Agree to differ

On her Muzzlewatch blog a couple of months ago, Cecilie Surasky, Director of Communications at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), excoriates the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for their recent survey of Israeli Jews, headlining the post, ‘ADL completely disappears 25% of Israel’s population- joining efforts with Avigdor Lieberman?’

Nowhere in their lengthy release does it mention what you can only find by reading the actual report, under Methodology, where it says:

The poll was conducted as a telephone survey…constituting a representative sample of the adult Jewish population (aged 18 and higher) in Israel.

So in the eyes of the ADL, if you are not Jewish, you are not Israeli. Some 25% of Israelis are not Jews…

She’s absolutely right to say the press release, which claims that it was ‘a comprehensive poll of Israeli opinions’ and consistently generalizes about ‘Israelis’ without ever mentioning that only Jews were sampled, is downright offensive. And the report, entitled ‘Israeli Views of President Obama and US-Israel Relations’, should have been clearer that it was a survey specifically of Israeli Jews. But it’s not true that you have to read all the way to the Methodology section – the second paragraph of the report – to find this out, because the very first sentence declares, ‘we have conducted an opinion poll among the Jewish public in Israel’.

And yet, a poll of all Israelis that fails to disaggregate Jewish views from those of other Israelis in the sample would be decidedly less interesting, a point I’ll return to. It’s not that the views of Palestinian Israelis are uninteresting – quite the contrary. But when aggregated with the views of the Jewish majority, they dilute and are themselves diluted by Jewish responses.

Importantly and somewhat surprisingly, she observes

Sounds just like “anti-Arab demagogue” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who thinks of non-Jewish Israeli Arabs, whose families lived in Jaffa and Hebron long before most Jewish Israelis made Aliyah, as a fifth column. Some choose to think Lieberman’s open racism is an exception, but it’s not. The kind of thinking which only recognizes Jews as citizens and denies full rights to others has long pervaded Israel and the Jewish Diaspora here.

The poll itself is mainly concerned with Jewish Israelis’ views of Obama and the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Israel. But that’s not what struck me as the most interesting findings.

Asked ‘Obama has declared his intention of bringing about reconciliation with the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to improve the United State’s position and reputation. Do you believe or not that such reconciliation will be at Israel’s expense?’ (Q13), 63% said ‘It will come at Israel’s expense (80% of those who expressed an opinion one way or the other).

Fifty-one percent said, ‘The U.S. should not negotiate with Iran’ and 66% support Israeli

military action aimed at destroying the Iranian nuclear facilities (81% of opinion holders), and 75% of those who supported an Israeli attack still supported it even ‘if the Obama administration opposed’ it.

Finally, 52% said American Jews should not ‘feel free to publicly criticize the Israeli government and its policy’ (Q20), while 35% disagreed. In a 2007 survey, only 36% opposed freedom of expression for US Jews, while 62% supported it. The recent J Street poll of American Jews found that 58% said ‘It does not bother me when American Jews disagree publicly with Israeli government policy’, while 28% said it did.

Last week the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah wrote a devastating critique of parallel polls of Palestinians in the occupied territories and of Israelis conducted by One Voice in February, two months earlier than the ADL survey. He discerns that the survey, developed by Dr. Colin Irwin of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, ‘...appears intended to influence international opinion in a direction more amenable to Israel, rather than to record faithfully the views of Palestinians or Israelis...The group's press release unabashedly spun the results to claim popular legitimacy for the two-state solution and to discredit alternatives...’

Nevertheless, I found it remarkably interesting. Unlike any other poll I’ve come across, it gets right down to the nuts and bolts, asking about a broad, if not quite comprehensive, range of options regarding the principal aspects of any solution, including even refugees and the corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank, as well as process related issues. Although neither Abunimah’s critique nor Irwin’s report mentions it explicitly, a footnote indicates that Palestinian Israelis were included in the Israeli sample and their responses are disaggregable, although not actually disaggregated except with respect to two questions about the division of Jerusalem mentioned in the note. As I mentioned earlier, this pollutes the responses of the Israelis, presumably drawing the Israeli proportions closer to the ‘Palestinian’. For example, when asked about ‘Greater Israel – A Jewish state from the Jordanian border to the sea‘, 47% of Israelis found the prospect ‘Unacceptable’. My suspicion is that this proportion would be lower in a poll of Israeli Jews.

Irwin’s method is to ask respondents to rate various propositions on a five point scale: ‘Essential’, ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, ‘Tolerable’, ‘Unacceptable’. I’m ambivalent about this approach. The first and last points are true polar opposites and may provide a sound basis for comparison. But I’m not confident that the respondents could distinguish ‘Acceptable’ from ‘Tolerable’. I’m not sure what Irwin wanted to capture with these terms myself. Furthermore, there’s no real middle term – the first four points on the scale are effectively opposed to ‘Unacceptable’. In his analysis, Irwin sometimes sums ‘Essential’ and ‘Desirable’ responses as if this were an ordinary five point scale where the response categories are more balanced around a non committal middle term. In other cases, he sums all four responses – ‘Essential’ through ‘Tolerable’ – to provide the impression of a larger base of support for a proposition.

