The Fantasy of Peace between Israel and Palestine

Quadrant article October 2014

LESLIE STEIN

The Fantasy of Peace between Israel and Palestine


Conventional wisdom would have it that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a land dispute over of what was once British-mandated Palestine. Given a modicum of mutual goodwill, it is assumed that the conflict could readily be resolved, with each side settling for somewhat less than its maximum demands. Many observers believe that the contours of such a settlement are already in place. Once Israel concedes almost all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians, anxious for a state of their own and realising that a viable military option is not available, would fall into line by agreeing to live in peace and harmony with Israel. Historical precedents are frequently cited in support of such a contention. In the wake of the Second World War, after Germany forfeited vast swathes of territory to Czechoslovakia and Poland, relations between Germany and those states were ultimately normalised. Supposedly more to the point, once Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk resolved their differences, South Africa seemingly entered a new era of racial harmony.

Unfortunately, Israeli-Palestinian disagreements are not amenable to standard conflict resolution techniques. For while one side, Israel, has been willing to compromise, the other, the Palestinians, have a long and consistent track record of rejecting any proposed arrangement which would give rise to a stable two-state solution. This was first manifested in July 1937 when a British commission of inquiry chaired by Lord Peel recommended that Palestine be partitioned. The Jews were to receive a narrow strip of coastal land that stretched from Ber Tuvia south of Tel Aviv into virtually all of the Galilee. The British were to retain Jerusalem plus a wide corridor linking that city with the coast, while the Arabs were to be allotted the rest of the country, including all of the Negev. At first the Zionists were inclined to reject the Peel Commission’s recommendations on the grounds that all of Palestine ought to have been awarded to them. After all, far more than half of the original mandated territory of Palestine had already in 1921 been hived off and handed to King Abdullah of Transjordan. As for the Arabs, they dismissed the Peel Commission’s recommendations out of hand.

In May 1939 Britain revoked the 1917 Balfour Declaration by indicating its intention to cede the entire country to the Arabs some ten years later. Within the first five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be permitted to enter Palestine. Thereafter, the Arabs would be able to veto all further Jewish immigration. Having been issued with an offer of eventual sovereignty over all of Palestine, the Arabs responded by turning it down. They were neither prepared to accept any additional Jewish immigration no matter how attenuated nor were they prepared to bide their time in attaining their independence. Far from appreciating the fact that Britain had effectively jettisoned the Zionist enterprise in their favour, the Palestinian leadership, under the sway of Haj Amin al-Husseini, demonstrated their ingratitude by throwing in their lot with the Nazis. In 1941 Husseini took up residence in Germany where he broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, visited a concentration camp accompanied by Heinrich Himmler and requested of Hitler that he approve of the Arabs emulating the Nazis in ridding Palestine of Jews.

After the war, Husseini returned to the Middle East to reassume the leadership of the Palestinians as head of the Palestinian High Committee. When in November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted in favour of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, Husseini played an active role in galvanising total Arab opposition to such a scheme. Once again, the Jews accepted partition, this time wholeheartedly, even though they were to be denied Jerusalem. Had the Arabs accepted the UN resolution, the Palestinians would have had a state that encompassed more land than was feasible after Israel’s War of Independence.

