Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (29 page)

The settlers and their supporters include two groups of people. One is religiously inspired. Many of this group come from the United States and are backed by fundamentalist Christians as well as Jewish organizations. Their view was well expressed by one who told Molly Moore of the
Washington Post
that ‘until all the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel as promised in the Bible there can be no peace.’
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The other, more materially oriented group, is represented by the settler who told Ms. Moore ‘the question is not if the settlements are legal or illegal. The issue is whether one leaves these hills to Arabs or whether Jews will live on them. That is the issue. The question of legality is secondary.’ In either case, the settlers are a powerful force, and the existence for which they are fighting is the incorporation of the West Bank and perhaps Gaza into Israel proper.

The majority of Israelis are not fighting for the settlers’ existence. Poll after poll has shown that a majority are willing to pull out of most of the settlements and turn them over to the Palestinians in exchange for a true, lasting peace. Most Israelis would be satisfied to live within slightly modified borders of 1967 Israel, and a wall to fence Israel off from the West Bank along that line is already under construction. But many don’t believe the Palestinians are interested only in getting the Israelis out of the West Bank and Gaza. They think the Palestinians won’t be satisfied until Israel has been destroyed.

This belief has waxed and waned. After the beginning of the Oslo peace process, launched in September 1993 with a historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn, there was a wave of euphoria and hope that gradually diminished as roadblocks, literal and figurative, kept cropping up. In the summer and fall of 2000, meetings at Camp David and then at Taba in Egypt seemed agonizingly close to achieving a settlement, and hope swelled again. It was the collapse of this effort that plunged Israelis into their present mood of grim determination. The strongly held view in Israel is that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a deal he couldn’t refuse at Camp David, bettered it at Boiling Air Force Base in December 2000, and then added cherries on top at Taba in January 2001. According to both Barak and President Clinton, if Arafat could have just taken ‘yes’ for an answer he would have had withdrawal of nearly all the settlements, an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, 97 percent of the land area of the West Bank, sovereignty over Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount), and a right of return to a Palestinian state of the refugees from the 1948 war that established Israel. Instead, goes the argument, Arafat did refuse and unleashed the suicide bombings of the second Intifada. This refusal lies behind the reluctant conclusion that the Palestinians’ true goal is the ultimate destruction of Israel. The editor and writer Yossi Klein Halevi told me: ‘This was the last straw for me. You know I have been all over the map in the last twenty years. At first I thought there was no hope of peace, then I began to accept some of the Palestinian points and to believe in their sincerity, but this does it. We have no choice but to fight back.’ A sign in Haifa made the same point: ‘Now we are all Settlers.’ Much of the middle of the Israeli political spectrum feels the Palestinians have left Israel no choice but to cast its lot with the settlers.

Some, however, have begun to ask a question to which we shall return. Could it be that the continuing expansion of the settlements creates on the Palestinian side a similar distrust and despair that feed the attacks the Israelis believe have left them with only an existential choice? Could it be, as some Israeli analysts suggest, that the Eretz Israel hawks actually foment strife in order to radicalize the Palestinians in order to unite Israel behind the existential fight? Is it, as an Israeli peacenik asked that ‘they want all the land, but without the Palestinians?’

This debate engages two other critical aspects of the existential question. One concerns the preservation of ‘the Jewish state.’ This point is not well understood in the United States. In Israel one hears the term ‘the Jewish state’ so often that it almost sounds like an echo of the Islamic identification of many Arab states. The whole point of the Zionist movement that led to the founding of Israel, was, after all, to create a country where Jews would not be persecuted because it would be theirs and under their control. Today, that control is increasingly at odds with local demographics, both inside Israel proper and in the occupied territories. The citizens of Israel include about 5 million Jews and 1.2 million Arabs, but the Arabs are reproducing much faster than the Jews. In the past this Jewish shortfall was more than made up by immigration, but that has fallen off in the face of the continuing conflict as well as rising living standards in places like Russia. Thus, more and more Israelis are likely to be Arabs.

