The New Middle East (24 page)

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt took Israel’s old military certainties away.

That’s not to say that without the Camp David Accords Israel would not have fought these conflicts. In each case the government said it was acting to protect the nation from external threats. But without the peace treaty the bar for military action would have been set much higher because the risks of a wider war would have been much greater.

Sadat believed that by doing the two Camp David deals with Israel he was not only ensuring peace for Egypt but would solve the ‘Palestinian Problem’ which had eluded Nasser. He was wrong. Not having had much luck with the Arab states that do exist around it, Israel has not been in much of a hurry to help create another one. President Jimmy Carter told me as we sat together in East Jerusalem:

The Camp David Accords came about in 1978, and that was a commitment by the United States and by Egypt and by Israel to give the Palestinians full autonomy and to withdraw Israeli ‘military and political forces’ from the West Bank and Gaza and from East Jerusalem, from Palestine. Then six months later came the Peace Treaty which only involved Israel and Egypt and the United States.

But with a clear feeling of bitterness even now, Carter added that in the end Israel took what it wanted from the agreements and ignored the rest.

The Peace Treaty [with Egypt] has never been violated. Not a single word has been violated. But from the very beginning, as soon as I left office as a matter of fact, Israel did not follow through with their commitment to give the Palestinians their rights. And so that was an unfortunate decision made by Israel to abandon that part [Palestinian autonomy] of the Camp David Accords which was ratified by the way by the Knesset and by the US Congress and also by the Egypt Parliament.

Peace with Egypt now gave Israel the opportunity to deal with the guerrilla movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which since 1969, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, had launched thousands of attacks on Israeli targets. The PLO had been based in Jordan but was driven out in the so-called Black September of 1970 by King Hussein, who was trying to protect his kingdom and his rule from being overthrown by the Palestinian militants. The PLO, as was clear from its title, did not see itself as an Islamist project; it was a secular liberation organisation. The PLO moved to Beirut and continued its fight with the Israelis. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to expel them from there too. This last conflict would end up putting US and European boots on the ground in an ill-fated peacekeeping mission. It also led to one of the most shameful episodes of Israel’s brief life.

As the PLO leadership left Beirut for exile in Tunisia its forces were strewn across the Arab world. ‘Their expulsion from Beirut marked the end of the PLO as a coherent fighting force.’
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Left behind in the Palestinian refugee camps were the fighters’ families. These camps were under the protection of the IDF when the Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon allowed the deployment into the Sabra and Shatila camps of a Christian militia group that was already fired up after the assassination of its leader, which it blamed on Palestinian militants. On 16–18 September 1982 these militiamen carried out a frenzy of rape and murder, slaughtering at least eight hundred men, women and children anywhere they found them. Their bodies were left to rot in the alleyways in which they fell. Survivors reported hearing the militia groups tell each other to use axes so as not to alert other Palestinians to what was about to happen to them too. There was outrage across the world, including in Israel, where Sharon had to resign after a commission said he bore indirect responsibility for the deaths.

Ariel Sharon seemed to have a profound impact on everything he touched. Before he was the defence minister he was the agriculture minister. At that time he was helping Israeli Jews trying to settle in the occupied West Bank to get around international law by claiming that the land was actually needed for military not civilian use, which is allowed under international law. But the Israeli Supreme Court stopped him. Sharon immediately called a meeting of all his advisers in a big hall and asked them for ideas about what to do next. Among them was a West Bank military legal adviser called Alexander Ramati. ‘I was sat somewhere in the middle. I raised my hand and said: “There’s a concept called ‘Mawat Land’.” [Sharon] stood up and came around to me. He told the person sitting next to me to get up. The guy got up. Sharon pushed him aside, sat down and asked: “What did you say?” ’

Ramati told him that under the laws of the old Ottoman Empire, land that had not been cultivated for three years was declared ‘Mawat’ or ‘dead’. At this point it returned to the Empire. In light of this old law the courts revised the ruling to declare that Israel was at present the custodian of the land. That meant that until the land’s status was resolved, it could be used for Jewish settlements as long as no Palestinian could prove that it was privately owned by them. The history of the beginning of the settler movement was told by Ramati, and other elderly judges and lawyers, in the 2011 Israeli documentary
The Law in These Parts
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The definition of ‘dead land’ was that it had to be far enough away that when standing on it you couldn’t hear the crow of a rooster on the edge of the nearest village. When Sharon heard of this loophole he told Ramati: ‘ “With or without your rooster, be at my office tomorrow at 8 o’clock.” [Sharon] issued orders to look for uncultivated land with helicopters. Overnight we had a helicopter and a pilot. Someone from operations and myself sitting in a cockpit with the pilot searching for “Dead Land”.’