For the next nineteen years Israel continued to live within the so-called 1949 or pre-1967 borders. Actually they were merely armistice lines with the final frontiers to be determined in the framework of peace negotiations. The Arabs themselves had never recognised such boundaries for as far they were concerned Israel in its entirety was illegitimate. This at a time when there was not a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank and when East Jerusalem was in Arab hands. In other words, even when the Arabs held all the territory that they are now demanding, they had no intention of suing for peace. The Jews, on the other hand, had no intention of seizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, as Israel locked horns with Egypt in what was to become the Six-Day War, on three separate occasions it assured Jordan that if it did not enter the fray, it would be left unharmed. As a manifestation of Israel’s non-aggressive intentions, only three brigades with a limited number of tanks were stationed along the Jordanian border. King Hussein of Jordan’s response was transmitted through his prime minister, Sa’d Jum’a, who in a radio broadcast announced, “We are engaged in a war of honour against our common enemy. For years we have longed to wipe away the shame of the past.” Shortly thereafter, at 11.15 a.m., the Jordanian Arab Legion rained down 6000 shells on West Jerusalem, injuring a thousand people and killing twenty. Nine hundred buildings were struck including the Hadasah Hospital at Ein Kerem. Israel was left with no choice other than to neutralise the Jordanian forces by removing them from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Three weeks after the Six-Day War, Ya’akov Herzog, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, met secretly in London with King Hussein. On being asked by Herzog whether or not he would now sue for peace, Hussein refused to commit himself. Herzog then approached Palestinian notables, hinting at a possible formation of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in the greater Jerusalem area and with a secure passage between Gaza and the West Bank. Unfortunately, in light of Israel’s full withdrawal after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the notables wondered if Israel would indeed remain in the newly conquered territories and, fearful of being branded as collaborators, they were unwilling to consider Herzog’s overtures. This left only the PLO, established three years earlier, whose attitude to any prospect of coexisting with Israel was encapsulated by its founding leader Ahmed Shukeiri, who days before the Six-Day War, when asked on French television what plans he had for the Jews of Israel, he simply drew a finger across his throat. The upshot of it all is that even had Israel wanted to vacate all the territory it had taken, there was no responsible Arab body to receive it. Such a state of affairs continued until 1993 when the PLO pretended to recognise Israel under the terms of the Oslo Accords.

To understand why the PLO seemingly had a change of heart, one must bear in mind the changed status of that organisation. At the beginning of the 1990s the PLO was in disarray. Having in 1982 been displaced by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) from Lebanon, it transferred its headquarters to Tunisia, where it languished far from its theatre of war. By 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union and of other communist regimes, the PLO lost its world power sponsors that had furnished it with arms and training and that had furthered its cause in the UN and other international arenas. Then in the 1991 Gulf War it misplayed its hand by throwing in its lot with Saddam Hussein, depriving itself of almost a billion US dollars in revenue from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states as well as further antagonising the USA. Given such setbacks, the PLO in Efraim Karsh’s words “had become a regional pariah, with Arafat on the brink of political extinction”.[1] Then out of the blue, the Oslo Accords afforded the PLO a second life. With Israel hoodwinked into relating to it as a legitimate negotiating partner and by facilitating the entry of its leadership into the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention permitting it to maintain an armed police force, the opportunity was too good to miss even at the price of formally recognising Israel.

Needless to say, after having attained such a remarkable change of fortune, the PLO never once lived up to any of its contracted obligations, such as amending its charter in the interest of promoting peace, limiting the size of its armed force, bringing all disparate armed groups (such as those of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad) under a single controlling authority, combatting terrorism both by force and by education, and concentrating its energies in furthering the economic and social progress of its people. That did not in the least hinder the PLO from enjoying the support of the international community, which began to regard it as a respectable organisation to which they donated funds copiously, welcomed it into international forums and likened its leaders to responsible statesmen, even going as far as issuing Arafat with a Nobel Peace Prize.

From 1993 onwards, with Arafat ensconced within the frontiers of mandated Palestine, the PLO began undermining Israel. As violent acts of Palestinian terror became commonplace, Arafat went through the motions of both condemning them and reasserting his so-called commitment to the “peace of the brave”. Meanwhile, he quietly commended the perpetrators of such outrages and comforted their families. The worst incident occurred in September 1996 when at an IDF checkpoint outside Ramallah, Palestinian police joined with Palestinian students pelting missiles at Israeli soldiers. For the first time since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords the Palestinian police fired at the Israelis, killing fifteen. All the while, the Israelis continued to concede additional slices of territory to the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA) while receiving nothing but empty promises in return.

