On Palestine (20 page)

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, author of this provision of the law, has brought up its potential applicability to Israel in specific cases, and with a well-conducted educational, organizational, and activist effort such initiatives could be pursued successfully.

That could have a very significant impact in itself, while also providing a springboard for further actions to compel Washington to become part of “the international community” and to observe international law and norms.

Nothing could be more significant for the tragic Palestinian victims of many years of violence and repression.

 

 

Adapted from “Nightmare in Gaza,”
AlterNet
, August 1, 2014, and “Outrage,”
Information Clearing House
, August 3, 2014.

Chapter Ten

The Futility and Immorality of Partition in Palestine

Ilan Pappé

There is a famous Jewish maxim that one should look for one's lost key where it was lost and not where there is light. In many ways, the so-called peace process in Palestine, with the concept of the two-state solution as its benchmark, has been a futile search under a powerful streetlamp far away from the lost key.

The congregation of world leaders, mediators, liberal Zionists, so-called moderate Palestinians, and some of Palestine's best friends in the West under the street lamp was motivated by a shared misconception of the Palestine conflict as one fought between two national movements. From within this perspective two other misconceptions emerge: the conflict in Palestine started more or less in 1967 with the occupation by Israel of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and secondly, these two areas are more “Palestinian” in nature and history than the rest of Palestine. Away from the lamp lie truths which are uncomfortable it seems not only to Zionists but also to those who fear a direct confrontation with the Jewish state. There in the darkness one can find the only relevant framing of the conflict in Palestine: as a struggle between a settler-colonialist movement and a native indigenous population that has raged since the late nineteenth century until today.

Seen from the perspective of settler colonialism the conflict is a relentless and tireless engagement with the attempt to take over as much of Palestine as possible and leave in it as few Palestinians as possible. Ironically, the wish to de-Arabize the country stemmed from a Zionist aspiration to create a European kind of democracy within the midst of the Arab world with one caveat only: it had to be a Jewish democracy.

Hence the colonialist impulse of the settlers was always geographical and demographic. The movement in its early stages was led by pragmatic leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, who recognized the need to take over Palestine bit by bit and without forgetting the imperative of always having an exclusive Jewish majority in the land. And therefore when the Jews were less than a third of the population during the mandatory period (1918–1948), the movement proposed a partition of Palestine in a way that would ensure the small minority of settlers' demographic exclusivity in parts of Palestine, with the hope of absorbing more settlers in the future and thus more land. In fact, early on—in the 1930s—the Zionist leaders tried to persuade the British government to help materialize these dreams by transferring Palestinians from future Jewish areas as part of a solution to the emerging conflict; but the empire was not convinced.

So the Zionist movement had to do it itself, namely had to contemplate both the takeover of the space for a future Jewish democracy and the removal of the Palestinians living in that space. The need to use force in order to change the demographic balance in a country in which the Jewish settlers were still only one-third in 1948 was accentuated by the failure of the Zionist movement to purchase a significant number of lands. The inevitable result was a vast ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine that had begun even before the British left the country in February 1948 and ended in early 1949.
1

This ethnic cleansing operation created the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—two geopolitical entities that came to the world as part of the incremental takeover of Palestine by the Zionist movement (as did a third area, Wadi Ara, which was part of the West Bank but was annexed to Israel under duress, when Jordan was threatened with war and conceded this slice of the West Bank to Israel in April 1949 as part of the bilateral armistice agreement).
2

The West Bank was carved out of the parts of Palestine allocated to an Arab state in the UN Partition resolution of November 29, 1947. It was the quid pro quo for a Jordanian consent to take only a limited part in the overall Arab attempt to salvage Palestine (the Jordanian Legion and the nascent Israeli army fought a bitter battle over Jerusalem and divided it between the two sides). The Gaza Strip was carved out of the Naqab or Negev and was created by Israel as a huge receptor of refugees. Israeli forces systematically cleansed all the villages and inhabitants south of Jaffa and pushed them into what became the Gaza Strip.
3
So these two geopolitical units were the leftovers of the Zionist attempt to Judaize the whole of Palestine—one was created as a result of a strategic understanding with Jordan; the other for the purpose of solving the demographic issue.

This was the real partition of Palestine until 1967. The fictive “peace partition,” the streetlamp, was conceived by Israel after the 1967 war. It came within a set of strategic decisions taken by the thirteenth government of Israel. The background for these decisions was a discontent among many of Israel's chief policy makers about the 1948 tacit alliance with Jordan. There was an active lobby pushing Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who was in power until 1963, to reconsider this alliance and find a pretext to occupy either parts of the West Bank or the whole of it. These were powerful people; some of them were generals in the 1948 war, such as Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan, others were ideologues who considered the West Bank as the heart of ancient Israel without which the Jewish state could not survive. The military men also concocted the myth of the River Jordan as a natural barrier for future invasions from the east against the Jewish state. Anyone who had seen the River Jordan, even on a particular good day, would know that this creek could hardly stop a unit of donkeys, let alone tanks.
4

This lobby had its chance to transform expansionist dreams into strategic planning once Ben-Gurion left office in 1963. Ben-Gurion was adamant in his objection for occupying any more parts of Palestine since he dreaded the incorporation of an additional and large number of Palestinians. But once he was gone, the government intensified its preparations for the eventuality of such an expansion. While Ben-Gurion was in charge he prevented a dangerous circumstance from developing into a war—circumstances quite similar to the ones which led to the 1967 war. In 1960, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the leader of Egypt and the Arab world, embarked on a brinkmanship policy that foreshadowed his moves in 1967. A different Israeli prime minister and a different UN secretary general did not prevent a war that their predecessors successfully diffused in 1960.
5

From 1963 onward, Israeli strategists intensified their preparations for the eventuality of a future occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These preparations included very systematic planning for how to run the two areas as occupied military zones.
6
They were put into effective use within a few days in June 1967. But they were not enough; a strategy had to be formulated and this task was taken up by the Israeli government in several meetings during the following months after the fighting subsided.