In the OneVoice press release, we learn that ‘74% of West Bank & Gaza Palestinians and 78% of Israelis are willing to accept a two state solution’. These figures represent the sum of all responses other than ‘Unacceptable’ to the question about the ‘Two state solution - Two states for two peoples: Israel and Palestine’. So we don’t actually know what the respondents found ‘Essential’ or ‘Tolerable’. In all probability, the Palestinians thought they were responding to a question about a version of partition where the border would be drawn along the Green Line (78% ‘Essential’) and East Jerusalem would be incorporated into the Palestinian state (89% ‘Essential’), while the Israelis, or the Israeli Jews, at any rate, thought they were being asked about a partition with the border drawn along the wall (58% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’), and Israel retaining sovereignty over all of Jerusalem (74% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’). So it is a distortion to imply that the Israelis and Palestinians surveyed are prepared to tolerate the same two state ‘solution’.

As Abunimah points out, 53% of the Palestinian sample were willing to tolerate ‘One joint state – A state in which Israelis and Palestinians are equal citizens’, but only 18% said it was ‘Essential’, and 43% said it was ‘Unacceptable’, while the Israeli sample wasn’t asked about this option. As for ‘One shared state - Bi-national federal state in which Israelis and Palestinians share power’, 34% of Palestinians and 32% of Israelis were prepared to tolerate it, while 59% and 66%, respectively, found it ‘Unacceptable’.

Note that, as Abunimah also remarks, ‘One Voice asserts that a "very conscious effort was made in this poll to cover as wide a range of potential solutions as possible." But except for the initial question about the type of state, all the other questions assume, and are primarily relevant to, a two-state solution.’

I think it might be instructive to compare what the Palestinian sample found ‘Essential’ and comparing it to what the Israeli population found ‘Unacceptable’, for some key issues, omitting the equivocal middle terms – ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, and ‘Tolerable’. In this way, we may discover some intractable sticking points. Among the Israelis, there was little consensus on what was ‘Essential’ – they are mainly united in their rejectionism.

The option the highest proportion of Palestinians deemed ‘Essential’ was ‘Historic Palestine – From the Jordanian river to the sea’ with 71%, another option not offered the Israeli sample. On what was ‘Essential’, the highest proportion among the Israelis was 32% for the two state ‘solution’.

A more recent survey, jointly conducted in late May and early June by the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah, asked

According to the Saudi plan, Israel will retreat from all territories occupied in 1967 including Gaza the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a Palestinian state will be established. The refugees problem will be resoved through negotiation in a just and agreed upon manner and in accordance with UN resolution. In return, all Arab states will recognize Israel and its right to secure borders, will sign peace treaties with her and establish normal diplomatic relations. Do you agree or disagree to this plan?

As is always the case with complex questions like this, ‘disagree’ answers are uninformative because we don’t know which component respondents objected to. But it is probably safe to assume that those who agree accept every component. Only 22.2% of Israeli Jews agreed with this formulation, 7% ‘definitely’. Among the Palestinian sample, 57.3% agreed, 8.3% definitely. Interestingly, in a follow up survey of Israelis only and not disaggregated by ethnicity conducted after Obama’s 4 June Cairo speech, 35% of all Israelis agreed, 13.3% ‘definitely’. This represents a slight decrease from before the speech when 36.3% of all Israelis agreed, 14% ‘definitely’. Although the margin of error is not stated, the drop may not be significant.

On the question of the border, 78% of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ ‘Israel should withdraw to the 67 border’, while 60% of Israelis said that was ‘Unacceptable’. There was again no consensus among Israelis on what was ‘Essential’, but 58% would tolerate a ‘Border established by the security wall’, an option 73% of Palestinians considered ‘Unacceptable’.

It was ‘Essential’ for 91% of Palestinian respondents that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine’, while 45% of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel’. A point of agreement was that majorities of both populations regarded it as ‘Unacceptable’ either to divide the city or to make it an ‘International City of Peace’ under UN or multifaith jurisdiction.

Ninety-eight percent of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished’ and 83% that ‘Abandoned settlements and infrastructure should be given to Palestinians’. Without access to the interviewers’ instructions or comparable metadata, I can’t be sure, but I surmise that this apparent contradiction arises because respondents were asked to consider each option independently of the others. These were ‘Unacceptable’ to 53% and 58% of Israelis, respectively. Thirty-seven percent of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlements on the Israeli side of the security wall should be part of Israel’ and 20% that ‘All the settlements should remain as they are’. Significant majorities of both populations agreed it would be ‘Unacceptable’ for settlers to stay in the Palestinian state.

Curiously, the Palestinian sample was not asked about the crucial corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank, but among the Israelis, 47% said a bridge would be ‘Unacceptable’, 57% rejected a tunnel, and 43% wouldn’t accept a ‘Corridor between Gaza and West bank on land given to Palestine under land exchange’. Only about 8% of Israelis thought it ‘Essential’ for there to be any form of ‘transportational contiguity’ between the two enclaves at all.

