There is
Life Without a Solution
Elyakim Ha’etzni
This paper was published as the ACPR’s Policy Paper No. 135
(2002)
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Those who claim that the establishment
of a Jewish state depends upon peace with the Arabs, can already give up
Zionism now...
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Zeev Jabotinsky
From “The Iron Wall” |
I. The Illusions of a Political Solution
We have no intentions to propose a
solution to the struggle between Jews and Arabs over life and dominion in the
Land of Israel. Proposed paper solutions were either consigned by time to
oblivion while others appear today as mere caricature. Solutions, which were
actually implemented, drowned in blood. A precondition for a rational approach
to the subject is an understanding that this conflict is sui generis, a
direct result of the singularity of the Jewish people’s existence and fate.
Never was there a dispute, where two peoples demanded that very same portion
of land and regarded the same city as their capital.
If one required proof that the
Jewish-Arab dispute over Palestine is insoluble, then Ehud Barak with his
spurned concessions, which some people considered most generous while others
termed them profligate, came along and demonstrated the thesis that there is
no solution. Indeed, Barak himself, and his collaborator, Shlomo Ben-Ami,
currently admit that an agreement with the Palestinians is impossible and
therefore the former proposes unilateral retreat and hunkering down behind a
fence, while the latter goes as far as inviting an international coercive
force which would interpose itself between the parties in order to save them
from each other.
Despite this, the know-it-alls and the
prognosticators of the left continue to disseminate the empty slogan: “There
is no military solution, there’s only a political solution.” In this manner
they are more or less effacing the entirety of human history which is studded
with military decisions that ultimately dictated political outcomes. With
demagogic manipulation they depict the signing ceremony of a political
agreement and conceal the sword which brought this agreement about. The
antecedent to the “political solution” which established the Hellenistic world
was Alexander the Great’s military victory; the victory over Napoleon at
Waterloo yielded as a political result the “restoration” of the old royal
regime in France; it was only the military victory over the “Third Reich”
which created the political conditions for the formation of present day
Europe. The creation of the State of Israel would not have come about, save
for the military victory which preceded it.
Hence, one should turn the leftist mantra
on its head and state that in general, military victories determine political
results.
According to this principle, what is the
political outcome to which we should aspire as the result of a military
victory in the War of Oslo? The answer almost suggests itself: Dismemberment
of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of the leaders. The liquidation
of the Tunis establishment needs to be Israel’s preeminent military goal
because this body personifies two mortal, terminal demands upon the very
existence of the Jewish state: The demand for the “right of return” of all the
Arab refugees and their descendants and the demand for the establishment of a
Palestinian state in western Eretz Israel. The Palestinian Authority is
both the “Palestinian state in the making” and also by its very essence, the
“Arab Agency” for implementing the “right of return”. It is Arafat’s
insistence on an unlimited “return” into the pre-1967 Israel of all 1948
refugees and their offspring which brought the Camp David and Taba
negotiations to their dismal end.
The reason for that demand is ingrained
in the very nature of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). All Arab
leaders make it abundantly clear that in their concept, the “solution” of the
refugee “problem” precedes their quest for a Palestinian state, the latter
(state) serving as a tool to implement the former (refugee solution).
In the words of the Israeli Knesset Member Azmi Bishara,
a Christian Arab, in a meeting in London:
The Palestinian conflict
must be brought back to its roots – the 1948 refugees. The PLO was founded
in 1964 in Jerusalem, then under Arab, not Zionist rule. The PLO was
established for the sake of the rights of the refugees. These rights precede
the right to have a state. We have no use for a state without the “Right of
Return”.
On this background Barak, Beilin and
Ben-Ami’s offer of statehood as an “Ersatz” for allowing the refugees
back reveals a profound ignorance of Arafat’s fundamental belief, his
political agenda and actual role as a leader and symbol. It is as if Israel
would have offered the captain of a huge ship the lowering of a small life
boat to enter the “Promised Land”, but only for himself and his close
entourage, thereby abandoning his ship with 99% of the passengers. This is of
course inconceivable, but on the other hand, flooding Israel with 3, 4, 5
million “refugees” is unthinkable because it means the immediate destruction
of the Jewish state. For that reason, even the extreme left is not ready to
compromise on this point. To fathom the enormity of the abyss which divides
the positions of Israel and the PLO, imagine the Federal Republic of Germany
threatening war and actually practicing terror, if not all 12 million German
post World War II refugees are allowed to return to former Breslau, Stettin,
Danzig and Konigsberg, East Prussia, Pomerania, Lower Silesia and the
Sudetenland.
Obviously, what we have on our hands is a
situation of confrontation, and as long as we choose the PLO as “partner”,
i.e. as the authorized representative of the Palestinians – no “solution”, no
compromise, are possible.
It follows that negotiations of any sort whatsoever are
possible only with local bodies representing local interests as opposed to
with the men from Tunis, who are the emissaries of the Palestine diaspora.
Furthermore, all negotiations can only refer to the search for a modus
vivendi, a Latin term which means “a way of living” or a mode of
existence, but not to either “peace” or a “solution”.
II. A Palestinian State in Western Eretz Israel –
The Termination of the State of Israel
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One can write volumes, with historical
perspective, about the damage, in the long term, inflicted upon the national
psyche, should the Jewish people forgo the Promised Land with its own hands
for the benefit of another people. Despite 1,878 years of life in exile,
amidst frailty and impotence, never did a community leader, rabbi or
rabbinical court negotiate the Jewish right to even a single centimeter of
the Land of Israel. Maimonides or the Vilna Gaon, even had they wanted to do
so, would have been regarded as incompetent for suggesting that. This leads
to a most absurd conclusion, namely that at the cost of 20,000 dead, the
Jews had to establish a state for themselves, to be vested with the
authority to forfeit the Land of Israel in their name. Had such a scenario
taken place in practice, it is doubtful that the State of Israel, as the
“authorized” agent for waiving the Land of Israel, would have survived for
long.
