John Kerry does not come over any more, but he still
sends his personal representative Martin Indyk. Once again a meeting was convened
between the representatives of the Government of Israel and the Palestinian
Authority, again an effort to achieve at least an extension of the
negotiations, and again it failed, and again an American announcement that efforts will continue. It was not easy to
locate this information - the editors in much of the electronic and printed
media did not really consider it a newsworthy item, and they can hardly be
blamed.
In the weekend edition of Yediot Ahronot, Nahum
Barnea published his wry analysis: "Everybody is sick and tired of the
talks. Correction: nearly everybody. Kerry maintains them like a gambler in a
casino who insists on placing his money on the roulette wheel, in the hope that
for once the ball will land on his number. When he took up the assignment he
believed that he would reach a Peace Agreement. Then he reduced his aim to a
Framework Agreement, after which he further reduced it to 'an American proposal
for a framework', and then further to just 'ideas'. In the end, the whole of
America's prestige is invested in a marginal, dubious deal [to prolong
negotiations for a few more months], which would only prolong the mutual
torture. From a means of achieving an agreement, the negotiations have become
an aim in themselves."
Prime Minister Netanyahu has no problem with negotiations
as an aim in themselves, talks which will go on and on and on lead nowhere.
This is precisely what he wanted in the first place and still wants today – to
be able to push off all demands and criticisms and international pressures and
whisper "Shhhh, keep quiet, we are talking, we are in negotiations with
the Palestinians, there is a Peace Process going on, please do not disturb."
And not only Netanyahu. Also Minister Uri Elitzur, of
the Jewish Home Party which constitutes the extreme right wing of the Netanyahu
Cabinet, has just declared that he and his party have no problem with extending
the negotiations "for another year." And why should they see any problem
with it? On the occasion of Passover, Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennet sent greetings
to party members proudly boasting that in the past year – a year of which eight
months had been devoted to negotiations with the Palestinians – “Settlement construction
in Judea and Samaria had increased by 123 %”. And Housing Minister Uri Ariel, another
of the same party’s senior ministers, will spend the Passover holiday as the
guest of honor in a mass event designed to reestablish the settlement Chomesh
in the Northern West Bank, which Ariel Sharon evacuated as part of the 2005 "Disengagement".
Why, then, not continue the negotiations for another year, or for that matter
for ten or twenty years?
From the very launch of negotiations under Kerry’s
auspices, most Israelis - and most Palestinians – did not entertain a real hope
for actual results. The unknown Palestinian who this week took up a gun and
wore gray clothing and set up an ambush at the settler road near the village of
Idna, was most likely among those who never regarded negotiations as the means of liberating their
people from Israeli occupation. It was Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi ,
who had gone over from a decades-long service as an IDF career officer to an equally successful career in the Israel Police
Intelligence Wing, who passed there in his car and was shot and killed in the ambush
, becoming the latest victim of the
ongoing conflict which had already claimed very many lives ever since the days
of Ottoman rule in this country.
Mizrahi had not been on military or police duty. He
was going in his private car, with his
wife and five children , on the way to Passover Seder with his in-laws. Like
many Israelis for whom the Passover Seder is one of the major family events of
the year. "A terrorist attack on the way to the Seder" cried out the
banner headlines. The Seder to which Mizrahi and his family were heading when
the fatal shots were fired was to be held by his wife's parents, living in Kiryat Arba.
Kiryat Arba is not just one more a community. It is
not even one more Israeli settlement on the West Bank. Kiryat Arba is a symbol
- the place where the entire settlement project began. Kiryat Arba is the place
where , in the first year of occupation, the then Labor Party Cabinet caved in
to Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his fellows, expropriated for their sake extensive Palestinian
lands near Hebron and established there the first big settlement on the West
Bank. There flourished the radical Religious-Nationalist ideology. From there
it expanded into Gush Emunim, the “Block of the Faithful” which developed into
the “Judea and Samaria Council" embracing dozens and then hundreds of settlements.