Among Palestinians, 96% said ‘Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space’, while this was unacceptable to 35% of Israelis. Ninety-three percent of Palestinians considered it ‘Essential’ for the Palestinian state to have an army, while 63% of Israelis said that would be ‘Unacceptable’, and 25% said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘The IDF should remain in the Occupied Territories/West Bank’.

On the central issue of the right of return for the refugees, 87% of Palestinians said return with compensation, as provided in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, was ‘Essential’, while 77% of Israelis said it was ‘Unacceptable’, 83% even without compensation. Even the prospect that ‘The number of refugees returning to Israel should be limited to family members and numbers agreed between Israel and Palestine/the Palestinians’ was unacceptable to 49% of Israelis. Similarly, 60% rejected ‘An Israeli recognition of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, while most refugees return to the West bank or Gaza and some return to Israel’.

In summary, in the context of a partition arrangement, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians consider it essential for the Israel to withdraw to the Green Line, evacuating all settlements, with Jerusalem to be incorporated into the Palestinian state, which must have its own army and control its own resources, and the refugees should have the right of return and compensation. A majority of Israelis regard most of these as unacceptable, with a large minority rejecting Palestinian control of resources. A significant plurality says it is essential for Israel to retain all of Jerusalem.

Key issues
	Palestinians – Essential %	Israelis – Unacceptable %
Israel should withdraw to the 67 border	78	60
All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished	98	53
Right of return AND compensation	87	77
All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine	91	-
All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel	-	45 (Essential)
Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space	96	35
Palestine should have an army	93	63

Finally, only 33% of Israelis said it would be ‘Unacceptable’ that ‘Israeli Arabs should be transferred to Palestine/the West Bank and Gaza’, while 18% thought it ‘Essential’ and another 46% can live with it.

What this shows is that when asked about ‘the two state solution’ majorities among both Israelis and Palestinians say they would tolerate it, but when probed about the details they are diametrically opposed on the main issues – borders, refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem. At the same time, there is no enthusiasm for binationalism on either side and while a small majority of Palestinians would tolerate ‘one joint state’, the prospect was so offensive to Israeli respondents that ‘the interview would often be brought to a close’.

The International Consensus, as I understand it, is more or less captured by the three principal demands of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative:

I. Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

II. Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

III. The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. [my emphasis]

The Palestinian respondents to the OneVoice poll regard these provisions as ‘Essential’. Their only departure from the Consensus is in demanding all of Jerusalem. It’s clear that they don’t mean just the part that Israel occupied in 1967 because 50% rejected the proposition that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into East and West along the pre 67 border’. Large, but not overwhelming, majorities of Israeli respondents, in contrast, reject all the provisions of the Peace Initiative, including 77% who reject dividing Jerusalem on the old border.

While we’re talking about The International Consensus, I might just point out that there is a wee problem. I mean apart from the problem about partition and all. It calls for an independent Palestinian state and goes on in a later section to offer normalisation of relations with Israel. This has received a lot of coverage lately, as US President Obama is quite keen on that aspect of the Initiative, effectively asking the Arab states to normalise relations before Israel complies with the provisions I quoted. Now the whole point of Israel is to be a Jewish state – state that privileges Jews in some meaningful sense. But what would it mean to achieve ‘a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194’? For reference, here is the relevant passage:

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible [my emphasis]

Nobody really knows how many of the millions of refugees would actually exercise their right to return, but, as I wrote some time ago,

In other words, it is up to the refugees themselves, and not someone purporting to negotiate on their behalf, to decide whether or not to return, and the place they are entitled to return to is not some arbitrary place, but ‘their homes’. Even if only a small fraction of those currently languishing in refugee camps were to decide to exercise their right, if it were a meaningful right – to return to their homes - it would almost certainly entail a non Jewish majority within the Green Line. The compensation due to those choosing not to exercise their right, if it were just, would almost certainly bankrupt Israel.

As I read it, therefore, any two state arrangement that provides the minimum just redress for the 1948 refugees would create a non Jewish majority in the Jewish state, which is precisely why the Zionists reject the right of return as ‘national suicide’. The inevitable outcome of two states in historic Palestine turns out to be two non Jewish Palestinian states, which defeats the purpose.

But of course, since the purpose of the two state ‘solution’ from the 1947 UN partition resolution to the Geneva initiative and the Road Map is precisely the creation or retention of a sectarian racist ethno-religious Jewish state, the question of justice - for the refugees or anybody – doesn’t arise. And in the absence of justice, there will not be peace.

Right to refuse

During talks with US President Obama last week, the Jerusalem Post reports, Israeli PM Netanyahu

spoke of the possibility of a "two peoples to live side by side in security and peace" if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state and agreed to an end of conflict.

