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Israel’s missed opportunities for peace

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Israel has squandered so many opportunities for peace that its very identity as a ‘Jewish state’ is in jeopardy.

Monday 29 October 2012

It is 39 years since the 6^th October/Yom Kippur war of 1973. After the peace talks in Geneva following the war, Israel’s then foreign minister, Abba Eban, the ever-articulate founding father of Israeli diplomacy, quipped that, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

While there is indeed truth in Eban’s famous assertion (which I will explore in my next article), the Israeli fixation on this hypothesis, with its implication that there is no Arab “partner for peace”, and that the situation today is somehow inevitable, clearly overlooks the long annals of opportunities missed by…Israel.

Eban seems to have wilfully turned a blind eye to one glaring example of this lack of engagement which occurred on his watch: Israel’s failure to avert that same all-out war in 1973, shattering the prospects for forging a lasting peace that its victory six years earlier had opened up.

Although that 1967 war ‘officially’ lasted just six days, it in reality continued in various forms for a further six years – until the next war of 1973. This period could have been an important window of opportunity, but the Israeli government, drunk on victory and convinced that it could have its cake and eat it, rejected peace plan after peace plan. Had Israel taken action back then to return the Arab territories conquered in 1967 in accordance with UN Resolution 242 and the Rogers Plan, it could have avoided the drift to the current impasse in which hundreds of thousands of settlers live in occupied territory and millions of Palestinians live unhappily and in segregation under Israeli military rule.

Back to 1967. Those who subscribe to the received Israeli narrative will argue that Israel was dragged quivering into a fight for its very survival in June 1967, the state had no territorial designs at the time, and would have ceded the conquered territories had there been a true partner for peace.

There is no doubt that the Israeli public, exposed to a continuous barrage of bombastic radio broadcasts from Cairo promising to “put an end to the entire Zionist existence”, was terrified in the run up to the war – as those on the ground, including the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, observed. However, the Israeli military establishment, which had been meticulously preparing for just such a confrontation since at least 1956, was confident it could defeat the bellicose Arab paper tiger, whose roar was definitely worse than its bite.

Indeed, I disagree with those who believe that Israel was acting in self-defence. Evidence of this can, for example, be found in how Israel cold-shouldered an Egyptian invitation in 1965 for then Mossad chief Meir Amit to go to Cairo for a clandestine meeting with none other than Abdel-Hakim Amer, Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s vice-president and confidante who unbeknownst to himself stood on the threshold of infamy with his subsequent mishandling of the 1967 war.

Israeli, pointing to the famous “Three No’s” of the Khartoum Summit of 1967, allege that there was no Arab partner for peace at the time. But this reveals a severe misunderstanding of the changes defeat had brought to Arab politics. For instance, Nasser tried to contain Syrian rejectionism in Khartoum, agreed to the principles of Resolution 242 and signed Egypt up to the Rogers Plan shortly before his death. “Go and speak of… a comprehensive solution to the [Palestinian] problem and a comprehensive peace,” Nasser reportedly told King Hussein of Jordan in Khartoum.

Regardless of whether Israel’s conquest was premeditated or accidental, the fact remains that the appetite to hold on to conquered land has been stronger than the urge to exchange it for peace ever since, despite early warnings of the dire consequences of this for the Zionist enterprise from the likes of Uri Avnery and Amos Oz.

The ultimate irony implicit in such warnings against Israeli intransigence, or perhaps inertia, is the possibility, with the direction things are heading, that Israel may ‘succeed’ where the Arabs have failed: destroying the Zionist dream of a Jewish-majority state by its own hand, especially with the recent revelation that there are now more Arabs living under Israeli control than Jews.

Moreover, it was not just the sting of comprehensive defeat that was prodding Nasser to pursue a revisionist course.

Although it was Israel which initiated peace overtures with Egypt soon after the 1952 Free Officers coup, it was Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who was then prime minister, who sustained and nurtured, along with then Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, the secret channels which eventually led to a blueprint for a peaceful resolution. Nasser had early on showed remarkable restraint in his public pronouncements and admitted in private that eventual peace with Israel was inevitable – but this early willingness to seek out an accommodation fell prey to the pincer movement of Israel’s predatory hawks and Nasser’s disastrous ambition to lead the Arab world by following the loudest and most radical voices on the “Arab street”. Nasser’s clandestine partner for peace, Sharett, was ousted by David Ben-Gurion, also in 1955, who believed this Israeli dove – who, far more than any other Israeli leader, understood his Arab adversaries – was “raising a generation of cowards”.

Ben-Gurion’s fears provide significant insight into a major psychological barrier on the Israeli side. The long history of persecution endured by Jews had not only created a deep and painful trauma, it also helped fuel Israel’s obsession with might and courage as ends in their own right.

But it is not just a question of psychology. Israel’s failure to reach a resolution with the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians, has deep ideological roots. The elephant in the room which classical Zionism has ignored or dealt with myopically is the Palestinian people.

Theodor Herzl himself seemed to expect the local Arabs would embrace the Zionist newcomers with open arms, because they would bring the gifts of science and progress with them. In the egalitarian, multicultural Utopia Herzl imagined in his novel Altneuland (The Old New Land), an Arab character, Reshid Bey, expresses his gratitude that Jewish immigrants have helped modernise Arab villages and boost the value of Arab property.

Despite his early talk of Jewish-Arab class solidarity, Ben-Gurion was more realistic. “A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily,” he admitted to colleagues in the Mapai Political Committee in 1938. This could only be addressed, he believed, through a show of strength that would persuade Arabs to submit to Zionist hegemony.

Like Zionist leaders before and after him, including Herzl, Ben-Gurion was also convinced that the support of the great powers, or a great power, was more important than reaching any kind of agreement or accommodation with the local Palestinian population.

That can help explain Israel’s long refusal to recognise or deal with the PLO, despite Egyptian attempts dating back to the 1970s to persuade Israel to enter into talks and despite the Palestinian National Council (PNC) shifting the focus of its national charter away from armed struggle and towards a phased political solution. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin, who was prime minister at the time, expressed his desire to keep the Palestinian question in “the refrigerator” – and by the time he took it out of the fridge, it was perhaps already too late to thaw it as Israel did not possess the willpower to reverse the too many facts on the ground it had established in the meantime.

Even after having reached peace with Egypt and despite the Camp David accords stipulating that “Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the representatives of the Palestinian people should participate in negotiations on the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects”, Israel still refused to countenance dealing with Arafat and his comrades.

Even after Yasser Arafat had, during the first intifada, persuaded the PNC to recognise Israel’s legitimacy, at least implicitly, and to accept all relevant UN resolutions dating back to the 1947 UN partition plan, Israel still refused to play ball. “The PNC declaration is an additional attempt at disinformation, a jumble of illusions, meant to mislead world public opinion,” was the Israeli cabinet’s harsh verdict of the historic 1988 declaration. But as the faulty Oslo Accords a few years later clearly demonstrated, the PLO’s willingness to recognise Israel was not an illusion but very real.

Israel is repeating a similar series of errors with its refusal to deal with Hamas and its inhumane blockade on Gaza, which is bound to fuel grievances for long years to come and is clearly against Israel’s own self-interest. Even PA president Mahmoud Abbas, one of the architects of the two-state solution, is seen as beyond the pale in many Israeli circles today.

And so the endless, impossible, rhetorical search for a “suitable” partner for peace continues fruitlessly.

Although Eban’s assertion about missed opportunities is the one that has lodged in the Israeli popular psyche, another of his quotes is a far more apt description of Israel and Zionism’s approach to the Palestinians and wider Arab context: “History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Sadly, we do not seem to have reached this vital juncture in history yet.

—

Follow Khaled Diab on Twitter.

This is the extended version of an article which first appeared in Haaretz on 22 October 2012.

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Tags: 1967 war, abba eban, amos oz, arab world, camp david, david ben-gurion, egypt, gamal abdel-nasser, hamas, israel, israel-palestine, jewish state, mahmoud abbas, mahmoud darwish, moshe sharett, oslo accords, palestinian question, peace talks, rogers plan, syria, theodor herzl, un resolution 242, yasser arafat, yom kippur war, zionism

The battle for Palestinian memory

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By Sohair Mohidin

Palestinians run the risk of forgetting the Nakba and there are those who do not wish us to remember it. But our future freedom depends on our memory.

Sunday 13 May 2012

Villa Palestine in Marseille, France. Photo: ©Abou Zouz

It is not easy to carry the responsibility of a collective memory in early childhood. For the first few weeks after I started school at the age of six, I used to go home to my mother almost every day in tears. The other children taunted me for being “Palestinian”. I asked my mother to explain to me what it meant and why we were different. She said that we Palestinians had so many things in common with our Jordanian brothers: “We are all the same,” she insisted. But – and there was this big “but”– “We have a home and lands in Palestine to which we cannot return for the time being, but to which we shall, one day, inshallah.”

I then embraced this belonging and my Palestinian identity in every single composition the Arabic or English teachers asked us to do for homework. I peppered my texts with mentions of Palestine, my grandfather’s lost land. Palestine appeared everywhere, in my drawings, in my accessories, in every single expression possible. The dream of a free Palestine has not left me since then.

When I was nine, I read all the stories that Ghassan Kanafani wrote for children. I remember the book cover with the title Ard el-Bortoqal al-Hazeen (The Land of Sad Oranges). I also kept that with me. Even to this day, the presence of oranges or the slightest hint of their tangy odour makes me feel melancholic for lost Palestine and the sad eyes of those Palestinian kids illustrated in that book.

My parents used to tell me, “When we die bury us in Palestine. If you can’t manage that, then try to bring some of its soil and bury it with us.”

