POLITICS
A Middle East Solution
Part II: The Israel Dilemma
(A few months ago, we handed our travelling correspondent Don Rose no
small assignment: come up with a solution to the Middle East Crisis. In this
second essay, he discusses the options for peace in Palestine.)
Having disposed of the problem of Iraq last week as the first step toward a Middle East solution, we turn now to the seemingly endless question of Israel and Palestine.
When I was a kid in Hebrew school in the early 1940s we used to bring in dimes and dollars to plant trees in a place we were told was the Jewish homeland, far across the seas. It was called Palestine. In Hebrew it was called “Eretz Yisreil” meaning “the land of Israel.”
This place had a remarkable city called Tel Aviv, which was all Jewish. All Jewish—that means even the crooks, bullies, bootblacks and hookers were Jewish. Really amazing.
Little did I realize then that this tiny patch of desert, about the size of New Jersey, had behind it centuries of historical conflict that would soon explode again into a perpetually seething cesspool of warfare and international controversy.
It remains the centerpiece of the problem of the Middle East, damned on one side as an alien, brutal, racist, occupying nation -- and lauded on the other as the only bastion of true democracy and modernism in that most significant part of the globe, providing a safe haven for a people besieged and brutalized through 5,000 years of history.
It is a contemporary geopolitical entity complicated by layer upon layer of Jewish, Muslim and Christian beliefs dating back to the very origins of those religions. It is miraculous symbol and tragic substance, complex myth and harsh reality, an ongoing drama playing celestial aspirations against hellish depravity.
It’s almost impossible to understand the problems and possible solutions—if any—without understanding some of its history and mythology. Please bear with me while I present a gloss that in itself is certain to be open to dispute. History, we know, is written by the winners, open to interpretation and may be, as Henry Ford believed, the bunk.
The original piece of land—bounded roughly by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, the Dead Sea and Jordan on the east, present day Egypt on one side, Syria and Lebanon on the other—is approximately the land of Israel to which Moses led his Hebrew tribes on their exodus from Egypt, though he did not live to enter it himself.
Biblical Israel was ruled by figures such as Kings Solomon and David in the capital of Jerusalem, then pillaged and conquered through the centuries by multifarious forces from the Romans—who renamed it Palestine—to the Egyptian Mamluks to the Muslim Arabian Caliphate, with some Christian crusaders thrown into the mix. After all, this is where Christ met his fate and where fundamentalist Christians believe Armageddon will occur.
Jews variously fled the place or were expelled through the years and through the wars, but a few always hung in there, even when it became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th Century, which essentially ruled it up to World War I.
Late in the 19th Century a man named Theodore Herzl founded a movement called Zionism to bring worldwide Jewry—primarily Europeans and later Americans—back to the biblical homeland. The “aliyah” or return brought with it economic development, including the founding of Tel Aviv, and was welcomed by the Ottoman Sultan. But the Sultan wound up on the losing side of the First World War and would see his empire chopped to pieces and the Palestinian territory go to the British.
In 1917, Lord Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary formally declared that Jewry should be given a homeland—widely presumed to be in the British Mandate of Palestine, though once Uganda was offered as the site. Jews represented about 10 percent of the Mandate’s population at the time and grew to more than 30 percent by the 1930s.
This never sat well with the Arab population of the territory or the surrounding nations—there had been Arab-Jewish hostilities since the time of Muhammad in the 7th Century and there was tension and skirmishing every time a partition of Palestine was proposed. Following World War II with its destruction of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis, pressures to fulfill the Balfour promise increased, along with Arab-Jewish tensions and a Jewish guerilla war against the British occupiers.
In 1947, with Jews representing a bit less than a third of the Mandate’s 1.9 million population, the United Nations authorized partition of the land into a Jewish area along the Mediterranean coast to a line about a quarter of the way westward to the Jordan River with leg-like extensions reaching northeast and southeast.
The state of Israel was established with these approximate borders in 1948—followed by a brief war declared by all the surrounding Arab nations. Israel won and expanded its area slightly: the new border came to be known as the Green Line. Syria, Egypt and Jordan each grabbed a piece of the balance of the Palestinian lands for themselves—Syria got the Golan Heights, Egypt copped the Gaza strip and Jordan got what we now call the West Bank and the eastern section of Jerusalem.
Israel was created as a tricky combination of Jewish religious state and liberal democracy. The primarily European, social democratic Zionists who founded it pledged equality to the Muslim Arabs—perhaps 20 percent of the population—who remained.
Meanwhile, vast numbers of Palestinian Arabs fled or were forcibly expelled from the new land. Israel says more than 500,000. The UN says more than 700,000. The Palestinians say 900,000. Take your pick—it’s a lot of refugees, and most were settled into camps because none of the other Arab nations wanted to claim or take them in. Thus begins the problem of the modern era.