And in Kiryat Arba itself the settlers live up to the present, including the
parents of Baruch Mizrahi’s wife, and celebrate every year the Passover and read
deep into the night the story of the ancient Hebrews’ Exodus from Egypt and delivery
from slavery. They do not draw from it any conclusion about their own present situation
and their own sojourn in an armed enclave closely guarded by soldiers at the
heart of an Occupied Territory .
The Israeli press did not pay much attention to the
history and political role of Kiryat Arba in its extensive coverage of the
attack in which Baruch Mizrahi was killed. Instead, the papers focused on the
human aspects, the three year old boy who asked "Is Dad in Heaven now?"
and the widow who wondered "Who'll now
make the kids laugh?" . What eye could stay dry when reading these painful
human experiences, taking up whole pages in the mass circulation newspapers?
None of sixty Palestinians killed by IDF gunfire during the past year, the year
of the negotiations, had gotten the Israeli media to interview their widows and
orphaned children . The maximum which they could expect was for the Israeli papers
to correctly spell their names.
In the meeting which Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas held this week with Knesset Members from the Labor and
Meretz parties, he said that the Palestinian Authority was ready to extend
talks with Israel - but on the condition that it would not be negotiations for the
sake of negotiations, but a real grappling with the concrete issues. In
particular, the negotiations should focus on the future borders between the existing
State of Israel and the to-be-created State of Palestine, and of Prime Minister
Netanyahu finally deigning to start drawing boundaries on the map. This would
be a quite logical idea - assuming that Netanyahu was serious in what he said in
the famous Bar-Ilan Speech and on several more occasions. One who agrees to the
establishment of a Palestinian state could logically be expected to indicate
exactly where that state is to be
established, is it not so? Apparently, not .
The Sole Mediator?
Since the mid 1970’s, the United States has assumed
a monopoly on mediation between Israelis and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. We
have gotten used to this as an essential fact of life – though, to look at it
objectively, this is quite a strange phenomenon. In no commercial dispute would
the business partner of one of the parties to the dispute gain the status of an
impartial arbiter.
The United States had one advantage, and one only,
over any other available broker: the US was considered the only actor on the
international arena with the ability to enforce an arbitration award on the State
of Israel, its close ally. In marked contrast to mediators from Scandinavia, or
the UN , or the EU – who had the option of shuttling back and forth between the
parties, talking to Israelis and to Arabs, and formulating a proposed solution which
they regarded as reasonable and fair – which would eventually join in the archive
the yellowed texts of dozens of earlier
proposals by dozens of previous mediators. The United States was considered as
being in quite a different category. After all, the U.S. had a proven ability
to get the State of Israel out of an occupied territory.
In 1957, President Eisenhower got the IDF withdrawn
from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, with an openly displayed blatant
pressure. That was prehistory, when Israel did not yet a have a firm political
and military alliance with the U.S. and had not yet completed the construction
of powerful levers within the American political system. Later on, the United
States got Israel out of Sinai for the second time, in a more gradual and
subtle process which began in 1974 by Henry Kissinger and ended in 1978 with
Jimmy Carter. The price which Egypt paid in order to regain the Sinai was
clearly evident: the biggest and most powerful country in the Arab World, which
had been for decades a crucial ally of the Soviet Union, moved over to become as
crucial an ally for the United States.
Syria was several times offered a similar deal, to
regain the Israeli-occupied Golan in exchange for swearing fealty to Washington.
Assad Senior and Assad Junior never rejected such approaches out of hand, but ultimately
they never conclusively agreed to fundamentally change Syria’s international allegiance.
Thus, the Golan Heights remained in Israeli
hands up to the present, except for the town of Quneitra which Kissinger passed
to the Syrians as an appetizer in 1974. Nowadays, of course, no one can guess
what kind of government would rule Syria in the future and what would be its
international orientation.
