Land for peace

It’s as if Ehud Olmert has set out to prove my point for me. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the AJC pamphlet, Israel’s quest for peace, which argues in a nutshell that Israel has never wanted anything but peace and has always extended its hand to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours in friendship, only to have its hopes dashed by their intransigence and implacable hatred for the Jews. I quoted Columbia University lecturer Joseph Massad, who explained in his Al Ahram article, ‘Israel's desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive…Israel's struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbours, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands its military occupies by force.’

Then on Thursday, Mr Olmert said ‘Israel was ready to make "big and painful" concessions to advance the peace process.’

"I am announcing to the heads of the Arab states on this occasion that if the Saudi king initiates a meeting of moderate Arab states and invites me and the head of the Palestinian Authority in order to present us the Saudi ideas, we will come to hear them and we will be glad to voice ours," Mr Olmert said.

"I think it is time to make a momentous effort in order to give a push to the diplomatic process... I am optimistic," he said.

So what is the nature of the ‘momentous effort’ and these ‘"big and painful" concessions’? Richard Boudreaux wrote in yesterday’s LA Times,

Olmert made it clear Sunday that his reservations about the terms demanded of Israel had not softened…Israel rejected the Saudi plan when it was first proposed. Israeli leaders have said they are willing to give up land for peace and allow the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state but would never agree to a full return to the 1967 borders. They have rejected the return of refugees to what is now Israel, saying the new Palestinian state should be the refugees' homeland.

Nothing has changed then since Sunday when I wrote about Olmert’s absolute rejection of the thought of allowing even one refugee to return to their home in what is now Israel. In any event, this is not really news. On 14 April 2004, US President George W Bush wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon

an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.

In an ironic twist, as Anthony Shadid reported in a moving story in yesterday’s Washington Post, hundreds of Palestinian refugees from Iraq huddle in their tents in Ruweished Refugee Camp near the Jordanian border with Iraq. According to Robert Breen, the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan,

"They can't go backward, and they aren't moving forward. They're literally stuck in the desert -- no way back, and nowhere to go."

"I can't recall ever having seen this kind of situation in such a bleak environment," Breen said.

It is spring in Ruweished, the season belied by the desolate environs but still weeks before the heat that residents call unbearable. Respiratory problems are rife because of the sandstorms....

The Palestinian Authority has offered the refugees sanctuary, but Israel, which controls the borders of the West Bank and Gaza, has denied U.N. requests to resettle them in the Palestinian territories, he said.

So the refugees are to be settled in the ‘Palestinian territories’, but the Israeli government still has the final say on that, as well. One of the refugees, who had spent four years in Ruweida, since fleeing the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, received a letter from the Canadian authorities.

"You have not provided sufficient evidence that you have a well-founded fear of persecution nor that you have been and continue to be seriously and personally affected by civil war, armed conflict or massive violation of human rights," it read in part.

Another story, by Seth Mydans in Sunday’s International Herald Tribune, described the plight of millions of ‘Citizens of nowhere’.

Hidden in the back corners of the world is a scattered population of millions of nobodies, citizens of nowhere, forgotten or neglected by governments, ignored by census takers.

Many of these stateless people are among the world's poorest; all are the most disenfranchised. Without citizenship, they often have no right to schooling, health care or property ownership. Nor may they vote, or travel outside their countries - even, in some cases, the towns - where they live.

They are stateless for many reasons - migration, refugee flight, racial or ethnic exclusion, the quirks of history - but taken together, these noncitizens, according to one report, "are among the most vulnerable segments of humanity."

Without the rights conferred by citizenship, they have few avenues for redressing abuses, and little access to resources that could help them build better lives.

It’s rather frightening that the IHT can somehow devote an article to statelessness without a single mention of the Palestinians.

Anyway, beyond the refugees who will never get to return to their homes, it comes as no surprise that ‘a full return to the 1967 borders’ is not on the table either. As Bush wrote,

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations [sic] centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.

In other words, the only painful concession that Olmert hasn’t already explicitly excluded is Jerusalem. And I think we can take it as read that since Israel has long since officially annexed all of Jerusalem (‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.’) and in 1998 declared a public holiday in honour of its ‘liberation and unification’, that this is not negotiable either.