After a brief, abortive war that failed to nationalize Egypt’s Suez Canal in 1956, came the Six Day War in 1967 that fully defined today’s problem. Sensing military operations by the bordering Arab nations, Israel launched a ferocious preemptive attack in all directions and in the eponymous six days defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan –capturing their Palestinian territories. More Arab-Israeli wars followed in 1973 and 1982, and a triumphant Israel extended its control to all of the former territories of the original mandate, including the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, West Bank and the whole of Jerusalem.
Israel’s success on the battlefield, however,
generated yet another Jewish problem that would subsequently change Israel
itself. Following the 1967 war, neighboring Arab states -- such as Morocco,
Yemen and Tunisia -- expelled a half million or more North African Sephardic
Jews in retaliation for yet another Israeli military victory over Arab nations.
Those Sephardic Jews had lived in North Africa and elsewhere for generations,
largely assimilated but still persecuted, especially during World War II,
when the Arab nations chose to side with Hitler’s Germany.
The Jewish refugees, fortunately, had a place to go. They would be absorbed
by Israel, even though Zionism was an alien concept to them. They were, however,
bitterly anti-Arab and would soon, along with refugees from the old Soviet
Union, change the political complexion of Israel, bringing to power, first,
the conservative Likud governments of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu,
and later, Ariel Sharon.
Meanwhile, Israel’s battlefield successes left it in the position of an occupier, though many dispute the term. There are some Jews who believe they had finally gained “greater Israel,” up to the Biblical borders. They began building settlements, which the Palestinian population and much of the world viewed as colonies.
Between the settlements and the strictures placed on the population by the Israelis, subjecting the population to humiliation and often violence by the police and military, the occupation was seen increasingly as an oppressive force. The Israelis always said their violence was retaliatory, rather than initiated by them.
Not surprisingly, organized resistance movements came into existence. Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, a generally secular insurgent movement, was the best known. Later the even more militant Hamas, rooted in Muslim fundamentalism, waged guerilla warfare — terrorism, if you will — against the occupiers. Some of the terror took place in other countries. The 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich are the most famous of these attacks, highlighting the goal of winning back the territories and ultimately destroying the state of Israel.
A good part of the last four decades has been bloodied by all forms of Palestinian terrorist acts. Kidnappings, murders, suicide bombings are regular parts of our evening news. And the Israeli military response, often claiming innocent civilians and children, are a regular part of Al Jazeera’s evening news.
One can argue about who fired the first shot and which side was more wrong than the other. The argument is endless and ultimately pointless because both sides are going to have to quit that game—write it off as history and get to work on a compromise. This is not the “moral equivalency” so often denounced by Israel and its supporters—it is the only practicable way to arrive at a solution.
The fact is, much of world opinion began to shift from sympathizing with the tiny nation that was created largely out of European shame over the Holocaust to a perspective that views the once oppressed Israelis turning into oppressors themselves.
The long occupation, military incursions and building of settlements across the green line violate United Nations tenets and the Geneva Convention, plus, in the view of many violate Israeli law as well. Israel views it as self defense. The United States, under all administrations, with rare exceptions supported almost all Israeli actions and positions.
Meanwhile, Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel and a series of abortive peace initiatives were begun after the PLO was recognized as the official Palestinian representative. Arafat eventually came around to acknowledging Israel’s right to exist—though very warily and never quite fully. Hamas never did.
Arafat theoretically renounced terrorism as he assumed leadership of a now internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and became involved in peace conferences and negotiations, including the 1993 Oslo Accords, which fizzled out. In brief, the goal was to bring about détente by creating a Palestinian state in the territories that one side calls “occupied” and the other calls “disputed” or “administered.”
The last major initiative aimed at finding a Middle East settlement came at Camp David in 2000. During his final months in office, President Clinton worked desperately to make a Middle East settlement the crowning achievement of his administration. Earlier, in 1993, he played a role in the Oslo agreements.
In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak took major steps forward in offering land for peace in an agreement that would assure Israel’s sovereignty. There are questions as to whether he could have sold the package at home. The Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, speaking for Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other key Muslim players in the region, put his stamp of approval on the deal. But, in the end, Arafat walked away. Popular opinion says that Arafat was totally wrong, that he should have immediately accepted the package, but there are independent observers who argue that the deal was not as fair as it should have been. In any event he was clearly wrong in not continuing negotiations.
Arafat went home and a new uprising or “intifada” began. The triggering event was, ostensibly, Ariel Sharon’s decision to make a highly visible visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, near sacred Muslim sites. Others believe Arafat hoped to use the violence to gain a better land deal. As vehement as the Arab response was, the backlash against the intifada elected Sharon Prime Minister who went about encouraging more and bigger settlements.
The Camp David summit, however, did serve a very useful purpose. It laid out the essential elements upon which a peace settlement must ultimately be based. From Clinton’s failed accord the Bush Administration–two years later, created a “road map” for peace that is remarkably similar.
It is evident now that for a permanent peace, Israel clearly must remain a Jewish state and the Palestinians must recognize this. But a Palestinian state should also be created in the disputed territories after Israel cedes a substantial portion of the land and disbands its settlements. Redrawing the borders of that state logically should start with the original green line, but it must be recognized that the line is not a fully defensible border and must be modified to give Israel a better footing.
