Convergences.

Salt, Jeremy

Israel and Palestine

In October the UN General Assembly decided by an overwhelming majority to call on Israel to pull down the wall it is now building across the West Bank and through Jerusalem. The only governments to join the United States in voting against the resolution were Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. The passage of a similar resolution tabled at a meeting of the UNSC had been blocked by an American veto. While constructing its wall (or walls, as they are now turning out to be), Israel has continued its land and air campaign against the West Bank and Gaza, killing dozens of civilians and destroying homes, apartment buildings and hundreds of dunums of arable land. The destruction in the Gazan town of Rafah rivalled the levelling of the centre of Jenin in April 2002, according to one correspondent. Tanks and mammoth bulldozers were brought in to crush 200 homes. Claiming that only ten were destroyed, the military then sent the bulldozers back 'to grind the evidence that the houses ever existed into the dust'. (1) The civilian victims included children, with their heads ripped off by tank shells. (One in five of the 280 people killed in Rafah over the past three years have been children or teenagers. During the same period Palestinians operating from Rafah have killed three Israeli soldiers and one settler.) 'The trouble is,' said an Israel army spokeswoman, 'when no one else is practising law and order we have to do it ourselves'. (2)

The ostensible purpose of this onslaught is to stop the suicide bombings which have been killing Israelis (including many children) in Jerusalem, Haifa and Netanya. Towards this end, senior figures in the Sharon government are openly saying that it might be necessary one day to kill Arafat and even to get rid of the source of the evil--the Palestinian people--altogether. In February last year Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon, representing the openly racist Moledet Party, launched what was described as a 'campaign' for the transfer of the Palestinians.3 In conditions of war, he argued, Israel would have the 'right' to bring on 'another nakba'--the Arabic word for disaster used to describe the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. The idea has never been repudiated by Ariel Sharon, whose position has been described by his spokesman Rana'an Gissin: 'There is a difference between wishful thinking and realpolitik. If the Palestinians would have a change of heart and move, okay, but Sharon realizes transfer cannot be done because of the stance of the Israeli public. What Elon is saying is not something that today seems possible'.4 Not impossible, just not possible today.

As Elon and Gissin spoke, Israel was putting the finishing touches to the 360-kilometre wall it is now building across the West Bank, running close to the 'green line' (the pre-1967 border) but biting into Palestinian land, enclosing within the 'seam zone' (between the wall and the green line) tens of thousands of Palestinians and separating landowners on one side of the wall from their land on the other. Israel plans to build supplementary walls that will enclose the Palestinians in a series of enclaves on the eastern side: if all these walls are constructed as planned they could reach 700 kilometres in length. But 'we are not talking about ghettos', spokesman for Likud MP Michael Eitan said last year. 'People will be able to exit and enter through a security gate'. (5) What the Israeli government likes to describe as a 'fence', and what the Western media obligingly accepts as a fence, is in fact a ten-metre high concrete wall complete with sensors and barbed wire and a 'dead zone' security perimeter with access through gates controlled by the Israeli military or paramilitary. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who lives in Ramallah, has described the effects of the wall on Palestinians living in fifteen villages or towns enclosed within the seam.

 Farmers [on the east side of the wall] cannot make their way
 to their land; hothouses and orchards have been destroyed;
 olives are left unpicked; teachers and students fail to get to
 school because the gate of the separation fence is not opened
 on time; feed for the livestock does not arrive consistently
 and the animals are being sold or slaughtered or left to die;
 water pipes for drinking or irrigation have been cut; siblings
 and parents are not permitted to visit; garbage trucks are
 unable to complete their routes; cesspits are not being
 drained on time. (6)

The assault on Palestinian agricultural life described in this passage is thoroughly consistent with Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza since the beginning of the occupation in 1967. Exempted from the permit regulations governing access to or exit from the 'seam zone' are Israeli citizens (in practice these are not likely to include Israeli Palestinians) or anyone entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. All Palestinians within the zone will need military permits to live in their own homes.