What this leaves us with, therefore, is the status quo. I’m not sure what Olmert might have meant by ‘painful concessions’. Perhaps he just meant that holding any kind of discussion of the issues with ‘the moderate Arab states’ would be painful. Or maybe he was just lying. I think the gist of it lies in the formulation he used, ‘to advance the peace process’. This is much like Condi Rice’s refrain about the ‘political horizon’. Olmert is content with the way the peace process has been progressing for the last thirteen years. Israel still has control over the entire West Bank and has established such ‘facts on the ground’ that nobody in their right mind is suggesting a return to the Green Line. In any case, Bush himself acknowledged that there was no longer any possibility that Israel would ever have to withdraw from the ‘populations centers’, and that clinches it. So the peace process can proceed. Israel really and truly wants peace, but not as much is it wants the peace process, which may or may not lead to peace, but definitely will not entail concessions so painful as justice for the refugees or withdrawal to the Green Line. And of course, ‘existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue’.

According to the LA Times article, ‘Israeli leaders have said they are willing to give up land for peace’. We’ve been hearing this refrain of ‘land for peace’ for decades. When you think about it, though, what’s it really about?

The only land that has ever been on offer, if it really was on offer at all, is land acquired by military conquest in June 1967. The principal import of the famous UNSC Resolution 242 is not creation of a Palestinian state, a matter that it never even mentions, but to emphasise ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’. So the land that Israel would be relinquishing, if it were ever really going to relinquish land at all, is land that was never rightfully Israel’s in the first place. It was territory acquired by war. Not really very much of a sacrifice. And lest we forget, the entity euphemistically known as ‘Israel proper’ which resides within the 3 April 1949 armistice line with Jordan commonly referred to as Israel’s ‘border’, incorporates a considerable amount of territory also acquired by war in 1948-49. But that probably doesn’t matter, because after all, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 (III) decided on 11 May 1949 ‘that Israel is a peace-loving State’. (I hasten to add that Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank for the next 18 years was also illegitimate and at the expense of the Palestinians who were supposed to get that land and more under the UN’s ill conceived December 1947 partition resolution (181). Ill conceived though it may have been, 181 did quite sensibly provide for international control of Jerusalem. Both Israel and Jordan grabbed bits of the proposed ‘corpus separatum’.)

Beyond one side of the equation of ‘land for peace’ being a bit bogus, as the land doesn’t really belong to Israel, is the other subtext. The suggestion is that since the Israelis are offering to give land, it’s the Palestinians who have to deliver the peace. That, in turn relies on the presumption that it’s the Palestinians who insist on violence and that Israel is the passive victim. Israel is willing to make painful sacrifices of its land if only those vicious Palestinians would leave them in peace. In reality, of course, it is the Palestinians who are the colonised people and on the receiving end of most of the violence. Palestinian violence, while demonstrably counterproductive, is wholly reactive. Amazing how they can pack all that into an innocuous little phrase, but then the Israeli hasbara ‘propaganda’ machine are no amateurs.

'A moral issue'

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon and David Horovitz on Thursday, also reported in the NY Times, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it absolutely unequivocal that he was not interested in any kind of peaceful settlement with Palestinians.

For 59 years, the Palestinian refugees languishing in squalid refugee camps have been considered an issue that can wait. Their plight has always been relegated to ‘final status negotiations’, left on the back burner, as if this were not a pressing issue – the most pressing issue – for well over four million people.

In answer to the Post’s question, Olmert made it plain that the refugees were entirely off the agenda.

I will not agree to accept any kind of Israeli responsibility for the refugees. Full stop. It's a moral issue. It's a moral issue of the highest standard. I don't think that we should accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem. Full stop.

[I would rule out] ...Any refugee coming to Israel. Full stop. Out of the question.

…Refugees, no way…I'll never accept a solution that is based on their return to Israel, any number.