In an interview with the Globe and mail’s Patrick Martin, ‘Daniel Gordis, author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish State Can Win a War That May Never End , and senior vice-president of the Shalem Centre, an influential right-wing think tank in Jerusalem’ justified the demand for recognising Israel as a Jewish state, averring, ‘The concept has always been part of our history’

[Daniel Gordis, Shalem Center photo]

Ever solicitous of the Palestinians’ best interests,

...It wouldn't be exclusive...Minorities would be free to practise their own religion and culture...But if there was to be a successful Palestinian state right next door, I believe Arab Israelis would be more comfortable moving to a state of their own kind.

Above all,

If the Jewish state is not central to our status, then we have no real right to refuse the return of [Palestinian] refugees.

So there you have it. Without recognition of Israel as a racist state, the ‘right to refuse’ would be wholly artificial.

Race to the horizon

The 8 November issue of the NY Review of books sports a letter

sent by its signers on October 10 to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The statement is a joint initiative of the US/Middle East Project, Inc. (General Brent Scowcroft, chairman, International Board, and Henry Siegman, president), the International Crisis Group (Gareth Evans, president), and the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program (Steven Clemons, director).

The signatories - 'Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Lee H. Hamilton, former Congressman and Co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, Carla Hills, former US Trade Representative under President George H.W. Bush, Nancy Kassebaum-Baker, former Senator, Thomas R. Pickering, former Under-Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to President Gerald Ford and President George H.W. Bush, Theodore C. Sorensen, former Special Counsel and Adviser to President John F. Kennedy', and 'Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System' - have spent all or part of their careers close to the centre of power.

They are concerned to ensure that President Bush's November Middle East peace conference succeed. But they themselves are best placed to know why that is out of the question. If it were so easy, how did it come to pass that they never managed to persuade the US administrations they worked for to extract the slightest concession from Israel when they had the President's ear?

Of course what they mean by 'succeed' and what justice demands are entirely different things. For one thing, they labour under the misappprehension that the protagonists are 'Israeli and Palestinian leaders', or hope that their readers will do so. The unnamed leaders they refer to are the thoroughly discredited Israeli PM, Ehud Olmert, the man who dreams of approval ratings as high as Dubya's and the terminally corrupt and ineffectual quisling Abu Mazen. One question that it does not occur to them to ask, or that they don't want readers to think about, is who will represent the Israeli Arabs? Presumably, since they are Israeli, Olmert represents their interests. But since they are not Jews, how likely is that? And since they are Palestinian, Abu Mazen must represent them. But they never even got to vote in the Palestinian elections, so that's hardly plausible either. As for the Palestinian diaspora, and the refugees in particular, they've never required representation before, so why should they get a seat at the table now? As a matter of fact, even though the right of return is an individual right that nobody can negotiate on the refugees' behalf, the US and the Quartet are happy to negotiate it away with anyone offering enough other humiliating concessions.

If the parties they identify fail to reach an agreement, the Quartet 'should put forward its own outline, based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the Clinton parameters of 2000, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and the 2003 Road Map.' They naively or cynically insist on 'A solution to the refugee problem that is consistent with the two-state solution', as if justice for the refugees weren't a direct contradiction of the persistence of a Jewish ethnocracy – necessarily one of the two states. But then all these illuminati need to address is 'the Palestinian refugees' deep sense of injustice'. They understand that they must never allow that an actual injustice occurred – ‘Don’t mention the Nakba’. To hammer home the point, they further insist the solution 'provides them with meaningful financial compensation and resettlement assistance'. That is, meaningful, as opposed to adequate or appropriate, compensation and help to resettle outside of Israel, unless Israel decides it can afford to allow a few to return 'to their homes', in the immortal words of UN General Assembly resolution 194.

The signatories are actually more generous than Clinton intended. Where Clinton suggested that Israel relinquish 'between 94-96%' of the West Bank for the Palestinian state. The 4-6% Israel would annex 'should be compensated by a land swap of 1-3%'. In contrast, this proposal countenances a 1:1 land swap. I assume that the ratio pertains strictly to area, rather than, say, population, infrastructure development, productivity, or some other factor that might be relevant. Since 1967, Israel has been assiduously establishing 'facts on the ground' – permanent settlements strategically sited to control the best land, the aquifers, and the Palestinian population – with the explicit intention of retaining the West Bank in perpetuity. Well meaning advocates of a two state outcome often lose sight of this elementary function of the whole settlement enterprise – to integrate the settlement network inextricably into Israel. It may be technically feasible to uproot and relocate nearly half a million settlers, some of whom have lived in 'Judea and Samaria' for over a generation and many of whom are motivated by a strong secular or religious ideological commitment to annexing the entire West Bank and are armed to the teeth. But even if it failed to result in an outright civil war, it would certainly rend bloody great holes in Israel's social fabric. Not that the fabric of a society where one third of all children go to bed hungry is all that robust to begin with. The main idea of the land swap is to ensure that Israel retains the 'large settlement blocs'. In other words, Israel is to be rewarded for forty years' cavalier flouting of the Fourth Geneva Convention. And in his April 2004 letter to then Israeli PM Sharon, the decider has given this his imprimatur.

