Background

The aim of the mainstream Zionist movement, from its inception a century ago, has been to create a Jewish state in Palestine.Ideally, this meant a state with a homogeneously Jewish population; for practical purposes, a state with an overwhelming Jewish population, tolerating a small Arab minority of perhaps 20 per cent.footnote¹

The main obstacle to the realization of this goal was the indigenous Arab population.In his recently published quasi-official history of Israel, British historian Martin Gilbert argues that ‘there was a strong desire among the Labor Zionists to live together with the Arabs, and not, as many of the extremists hoped, to make them subordinate to Jewish nationalist needs, or even to drive them out of Palestine altogether’.Scholarship does not sustain this claim.Labor Zionism was committed to the ‘building of a Jewish society by Jews alone, from foundation stone to rafter’ in ‘all of Palestine’ (Anita Shapira).Accordingly, as Zeev Sternhell shows in an important study, ‘nobody fought against the Arab worker more vigorously than [Labor Zionists]; nobody preached national, economic and social segregation with more determination than the Labor movement’.footnote²

Territory Over Peace

After the June war, Israel called for partial withdrawal on all the Arab fronts.Egypt offered in February 1971 to sign a bilateral peace treaty if Israel fully withdrew from the Sinai.Israel refused.In the name of ‘security’, it demanded retention of part of Sinai, Moshe Dayan famously declaring that ‘we prefer Sharm-el-Shaykh without peace to peace without Sharm-el-Shaykh’.Once Egypt proved itself a military force to be reckoned with in the October 1973 war, Israel came around, agreeing at Camp David in 1978 to the peace terms it rejected in 1971. A core Zionist tenet, Zeev Sternhell observes, is ‘never giving up a position or a territory unless one is compelled by superior force’. Israel did continue to bargain hard at Camp David, demanding—unsuccessfully—to retain control of the oil refineries, settlements and airfields it had built in Sinai. Yet Sharm-el-Shaykh figured not at all in these intense, often bitter, negotiations. Israel abandoned Sharm-el-Shaykh—its crucial ‘security’ asset—without even a whimper. It is an instructive lesson in the substance, or lack thereof, of Israel’s ‘security’ concerns. footnote⁶

Confronting, in the first years of the intifada, the compound force of Palestinian civil resistance and widespread international outrage, Israel considered the prospect of full withdrawal. But the challenge to Israeli power soon receded. As the intifada lost momentum, a concatenation of events—Iraq’s destruction in the Gulf War, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the open alignment of the Arab regimes with the us , the plo’s precipitously declining fortunes—convinced Arafat to cut a deal with Israel, accepting partial withdrawal in exchange for the trappings of statehood. The plo’s capitulation at Oslo did not result from political ineptitude. Uri Savir’s account of the negotiations shows that the Palestinian negotiators did, at every crucial juncture in the Oslo process, raise the right objections. The problem was, they had no power. footnote⁷

Once Arafat conceded, as he effectively did at Oslo, that the West Bank and Gaza were ‘disputed territories’, both sides having equal title, it was inevitable that, in the ensuing battle over per centages, a fifty-fifty split would be held up as the legitimate ‘compromise’. Yet Netanyahu deserves the lion’s share of credit for recasting public discourse. By tenaciously claiming that Israel had title to all, and Palestinians to none, of the West Bank, Netanyahu turned any withdrawal into an Israeli concession. Who could then expect Israel to ‘give away’ more than 50 per cent of ‘its’ land for peace? Before Netanyahu, full withdrawal in exchange for full peace was the legitimate compromise, Labor’s partial withdrawal the illegitimate one; after Netanyahu, partial withdrawal in exchange for full peace became the legitimate compromise, zero withdrawal the illegitimate one. Redefining the poles of debate with his pugnacious theatrics, Netanyahu has effectively legitimized the Labor Party’s rejectionist stance, in the process also managing to ‘lower’, as he put it, ‘the level of Palestinian expectations’. Apart from ‘extremists’, no one any longer speaks about full withdrawal. Indeed, the call for full withdrawal is now equated with the call for zero withdrawal, as pundits condemn the ‘extremists on both sides’.

Wye Memorandum

The Wye Memorandum is basically divided into two parts, ‘Further Redeployments’ and ‘Security’. (A third section takes up miscellaneous ‘Other Issues’.) Bits and pieces comprising some 40 per cent of the West Bank are to come under ‘full’ (Area A) or ‘partial’ (Area B) Palestinian jurisdiction before final-status negotiations begin. According to Savir, Rabin was prepared to relinquish ‘roughly 50 per cent’ on the eve of final-status negotiations.footnote⁸ The putative ideological rift between Labor and Likud amounts to perhaps 10 per cent of the West Bank. Indeed, the various final-status maps of the Likud all fall within the parameters of Labor’s Allon Plan, retaining for Israel roughly half the West Bank. footnote⁹ For those who care to hear the truth, the Israeli press has been reporting for years that ‘there’s almost no difference between Netanyahu’s and Peres’s concepts of the permanent agreement’, indeed, ‘Sharon and Peres are not far from each other in their perception of the permanent settlement’. footnote¹⁰ This pragmatic convergence between Labor and Likud points up, incidentally, that partial withdrawal was the maximum Israel could have hoped for at Oslo. Israel did not effect a 'historical compromise' with the Palestinians; only with reality.

