finally,
Sharon’s peace plan to the Palestinians in 2002 said: we are going to give you
42 per cent of the 80 per cent of the 22 per cent of the 100 per cent of land
that was originally yours, and this 42 per cent will remain under continuous
curfew.’ Shafir comments: ‘A particularly painful aspect of this land-for-peace
formulation from a Palestinian perspective is that by using the current
possession of the land as the starting-point instead of the respective group’s
original relationship to the land, the categories of who gives and who receives
are reversed, and it is Israel that appears generous’: ‘Reflections on the
Right of Return: Divisible or Indivisible?’, in Ann Lesch and Ian Lustick, eds, Exile
and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews, Philadelphia 2005, p. 302.
[59] In one of the finest reflections of any
Jewish thinker on this history, Andrei Marmor pointed out that not only was
there no difference of principle in the seizures of territory in 1948 and 1967,
but that ‘in a moral comparison between these two episodes of conquest, the
occupation of Arab land in 1948 would fare much worse. As morally wrong and
politically stupid as the settlements are, at least they are not established in
a process of ethnic cleansing. To the best of my knowledge, relatively few
Palestinian residents were evicted from their homes in the course of
resettlement, no atrocities accompanied the confiscation of Palestinian (mostly
agricultural) land on which those settlements have been erected, and there were
no population transfers involved. Unfortunately, none of this can be said of
the 1948 conquest’: ‘Entitlement to Land and the Right to Return: An
Embarrassing Challenge for Liberal Zionism’, in Lukas Meyer, ed., Justice
in Time: Responding to Historical Injustice, Baden-Baden 1994, p. 323.
[60] The vast majority come from what is today
Israel, not the Occupied Territories. Any idea that they should be allowed to
return to what were once their homes ‘is and will continue to be anathema to an
overwhelming, remarkably unshakable majority of Israelis’: Dan Rabinowitz,
‘Beyond Recognition: Staggered Limited Return of Palestinians into Israel’, in
Lesch and Lustick, eds, Exile and Return, p. 415.
[61] Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of
Deceit: How the US Has
Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Boston 2013, pp. 117–19.
[62] It is noticeable that one of the
earliest and clearest critiques of the Ramallah regime came from inside the
Palestinian community in Israel: see Azmi Bishara, ‘4 May 1999 and Palestinian
Statehood: to Declare or Not to Declare’, Journal of Palestine Studies,
vol. 28, no. 2, 1999, pp. 14–15, eliciting an indignant protest from the
Israeli peacenik Uri Avnery, who expressed his ‘whole-hearted support’ for
Arafat and faith in ‘the remarkable story of Ehud Barak’, as ushers of a
realistic two-state solution to come: ‘A Binational State? God Forbid!’, Journal
of Palestine Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, 1999, pp. 55–60.
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