Therefore,
those readers for whom the very need to give the Jews reasons why they
should not establish a state in their homeland for another people is
demeaning, will please excuse me. Such readers, even if you were to provide
them with all the arguments and persuasions in the world, as to why the
retention of their homelands would presumably not be salutary for their
future, pernicious to their security and harmful to their interests, would
still not care to listen, just as a normal child will not renounce his
mother. We are totally unique and special in comparison with any other
people, by this very phenomenon of internal haggling over our homeland
regarding its price and whether it is worthwhile. But like it or not, since
the debate has been launched in any case, we too will participate in it.
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Those who support the establishment of
a Palestinian state, even if they belong to the left, condition their
agreement upon at least five restrictions:
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Demilitarization and
limitations on armaments.
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A prohibition on signing
treaties, and especially military treaties, without Israel’s agreement
(for example “security” agreements with Iraq, Iran, or Syria which would
bring their forces to the outskirts of Tel Aviv).
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Israeli supervision over the
exploitation of the mountain aquifer, which provides a third of the
country’s water.
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Israeli supervision over the
border crossings, amongst other things, to prevent the entry of millions
of refugees and their descendants. (Arafat toys with the idea of emulating
the late King Hassan II of Morocco who marched tens of thousands of
civilians towards the boundary with Spanish Morocco and challenged the
Spanish army to fire on them. The colony fell into Moroccan hands without
a single shot being fired. How would Israel respond to a similar
procession towards Lydda, with women and children in the vanguard of the
march?)
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Israeli control over the air
space above the Palestinian state, because without such control the Israel
Air Force would not be able to protect the country against the “eastern
front”. Already today there are various restrictions on flights over
Judea-Samaria due to the surface to air missiles in Arafat’s hands. The
air force is planning to train in the United States in addition to relying
on Turkish skies for this purpose.
We will leave it for the reader to judge,
what the prospects are that any Palestinian government whatsoever, even if it
was not headed by a criminal person such as Arafat, would maintain and honor
these restrictions:
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If today the “Palestine Authority”,
composed entirely of separate islands surrounded by areas under Israeli
control and supervision, manages to equip itself with mortars, land-mines,
thousands of tons of explosives and anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry,
who can fathom the military threat emanating from a Palestinian Authority
enjoying statehood?
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If the “Palestine Authority”, while
still dependent upon Israel for electricity, water, communications, money,
land and air links, raw materials and fresh produce already tries to forge a
pan-Arab coalition against Israel, threatening her with an all-regional war,
what can prevent a Palestinian state from institutionalizing such a scheme
via military alliances?
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If already under the Oslo Regime, the
“Palestine Authority” is running amuck in contravention of all its
obligations, to the extent that in the Gaza Strip the entire water system
has been destroyed, is it difficult to extrapolate what will happen to the
mountain aquifer once the entire area is under its complete jurisdiction?
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If under the present situation, when
the border crossings with Egypt and Jordan are controlled by Israel, tens of
thousands, and one can venture hundreds of thousands, have been infiltrated
into Judea, Samaria and Gaza (YESHA) and even inside the “Green Line”, what
can we expect when the crossings come under the control of a Palestinian
state?
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If already today, when the “Palestine
Authority” enjoys full power over 16% of the area, only Arafat – in an
address to the Arab countries – rejected Barak’s proposals because in the
event of war he would not allow Israel to use his air space against “brother
Arabs”, is it conceivable that he will act differently when he actually
heads such a state?
Binyamin Netanyahu correctly notes that
there is not a state in the world that will back Israel’s demands to deny a
Palestinian state its sovereignty in five such fundamental and vital areas,
which epitomize the very concept of sovereignty. Hence, a Palestinian state
will be able merely to shrug off these limitations, and with full world
support.
On the other hand, if these five threats
are realized, the life of the State of Israel will become an unceasing
nightmare, and Arafat will speedily witness the realization of his plan, upon
which he expounded before 40 Arab representatives in a Stockholm hotel: To
push masses of Jews outside the State of Israel. Actually, a million Israeli
Jews if not more, young and productive, those who could easily make their way
in life in any other place in the world, will be those who hasten to abandon
ship, refusing to live in the hellish “peace” and residing in a close and
stifling proximity to a hostile terrorist state. These Israelis will come from
precisely those circles which are constantly demanding peace at any price.
To complete the picture we must add, that
even if during the first stage, the Jordan Valley is not included within a
Palestinian state, sooner or later nothing will prevent that state from
reaching the Jordan River and causing the fall of the Hashemite monarchy. As a
result, this terrorist state will extend to the border with Iraq and almost
surround the minuscule Jewish state.
The Israeli military commentator Ze’ev
Schiff asked “top Jordanian officials”: “In terms of Jordan’s strategic
interests, was it better for the Jordan Valley to be in Israeli or Palestinian
hands?” “Israeli”, was the answer.
Schiff adds: “The Jordanians are very
concerned about Clinton’s idea of transferring the Jordan Valley to the
Palestinians...thereby exposing Jordan to political and demographic pressure,
as well as subversive activity.”1
A final remark:
Under Oslo, the establishment of the
Palestinian state was meant to constitute the culmination of the “Peace
Process” and be accompanied by a solemn declaration on behalf of the
Palestinians that this is the “end of the conflict” and that they have no
further claims on Israel.
On paper at least, there is some inner
logic to this concept. Not so, PM Sharon’s proposal to let the Palestinians
have a state in the interim stage, leaving open the most explosive issues such
as Jerusalem, the refugees, the settlements, the final borders. As a result,
Israel will have to face all the Palestinian belligerency as before, only
backed and reinforced by the incomparable status and power of a sovereign
state.
The absurdity of this concept is
self-evident.
We can sum up by rejecting from the very
outset the good outcome of any Palestinian sovereignty exercised west of the
Jordan River.