By the year 2000 Ehud Barak in his capacity as Israel’s prime minister began to fear that if Israel continued to give away the store in stages, it would eventually be bereft of bargaining chips for the purpose of extracting serious Palestinian concessions. Accordingly, he pushed for a round of talks that had the express purpose of settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. President Clinton, who was very receptive to the idea, offered to participate and host them on July 11 at his Camp David retreat. As the sessions progressed Barak found himself sequentially improving on his offers, given that all his preceding ones continued to fall short of Palestinian demands. The situation became quite farcical. The PA negotiating team referred to him as a lemon to be squeezed over and over again, while Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s deputy, stated that it was his credo not to move one step forward, for Israel “has to come our way on all the issues on which it procrastinates”.[2] Indeed Barak did his best to comply. In the end he offered to hand over all of Gaza, 91 per cent of the West Bank and some sections of East Jerusalem. (By the year’s end he was even prepared to concede 96 per cent of the West Bank.)

To the chagrin of both Clinton and Barak, Arafat insisted that no agreement would be reached unless Israel acceded to his demand to accept the right of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their former homes in Israel. Furthermore Arafat rejected any formula for shared sovereignty of the Temple Mount. As far as he was concerned, the Jews had never built a temple there in the first place. The process of denying that the Jews have an historic bond with their ancestral home is well entrenched within the PLO.

The Palestinian response to an offer of statehood with a capital in East Jerusalem was to unleash an organised orgy of wanton violence against the Jewish State that culminated in the deaths of 1009 Israelis. The uprising, or al-Aqsa Intifada, was ostensibly a reflection of Palestinian frustration in continuing to live under Israeli occupation. But in reality the occupation was perpetuated by the Palestinians themselves, who refused to make even the smallest of compromises which could have led to their independence. The PLO’s charter remained unaltered; Hamas, openly striving for Israel’s elimination, includes a clause in its charter that calls for the slaughter of all Jews.

It is commonly believed, even among some naive Israelis, that because the PLO had formally recognised Israel, sufficient willingness and flexibility on Israel’s part would result in the attainment of a mutually acceptable peace agreement. In truth, the Palestinians are not interested in making peace with Israel under any circumstances. In this regard, Ehud Olmert’s overture to Abbas is apposite. In September 2008, after a series of lengthy deliberations, Olmert presented Abbas with a proposal which is unlikely ever to be surpassed, nor, considering that most Israelis judged it excessive, will it ever be repeated. On offer was the formation of a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 93.6 per cent of the West Bank. To provide an offset for the 6.4 of the West Bank land that Israel would retain, Israel would forgo parts of its own territory amounting to an area equivalent to 5.8 per cent of the West Bank. A substantial portion of such land would consist of prime agricultural soil adjacent to Gaza currently cultivated by Israeli farming communities such as Be’eri, Kissufim and Nir Oz.[3] As Haaretz editor Aluf Benn noted, “The implementation of the Olmert plan would require the evacuation of tens of thousands of settlers and the removal of hallmarks of the West Bank settlement enterprise such as Ofra, Beit El, Elon Moreh and Kiryat Arba, as well as the Jewish community in Hebron.”[4] Finally, the 6 per cent of West Bank land area left in Israel’s favour would be met by the provision to the Palestinians of a land link between the West Bank and Gaza so that in essence the Palestinians would be fully compensated for any West Bank land still retained by Israel. As for Jerusalem, sovereignty of the Old City was to be vested in an international condominium consisting of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the United States.

Abbas promised to get back to Olmert the following day, but Olmert never heard from him again. To account for Abbas’s inexplicable behaviour, in March 2009, on Al Jazeera, Abbas’s offsider Saeb Erekat confected a conversation between Olmert and Abbas in which Abbas declaimed, “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine, the June 4, 1967 borders, without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” That, in Erekat’s words, was “why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign”.[5]

The continued refusal of the Palestinians to accept a final and conclusive termination of their dispute with Israel should have come as no surprise. In June 1974, at a Palestine National Council Meeting in Cairo, the PLO conceived of a strategy of initially striving for control over only part of Palestine with the aim of gradually extending that control to cover all of the country. Since then it has never, even for a second, deviated from that path.