With regard to the Palestinians, the experience of the
past twenty years in general and of recent months in particular clearly
indicates that the United States is either unwilling or unable to "deliver
the goods" and facilitate the creation of an independent Palestinian state
which would be a loyal Americans ally in the Middle East. It should be noted, of
course, that in fact the Palestinians - at least, the leadership of the PLO and
Fatah – have already in 1993 placed themselves deep into the United States’
pocket, in exchange for the minor gain of establishing a powerless Palestinian
Authority in the shadow of continuing Israeli occupation .
Had the Americans been willing to offer
Palestinians a full liberation from the yoke of occupation, they might have
been able to penetrate deeper into the grassroots of Palestinian society, perhaps
wean young Palestinians from the habit of regularly setting the Stars and
Stripes flag on fire. But apparently, to generations of American policymakers this
was not a consideration weighty enough to justify a confrontation with the government
of Israel and its supporters on Capitol Hill...
Whatever the considerations and reasoning, the bottom
line is quite clear. The U.S. government – whoever the President and Secretary
of State might be – is clearly unable to offer the Palestinians what Kissinger
and Carter provided to Egypt. And if so, then fallen and gone is its sole
justification for being the sole mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.
Another way will have to be found.
Some questions – and a few initial answers
- What are the chances that, after all, John Kerry will succeed in patching up some deal
which would allow the extension of the negotiations (or what passes under this
name) until the end of the year? As the situation seems now, the chances are
very low - but in our region everything is possible.
- And if after all negotiations are renewed, what
are the chances that Kerry would also prove able to take advantage of the
additional seven months in order to formulate a Framework Agreement, get the
two parties to agree, transform it into a detailed Peace Agreement with a
binding timetable for implementation and get it actually implemented on the
ground? By all logical analysis, an even far smaller chance. It is much more
likely that, even if negotiations do resume, they will continue sluggishly for
a few useless months and finally collapse in the next crisis.
- What are the chances, should the efforts of John
Kerry come to an unequivocal and
irreversible collapse, that the next US President will make a new try during
his or her administration, which would include the symbolic date of fifty years
of occupation in 2017? It is very difficult to know today who would win the Presidential
elections in November 2016, of which party and under which program and policy. Logically,
however, it can be assumed that whoever it would be would have no great
enthusiasm about plunging again into this quagmire.
- What are the chances that there would again be in Israel a peace-seeking
government, which would make its own independent peace initiative and make to the Palestinians
an offer which the Palestinians could accept? As things look now, the chances
are very low. The supporters of a daring peace initiative constitute a Left minority
among the citizens of Israel. Most Israeli citizens are convinced that
achieving peace is simply not possible. In the past, the citizens of Israel
brought Yitzhak Rabin to power - and he was assassinated. They brought Ehud Barak to power, who claimed to be the
successor of Rabin - and proved unequivocally that he was not. And they put
their trust in Ariel Sharon’s proposal to withdraw unilaterally - and the
result was not especially successful. Another opportunity probably there would
not be. Israeli citizens are unlikely to again bring to power a Prime Minister committed
to making peace and/or giving up territory.
- On the other hand, what are the chances that, if under
international pressure the Government of Israel is made to sign an agreement
with the Palestinians, Israeli citizens would lend this fait accompli their
support via a referendum or elections? For that, there is a reasonable chance,
even a high one. All Israeli opinion polls indicate a majority willing to
accept a peace agreement involving the relinquishing
of all or most of the territories occupied in 1967 - while at the same time expressing
considerable skepticism about the feasibility of such an agreement being achieved in reality. It is a very passive
majority, a majority which would not lift a finger in order to promote peace, neither
going out into the streets nor voting in elections for peace-seeking parties.
But if an agreement was to be brought to Israel’s citizens as a fait accompli,
there are good reasons to assume that only a Religious-Nationalist minority on
the Right would seriously oppose it. To get there, of course, there has to be an
external force able and willing to impose an agreement. And if not the Americans,
who?