In Tel Aviv and elsewhere the suicide bombings continued regardless. A poll of West Bank and Gazan Palestinians in April this year indicated that: 75.3 per cent strongly supported or 'somewhat' supported the intifada; 59.9 per cent supported suicide bombings; almost 70 per cent were pessimistic or very pessimistic about the prospects for a peaceful settlement; 37.6 per cent believed the 'peace process' was dead; 64.6 per cent supported 'military operations' against Israeli targets; 21.1 per cent trusted Arafat more than any other Palestinian leader; 36.1 per cent did not trust anyone; 22.6 per cent trusted Fatah more than any other Palestinian organization; 22 per cent Hamas; and 34.3 per cent no one. (7) Since Israel's threats to expel or kill him, support for Arafat has climbed to 50 per cent, and following Israel's attempt to kill the wheelchair bound leader of Hamas, Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, support for that organization is also certain to have climbed. Loss of faith in the 'peace process' and the 'road map' are mirrored on the Israeli side. Indeed, following the killing of three Americans travelling in a convoy through Gaza in October, John Wolf, the diplomat given the task of putting the 'road map' on the road, left the Middle East with no apparent intention of returning.

The costs of occupation, suppression and settlement are putting the Israeli economy under the severest strain. Indeed, the Israeli economy (and Israel's ability to maintain the occupation) would have collapsed a long time ago but for US aid, now running at about $US6 billion annually in loan guarantees and grants. From 1949 until now, the United States has given Israel a minimum of about $US120 billion in military and economic assistance. (8) Israel gets 50 per cent of all US foreign aid, far more over the years than all aid directed towards the billion-plus population of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and to the official figure has to be added private, tax-free philanthropic contributions (often directed towards the expansion of settlements in the West Bank).

This vast sum of money has not been enough to prevent the Israeli economy moving closer to breaking point. In Le Monde Diplomatique Joseph Algazy has written of the queues of single mothers, the homeless, the unemployed, and even Beduin ejected from their traditional land, lining up or sleeping on the pavement outside Israeli government offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all of them victims of Sharon's neo-conservative, 'anti-social' policies. (9) The country is in deep economic recession. In the first half of 2003, per capita GNP fell by 0.7 per cent, after plunging 6.7 per cent in the first half of 2002 and a further 1.3 per cent in the second half. Hi-tech industries have been badly affected, but school teachers and retrenched government workers have also joined the ranks of the unemployed. Social welfare programs have been cut, and benefits and rights reduced (including maternity and family allowances). The retirement age for men has been raised from 65 to 67 and for women from 60 to 67. Researchers at the Jewish Joint Distribution Centre's Brookdale Institute, working with the Ministry of Health, have concluded that 400,000 families (22 per cent of the total) are suffering from 'nutritional insecurity' of which a key component is the inability to provide children with enough food for proper growth. According to one charity quoted by Algazy, the number of Israelis seeking food aid has jumped 46 per cent in a year, at a time when Sharon has continued to direct funds towards the expansion of West Bank settlements. Since the beginning of this year his government has let tenders for the construction of 1627 new homes on the West Bank.

Iraq, Syria and Iran

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, US forces are plainly under siege. In Afghanistan, the mandate of the Karzai government runs no further than the municipal limits of Kabul. The 'provincial governors' are the same ethnic warlords whose human rights abuses have been chronicled over a long period of time. The Taliban have regrouped, and are crossing the long, porous border into Pakistan and back again without the United States or the Musharref government being able to stop them (yet when Syria says its border with Iraq is too long to prevent people slipping into Iraq to join the resistance against the US occupation it is accused of lying). Opium growing, suppressed by the Taliban, is again thriving. The towns and cities are in a state of ruin. The United States has neither suppressed the Taliban nor rebuilt Afghan society.

In Iraq the resistance targets--usually described by spokesmen for the occupation as 'Saddam loyalists', 'thugs' or 'criminals'--include individuals, embassies and organizations identified with the occupation. In one of the bloodiest attacks, UN offices in Baghdad were destroyed by a suicide bomber, and most recently 'a few holdouts from the old regime' (to quote the intended victim himself) fired a wave of missiles at the Rashid Hotel in an attempt to kill Paul Wolfowitz. The targets have also included members of the Iraqi Governing Council and police working with the occupation administration. The Kurds in the north are cooperating/ collaborating with the occupation authorities: it was a Kurdish tip-off that led American marines to the house where they slaughtered Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusai. In the south, some Shi'i leaders are counselling tacit co-operation while others are fomenting resistance.