On the very day in September 1993 that Arafat, Rabin and Clinton gathered in Washington for the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords, Arafat, in a pre-recorded television address broadcast in Jordan, informed his Arab audience that he had just accomplished the first step of the PLO’s plan of dismantling Israel by stages.[6] Most leading PLO functionaries have at one time or another articulated similar notions. For example, in May 2001 the late Faisal Husseini, who was slated to succeed Arafat, in an interview given to an Egyptian journal, likened the PLO to a Trojan horse that given a foothold on territory controlled by Israel would eventually overrun the entire Jewish State. In December 2009 Abbas, who actually did succeed Ararat, stated that “there is no disagreement between Fatah and Hamas. About belief? None! About policy? None. About resistance? None.”[7] What Abbas was essentially saying was that like Hamas, his Fatah organisation, of which he is chairman, is committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state from Jordan to the Mediterranean. How otherwise could Hamas and Fatah share a common belief and policy?

Such views are also maintained by the vast majority of the Palestinian population, whose hatred of Israel is bequeathed from one generation to the next. Of late, the intensity of such hatred has increased even at the very time when Israel has been prepared to meet them halfway.

In trying to understand the source of their rancour, one could rule out its stemming from a frustrated Palestinian nationalism. Historically the Arabs in Palestine have never regarded themselves as constituting a distinct national entity. There has never been an independent Palestinian state and at no time since the destruction of the second Temple was Jerusalem a capital city of any non-Jewish state, not even a regional centre in the Ottoman empire. In 1923, the Arab Executive Committee, the umbrella organisation of the Palestinians, in a submission to the League of Nations, claimed that Palestine had been unlawfully severed from its mother country, Syria.[8] When the Arab High Command rejected the 1937 Peel Commission’s partition proposal it did so on the grounds that Palestine belongs to the Arab and Muslim worlds.[9] Ten years later, in once again presenting its case, this time against an imminent UN partition scheme, the Arab High Command advocated the incorporation of Palestine and Transjordan into a “Greater Syria”.[10] In 1977, well after Israel had been established, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO executive committee, formally let the cat out of the bag in an interview with James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper Trouw. Without mincing his words, Muhsein explained:



the Palestinian people do not exist. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.[11]



As for Hamas, the struggle against the Jewish state derives its inspiration not from any nationalistic feelings but from Islam. The purpose of the struggle is to establish an Islamic state over all of Palestine as part of the Muslim crusade to extend Islam to the world at large.

A toxic brew of Nazi and Islamic anti-Semitism which had been indelibly instilled into the Arab psyche by the founding Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini and maintained to this very day is the root cause of Palestinian intransigence. To the Muslim belief that land once held by Muslims is absolutely inalienable is added a cocktail of egregious racist anti-Semitism that would have won the admiration of Julius Streicher.

An abiding hatred of Israelis within Palestinian society continues to be consciously fomented by the Palestinian leadership. The inculcation of the most extreme of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiments commences in kindergarten and school where children are taught that the entire region from the River Jordan to the sea constitutes Palestinian territory and that Israel within its 1949 borders occupies land illegitimately wrested from them. Israel is whitewashed out of all school maps and Israeli cities are listed in song and poetry as Palestinian ones to which the children are destined to return. Above all, suicide bombers are slavishly adored. Their pictures grace the walls of practically every classroom and the students are encouraged to emulate them. City squares, sports venues and sport teams as well as public landmarks are named after the most bloodthirsty Palestinian murderers, who are regarded as embodying the supreme virtues of the Palestinian people.