This huge responsibility of belonging to a place I’d never seen and would probably never visit, of identity and of memory instilled in me how important the right of return is to Palestinians. This is my cause which I should stand for no matter what. But what is my identity? The question of who I am has echoed in my mind for years. I found part of the answer in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem I Come From There.

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.

And “there” for my father is the town of Silat al-Harethyiah near the city of Jenin, which he left in 1957, originally to serve for three months in the East Bank border town of Ramtha. He was a police officer. Back at that time, the West and East Banks of the Jordan were one open territory ruled over by Jordan.

My father’s service took longer than he has imagined, so my mother joined him six months later. They were newlyweds. My father was 21 and my mother was 18. My father was still on duty, a decade later, when the 1967 war broke out. This marked the beginning of my family’s displacement, and my parents were given a “nazeheen card”. Nazeheen are Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Jerusalem as a result of the 1967 war.

My father was forced to sell the house he built in Silat al-Harethyiah because my grandfather feared that the Israelis would take it over under what they call the Absentee Property Law, which was created to enable Israel to seize the maximum amount of property, especially since it is Israelis who created the displacement which led to this “absence” of the original owners.

Growing up as a Palestinian in Jordan did not “de- Jordanize” me, but it did not make me less Palestinian either. It only reinforced both my Arab identities and my desire to exercise my right of return. This right is recognised in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 and is enshrined in numerous bodies of international law, including customary and treaty law. Article 13(b) of the Universal Declaration of Human Right states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Like exiled Palestinians everywhere, I am in a constant state of deferment, as if we are all sitting in a waiting room awaiting the return train home. In recent years, I have been struck by the realisation that there are so many things in my life I keep on subconsciously postponing, as if I were in a temporary state of transit.

This reminds me of the late grandmother of my friend Ahmad Ameen, a screenwriter who lives in Amman. After his grandmother, a refugee from Jaffa, passed away, he and his mother started to sift through the belongings in her room. “I looked under the bed to find dozens of black bags sitting there. I crawled under the bed and took them out one by one. They were dozens of black bags containing expired canned food,” he told me in dismay.

“Was she in a constant state of waiting?” he asked me. “Or did she simply carry her identity as a refugee with her wherever she went?”

And the burden of memory is not just about not forgetting, it also carries other burdens. One is the immense pressure, known to vulnerable minorities everywhere such as Jews, to make something of your life in order to attain a measure of security. “As a Palestinian, you need to overachieve, to secure something for yourself because you will most probably be somewhere else soon, and the risk is very high that you will lose it all,” my friend Deema Shahin reflected. This can be referred to as the “culture of return”.

But would I actually return? I sometimes ask myself: “If I have the choice, would I really want to live there? Would that really be home to me?” At times like this, I answer myself: “If you give up on this, if you accept the concessions made since Oslo, our right of return will sooner or later be exhibited in museums.”

Then, the unruly horse of my imagination would gallop off with me, and I’d imagine my future children taking their children on a guided tour to the ruins of our memory. I’d imagine them saying in a foreign language: “Here they dreamt, here they fought, here they aspired, and here they died of frustration…may their memory rest in peace.” In panic, I’d rephrase the last part: “…and here they died of frustration, and here their memory survived, peace be upon them.”

But the trouble with our painful memories is not only the risk that we may forget, but also that there are those who do not wish us to remember, who wish to punish Palestinians for feeling pain at their loss, at their Nakba, their Catastrophe, of 1948. In March 2011, the Knesset enacted its controversial “Nakba Law”, which denies state funding to institutions, including schools, which “undermine the foundations of the state and contradict its values”, which has been read to include the marking Israeli Independence Day by Palestinian citizens of Israel as an occasion of mourning for Palestinians.

Here I would like to paint a contrast rather than draw a parallel. Whereas Israel denies the right of Palestinians not only to commemorate the loss of their homes, but also their right of return and even their right to visit, Israel has a “Law of Return” for Jews which allows, organises and facilitates the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world to what was once Palestine, but where Palestinians now live under occupation and apartheid.

Over the past two decades, land expropriation through the construction of the illegal Israeli separation wall and aggressive settlement building has left Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with fewer resources, and even without homes, due to demolitions and evictions.

Rather than seeing more Palestinians driven off their land, we should be seeing the return of Palestinian refugees. When the Resolution 194 was passed, it did not stipulate that peace was a prerequisite for return. Over the past 18 years, the peace process has been trudging from one swamp to another, until it completely drowned in its own shortcomings. The peace process is dead and the only way out is to acknowledge that and work on creating new structures that could lead to a comprehensive solution. For decades now, the international community has found comfort in managing the conflict instead of ending it. Living the illusion of resuming negotiations in the current state of affairs will only contribute to increasing the frustration of Palestinians in the current Arab revolutionary context.

When I am asked how the right of return will be implemented, my answer is through one secular democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis together, a state where all citizens enjoy equal rights. This can only happen when the Israelis remove all forms of occupation, discrimination and hatred established within their education system and policies.

So far Israeli politicians have failed to present us with a true partner of peace. All we see is the shifting of Israeli governments from left to extreme right, and they all proved not only a lack of political will but also to be violent. Their poor proposals did not respond to the minimum Palestinian aspirations.

Israeli society should realise that their politicians have put them under the worst form of siege, that of the endless fear of extermination and distrust of the whole world. Peace cannot be achieved with such a recipe. Peace cannot be achieved if Israelis fail to recognise and implement our rights.

Today, away from the failures of politics I still see my free Palestine coming. The work of our memory hasn’t even begun yet. The work of our memory is too powerful for a state of occupation to control. It goes beyond everything because we keep it alive within us and for generations to come. On Nakba Day, we remember hundreds of Palestinian villages that were wiped off the map by Jewish armed groups. We remember hundreds of innocent Palestinians who were killed while defending their lands and homes. Our memory will be at the vanguard of the endless battle for our rights and our freedom.

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Tags: 1967 war, amman, discrimination, displacement, east jerusalem, freedom, immigration, independence, israel, mahmoud darwish, memory, nakba, palestine, palestinian refugees, palestinians, peace process, un general assembly, west bank

Shlomo Sand: “I am not a Jew. I am an Israeli.”

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By Khaled Diab

Bestselling Israeli historian Shlomo Sand on identity politics, political despair, why Lieberman is right… and drowning sorrows with Mahmoud Darwish.

Monday 12 March 2012

Shlomo Sand. Photo: Khaled Diab

Entering Shlomo Sand’s office at Tel Aviv university, the first thing that catches the eye are the numerous language versions of his controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People, which has been a bestseller both in Israel and internationally. As an Egyptian with a keen interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I had read his book with great interest – and now I was meeting the man behind this intellectual earthquake.

Despite the title of his book, Sand, with his neatly cropped beard and air of the anti-establishment academic, is not polemical, neither in his writing or in person. Rather, he projects the image of what academia should be ultimately about, intellectual scepticism and deep questioning. However, his willingness to stand up and challenge sacred cows have left their mark, and he comes across as a deeply pessimistic person, although he is highly approachable and possesses an irrepressible passion for debate and conversation.

The polemical reactions to his iconoclasm overlook numerous important points, including the fact that, although he does not believe that a “Jewish people” exists per se, he holds firm to the notion that the existence of an Israeli people is a concrete reality, but that these Israelis are both Jewish and Arab, and that Israel should not identify itself as the homeland of the Jewish people, but should, instead, define itself as the state of the Israeli people. Also, for Arabs and opponents of Israel, it is also crucial to point out that the “Jewish people” were not the only people who were “invented”. Sand stresses that similar cases can also be made for other peoples, including Arabs and Palestinians, and that inventing mytho-histories is a central component of modern nation-building, especially the 19th-century model in eastern and central Europe.

Although I don’t agree with everything he asserts, his vision of two independent Israeli and Palestinian republics of all their citizens, with a minority Jewish and Arab population of equals in each, is a refreshing option to consider, as is the urgent need not only to reinvent the Israeli people but also the Palestinian people.

Without further ado, I’ll let Sand speak for himself.

Shlomo Sand: It’s very difficult for me because I have started to lose hope. If we jump to the end, if you want, I don’t believe peace will be reached.

Khaled Diab: You mean, in the short term, in the long term?

In the long term, I don’t know, I’m not a prophet. In the short term, I mean. This is the subject of my latest book. I’ve finished it pessimistically. Even the Oslo agreement was a bluff.

Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the doctor, was the leader of the Palestinians in Gaza. He was in the delegation of 1989 to Madrid. I met him 23 years ago. He died a long time ago. I remember, I went with a few academics to Gaza – he invited us. He was a secularist from a kind of Marxist background, not a communist. I remember he said that he was against the Oslo agreement. I asked him if it was because he didn’t want to recognise the Israeli state.

He started laughing. He said, “I have recognised the Israeli state since 1948.” By the way, he had a Jewish lover… woman?…

Girlfriend?

Yes. He said, I recognised it before Arafat. “No, it’s not because of this that I am against it,” he said. “I think that the Israelis are going to manipulate us again.”

“We promised to try to stop the violence. Israelis did not promise to stop the colonisation,” he said. Arafat wanted to go back to Palestine so much that he signed it, and he lost.

When you say that it’s a bluff, how much of it do you think was an intentional bluff and how much of it do you think was down to the fact that the extremists within Israeli society were more organised and…

You have to know that this is the subject of my book, and it’s not about the extremists, it’s about the centre of power, especially the Labour party. I read, during my research, Rabin’s last speech in the Knesset. When he proposed the peace, he insisted that Jerusalem would be united with Ma’ale Adumim under Israeli sovereignty. There would not be any discussion about this point. And also the Jordan Valley would belong to Israel. That was the last speech of Rabin before he was assassinated.