As far as I know there are only two basic proposals for what parts of the area of Palestine euphemistically known as 'Israel proper' the future Palestinian state would score in the land swap. One of these is to unload some barren area in the Negev Desert in return for water resources and olive groves. The other is to trade off areas of northern Israel with high concentrations of Palestinian population, like the Little Triangle. This latter approach, reminiscent of, if not quite identical with, the execrable Avigdor Lieberman's plan, conveniently rids the Jewish state of a significant proportion of its unwelcome non Jewish population, appreciably slowing the tick of the dreaded ‘demographic time bomb’. Lurking beneath the innocent sounding 1:1 land swap, then, we discover retrospective sanction of clear, blatant, and overt violations of the laws of war. At best, it is a cynical exercise in 'the acquisition of territory by war', precisely what UN Security Council Resolution 242 emphasised was 'inadmissable'. At worst, it is also another round of ethnic cleansing.

On Jerusalem, the Brzezinski group shows themselves quite out of touch. They want 'Jerusalem as home to two capitals, with Jewish neighborhoods falling under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty'. It’s important to note that ‘Jewish neighborhoods’ is a euphemism for the settlements in and near Jerusalem. It’s impossible to be sure what they might have in mind here, but it’s certainly possible that they mean to exclude the Jewish ‘neighborhoods’ that surround and penetrate Arab East Jerusalem from the land swap equation. The Jewish ‘neighborhoods’ may even include the notorious E1 corridor that divides the West Bank in two.

In any case, Arutz 7's Hillel Fendel reports that 'An unprecedented coalition of American Jewish groups has formed on short notice to ensure that united Jerusalem remains Jewish...Jewish leaders around the world are coalescing around a simple bottom-line position: World Jewry opposes Israeli negotiations which would include any discussion of ceding sovereignty over part or all of Jerusalem.' If world Jewry rejects sharing Jerusalem, it can only mean that people like these who demand its partition must be antisemites.

Brzezinski et al. also show themselves to be on the outer fringes of acceptable discourse by advocating participation in the 'peace' conference not only of Syria, but even Hamas. Clearly only a lunatic would even consider inviting the party elected to 'govern' the PA to such an event. Like many, they are keen to see 'results relevant to the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians'. They want 'concrete steps to improve living conditions and security, including...prevention of weapons smuggling, cracking down on militias, greater Palestinian freedom of movement, the removal of unjustified checkpoints, dismantling of Israeli outposts, and other tangible measures to accelerate the process of ending the occupation.'

Nothing could be more obvious than that weapons smuggling is a bad thing. But whose living conditions and security improve if it is effectively prevented? Israel, of course, has never found any need to smuggle weapons. It has a steady flow coming from the US and a world class arms industry of its own. Since Israel tries to control everything and everyone moving in or out of the occupied territories, the occupied population can only arm itself surreptitiously. Similarly, there is little enthusiasm for cracking down on settler militias, much less on the formidable Israeli military. It's just those engaging in legitimate, albeit counterproductive, forms of armed resistance to the occupation who concern the foreign policy nabobs. They demand the removal of those checkpoints deemed unjustified. But if history is any guide, Israel will insist that the checkpoints are a justified measure to safeguard the security of Israeli citizens. Those whose principal worry is Israeli security will accept that rationale. And Palestinians are to enjoy 'greater freedom of movement' than they have under curfew, but actual freedom of movement – even around the West Bank, much less between the WB and Gaza, in or out of 'Israel proper', or between the occupied territories and Jordan or Egypt - is not on the agenda.

They further demand dismantling of Israeli 'outposts' - the settlements that have not yet received the endorsement of the Israeli government. It must be a big step to ask that Israel dismantle settlements that are illegal even by their own lights. Especially since this demand has been made and ignored so many times before. They want 'to accelerate the process of ending the occupation'. As there has never actually been a process of that kind, its acceleration need not result in a burst of speed. But then, since the objective is Condi's 'political horizon' – the destination that can never be reached - the pace of progress is irrelevant.

The right of casuistry

If, like me, you thought that NY Times article about the right of return had a strange spin, this will really blow your mind.

Jerome M. Segal, who, according to Ynet, ‘directs the Peace Consultancy Project at the University of Maryland Center for International and Security Studies’ last week penned what I can only charactarise as appalling casuistry.

Writing of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, he makes five numbered claims. His argument, such as it is, also depends on a sixth. For reference, here is the text of the relevant passage of Article 11,

The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.

First, he points out that ‘…there is no mention in 194 of "a right of return"’. That’s true enough, but surely the framers of the resolution must have meant something when they wrote, ‘should be permitted’. The implication and the intent couldn’t really be very much clearer. This is actually one of the most embarrassingly stupid and puerile points I’ve ever seen anyone commit to print, although the balance of his ‘argument’ certainly comes close.

‘Second, the resolution, which was enacted in 1948, is clearly referring to the 1948 refugees.’ And so it cannot be taken to apply to their descendants –

there is no explicit statement of that sort. Indeed, since it was envisioned that action on the refugees would be taken promptly, there was no intended reference, one way or the other, to third and forth [sic] generations of the 1948 refugees over a half century later.