III. Back to Military Government? Transfer?
Israeli society has extracted one
understanding from the debris of Oslo, namely not to rule directly over the
local Arabs. Even on the Radical Right you will not detect today any nostalgia
for the era of military government, when a Jewish authority carried the burden
of managing the lives of thousands of alien citizens. The reasons for this do
not matter much now; there is likewise no purpose in dwelling upon the moral
issue (“occupation”) which the Left brandishes in this context. It will
suffice to jot down two facts: That this form of government proved a failure
and that the Israeli people do not want it any more.
The Civil Administration arm of the
military government atrophied even before it was dismantled by Oslo, because a
military government by its very nature is intended to be only temporary. To
everyone’s surprise it survived for 27 years.
Also, perhaps we are not fit for this
type of rule: On one hand we were not severe enough in enforcing it, but on
the other hand not gentle enough in showing understanding, concern and
empathy.
In summary, direct Israeli rule over the
thousands of Arabs concentrated primarily in the 16% of the “A” areas is
inconceivable. If we must enter Arab cities for military purposes we will not
do so with a view to remaining there.
On the other hand, another option –
“transfer” – is still on the agenda in Israeli public opinion. Moreover, Arab
cruelty and hostility have reinforced the strength of the proponents of this
approach.
Since I am expressing a personal opinion,
I could content myself by categorically rejecting the very idea of expelling a
population by force, under a preconceived plan, and in a time of peace.
However, beyond this, the idea is
impractical because today’s world regards “ethnic cleansing” as a war crime
and has established patterns of operations to prevent it by force via outside
military intervention, as we have already witnessed in Kosovo. If this was the
case in a territory which everybody acknowledged to be under Yugoslav
sovereignty as in the Kosovo example, this attitude will apply even more so in
an area such as YESHA which under international law is devoid of sovereignty.
Let it be noted further, that most of the
local Arabs who vacated the area of the State of Israel during the 1948 war
did so in the winds of war. In most cases it was voluntary flight rather than
as a result of Israeli premeditated planning. Furthermore, psychologically the
“transfer” was rendered possible only due to the terrible cost which the War
of Liberation and Independence imposed: 1% of the Jewish population were
fatalities (6,500 of 650,000), about 50,000 fatalities – heaven forbid – in
today’s figures.
It would seem, that save for a situation
where the Palestinian Arabs impose a general regional war upon us, even the
most enthusiastic “transfer” person would not wish to pay such a price from
the outset, to achieve a parallel result. On the other hand, the idea of
“voluntary transfer” as per the doctrine of the late minister Rehavam Zeevi
does not seem realistic in today’s national and political climate and in any
foreseeable future.
IV. There is Life Without a Peace Agreement
The bitter years after Oslo, which led to
peak frustration under the government of Barak and Ben-Ami after the cave-in
at Camp David II and Taba, prove that the Arabs do not want and perhaps are
unable to conclude a peace in the European sense of the word with the “Zionist
entity”, aside from “Hudaibiya”-style agreements with the infidels,
which they are commanded to violate at the first opportunity. Therefore, we
have to free ourselves from the false illusions that were planted in our minds
by the peace-school; we must change the “diskette” and rehabilitate old
thought processes regarding life without agreements and without “solutions”,
life in the midst of a conflict and with it. After all, such was all Zionist
history, beginning with the first Zionist immigration (aliyah). This
history was studded with waves of Arab uprisings, and yet we grew in
population from 50,000 following the First World War to 5.3 million to date,
without formal peace. During this entire period we experienced “disturbances”,
namely violent outbreaks every few years or so, most of which were suppressed
by military action (for example the uprising of 1936 to 1939 and the 1948
war). The military victories yielded intervals of tranquility, construction
and growth.
In the forty-year period
following the establishment of the State of Israel and until the first
intifada (1988), wars with Arab countries replaced clashes with the local Arab
population within the country. In this as well, the pattern held: Israeli
military victories yielded armed respite, used by Israel for building and
development. Even the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan are no more than
that, because both Left and Right admit that everything is contingent on
meeting the demands of the Palestinians, and that in the event of an all-out
war with the Palestinians, the conflict will become “regional”. Egypt will
surely join the war at the head of the “region”, while Jordan will be dragged
into it, even against its own will, as occurred in 1967 and partly in 1973.
Fact: Egypt has already threatened
war should Israel attempt to topple the Palestinian Authority or harm Arafat
personally.
In this entire period of no peace, Israel
has become a military and high-tech power. It absorbed millions of immigrants,
settled a quarter of a million Jews in YESHA, built an advanced civilization,
and can even claim some cultural achievements, while maintaining at the same
time a working democracy, the only one in the region.
The Left, which has seen all its
“solutions” evaporate, continues to throw down the gauntlet at the feet of the
Right, challenging: “And what is your solution?” To this, the most direct and
honest answer is, simply – “more of the same”, still more of what we have been
doing already for 120 years: More aliyah, more children, more
settlements, amassing greater strength, displaying more cohesion and
steadfastness.
A human creature is capable of making do
in complicated situations where there is no solution, and most of us
experience this sometimes in our private lives. What we find difficult to cope
with is frustration, loss of way, false hopes and broken dreams. It is a fact
that the so-called “settlers”, who are living under conditions of severe
pressure and have all too frequently to bury their murdered dead, still exude
optimism and joie de vivre, while their brethren who reside in more
secure places display weakness, hesitation and even doubt regarding their
future here. We are all made up of the same material, and the entire
difference is that the latter harbored illusions and false hopes, which were
suddenly dashed.
Furthermore, paradoxically, the
internalization of the absence of peace as a fact of life may even produce
psychological alleviation. If the Jewish-Israeli collectivity could have
approached a collective psychiatrist or social psychologist for advice and
spiritual solace, it appears that this would have been his answer: Desist from
the nervous search for peace mirages, stop wringing your hands with the
complaint “Shall the sword devour forever?” Learn and understand that the
Jewish state was not created to spare you the need to fight, but to provide
you with the capability to do so, which was denied Jews for 1,866 years, since
the suppression of the Bar-Kochba rebellion. Keep in mind that despite the
siege and hatred which surround you – you are a great success story and not a
failure.