Immediately after the 1967 war ended the thirteenth government of Israel began discussions that produced a series of decisions that all in one way or another condemned all the people who lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to life imprisonment in the biggest ever human mega-prison witnessed in modern times. The Palestinians living there were incarcerated in such a fashion for crimes they never committed and for offenses that were never ever pronounced, admitted, or defined. Today a third generation of such “inmates” have begun their life in that mega-prison.

The particular government which took this callous and inhuman decision represented the widest possible Zionist consensus: every ideological stream and view was presented in that government. Socialists from Mapam sat alongside the Revisionist Menachem Begin and shared the glory and the power with the various factions that made up the Zionist Labor movement. They were joined by members of the most secular liberal and the most religious and ultra-religious political parties. Never before, nor after, during this government's term in office, would such a consensual partnership lead the state of Israel in its future and crucial decisions.

Contrary to common wisdom about the history of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, no one apart from the government of Israel played any crucial role, then and ever since, in deciding the fate of these territories or the people living in them. What these ministers decided in the second half of June 1967, and in the following months of July and August, has remained to this day the cornerstone of Israeli policy toward the Occupied Territories. None of the successive Israeli governments deviated from these past decisions, nor did they wish to deviate from them in any form or shape.

The resolutions taken in that short period of three months, between June and August 1967, charted clearly the principles to which future governments in Israel would religiously adhere and from which they would not diverge, even during the most dramatic events that followed in years to come, be it the first or second Intifada or the Oslo peace process and the Camp David summit of 2000.

One explanation for the resilience of this set of decisions is the extraordinary composition of the 1967 government. As mentioned this government represented, as never before and never since, the widest possible Zionist consensus. One can also attribute it to the euphoric mood in the wake of the total devastation of six Arab armies by the IDF and the successful blitzkrieg that ended with the military occupation of vast areas of Arab lands and countries. A messianic aura surrounded the decision makers in those days energizing them to take bold and historic decisions, which their successors would find hard to refute or change.

All these plausible explanations tend to see the policies as the direct product of the particular and extraordinary circumstances of June 1967. But these decisions were mainly the inevitable outcome of Zionist ideology and history (however one chooses to define this ideology or insist on its shades and innuendoes). The particular circumstances made it easier to remind the politicians of their ideological heritage and reconnected them once more, as they did in 1948, to the Zionist drive to Judaize as much of historical Palestine as possible.

The first decision was not to ethnically cleanse the population despite the joy of expanding the Jewish state onto what many Israelis felt were the natural and historical borders of ancient Israel. The ministers played with the idea but eventually ruled it out. They doubted whether the army had the will and mentality to carry it out, as it was unclear whether the army had sufficient means for accomplishing it.
7

The second decision was to exclude the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from any future deal based on territories for peace (a principle that, at least in theory, the government accepted for the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights). The prevailing sense in those meetings was that the international immunity for land expansion was guaranteed—not as an endorsement of expansionism per se but more as an unwillingness to confront it. But with one crucial caveat: there could not be a de jure annexation of the territories, only a de facto one.
8

The third one was not to grant full citizenship to the occupied population so as not to endanger the demographic Jewish majority. There was then, and there is now, a consensual Israeli impulse and overwhelming desire to keep the West Bank forever, while at the same time there was and is the twofold recognition of the undesirability of officially annexing these territories and the inability to expel the population
en masse. The aspirations about the Gaza Strip then and now are more ambivalent—the main drive was to see it disappear. It was a vision in 1967 which has become a dangerous blueprint for action these days. And yet keeping these territories, with the population in it, seemed as vital as the need to maintain a decisive Jewish majority in whatever constituted a Jewish state.

The minutes of the meetings are now open to historians. They expose the impossibility and incompatibility of these two impulses: the appetite for possessing new land on the one hand and the reluctance to either drive out or fully incorporate the people living on them, on the other. But the documents also reveal a self-congratulatory satisfaction from the early discovery of a way out of the ostensible logical deadlock and theoretical impasse. The ministers were convinced, as all the ministers after them would be, that they had found the formula that would enable Israel to keep the territories it coveted, without annexing the people it negated and while safeguarding its international immunity and reputation.
9

When those three goals are translated into actual policies they can only produce an inhuman and ruthless reality on the ground. There can be no benign or enlightened version for a policy meant to keep people in citizenless status for a long period of time. Only one known human invention operates in such a way which robs temporarily, or for longer period of times, the basic human and civil rights of citizens: the modern-day prison.