"CSIS Report Legitimizes Occupation,"
by Hussein Ibish

Background:

On 23 October 2000, Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), published a paper on the CSIS Website titled, “Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians.” In this paper—presented as a “rough working draft” of a chapter for a forthcoming book—Cordesman legitimizes occupation as a tolerable, even desirable, status quo, and proposes a coherent strategy for enforcing that occupation.

CSIS is widely regarded by—and intertwined with—the Washington establishment, so any major paper from CSIS is likely to greatly reflect and affect thinking in Washington. This is notable, considering that this paper does not contain an analysis of the strategic positions of both sides given their aims and positions, but rather focuses almost exclusively on the challenges facing Israel in suppressing any major Palestinian effort to end the occupation. While purporting to evaluate strategies for peace and security, Cordesman carefully avoids any mention of the United Nations Security Council resolutions—such as 242, 338, and 476, among others—which form the legal basis for the resolution of the conflict and which mandate the terms any “peace” must reflect. Cordesman also fails to mention the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which regulate the behavior of occupying powers.

Peace with Military Occupation?:

These ideological distortions are apparent in the very language Cordesman uses to describe areas of the Palestinian territories. He refers to “Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip” without qualifying these terms or placing them in quotation marks (p. 13). Primarily Israeli government officials and extremists use this pseudo-biblical terminology.

Not only does Cordesman employ language that denies the existence of the occupation, but he also makes no distinction between the goal of the occupiers to extend and enforce their control, and the goal of the occupied to win liberation. By focusing almost exclusively on the strategic and tactical means through which Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza can be successfully imposed on the Palestinian people, Cordesman in effect endorses the aims of the invader. What is elided is the basic observation that the conflict is driven by the occupation. Also omitted is the fact that peace depends on bringing occupation to an end in accordance with international law. Specifically, this includes the dictates of the very UN Security Council resolutions cited in every “peace process” document as the guiding principles to resolve the conflict. Cordesman leads his analysis and readers to a fundamental error: that “peace” can be achieved without an end to occupation.

Cordesman’s Sources:

Cordesman relies extensively on information from the right-wing Israeli International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). This institute’s board of directors is chaired by Shabtai Shavit, former director of Mossad, and also includes Aharon Scherf, former director of Israel’s foreign affairs division. Cordesman also relies on documents produced by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think-tank subsidiary of the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

In Cordesman’s paper, 74 citations are from western sources—many reflect a pro-Israel bias—and 35 come from Israeli or overtly pro-Israel sources, many of which are intensely ideological and provide much of the substance of this paper. The Palestinian or pro-Palestinian sources constitute just 6 citations out of 113. In and of itself, such a remarkable imbalance of sources does not necessarily condemn a paper to uselessness or excessive partisanship; but in this case, it is reflective of extreme bias toward Israel and outright disinterest in the Palestinian perspective.

Although Cordesman makes a few token efforts to acknowledge Palestinian national rights and strategic concerns, these are so limited as to be dismissive. Israeli desires for maximum security, expansion of settlements, retention of large areas of the Occupied Territories, and other goals contrary to international law, are treated as natural and justified concerns. Palestinians are said to have “an equally strong incentive to create a contiguous state and obtain the return of as much territory as possible” (p. 73). The problem, according to Cordesman, is that “both sets of demands are just in theory, but may not be achievable in practice,” apparently because they are mutually exclusive.

He also dismisses the right of return for Palestinian refugees and has little understanding of the issue. First, he gets the number of refugees wrong, reporting that “there are up to 1.5 million people who claim Palestinian refugee status” (p. 75). In fact, already in 1998 there were 3.6 million Palestinians registered as refugees with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Second, Cordesman states that “serious questions arise as to whether the refugees fled because of Israeli military action and persecution, on their own, or because Arab leaders encouraged them to do so” (pp. 67-8). That the hoary canard about Arab leaders encouraging the Palestinians to flee in 1948 should appear in a paper written in 2000—when it was thoroughly debunked in the 1960s—is yet another indication of the extent to which Cordesman’s paper is informed by right-wing Israeli propaganda. In any event, the rights of refugees are not contingent on the circumstances in which they became refugees—they are absolute. The right of return is firmly rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and is specifically applied to the Palestinian refugees by UN Resolution 194.

Justifying Israel’s Brutality:

Cordesman provides extensive rationalizations for Israel’s brutal response to the uprising. He strongly implies that Israel has had no choice but to kill hundreds of Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, because “troops cannot let mobs armed with stones or Molotov cocktails close on their positions, or rely on riot control gear used in dealing with civil disobedience” (p. 8). He fails to note that the Israeli military does not even attempt to use riot control gear against Palestinian demonstrators, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, but gives its soldiers no options but lethal force. Going even further, Cordesman describes Palestinians’ suffering as a “political advantage” they have over Israel (p.8).

Toward the end, “Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians” degenerates from a rationalization of Israeli abuses to an agenda for the systematic torture and political repression of Palestinians on a massive scale. Should the uprising against the occupation escalate, Cordesman writes, Israel may be “forced” to take numerous “draconian” measures (p. 64). (All emphases in the following quotations are added.) Israel could be “forced to make extensive use of the IDF and methods like reoccupation, expulsion and/or creating security zones that isolate Israelis from Arabs” (p. 87). “Securing the area and East Jerusalem could force Israel to a) rely on a combination of police and paramilitary operations on a community-by-community—and sometimes house-by-house—basis, b) rely on curfews and strict limitations on local movement, c) return to demolitions and limited expulsions, d) suppress all signs of violence or protest with force, often deadly force, e) hunt down and seize or kill suspected enemies, and/or f) expel large blocks of Palestinians from such areas” (p. 88).

Cordesman concludes: “[E]ffective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detentions that are ‘arbitrary’ by the standards of civil law, break-ins and intelligence operations that violate the normal rights of privacy, levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties” (p. 108). Moreover, these measures need not be restricted to Palestinians suspected of violence but can be used against those suspected simply of “extremism.” This is a call for a war on dissent, a war on democracy, and a war against an entire people, in the event that they be so bold as to insist on their liberation from foreign military occupation.

Hussein Ibish is Communications Director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The above text, based on a presentation at Palestine Center’s November 17 conference titled, “Beyond the ‘Peace Process’: Toward a New Framework,” may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the author and to the Palestine Center. This Information Brief does not necessarily reflect the views of Palestine Center or The Jerusalem Fund.

This information first appeared in Information Brief No. 56, 4 December 2000.