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yasser arafat
In Gaza We Are Witnessing the 21st Century Version of How the West Was Won
In a terrible historical irony, Israel has been caught and is paying the price for holding the European colonial bag.
Jan 24, 2024
At least 25,000 Gazans, the vast majority children and women, have been killed or wounded. Twenty-five thousand is one-in-a-hundred Gazans and just over 20 times the number of Israelis killed in October. If we translate that proportionately into U.S. numbers, it’s the equivalent of more than 3 million U.S. people. Three percent of all Gazans have been either killed or wounded, and no end is in sight.
Nowhere is safe from Israeli bombs and shelling: 70% of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations humanitarian chief describes Gaza as uninhabitable with water, food, and fuel still in desperately short supply. UNRWA, the U.N. relief and aid agency in Gaza, reports that 570,000 people face “catastrophic hunger.” Hundreds of thousands, it reports, face death from famine, thirst, disease, and lack of medical care.
Under pressure from the Biden administration and world public opinion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to pursue Hamas with more surgical strikes, but the devastating and indiscriminate bombings go on and the daily death toll mounts.
Deep and profound Zionist racism lies at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and today’s genocidal war in Gaza.
How can we understand the reality that descendants of a people who suffered genocide can inflict it—albeit in a different form—on another people? Was it inevitable? What besides an immediate cease-fire, which is an urgent necessity, is the alternative?
The answers are not complicated: First, we need to recognize that brutalizing people does not necessarily ennoble them, though many do transcend their suffering and become powerful agents for justice. Trauma, as Palestinians certainly know, reverberates through generations.
As a Jew, it is also painful to recognize, as I have for many years, that deep and profound Zionist racism lies at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and today’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Many who escaped European pogroms, survived the Holocaust and Soviet antisemitism, and the banalities of American life carried Euro-American racism and colonial values with them to Israel and to the lands and people conquered in 1967. Years ago, I participated in interviews with Israel’s esteemed former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with Jerusalem Mayor (later Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and others. The racism of three Israeli leaders was shocking, although Eban’s was more elegantly expressed. In another interview. Sharon’s water minister Meir Meir pledged that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories would have “enough water… to drink.” Six weeks after leaving California, one West Bank settler explained that with every war God had liberated the land for Jews, and that it is their responsibility to settle and hold it.
God has been on the side of conquering imperialists from time immemorial.
In 1981 Beirut, months before Ariel Sharon’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon, during an unimpressive interview with U.S. peace advocates, Yasser Arafat nailed it, saying “It’s cowboys and Indians all over again.” In Gaza today we are witnessing the 21st century version of how the West was won.
My Bona Fides
I am Jewish, born in 1946 in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. My father fought in that war and satisfied his ambition of pissing in the Rhine. When visiting one of my best friends, I would often see the Auschwitz numbers tattooed on his grandmother’s arm. Eichmann’s capture in Argentina generated a flood tide of paperback Holocaust literature, and as a young teenager I shoplifted books from the local drug store and read about people like me being transformed into lampshades or reduced to the ashes that lined concentration camp paths. I was taught three fundamental lessons from the Judeocide: Never again to anyone. Never turn your head away from witnessing and responding to injustice. That there is a correlation between truth and who lives or dies and how.
Thus, I found my way into the civil rights movement and, beginning in the 1970s, to the Middle East. Back then, there was little or no substantive literature about the Middle East in the United States. You could find Israeli propaganda and a few tomes about King Tut’s tomb. But landing in London in 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, which we mistakenly thought had ended the Indochina War, and eager to learn what was being done in my name in the Middle East, the legacy of British colonialism meant that histories and analyses there were readily available. I made a feast of them. I also had the unique privilege of working with and learning from Israeli pacifists on the War Resisters International Council and Said Hammami, then the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representative in London.
There was much to learn. Stereotypes and mythologies were shattered. Once during a four person conference working group with Hammami, the Algerian ambassador and his assistant amazingly echoed the words of Golda Meir: “The Palestinian people don’t exist.” The ambassador had fully embraced the Arab nations’ lesson from their catastrophic 1967 defeat and humiliation. No more sacrifices for Palestinians.
Israel has self-defeatingly transformed itself into a pariah nation.
I first traveled to the Middle East in 1975 as part of a Breira (precursor to Jewish Voices for Peace) and National Council of Churches fact-finding delegation. We arrived in Beirut 15 minutes before the civil war started, and it was surprising how quickly a war-resisting pacifist could become accustomed to gunfire. Most memorable in Beirut was our recorded interview with PLO adviser Sabri Jiryis, who that year met with U.S. leaders in Washington, D.C. and was deported on Henry Kissinger’s orders. With us, Jiryis put forward the case for a two-state solution in an interview that was cut short when gunfire moved from four blocks away, to three, to two, and then surrounded us.