The ‘international community’ envisaged prompt implementation. Israel defied the ‘international community’, quite deliberately, as Mr. Abu Ghneim pointed out in Hassan Fattah’s article, ‘the Israelis were betting that the elders would die, and the youth would forget’. And so now they are off the hook, because the ‘international community’ didn’t realise in the days before Israel was even recognised as a state that it was destined to be a rogue state and ignore all customary and explicit norms for the behaviour of states.

In must the same vein,

there may have well been many points at which a return would have been practicable in the past, after 60 years of continued conflict and with the vast growth of the refugee populations, no significant return is practicable now or in the future.

Again, his ‘reasoning’ is that Israel should be rewarded for failing to implement 194 at the time. The cynical delaying tactics in the view of the childish mind that ‘directs the Peace Consultancy Project’ relieve Israel of responsibility.

Furthermore, in yet another version of the same pathetic sophism,

the Resolution speaks of a "return to their homes." The resolution is silent about return to anyplace else, whether to lands near their homes, or more generally, to lands within the 1949 Armistice lines. Moreover, given that in almost all cases the refugees' homes no longer exist or have become the homes of successive generations of Israelis, a return to homes is not practicable at all. In short, the return provision is completely empty only compensation is relevant. [sic]

Fifthly, in a slight twist, he wants to reinterpret ‘live at peace with their neighbors’, as a commitment to do so forever. Since there is no predicting how the returnees would react in a war, no refugee can ever meet that criterion and the framers of the resolution were obviously just wasting their time. How could they have known that 59 years down the track, some numbskull would come along and imagine he could undermine their obvious intentions with his wet noodle sharp logic.

Finally, the icing on the cake

Any one of these interpretations might be challenged by Palestinian negotiators. They might argue that each one of them violates the spirit of the resolution, and they might argue that there are yet other facets of international law to back up their claims.

Indeed they might. But since Jerome M. Segal has called their interpretations into question, it is now just a matter of opinion whose should prevail. His five infantile points have rendered the whole issue an arbitrary decision and the logic of the matter, the intentions of the General Assembly, the demands of just redress, solidarity with the oppressed, even elementary bourgeois property rights, have now become mere irrelevancies.

Seriously, though, there’s a troll over on Mitchell Plitnick’s Third way blog trotting out the old long since utterly discredited Joan Peters From time immemorial crap, and another one (or maybe the same one?) on Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam site who reckons that because ‘Hajj Amin el Husseini’ allegedly ‘worked for the Nazi Germany as a propagandist for the Arabs and a recruiter of Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces’, the appropriate response is collective punishment of all Palestinians forever.

So I might just take this opportunity to reiterate that it doesn’t matter where the 1948 refugees were born, how long they lived in Palestine (although we know for sure that at least some families had been there hundreds of years), whether anyone encouraged them to leave (although that myth has been put paid to now, as well), whether they left at gunpoint or of their own free will. They are still entitled to return and resume their property.

Another thing that is completely irrelevant to the question of Palestinian refugees’ right of return is the flight, or expulsion, of Jewish Arabs from Iraq and other places in the Middle East. They, too, are in principle entitled to return, regardless of the reasons they left. It doesn’t matter whether the numbers are similar or different. Each individual refugee has their own right of return.

The real problems with 194 are

• that it doesn’t envisage compensation for displacement per se, as I pointed out the ‘herring’ post this morning,
• that the most obvious reading is that return and compensation for lost property are posed as alternatives, when in reality, each refugee should be entitled to both, and

· that as a General Assembly resolution, it has no teeth.

Whatever the wording of the resolution and whatever its formal legal force, the bottom line remains, no justice, no peace!

Who ordered herring?

In yesterday’s NY Times, Hassan M Fattah reports from Amman, ‘For Many Palestinians, ‘Return’ Is Not a Goal’. After nearly six decades in exile, he discovered that the view that ‘it may be neither possible nor desirable to go back’ is ‘being voiced, especially by younger and wealthier Palestinians’.

“The Israelis were betting that the elders would die, and the youth would forget,” said Mr. Abu Ghneim, the refugee, as he sat flanked by several other Palestinian elders who have campaigned for the right of return. “But we are here and the young haven’t forgotten. Our right to return to our homes and lands can never be replaced, not with money or anything else.”

But maybe the Israelis are right. It’s just a matter of time. Sixty years weren’t quite enough. But maybe a hundred will do. From reading Fattah’s article, you would get the impression that it is just a few surviving diehards who hold out any hope for actual implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which Fattah quotes from.

Resolution 194 says, “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,” and calls for them to be compensated if they choose not to return.

After all, their descendants are doing just fine.

…Abdallah Zalatimo, 41…returned to Amman in 1976, before attending college in the United States.

In the late 1980s he opened a business making Arabic sweets that has grown to include shops in several Arab countries with several million dollars in revenues. “What right do I have to ask for awda when I am here and content?”…

Fattah acknowledges

Most Palestinians who fled to Jordan were granted citizenship and today account for well over half of the country’s population. Palestinian refugees living elsewhere, however, have survived with few rights and no citizenship.

But he is content to generalise on the basis of interviews with prosperous business owners in Jordan.

