One State, page 8
The impetus to bargain away Palestinian fundamental rights in this way, though they were unassailably enshrined in law and common humanity, was the logical consequence of a Palestinian fear of total annihilation by Israel. It was a despairing strategy to salvage something from which to regenerate the remnants of Palestine, even though the price was high. Without this sacrifice, it seemed to Arafat and his successors that Israel would finish what it had started in 1948: the destruction of the Palestinian people, the loss of the land that remained to them and possibly their total expulsion. That matters should have come to this pass, of a people forced to de-legitimise their own national cause, renounce their legal rights and recognise the theft of their land by others as legally and morally acceptable (as implied in Palestine’s recognition of Zionism), is the stuff of tragedy.
The Palestinians never posed any physical threat to Israel’s continued existence. It was rather the fact of their moral power to invalidate Israel’s claim to the same status – that of a legitimate nation in its own land – by their very existence as living witnesses to their own disinheritance. The near-hysterical Israeli reaction to any mention of a refugee return to Israel is motivated by this fear. So long as the Palestinian cause survived, a question mark would hang over the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
There is no doubt that Palestinian ineptitude and an inadequate leadership contributed to this depredation in Palestinian fortunes. For Arafat to have concluded that there was no alternative other than to surrender to Israel’s demands (though not all), was a mistake. Palestinians had no formal power, it was true, but they had a negative power: to say ‘no’ to Israel’s conditions at the Oslo Agreement and subsequently. The failure to exploit the fact that Israel would never have negotiated in 1993 had it not needed to – and it was that which gave the Palestinian veto its power – was a cardinal error. There is a whole story to be told about the mistakes, naïveté and sheer folly of Palestinian conduct, not to speak of the ineptitude, selfishness and timidity of the Arab governments – all of which played their deadly part in this tragedy. Even then, could the Palestinians’ failure to defend themselves adequately against Israel have justified what was done to them? Where is it written that failure is a crime, deserving of punishment? While not stupid, nevertheless, the Palestinians had been required in the short space of a few decades to transform themselves from peasants and refugees into a modern people able to hold their own against the sophisticated challenges of dealing with Israel and its supporters. That they faltered and failed in various ways should not have been surprising. On the contrary, the only surprise was that they had come as far as they had.
The most important cause of Palestinian degradation and near destruction, however, was the ceaseless support and indulgence showered on the Jewish state by the US and Europe since its inception and before. A reassessment of this misguided policy and of where the Zionist project could lead was possible at several junctures in the history of the conflict over the last 75 years. But no one bothered, since the action needed to rectify the problem involved some hard questions about the nature of what had been created in the Middle East and a reversal of Western policy towards the Jewish state. Thanks to this negligence, Israel succeeded in changing the occupied territories beyond recognition. It colonised and cantonised them, erecting an impenetrable barrier wall to enclose and isolate these cantons, creating a series of ghettos inside which Palestinians festered, incapable of leading a normal life. Each community was separated from the others and hardly anyone could visit Jerusalem any more. Moving about ‘illegally’ through tortuous unpaved roads and tracks, which was the only alternative to perpetual imprisonment, took hours and carried considerable risks of discovery by Israeli patrols and at Israeli checkpoints.
Nothing that has been written here is new, mysterious, or hidden. The information is all in the public domain, available to anyone who cares to look, and is often exposed to public view through the media. How much better known it must have been to the myriad experts and specialists of the American and European governments! Israel never concealed (or halted) its colonisation programme of the Palestinian territories. It relentlessly judaised Jerusalem before the public eye, brazenly appropriating it as its capital and vociferously wearing down opposition to this illegal move. In broad daylight, Israel succeeded in parcelling up the Palestinian territories into separate enclaves without physical means of connection. For decades, it openly changed facts on the ground, as if there had been no international law and no peace process. The results could be clearly seen on the numerous published maps of the occupied territories, showing a grid of Israeli settlements and bypass roads, as well as the barrier wall, all of which broke up the territory into a jigsaw of Israeli and Palestinian pieces. At the same time, Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians were shown on television, reported on by journalists, documented by human rights organisations, and observed by foreign diplomats, church and international groups, and a host of visitors.