This prospect poses excruciating questions. If the Israeli Arabs are to be fully integrated into Israeli society, they will inevitably dilute and challenge the concept of the Jewish state. If they are not to be fully integrated, the inevitable implication is for a kind of apartheid rule that is inimical to the fundamental values of Judaism and the state of Israel. Yet, ominously, one increasingly hears talk in Israel of ‘transfer,’ meaning transfer of Israeli Arabs out of Israel. It sounds uncomfortably like ethnic cleansing. The settlements only make this issue more complex. In the occupied territories there are another 3.5 million Palestinians, who are also reproducing much faster than the Jewish Israelis. By 2010, it is estimated, more Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will be living in the old mandatory Palestine than Jews.
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If the settlements are to remain and expand, what will be the status of the Palestinians, now a majority, in Greater Israel? As one Israeli professor said to me, ‘If Arafat were smart he would reject the Palestinian state idea and say the Palestinians want to be Israelis on a one person one vote basis.’

It was precisely that prospect that led Prime Minister Rabin to resurrect Yasir Arafat from exile in Tunis in 1993 and initiate the Oslo Peace Process, with Arafat as his main interlocutor. He saw that a Jewish, democratic state could be viable only as a small Israel within some modification of the 1967 borders. He needed a Palestinian entity and someone with whom to make peace, and Arafat, with all his warts, was the only possible choice.

That leads to the final question. Even in a small Israel, the status of the Israeli Arabs and whether Israel is a Jewish state or a secular one are searing questions. Lev Grinberg says that ‘by any standard Israel is not a democracy.’ That is a huge overstatement. For its Jewish citizens, Israel is one of the most raucous and vibrant democracies around. In fact, as we will see later, some Israelis believe one problem in reaching a settlement with the Palestinians is ‘too much democracy.’ But it is also true that Israeli Arabs are distinctly second-class citizens. Raheek is an impressive young Israeli Arab woman from Jaffa who speaks Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English fluently and who works for a group protecting the rights of Israeli Arabs. She points out that schools, public services, and road repairs are substantially underfunded in Arab neighborhoods compared with Jewish areas, that there are severe restrictions on the buying of land and starting of businesses by Arabs, that school text books reflect only the Israeli view of history, and that Arabs are not subject to the military draft and not encouraged to join the Israeli army. Although the reasons for this later situation are obvious and understandable, in Israeli society service in the army is a sine qua non for advancement. This second-class citizenship has gone so far that in the Israeli parliamentary elections of early 2003, two Israeli Arab Knesset members were initially barred from running for reelection by the Central Election Committee. The Supreme Court later overturned this ruling, but it demonstrates dramatically what Nissim Calderon calls the contradiction between the notion of a Jewish state and a democracy.

The West Bank

But the complications don’t really begin until you get to the West Bank. I began to appreciate this when I got a call one day at about 3 P.M. telling me, ‘Chairman Arafat can see you, but you must be at the Ramallah checkpoint at 5 P.M.’ Since Ramallah is essentially a suburb of Jerusalem, under normal circumstances it shouldn’t take more than a half hour to get there.

But nothing about the West Bank is normal. This area has essentially been under Israeli occupation for thirty-five years. The need to protect increasing numbers of settlers has resulted in a crazy system of 400 kilometers of special roads bypassing Palestinian population centers so that settlers and Israeli military traffic can pass quickly and safely. At the same time, many of these roads are cut off or have long detours, and the ubiquitous military checkpoints require frequent stops. As a result of all this, I just made it in time to meet my guides, the Mayor of Bethlehem, his brother, and the Palestinian Ambassador Designate to the United States. We moved slowly to the checkpoint in a long line of trucks, bicycles, donkeys, and people on foot. The Israeli soldiers were kids, maybe 18 to 25 years old. They were polite and thorough, but it wasn’t hard to feel the humiliation of my companions, mature, experienced officials, at being questioned by children about what they were doing in their own back yard.