The Terrorism Mantra

The Wye Memorandum reeks of the rancid Israeli—and American—discourse on terrorism. Terrorism is a self-generating force. It originates in the ‘terror support structure’, ‘terrorists and their structure’, ‘terrorist organizations and their infrastructure’, ‘terrorist cells and the support structure that plans, finances, and supplies and abets terror’, ‘organizations (or wings of organizations. . .) of a military, terrorist, or violent character’, and—lest we forget—the ‘external support for terror’.

Detached from its Israeli environment, Palestinian terrorism is always the cause but never the effect of evil: assaulting Israeli innocents, it is by definition unrelated to Israel’s brutal rule. Thus, to understand terrorism, it is irrelevant that, since the Oslo accord, more than 600 Palestinian homes have been demolished and 140,000 dunums of Palestinian land confiscated. It is also irrelevant that, owing primarily to Israel’s illegal imposition of closure on the eve of Oslo, the Palestinian standard of living has fallen by nearly 40 per cent, with 30 per cent of the workforce unemployed and 40 per cent of the population living at or below the poverty line.footnote¹³

Given that terrorism is an implacably negative force, the only means to combat it is an implacably positive force: repression. And in this Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the more repression the better: any restraints will impede the struggle. Accordingly the Wye Memorandum gives short shrift to human rights concerns, despatching them in one sentence: ‘without derogating from the above, the Palestinian Police will. . .implement this Memorandum with due regard to internationally accepted norms of human rights and the rule of law. . .’ Presumably on account of its exemplary human rights record, Israel is not called upon to do even this much. Indeed, the record does impress. According to Amnesty, even after Oslo, Israel continued to engage in ‘mass arrests of Palestinians’, place ‘thousands of Palestinians’ under administrative detention without charges or trial, sometimes for ‘years on end’ (‘many may have been prisoners of conscience’); ‘use torture systematically on Palestinian political suspects. . .its use was effectively legal, an internationally unprecedented state of affairs’ (‘this legalization of torture has, over the past five years, if anything, become a more entrenched part of the system in which Palestinian detainees find themselves’); resort to ‘brutality, amounting to torture or ill-treatment. . .at checkpoints’; and conduct ‘unfair trials. . .convictions are almost invariably based exclusively on the accused’s confession, usually extracted by the use of torture and ill-treatment.footnote¹⁴

A Police State

The single most egregious Palestinian violation of Oslo is the size of its police force, which ‘well exceeds’ (Human Rights Watch) the already extraordinary 30,000 figure allowed for in the Interim Agreement (Annex i , Article iv). Revealingly, Israel has not exerted any real pressure on Arafat to correct this. Indeed, already thinking ahead in the 1978 Camp David Accords, Israeli negotiators stipulated that the ‘self-governing authority’ in the West Bank and Gaza should constitute a ‘strong police force’ to assure Israel’s ‘security’ (Framework, paragraph a2). The same ominous phrase stipulating a ‘strong police force’ reappears in the September 1993 Declaration of Principles (Article viii), the May 1994 Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area (Article viii), and twice in the Interim Agreement (Articles xii, xiv). The Wye Memorandum only calls on the ‘Palestinian side’ to ‘provide a list of its policemen to Israeli side’. So long as Israel can monitor in which direction the rifles are pointed, the more police, the better—especially as Palestinian illusions are dispelled and resistance mounts. The Wye ‘land-for-security’ formula means, incidentally, that in return for any land, the Palestinians forfeit the right to all resistance, including the basically non-violent civil disobedience characterizing the first years of the intifada, condemned by Israel and the us as ‘terrorist acts’.footnote¹⁸ Nelson Mandela renounced the right to armed resistance only after the South African government acknowledged the right of the indigenous population not to a Bantustan but full human rights. The indigenous population of Palestine was forced by Israel to forfeit its right to any resistance in exchange for a Bantustan.

Prospects

Like the South African Bantustans, the fragmented Palestinian entity resulting from the Oslo process will no doubt eventually be granted statehood.footnote¹⁹ And like the Bantustans, it will be a state in name only. Recall that the viability of a Palestinian state resulting from full Israeli withdrawal was never at all certain; much intellectual energy was expended to conquer these doubts. What then is one to make of a Palestinian state resulting from a partial Israeli withdrawal? Israel is now ‘resigned’ to the prospect of an independent Palestinian state because it will not be one. Recall further that, for Bantustan critics, the issue was not only viability but equity: whites engineered a grossly inequitable division of South Africa’s resources, keeping for themselves everything worth keeping. All the Bantustans won was the right—in the words of one dissenter—to ‘police themselves and administer their own poverty’.footnote²⁰ This is also the only right Palestinians can expect to win under Oslo.