V. A Virtual Model
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And yet, the human mind will continue
to search for answers, if only theoretical ones. Therefore, even after
having realized that the conflict has no “solution” (a term borrowed from
mathematics) and that the concept “process” (borrowed from chemistry) is
inapplicable, we shall try, as in the Platonic world of ideas, to draw a
model of a modus vivendi, for the time being a virtual one, between
them and us who are fated to remain neighbors. To say the least, such a
model can be useful in arguments, in the perpetual debate between us and the
“world”. It will also satisfy a psychological need to tell ourselves – here
is what could have been done if we had had a partner truly willing to make
peace with the idea that the Jews have returned to their homeland for good.
Also, who knows? Germany
and Japan underwent a democratic mutation, after they were
destroyed in war.
Post World War I Germany, not unlike the Arabs, harbored inferiority
complexes, coupled with deep feelings of resentment at having been wronged –
in the Versailles (peace) Treaty and before – by the whole world. At the
same time, they felt they had not “deserved” their defeat, supposedly being
in all respects better than their enemies and superior to them. This
conviction reached clinical dimensions in the Nazi “Herrenrasse”-doctrine,
which most of the Germans enthusiastically embraced. This whole syndrome of
Nazi fanaticism is very similar to today’s Islamic fundamentalism. Both
cultivate dictatorships, worship power and use violence, or the threat of
violence, as their almost exclusive political tool. Last but not least –
both strive for world domination.
Germany emerged from World War I relatively unscathed. She lost very little
home territory, suffered almost no military occupation, and yet, despite an
enormous loss of blood, waited for only 21 years – the span of time
necessary to raise a new generation of soldiers – to resume the war. Only,
this time her cities were bombed into ruins, she was subjected to military
occupation, starved out for years, her leadership condemned and sentenced,
some of it hanged, she lost vast territories (Eastern Prussia, Pomerania and
Silesia), 15 million of her people became refugees. And yet, it was exactly
this treatment which cured Germany – by now for some 50 years – from the
cult of power and superiority firmly implanted in it. Maybe for the first
time in its history, it is a democracy both genuine and viable.
If it could happen there, and similarly in Japan, perhaps a resounding
Israeli military victory, for once carried out to the finish and not
immediately vitiated at the negotiating table, could one day bring about
that forced reconciliation of the Arabs with the presence of a Jewish state
in their midst, advocated by Jabotinsky in his famous article “ The Iron
Wall”.
The sole possible model, should such a “miracle” happen, is autonomy.
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Let us preface that a Palestinian
autonomy will not arise under an agreement and it is doubtful whether this
is at all desirable. For such a program to succeed we should flee
negotiations, agreements or signatures as from a fire, because by their very
existence they strew obstacles on the path towards reaching any practical
outcome whatsoever. Further, if something is signed, the document itself
becomes the target for attacks and its chances of being realized will suffer
the same fate as all the agreements which we signed with the Arabs from time
immemorial. Autonomy must be established “de facto”, on the ground,
in practice, as much as possible without any “de jure” agreements and
without calling by names the facts that will be created, or affixing tags to
them.
Furthermore, a fait accompli established after a military decision
will shield from personal attacks those who would make peace with these
facts and take part in their implementation. According to the experience of
the 20 years of Israeli rule in YESHA which preceded the first intifada, the
manning of the jobs and posts in the Autonomy by local Arabs should not
constitute a problem, subject to the condition that, at least in the first
stage, we do not demand from them formal recognition and agreement, or the
assumption of political responsibility. If the Autonomy will manage to
function successfully for a number of years, internal social and political
factors will arise spontaneously in the work process, which, in conjunction
with the Israeli mother state, will formulate and shape the Autonomy and its
institutions. Thus, the Autonomy as a modus vivendi will be
established gradually in a modular fashion, on a trial and error basis,
rather than being a hard and fixed model, transported from the planning
table on a take it or leave it basis.
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In the previous chapter we expressed
opposition to direct Israeli rule over the majority of the Arabs in YESHA.
But this does not mean that we can leave the Autonomy suspended in the air
after the fashion of the Camp David Agreement between Begin and Sadat. The
very concept of autonomy carries the implicit assumption regarding the
existence of an overall framework under which the Autonomy is to be
subsumed, with this framework delegating autonomous powers in specified
spheres. An autonomy which is not defined within the system of a mother
country will perforce slide into the status of a sovereign and free state.
It will leave the harbor for the open sea, no rope mooring it to the quay.
This is how Begin’s autonomy meandered via Madrid and Oslo until it reached
the edge of a state, a terrorist state.
Hence, from the aspect of international law the areas of YESHA must be
incorporated into the State of Israel and it is the Israeli Knesset that
will legislate autonomy for the Arab residents.
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There is no point in going into minute
details regarding the division of authority between the mother country and
the Autonomy. The guiding line will be turning over the maximum number of
functions, so the Palestinians can conduct their life without Israeli
intervention.
Israel will retain in her hands, at the very least – security (aside from
internal policing), foreign affairs, basic infrastructure and supervision
over entry and departure at international boundaries.
The residents of the Autonomy will have an Authority with a democratically
elected administration and they will not vote for the Israeli Knesset. If in
the future a Palestinian state will arise across the Jordan River, as the
original British intention had been, the Arabs of the Autonomy will be
citizens of that country. There they can express their national personality,
while in the Autonomy they will implement their home rule.
The boundaries of the Autonomy will not be fixed in accordance with the
Armistice Agreements of Rhodes (“the Green Line”), and definitely not in
accordance with the Oslo Agreements (areas A-C). They will be delineated
with a view towards encompassing the overwhelming majority of the YESHA Arab
population together with the requisite expanse to provide for their
development. It is a plausible assumption that Israel will detach from the
Autonomy areas such as the Jordan Valley and the surroundings of Jerusalem.