The process that would create what became euphemistically known as ‘facts on the ground’ had begun. The first settlers, who began arriving after the 1967 war, were driven by a religious belief that the West Bank, or ‘Judea and Samaria’ as Israel calls it, was given to the Jews by the Almighty. The 1967 war was a watershed for Israel’s religious Zionist movement. The victory against the Arab armies was seen by them then, and is still seen by many religious people today, as a modern miracle. It was a sign from God that He was protecting the land of Israel. The religious Zionists saw it as their duty in return to reclaim all the land of Israel that He had bestowed on the Jews. They are still trying to do that, and after the 2013 elections they have never had as much political power as they do today.

Over time though, after the 1967 war, many more secular or ultra-Orthodox people just moved in to the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza because the government provided them with cheap housing. The growth of the settlements, some of which have swelled into huge population centres, has become the biggest threat to the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. The 4th Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer of the occupying nation’s civilians on to the land it has occupied. The United Nations’ bodies regularly issue demands calling for the withdrawal of settlers from the territories based on article 49 of the convention.
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But Israel claims historical and biblical links to the land and says the convention is not relevant to the territories because ‘as there had been no internationally recognized legal sovereign in either the West Bank or Gaza prior to the 1967 Six Day War, they cannot be considered to have become “occupied territory” when control passed into the hands of Israel.’
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But even its best friend, America, considers the land to be occupied. I was in the audience on 21 March 2013 when President Obama told a packed convention centre in Jerusalem of Israeli university students:

It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank or displace Palestinian families from their homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

Thirty years earlier, with the scattering of the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance and a growing number of Jewish settlers moving onto their land, life under the occupation of the Israeli security forces slowly began to push the Palestinian population to the brink of revolt. Their anger exploded in 1987 and led to six years of widespread rioting and the establishment of Hamas. Its charter, produced in 1988, calls for Israel’s destruction and in effect says it is every Muslim’s duty to ‘liberate’ Palestine. Its content has been used by Hamas’s opponents to accuse the group of anti-Semitism. Mahmoud al-Zahar told me the charter is not a reflection of Hamas thinking today:

The charter was just an attempt to put the movement into an ideological framework. It is not a covenant such that before anybody does anything they go and read it. You [the West] have abused the charter to give the impression that Hamas is fanatical and extremist and so forth. But I think the accusations against the charter are now finished with because the same [Islamist] character is now present [after the revolutions] in Egypt and Tunisia and Morocco and everywhere.

Hamas was born of the First Intifada, which was itself the response to the coming of age of the first generation of Palestinians who had only known life living under Israeli occupation. The images of young men and boys in the West Bank and Gaza using rocks and stones against heavily armed Israeli troops won the Palestinian cause much more international sympathy than the militancy of the PLO. It also re-established the boundaries they were fighting for. In 1979, a month after he had concluded the signing of the Camp David Accords, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had declared that ‘the Green Line no longer exists, it has vanished for ever . . . We want to coexist with the Arabs in Eretz [the land of] Israel.’
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The Intifada brought the Green Line back into people’s lives because most Israelis, apart from settlers, were suddenly restricted from entering the West Bank and Gaza for their own safety. That remains the case for most areas today.

The PLO’s leadership had been physically and politically marginalised in Tunis, but Yasser Arafat used the momentum of the Intifada to rethink his strategy. In 1988 the Palestinian leadership accepted the idea of the two-state solution envisaged by UN Resolution 181 from 1947, and thus recognised for the first time Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinian government in exile also renounced terrorism. It was in stark contrast to Arafat’s response to the peace process between Israel and Egypt ten years before, when he declared from Beirut: ‘There will never be an alternative except the gun, the gun, the gun.’
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In 1991 the US, under President George Bush Sr, and the soon to be defunct Soviet Union co-sponsored the Madrid Convention. It was the first time in forty-three years that Israel sat down with all its Arab neighbours to discuss peace. The Palestinians were part of a joint delegation with Jordan. The PLO and Yasser Arafat were not invited. It led to Israel’s 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, but more importantly to secret negotiations hosted by the Norwegians in Oslo which produced the first face-to-face agreement between the PLO and the Israeli government, the 1993 Oslo accords. Arafat though went into the negotiations with a weaker hand internationally because he had infuriated the West and the Gulf states by supporting Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War in 1991. He had emerged from the crisis, after Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait, looking, to his financial and political backers, both treacherous and clueless.

Arafat had already shown by then that he was not very good at international diplomacy. He put himself on the wrong side of the Sunni–Shia divide by becoming the first foreign ‘head of state’ to visit the new Shia leadership in Tehran after the 1979 revolution. He eventually fell out with the Iranians too, and also for supporting Saddam in the eight-year Iran–Iraq war. The new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described Arafat as a ‘traitor and an idiot’.
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It was a sentiment many Arab heads of state could agree with.

There had been other peace processes in the past, but the 1993 Oslo agreement was the one that led to the creation of the Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority. The negotiations planned under the Oslo accords were to lead ‘to a permanent settlement based on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338’.

Security Council Resolution 242 was passed on 22 November 1967, after that year’s war. It required:

the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of the following principles:

Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force.