To make this accord work, the Palestinian side will have to acknowledge that point—and the Israelis are going to have to ignore their minority who believe they are entitled to Biblical borders in a modern world. Though it is a Jewish state, the majority of Israel is secular and most resent the control exercised by super-religious types who have disproportionate influence on the government.
The last two sticking points, for which a Solomonic split is required, are:
1) The right of return
2) Who rules Jerusalem
The first basically says that those Arabs who fled or were expelled in 1948—and their successor families—should be permitted back to claim their original turf in today’s Israel. There is a natural justice to such a claim; many peace treaties following wars would contain similar provisions. But aside from the impracticality of trying to find out exactly who would have such a claim after nearly 60 years, and exactly what that claim might physically be, even the most liberal Israelis will never accept it.
Almost all Israelis believe it will be another population bomb—of which more later—and will lead to a majority Arab population. Some form of compensation—financial, most likely—will have to be substituted, although it is conceivable a very limited number of people might be offered a home. (Which says nothing, of course about the right of a half million Sephardim to return to North Africa, though how many would really want to go?)
Israel declares Jerusalem to be its capital. Palestinians, who represent about one-third of the city population, consider it to be their capital as well. Muslims have deep religious ties to the city dating back to the time of Muhammad, who, many believe, rose to heaven from Jerusalem. Needless to say it is sacred to Christians as well.
Israel took over the Arab East Jerusalem in 1967 and has controlled it—actually encroached upon it—since. Any peace treaty will have to cede partial control back to the Palestinian side in some form of shared-power, shared-security arrangement that will permit each to claim its capital there. Even Ehud Olmert, the new Israeli prime minister and former mayor of the city, has discussed this possibility. The alternative would be to put the entire place under UN control, which likely will be unacceptable to the Israelis who do not trust the UN any more than they trust the Arabs.
Of course it’s easy to sit back here as a
secular, non-observant, non-practicing, left-leaning Jew and formulate solutions
while across the oceans two stubborn, wounded peoples seem intent on protecting
themselves through aggressive self-defense. What is going on there now, however,
is totally counterproductive, with both sides going in the wrong direction.
Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim party dedicated to the eradication of Israel,
early in 2006 won a huge parliamentary victory over the late Arafat’s
Fatah grouping.
Although Hamas won a controlling majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament, few observers have noted that Fatah -- and the other secular parties -- actually won 55 percent of the popular vote. A recent Palestinian poll, moreover, shows that as many as three-fourths of the Palestinian people, including 60 percent who voted for Hamas, would favor negotiations with Israel to create a two-state solution. This tends to confirm the many news analyses that the Hamas victory came more out of disgust with the corruption and failures of Fatah than support for its intractable “drive the Jews into the sea” viewpoint.
That said, Hamas is in power and Fatah is not. We must wait to see whether the Hamas leaders decide to go pragmatic or get voted out of office in years to come. The position of the U.S. and European Union, refusing financial aid to an avowed terrorist organization that won’t recognize Israel, is a logical push in the right direction, though it could backfire. If the western powers are able to cut a fine line by actually providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people without supporting its government, it may work. Hamas might be forced to change its mind, or they might get voted out—best case.
On the other hand, Israel is not helping matters. Sharon -- a year before his incapacitating stroke -- realized that the occupation could not continue as it was because if a “Greater Israel” were to be formed under Biblical boundaries, he would soon be ruling a supposed Jewish state with a majority of non-Jews. Goodbye democracy.
So he began a staged closing of Israeli settlements—beginning in the Gaza Strip, a narrow band on the Mediterranean, separated by Israeli land from the rest of the Palestinian territories. Though the settlements are now gone, Israel continues to be fired upon from there and sharply returns the insults.
At the same time, Sharon began building a physical barrier—a wall or fence—on the western side of Israel as a way of stopping suicide bombers, much like the wall some want to build on the Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration.
Indeed, however gross the idea seems, it did serve that one purpose. But there is another agenda as well, being carried out now by Olmert and his new centrist government. The wall, which Olmert says will become – unilaterally -- the new Israeli border when completed, extends far beyond the green line into the West Bank to encircle 48 Jewish settlements and more than 170,000 settlers. It also incorporates East Jerusalem and 184,000 settlers who live there now. (Some 52,000 other settlers live outside the proposed path but Olmert envisions re-settling them back inside the wall.)
The proposed route of wall will chop the territories into three additional separate and noncontiguous areas like Gaza—hardly the makings of an acceptable Palestinian state and an unlikely path to peace.
So at the moment we have a Palestinian government dedicated to Israel’s destruction that will not negotiate. And we have an Israeli plan to separate itself unilaterally behind a wall that is certain to invite further warfare.
Where once we seemed close, now we seem further than ever from an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. But the foundations have been laid – if only reasonable men and women would embrace them. There are new twists and turns every day as the Hamas government begins to cope with governing and Israel, the U.S. and European Union work to destabilize that government or change its outlook.