We arrived in Jerusalem following a Palestinian bombing in Zion Square. Most of the dead were Israelis, but three Palestinians were also killed—women shopping for a wedding dress. In the wee hours of the following morning, I was awakened by the haunting sounds of Palestinian women ululating in the cemetery behind my hotel.
There was also cognitive dissonance at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum. The first exhibit rightly documented Nazi marginalization of Jews and the confiscation of Jewish properties. But Yad Vashem was built on seized Palestinian land and is a little more that a stone’s throw from the site of the 1948 Deir Yasin massacre of Palestinians.
Years later in Gaza, I endured what may have been the worst night of my life. The territory was under curfew, and we were being briefed by an UNRWA official when we were called to come out to witness young Yusef’s dead body laid out in a stone shed. With his buddies, he’d been violating the curfew and castigating patrolling IDF troops. One soldier couldn’t take it, knelt on the ground for greater stability, and, from 50 yards, shot Yusef twice between the eyes. The rest of the night was a struggle over who would get Yusef’s body, the IDF or his family,
And on another occasion, with colleagues, I was almost kidnapped in Gaza.
Beginning in 1976, after returning to the U.S., I was privileged to work with some of Israel’s founders, men who had created the Israeli Council for Israel-Palestine Peace (ICIPP). They had issued a manifesto describing what they could accept as a foundation for Israeli-PLO negotiations. Their manifesto was published in 14 languages to ensure that Palestinian leaders wouldn’t miss it. Arafat sent signals indicating an openness to exploring possibilities on the basis of the manifesto. What were initially secret negotiations ensued and eventually became what we know as the “Peace Process.” Uri Avnery, who in his youth fought in the Irgun. was a leading figure in those negotiations and later described them in his compelling book: My Enemy, My Friend. It was anything but a smooth process. In 1978, Hammami was murdered in London by Syrian intelligence. Issam Sartawi, the leading Palestinian figure in secret negotiations, was killed by an Abu Nidal assassin..
The Massacre and the Genocide
The Hamas massacre of October 7 was unconscionable, certainly illegal, and at the far end of immoral brutality. Even if it is seen as a “jail break” from the “open air prison” of the 16-year Gaza blockade, with all of the suffering that has entailed, the massacre was unconscionable, to be condemned, self-defeating (witness 25,000 dead and counting), and never repeated.
That said, as Thomas Friedman has repeatedly written in The New York Times these last three months, there were other alternative responses that would have reinforced Israeli security and allowed it to retain the moral high ground. Instead, Netanyahu and the most right-wing and racist government in Israel’s history opted to destroy Palestinian Gaza. Israeli General and War Cabinet member Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” announced the IDF’s racist, genocidal campaign. And as the South Africans documented in the Hague, similar expressions of racism and commitments to elimination have flowed from the mouths of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, other cabinet members, military leaders, and military units, as well as in the Israeli press.
Daily images testify to the reality that Netanyahu’s and his government’s attacks have been targeted against the people of Gaza more than Hamas.
Beyond tragedy, compounding its history of what Jimmy Carter termed apartheid not long after his presidency, Israel has self-defeatingly transformed itself into a pariah nation. As Friedman explains, beyond the consequences of international isolation, with increasing numbers of Israelis already leaving for the West, the Zionist experiment itself may be at risk. Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority reports that half a million Israelis have left the country since October 7.
Another tragic but predictable consequence of the genocide is something that the refugee Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt predicted in 1948. Just or not (and it is not), the world’s Jews would be judged by how Israel related to its Arab neighbors. Israel’s indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians will fuel antisemitism for decades to come. That said, and to be appreciated, are the words of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the nonviolent Palestinian leader in Ramallah who cited and appreciated cease-fire demonstrations by U.S. rabbis and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Daily images testify to the reality that Netanyahu’s and his government’s attacks have been targeted against the people of Gaza more than Hamas. The goal goes far beyond destroying Hamas. Rather, as we witness Gazans being driven to the border with Egypt and read Israeli cabinet members’ appeals and plans for “thinning” the Palestinian population in Gaza, the ultimate goal is a second and greater Nakba. But, unlike 1948, Egypt is not cooperating as Jordan did 75 years ago.