On the other hand, it cannot be precluded that areas within the Green Line,
such as the city of Um el Fahm and other concentrations of Arab Israelis
preferring Arab home rule, will be adjoined to the Autonomy. Residents of
such areas will no longer vote for the Knesset. The very existence of such
an option would serve as an excellent tranquilizer for many elements within
the Arab Israeli population who today constitute sources of ferment and
rebellion. Arabs who live in the regions of YESHA that will be detached from
the Autonomy will have the option of receiving Israeli citizenship,
according to the East Jerusalem model.
The acquisition of citizenship in the country across the Jordan River by the
residents of the Autonomy is not necessarily conditioned upon the
establishment of a Palestinian state in Trans-Jordan. The State of Israel
should not intervene in developments within the Hashemite Kingdom.
Therefore, it cannot be precluded that the residents of the Autonomy will
become citizens of the Jordanian Kingdom and vote for the parliament there.
In any event, for the sake of our model it must be assumed that the state to
our east will maintain friendly relations with us. Furthermore, this state,
which in any case possesses a Palestinian majority, can be awarded in a
bilateral agreement a status that will allow it to provide support and
protection to its citizens who reside in the Autonomy.
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The success of the Autonomy is
contingent to a large extent on Israel’s ability to understand and
internalize that the welfare of its inhabitants – in terms of economy,
health, progress and modern government – is in its clear interest. Under the
military government this was not always self-evident and this mistake
wrought a severe payback upon us. Experts say that if Israel had invested in
the Civil Administration even a small percentage of the money which it
poured after Oslo into Arafat’s coffers, the first intifada (1988)
would not have erupted.
The case of Jerusalem furnishes proof. Our sworn enemy, the late Faisal
Husseini, made untiring efforts to set Jerusalem ablaze and did not succeed.
If Jerusalem is relatively tranquil, this tranquility persists despite vast
efforts expended by the Palestinian establishment to incite and goad the
Arab residents of east Jerusalem into rebellion, because there is no place
in the country as important to them as Jerusalem for displaying resistance
and rebellion against Jewish rule.
The reason for Arafat’s failure is not the transformation of Jerusalem’s
Arabs into Zionists, but advantages in the economy, health services and
welfare on the one hand and the aversion to the tyrannical and oppressive
Palestinian rule on the other hand, with a clear preference for a democratic
Rule of Law. This has persisted despite many claims, some of them
undoubtedly justified, regarding a certain unequal treatment of the Arab
sector in Jerusalem.
An example from life: The Israeli police were requested to provide, if
possible, an opinion that the construction of a Jewish neighborhood in
Ma’aleh Ha’Zeitim (Ras el Amud – which overlooks the Temple Mount) endangers
security, since that would touch off severe rioting on the part of the Arab
residents. In this manner, it was sought to find a pretext to prohibit the
project altogether. However, the police were forced to disappoint those who
invited the opinion. It emerged that on the contrary, the Arabs in the
vicinity welcomed the establishment of the neighborhood, on the assumption
that it would raise the level of development and observance of the law in
the entire quarter. The construction of Har Homah (to the south of
Jerusalem, bordering on Bethlehem), also created a greater furor amongst the
Jewish “Peace Bloc” than amongst Jerusalem Arabs. What has occurred in
Jerusalem, and precisely what has not occurred, serves as a most valuable
guide to the future, because it constitutes a rebuttal of prevalent thought
patterns, accepted by Right and Left, which ascribe to the local Arabs the
mechanical imitation of European nationalist concepts from the previous
century.
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A note of caution. All these
arrangements or similar ones will not solve two fundamental problems: The
problem of the Arab refugees in Israel and abroad and the problem of the
increasing population density, primarily in the Gaza Strip. On the narrow
area of western Eretz Israel, 6.5 million residents of Israel and
perhaps 3 million YESHA Arabs are crammed, and this number is about to
increase in a dramatic fashion, thus creating – in addition to the political
threat – an unbearable burden on water and land reserves, on the ecology and
on the economy. These problems can be solved only via resources in land and
finance located outside the area of western Eretz Israel. It is
solely due to narrow nationalist political considerations that the Gaza
Strip is crowded to bursting point, whereas the areas of northern Sinai are
empty. This applies all the more to the empty expanses of Jordan, which
organically belong to the political and economic context of the Palestinians
and represent the only solution to the Palestinian impasse. It was after all
for this very purpose that in 1922 the British separated the two parts of
mandatory Palestine and received the assent of the League of Nations to
close off the eastern portion, constituting 3/4 of the total area, to Jewish
immigration and settlement, including the right to purchase lands, and even
precluding Jewish residence there. All this occurred despite the fact that
this spacious region had been originally earmarked by the League of Nations
to form part of the Jewish people’s national home, to which it belonged in
past history.
VI. The Hoax of Two Palestinian States
At this stage it might be useful to take a closer look at the historical and
political occurrences which gave birth to today’s Jordanian Hashemite Kingdom.
In a letter, written by Lord Balfour, the
British Foreign Minister, on November 2, 1917 to Lord Rothschild, who would
bring it “to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation”, he stated: “His
Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people.”
The letter is known as the Balfour
Declaration. Its text was incorporated in the “Mandate for Palestine”, by
which the League of Nations entrusted to Britain “the administration of the
territory of Palestine”. The Mandate (confirmed on July 24, 1922) made Britain
“responsible for putting into effect the declaration made in November 1917
in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people...”, adding: “...recognition has thereby been given to the
historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds
for reconstituting their national home in that country...”
The Mandate further instructed the
Administration of Palestine: “To facilitate Jewish immigration and
encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency...close settlement by Jews on
the lands, including State lands and waste lands...”