Almost no Palestinian questions the demand for Israel’s recognition of the right to return; many, however, now say returning is becoming less and less feasible.

In reality, of course, it was never feasible, if by feasible we mean acceptable to an Israeli government obsessed with maintaining a Jewish majority. Indeed, on 1 December 1948, ten days before passage of Resolution 194, the UN representative of the then provisional state of Israel, Mr Shertok (later to become Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second PM) was already looking for excuses to keep the refugees out when he told the General Assembly

that the problem could be solved satisfactorily only in connexion with the final peace settlement, and that it was not a question of the rights of certain individuals but of the collective interests of groups of people. It was not enough to allow these individuals to return when and where they desired, for the question arose as to who was to assume responsibility for their integration in their new environment. The final solution, which could be worked out only after the peace settlement had been concluded must be one to which all Governments would lend their support and co-operation.

In the latest version, Fattah reports that PM Olmert and FM Livni ‘expressed reservations’ about the right of return.

Israel says that Palestinians should have the right to return to a new Palestine, not to their original homes, especially considering that their numbers have exploded since the original 711,000 people fled in 1948. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees says it has 4.3 million registered Palestinian refugees.

Obviously, Israel could never absorb 4.3 million refugees, but a string of disconnected Palestinian Bantustans with no water, no economy, and no border with any country but Israel can easily do so. After all, Palestine, the country that only exists on the ever receding horizon, as Condi likes to say, will not be a Jewish and demographic state and won’t have a Jewish majority to protect. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because as everybody knows

In 2003, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank city of Ramallah, in one of the most comprehensive surveys conducted on the subject, found that most Palestinians would be unlikely to move if they were granted the right of return.

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. For starters, Fattah has taken a number and reinterpreted it. The PSR survey really did find that only 10% of the some 4500 refugees they surveyed said they would return to live in Israel as Israeli citizens. But like most statistics, it’s easy to misinterpret if you ignore the context and the wording of the question.

That was one of five options. In reality, only 17% said they would stay in their current host country, which must be what Fattah means by ‘unlikely to move’. So his assertion is fundamentally false. The proportion who would move either to Israel, the Palestinian state, or a third country was actually 66%. Thirteen percent said they wouldn’t accept any of the options offered, and it’s easy to understand why.

To put the survey into context,

Based on several previous surveys showing that the overwhelming majority of the refugees (more than 95%) insist on maintaining the "right of return" as a sacred right that can never be given up, PSR surveys sought to find out how refugees would behave once they have obtained that right and how they would react under various likely conditions and circumstances of the permanent settlement.

The question was couched explicitly in terms of the Taba negotiations of January 2000.

The establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Israeli recognition of UN resolution 194 or the right of return. But the two sides would agree on the return of a small number of refugees to Israel in accordance with a timetable that extends for several years. Each refugee family will be able to choose one of the following options:

1. Return to Israel in accordance with an annual quota and become an Israeli citizen

2. Stay in the Palestinian state that will be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and receive a fair compensation for the property taken over by Israel and for other losses and suffering

3. Receive Palestinian citizenship and return to designated areas inside Israel that would be swapped later on with Palestinian areas as part of a territorial exchange and receive compensation

4. Receive fair compensation for the property, losses, and suffering and stay in the host country receiving its citizenship or Palestinian citizenship

5. Receive fair compensation for the property, losses, and suffering and immigrate to a European country or the US, Australia, or Canada and obtain citizenship of that country or Palestinian citizenship.

There are a number of factors that could easily lead to the small proportion saying they would move to Israel. One of these is that only 16% of those surveyed thought that Israel would accept the proposed solution in the first place. It transpires, unsurprisingly, that the 77% who didn’t think so were right. Another is that under the Taba plan, only ‘a small number of refugees’ would get to return to Israel. So respondents might have selected other options on the basis that their need to return was not as great as some other refugees, for example, those who already have family living there. Furthermore, in the context of the Taba plan, which would have established a separate Palestinian state, the prospect of Israeli citizenship may not have seemed very inviting, in light of the treatment existing Palestinian Israeli citizens receive.

None of the options allowed for the possibility of returning to a united Palestine, which I think it is reasonable to speculate would have provided an attractive option. Finally, after sixty years in the wilderness, it seems likely that many have relinquished hope that a just solution is forthcoming and therefore selected an option that seemed a lesser evil.

A more recent qualitative study may shed some light on this. Juliette Abu Iyun and Khalid Nabris, of the Palestinian Center for the Dissemination of Democracy and Community Development (Panorama), in their "Time For Them to Speak and For Us to Listen": The Final Report of a Participatory Research and Education Project with Palestinian Refugees in Jalazon Refugee Camp, based on research undertaken in 2004 and 2005, found that

Most participants were sceptical about the possibility of realizing a just solution through negotiation given Israeli intransigence and unwillingness to offer serious concessions to attain peace,and the current imbalance of power including the United States' unabashed bias in favour of Israel.

