86
years of missed opportunities
between the Israelis and the
Palestinians
By
Jonathan
Power
May 28, 2003
LONDON - "It is a maddening circle of suspicion and
fear," editorializes the New York Times. But this is how
it has always been since the days of the Balfour
Declaration in 1917 when the British government gave the
official nod to the Zionists who wanted to re-create a
biblical homeland on what for 700 years, until the
break-up of the Ottoman empire in the wake of Turkey's
defeat in World War 1, had been Muslim territory. In all
the intervening years not once have the two parties been
at a common point of compromise at the same time.
The Balfour Declaration was a misguided attempt to
meet the vision of what were then a relatively few Jewish
idealists who wished to turn back the historical clock.
If every ethnic group in the world asserted so vigorously
ancient yearnings the world would become totally chaotic
in a very short time, and none quicker than the North
American continent itself. Indeed if there hadn't been
the holocaust many years later it is doubtful if either
the U.S. or Europe would have felt the deep pangs of
guilt that solidified their, until then, wavering support
for the Zionist enterprise. Nor would so many Jews have
taken the Zionist ideal so seriously.
In 1936, twelve years before the British decided to
throw up their hands and withdraw from Palestine, they
came up with their own plan for partition. At that moment
it looked as if London had belatedly understood the
reasons for Arab hostility and resistance and had
responded reasonably intelligently, in a way they should
have thought of in 1917. Yet the Arabs refused what by
today's standards would be regarded as a good deal. They
couldn't accept partition just as the Israeli right can't
accept it today. Besides they always maintained that
Palestine had been twice promised. During the struggle to
undermine the Ottoman Empire, Britain had told the
Palestinians they too would get their homeland in return
for cooperation.
The Jewish population has not, until relatively
recently, favoured partition. Yet the leadership of
Israel at important moments has pushed for it. Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion, who led the war of
independence when, in the wake of the departing British,
three neighboring states attacked Israel, worked
hard to restrain the urgings of his generals to seize the
West Bank. Ben-Gurion preferred legitimacy to real
estate. After the later 1967 war when Israel had overrun
the West Bank the then retired Ben-Gurion said Israel
must unilaterally withdraw from the occupied territories.
But he was ignored and the settlement movement began,
although it was only a small minority who thought this a
sensible idea. At this point it might have been
relatively easy to squash it. But Washington connived
with the settlement mood, even allowing tax exemptions
for organizations who subsidized the settlers. At that
time the U.S. was in the thick of the Cold War and
instinctively pro Israel, since the country had
humiliated the Soviet Union's Middle Eastern clients. It
was a great historical moment for compromise missed.
Palestinian sentiment was prepared to back a
demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank. The
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was still a
marginal group and the Palestinians docile. The Israelis
had captured it without firing a shot. Around this
time Israeli intelligence began to encourage Hamas, the
militant "Greater Palestine" movement as a balance to the
PLO, just as later the CIA gave financial and arms
support to the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to
resist the Soviet occupying army.
Over the years, as the settlers have grown both
numerically and politically strong, the wise perceptions
of Ben-Gurion were relegated to the distant background
until Yitzhak Rabin won the premiership and earnestly
began to try and break the impasse, only to be felled by
an assassin from the settler movement. A later
Labour government led by Ehud Barak tried to do the same,
becoming tantalizing close to settling a deal on the
terms of formal partition. If on less generous lines that
the British plan of 1936 or Ben-Gurion's ideas, it was,
given the sea of bitterness on the Israeli side and the
strength of the settler lobby, nothing less than
miraculous. The PLO head Yasser Arafat inexplicably
turned it down, although his negotiators, along with
Barak's, showed in the subsequent negotiations at Taba,
just before the Israeli election that led to Sharon's
victory, that the gaps between the two sides that had not
been closed at Camp David were quite bridgeable.
Is this what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon means when he
said earlier this week that "The moment has arrived to
divide this tract of land between us and the
Palestinians"? Or is it a ploy to buy time with the Bush
Administration that seems at last to be stepping up the
pressure. There is nothing to suggest in Sharon's past
that he is a Ben-Gurion figure. Yet for all the rightwing
leanings of his government and the strength of the
settlers the opinion polls show, as they have since the
time of Rabin, that most of the time a good majority of
Israelis want such a settlement. For the first time Egypt
and Saudi Arabia are behind it. Sharon must know that if
in 86 years the Palestinian cause could not be squashed
it is unlikely he can do it now. Some sort of compromise
he appears to realize is inevitable. But for it to work
over the next 86 years it has to be a generous one,
otherwise there is simply no point- "the maddening circle
of suspicion and fear", that leads to more and more
violence destroying the economies and livelihoods, not to
mention that precious state, the peace of mind, of both
sides will never be broken.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
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