In
communicating with others about Israel and the Palestinians I often hear:
1.
The
Arabs/Palestinians can’t be trusted – look what they’ve done, and/or
2.
I
don’t like current Israeli positions but both sides are equally wrong - e.g. – why are you so: “pro-Palestinian” ?
and/or
3.
Why
are you concerned about Palestinians? There is no real “Palestinian”. People have taken advantage of things in
creating something that isn’t real and/or
4.
Israel
does its best in difficult circumstances.
I find this
very frustrating.
It is
obvious to me that some Palestinians and the leadership of neighboring Arab countries
have made serious mistakes. As World
War II ended, Palestinians and neighboring Arab leaders should have accepted
and supported the idea of proposed Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Jordan’s King Hussein made a huge mistake in
getting involved in the June, 1967 War in support of Egypt.
I am
troubled, though, by the continuing message which says essentially: “Israel wants to make peace, but there are no
Palestinian leaders to negotiate with”.
I’ve found
after reading numerous books and other writings that the reality has been more like: “Israel wants to make peace as long as its
proposed partner has guaranteed in
advance that the terms will be overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor (e.g. unacceptable for lasting peace with the
Palestinians)”.
Yasir Arafat
could have agreed to several Israeli peace proposals. It is unclear what good this would have
accomplished if his leadership would then have almost immediately been
overthrown (or if he would have been assassinated) as being a traitor to his
cause.
In The
Bride and The Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of
the June 1967 War (Yale University
Press, 2012), Avi Raz speaks effectively
of the aftermath of the 1967 war. His
deeper message clearly is shown at the end of the book:
(p.282) Though the June 1967 War had catapulted the Palestinians
onto center stage, Israel had refused to recognize their emergence as an
independent political factor – a nation with a legitimate claim to
statehood. It took more than three
decades of occupation and five years of Intifadah for Israel to concede its momentous mistake.
However, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process failed, and
in 2000 a second, much bloodier Intifadah erupted. A serious study of the peace process and
its collapse awaits sufficient historical perspective and access to the
relevant official records. But it is
already clear that the failure is largely rooted in the pattern set by the
Israeli government during the early days of the occupation. While Washington insisted that Israel should
return to the pre-June 1967 War borders, the Israeli aim was – in the explicit
words of Premier Levi Eshkol – to retain the “maximum of territory.” This line was pursued by subsequent
governments. It was underpinned by
Jewish settlement in the occupied territories which the Eshkol government had
instigated early on. The settlement
construction in the West Bank never stopped; in fact it increased sharply after
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had got under way. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister between
2006 and 2009, stated in 1988 that the
“policy of expanding Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria…was designed to
block any possibility of pressure for Israel to withdraw from these areas.” It took Olmert another two decades of
intensive building of settlements to acknowledge the inevitable territorial
price the Israelis must pay for peace.
On 6 June 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, Abba Eban
said at the UN Security Council that “men and nations do behave wisely once
they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Eban reiterated the same aphorism in articles and speeches in later
years, always referring (p.283) to the Arabs.
He and his government colleagues never thought of themselves in this
context. Only when Eban was no longer a
member of the cabinet did he admit privately that “the [Israeli] government
sometimes makes the right decisions but not before trying every other
possibility.” Indeed, throughout the
four and a half decades that followed the June 1967 War, it has been Israel
that has time and again proved the validity of Eban’s maxim.
The policy towards the Gaza Strip is yet another glaring
example of a fatal mistake that took Israel nearly forty years to correct. As we have seen, the Eshkol government
decided to retain Gaza, and subsequent governments built civilian settlements
there. This blunder was not corrected
until the premiership of Ariel Sharon, one of the prime movers of the Israeli
fait accompli approach and the godfather of the settlement project. In the summer of 2005 Sharon finally yielded
to the intolerable cost – in blood, money, and international reputation – of
keeping this tiny, poor, and densely populated province of maintaining the
security of a few thousand Jewish settlers who lived lavishly in twenty-two
settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians.
To be sure, Sharon had no intention of giving up “Judea and
Samaria.” In fact, the so-called
Disengagement from the Gaza Strip was designed to freeze the political process,
thereby preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and maintaining the
geopolitical status quo in the West Bank.
Yet an increasing number of the more realistic Israelis have recognized
that the conflict with the Palestinians cannot
be resolved unless Israel accepts what the whole world has been saying from day
one of the occupation: Israel must return to the pre-Six Day War lines with
minor and reciprocal modifications. In 2002 the Arabs offered what Israel had
called for from its foundation in 1948: an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict,
recognition of Israel, peace agreements, and normal relations – in exchange for
withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967, a just solution to
the refugee problem in accordance with UN Resolution 194, and the establishment
of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with
Arab Jerusalem as its capital. This
far-reaching peace initiative was crafted by Saudi Arabia, adopted by the
twenty-two member Arab League at its summit in Beirut in March 2002, and
reaffirmed at the Riyadh Summit of the Arab heads of state in March 2007. In Israel none of the governments (p.284) since 2002 –
Sharon’s, Olmert’s, or Netanyahu’s – has ever discussed the Arab peace offer.
Despite high-sounding proclamations about the desire to make
peace with the Arabs, whenever a prospect of reconciliation was on the table,
Israel has been immobilized by fear of what it would entail. ‘Aziz Shehadeh, who led the Palestinian entity
movement, wrote in 1969: “Immediately after June 1967 a golden opportunity was
offered to the Israel Government to achieve a peaceful settlement…. The
Israeli leaders wavered and did not
grasp the importance of this offer.”
Shehadeh concluded: “The seed of peace that was planted immediately
after the Six Day War has thus been trampled upon by forces both within and
without the country.” But Israeli
leaders kept maintaining that no Arabs were willing to negotiate a peaceful
settlement with Israel. As late as 1975
Yisrael Galili, who served in the cabinet from 1963, went so far as to claim
that “there was not a single occasion when the government of Israel refused to
respond to an Arab initiative.” However,
a number of prominent contemporary officials and observers – including a
cabinet minister and an army general – argued retrospectively that in the
aftermath of the 1967 War, Israel missed an opportunity for a settlement with
both Jordan and the Palestinians, particularly the latter.
Indeed, it was not the Arabs who never missed an opportunity
to miss an opportunity – as Eban’s often cited quip suggests – but the
Israelis, who persistently and deliberately squandered every opportunity for a
settlement. They changed tack only
when doing so was inescapable. King
Hussein’s pithy summary was that “Israel
can have either peace or territory, but not both.” Abba Eban, who quotes this observation in his
1993 memoirs, goes on to say that it was “not far from being a universal
international consensus.” But it was
Eban who quarter of a century before had
carried out Israel’s foreign policy of takhsisanut,
or deception, designed to serve as a political cover-up for the effort to gain
time while staying put in the occupied lands and creating a fait accompli.
This study has focused on Israel’s policy and practice in
the aftermath of the June 1967 War, and some readers might feel that its
conclusions, which are especially critical of Israel, are not even-handed. But it should be borne in mind that the parties
to the conflict were unequal. There were
the victorious occupiers on the one hand and the vanquished and the occupied on
the other, and the former held all (p.285) the cards. They were aware of international resentment
but did not care. A popular song which
came out in 1969 appropriately captured the Israeli collective spirit:
The whole world is against us
Never mind, we’ll overcome
. . . . . . . .
And everybody who’s against us
Let him go to hell