Roots of Tragedy
The roots of today’s crimes trace to centuries of European antisemitism and the Balfour Doctrine which was designed to reinforce British (and since 1948/56) U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Arab world. Theodor Herzel’s Zionism sought “a land without people for a people without a land.” But as with all other colonial settler initiatives (think the U.S. South Africa, Australia) there were people on the land. Worth noting is that the Nuseibeh (Muslim) family, which traces its presence in Jerusalem to the 4th century C.E., has long held the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In a terrible historical irony, Israel has been caught and is paying the price for holding the European colonial bag. Indeed, it is cowboys and Indians all over again. But the 21st century is not the 18th or 19th centuries. Genocides are witnessed in real time and rightly generate global outrage.
Mattityahu Peled was Israel’s third ranking general in 1967. He was later a principal figure in the secret negotiations with the PLO and an uncompromising peace advocate in the Israeli Knesset.. During a speaking tour in the United States, he described how the Israeli military pressed Prime Minister Levi Eshkol not to accept President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to mediate the crisis initiated by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Israeli army knew what it could do. And with Eshkol’s green light they it did it: destroying the Egyptian Air Force in the first hour of the war and then conquering the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem. and Gaza all within six days.
Peled once described an exchange he once had with Ezer Weizman, formerly the commander of the Israeli Air Force and later the IDF’s chief of staff, within days of Israel’s conquests. The exchange illuminates the essence of the totally unnecessary Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. Walking in East Jerusalem, Peled turned to Weizman and said, “Now we can create the Palestinian state on our own terms and be done with the Palestinian problem.” Weizman responded, “What? Are you crazy?” And from there followed the commitment and campaign for colonial settlements at enormous human cost and in violation of international law in the pursuit of creating Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the sea..
Recall, that even David Ben-Gurion, long honored as the father of his nation, refused to declare what Israel’s borders would be. No Israeli leader has done so since. The goal has always been a Greater Israel, just as settler colonialists here in the United States expanded the country from the Atlantic coast, across the continent to the Pacific Ocean with genocidal campaigns, conquests, and settlements.
And From Here
Would that the plug could be pulled on the Netanyahu government today. Even as we properly condemn the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and write in “Cease-fire” in presidential primaries, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been playing with the plug. While in Jerusalem, he has been meeting with members of Israel’s increasingly divided war cabinet and with at least one opposition leader in what appears to be some drilling at work in the wall of Israeli solidarity.
Extending the war means extending Netanyahu’s time in office and delaying his hoped-for ouster and imprisonment for corruption. Having launched a poorly conceived war of revenge and conquest, the Israeli prime minister has placed himself and Israel in an impossible situation: Even General Gadi Eisenkot of the war cabinet concedes that the IDF cannot achieve its announced goal of totally destroying Hamas. Netanyahu thus finds himself in an impossible position: fighting a war that cannot be won and which politically he cannot afford to lose.
There is of course a way out: Biden could and should declare, “Enough!”, cease providing diplomatic cover in the United Nations and elsewhere for the IDF’s genocide, and end the deluge of weapons flowing to the IDF that makes the Gaza massacre possible.
One possible Netanyahu escape hatch is to widen the war in order to bring the U.S. more deeply into it on Israel’s behalf. This helps us to explain the drone assassination of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards intelligence chief in Damascus and the ultimatum Israel has delivered to the Lebanese government to contain Hezbollah in Lebanon, or else.
Would that it was otherwise. President Joe Biden appears to be falling toward Netanyahu’s trap as our president widens the conflict with an unwinnable war against the Houthis in Yemen.
There is of course a way out: Biden could and should declare, “Enough!”, cease providing diplomatic cover in the United Nations and elsewhere for the IDF’s genocide, and end the deluge of weapons flowing to the IDF that makes the Gaza massacre possible. These and the firm resolve that constructive U.S.-Israel relations depend on an Israeli commitment to engage in credible diplomacy for either a two-state solution or another political framework that guarantees Palestinians national self-determination and the full exercise of their human rights.
It is worth noting that in the midst the war and genocide, the Saudis have reiterated their peace plan, which includes normalization of relations with Israel..
Noam Chomsky once remarked that there are rational solutions to the existential threats that confront humanity. The question, he concluded, is whether we have the will to implement them.
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Netanyahu's Bold Boast: 'Proud' to Thwart Palestinian State Creation
'Netanyahu not just admitting to monumental deception but gloating about it'
Dec 17, 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he was "proud" of preventing the creation of a Palestinian state during a press conference in Tel Aviv Saturday night.
Speaking alongside Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu claimed that he had halted the progression of the Oslo peace process, which began in 1993, calling the Oslo Accords "a fateful mistake" and said the results of the “little Palestinian state in Gaza” brought about by the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 demonstrated the danger of allowing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank.