If a Martian had dropped down onto the West Bank in this situation, he would have understood Israel’s strategy at a glance and drawn the obvious conclusion from it: that there was no possibility of the chequered landscape he saw becoming one contiguous state for anyone. Yet, the official Western discourse was that it was possible and would happen. Western powers persisted in speaking of a ‘road map’ towards the creation of an ‘independent, viable and contiguous’ Palestinian state and went through the motions of trying to help create such a state.
It is not credible that Western government officials and analysts did not know these facts. So, what was going on? Why did they persist in the charade of making empty pledges to the Palestinians about something they knew could not happen in the conditions as given? While knowing that neither the US president nor a single European leader was prepared to face Israel down, or bring the slightest pressure on it to cooperate? Was this some kind of cynical game to pacify Arab and Muslim opinion and maintain a liberal peace-loving façade for their own electorates?
If the West was playing a game, then it was a deadly one, played at the expense of Palestinian lives and the stability and security of a whole region. Indulging Israel’s adventurism and intransigence had led to this impasse. Continuing the practice would be an act of criminal negligence and unforgivable irresponsibility. The Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs were entitled to know if the West was serious about a proper settlement to the conflict, or if it was playing games. If the former, then it would have to take the necessary steps to bring that settlement about. If there was any possibility that it was the latter, then the Palestinians would have to withdraw from a peace process set up on such terms. For far too long, as it was, they had allowed themselves to be used as pawns in a game played for other people’s ends, be they Zionists fulfilling their dreams, Europeans expiating their post-Nazi guilt, Americans implementing their strategic aims and expressing their evangelical fervour, and Arab regimes legitimising their existence to their populations. Had the Palestinians appreciated their own strength – as potential de-stabilisers in an important region, as global icons for millions of oppressed people, as the key to defusing anti-Western Islamic rebellion and as the lynchpin of a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict – they would not have become so subservient to Israeli/Western designs.
With the Western world intent on keeping Israel happy, what sort of settlement could emerge from such a basis? And if the ongoing sham pretence of a ‘peace process’ were finally thrown aside, what would be the parameters of a durable and just settlement – not just a short-term political fix, which was all that had ever been on offer?
CHAPTER FIVE
The One-State Solution
The Palestine–Israel conflict has traditionally been presented in the West, especially by Zionist commentators, as extremely complicated. Views predicated on this premise have served not only to obscure the actual situation, but have also forcibly led to the conclusion that the solution to such a problem was bound to be no less complex and probably impossible to achieve. In reality, nothing was further from the truth. The issue is in essence quite simple: a European settler movement ineluctably displaced an indigenous population and wilfully denied its basic rights, inevitably provoking resistance and recurrent strife.
The obvious way to end that strife would have been to redress the injustice done to the indigenous people as far as practically possible, and find a reasonable accommodation for the needs and rights of everyone involved. The parameters of such a solution are clear, and the only difficulty was how to implement them, not because of their complexity, but because of Israel’s obdurate clinging to its settler colonialist ideology, Zionism, and the Western support that allowed or even encouraged it to do so.
This chapter is concerned with the question of what constitutes a durable and just settlement between Palestinians and Israelis, irrespective of how attainable it was at the time of writing. The fact that something is right or wrong is independent of what can be done about it. Israel had no new ideas for solving the conflict, only re-workings of the old Zionist formula for maintaining a Jewish state, that is, one with a Jewish majority. In three-quarters of a century, Israel never managed to resolve its original dilemma with the Palestinian presence. Its attempts at obliterating the Palestinians in myriad ways – from their original dispersion, to the denial of their history and existence, to their political marginalisation, to their imprisonment in ghettos – had failed to eradicate them as a physical and political reality.