US soldiers are being targeted across the country in up to thirty-five attacks a day, from the Kurdish north through the central Sunni Muslim triangle to the Shi'ite south. More than one hundred have been killed since the war officially ended in March. Troop morale is a serious problem, but no relief is in sight. Poland has some troops in the south and the Turkish Parliament voted to help with up to 10,000 troops, but that quickly foundered on across-the-board opposition in Iraq (and the Turkish public does not want troops there either). In New York, the United States managed to secure a unanimous UNSC vote that puts a temporary gloss of international approval on the occupation, but this was not followed by offers of troop support and financial commitment. A donor conference convened in Madrid fell well short of the $US56 billion the World Bank estimates will be needed for the reconstruction of Iraq over the next few years. The Bush administration is stumping up $US20 billion of the $US33 billion committed at Madrid, but the Senate has voted to turn $US10 billion of that amount into a loan to be paid back from sequestered Iraqi oil revenue. At the moment, the oil is only trickling out because of the repeated, and so far unstoppable, sabotage of the pipelines. Halliburton is waiting in the wings but so are the state-run oil companies--Chinese, Algerian, Russian and French. They all signed contracts with the overthrown Iraqi government for the redevelopment of the oil industry and have a strong legal case to challenge the attempt to bring Iraqi oil under US control.

Domestically, a year ahead of presidential elections, the credibility of the Bush administration is slowly unravelling. In its 'war on terrorism', the United States is swatting at mosquitoes in the dark, and now that the CIA, and even Colin Powell, have admitted that Iraq probably did not have weapons of mass destruction, it is evident to an increasing number of Americans that Bush and the people around him have lied to them. Compounding foreign policy difficulties is the sickly state of the US economy. Manufacturing industry remains in crisis. There has been no growth in real wages over the last year. Unemployment hovers around 6 per cent, with underemployment reaching 10.2 per cent in July 2003. The Economic Policy Institute report 'Labor Market Left Behind' concludes that the labour recovery (such as it is) is the worst on record since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1939. (10)

With no quick victories in sight, abroad or on the home front, the embattled neo-conservatives around Bush are pushing for a widening of the front in the 'war against terrorism'. North Korea has proved to be so truculent that an adventure in that direction would be extremely imprudent, but that still leaves Syria and Iran. In early October, in 'retaliation' for a suicide bombing in Haifa a few days earlier, Israel launched an air attack on what it claimed was an Islamic Jihad training camp at Ain Sahab, twenty kilometres from Damascus. In fact there was no training camp of any kind at Ain Sahab: there had been one, for a secular Palestinian resistance movement, but it was closed years ago. There are no training camps for Islamic radicals in Syria; neither have Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction' been transferred there, and neither is the Syrian government 'allowing' anyone to cross the border to kill US servicemen in Iraq, as claimed by Wolfowitz11 and other leading figures in the US power elite. At a meeting of the UNSC, following a complaint by Syria, the United States vetoed a resolution condemning the Israeli attack: instead, ambassador John Negroponte (who helped to run the Contras in Nicaragua for the Reagan White House) used the occasion to threaten Syria for standing on 'the wrong side' in the war on terrorism. There can be no doubt that the attack on Syria was preceded by another of the 'green lights' the United States has flashed in Israel's direction over the past four decades. Afterwards Bush said what he had probably said before Israel's warplanes took off: 'I made it clear to the Prime Minister [Sharon] ... that Israel's got a right to defend herself ... that Israel must not feel constrained in defending the homeland'. (12) After all, Sharon is a 'man of peace', as he had asserted on a previous occasion. (13) Richard Perle chimed in: 'I am happy to see the message was delivered to Syria by the Israel Air Force, and I hope it is the first of many such messages'. (14) Along with Douglas Feith, Perle was one of the authors of a document prepared for Benyamin Netanyahu during the Israeli election campaign of 1996. In 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' he called for 'striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper'.