The purpose of the protracted ‘transitional’ period in the Oslo process is not to build ‘confidence’ between lsrael and Palestine but rather to structurally consolidate Israel’s domination over Palestine. In addition to settlementand road-building, this entails coopting Palestinian élites, refining ‘security collaboration’, and so on. The main alleged threat to Israeli security in June 1967 was not the West Bank but the Egyptian Sinai. In October 1973 , Egypt launched a surprise attack, seeming to threaten Israel’s existence and costing 2–3,000 Israeli lives—many times, incidentally, the total victims of Palestinian ‘terrorism’. Nonetheless, once Israel decided on full withdrawal, confidence somehow proved not at all an obstacle: a mere three years elapsed between Camp David and Israel’s total pull-out from the Sinai. Yet the Oslo process is already in its fifth year, with no end to the purported ‘confidence-building’ process in sight. The Camp David Accord and subsequent Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty combined came to less than a dozen pages. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement alone runs to hundreds of pages. Israel is not ending the occupation; it is dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s to secure it.

Arafat must eventually choose between two equally bad alternatives. He may unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state over 40 per cent of the West Bank, blustering, as the Bantustan leaders did, that this is ‘only the first stage’. In fact, the main lesson of the South African experience was that emancipation was achieved despite and around not through the Bantustans: indeed the Bantustans impeded the struggle for justice. Declaring Oslo dead, Israel will then unilaterally annex the rest of the West Bank. The more Netanyahu postures indignation at the prospect of a unilateral Palestinian declaration, the better his pretext, if and when Arafat does issue a declaration, to annex half the West Bank. Totally dependent, Palestinian élites will continue to do Israel’s bidding, repressing dissent while enjoying the perquisites of collaboration. Pundits will no doubt wax eloquent over the ‘irony of history’: although the ‘peace process’ died, each side got what it wanted—the Palestinians a ‘state’ and Israel ‘secure borders’.

Property and Power

Enticed by a slightly larger Israeli withdrawal and an enlarged American ‘aid’ package, Arafat may alternatively enter into a final settlement with Israel. Israel will then get an official deed to nearly all of Palestine: it would be the jewel in the crown of Zionist diplomacy. ‘At its heart’, historian Martin Gilbert writes, ‘Zionism had striven for a hundred years for the recognition of its legitimacy by the Palestinians’.footnote²¹ Indeed, for all its flouting of international law and contempt for ‘Goyim’ opinion, Israel has always sought official imprimaturs of its proprietary right to Palestine. The Balfour Declaration and especially the 1947 un Partition Resolution (181) loom large in Zionist histories.footnote²² Property may be, as Proudhon memorably put it, theft, but it is also theft invested with the power of legitimacy. Hence Netanyahu’s insistence at and since Wye that the Palestine National Council officially, democratically and without any ambiguity annul the Charter. For a long time, Israel exploited the Charter to discredit the Palestinian leadership: it ‘served as a gold mine of raw material’ for ‘Israel’s propaganda’.footnote²³ Now that the same Palestinian leadership stands poised to collaborate, Israel wants all the official documents to be fully in order. Not a scratch of doubt must remain that Palestine belongs ‘by right’ not at all to the indigenous population but only to the Jews.

The Oslo process cannot produce a permanent settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan will soon be half Israeli-Jewish, half Palestinian-Arab. Lincoln long ago understood that a state of affairs in which the population is half free, half enslaved cannot forever endure, Israel no doubt also knows this. Edward Said rightly observes that Zionism’s suc cesses owe much to its pragmatic discipline of detail (‘another dunum, another goat’).footnote²⁴ Yet, ultimately, Zionism has always depended on the ‘miracle’ to break free from an impasse. Indeed, it harnessed the discipline of detail to make the ‘miracle’ possible. The intractable Arab ‘demographic problem’ was resolved in 1948 by the ‘miraculous clearing of the land’ (Chaim Weizmann). The loss of Zionist élan in the early 1960 s was restored by the ‘miracle’ of the June War. The resurgent Arab ‘demographic problem’ in the 1970 s was overcome by the ‘miracle’ of Russian Jewry. Israel no doubt hopes for yet another ‘miracle’ to resolve the conflicts inherent in the Oslo process. An Oslo settlement between Israel and Arafat would command international legitimacy. If Palestinians continue to resist, Israel may engineer—alas, with impunity—another ‘miraculous clearing of the land’. Public opinion within Israel would pose no obstacle. Rather the contrary, polls indicate that, if there are no international repercussions, fully 65 per cent of Israelis would support expulsion of all the Arabs.footnote²⁵

Barring a ‘miracle’, the inevitable, if very distant, future is one in which Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, enjoying reciprocal individual and communal rights, coexist within a unitary entity. Yet, just as the centre of gravity of the Palestinian struggle shifted from southern Lebanon to the occupied territories after the defeat suffered in June 1982 , so the centre of gravity of the Palestinian struggle may shift again from the West Bank and Gaza to Israel following the defeat suffered at Oslo. Only the Israeli Palestinians now have a clear goal—full individual and communal rights—and a leadership able to articulate it.footnote²⁶ Paradoxically, the fruit of Oslo will perhaps be that the Palestinian struggle for justice will—in Amilcar Cabral’s phrase—‘return to the source’.