Of course, the fact is, that it’s not necessary for Israel to ‘accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem’. It doesn’t matter why the refugees left, they are still entitled to return and they are still entitled to resume their property. Taken to its logical conclusion, Israel’s refusal to accept the return of the refugees sets a precedent that in principle, anyone can occupy anyone else’s property when they are absent for any reason. All they need do is claim that it wasn’t their fault that the owners left in the first place. Even if it really was their fault.

Keinon and Horovitz don’t explore the matter any further, but I think we can work out the nature of the ‘moral issue of the highest standard’. First of all, in denying responsibility for their flight in the first place, Olmert, like his predecessors and all apologists for the Jewish state, ‘doth protest too much’. Since the right of return does not depend on any kind of Israeli guilt for the ethnic cleansing, their insistence on denying it suggests that they are in fact guilty, and certainly does nothing to erode the refugees’ rights.

Furthermore, by denoting them ‘refugees’, he explicitly admits that they have a legitimate claim for refuge. Refuge from what? Well, could it be the Plan Dalet ethnic cleansing program on which the Jewish state’s cherished Jewish majority is based? Olmert may say what he likes, but two decades of painstaking scholarship in the Israeli military archives, in Ben Gurion’s obsessive diaries, and elsewhere by Israeli Jewish historians, have revealed that there were not just random massacres and excesses, but a worked out strategy to ‘spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border’, as Theodor Herzl so delicately put it in his diary on 12 June 1895.

The ‘moral issue of the highest standard’ is of course precisely the maintenance of Israel’s Jewish majority. In Zionist parlance morality doesn’t have the universalist connotations we are accustomed to attribute to it. What’s good for the gander may often be the exact opposite of what’s good for the goose. In this case, however, there is a kind of consistency. Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab countries who have settled in Israel and their descendants do not claim a right to return to their countries of origin. By the same token, on what basis should the Palestinians displaced by Zionist colonisation claim, or wish, to return or to demand restitution of their appropriated property? But wait. Hasn’t Israel been clamouring for decades for restitution of Jewish property and compensation from all kinds of authorities in Europe?

Anyway, that’s not the basis of the argument. For Olmert, it’s not Israel’s fault, so it’s not Israel’s responsibility, and anyway, it’s not convenient for the Jewish state to absorb 4,000,000 Palestinian refugees, or even one. The first argument is not just irrelevant, but false. The second is patently racist. But it should come as no surprise that ‘the international community’ has tolerated this obstructive attitude and copped the cost of looking after Israel’s mess for nearly six decades. After all, it’s more or less the same international community that President George Bush I addressed on 23 September 1991,

Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations.

This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel's right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.

It’s more or less the same international community that accepted Bush’s lame red herring that Jewish suffering somehow justified Jewish racism, his bogus assertion that Israel was ‘a member of good standing’, and his ludicrous allegation that Israel’s ‘right to exist’ is in any way in the interests of peace.

To their everlasting shame, the response was overwhelmingly to resolve, "The general assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975." That was the resolution that, ‘taking note of’ this and that, none of it really relevant, and recognising what is obvious to the most casual observation, ‘Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.’

With friends like these, it’s beginning to look as if the refugees are on their own.

Returning to the original point, if Olmert will not consider a just resolution for the refugees, including the right of return, there is no prospect of a peaceful outcome.

A mighty effort

Writing about US Secretary of State Rice’s Middle East junket the other day, I quoted the NY Times quoting her on ‘how quickly we can accelerate the road map and how we begin to talk about the political horizon that everybody is interested in.’

Well it seems Thom Shanker has twigged what she’s really on about. In his news analysis yesterday, ‘Perhaps Thinking of Legacy, Bush Has Rice on the Move’, he writes parenthetically,

(Ms. Rice, a scholar of Soviet affairs, is no doubt aware of the Brezhnev-era joke in which a Kremlin party leader intones, “Comrades, global Communism is on the horizon,” to which a reply is whispered from the back of the hall, “Doesn’t the horizon always move away exactly as fast as you move toward it?”)