They accept a kind of Bantustan – all of them, all of them. This doesn’t mean that Rabin could not have progressed after this if he wasn’t assassinated. But Rabin, at that point, proposed more or less what Bibi Netanyahu is now doing.

But isn’t he going even further than that?

Yes, he is going a little bit further than Rabin in ’94.

The concept of the Land of Israel, and also the power, the emitted power, cannot bring a coalition with the goodwill to deliver the rights of the Palestinians. This is because the “Land of Israel” (“Eretz Yisrael”) is seen as the land that belongs to Israel, do you understand? I didn’t use to understand this. I thought that pragmatism would prove stronger. No, no, it’s very deep. It’s not only deep among extremists. There is not a single political party that can make peace on the Israeli side.

Beyond political parties, do you think the people themselves, the Israeli people, have a desire to…

They have a desire to live in peace. At the time when the terror was very, very strong, a lot of people became very tired of the occupied territories. Now the impression of the average Israeli is that they can continue to live like this for another hundred years.

So they think the conflict is manageable?

Yes, the average. But more and more people not on the left feel that there is no solution. They feel that it is going to end, in some way or another, badly. There is, if you want, 20% of the population, I think, which is not proposing a solution but don’t believe in any solution. They are very pessimistic.

Now the majority. It’s one of the paradoxes, and I don’t like paradoxes, that Israeli society cannot sacrifice… has stopped wanting to and being capable of sacrificing soldiers, on the one side. On the other side, they don’t fight for peace.

You have to know, all of us studied the Bible for something like 12 years at school. The curriculum is based on a historical narrative that the land belongs to Jews. Basically, an average Jewish citizen of Israel cannot understand why we have to divide the land.

By necessity, if there was pressure from abroad, if the Americans really wanted to push Israel, I think there could be some compromise.

So you think no compromise is possible from inside, it has to be forced from the outside? So, do you think, for example, that the Jewish and Arab communities in America could help in pushing Israel in the right direction?

No… Young people in universities, professors like me are very critical of Israeli policy. But organised Judaism is very, very pro-Zionist. This development began in ’67. And they are on the right wing of the Israeli political system.

There is a movement now, J Street and the likes, but it is not serious and they are contradictory.

Don’t you think it could get stronger, something like J Street? And these young people, as they get older and take on positions of influence…

No, no, because there is also something very strange about this. Somebody who wants to take part in Jewish politics in the United States, and not mainstream American politics, you have to understand. Why is Woody Allen not active in Jewish politics, for example? Because he’s very American. Most professors I know who are critical of Israel do not organise themselves to fight against Israel.

So you mean that American Jews are either organised and pro-Israel, or are apathetic and critical of Israel?

Exactly. Apathetic or critical but not organised… There is J Street which is kind of leftist Zionism or liberal Zionism, in someway, but I don’t think that it will become a very strong movement. Because if they understand what’s happening in Israel, in some ways, they become less interested in Israel.

Is this because it conflicts with their principles?

Yeah. The only way this will change, because I know the history of Judaism in the United States before 1967 when it wasn’t so pro-Israeli. If there were to be a massacre in the Galilee and an American Jew would go out of his garage and the neighbours would look at him with a bad eye, something might change.

So you mean things have to get a lot worse to mobilise…

When they begin to feel that the image of a Jew cannot go with the aggressive politics of Israel, if it really becomes a contradiction, may be organised Judaism will start to change its politics.

Or if there is a net contradiction between the politics of Israel and American politics. For the moment, this is not really the case. Like it did in 1956 during the Sinai war. The Jewish community in the 1950s did not fight for Israel at all. It’s very important to understand this.

This is the only, only hope that I can see. Inside Israel, not. I think that Lieberman is right. He understands very well that the real danger for Israel is the Palestinian-Israelis.

Is that why he proposed those land swaps?

Yeah. He knows, and he’s right, that the real danger will be the Palestinian-Israelis and not the Palestinians.

Because they have a power centre within Israeli society and they’re frustrated?

Yes, and they are a better-educated and they have higher political awareness.

They understand Israeli society?

Much more. Relatively, they are less oppressed but mentally they are much more oppressed, because they have problems with their identity. They speak Hebrew. The young students, who are the most extreme, with every step, are becoming culturally more Israeli and they are becoming more active Israelis politically.

The problem is not only the occupied territories. Now, I don’t believe the leftists who are talking of a binational state. It’s a joke. I’m not against it. But to propose to Israelis to become, from one day to the next, a minority in their own state is a joke, do you understand.

But do you think they will become a minority?

It’s 5.9 million Israeli-Jews versus 5.6 million Palestinians. So, they are more or less equal in number. So, you can’t propose to Israelis to live in a state where they will become a minority, especially when the leftists are proposing the right of return. It’s a joke.

Do you mean it would never be accepted?

They would blow up the Middle East before, and they have the capacity.

You know, rationally, I’m for a two-state solution. But not a Jewish and an Arab state. An Israeli and a Palestinian republic.

And each one would have Arab and Jewish minorities?

Yeah. I say an Israeli state, and not a Muslim state or an Arab state, but a Palestinian state with Israelis living there. And, here, Palestinians living here as full citizens. Israel has to belong to its citizens and not the Jews of the world.

Isn’t that what the bi-national state is about?

No, the bi-national state, as I told you, is a very bad programme. The Arabs will become a majority, not as part of a gradual process.

Just at once…

Just at once. And I don’t think that this racist society, the Israeli Jewish society is a very racist society. You cannot propose this. First of all, if you are speaking about a bi-national state, okay, I’m not against it, but on one condition, throw out the Israeli army before. If not, it’s a kind of legitimisation of the occupation.

Well, how about, if you’re going to make it a state for all its citizens, that all the state institutions become open to all the citizens, like the army becomes a joint Israeli-Palestinian army.

No, I’m speaking about two states, two republics that are confederated. You cannot… We cannot live here without Arabs. If somebody doesn’t want to live with Arabs, I tell my students, he has to go to Paris and not live in the Middle East.

Well, even in Paris, you’ve got plenty of Arabs.

It’s a joke. Well, anyway, I say that living in the Middle East is living with Arabs.

So, what’s your vision? That we would have the two-state solution with the 1967 borders but the Jews who live in the West Bank can continue to live in the West Bank but under Palestinian rule, as Palestinian citizens.

Yes, with the same and equal rights, not with 16 times more water than the Palestinians, like they have today.

So, the settlements would become joint Arab-Jewish neighbourhoods, for example, under full Palestinian control, something like that?

They would have an option to go back to their homeland, Israel.

And those who want to stay can stay as Palestinian citizens?

With equal rights.

Not as Israeli citizens living in Palestine?

They can have dual nationality, citizenship. You know, I also have French citizenship.

So the same can also apply to Palestinian-Israelis?

Yes, they can have double nationality, and they can move if they want to, but they don’t want to.

But then there are a lot of barriers even to that idea. For example, I’ve met the settlers in Hebron and they refuse the idea of living under Palestinian rule.

They would have a choice. They could go back to the homeland. You know, in 1962, millions of Europeans had to leave Algeria, half a million Israelis can leave the occupied territories. Now, you say a lot of them will not. Okay, they can accept to live in a Palestinian state.

Do you think that the Palestinian state will accept them? That’s another question, because they fear they will be discriminated against or become second-class citizens.

They have to behave nicely so as not to become second-class citizens, and they have to submit themselves to Palestinian authority, to live without problems. Most of them will leave.

I don’t believe any of this will happen but it is the only rational proposition. The future is a state that belongs to all its citizens, like France, like Britain, like the United States.

Speaking of Britain, one idea I’ve had is that, one huge barrier to coexistence is identity, so I thought the way to make a two-people federation work would be to come up with an additional national layer. So you would have an Israeli identity, a Palestinian identity, with the two of them joined together in a supra-identity, if you like, which we could call something like Canaan, or New Canaan.

We can start with the form of Europe. Europe today is a confederation. It will finish up like Switzerland. But it is a process.

But how about using Britain as a model? Britain is a good example. The way four different nations exist together under an umbrella identity called “British”.

First of all, I want to create a real umbrella within Israel itself, the principle being that the state is an Israeli state and not a Jewish state. This is the first step to existing in the Middle East. The second step, as you say, is a process that my children and grandchildren have to build in the future. We have to live in the Middle East with Arabs.

As a historian, I can say that if Israel is not to disappear, it has to become something completely different in the future, a part of the Middle East, a part of the goodness of the Middle East, not of the badness. For the moment, the democratisation in the Middle East is developing according to Islamic beliefs, but it is a democratisation.

In my concept, there is a difference between democratisation and liberalisation. The process we are seeing is democratisation and, unfortunately, not enough liberalisation. I am for a liberal democracy, a social, liberal democracy.

I am also for democratisation. Every time in history that somebody tried to stop democratisation, it created perversion, like in Germany in the 19^th century, like in Algeria in the early 1990s. Now, in Egypt, I am for democratisation. I am against the army. The United States is doing everything possible to keep the military in power, and Israel supports it.

When I speak about our world in the Middle East, Egypt can become like Brazil, with Saudi money, oil. Egypt with Saudi could become the Brazil of the Middle East, like Nasser dreamed. But Nasser was afraid of the masses.

Nasser was willing to make peace with Israel, but he was afraid of the reaction on the street.

He was always afraid of the reaction on the street.

That’s why he marched blindly into the 1967 war. He could’ve avoided war…

Exactly. I am very angry at him. Do you know Eric Rouleau? Eric Rouleau was one of the greatest journalists of the Middle East. He wrote for Le Monde. He was a personal friend of Nasser’s, as well as of Mitterand. He became France’s ambassador to Tunisia. He invited me to spend three days at his house. He is writing his memoirs. He read my book and he was fascinated by it. By the way, he’s originally Egyptian, a Jewish-Egyptian. He was very young when he left. He was a communist, like a few others.