Those, who since 1967 implement
this provision in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, are known as “settlers”. The term
could have been taken in direct quotation from this Mandatory provision, which
– according to Eugene Rostow and Julius Stone, both distinguished professors
in the field of international law, is still in power and will remain so, as
long as the final status of this territory has not been determined.2
Howard Grief
points out that the Mandate (including of course the provision for “close
settlement by Jews on the lands...”) is part of American domestic law by force
of the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine, a treaty signed in 1924 with
Britain, ratified by the US Senate in 1925, formally signed and proclaimed by
President Coolidge.3 The Convention preamble
quotes the Mandate and further states: “...the US consents to the
administration of Palestine by His Britannic Majesty, pursuant to the mandate
recited above.”
The US is therefore bound by its own
domestic law “to facilitate” Jewish settlement in YESHA, even though the
Mandate has ceased to exist. This is the opinion given by the International
Court of Justice on South West Africa4 in the
matter of the South African Mandate over the territory known today as Namibia.
The court rejected South Africa’s claim to be free of the provisions included
in the Mandate, ruling that the substantive obligations of the mandate
continued in force despite the dissolution of the League of Nations, being the
essence of a “sacred trust of civilization”. They were the raison d’être
and original objective of the whole mandatory arrangement and did not depend
on the continued existence of the League of Nations, nor did they come to an
end merely because the League’s supervisory organs ceased to exist.
This precedent clearly applies to YESHA,
until this territory acquires sovereign status under international law, either
by independence or by annexation to another sovereign state.
It follows, that announcements made by
various American administrations, denigrating Jewish settlement in YESHA by
describing it as “obstacles to peace”, or even defining it as “illegal” –
directly contradict American law.
An important point of departure:
Mandatory “Palestine”, and in other words the “Jewish national home”, included
both banks of the river Jordan, up to the border of Iraq in the east. The
Zionist Organization had already invested considerable sums and acquired large
tracts of land in eastern Palestine, Jewish settlers were poised to set up
kibbutzim. But it was not to be.
Less than two months after the
confirmation of the Mandate, on September 16, 1922, the League of Nations
approved a British Memorandum, entitling Britain “to postpone or withhold
application in the territory known as Trans-Jordan” – of all provisions
relating to the Jewish national home. Britain bestowed upon Abdullah ibn
Hussein of Arabia the title “Emir of Trans-Jordan”, at the same time
interdicting Jewish immigration, settlement and land acquisition in the whole
vast area east of the river Jordan, leaving the Jewish national home with only
23% of its original area (Judea, Samaria, Gaza included).
Two reasons prompted Winston Churchill,
the Colonial Secretary, to effect this de facto partition of Palestine,
although de jure Tans-Jordan still constituted part of the Mandate
until 1946, when Trans-Jordan was transformed into the “Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan” with Emir Abdullah as its king. The immediate constraint upon
Churchill was the ouster of Feisal, Abdullah’s elder brother, by the French
from Damascus, whereupon Britain installed him as King of Iraq. Abdullah,
marooned in Amman, then a village (all of the inhabitants of Trans-Jordan only
numbered 200,000), became restive and threatened to attack French Syria with
his riflemen. To solve the problem of Syria having been promised by Britain to
its Hashemite war allies against the Turks, Churchill tore three quarters of
the land from the Jewish national home to create yet another colonial fiefdom.
But there was a second, more significant
reason. As early as 1920, and then again in 1921, the local Arabs in western
Palestine staged murderous riots, targeting Jewish immigration and settlement.
True, in the short period of Feisal’s reign in Damascus they called themselves
“Southern Syrians”, a concept well rooted in the past, also the official
doctrine in Syria even today, but now that the Mandate of Palestine had become
a fait accompli, they engineered a new Palestinian national identity
and demanded the country exclusively for themselves. On the basis of this
background, the British decided to reserve the far larger part of Palestine
for the local Arabs. Trans-Jordan was meant to come under Hashemite rule
(“Palestinian”), in much the same way as Iraq was thoroughly “Iraqi” under
another Hashemite king.
Today, 70% of King Abdullah II of
Jordan’s subjects are Palestinians. The remainder, Bedouins, do not constitute
a nation of their own. In other words, if indeed – in reaction to Zionism –
the local Arabs managed to create a nation of their own, a “negative” of the
Jewish picture, as it were, then this is today the only nation which inhabits
the Kingdom of Jordan.
But this raises a logical dilemma: If the
Hashemite Kingdom is the legitimate expression of the Palestinian national
identity, then the Palestinians already have a state of their own, and their
claim for a state in the so-called “occupied territories” in western Eretz
Israel is, in fact, for a second Palestinian state. On the other hand, if the
Kingdom is not the nation-state of the Palestinians, then where is their
elementary right for self-determination? Why is self-determination valid only
vis-à-vis the Jewish state?
Consider the absurdity: An Arab mother
gave birth in Jerusalem to two children. Does it stand to reason, that the one
who lives in Amman should belong to the “Jordanian nation”, while his brother,
in Jerusalem, is a “Palestinian”? Do not both of them live in the same ancient
Land of Israel or – former Mandatory Palestine?
But the two Palestinian states – “Jordan”
and “Palestine” – would not co-exist, side by side, for long. A PLO-state in
YESHA will immediately strive to annex Jordan, claiming for itself by pan-Arab
consensus the status of “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian
people”. Then the Israeli Arabs, already numbering over a million, will demand
autonomy, “Anschluss” to Greater Palestine to come next.
One must admit that the
Palestinian cause has made fabulous headway, while the Jewish national home is
constantly shrinking, both in ideology and national motivation.
This is particularly spectacular if one
takes a glance at some hard facts, which even the most ardent “Arabist” will
not be able to erase from history:
No encyclopedia preceding 1917 – the year
of the Balfour Declaration, when the Zionist claim began to cast its
Palestinian shadow – mentions the “Palestinian people” in any way.