Obviously, there’s no need to be a scholar of Soviet affairs to note this peculiar phenomenon of the infinitely receding horizon, but it’s refreshing that the newspaper of record notes it in this context, for the horizon is really quite an apt metaphor for the ‘Middle East Peace Proccess’. Notwithstanding this useful insight, however, it wouldn’t do to be too hasty to judge Mr Shanker’s clueyness. A couple of paragraphs earlier, he wrote,

The Palestinian president and the Israeli prime minister promised to join her for three-way talks within a month, with a meeting in Washington in advance by the so-called quartet — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — that has been trying to promote Middle East peace.

So we have a situation where a country of some 7 million, occupies territory with a population of some 3-4 million over a period of four decades in defiance of binding UN Security Council resolutions, underwritten with billions of dollars per year from the US, and yet the US itself, in league with Europe, Russia, and the entire ‘international community’, has failed, although exerting its best efforts since the promulgation of the Road Map in 2003, to secure the cooperation of its client?

This Quartet is a funny mob. Since all the member of the EU and the US and Russia are all members of the UN, you’d kind of think the UN alone could carry the ball on this one. But of course the UN has no power to compel a member state to do or not to do anything unless it meets two conditions. It needs a Security Council resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, and it needs member states to contribute troops. Meeting the first condition is usually a problem when it comes to Israel because the US routinely deploys its veto to preclude it.

But there was at least one occasion when it failed, or forgot, to do so. UNSC Resolution 242 was adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, some five months after the June 1967 war in which Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Almost everybody reads the operative clause, ‘Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires …Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’, as intending that the Israeli military was to withdraw from all those territories. The usual interpretation for the wording ‘from territories’ rather than ‘from the territories’ or ‘from all territories’, is that the Security Council members wanted to allow for minor adjustments to the 1949 ceasefire lines, the Green Line, in establishing final borders. And that is the explanation that Lord Caradon, one of the drafters, gives. Furthermore, in the discussion, the Indian representative was quite explicit that the intention was for the Israeli troops with withdraw from all of the territories, and nine other members explicitly supported this position, with only Israel itself, then represented on the Council, objecting. You might think that the prefatory clause, ‘Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’ would clinch the matter. But there are those who disagree.

According to Ted Lapkin, the Director of Policy Analysis at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), for example, ‘By withdrawing from the Sinai in 1979 – which constituted 90% of the 1967 occupied territories, Israel complied with the stipulated requirements of 242.’

Anyway, that was a fluke. According to Carter’s new book, ‘The United States has used its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block resolutions critical of Israel.’ Among those vetoes that ‘have brought international discredit on the United States’ was his own veto of draft resolution S/13911 on 30 April 1980.

The point is that the UN can’t enforce ‘international law’, ‘human rights’, or anything, even with a Security Council resolution, without the US’s full cooperation. Indeed, even without the specific institution of the Security Council, which alone can make binding resolutions, with its five veto wielding permanent nuclear powers, the UN would be a far cry from the kind of unifying force for peace that liberal mythology makes it out to be. It is not a warm and cuddly meeting of human beings from all corners of the globe. It does not represent the people all over the world, but the very states that govern them. In plainer language, that preside over their exploitation and oppression on behalf of each country’s ruling minority. So it would be foolish to expect too much.

Even at its most earnest, the UN fails to rise above its fundamental cynicism. Take the Millennium Development Goals, ‘Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day’. I won’t be the first to point out that 2015 is a long time to go hungry – longer still when they first said it in 2000. Or to ask why the baseline is set at 1990 for a project that begins in 2000? And what about the other half? How long is it ok for them to live on such a paltry sum and ‘suffer from hunger’? On Thursday, Reuters reported, ‘The steadily rising Iraq war price tag will reach about $8.4 billion a month this year’. Per month. Just for Iraq. That would feed a lot of people. One could go on about the incompetence, inefficiency, waste, empire building, and featherbedding that goes on in UN agencies alongside some dedicated and profoundly frustrated people.

Sometimes you read about ‘the international community’. I find it easy to fall into assuming that this means something more substantive than just what the UN decides. For example, a couple of years ago, prominent Australian ‘public intellectual’ Robert Manne broke his silence on the Palestine issue to assert, among other things, ‘In 1947 the international community decided to establish a Jewish state in a part of the British mandatory territory, Palestine. That decision seems to me to have been both just and, as important, irrevocable.’