He ran away and then became a very important journalist. He told me about the first time he met Nasser. The only thing that made me angry at Eric Rouleau, who is really a great journalist, is that he admired Nasser. I don’t admire him, at all. I think Nasser is one of those responsible for what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians today.

Now, during our discussions, he tried to defend Nasser. We know today that Nasser didn’t want war in 1967. But I judge him as a leader and not by his intentions.

This is what he told me: the first time he met Nasser, Nasser invited him to his house. He knew that Eric Rouleau was Egyptian, and Eric Rouleau asked him, why are you not freeing all the political prisoners. Nasser looked at him and said, at the end of this month, they will all be free. Second question: why don’t you liberate Egypt’s political life, why don’t you allow political parties? Nasser said to him that he would not stay in power for one month if he did that. They continued to be friends till the end.

Eric Rouleau said to me that Nasser was a real head of state. So, I asked him, how about Arafat? He said, no. Arafat is the chief of a tribe, he said. But I don’t agree with this admiration of Nasser.

You see, the 1967 war shows that he was not a real leader… The bankruptcy of Arab nationalism – Ba’athism and Nasserism – is tragic. You see, it’s tragic for the Middle East. That cannot change. I wanted the Middle East to be like South America today.

Speaking of Arab nationalism, you talk about the invention of the Jewish people, but when I was reading your book, I was struck that you could equally write a book called The invention of the Arab people.

Well, there is a book in French called The invention of the Palestinian people.

But I’m talking about the Arab, not the Palestinian people.

I’ll give you an example. They think they are shocking the world by saying this. Yes, I think that the Palestinians were not a real people a hundred years ago. If they had been a real people, then the Zionist colonisation could not have succeeded.

In some ways, the idea of an Arab people is a myth. There is Arab culture, or cultures in plural. There is Arab civilisation. But people started to develop themselves… See, when I say that the Jewish people don’t exist, and I don’t believe that the Jewish people exist, nevertheless, I think that the Israeli-Jewish people exist. They created their own culture, cinema, a language.

The Arab world is in a very tragic situation. On the one hand, there is no one Arab people with the solidarity which you can find among the peoples of Europe. Unfortunately, you don’t have one Arab people, but you also don’t have a real Syrian people, a real Egyptian people. It’s a process. You know, when I look at the demonstrations last year in Tahrir, I saw a lot of Egyptian flags. I saw that, with all the Islamic discourse, they kept the flag, the Egyptian flag. In all the interviews, on the street, there was always a lot of Egyptian national feeling. I am not a specialist, but I felt that it was a kind of national revolution – something that crystallised around the idea of Egypt, this mass movement.

I don’t believe in the concept of the pan-nationalism of my ex-friend Azmi Bishara. It’s a bluff. They have played with it for too long without any power, any power to resist foreign imperialism. Arab nationalism as a force didn’t succeed. It failed. A lot of people now think that the Islamic, the New Muslims will create a kind of anti-imperialism. I don’t believe it will.

Yes, it’s already failed. Some people haven’t noticed yet but it failed a long time ago.

Then, we have to start again from the beginning, on the basis of the Egyptian people.

I’m not a professional historian, but I’m struck by how once fluid ideas of identity have become so rigid and fossilised. For example, it was completely normal, even up to 60 or 70 years ago, for someone to describe themselves as both an Arab and a Jew. Today, you know, that’s complete heresy to say something like that.

One moment, it’s very important what you said because I’m dealing with it now, in my new book. I’m writing about how I stopped being a Jew. The term “Arab Jews”… By the way, I’ve met people that define themselves in this way, a long time ago. Abraham Sarfati, he was an Arab Jew, in some way, a Moroccan Arab Jew. I think that the immigrants who came here were Arab Jews because their language was Arabic.

It’s very interesting, and I’m trying to work on it. You take an immigrant who came from Egypt or came from Morocco or from Iraq to here. His secular, daily culture was Arab. His religious culture was Jewish. It wasn’t like in Eastern Europe where Jews had a daily secular life which was different from their neighbours.

Now, this immigration, this poor immigration which came here, to the Zionist enterprise, they quickly learnt that the very lowest level in society was the Palestinian Arab. So, they tried to separate themselves. In the ‘50s and in the ‘60s, these immigrants, these Jewish Arab immigrants, or Arab Jewish immigrants, tried to hide their Arab daily culture and put forward their Jewish religious culture. Then, Zionism, which is a secular nationalist movement, stopped the secularisation of these immigrants.

The process of secularisation stopped because they wanted to be Jews, and every sign of Jewishness was religious. They didn’t have a Jewish secular culture. An Arab Jewish secular culture did not exist. You know, in Iraq it was different, the intellectuals from the Maghreb went to France and to Canada, only the poor arrived here. They were crushed by the Ashkenazi culture. In Eastern Europe, they had a strong, Yiddish secular culture. Sometimes I use the word Yiddish people, and not Jewish people, because they had a language, a daily culture, they were different to their neighbours, they had theatre, they had literature.

But didn’t the Sephardim have Ladino?

You see, the Ladino phenomenon could have become like Yiddish but it was too sparse. There was no concentration like there was in Eastern Europe. It didn’t become like Yiddish for two reasons. First of all, the Jews in North Africa, who came from Spain, and in Turkey, in the Ottoman Empire, they were very integrated into the local cultures, not like in Eastern Europe. Under Islam, they lived completely differently than in Christendom. This is the reason, for example, that I try to fight against the concept of Judeo-Christianity.

In my first book, there is a sentence which asks why my aunt, when they took her to Auschwitz, didn’t know that she lived in a Judeo-Christian civilisation? Now a lot of French intellectuals of Jewish origin don’t stop talking about Judeo-Christianity. In my new book, I try to explain that the difference between Judaism and Christianity is much greater than the difference between Judaism and Islam. First of all, there is no Son of God, and the problem with the Son of God. And also, if I look at the history of the Jews under Islam, it wasn’t at all a paradise, but you cannot compare it at all to the experience of Jews in the Christian world.

But Jewish life in Christendom also had its high points, like German Judaism prior to Nazism, American Judaism today.

You are making a mistake.

Is this a mistake?

Yeah, because it wasn’t Judaism. What do you mean by Judaism?

Well, I mean Jews…

They were so integrated that most of them did not consider themselves to be Jews. You know what is the most tragic thing that I read? It was about a comedian and an agent who were arrested in 1936 and sent to the concentration camps. He went to the concentration camp and said I met communists, socialists – the most tragic were the Jews because they did not know why they were in the concentration camp.

Because they believed that they were fully German?

They were. This is your mistake. They were. Who is more German Heinrich Heine or Hitler’s father?

I don’t know Hitler’s father but Heinrich Heine was a great German poet.

Well, you know, Hitler’s father was a petty clerk that spoke the local dialect of his region of Austria. He didn’t know High German, you know Hochdeutsche.

Well, some say that the Jews were really the most German of people because they were raised…

They built the German culture. They were much more in the city… They were not peasants. The concept of the nation, of the German nation, with the language started from… I’m becoming more and more convinced that the Nazi reaction, the antisemitic, Nazi reaction was not against the marginalised, it was the revolt of the marginalised against the centre. Jews were at the centre in terms of their way of life, they were citizens. They were Germans. They spoke German better than Hitler. By the way, they called themselves Israelites, not Jews. They didn’t like the term Jews. Even the religious said they were Israelites, the people of Moses’ religion. They didn’t describe themselves as Jews. Now you want to make them Jews again? After Hitler decided they were Jews?

Most of them, and I’m not speaking about Jews from Eastern Europe, I’m talking about German, French. They didn’t understand what antisemitism was doing with them. Now I respect everyone. If someone says that he is a Jew, I don’t care. Secular Jew, okay. But they don’t give me the right to define myself as a non-Jew.

You mean that people should have the freedom to define themselves the way they wish?

Yes. In reality, I don’t think that I am Jew because I am a non-believer. You know, I am of Jewish origin. This can be important sometimes. The fact that I am writing this book, it means that it was important for me. But, no, my horizon is humanity and my daily life is that of an Israeli – shitty Israeli culture, okay. But it is not Jewish. My grandfather, if he were before me now, he would start to laugh if I said that I was a Jew.

How can someone become a secular Jew? You can become a religious Jew. You can become a Muslim. You can become a member of the Labour party. You can become British. You can become Israeli. How can you become a secular Jew? And then I realised that it was a closed club.

In this age, at the beginning of the 21^st century, I decided that I don’t want to belong to a closed club, if I have the choice.

So I can’t become a secular Jew, you mean?

You cannot.

But I could become a religious Jew by converting.

But you can’t become a secular Jew. And I don’t want to belong to a closed club. We suffered – I mean my parents and my grandparents – suffered too much from closed clubs. The Arian club was closed to them. German nationalism was closed. In our past, we suffered too much from closed clubs.

All my life I said that I would continue to be a Jew until the last antisemite was removed from this Earth. Now, I’ve stopped with this. I don’t want to be a Jew.

But others will continue to define you as a Jew.

Well, Hitler defined me as a Jew. That doesn’t mean that he was right. Yes, others will continue. They don’t let me. I cannot change my identity card. They won’t let me change my ID. I want to write Israeli as my nationality. But I have Jewish nationality. This is a good reason not to define myself as a Jew. I see that I am Israeli, a shitty Israeli citizen, a shitty Israeli writer and a shitty Israeli historian.

Speaking of defining a religion as a nationality, there is also a strong parallel between Jewish nationalism and Muslim nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan is very similar to Israel.