Far from being ashamed or distancing themselves from the evil deeds perpetrated by their “freedom fighters”, the PA is more than proud of them, officially according them respect and gratitude. Take for instance the insertion in July 2013 of photographs of five Palestinian terrorists and a summary of their feats in the official Facebook page of Fatah. Accompanying the photograph of one Abdallah Bargouti, currently serving sixty-seven life sentences for organising various acts of murder, is a list of his “accomplishments”. And what are those accomplishments? The list reads as follows:



The Sbarro restaurant operation in Jerusalem which killed 15 Zionists, the Moment Café operation which killed 11 Zionists, the Sheffield Night Club operation which killed 15 Zionists, the Hebrew University operation which killed 9 Zionists, the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall operation which killed 11 Zionists.[12]



The adulation of terrorists emanates from the very pinnacle of the PA leadership. In July 2010, on the occasion of the death of Muhammad Daoud Oudeh, the organiser of the Munich Olympic Games massacre, Mahmoud Abbas sent a telegram of condolences to the deceased’s family. In it he described Oudeh as a prominent Fatah leader and a wonderful brother and companion, who, as a relentless fighter, devoted himself in defence of the Palestinian revolution.[13]

The immediate wish-list of the PA, as repetitively articulated by its leadership and media outlets, includes Israel’s acceptance of the right of return of all Palestinian refugees and Palestinian control of the Old City of Jerusalem in its entirety, forestalling Jewish access to the plaza facing the Western Wall where the establishment of an Arab housing estate has been flagged.[14] Not only would the Old City be Judenrein (Jew-free) but so too would the future Palestinian state. As Abbas declared: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli—civilian or soldier—on our lands.”[15] Finally, far from being willing to recognise Israel as a Jewish state (which was the explicit intention of the 1947 UN partition resolution) the PA has called upon Israel to acknowledge its exclusive role in the creation of the Palestinian Nakba (tragedy).[16] The effrontery of it all is breathtaking. After failing in their campaign to stifle Israel at birth, the Palestinians expect Israel to apologise for that failure.

Whichever way one looks at it, it ought to be patently obvious that the Palestinians have no desire to make peace with Israel. The sole purpose and function of their organisations—Fatah, the PLO, Hamas, the Muslem Brotherhood—is directed towards the destruction of the Jewish State. Without Israel, nothing would be heard of Palestinian national aspirations. When in 1948 Jordan illegally took possession of the West Bank and Egypt took the Gaza Strip, areas designated by the UN for the establishment of a Palestinian state, no Palestinian leader uttered the slightest complaint. Years later, as the PLO leaders formulated their movement’s objectives, they assured King Hussein that they would not contest his rule over the West Bank. All they sought was the elimination of Israel, an objective which they assumed Hussein also held.[17]

By instilling in their followers an ideology of hatred towards Israel, by inciting them to undertake acts of murder described as wondrous deeds and by insisting that the return to Israel of all Arab refugees and their offspring is a non-negotiable sacred right, the Palestinian leaders have foreclosed all prospects of ever attaining peace. Now, even if Palestinian leaders did indeed want peace, they would be unable to pursue it lest they be assassinated.

Palestinian intransigence had been aided and abetted by the international community. In fact without its support, the Palestinians may well have become somewhat more accommodating. But by playing along with the farce that the Palestinians are victims, that those now living for several generations in areas of mandated Palestine such as Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinian refugees, by the open-ended financing of their organisations without any serious accountability and by rubber-stamping their demands in world forums, the international community has blithely contributed to the continuation of the bloodletting it purports to abhor.

Until a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders emerges that purges Palestinian society of its dysfunctional genocidal obsession, Israel is destined to continue to live in a state of alternating hot and cold wars. Just as it has done so during the past sixty-six years, managing in the process to develop its economy and society to ever higher levels of attainment, so hopefully will it continue to do so in the future.



Leslie Stein is the author of Israel Since the Six-Day War, published in July by Polity Press. He was an associate professor at Macquarie University until his recent retirement.