The Encyclopedia Britannica
(1910-11) says: “Palestine...the territory which in the Old Testament is
claimed as the inheritance of the pre-exilic Hebrews... The river
Jordan...marks a line of delimitation between western and eastern
Palestine...”
Palestine, or Filastin, as homeland of
Arab Palestinians –what a thought! Yet the reason for that is obvious.
The Palestinian claim sounds particularly
hollow on the background of authentic Arab voices. In his testimony before the
Anglo-American Committee (1946), the eminent Arab historian, Professor Philip
Hitti, had this to say:
The Sunday schools have
done a great deal of harm to us, because by smearing the walls of the rooms
with maps of Palestine they are associating it in the mind of the average
American – and I may say perhaps the Englishman too – with Jews. Sir, there
is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.5
Another Arab professor, John Hazam,
declared in his testimony before the same committee: “Before 1917, when
Balfour made his declaration, there was never any Palestine question, or even
any Palestine as a political or geographical entity...”6
In a similar manner, publications
preceding 1950 knew of no “West Bank”. Few would believe today that even the
UN 1947 Partition Plan (Resolution 181) uses terms such as “...the mountainous
country of Judea”, “the Samaria District”.
The “West Bank” was invented following
the invasion of Western Palestine by “Trans-Jordan” in 1948 and after the
annexation of Judea-Samaria to the newly formed “Hashemite Kingdom”. The
apparently neutral term “West Bank” was of course chosen to cleanse the Jewish
connotation of Judea-Samaria.
A Jordanian tourist guide from the year
1959 carries a geographical map showing the “East and West Banks”, while
pre-1967 Israel is designated as “Occupied area of Palestine”. It seems that
only a Jewish presence casts the Palestinian shadow!
Prince Hassan of Jordan, addressing the
Jordanian National Assembly (February 2, 1970), declared: “Palestine is Jordan
and Jordan is Palestine. There is one people and one land with one history and
one destiny.”
One can expect with certainty to hear a
similar statement from Arafat, immediately after proclaiming a Palestinian
state.
Actually, Farouk Kaddoumi, then as now
the PLO’s “Foreign Minister”, expressed the same idea: “There must be a
connection, because the PLO regards Jordanians and Palestinians as one
people.”7
King Hussein had the same message: “The
two peoples are actually one – this is a fact.”8
The naked truth came out in detail in an
interview for the Dutch newspaper, Trouw (March 31, 1977), given by
Zohair Mohsin, head of the Za’ika terror group and member of the PLO Executive
Council, as follows:
It is only for tactical
reasons that we carefully stress our Palestinian identity, for it is in the
national interest of the Arabs to encourage a separate Palestinian identity
to counter Zionism: The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the
ongoing battle against Israel...After we will have attained all our rights
in the whole of Palestine, we must not postpone, even for a single moment,
the reunification of Jordan and Palestine.
We also have this revealing dialogue, on
the highest level, between the late King Hussein and the late President Assad
of Syria, held during the Amman convention, November 1987:
Assad: “Palestine is mine, part of Syria. An independent state called
Palestine never existed.”
Hussein: “The appearance of the Palestinian national personality comes
as an answer to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish. But in truth,
deviation from the national Arab framework is not to be permitted.”
Arafat, who was also there, threatened to
leave the convention.9
The facts and dicta relating to the
defining moments of the territories to the west and to the east of the river
Jordan are anything but past, irrelevant history. On the contrary, in creating
Trans-Jordan, Britain had been quite far-sighted regarding future developments
between the two conflicting and warring peoples. Nevertheless, all those
concerned – the Palestinians, the Israelis and the Jordanians – take great
care to circumvent this subject, each for his own reasons. Israel, in whose
clear interest it should have been to refute the Palestinian complaint of
having been denied a national home, finds itself restrained from raising the
issue for fear of vexing Jordan, with whom its relations have always been a
little better than with the other Arab states.
Two decisive developments, turned the
1922 partition of Palestine, retrospectively, into an irrevocable necessity:
The Holocaust, which wiped out the Jewish masses for whose “close settlement
on the land”, eastern Palestine had been allocated. On the other hand, the
Palestinian 1948 refugees, who are now the majority of the Jordanians, do in
fact live in one and the same country, both east and west of the Jordan River-Eretz
Israel, or former mandatory Palestine.
At the time, the Jewish Agency sharply
protested against the amputation of 77% of the Jewish national home. But today
there is no irredentist movement in Israel in favor of bringing Trans-Jordan
under Israeli rule. And yet, there is one thing Israel cannot, should not,
tolerate: The removal of Jordan from the Israeli-Palestinian equation.
Israel is entitled to reject the cynical
rules of a game, according to which the areas in Trans-Jordan, which were cut
off from the Jewish national home for the purpose of creating a land reserve
for the Palestinians, should be closed to the latter, so as to turn all the
pressure inward, into the minuscule Jewish state, in order to create a
population explosion there. If we have already contributed to them, nolens
volens, 3/4 of our national home, then this contribution should at least
be utilized to fulfill functions vital to their “national home”.
Of course, a vast project which
would embrace Israel and the Autonomy, Egypt and Jordan, will require regional
and international cooperation and the mobilization of resources on a gigantic
scale. This would be a veritable New Middle East, the very antithesis of the
“New Middle East” of Oslo vintage ushered in by Shimon Peres, which is
feasible only upon the ruins of the Jewish state.
VII. Back to Reality
Through the prism of actuality the
aforementioned model is indeed only virtual and totally detached from
Arab-Jewish reality – today and in the foreseeable future.
Therefore, a realistic response to the
question “What is your solution?” is not the simulation game which we call
autonomy, but the continuation of Zionist praxis and even its manifold
intensification. Without it, the Zionist state will not only suffer
stagnation, but our very existence will be in danger. For the State of Israel
standing still is poison. Israel’s situation resembles a performer in a high
wire act, where all physical forces attract him downward, and only the dynamic
movement forward saves him from falling and crashing. The Arabs have all the
material advantages, including the unconditional support of most of the
“world” due to anti-Semitism, love of petroleum, the Arab market and the
strategic weight of their vast expanses and huge masses. And the Arabs are
aware of their strength. Therefore, merely to survive we must strengthen
ourselves all the time spiritually and physically, and in this order.