The nation of Pakistan is built on the principle of religion. Also, in Sri Lanka in some way. Ireland is also somewhat similar. But Ireland had to change its laws to join the EU. Israel cannot join the EU with its laws.

So, the original idea, the old idea of a “Jewish nation”, if I’ve understood it correctly, of “umma”, is similar to the idea of the “Islamic umma”, the idea that all Muslims have a spiritual link to each other.

Yes, yes.

So, in a way, Israel is like the idea of an Islamic caliphate.

[Laughs] Yeah, yes, in some way. Yes, because the word “umma” means the Islamic “umma”. They took this word to replace the word “nation”.

You talk about reinventing identities. Well, there was a time when Palestinian equally meant a Jew. Now it’s exclusive only to Christians and Muslims.

By the way, Golda Meir, at the beginning of the ‘70s when the word “Palestinian people” started to be popular, she was astonished. She said, “I’m a Palestinian.” She had a Palestinian passport issued by the British mandate authorities.

And you also said in your book, if I recall correctly, that the Zionist movement managed to create this creative, convincing identity in order to build a nation, so why not reinvent it. But can that equally be said for the Arab side, for the Palestinians, that the way to move forward is to try to creatively reinvent identities to make them more inclusive of each other?

You see, I hope, you know, the past 40 or 50 years, the idea of the Palestinian people was crystallised. I don’t believe that the Palestinian people existed 100 years ago. For example, the culture and identity of the Arabs of the Galilee was much nearer to the Lebanese.

Now, to create nations, you have to be an engineer in some way. All nations are a creation. My formula is, to create a nation, you need to invent people into the past. In order to create a future nation, you invent a story, you know, a mythological history. The Palestinians needed one too. You know a lot of Palestinians believe that they are the descendants of the Canaanites.

Some of them might be.

In my book, I say that most of them were Canaanites who became Jews and the later they became Muslims. This applies to part of them, some of them, because this is a part of the world where everybody moves. But to create nations, to crystallise a nation, you need myths. The idea that a people existed for 2,000 years is a myth.

I had a discussion with a Palestinian painter at the Bozar who tried to convince me that they are the real Canaanites. No, this is a myth. The concept of people is modern. You can imagine that a thousand years ago an agrarian society with a very low level of communication, without newspapers, without books, without schools, without TV, without the internet. You can imagine a village of your great, great, great, great grandparents, they knew that they belonged to the village.

A thousand years ago, every valley, every mountain had a different dialect. To speak about peoples in the modern sense of the word is unbelievable. When they speak about the Jewish people 2,000 years ago, you see they didn’t have a single language. In the capital of the kingdom, they spoke differently than in the villages. The vocabulary of a peasant was so poor – he didn’t need a broad vocabulary. Can you imagine speaking about a people without schools?

In your book and at the beginning of our conversation, you talked about, before we started recording, you talked about Mahmoud Darwish. You’ve met him a number of times and you were friends, right?

We were very young. He wrote a poem about me.

Yes, about an Israeli soldier who felt remorse.

I have here Majda al-Rumi singing this song about the soldier in front of Mubarak and all your generals. She sings it without mentioning it’s about an Israeli soldier.

Well, that brings me to an interesting point. You describe, after the war of ’67, the drunken night you had with him.

You remember that I mention he drank alcohol. You know that the Arabic translator, he took out the alcohol. But I said, sorry. He said, but it’s not important, we don’t need to mention the alcohol.

It’s absolutely important, I think. It shows that culture…

Yes, I insisted that they publish the story of the alcohol.

Well, in the Arab world, for decades, you’ve had the idea of a cultural boycott of Israel. Now they’re taking that even further by trying to get the West on board. But then you have someone like Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of the Palestinian people, had contacts with Israelis, with Israeli Jews, and had friends who were Israeli Jews. And yet many activists today think that’s a big no-no, a taboo.

Elias Khoury was attacked because he wrote nice things about me. Then, he wrote again, saying you attacked because I am a friend of Shlomo Sand, but he’s a friend of Mahmoud Darwish. He used this against his critics. “I am a friend of a friend of Mahmoud Darwish and you are against it?” he asked.

I don’t want to comment because I don’t want to insult Palestinians, but you know, the victims are not always clever.

So, you think that the cultural boycott is not productive?

Not completely.

So, you think it should be targeted and not a blanket one?

They will not invite me to Ramallah because I teach at Tel Aviv university.

Even though you wrote a book that was translated in Ramallah and is popular among Arab readers.

Now, any pressure that is not terror is welcome. But be careful. You have started to boycott the most liberal segment of the Israeli political culture. It’s a very, very closed-minded tactic. Do you agree?

Well, I’m in your office, after all. The way I see it is that there can be no just resolution to the Palestinian cause without a strong Israeli involvement.

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Tags: 1967 war, arab, arab jews, arab nationalism, ashkenazi, binational state, christendom, christianity, citizenship, coexistence, conflict, democratisation, israeli-palestinian conflict, israelis, israelites, jew, jewish state, judaism, mahmoud darwish, nasserism, palestinian state, palestinians, religion, shlomo sand, umma, zionism

Peace in New Canaan

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By Khaled Diab

As Israeli-Palestinian peace talks fail again, it is time to build a New Canaan of diversity, tolerance and peace based on reimagined identities.

Monday 30 January 2012

The resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Jordan this month has resulted in deadlock and mutual recriminations over the issues of borders and security. Meanwhile, Palestinian youth activists have held numerous small demonstrations to protest against the talks in the absence of a settlement freeze and a clear vision of the future borders of an independent Palestinian state.

In a way, there is really little left to negotiate over. This was depressingly highlighted in the latest Peace Now report which said that the unprecedented rate of settlement construction threatened to torpedo the two-state solution. Personally, I think Israel blew that option out of the water some years ago.

Simply put, the scraps of land left over in the West Bank cannot be meaningfully weaved together to form the fabric of a feasible Palestinian state, while Gaza floats like a lone and isolated meteoroid in the Israeli cosmos.

Moreover, for Israel, evacuating the half million settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to make way for a viable Palestine not only runs the risk of precipitating severe internal divisions and even conflict, it would also carry a substantial economic price tag.

Although the settlements are largely built on seized land, Israel has nevertheless invested, according to a comprehensive 2010 study, an estimated $17 billion in building homes and infrastructure in the West Bank, while the market value of these properties is probably several factors higher. That’s not to mention the enormous material and human cost of the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation.

The Palestinians, who have seen much of their homeland vanish to make way for Israel, feel that they have compromised enough by accepting a state on a fifth of historic Palestine and are in no mood to settle for less, even if Israel petrifies their dreams in concrete. In a last desperate bid to arrest this state of decline, the Palestinians have gone to the UN to seek symbolic statehood first.

But concrete walls and paper states are not the answer and will not resolve this longstanding conflict. A far better solution would be for Israelis and Palestinians to accept that they are stuck together on this increasingly indivisible land and to find creative ways to coexist peacefully and justly.

Instead of this generations-old and outdated nationalist fixation on ethnicity and the romanticisation land, it is time for both sides to shift their attention away from the soil and towards the people living on it, to create a society of equal citizens, regardless of whether they identify themselves as Israeli or Palestinian, or as Jew, Muslim, Christian or atheist.

For this to work requires the creative re-imagining of the current ethnocentric nationalism, and to remould it along egalitarian civic lines. An important psychological hurdle would be to end the negationist tendency on both sides, which only serves, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to delegitimise the claim of one side or the other to live on this land and, hence, breeds immense distrust.

Israelis, especially the right wing, need to accept that a Palestinian people exist and stop dismissing them as Arab newcomers, invaders and usurpers. In my view, describing the Arabic-speaking population as Palestinian is more accurate than saying they are Arab. The only true Arabs are the inhabitants of Arabia, while the rest of what we refer to today as Arabs are a diverse spectrum of Arabised peoples whose only universal denominator is that they speak Arabic, although most share numerous common cultural and religious features.

In fact, the idea of a unified “Arab people” as imagined by pan-Arab nationalism is every bit as invented and constructed as the idea of a “Jewish people”, as if sharing a common language, in the former, and a common religion, in the latter, somehow automatically instils its members with a unique essence.

Similarly, Palestinians, particularly the Islamists, need to accept that an Israeli people exist and that they are not merely European colonists. Even though Zionism was born in Europe as an ideology, today’s Israeli Jewish population is a diverse mix of Jews from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and this melting pot forged a distinctive Israeli identity which is neither here nor there.

Moreover, even though a lot of Israel’s behaviour is colonial in nature and the Zionist project involved the dispossession of an enormous number of people, Zionism was also a liberation movement for the Jews, who have suffered, despite a number of “golden ages”, marginalisation, discrimination and periodic persecution for centuries, with the worst example being the Holocaust.

Once the two sides have accepted each other, the next step is to create a hybrid cultural and national identity that is more inclusive of the other. This does not mean that Israelis and Palestinians need to abandon their respective identities. Instead, they should create a new, unifying meta-identity.

In this, both Israelis and Palestinians can build on their cultural tradition of diversity to expand their respective identities to encompass the other side. In addition to a core that has remained on this land since the times of ancient Canaan, the modern Palestinian population is a melting pot of peoples from across the Middle East, Europe and even sub-Saharan Africa, as reflected in many place names, such as the Armenian quarter, and family names, such as al-Masry (the Egyptian). This malleable identity once also included the Jews of Palestine.

Likewise, the modern Israeli identity not only managed to assimilate diverse Jewish populations from around the world, it has also, albeit uncomfortably, managed to integrate the Palestinian population that remained within Israel after 1948. These Palestinian-Israelis offer a possible, yet incomplete, blueprint for deeper future symbiosis, as does the complex identity of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, who, though their heritage is both Jewish and Arab, have thus far not managed to bridge the contemporary chasm separating the two.

