World of nuance

Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance. The Barak story is pertinent to Jimmy Carter’s account of the world’s most intractable conflict. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has provoked strong criticism of the former president by some American supporters of the Jewish state. Their gripe partly involves the tiresome refrain that questioning that state’s policies or actions somehow involves being ‘antiIsraeli’ or, worse still, anti-Semitic. It is the familiar tactic used by Israel’s most strident advocates to shut down debate about the country. But another, more difficult, element is Carter’s alleged softness on terrorism. Kenneth Stein, a member of the Carter Centre who resigned in protest over the book, wrote recently that its most troubling aspect was ‘Carter’s apparent willingness to condone the killing of Israelis’. The charge stems essentially from a comment on page 213. Here, Carter writes that it is imperative ‘that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace [drawn up by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia] are accepted by Israel’. The problem lies in ‘will’ and ‘when’. Is Carter really saying that terrorism is a legitimate tool until a peace deal is done? If so, he would seem to have out-Baraked Barak in conceding the reality from the other side. But such an interpretation hardly sits with Carter’s comment earlier in the book that Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians were ‘morally reprehensible and politically counterproductive. These dastardly acts … are almost suicidal for the Palestinian cause.’ One of Carter’s problems is that he has entered the world of nuance. For fundamentalists on both sides of the divide there can be no such phenomenon. They prefer Orwellian simplicity and the superiority of their own twoor four-legged views. Selective and, at times, deliberately distorted quotation is part and parcel of this. So too is the troublingly fine line between terrorism and national liberation. The message Carter conveys on this is unoriginal but bears repeating: occupation produces violence. The moral and indeed politically pragmatic question that follows is the radius of such violence. Does Israeli occupation – and settlement of the West Bank – make Israelis in Tel Aviv cafés ‘legitimate’ targets of Palestinian anger? Should that anger be directed only at those wearing Israeli military uniforms in the West Bank itself? Or should the settlers be targeted as the practical embodiment of Israeli usurpation? If Israel eliminates individuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (and elsewhere), should it not expect retaliation in kind? Here, it is worth noting comments by the former Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, assassinated by an Israeli missile in early 2004. In 2003, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising against the Israelis, which cost more than 5000 lives, the majority of them Palestinian, Yassin observed that the ‘main battle is against Israeli soldiers and settlers’. Attacks inside Israel, he asserted, were a ‘response to Israel’s crimes against our people’. This takes us to the broader issue of whether Carter’s criticisms of Israel lean towards the anti-Semitic. It is truly extraordinary that those who claim to be ardent friends of Israel often seem to know so little about the country. As any visitor quickly discovers, Israelis have made an art form of no-holds-barred wrangling about the state of the world, the region, the nation, the family and the individual, and everything in between. There is no more vigorous criticism of Israeli behaviour than within Israel itself. Debate in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), elected through a system of proportional representation generous to smaller parties, makes Australian parliamentary behaviour look limp by comparison. Carter notes that, during a presidential visit to Israel in 1979, he was invited to address the Knesset. ‘Although I was able to conclude my remarks with just a few interruptions, it was almost impossible for either Prime Minister Begin or others to speak.’ Such argumentativeness, sadly, seems to sharpen bias rather than abrade it. Many of the protagonists on either side of the conflict are programmed to hear and to read only that which suits their prejudice. To write about the causes of violence is somehow to endorse terrorism. Yet it is surely possible to support Israel and to criticise its policies; possible also to sympathise with the Palestinian predicament and to abhor some Palestinian actions. The use of the ‘A’ word in the title of Carter’s book caused offence in some quarters. Yet Carter’s criticisms pale in comparison to those offered by a few prominent Israelis. In 2002, for example, a former attorney-general in the Rabin government of the 1990s, Michael Ben-Yair, wrote that ‘we enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society … In effect, we established an apartheid régime in the occupied territories immediately after their capture [in 1967]. That oppressive régime exists to this day.’ In the closing summary of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid Carter suggests that there are two interrelated obstacles to peace in the Middle East: 1. Some Israelis believe that they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; 2. Some Palestinians react by honouring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories. These two points boil down to two words: land and terror. As long as Palestinians are denied a viable state of their own, some of them will resort to violence. Israel argues that it will never negotiate under fire. Palestinians retort that Israel will never negotiate unless it is under fire. When the smoke clears – temporarily – more bodies lie in the street and new hatred lies in the heart. Carter takes particular aim at Israeli settlement policy. So he should. It beggars belief that Israel and its die-hard supporters cling to the notion that the problems with peacemaking are all the fault of the other side. For almost forty years, Palestinians have witnessed the relentless alienation of the very land that might have become their state – indeed, must become their state if it is to have any chance of viability. It is true that the eight thousand or so Israeli settlers in Gaza have now been withdrawn. But this was driven by Ariel Sharon’s determination to keep the bulk of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Not for good reason was Sharon deemed the father of the settlement movement. We might recall that the fitful progress of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s was accompanied by a dramatic increase in Israeli settler numbers in the West Bank. Oslo did not expressly forbid settlement expansion but did require the ‘integrity and status’ of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to be preserved in the period leading up to final status negotiations. Sharon’s interpretation of this, as Carter notes, was to urge Israelis to ‘move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements’. Israelis certainly took this to heart. During the ten years after Oslo was launched in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled, to around 230,000. Today there are some 250,000. According to Israel’s Bureau of Statistics, population growth in Israel proper between 2001–05 averaged just on 1.9 per cent a year; yet the West Bank settler population continued to grow by approximately five per cent annually. Little wonder that Dennis Ross – at the forefront of American peacemaking efforts during the Clinton years, and no enemy of Israel – wrote in his hefty memoir that one of the mythologies of Oslo was ‘that it was only the Palestinians who failed to fulfil their commitments. Usually [italics added] it was both sides.’ Another Carter target is Israel’s security barrier, which he describes as more an ‘imprisonment wall’ than a ‘security fence’. We should all have sympathy with Israel’s concern to rid its citizens of the scourge of terrorist attacks emanating from the West Bank (and Gaza). Sharon could in fact have created both greater security and a realistic political demarcation between Israelis and Palestinians. But that would have meant building the wall along the 1967 border. Instead, it lops off around nine per cent of the West Bank to encompass Israeli settlements. In the process, Carter notes: the wall cuts directly through Palestinian villages, divides families from their gardens and farmland, and includes 375,000 Palestinians on the ‘Israeli’ side of the wall, 175,000 of whom are outside Jerusalem … The area between the segregation barrier and the Israeli border has been designated a closed military region for an indefinite period of time. Israeli directives state that every Palestinian over the age of twelve living in the closed area has to obtain a ‘permanent resident permit’ from the civil administration to enable them to live in their own homes. They are considered to be aliens … While Carter does not draw a direct comparison between these directives and apartheid South Africa’s infamous pass laws, the thought hangs on the air. Carter does observe that the motivation behind the ‘forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa – not racism but the acquisition of land’. The dividing line between these two elements, however, appears almost as paper-thin as that between terrorist and freedom fighter. Ethnic cleansing, relocation or the gentler euphemism of ‘transfer’ has bobbed around in Israeli thinking since long before the creation of the modern state. The roll-call of Israeli notables hankering after the idea includes Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. One of its most energetic and vulgar advocates is Avigdor Lieberman, founder of the Yisrael Beytenu (Israel Is Our Home) party, which won eleven seats in Israel’s 2006 election. Among Lieberman’s contributions over the past several years to a resolution of the conflict has been a description of Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up nearly twenty per cent of the country’s total population, as its ‘number one problem’; that these citizens should ‘take their bundles and get lost’; and that Palestinian prisoners held by Israel should be bussed to the (perhaps aptly named) Dead Sea and drowned. In late 2006 Lieberman called for the execution of any Arab Israeli parliamentarian who met with representatives of the Hamas-led Palestinian government. These might be dismissed as the dribble of the deranged, except that Lieberman is now Israel’s deputy prime minister and minister for strategic affairs. An opinion poll published in September 2006 placed Lieberman second, after Benjamin Netanyahu, as the preferred Israeli prime minister. (The current incumbent, Ehud Olmert, came fifth.) One of Israel’s finest writers, David Grossman, described Lieberman’s political elevation as a ‘brutal kick’ to Israeli democracy: the ‘appointment of a compulsive pyromaniac to head the country’s firefighters’. What is curious about Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – and the reception it received – is that for all the book’s readability it is a mostly unremarkable