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At first Israel tried, always with the help of the Americans, to negotiate peace with the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories, which was allowed to take part, as an official peace delegation, in the 1991 Madrid peace conference.
This conference was the award the American administration had decided to hand out to the Arab states for backing Washington’s military invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf War. Openly stalled by Israel, Madrid led nowhere.
At the centre of Rabin’s peace efforts stood the Oslo Accords that began rolling in September 1993. Again, the concept behind this process was a Zionist one: the Nakba was totally absent. The architects of the Oslo formula were Israeli intellectuals who, of course, belonged to Israel’s ‘peace camp’ and who ever since 1967 had played an important role in the Israeli public scene. Institutionalised in an ex-parliamentary movement called Peace Now, they had several political parties on their side. But Peace Now has always evaded the 1948 issue and sidelined the refugee question. When they did the
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Labour was back in power in 1999 and, with it, the ‘Peace Camp’, this time led by Ehud Barak.
And when US president Clinton invited Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to a summit meeting in Camp David in the summer of 2000, the Palestinians went there in the expectation of genuine negotiations over the conflict’s end.
the original document of September 1993 promises the Palestinian leadership that if they were willing to agree to a waiting period of between five to ten years (during which Israel would partially withdraw from the Occupied Territories), the essentials of the conflict as they saw them would be on the table in the final phase of the new peace negotiations. This final phase, they thought, had now come and with it the time to discuss the ‘three essentials of the conflict’: the Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the future of the Israeli settlements. A
Under its guidance, naïve Palestinian negotiators put the Nakba and Israel’s responsibility for it at the top of the Palestinian agenda.
Of course they had completely misread the tone of the US peace scheme: only Israel was allowed to set the items of a peace agenda, including those for a permanent settlement. And it was exclusively the Israeli plan, totally endorsed by the Americans, that was on the table at Camp David. Israel offered to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, leaving the Palestinians about fifteen per cent of original Palestine. But that fifteen per cent would be in the form of separate cantons bisected by Israeli highways, settlements, army camps and walls.
This humiliation, further compounded by the provocative visit of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem in September 2000, triggered the outbreak of the second Intifada.
among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.
Pappe pointedly escews the use of "terrorists" here.
Baroud’s Searching Jenin contains eyewitness accounts of the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp between 3 and 15 April 2002 and the massacre Israeli troops committed there, searing testimony of the cowardice of the international community, the callousness of Israel and the courage of the Palestinian refugees.
On 20 April the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1405 to send a fact-finding mission into the Jenin camp. When the Israeli government refused to cooperate, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan decided to abandon the mission.
people genuinely concerned about the Palestine question needed to be reminded that this conflict was not just about the future of the Occupied Territories,
but that at its heart are the refugees Israel had cleansed from Palestine in 1948.
The Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, lost no time in formulating a wall-to-wall consensus: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes that had been theirs before 1948. The Knesset swiftly passed a law to this effect,
far more importantly – so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundations of Zionism.
For Israelis, to recognise the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli actions is deeply distressing, in at least two ways. As this form of acknowledgement means facing up to the historical injustice in which Israel is incriminated through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, it calls into question the very foundational myths of the State of Israel, and it raises a host of ethical questions that have inescapable implications for the future of the state.
in 1948 Israel was able to establish itself as an independent nation-state on part of Mandate Palestine because early Zionists had succeeded in ‘settling an empty land’ and ‘making the desert bloom’.
But what the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognised as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel.
Israeli Jews would have to recognise that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.
The Road Map was the political product of the Quartet, the self-appointed body of mediators comprising the US, the UN, Britain and Russia. It offered a blueprint for peace that happily adopted the consensual Israeli position as embodied in the policies of Ariel Sharon (prime minister in 2001 and again from 2003 until his illness and departure from political life in 2006).
withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005
Symptomatic, too, is that the refugees of 1948 are not even mentioned in the Quartet’s peace agenda.
when the presence of the Palestinian minority population threatens to change from a ‘demographic problem’ to a ‘demographic danger’, the Jewish state will act swiftly and without mercy.
The police raid on Jaljulya was entirely ‘legal’: on 31 July 2003, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from obtaining citizenship, permanent residency or even temporary residency when they marry Israeli citizens.
From left to right, the platforms of all the Zionist parties during the 2006 election campaign highlighted policies that they claimed would effectively counter the ‘demographic problem’ the Palestinian presence in Israel poses for the state.
None of this is new. Already in the late nineteenth century Zionism had identified the ‘population problem’ as the major obstacle for the fulfillment of its dream.
David Ben-Gurion was very clear in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine Ben-Gurion instigated the following year, his ‘new approach’, ensured that the number of Palestinians was reduced to less than twenty per cent of the overall population in the new Jewish state.
Thus he has opted for what he calls hitkansut, Hebrew for ‘convergence’ or, better, ‘ingathering’, a policy that aims at annexing large parts of the West Bank but at the same time leaves several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control.
In other words, hitkansut is the core of Zionism in a slightly different garb: to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.
This explains the 670-km long serpentine route of the 8m-high concrete slabs, barbed wire and manned watchtowers that make up the Wall, and why it runs more than twice the length of the 3...
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once Israel succeeded, after 9/11, in making the West think of the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as ‘Muslims’, it found it easy to elicit support for its demographic policies there too, certainly where it counted most: on Capitol Hill.
When, in the mid-1960s, it became clear that the Arab world and the nascent Palestinian national movement refused to reconcile themselves with the reality Fortress Israel had created for them, Israel decided to extend its territorial grasp and, in June 1967, conquered the rest of Palestine,
In 2006, in the ninety per cent Israel covets there are about 2.5 million Palestinians sharing the state with six million Jews. There are also another 2.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the areas Israel does not want in the West Bank. For most mainstream Israeli politicians and the Jewish public this demographic balance is already a nightmare.
Fifteen minutes by car from Tel-Aviv University lies the village of Kfar Qassim where, on 29 October 1956, Israeli troops massacred forty-nine villagers returning from their fields.
the refugee problem stands at the heart of the conflict and that the fate of the refugees is pivotal for any solution to have a chance of succeeding.
We end this book as we began: with the bewilderment that this crime was so utterly forgotten and erased from our minds and memories.
The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character.