Politically, this supra-identity can be expressed in the creation of an umbrella state which I propose to call New Canaan, since Canaan is the original name of this land, and the identity of the original Canaanites is shrouded in mystery. I add the prefix “New” both because this union will be future-looking and because it will work to overcome the petty tribal and religious divisions, rivalries and conflicts that have marked this land since antiquity.

Within this federated state, where freedom of movement and equality will be guaranteed for all, cultural and social issues can be the preserve of Israeli and Palestinian community governments, while common issues relating to the economy, defence, foreign policy and the protection of fundamental rights can be handled by a joint bi-national parliament.

And to reach this secular “promised land” requires peace-seekers on both sides to embark on an exodus away from the captivity of their past towards the freedom of the future. It’s high time for Israeli and Palestinian doves of a feather to flock together against the hawks.

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Hebron settlers: “I don’t like Tel Aviv, does that mean we should tear Tel Aviv down”

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By Khaled Diab

Hebron settlement is as important as Tel Aviv, Israel is obliged to protect it and what Arabs lost in war should not be returned, says spokesman.

Monday 9 January 2012

Khaled Diab: What I’m gathering from what you’ve been saying is that you feel there’s a lack of understanding, comprehension and empathy and, even sympathy, towards your community and its aspirations. But how about if we turn the tables, do you feel your community understands and comprehends and empathises with mainstream concerns, such as, for example, you said that you were about 800 people here, yet you need several hundred, or a couple of thousand, soldiers to protect your presence here? Quite a lot of mainstream Israelis are relatively bitter about that. And how about the wider concerns, that your presence here has a humanitarian impact on the Palestinian population of Hebron.

David Wilder: That’s a big question, so let’s chop it up. Let’s start with the first part of the question. In terms of the military. First of all, it’s important to understand that the community here is here with the… the community here was re-established with the express consent and approval of the Israeli government. In other words, it’s not a pirate community. So, it’s real, it’s official, it’s not, you know, where somebody came in and they put up a tent, and then we grew and reached…

But the early settlers after the 1967 war, weren’t they like that?

We first came back… we came in 1968. People rented a hotel and then the Israeli government moved them to a military compound, and they lived there for two and a half years. After that, Kiryat Arba was established by the Israeli government, by Moshe Dayan, and they moved up there.

In 1979, a group of women and children moved into Hebron, to Beit Haddasa, which was a Jewish building, it was built by Jews in 1893 as a medical clinic which was used by both Jews and Arabs in Hebron. At that time, it was empty. The prime minister then, Menachem Begim, wasn’t overjoyed that they were there but he didn’t throw them out. He made their living conditions extremely difficult, but he didn’t expel them.

In 1980, following a terrorist attack here, when six men were killed, the Israeli government voted and re-established officially a Jewish community in Hebron. And a lot of, not all of, the buildings… but some of the buildings here, the rebuilding or the renovations, were done with funding from the Israeli government. So it’s something that’s real and official, ok.

The fact that there are people who don’t like it, you know. I don’t like Tel Aviv, does that mean we should tear Tel Aviv down and throw everybody out? No. I like this; they like that.

In terms of the military presence here, the Israeli military, or the Israeli government, has policies whereby they protect Jews wherever they are. And there are Jews here, so they also have to be protected. When I came to Israel in 1974, you didn’t have in Jerusalem security guards at bus stops, checking people getting on buses to make sure they’re not carrying bombs to blow up people on the bus. It’s a tremendous outlay to have security people at bus stops, you know, but Israel did it because it was a necessity. And the same thing is true in Hebron.

First of all, I’m not responsible for the fact that there are only 850 people here. The property that we have is full. If we’re allowed to build in Hebron on the property that we own, then we could have more people here. If we could buy from Arabs that want to sell us property, we could have more people. But as you’re very much aware, PA law says that Arabs who sell property to Jews will be summarily executed – it’s a capital crime [Ed: the PA has not actually executed anyone for this offence]. And they do it, so most Arabs, they’re not looking, you know, for all those virgins up there in the sky, so they don’t do it, because they’re not really interested in getting killed. It’s a very difficult procedure.

The military that is here have several different functions. They’re here to protect me, for sure. They’re also here to protect you, and all the other people that come here to visit, because we have a lot of people that come in to visit. Today, there’s a group of 400 people here.

But, as far as I’m concerned, the most important role of the military here has absolutely nothing to do with us. When Hebron was divided in 1997, the Hebron Accords, Israel pulled out of most of the city. It was given entirely to Arafat, and we pulled everything out. When we did that, the other side of Hebron turned into a terrorist nest, and you had people running around Israel from Hebron blowing themselves up, in Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva and Haifa. There was a soccer team, a football team, in Hebron that they all turned into suicide bombers. There was an article about them in Newsweek.

In other words, when there was no Israeli intelligence, no Israeli security, on the other side of the city, it just, you know, it turned into a breeding ground for terrorism. And the same thing happened in Jenin. It happened in other places. And it cost us. It cost us a lot of lives. The Israeli military, as far as I’m concerned is here at least as much for, if not more, to protect the people in Tel Aviv than they are to protect me. Because if they can prevent someone from building a bomb and getting out to Tel Aviv or wherever they want to go to blow themselves up, then that’s certainly no less important than making sure that I’m safe and you’re safe. And that takes soldiers, you know.

Well, you can say that, if we pulled out of all of Hebron. Great! Well, then let’s just look at… if we want to learn a little bit from our recent past, we did that in Gush Katif. We pulled out of Gush Katif and we got 10,000 rockets back into Israel from what we gave them.

And you regard that as a pullout? I mean, the military is still in there.

They pulled out. They pulled out entirely.

Yes, but the military presence of Israel is still there. There’s the whole no-man’s-land. There’s the perimeter. There’re regular raids. The borders and economy are controlled by Israel.

No, no, of course not. The only reason you have raid is stop them throwing rockets at us. When we pulled out, the idea was… the Europeans invested a lot of money there. The Israelis who were down there, they had initiated and developed tremendous flower industries and the Europeans bought a lot of the hothouses that they used, which were… I don’t understand the field at all, but they were very sophisticated… So that the Arabs who then inherited what we left would be able to use them, and they destroyed them. They took them apart; they destroyed them.

When Israel pulls out of areas, they’ve turned into terrorist bases which have wreaked havoc in Israel proper, ok. I’m not talking about what they try to do in Hebron. I’m talking about what they try to do to people in Tel Aviv – and that, I think, is a major reason why the military is here and why the numbers have to be where they’re at.

So that’s the first part of the question. The other part of the question is dealing with… you asked me about, you know, well, there are people that don’t like us here… So, there are people that don’t like us, so what?

The concept of Hebron – i.e. Jews with horns and tails who breathe fire and eat one Arab for breakfast and two for lunch and three for dinner with the blood dripping off from your moustache from the one you’ve just finished – that’s the vision that people have. And they come in and it’s not like that. When I used to give tours… I still give tours but a different kind of tour… We would start in Kiryat Arba and the bus would come in and I’d just go around Kiryat Arba in the bus before coming down here into Hebron. And I used to watch people’s faces, and they didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe they were in Kiryat Arba, because Kiryat Arba is a settlement, and you know what a settlement is, a settlement is some tents, right? But that’s what people thought, that was the vision they had.

And a lot of Israelis who come in, not for a political tour, they can ask questions if they like, but forget the politics, just the historical element, the religious element, what Hebron means to the Jewish people, whether you’re religious or you’re not religious, it doesn’t make any difference. Everybody has a heritage, and they see it and they hear a little bit, and all of a sudden (clicks fingers): this isn’t what they taught me about Hebron. And it’s a totally different image. And that’s when mainstream Israelis who say may be we shouldn’t be here start saying, may be we should be. And we’ve had that happen.

It happened not so long ago. A major Israeli television entertainment personality was here and, after he was here, he said, yeah, there are problems with the community here and there, but we can’t leave Hebron, you know, and that happens when people see it, when they’re here, when they start to feel it a little bit. And we see that happen time and time and time again. It’s not an isolated kind of a thing.

To touch on something you said in passing about the taboo amongst Palestinians towards selling property to Israeli Jews. How does the community here and other groups among the Jewish community feel about selling land to Arabs, Palestinians? Look, if a Palestinian came and asked to buy your land…

Ok, look, there’s a major difference between what I like and what I don’t like and what is legally acceptable. I can say that I don’t like it, I can even oppose it, but the Supreme Court just ruled, up north in one of the moshavim, that when they had a tender to buy property, there was an Arab couple that wanted to buy and the community wouldn’t let them, the Supreme Court said you have to let them, you have to sell it to them, cuz they’re no different than anybody else.

Legally, according to PA law, which is based on Jordanian law, an Arab that sells property to a Jew is to be killed. Israeli law doesn’t say that. There can be reasons why yes and why know; there can be security elements; there can be all sorts of elements.

We used to have here, many years ago… They were building outside here, and there were Arab workers. One day, an Arab came inside here, with a gun, and he pulled them all together and told them if you come back here tomorrow, I’ll kill you. That was an Arab telling the Arabs. The next day nobody showed up.

In other words, there can be differences of opinion – pro, for, against, whatever – and that’s all legitimate. But when you take that and legalise it, and you say the law is…

But isn’t there a law, a form of legalisation, that says Israel officially owns all the land of Israel, like the Israeli government…

I wish that was true, but it’s not. I mean, you can ask me religiously what I believe, but in terms of what’s on the books, the president of the Supreme Court ruled, much to my own personal differing of opinion or opposition, but she’s the president of the Supreme Court, not me – at least, for a little while longer, she is. She ruled that any land that’s not registered as being owned by the Israeli government or the state of Israel belongs to the Arabs. Now I don’t know where she gets that from. But it’s just the opposite of what you just said.