The attack on Ain Sahab was followed on 16 October by the passage through Congress (by 398 votes to five) of the Syria Accountability Act, opening the door to a range of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Syrian government, and perhaps further military action. Syria's support for the United States during the 1990-91 Gulf War means nothing now. Neither does the invaluable help it has given the United States in its 'war on terrorism'. (Bear in mind here that there is no love lost between Islamic radicals and the secular Ba'thists despite Syria's recognition of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah as movements of resistance against Israeli occupation.) According to Nation, 'shortly after 9/11 the US government received [from Syria] hundreds of files on Al Qaida, crucial data on Islamist terror cells and intelligence on future terrorist actions'. (15)

As for Iran, the emphasis is on the nuclear weapons Iran does not have, and would be unlikely to develop, knowing that Israel would almost certainly attack at the first sign of a budding nuclear weapons capacity. But Iran does have nuclear research facilities which, at the request of the EU, it agreed to open up to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection. The accusations against Iran unavoidably lead to the question of Israel's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Israel has allowed outside inspection of its nuclear research and production plant at Dimona only once. President Kennedy insisted in 1961, but when the American inspectors arrived they were taken into a false control room. They never realized the six floors of the real plant were right beneath their feet. (16)

Because Israel has never admitted to the existence of nuclear weapons, no one knows how many it has, but estimates range from 200 to 500. Israel is ranked as the world's fifth largest nuclear power in terms of the warheads it possesses: these are few in number compared to the thousands in the US nuclear armoury, but for sophistication (including miniaturization), Israel probably has no equal. For blowing the whistle on what was going on at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped in Rome in 1986, put on secret trial in Israel, and sentenced to life imprisonment, eleven years of which he served in solitary confinement. Since the 1960s Israel has continued the development of nuclear weaponry with the help of the United States (including, during Clinton's presidency, the provision of super computers to enable simulated testing). It has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It is the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. It is the only state in the Middle East that occupies the territory of other states (Syria and the Shaba'a farm zone of Lebanon) and of another people (the Palestinians). It has frequently gone to war against bordering states, yet it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has attacked none of its neighbours, which recently handed the names of 225 Al Qaida suspects it had expelled to the UNSC, which does not have nuclear weapons, and which has not elected a notorious massacrist as its head of government, that the US government apparently expects the rest of the world to believe is a grave threat to peace in the region.

The US and Israel

How much longer can this situation continue? Will the Palestinians be ploughed under, like their olive groves and orchards, and like Rachel Corrie, the young American peace protestor, deliberately crushed by an Israeli bulldozer? Will Palestine and Iraq converge, bringing down the Arab system? Or will the Arab states continue to shamble along, incapable of reacting to whatever the United States and Israel choose to do? And what about these two countries? The relationship with Israel is completely destructive of US policy interests in the Arab and Islamic worlds. And US economic and military aid is just as destructive of Israel's long-term interests in the Middle East. Without it, Israel would have had to withdraw from occupied land and make peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world a long time ago. It would not have been able to launch its wars against the Arab states in the first place. It would have been forced to live within its means.

Before the war on Iraq was launched, Anatol Lieven wrote that 'as far as the Israeli lobby is concerned a disaster in the Middle East might be the one thing that would at least bring a discussion of its calamitous role into the open in the US'. (17) Americans, particularly the families of the servicemen and women being killed in Iraq, are now beginning to ask the questions that may lead to an examination of Israel's role. They want to know why their sons and daughters were sent to Iraq in the first place. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. That was obvious from all the reports of the weapons inspectors. There were no links between September 11 and the government of Saddam Hussein, so why was the Bush administration so determined to go to war? Who was pushing the hardest for war; whose intelligence agency was most likely to have provided the misleading intelligence about weapons stocks and attempted purchases of uranium from Niger; and who stood to benefit the most from the disabling of Iraq? Time and time again the answer is Israel. According to Lieven, the neo-conservatives in Washington and their allies in Israel would like to see 'a long term imperial war against any part of the Muslim world which defies the US and Israel, with ideological justification provided by the American mission civilisatrice--democratisation'. (18) But the rationale is not just American. In early October, several Israeli Cabinet ministers issued a statement which asserted that 'the war on radical Islam is a righteous cause. The state of Israel is, symbolically and operationally, on the frontline of the battle to defend civilization'. (19) The subordination of the region through the installation of puppet governments or by breaking it down into ethno-religious statelets has been part of Israeli strategic thinking since the 1950s. Iraq may help the American public finally understand the immense damage done to US interests across the Muslim world by the relationship with Israel.