account of the forces at work in this troubled part of the world. Carter’s admiration for Anwar Sadat, who led Egypt into a peace treaty with Israel and paid with his life; his wariness about the then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; his respect for Jordan’s King Hussein and indeed the Syrian President Hafez al-Assad (both now dead); and his despair over America’s approach to the Middle East are of interest but hardly earth-shaking. Carter’s way out of the mess is firmly rooted in the decades-old land-for-peace formula that he helped put into practice in the Camp David Accords, paving the way for Israeli–Egyptian peace in the late 1970s. Carter sketches three key requirements for a resolution of the conflict. First, the ‘security of Israel must be guaranteed’, with the Arabs acknowledging openly and specifically that Israel is a reality and has a right to exist in peace. Second, the internal debate within Israel ‘must be resolved in order to define Israel’s permanent legal borders’. This is code for no more Greater Israel and for a Jewish state confined to its pre-1967 borders, unless ‘modified by mutually agreeable land swaps’. Third, the ‘sovereignty of all Middle East nations and sanctity of international borders must be honoured’. On this, Carter writes there is little doubt ‘that accommodation with the Palestinians can bring full Arab recognition of Israel and its right to live in peace’. The great difficulty of course is turning these worthy ideas into realities. Carter offers little on this, other than a hope that his book might provoke debate over how a lasting peace might be attained. In the longer term, he might achieve that debate. In the short term, reaction to the book has again exposed the bunker mentality that too often passes for discussion about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Henry Siegman, senior fellow for the Middle East on the Council on Foreign Relations and a former head of the American Jewish Congress, observed that criticism of Carter’s book was ‘noteworthy only for what it reveals about the ignorance of the American political establishment, both Democrat and Republican, on the subject of the Israel–Palestine conflict’. One question that should now scratch our minds is whether in fact it is too late for a land-for-peace deal leading to a two-state solution. This is not just because of the loss of significant tracts of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements and their supporting infrastructure. It is also whether the underlying dynamic has shifted irreversibly. For much of the twentieth century, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was nationalist in character. The struggle was about a line on a map. We all know now where to draw that line – roughly along Israel’s pre-1967 borders. But the rise of Islamism and the election by the Palestinians of a Hamas government; the American débâcle in Iraq; an emboldened Iran pursuing both a nuclear weapons capability and a divisive Shia-outreach programme; and the limits of Israeli military power illuminated by its failure to destroy Hezballah have made Israeli–Palestinian peacemaking even more problematic. Israel’s defenders are right to argue the unfairness of blaming all the woes of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is a good excuse but a bad justification for many of those woes. Fixing it would not make the problems goes away. In fact, a resolution could make life more difficult for sclerotic Arab dictators by removing an ‘external’ reason for their own glaring shortcomings. But they should not be overly concerned. The reality is that Israelis and Palestinians are singularly adept at giving each other reasons for continuing bad behaviour. Settlements, terrorism, targeted killings, collective punishment, arbitrary detention – the envelope of excuses may not be all that thick, but its contents are deadly. Israel and the United States preached the virtues of Palestinian democratisation, then spurned the Hamas government it delivered. Understandable perhaps, but possibly short-sighted and certainly hypocritical. A senior Hamas figure recently stated that the problem was not ‘that there is an entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent.’ Perhaps he was merely playing with words. Perhaps, though, it was a chink in the door for negotiations between enemies. We are unlikely to find out any time soon. It is much more comfortable for Israel to hide behind the mantra of there being no partner for peace. It is hardly any better on the Palestinian side, where victimhood provides cover for the most self-contradictory behaviour. Qassam rockets fired from Gaza are poorly aimed at individual Israelis but score direct hits on Israeli popular opinion. Carter notes that ‘following policies of confrontation and inflexibility, Palestinians have alienated many moderate leaders in Israel and America and have not regained any of their territory or other basic rights’. Carter writes that a lasting and comprehensive peace will not be possible unless Israel reverses ‘colonizing the internationally recognised Palestinian territory, and unless the Palestinians respond by accepting Israel’s right to exist, free of violence’. Those who follow events on the ground have known that for a very long time, as do the protagonists themselves. If anything, peace today is even more of a mirage. And books such as Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid quickly become yet another plea for reasonableness in a demonstrably unreasonable world.

Peter Rodgers

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