There is land that’s owned by Arabs, I know that, and there’s land that isn’t. There’s land that’s owned by Jews, that’s owned by Arabs, there’s state-owned land. In any country in the world, there’s state-owned land.

And you think land captured by conquest is legitimate property?

You’re asking about…

Like what, for example, the international community regards as occupied territory?

Like the Jordanian conquest of 1948. The land that they took in 1948 by conquest. Is that legally theirs or not?

Or the land that Israel took in 1967. I mean, in all cases.

First of all, you see one of the anomalies of the conflict today is that there’s almost a given that violence, or different levels of violence, committed by one side is legitimate and accepted and understood and justifiable, and from the other side it’s not. There are consequences. If somebody declares war, or forget the war, if somebody walks into my office, and I start beating them up. You walked into my office just now and you said, my name is Khaled, and I jump on you and start hitting you, and you sue me, ok. You sue me for a million shekels. You take me to court. Then I’m going to have to pay the consequences for beating you up. May be you beat me up too. But I have to pay for what I did. It’s my problem. It might have hurt you, but I have to pay the consequences for what I did.

If somebody starts a war with you, then there are consequences for that. People can’t declare war and figure that even if they lose, they’re not going to have to pay a price. You know, when you say, as Nasser said, we’re going to throw them into the sea and, you know, he made a pact with the Syrians and the Jordanians, and he said, you know, let’s finish them off.

In 1967, the prime minister was Levi Eshkol…

But didn’t Israel start the 1967 war or don’t you regard that Israel started it?

I don’t know. The history books that I have say that Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran. That’s an act of war. The United Nations left. You know, that’s an act of war. The fact that he closed the Straits of Tiran, that he put a blockade on Israel, and said we’re going to throw you into the sea, formed a military pact with the Syrians and the Jordanians, I think that’s pretty much an act of war.

When Levi Eshkol was prime minister and he sent representatives from the state of Israel, including Golda Meir, to Hussein in Jordan saying to him, we don’t want anything, just leave us alone – we have enough to worry about up north and down south, just leave us alone. We’ll leave you alone, you leave us alone. And his response was to start shelling Jerusalem. He started shooting missiles from Jordan into Israel.

So, what, he thought he was going to do that and we were going to just ignore him? May be he thought that we would be finished, that they would defeat us and he would get everything. He wouldn’t just have East Jerusalem, he would get West Jerusalem too and a little bit more. But it didn’t work like that. You can’t start a war and expect that, if by chance you lose the war, it’s not going to cost you anything.

We came into Judea and Samaria and Gaza as a result of that war. And we stayed. Today, when people talk about the Geneva Convention and civilians and all of that, there are many different responses to all of those questions. The first one is, of course, if you want to say that we’re not allowed to be here, or that we’re occupying this, then who’s the legal owner, so to speak?

In other words, back in 1974 or 1975, Hussein relinquished all claims to Judea and Samaria. He said, I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s not mine any more.

But he relinquished them to the Palestinians, not to Israel.

No, he said, it’s not mine.

And he voted for the Palestinians, the PLO, as the representatives of the interests of the Palestinian people.

But that doesn’t mean just because he said so that it belongs to them. I mean, like, you know. The questions involved… I mean, legally, I don’t have any problems with international law. I mean, there are no problems. But if we take a place like Hebron, ok, and we take… I mean, right now, there was a… You know, for 700 years, Jews and Christians had no access to Machpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Is that true?

Oh, yeah, unfortunately it’s true. In the year 1267… In 1260, the Mamluks pushed out the Crusaders. The Crusaders came in about 1100. And, ironically, the Crusaders in Hebron threw out the Jews. It was the first time I know of in a long, long time that there hadn’t been Jews in Hebron.

In 1260, the Mamluks threw out the Crusaders and let the Jews back in. The Mamluk emperor was a guy called Baybars and he closed off Temple Mount and, as an aside, he closed of Machpelah. He said, it’s a mosque. And for 700 years, we couldn’t go inside. There used to be stairs on the eastern wall. Jews could go up to the seventh step. That’s as far as we could go. They started to let Christians back in in the early to middle 1900s. Jews couldn’t go in. And for hundreds and hundreds of years, there were stairs on the eastern wall and Jews could go up to the seventh step.

And it’s only since we came back, is that side accessible to anybody. Anybody who wants to can go in. There are different sides, and this for this, and that for that, but anybody that wants to can go inside, with very, very few exceptions. Today, and you can read it, I’m writing about it now, the Arab mayor of Hebron… I say it to people all the time, but nobody really believes it, but now he’s said it… He said it, you know, and it was printed by, in Time magazine, by a writer who’s not a big friend of ours, so if he writes that’s what they said, then I think he’s accurate. The Arab mayor of Hebron today says that if he ever controls it, he won’t let Jews back in. He says it’s a mosque, always has been, always will be. He said, you know, we’ve been there as a mosque since, you know, 1260 or 1400 or whatever date.

If we’re not here, then there’s no access. It’s gone.

So, you feel yourselves to be guardians of the Jewish heritage of Hebron?

We… Let’s put it this way, if there wasn’t a Jewish community in Hebron today, it doesn’t matter whether I’m here or somebody else is here, if there wasn’t a Jewish community in Hebron today, Machpelah would’ve been lost a long time ago. We would’ve lost Machpelah in 1997. Arafat demanded it then, and they wouldn’t give it to him. And the people who wouldn’t give it to him weren’t rightwing extremists like me, they were leftwing extremists. Bu they were the ones running the show, and they took to Arafat the numbers, and they said this is how many Jews are visiting and how many Arabs are visiting. We can’t give it away, we can’t give it to you, there are too many Jews that go visit, and those numbers keep growing.

Part I – The art of peace

Part II - From secular America to religious Hebron

Part III – “We are not extremists”

Part V – Palestinian people do not exist, are “PR bluff”

Part VI – Living with Palestinian “dhimmis”

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Tags: 1967 war, blockade, gaza, hebron, israel, israel-palestine, israelis, jews, kiryat arba, palestinians, tel aviv, terrorism

Avoiding the ultimate price tag in Israel

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By Khaled Diab

With the rise in Jewish fanaticism, Israelis are faced with a paradox: peace with the Palestinians could stoke conflict within their own ranks but avoiding full-blown civil war requires an end to the occupation.

Thursday 20 October 2011

Once upon a time, the words ‘price tag’ evoked nothing more ominous in my imagination than something attached to the inside collar of a new shirt. But in Israel it has come to be associated with the destruction of Palestinian property, the burning of their fields, the poisoning of their wells, and the desecration of burial sites.

And the standoff seems to be escalating, as demonstrated by the recent spate of attacks, such as the torching of a mosque, this time inside pre-1967 Israel. In fact, according to one estimate by the UN, ‘price tag’ attacks rose by a stunning 57% in the first seven months of this year.

But it is not just Palestinians who have been suffering the wrath of these extremists. Increasingly, the price tagging movement has done the once unthinkable and targeted Israelis, both soldiers and leftist activists.

Political violence perpetrated by Israelis against Israelis has shocked Israel – which is hardly surprising, since the extremists have effectively placed their own compatriots in the enemy camp. It has also taken many Arabs by surprise, since one of the few things that Arabs admire about Israelis – even if it is begrudgingly or for the purposes of self-criticism – is how apparently tightly knit and unified of purpose they are.

Now that the unthinkable has occurred, could the unimaginable one day happen? Could Israelis go to war with each other?

In the past, despite the vast ideological, cultural and political diversity of its Jewish population, Israel was able to pull rank and manufacture consent surrounded as it was by enemies, both real and imagined. But as the threat from its Arab neighbours subsided and they began extending their hands in peace rather than rattling the sabres of war, Israel’s efforts to paper over its internal cracks and fault lines could not arrest the deepening divisions.

In some ways, it can be said that Israel is already in a state of internal ideological warfare – a sort of quasi-civil war that has not yet turned violent, the ‘price tag’ campaigns excepted. This can be seen in Israel’s fractured political landscape and in the bitter division between secularists and religious Jews who have effectively ‘ghettoised’ themselves geographically. Contrast, for example, the relatively liberal, relaxed and hedonistic atmosphere of fun-loving Tel Aviv with the mini-theocracies that have emerged in pious Jerusalem.

There is also the tension between the geographical maximalist supporters of a ‘Greater Israel’ and the more pragmatic backers of the two-state solution. In the wake of the 1967 war, the Israeli political mainstream was generally reluctant to cede the territorial gains Israel had made, and they were helped in their resolve by Arab rejectionism at the time, which was intensified by the bitter and humiliating sting of rapid defeat.

Since the Oslo process began, the mainstream has largely been won over to the idea of ceding land for peace, though there are vast differences of opinion over how much land for how much peace should be exchanged.

This mainstream dithering, along with the need to maintain a consensus of sorts by following the path of least internal resistance, was exploited by extremists – right-wing revisionist Zionists in alliance with religious Zionists who, ironically, are the ideological descendants of the ultra-Orthodox movements who opposed Zionism on religious grounds but were ‘converted’ into a messianic movement by Israel’s spectacular military victories in 1967. In fact, many residents of the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood of Mea Shearim are still opposed to the existence of Israel – as was advertised on a big banner ther just last week – and some refuse to speak Hebrew, which they see as too holy for secular use.

Together, the different groups that make up the settler movement managed to pull off the feat of accelerating settlement activity in order to create ‘facts on the ground’ to the extent that more than half a million settlers now live on land which had been earmarked for the future Palestinian state, where the most extreme have enjoyed pretty much a carte blanche to live and act outside the law.