If the situation in Iraq is not 'stabilized' (that is, if the United States does not succeed in turning it into an anti-Arab Arab state) within a year, and if the economy does not pick up, it seems likely that Bush will be bundled out of the White House. Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and indeed the whole crew running the United States will go down with him, disgraced and removed from public life forever. They have to work on their options, which is why the trial of Saddam Hussein will be turned into a grand spectacle stretching out to the beginning of the US election campaign. The Iraqis will try him but the procedures will have been worked out in advance with the Americans to prevent disclosure of their own involvement with the Baathists and Saddam personally over the last forty years. It will be impossible to establish a properly constituted government by next July, when the Iraqis are supposed to take over from Paul Bremer, but it is obvious that the Americans have no intention of handing over real power. The process of turning Iraq into a milch cow for corporate America has only just begun.

With ninety-seven years still to go, the grand plan for the new American century is already falling apart. It is completely unrealistic to think that the United States can continually extend the boundaries of the 'war on terrorism' across the Muslim world without intensifying waves of resistance, but resistance is precisely what the 'realist' neo-conservatives need in order to prove that the war is necessary. Like the endless war with a remote, unseen enemy in Orwell's 1984, the 'war on terrorism' is being built into the US body politic as a permanent fixture requiring endless vigilance in defence of the homeland. Each future victory will be trumpeted far and wide, each setback will serve as the stimulus for further action and the sacrifice of more lives. What the 'war on terrorism' actually involves is the refashioning of governments, societies, historical consciousness and religious sensibility across the Muslim world to suit the interests of Israel and the United States, but the neo-conservatives apparently really believe they can do it. The will to power--the pure ego--in all of this is stupendous.

(1.) C. McGreal, 'Death of a Town', Guardian, 27 October 2003.

(2.) McGreal.

(3.) See B. Lynfield, 'Israel Expulsion Idea Gaining Steam', Christian Science Monitor, 6 February 2002.

(4.) Lynfield.

(5.) Lynfield.

(6.) A. Hass, 'IDF Redefines Palestinians West of the Fence', Haaretz, 14 October 2003.

(7.) See poll result no. 48, on Palestinian attitudes towards the Palestinian situation in general, April 2003, Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, http://www.jmcc.org/.

(8.) Precise figures are very hard to arrive at, but for some estimates see D. R. Francis, 'Economist Tallies Swelling Cost of Israel to US', Christian Science Monitor, 9 December 2002; S. McWilliam, 'A Conservative Total of US Aid to Israel: $91 billion--and Counting', Congress Watch, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, http://wrmea.com/html/ US_aid_to_Israel.htm, January-February, 2001; and P. de Rooij, 'US Aid to Israel: Feeding the Cuckoo', Counterpunch, 16 November 2002. Adjusting the data and putting the result in 2001 dollar terms, de Rooij estimates that the US has given Israel $US143 billion in aid just since the 1967 war. Other estimates go even higher.

(9.) J. Algazy, 'Israel's Age of Austerity', Le Monde Diplomatique (English version), October 2003.

(10.) See Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epinet.org.

(11.) See E. Vulliamy, 'US Says Syria Stands in Way of Peace Deal', Guardian, 13 April 2003. According to Wolfowitz: 'The Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try and kill Americans. We need to think about what our policy is towards a country that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals'.

(12.) G. Leupp, 'Israel's Raid on Syria. Stage Four in the Terror War', Counterpunch, 18-19 October 2003.

(13.) Leupp.

(14.) Leupp.

(15.) See 'Is Syria Next?', Nation, 16 October 2003.

(16.) See the BBC World Service program, 'Israel's Secret Weapon', broadcast in two parts on 17 March and 29 June, 2003.

(17.) A. Lieven, 'The Push for War', London Review of Books, 3 October 2002.

(18.) A. Lieven, 'A Trap of their Own Making', London Review of Books, 8 May 2003.

(19.) McGreal.

Jeremy Salt teaches political science at Bilkent University, Turkey.