Our leitmotiv is unilateral
action, free of any agreement or pact with the Arabs. Following the failure of
the Oslo Agreements, even the Israeli Left has now reached the conclusion that
an agreed upon “solution” with the Arabs of YESHA is not possible, and
therefore nothing is left but unilateral action. Only because this camp is
possessed, as by a dybbuk, with the obsession of relinquishing YESHA,
it has hastily fabricated a new artificial “political horizon”, dubbed
“unilateral withdrawal”. Israel is to abandon, without any agreement, most of
the YESHA areas and uproot perhaps a hundred settlements including their
150,000 Jewish inhabitants, and – “apré moi deluge”: Flames of
internecine civil war, kindled within the Jewish people, and rising flames of
enthusiasm and motivation amongst the Arabs, following the flight of the
Israeli Defense Forces and the collapse of the Jewish settlements. Also, the
outside world will slowly arrive at the conclusion that the state of the Jews
in its entirety was but a passing episode. The Palestinians, free even of the
Oslo Agreement stipulations, will immediately proclaim a state and this state
will conclude military agreements with countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Their armored forces and guns will swiftly threaten Jerusalem, Petach Tikva
and Beersheba. The Palestinian state will be flooded by returning refugees,
who will press upon the Green Line. The waters of the mountain aquifer will be
exploited to exhaustion and the air space will be closed off.
These are the starting conditions, under
which Israel will then be compelled to fight an all out regional war, to the
very bitter end, over Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Alternatively, should
these areas also be included in the unilateral withdrawal, then the war will
break out over the boundaries of the 1947 UN resolution and the Arab claim for
the “right of return”.
Even assuming that such a war would have
erupted in any case as a direct and necessary consequence of the Oslo
Agreement, just as the Second World War was born out of the Munich Agreement
of 1938, let the readers judge our prospects for winning and our foreseeable
casualty total under each one of these two scenarios: The present status quo
as a starting line for war, or the situation following unilateral withdrawal
from most areas of YESHA.
Note should be taken that the question
that is now posed in Israel by right and left no longer concerns this or that
agreement with the Arabs, but our own agenda, unilateral in any case: Are we
to retreat and discard everything we own beyond the Green Line, or, on the
contrary – go forward in building Zionism in the original “Zion”, which is
Jerusalem and YESHA?
In this context, listen to an echo from
68 years ago, the voice of Zeev Jabotinsky in his famous article “The Iron
Wall”, which could have been written today:
One cannot dream of a
voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs over the Land of Israel,
neither today nor in the foreseeable future...
Any native people is going
to fight settlers as long as it has a shred of hope to rid itself from the
danger of alien settlement. This is how the Arabs of Eretz Israel are acting
and this is how they will act as long as they have a spark of hope that they
can succeed in preventing the transformation of Palestine into the Land of
Israel...
We have no way of promising
something in exchange to the Arabs of Eretz Israel.... A voluntary agreement
is ruled out... and therefore settlement can proceed apace only under the
protection of a force which is not dependent upon the local population, an
iron wall which the local population will be unable to breach.
We are damaging our cause
with our own hands if we keep prattling about an agreement and din into the
minds of the leaders of the Mandatory Power that an iron wall is not the
essential, but incessant negotiations.
I do not intend to maintain
that any agreement whatsoever is impossible with the Arabs of the Land of
Israel. What stays impossible is a voluntary agreement.
When every crack in the
iron wall will be sealed, only then will the extreme groups lose their
influence...and only then will influence pass to more moderate groups... in
other words the only way to attain an agreement in the future is to totally
abandon any attempt to reach an agreement in the present.
Endnotes
1 |
Ha’aretz, January 12, 2001. |
2 |
Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine – Assault on the Law of Nations,
The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 1981, pp. 121-2. |
3 |
Howard Grief, “The Illegality of the Sharm e-Sheikh Memorandum Under
Israeli Law”, Ariel Center for Policy Research, Policy Paper No. 91, 1999. |
4 |
1950 I.C.J. Reports 128, 131 ff. |
5 |
Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, State
Department Building, January 11, 1946, Ward and Paul official reporters,
p. 5. |
6 |
Ibid, p. 46. For a complete picture, it might be useful to add Ben
Gurion’s reaction to Prof. Hitti’s statement, in his testimony before the
very same committee:
I agree with him
entirely; there is no such thing in history as Palestine, absolutely, but
when Dr. Hitti speaks of history he means Arab history, he is a specialist
in Arab history and he knows his business. In Arab history there is no
such thing as Palestine. Arab history was made in Arabia, in Persia, in
Spain and North Africa. You will not find Palestine in that history, nor
was Arab history made in Palestine. There is not, however, only Arab
history; there is world history and Jewish history and in that history
there is a country by the name of Judea, or as we call it, Eretz
Israel, the land of Israel. We have called it Israel since the days of
Joshua the son of Nun. There was such a country in history, there was and
it is still there. It is a little country, a very little country, but that
little country made a very deep impression on world history and on our
history. This country made us a people; our people made this country. No
other people in the world made this country; this country made not other
people in the world. Now again we are beginning to make this country and
again this country is beginning to make us.
The
Jewish Case before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine as
presented by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Statements and Memoranda
(Jerusalem, The Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1947, pp. 61-2), Cited from:
Arthur Kahn and Thomas R. Murray, The Palestinians – A Political
Masquerade, A.F.S.I. |
7 |
Newsweek, March 1977. |
8 |
Broadcast on Egyptian TV, October 10, 1977. |
9 |
Ma’ariv, November 30, 1987. |