From uprising to war.

Salt, Jeremy

By the middle of 2001, the third Palestinian intifada (1) was no longer an intifada, or 'shaking', but a war. Not a civil war as Robert Fisk described it (2)--by definition there cannot be a civil war in a territory under occupation--but a colonial war between occupier and occupied.

The Middle East is giving every indication of heading towards a great calamity. The intifada does not just signal the end of a 'peace process', that was debauched from the beginning, it may well be the prelude to something infinitely worse than a colonial struggle in occupied territories. There is not one portent that is positive. Peace plans have been ineffectual. One plan, put together by President Mubarak and King Abdullah, was rejected by Israel because it called for a freeze on settlements as a necessary condition to the resumption of negotiations. Far from freezing settlements, the government of Israel is expanding them, announcing in April the forthcoming construction of 496 houses at Maale Adunim near Jerusalem and 212 at Alfe Menashe near Nablus. The rhetoric on both sides is consistent with the violence. While Palestinian leaders are ritualistically calling for an end to violence, the people are demanding weapons to defend themselves. As for the Israeli government, it has steadily calibrated the methods by which it is attempting to suppress the Palestinians. Its tools now include reoccupation of the patches of territory from which it has withdrawn its forces; the open assassination of Palestinians by missiles fired at their cars and booby-trapped phone boxes; the killing of demonstrators by sniper fire; the bombardment of refugee camps from land, sea and air; economic blockade and the destruction of citrus and olive crops; and the use of F16 fighter jets against Palestinian targets, for the first time since the 1967 war. Yet, despite this onslaught, as this article is being written the Palestinians have not broken.

This raises the question of what comes next. The Bush administration made it clear upon taking office that it would not become as closely involved in the Middle East as the Clinton administration had been, yet step by step it is being drawn back into the centre. Historically, the Republicans are more sensitive to Arab concerns, but a substantial change of direction is unlikely. Only recently nearly 300 members of Congress--200 from the house and 87 from the Senate--sent Bush a letter urging the reconsideration of aid to the Palestinian Authority because of the 'deliberate campaign of violence' by Palestinians against Israel. The reporting and editorials of key journals of influence (especially the New York Times) remain firmly biased in Israel's favor. Where Israel remains vulnerable, even in the United States, is in relation to the question of settlements. International condemnation is growing. The Swedish government (Sweden currently holds the presidency of the European Union) has done no more than reiterate the position in international law by describing all settlement activities as illegal and constituting a major, if not the only, obstacle to peace. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone a step further, describing settlements as a war crime under international humanitarian law. The international committee of inquiry chaired by former United States senator George Mitchell has called on Israel to freeze settlements as a prerequisite for the resumption of negotiations. Even the Bush administration has called them 'provocative'. In response, Israel is talking of confiscating no more Palestinian land and of restricting the expansion of settlements to their 'natural growth', but it has refused to freeze them. Instead it turned effect into cause. In the Israeli view it is Palestinian violence rather than over thirty years of occupation, settlement and annexation, and all the Israeli violence that has gone with it, that is the core of the problem. Obliging as always, this is the message the United States administration is passing on to the Palestinians.

American indulgence of Israel can only encourage Sharon to think that he can go even further. Given that there now seems no possibility of a return to negotiations on any basis acceptable both to the Palestinians and the Israelis, even the idea of a rump Palestinian state with a defeated and docile population is beginning to fade into history. Older solutions are now coming to mind. There was a very curious, if oblique, reference in a recent issue of Jane's Foreign Report, in which the unnamed correspondent was writing about Jordan's difficulties as a result of the intifada. (3) These include empty hotels because tourists have been frightened off; the loss of trade with the West Bank because of the random closure of the border by Israel; a thirty per cent unemployment rate; and a financial situation so precarious that only recently King Abdullah had sold royal land to give the army a wage increase. The conclusion was that the king's 'success story' would continue if the economy picked up, 'and as long as Jordan [whose population is already seventy per cent Palestinian] is not flooded by the arrival of more Palestinians'.