Once through the checkpoint, I discovered what tank trucks do to city streets – grind them up and spit them out. Our car jumped and lurched over ruts and holes to Arafat’s partially bulldozed headquarters, the Muqata. A few days earlier, Sharon, in a fit of rage, had dispatched his tanks and bulldozers for another go at squeezing Arafat even tighter. As we approached, we passed the tanks ringing the now dilapidated building, and then parked and entered through barbed wire and past sandbags.

Arafat is a small man, and at seventy-seven and afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, he shows his age. It is difficult to imagine him as the frightening scourge of the Israelis. But his mind is still sharp, and on that day it was focused on the latest American outrage, the bill just passed by Congress directing the president to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This had been reported, with glee bordering on euphoria, in the Israeli press that morning. For the Palestinians, the relocation of the U.S. embassy would legitimate Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and further reduce Palestinian hopes of retrieving lost ground. I explained that the whole thing was a political exercise. The bill had a loophole allowing the president to ignore the directive if he deemed that moving the embassy would harm U.S. national security, and he would surely deem precisely that. The vote was a way for Congress to satisfy its pro-Israel constituency without running the risk that the move would actually occur. Clever American politics, but try to explain that to a suspicious foreign audience.

Arafat was at pains to explain that he was not directing or instigating terror attacks on Israel. Noting that the Israeli army had more or less destroyed all the Palestinian Authority’s police stations and public offices, including closing Palestinian universities and taking computer hard drives, he argued that he had little capability to direct anything. ‘Bush,’ he said, ‘calls for reform and elections, but how can we hold elections when we can’t even make a telephone call?’ He attributed the suicide bombing to the extremist Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations that are competing with his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for the support of Palestinians, and noted that the more Israel attacks him and undermines the Palestinian Authority, the stronger Hamas becomes. He also denied that he had rejected the Clinton and Taba peace plan ideas. Rather, he said, it was Barak who had backed away from the Taba talks after admitting he couldn’t sell the ideas to the Israeli public. (In fact, he lost to Sharon in the next election.) One is instinctively skeptical of an old survivor like Arafat, but his comment that he would welcome a settlement imposed by the United States or the international community policed by U.S. and international forces, was arresting because it matched the comments of some Israelis who told me that the only hope is a U.S.-imposed settlement.

Saab Erekat is the Palestinian chief negotiator. A University of California graduate with a Ph.D. in economics, he lived for eight years in San Francisco and participated in all the negotiations at Camp David and Taba and in between. He is also the Mayor of Jericho, and I arranged to meet him there the following afternoon. My Israeli Arab cab driver got me to the Jericho checkpoint the next day but was not allowed to take me through. I had to leave the cab, walk through, and pick up another cab on the other side to get to Erekat’s office.

I asked Erekat immediately why the suicide bombings and terrorist attacks couldn’t be stopped, and noted that as one who knew America he surely recognized how devastating each of those attacks is to any American support for the Palestinian cause. His response was deeply troubling. Of course he knew, he said. ‘But, Clyde, listen to me. I am supposed to have some authority in Jericho, but I am being made more irrelevant every day. The real head of Jericho is Lieutenant Allon down at the checkpoint. It is he who decides who gets into the city and who gets out, whether an old woman gets to the hospital or not, whether fuel oil comes in or not. And just as he is undermining me, the guys over here’ – pointing to the mosque – ‘are also making me irrelevant by telling the people that Erekat can do nothing for you and only God can help. Let me tell you something about terror attacks. Life on the West Bank is hell. Unemployment is near 80 percent in most areas. Half the people are living on $2 per day in hovels and have to wait at checkpoints so the Israeli settlers can have priority. The Israelis complain about suicide bombings, and I agree that they are immoral, but more Palestinians are being killed by Israelis than the reverse. Every time Sharon orders reprisals and assassinations, he creates more support for Hamas and Islamic jihad. Let me tell you, I have a teenage son. He is harassed at school and taunted because I, his father, am seen as a pro-American softie. I just pray every night that he doesn’t become a suicide bomber, hoping in some crazy teenage way to save the family honor. How can we stop anything when Sharon has dismantled our entire infrastructure? Is Bush joking?’