Yet the Israeli fantasy persisted that it was still possible to pursue a policy against the Palestinians that would simply make the problem go away. This can be summed up as a ‘more of the same’ strategy: nullifying Palestinian resistance by overwhelming force, confining the Palestinians in small, isolated enclaves so as to prevent their forming any sort of meaningful state, strangling their economy and society, and thus pushing them to emigrate (to Jordan or anywhere else, as long as it was outside what Israel considered to be its borders), and ignoring the rest – the refugees in camps, the other dislocated Palestinians, and those treated as unequal citizens of Israel. The difficulties of managing such scattered Palestinian groupings in order to ensure that none of them bothered Israel would have been a daunting prospect for anyone. But it seemed not to have deterred successive Israeli leaders from trying to make it happen.
The alternative – accepting the Palestinian presence as a reality that had to be addressed through genuine negotiations and a mutually agreed settlement – was not one that Israel wanted to contemplate. The desire on the part of ordinary Israelis for ‘peace’ was widespread after the Oslo Accords, but it was not accompanied by an acceptance (or even an understanding) of the requirements that such a peace would demand from them. Most of those who accepted the need for Palestinians to have their own state were unclear about the Palestinian state’s exact geography, and unprepared to relinquish land they had come to regard as theirs. In fact, as the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy pointed out in Haaretz (19 March 2006), had Israelis seriously supported the creation of a Palestinian state, they would soon have realised that it was not compatible with the carve-up of the West Bank they and their government had brought about. He identified this situation as ‘Israel’s national disease, to have their cake and eat it’.
Reconciling these opposites had been a central preoccupation of Israeli leaders ever since the acquisition of the 1967 territories and the emergence of the two-state proposition. Israel had been able to ignore this solution for decades until it gathered such inexorable momentum over time as to make it impossible to reverse. Moreover, by its relentless policy of settling Jews in the Palestinian territories (140 settlements dotted all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with 100 illegal outposts in 2021), Israel was helping to bring about a situation it desired even less: the inextricable mixing of the two peoples so as to preclude their future separation.
Israeli fears of Palestinians as a ‘demographic threat’, openly discussed by Israeli politicians and leading figures, were regarded uncritically in the West as legitimate, as if it were acceptable for a nation to define itself exclusively by reference to ethnicity or religion, and seek to exclude those who did not qualify on those counts. It was such ideas of course that had led to the expulsion of the non-Jewish (Palestinian) population from the country in the first place, and which continued to fuel the impetus to expel even more, including those who are citizens of the state. Meanwhile, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were segregated inside their own areas. These Israeli attitudes clearly reflected a combination of the anti-Arab racism that was an inevitable concomitant of Zionism and a feature of the Jewish state from the beginning, and the more recent Israeli fear of ‘terrorism’ – that is, resistance – for which the mass disappearance of Arabs was seen as the only remedy.
Accordingly, ambitious scenarios for a future Israel, shorn of its Palestinians and safe for Zionism, were much discussed at one time. ‘Our future in 2020’, published in 2005, envisaged a demilitarised Palestinian state possibly federated with Jordan, with the right of refugee return abrogated, and full normalisation with the Arab and Islamic states. Joint Israeli/Arab projects would be dominated by Israel with the Arabs providing the land and the manpower; the Arab trade boycott would be terminated, and Israel would become the local agent for multinational companies in all parts of the region.1 A year later, Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, who did not believe that a Palestinian state in the 1967 territories was viable and might become unstable for that reason, proposed several grand measures to enhance Israel’s future security. According to these, Israel would annex 12 per cent of the West Bank and ask Jordan to donate 100 sq. km of its own land to compensate the Palestinians; 600 sq. km of Northern Sinai would be taken from Egypt and joined on to Gaza to make it more viable, and Egypt could be compensated with 200 sq. km of Israel’s Negev Desert. A tunnel would be dug under Israeli territory to connect Egypt with Jordan.2 Eiland did not explain why either Jordan or Egypt should accept these encroachments on their land and security. Yet in 2022, after nearly two decades, versions of these proposals were still being considered.