Now why would anyone think this even a possibility? The reason is that 'transfer' is again on the agenda. According to an Israeli newspaper, 300 leading figures in Israel's defence establishment recently sent a memorandum to the country's president in which it was asserted that 'it will be necessary to find some place for resettlement outside the state of Israel (perhaps to the east of the Jordan) for the Palestinian population of the territories'. (4) The idea is hardly new. Theodor Herzl, the founding figure of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, wrote in his diaries of 'spiriting' the 'penniless population' of Palestine out of their own country. The notion of transfer as a solution to the problem of establishing a Jewish state in a land whose population was not Jewish surfaced repeatedly during the process of colonization behind the shield of British occupation. Chaim Weizmann described the flight of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 as a 'miraculous simplification of our task'. In fact there was nothing miraculous about it. It was entirely of human construction. Most of the Palestinians who left were terrorized into flight or herded out of their towns and villages and pointed in the direction of Lebanon and Jordan in what would now be called a process of ethnic cleansing. Even Israel's own inaccurately described 'revisionist' historians--no proper Israeli history was written in the first place for it to be revised--have confirmed these accounts on the basis of their research in the country's military archives. Israel's first generation was responsible for all this, yet it is still possible to read of 'the inclusive liberal dreams of Israel's Zionist founders'. (5) In fact these dreams were illiberal and deliberately exclusive. The differences, between Labor Zionists and Revisionist Zionists, between the 1948 generation and the post 1967 generation, between those who established a state for the sake of the state and those who sought to expand it in the name of the Lord, between Golda Meir and Yitzhak Shamir or Benyamin Netyanhu and Ehud Barak, have always been exaggerated by such writers as Amoz Oz--another favourite of the New York Review of Books. It was the Labor Zionists who drove out the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 and who began the colonization of the territories taken in the June war. On all key points--Jerusalem, the expansion of settlements, the control of borders and the West Bank's water resources, and the refusal to acknowledge Israel's responsibility for the refugee problem--Labor Zionists and the revisionists speak with one force. Ehud Barak did not retreat from one yard of Palestinian territory and expanded settlements as enthusiastically as Netanyahu. That is why there is no real contradiction in Shimon Peres serving Ariel Sharon as his foreign minister.

Now Israel has a government which includes advocates of transfer in an environment where a peace acceptable to both Israel and the Palestinians no longer seems possible. For an insight into how far Sharon may be prepared to go we only have to turn back to 1982 and the invasion of Lebanon. There, Sharon sought to pulverize the Palestinians into submission. A key element in 'Operation Iron Brain', which was a subsidiary part of 'Operation Peace for Galilee', was to strike the refugee camps with such force that the Palestinians would scatter far and wide. The massacres of Sabra and Shatila may well have been a deliberate part of his criminal thinking. His partner in planning 'Peace for Galilee' was Menahim Begin. In 1948 Begin orchestrated the massacre of civilians at Deir Yassin, later boasting of how the state of Israel would not have come into existence without the flight this massacre precipitated.

Unable to crush the Palestinians--aware that he has the freedom to do almost anything without the United States intervening and looking for a solution that will resolve the conflict in the territories once and for all--will Sharon's next big adventure be a calculated attempt to drive the Palestinians from the West Bank behind the screen of a military operation, ostensibly designed to crush the centres of terrorism? Amidst scenes of carnage and chaos, inflicted in some areas as warning to the rest, Israel would count on the majority of Palestinians fleeing rather than put the lives of their families at risk. Those who fled across the Jordan would never be allowed back because of the threat they would pose to the security of Israel and its citizens. This has all happened before and there is no good reason to think it cannot happen again.

Arab governments are doing their best to swallow what is being forced down their throats, but at some point even they are going to choke. They have suspended all political ties with Israel. The weakest link is Jordan, whose population is seventy per cent Palestinian, whose 'peace' treaty with Israel is hated and whose economy is being wrecked by the war on the West Bank.

According to the same article in Jane's Foreign Report:

 ... the well to do are leaving. Farmers are losing money: Israel
 closes the border with Jordan at random and lorries loaded with
 perishable produce wait for days for inspection. Their cargo rots
 before it reaches West Bank customers. About 30 per cent of the
 work force is unemployed. The foreign debt is an enormous (for
 Israel) $7 billion. The king recently sold his private lands to
 give the army a wage increase. (6)

The war in the Occupied Territories now threatens to embroil these 'moderate' Arab regimes despite their attempts to put the responsibility for defending the Palestinians and curbing the Israelis on other shoulders--the United Nations, the United States, Europe--that is, anyone but themselves. Every missile fired into the West Bank and Gaza, every assassination and every child killed strikes at the foundations of their stability. Yet Israel continues on its own way, listening to no one; hubristic, narcissistic, arrogant, insecure; the architect of its own nightmares.

(1.) The first intifada was from 1936-1939 and the second was from 1987 to about 1990.

(2.) See R. Fisk, The Independent, 11 April 2001.

(3.) Jane's Foreign Report, no. 2638, 3 May 2001.

(4.) Ha'aretz, 23 March 2001.

(5.) C. Hedges, 'The New Palestinian Revolt', Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001, p. 137.

(6.) Jane's Foreign Report, no. 2638, 3 May 2001.