Moreover,

In both the first and second rounds of the study [i.e. before and after an educational component], the majority of the participants expressed strict adherence to the Right of Return and rejection of any formula that does not enable them to exercise this right, though younger participants and particularly women were more open to discussing alternatives as long as the Right of Return was not compromised. However, many participants were unsure if Palestinian decision-makers share their resolve. They favored holding a referendum before action over any proposal, and regardless of the outcome, most of the participants insisted on their inalienable individual rights as refugees.

And those were refugees in Ramallah. In the 2003 PSR survey, the proportion who said they’d become Israeli citizens was thirteen percent among refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, but only five percent among the refugees in Jordan, which may shed some light on Fattah’s article, datelined Amman. Among those in Lebanon, the figure was 23%.

Finally, Fattah knows that Resolution 194 provides for the refugees to choose whether or not to return. But he has not thought carefully about what refugee choice actually entails. Others have, like BADIL, the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. But I guess NY Times reporters don’t have to be any clueyer than their colleagues over in the editorial writing department. BADIL’s February 2000 Occasional Bulletin No. 04, ‘The Right of Return and the Meaning of Refugee Choice’ points out

Determination of refugee choice cannot be undertaken prior to a peace agreement, which explicitly recognizes the right of refugees to return to their homes and provides guarantees for the voluntary character of return – i.e., refugee choice. Without guarantees for implementation of the right of return as codified in a peace agreement, refugees cannot make an informed, free choice about whether they wish to return. In other words, refugee choice cannot precede recognition of the right of return by the country of origin, and provisions for its implementation.

in particular,

Refugees must be supplied with information about the conditions in their country of origin, provisions for safety and protection from the authorities in the country of origin, and details about the procedures for repatriation.

So it seems a bit premature for anybody to start celebrating the permanent exile of those 4.3 million. The conditions don’t even exist yet for them to make the informed choice required by Resolution 194, if that is to be the criterion. And in truth, 194 does not go far enough. When, in December 1948, it said, ‘at the earliest practicable date’, I don’t think it envisaged fifty-nine years of exile, and counting. Surely, a truly just solution would have to compensate the victims for that, as well as for the property losses 194 expressly provides for.

A lot of people and a lot of organisations claim that they are working for a just peace. What most of them are principally concerned to ensure is that Israel gets to retain its Jewish ‘character’. But that’s not the kind of justice that will ensure any kind of peace. Unless Israel is prepared, as it may be, to carry out its own ‘final solution’, justice for the victims of the 1948 adventure in ethnic cleansing remains an essential component of any peaceful outcome.

[Thanks to Sol Salbe for sending the NY Times article and Juliette Abu Iyun for her prompt response to my request for her report.]

Disenfranchising the minority for a change, etc.

According to yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, there are moves afoot to implement a threshold of 5% - or 6 of 120 seats - for parties to take seats in the Knesset. Although plainly a move to disenfranchise the three sitting Arab parties, or ‘factions’ as the Post is pleased to characterize them, none of which holds more than four seats, it would also eliminate the liberal Meretz party, which currently holds four seats, along with any other small parties, such as the Greens. The article doesn’t specify how the votes from failed parties are to be distributed, but in Turkey, a similar 10% threshold enables the reigning soft Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) to govern with a huge 66% majority even though they achieved less than 35% of the popular vote in the 2002 parliamentary elections.

Bloggers sell out!

Yesterday’s NY Times reports on a bunch of high profile bloggers accepting money from politicians. Some of them obviously don’t have very strong principles, because they sold out for a pittance. As for me, would I take money from Clinton? For 20,000 Euros a month, sure, I’d tell her anything she doesn’t want to know.

Jews sans frontiers posted a satirical piece attributed to Gabriel Ash and said to have first appeared on yellowtimes in 2003.

Soldiers should be instructed not to use the Star of David when defacing Palestinian property... the IDF could provide soldiers with defacement kits which include a sticker with the following disclaimer (in colloquial Arabic): "This humiliating act is performed by the State of Israel and has nothing to do with Jewish religion.”

Army Education Officers should be dispatched to all Palestinian villages and neighborhoods. The officers should take advantage of the long curfews which keep the population indoors in order to pass from house to house educating people about the deep historical commitment of the Jewish religion to justice and human rights, the beauty of Jewish holidays, the celebrated self-mocking Jewish humor, and the significant contributions of Jews to world culture. Officers will distribute to Palestinian families …free DVD recordings of "Annie Hall"…

Olmert said Israel will be ready to evacuate occupied lands and settlements in return for "real peace." "You have to stop violence and terror, to recognize our right to live in peace and security by your side and to give up the right of return. That's a right, natural and possible target," he said.

I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one. But then, it’s not really news when an Israeli PM undertakes to ‘evacuate occupied lands and settlements’, note not ‘the occupied lands and settlements’ or ‘all occupied lands and settlements’, in exchange for the Palestinian ‘leadership’ relinquishing a right that is not theirs to negotiate. In other words, once again taking a lesson from Jacob and Esau, or perhaps Tom Sawyer, Israel is making a generous offer to return a small part of what they stole if the Palestinians will give up their birthright.

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