- The track on which the Palestinians embarked with
President Mahmoud Abbas signing the documents for Palestinian accession to
fifteen international conventions leads to a frontal collision with the government
of Israel - but in a different way from what we have known before. The
confrontation would take place primarily in the international arena, accompanied
by Popular Resistance on the ground – i.e., demonstrations of Palestinians to
tangle with the army and settlers, with the army opposing them with tear gas
and sometimes with live ammunition, and the Palestinians responding with stones
and sometimes Molotov cocktails. But would it be possible to prevent a
repetition of what happened in 2000-2001, a fast escalation towards mass
bloodshed on both sides?
- International diplomacy would be at the spearhead
of Palestinian effort – an attempt to make the State of Palestine into a firm fact
in International Law, in the hope that eventually it will become such on the
ground as well. Clashes in the international diplomatic arena would likely culminate
with an appeal to the International Criminal Court, filing lawsuits against
Israeli officers for acts committed in the Palestinian territories, and against
the leaders of the settlement project whose activities violate International Law.
And the Palestinian doomsday weapon would be the threat – which might turn out
to be more than a threat – of disbanding
the Palestinian Authority and "handing over the keys" to Israel, and
thus imposing on the State of Israel the financial and administrative burden of
daily running the residents' lives, removing the fig leaf of "Palestinian Self-Government"
and facing Israel with the choice withdrawing from the territory or annexing it
granting civil rights to its residents.
- Concurrently, there can be expected all kinds of informal
initiatives and pressures worldwide. The BDS campaign would expand, its
proponents calling economic boycott and cultural
boycott and academic boycott and any other boycott on Israel and on all things Israeli.
At the same time there would be more mainstream
groups - possibly including respectable businesses and firms in European and other countries – taking
initiatives against the settlements and those linked with the settlement
project . The European Union may finally take the long-contemplated step of systematically
marking all settlement products coming into the European market, in order to
alert and warn customers – possibly followed by more drastic EU measures . And of
the Government of the United States, there might be expected at least what is
known as "benign neglect" – i.e. watching from the sidelines all
these moves and refraining from blocking them via the levers at its disposal on
the international arena.
- Would all these cumulative pressures be
sufficient to bring about, in the foreseeable future, an end to the occupation
and an IDF withdrawal from the occupied territories and the signing of a Peace Agreement
between the existing State of Israel and the to-be-created State of Palestine?
- Or are we are likely to mark the Fiftieth Anniversary
of the Occupation in 2017, and the Seventy-Fifth
in 2042, and perhaps also its Centennial in 2067? Of course, it can be assumed that
meanwhile it would no longer be called "occupation" and there will be
no further pretence that it is “temporary”. Temporary occupation will have become
permanent Apartheid, though presumably somebody will invent an original Hebrew
word for “Apartheid”. If there is nobody to save Israel from itself, this
situation would persist as long as
Israel has a military superiority in the Middle East and as long as the United
States dominates the world and is able and willing to provide support for
Israel and for Israel’s policies. History shows that no military hegemony,
regional or global, lasts for ever.
- Should the
efforts of all of us be conditional upon the chances of success? Absolutely
not. All of us - Palestinians under occupation, peace seekers and opponents of
the occupation inside Israel, and people who care anywhere in the world will do, must
do all we can, no matter what. There is no other choice.
"What now?" - faced with the diplomatic
failures, the Meretz Anti-Occupation Forum invites you to a panel discussion:
Talks with the Palestinians failed, as expected. Israel
imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority. Are we on the brink of conflict
? Is there any chance of a return to the
negotiating table? Would that be worthwhile? How should the Israeli Peace Camp
deal with the new situation? How do we face international pressures and calls
for a boycott of Israel? Might this be the time to stop talking about the struggle against the Occupation and begin
talking about a war on Apartheid?
Wednesday, April 23, at 19:00 ( Please be on time!
) at the EPGB Radio Pub,
7 Shadal Street, Tel Aviv.
Opening remarks:
Meretz Party Leader, MK Zahava Gal’on
Speakers:
Avi Issacharoff – Senior commentator, Walla & Times
of Israel
Yossi Gurvitz - Journalist and blogger (+972
Magazine)
Yifat Solel – Chair, Meretz Anti-Occupation
Forum
Moderator:
Mossi Raz