The Oslo Accords were an agreement signed by Israel and the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) that saw the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a process that was meant to lead to a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Netanyahu's comments come after several Israeli officials said that there would be no two-state solution following the end of Israel's indiscriminate war on Gaza, which has destroyed much of the occupied territory and killed at least 18,800 Palestinians, primarily women and children, in Israeli attacks since October 7, according to the territory's health ministry.
Israel's right-wing ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, answered "absolutely no" when asked during an interview on Sky News last Wednesday about whether a two-state solution would arise following the end of the Gaza War. "Israel knows today, and the world should know now that the reason the Oslo Accords failed is because the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel," Hotovely said.
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Exactly Like Its Predecessors, Trump's Peace Plan Has Been Designed to Fail
The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap set by the president and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens
Jul 01, 2019
Donald Trump's supposed "deal of the century," offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peace-making, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.
For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.
The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away--to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.
Even Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducement he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.
That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.
But Israel's image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
It is worth examining what those landmark "missed opportunities" consisted of.
The first was the United Nations' Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel's telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians' homeland.
But the real story is rather different.
The recently formed UN was effectively under the thumb of the imperial powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. All three wanted a Jewish state as a dependent ally in the Arab-dominated Middle East.
Fuelled by the dying embers of western colonialism, the Partition Plan offered the largest slice of the Palestinian homeland to a minority population of European Jews, whose recent immigration had been effectively sponsored by the British empire.
As native peoples elsewhere were being offered independence, Palestinians were required to hand over 56 per cent of their land to these new arrivals. There was no chance such terms would be accepted.
However, as Israeli scholars have noted, the Zionist leadership had no intention of abiding by the UN plan either. David Ben Gurion, Israel's founding father, called the Jewish state proposed by the UN "tiny." He warned that it could never accommodate the millions of Jewish immigrants he needed to attract if his new state was not rapidly to become a second Arab state because of higher Palestinian birth rates.
Ben Gurion wanted the Palestinians to reject the plan, so that he could use war as a chance to seize 78 per cent of Palestine and drive out most of the native population.
For decades, Israel was happy to entrench and, after 1967, expand its hold on historic Palestine.
In fact, it was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who made the biggest, unreciprocated concessions to peace. In 1988, he recognised Israel and, later, in the 1993 Olso accords, he accepted the principle of partition on even more dismal terms than the UN's--a state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine.
Even so, the Oslo process stood no serious chance of success after Israel refused to make promised withdrawals from the occupied territories. Finally, in 2000 President Bill Clinton called together Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to a peace summit at Camp David.
Arafat knew Israel was unwilling to make any meaningful compromises and had to be bullied and cajoled into attending. Clinton promised the Palestinian leader he would not be blamed if the talks failed.
Israel ensured they did. According to his own advisers, Barak "blew up" the negotiations, insisting that Israel hold on to occupied East Jerusalem, including the Al Aqsa mosque, and large areas of the West Bank. Washington blamed Arafat anyway, and refashioned Israel's intransigence as a "generous offer."
A short time later, in 2002, Saudi Arabia's Peace Initiative offered Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a minimal Palestinian state. Israel and western leaders hurriedly shunted it into the annals of forgotten history.
After Arafat's death, secret talks through 2008-09--revealed in the Palestine Papers leak--showed the Palestinians making unprecedented concessions. They included allowing Israel to annex large tracts of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians' expected capital.
Negotiator Saeb Erekat was recorded saying he had agreed to "the biggest [Jerusalem] in Jewish history" as well as to only a "symbolic number of [Palestinian] refugees' return [and a] demilitarised state ... What more can I give?"
It was a good question. Tzipi Livni, Israel's negotiator, responded, "I really appreciate it" when she saw how much the Palestinians were conceding. But still her delegation walked away.
Trump's own doomed plan follows in the footsteps of such "peace-making."
In a New York Times commentary last week Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, candidly encapsulated the thrust of this decades-long diplomatic approach. He called on the Palestinians to "surrender," adding: "Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission."
The peace process was always leading to this moment. Trump has simply cut through the evasions and equivocations of the past to reveal where the West's priorities truly lie.
It is hard to believe that Trump or Kushner ever believed the Palestinians would accept a promise of "money for quiet" in place of a state based on "land for peace."
Once more, the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it--it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leaderships are united--again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.
The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens.
When Trump's plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory.
The Palestinans will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos. And decades of western diplomacy will finally have arrived at its preordained destination.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
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