The Jordanian option, where the Palestinian enclaves would be formally attached to Jordan, had gone into abeyance following Ariel Sharon’s death in 2014. Jordan had always struck Sharon as the natural home for Palestinians, although he realised that Jordan would not be willing to go along with this. He therefore envisaged that, given time, the Palestinian entity created by Israel’s fragmentation policy in the West Bank, would itself agitate for a federation with ‘the artificial kingdom’, as he called Jordan. He foresaw it as inevitable that the West Bank Palestinians would meld socially and economically with Jordan (where approximately 60–70 per cent of the population was Palestinian), and together they would form the ‘Palestinian state’. The advantage of this outcome for Israel was that the transition would happen peaceably and not appear to have been imposed by force, Amman might replace Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state, and the refugee problem could be solved there. In other words, the Israeli plan was to promote this solution by knowingly creating a fragmented, non-viable entity in the West Bank which was bound to look towards its Jordanian neighbour for a solution.
This plan was not as fanciful as it sounded. Many exiled Palestinians living in Western countries owned second homes in Jordan, went there regularly to see friends and relatives, arranged for local marriages for their children, and aimed to retire there. Since a considerable number held Jordanian nationality – a leftover from the days when the West Bank was annexed to Jordan – it made those moves all the easier. One could see how plausible, even natural, it seemed for the Jordanian state to become the substitute homeland for Palestinians denied any other.
The intense striving for an independent Palestinian state post-Oslo, however, put the Jordanian option out of mind. But it did not vanish from Israel’s political thinking. Meanwhile, Israel’s only strategy for Palestinians was repression and more repression. Undoubtedly, many Israelis were genuinely afraid of Palestinians, especially after the Second Intifada, and hence their support for the building of the separation wall. But at bottom, there was also the ever-present fear that whatever acknowledgement was made of the Palestinians as a political presence, even a denuded one, could signify the beginning of an unstoppable unravelling of the Jewish state itself.
As ever, the real problem lay with Israel’s governing ethos and its inability to evolve. Zionism, which had been so resourceful in its early stages, ingeniously exploiting every opportunity to further its aims and intelligently considering its every move, showed itself in the end to be unimaginative and unable to adapt to new realities. The ‘Iron Wall’ philosophy of Vladimir Jabotinsky, articulated in the early decades of the twentieth century, remained more than eighty years later Israel’s only answer to the problem.3 To deal with the Palestinian threat by building a wall, both physical and political, that would shut the Palestinians out was the only solution Israel could think of to forestall the inevitable consequences of its project. Basing Zionism inside another people’s land without ensuring their effective annihilation, on the model of what happened, for example, in the settler colonialisms of Australia or the US, was a foolish mistake. This omission returns us to Benny Morris’s regret, set out at the beginning of this book, that Israel did not expel the whole of the Palestinian population in 1948 and safeguard Zionism’s long-term future.
But this did not happen and Israel should have evolved ways over the decades of its existence to address the problem it had created other than by recourse to crude strategies of repression and brute force. Where the global trend was towards pluralism and the integration of minorities, Israel’s struggle for ethnic purity was regressive and counter-historical. Nor was it likely that such strategies would work even on the practical level, for, as already discussed, the difficulties of removing so many Palestinians and ensuring that they did not return or resist the fate Israel had assigned to them, were formidable. Pursuing the same ‘iron fist’ policy Israel had always adopted actually limited its options in the long run. The more Israel repressed the Palestinians, the harder they resisted. Gaza was a case in point where constant bombing and policing was militarily costly, and had not succeeded in quelling its Hamas and Islamic Jihad leadership.