Emboldened by this sense of impunity, this hoodwinking and political coercion has now, with the emergence of the ‘price tag’ movement, turned into open and violent intimidation, in a classic case of ‘blow back’.

But what can be done to turn the tide?

Debate in Israel has largely focused on law and order issues, of catching and punishing the perpetrators of these violent acts and challenging their sense of impunity. Though necessary, this is only a case of attacking the symptoms and not treating the disease.

Undermining the increasingly fanatical settler movement requires an end to the settlements. The silent Israeli majority who have consistently voiced their support for the two-state solution – most recently in a poll that found 70% of Israelis support a possible UN vote in favour of an independent Palestine – must come out of their bunkers and be counted.

Now it is time for them to back up their sentiments with deeds. If the Israeli mainstream wishes to keep the two-state solution alive, now is the time to act forcefully and resolutely to abandon all the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem which are impeding the creation of an independent Palestine, or hand them over to Palestinian sovereignty where they can be opened up and transformed into mixed Arab-Jewish communities.

But such a course of action – which would not only bring about peace with the Palestinians but preserve Israel’s corroding democracy against this extremist onslaught – paradoxically carries with it the risk of escalating the ‘price tag’ campaign into full-blown civil conflict or war. Look what happened when Ariel Sharon, the one-time darling of the settler movement, tried to dismantle the relatively small settlements in Gaza, some will point out?

But this risk will rise with time, not diminish. For now, extremists willing to turn on their Jewish compatriots are a relatively small minority, but they are winning fresh converts constantly.

As numerous Israeli visionaries have warned for decades, the occupation is a corrupting, divisive and draining influence on Israel. If Israelis wish to salvage the secular and democratic nature of their country, and to live at peace, not only with the Palestinians but also among themselves, there is no more room for complacency and dithering.

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Tags: 1967 war, civil conflict, civil war, conflict, democracy, east jerusalem, greater israel, hebrew, independent palestine, israelis, jews, oslo process, price tag, settlements, settler movement, west bank, zionism

The six-day curse

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Rating: 9.8/10 (6 votes cast)

By Khaled Diab

Rather than an almost miraculous blessing, Israel’s six-day victory in 1967 has proven to be a naksa for Israelis and Arabs alike.

Monday 6 June 2011

In the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there have been precious few win-win situations, and each side’s victory is usually the other’s loss; its joy, the other’s grief. The most striking example is the dichotomy between the sorrowful Palestinian Nakba Day – which was marked, this year, by thousands of Palestinian refugees attempting to return symbolically to their abandoned homes – and Israel’s Independence Day, with all its zealous flag-waving, partying and national joy.

Another notable example is the contrast between the nakba-rhyming naksa (or ‘setback’), which commemorates the Arabs’ crushing defeat at the hands of Israel in June 1967, and Jerusalem Day, which celebrates Israel’s stunning six-day victory and the ‘reunification’ of the Holy City – although even among Israelis, Jerusalem Day is not much of a cause for celebration and “most people in Israel don’t even know, and don’t care, why it even exists”, according to Yossi Sarid.

“Jerusalem 2011 is a sad city pretending to be glad,” adds Sarid.

And the gladdest were the right-wing settler and religious Zionist movements. On 1 June, I came across hundreds of Israeli youths dressed in celebratory white shirts and matching kippahs streaming excitedly out of the city’s Damascus Gate (Bab el-Khalil) in East Jerusalem, in unspoken defiance and insensitivity to the passers-by in this predominantly Palestinian section of the city.

In the Mamilla shopping arcade, just outside the old city’s walls, an obsessive petitioner, who haunts shoppers at the mall on an apparently daily basis, didn’t even take Jerusalem Day off from his quest to collect signatures to keep Jerusalem “united”. He implored shoppers and strollers to sign his petition urging the prime minister not to “divide” the city. Perhaps he’d mistaken Binyamin Netanyahu for some sort of closet peacenik who cared about international law and the rights of the Palestinians. He’d also obviously missed Bibi’s reality-defying speech to the US Congress in which he said quite unequivocally: “Jerusalem must never again be divided. Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel”.

Inside the old town, near Zion Gate, a group of jubilant performers dressed up as Israeli flags danced the Horah, a circle dance originally imported from the Balkans by Romanian Jews which has become the quintessential folk dance in Israel and somewhat resembles maypole dancing, but without the pole.

Though the dance was well-choreographed and pleasant enough to behold and the joy of the dancers seemed genuine, what they were celebrating – the conquest of Jerusalem and the West Bank – made it seem like they were cheerfully running circles around the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the conflict, rather like the settlement ring around Jerusalem, and dancing on the grave of the peace process.

Other aspects of the Jerusalem Day celebrations were not as good-natured. For the first time, the focal point of the day’s main event, the so-called Flag Dance, was provocatively the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, where settlers have been making hostile inroads in recent years.

Tens of thousands of settlers marched from there, through Damascus Gate, finishing off at the Western Wall. During the procession, some marchers were witnessed chanting offensive slogans, including the worryingly violent “Death to leftists” and “Butcher the Arabs”, not to mention “Muhammad is dead” (which is something of a bizarre insult, considering that everyone knows that).

In many ways, Jerusalem Day is a poignant symbol of how Israel’s 1967 victory was perhaps more of a naksa (setback) for Israelis – albeit a disguised one – than for Arabs, for whom it was an overwhelming defeat. Prior to the war, many Israelis saw their young state as militarily vulnerable, and this apprehension created a certain pragmatism in a number of Israeli circles about the need for peaceful coexistence.

This was perhaps best embodied in the views of Israel’s second prime minister Moshe Sharett, who exchanged secret peace overtures with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the early 1950s. Unfortunately for posterity, these efforts were torpedoed by David Ben-Gurion, the Lavon Affair and the fact that the Egyptian leadership feared that the “Arab Street” was not yet willing to accommodate Israel.

The 1967 war bred a dangerous philosophy in Israel which blended unilateralism and militarism with complacency over the long-term consequences of continued occupation of large swathes of Arab land and exercising military control over the lives of millions of Arabs. This was perhaps the course of least resistance, considering Israel’s fractured political landscape, which provides the ideal habitat for hawks to turn the doves into lame ducks.

Naturally, there were Israelis at the time who wanted to use the captured lands (with the notable exception of Jerusalem and much of the West Bank) as a bargaining chip towards a peace settlement with the country’s Arab neighbours. But these voices were too few and too disorganised amid the euphoria and greed triggered by overwhelming victory and the apparent Arab intransigence signified by the famous “three nos” of the Arab League’s Khartoum Resolution.

However, the well-organised and ideologically driven settler movement quickly moved to sideline these voices of reconciliation by establishing the first illegal settlements. While this was going on, Israel’s political class was either happy to let them have their way or allowed themselves to be bullied and browbeaten into acquiescence.

In fact, Israel’s “miraculous” military success also turned Religious Zionism, with its uncompromising attitude towards the conquered lands, especially the West Bank (which Israel officially calls Judea and Samaria), from a marginal movement and thrust it right into the Israeli mainstream.

Since then, the settler movement has worked hard to establish “facts on the ground” to guarantee the “integrity” of the “Land of Israel”. For example, the settler population has tripled since the launch of the Oslo peace process, thereby derailing the two-state solution by slicing up much of the land that was earmarked for the future Palestinian state.

Although the idea of “land for peace” emerged internationally in the wake of the war, as embodied in UN Security Council Resolution 242, many Israeli leaders have been motivated by an underlying assumption that, with time, military superiority could deliver both.

Meanwhile, the crushing defeat gradually led many Arabs and Palestinians to become far more realistic about the effectiveness of an armed solution to the conflict. Even the Khartoum Resolution, despite its rejectionist tone, recognised that diplomacy, not war, was the way forward.

The late Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat was the first Arab leader to act openly on this philosophy. Even though he instigated the 1973 war, his aims were tactical: to readjust the military balance of power and force Israel to the negotiating table. Despite initial Arab hostility towards Sadat’s peace overtures and their anger over Egypt’s separate peace deal with Israel, not to mention Sadat’s arrogant condescension and sidelining of the other Arabs, all the Arab states eventually accepted the premise openly. On a side note, one can only speculate about how much stronger Egypt’s bargaining power would have been had the other Arabs presented a united front with, rather than against Egypt, and had Israel agreed to comprehensive rather than bilateral talks.

Today, Arab countries not only accept this principle but have offered Israel, through the Arab Peace Initiative, full recognition and normalisation in return for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) and a “just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Despite this, Israel’s leadership continues to procrastinate, preferring mushrooming settlements to a comprehensive settlement, apparently secure in the belief that military might will prove right in the end. But this sort of battlefield diplomacy is bound to fail and will lead to Israel living in a state of perpetual conflict which, though it may appear manageable today, could easily backfire in the future.

History has shown repeatedly that denying a people their rights cannot continue indefinitely, especially if the wave of change currently washing across the region inspires the Palestinians to mount a mass peaceful movement for their rights. Like the Arabs have learnt through bitter experience, Israelis may one day discover that what they reject today may seem like an unattainable dream in the future.

Ordinary Israelis need to wake up fast to how the settler movement has taken their collective fate, and that of their children and grandchildren, hostage and to mobilise en masse against the settlements while Israel is still in a position to do so. They should take to the streets and say clearly: “Yes to a comprehensive settlement. No to the comprehensive settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

As in the story of Genesis which inspired the Israeli name for this war, many of the seeds of the current sorry state of affairs were planted in those six fateful days. It’s time to bring about the dawn of the seventh day of justice and reconciliation. Only then can we all rest.

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Tags: 1967 war, anwar el-sadat, arab countries, arab league, binyamin netanyahu, children of the revolution, conflict, egypt, israel, israel-palestine, khartoum, nakba, naksa, palestine, peace process, revolution

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