By ‘the international community’ here he is of course referring specifically to UN General Assembly’s partition Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, whose substance was to create not only a Jewish state but also an Arab state within the area of Mandatory Palestine. So the creation of the state of Israel, in the absence of an independent Palestinian state in the area stipulated by the UN General Assembly, was not in accord with the decision of ‘the international community’.

Another aspect of 1947’s ‘international community, is that the states comprising the international community that voted in favour of this decision included such beacons of democracy as Somoza’s Nicaragua, Morinigo’s military dictatorship in Paraguay, and the Stalinist regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe. It is worth noting that the states represented at the UN in 1947 included just 57 countries, mainly European and Western Hemisphere countries. Not one country of Sub-Saharan Africa, other than the Union of South Africa, which was on the verge of formalising apartheid as state policy, even existed at the time. Among this peculiarly skewed collection of nation states, 13 voted against Resolution 181, 10 abstained and one, Siam, was absent for the vote. That means that some 58% of ‘the international community’ as constituted at the time actually supported partition.

It is also worth noting that there was an alternative proposal on the table at the same time that would have created a ‘federal independent state of Palestine’ with proportional representation of all ‘elements’ of the population and safeguarding ‘the rights of religious establishments of all nationalities in Palestine’. Consideration of this proposal was quashed, somewhat cynically in my view, by rulings from the chair, one Dr Aranha.

At the time of this resolution, we did not have the wealth of experience we now enjoy of the effects of partition, although the horrors surrounding the partition of India some three months earlier might have provided some insight. While the rejected proposal leaves much to be desired, it seems clear that it would have been infinitely preferable to partition and might, if enforced rigorously, have precluded some of the excesses carried out by the Jewish state.

A year and a half later, after the ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 indigenous Palestinians and the capture of considerably more territory than Resolution 181 had awarded, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 ‘Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations’.

In doing so, it expressly recalled, ‘its resolutions of 29 November 1947 [the partition resolution 181] and 11 December 1948 [Resolution 194 on the return of the refugees] and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representatives of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions’. It’s going to require some more research to uncover those ‘declarations and explanations’, but by the end of 1952, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban was arguing, ‘If we are to be faithful craftsmen in the greatest of all arts - construction of world peace - we must continually perfect our instruments and sometimes not hesitate to change them.’ The refugees, he argued, were a result of the war, so it wasn’t Israel’s fault or responsibility, and anyway, they had absorbed so many refugees from other countries, and blah blah blah.

So obviously the UN is not going to do anything to achieve peace in Palestine, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, for the reasons I mentioned – it can’t.

As for the EU, a lot of people have held out great hopes. Some imagine that the EU can serve as a force to counterbalance the sole superpower. Well, when they jumped on the bandwagon and cut off the PA after the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza voted wrong last January, consigning hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to even deeper poverty, they surely put paid to any such residual illusions. Still with Britain and France on board the Road Map, along with Russia and the US, only China could veto a Security Council resolution. I’ve never heard a suggestion that this was any kind of possibility. So the Quartet was actually in a position to place the nearest thing the UN has to compulsive power into motion. There could have been a resolution under Chapter 7 calling on the Israelis to get out forthwith or else. It won’t have surprised anyone that this is not what transpired.

As a matter of fact, considering the level of the US subsidy to the Israeli occupation, you’d think that all it would take to end the occupation would be a threat to withhold that money.

In reality, Israel started out by expressing its reservations about the Road Map, which effectively reduced it to a meaningless scrap, and nobody objected. It insisted that it would take no action whatsoever until ‘the Palestinians held up their end’. The Israelis insisted that the powerless quisling Palestine Authority not only achieve a ceasefire with the armed groups that were not under their control, but fully disarm them. In other words, the Israelis would not move one ‘illegal outpost’ caravan until after the Palestinian civil war. So the Quartet is yet to reach the first milestone along the Road Map they were due to complete two years ago.

All things considered, I think we’d have to conclude that The Quartet has not really been exercising much effort to ‘promote Middle East peace’.

But then, this all assumes that the key to ‘Middle East peace’ is partition. That’s a funny kind of assumption that I intend to address another time.