Panel III:
The Bush Administration
and the
Palestine-Israel Conflict
George Hishmeh: One thing I want to say before our first
speaker, Jason Vest, is that I was surprised last night, I was listening to the
BBC I started listening to the BBC after for thirty years I have not listened
to the BBC in the States, but now I have to depend on the BBC for my news. I must agree with As'ad AbuKhalil [inaudible]
says the media here is really awful about coverage. For the first time I heard a story that
American troops in northern Iraq are going and demolishing people's houses
because they are involved in one way or another in the problems that they're
having in Iraq. This reminds me of
somebody else that's doing the same thing, just on the other side of the Arab
world in the eastern
Mr.
Vest. Oh, you don't want to start? We'll start with the next one then. Mr. Wilcox.
Phil Wilcox: Philip
C. Wilcox, Jr. is President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a
Washington D.C.-based foundation devoted to fostering peace between Israelis
and Palestinians. Wilcox retired from
the
Phil Wilcox: Thank you very much, George, and
thank you to the Center for inviting me.
George said that the best is yet to come and it reminds me of the story
of the waiter in the German restaurant who was serving various courses and the
customer complained and he said, "Well, don't worry, the wurst is yet to
come." I hope that isn't true.
I
was asked to speak on competing agendas among the White House, the Department
of State, the Department of Defense. I
will talk about that. I think that's
something you all know a great deal about in any case, so I may range a bit
more broadly in my comments. I am not
privy any official insights. I read the
press as all of you do. It seems to me
that the administration has pulled away from engagement in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is
totally preoccupied and very worried about our deepening and troubled adventure
in
The
fact is, I think that engagement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would
require a different kind of involvement.
It would require of course a political, intellectual effort. It would not be a resource-intensive
activity. It would require a commitment
by the president, an appointment of a senior envoy with broad powers. It is something that could be carried out
while we struggle with the problems in
Let me
talk a bit about the domestic tradition here, that this is a dangerous conflict
for administrations to address in an active way because it will alienate Jewish
voters and Jewish campaign contributions.
I think that's gravely exaggerated.
I'm not a politician and they presumably know their business, but I
believe the American Jewish community is deeply divided. Indeed, I think there is a potential, at
least a silent majority there that could be mobilized by strong, wise
presidential leadership. I think there
is a liberal core in the American Jewish community that's deeply worried about
what is happening in
There are
large, active Arab-American, Muslim-American communities in our country which
are not as well organized as the Jewish community. Those are also important constituencies. Needless to say there's a very large
organized Christian community here in the center that is interested in more
active, wise leadership in this conflict.
The fundamentalist Christian right which clings to Israel not because it
loves Jews, because it believes that the creation of Israel and the conquest of
all of the ancient Jewish lands will bring the coming of the Christian messiah,
thereby the end of the Jews and all other faiths, does not represent the
Christian community. The thought that
this administration can't afford to offend the Christian right, I think, is
also overdrawn, because they have other agendas,
What about
money? I dont know. I think there's a lot of money that is at
stake, but I don't think the Jewish funds from Jewish donors are a factor writ
large. They may well be a factor in one
or two or three races.
We have
seen what happened to Howard Dean when he suggested that the U.S. take a fair
and balanced approach to the issue. He
was assailed by his Democratic colleagues.
So this tradition that you don't touch this issue during election year
is not a Republican notion, it's one that infects the Democrats as well.
I think
that a strong, wise American initiative would rally support from the majority
of all Americans. I think that there's a
deep concern in this country about our policy and about what is happening in
the region, and that American voters, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and others,
could support a strong, emphatic initiative if it were done with respect and
empathy for both parties and if it were sustained. Indeed, I think it would be a political
plus. It would indeed help to restore
our international reputation, which is severely tarnished these days, in
considerable part because of our policies in the Middle East. It would, if done properly, bring forth a
liberal, pragmatic, pro-peace coalition among the Jewish, Christian, Muslim and
Arab-American communities. That may be
wishful thinking, but I think it's some time for more optimism and adventurous
thinking. We need to rid ourselves of
these notions that seem to paralyze us and in the process damage our national
interests and that of our friends.
What
should be done? The roadmap seems to
have ground to a halt. The roadmap might have had promise had the administration
been absolutely committed to it and pushed it hard, but it's flawed because it
does not define a clear destination like other processes, like the former Oslo
process. That is its principal failure. The far more promising initiatives are now at
hand in the form of the Geneva Accord, of which the Nusseibeh-Ayalon outline is
a variation of that in briefer form. I
think those are tremendously promising because they were negotiated by Israelis
and Palestinians, not by Americans. They
address all of the problems and demonstrate that there are grounds for
accommodation, compromise, in every area.
They are, I think, reflective of public opinion recorded by polls in
both Israel and Palestine in recent years.
I think they reflect what will ultimately be the shape of a two-state
peace. They should be grasped. The roadmap and the Geneva Accord are not
entirely incompatible, not by any means.
If the administration wanted to, it could marry the two initiatives and
define Phase 3, which is now undefined in the roadmap, in terms of the Geneva
Accord. The Russians, I gather from the
press, are trying to incorporate the roadmap into a United Nations Security
Council resolution. I have some problems
with that, because I think the roadmap has now been overtaken and that it would
be a step backward to accord the status of international law to the
roadmap. If they want to do it right
they should embrace the Geneva Accord in a UN Security Council resolution.
What would
happen if the U.S. were to move away from its passive, more or less, policy and
embrace a bold initiative based upon something like the Geneva Accord? I think it would profoundly alter the
political dynamic inside Israel and Palestine.
I think the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rally to it. I think it would for the first time place
their leaders, particularly Sharon, on the defensive; Arafat has indicated he
finds the Geneva Accord an attractive approach but he's been careful not to
endorse it. I think that Israeli society
is still volatile. It has shown in the
past that it can change course, it can throw out right-wing governments if the
U.S. wanted to define something like the Geneva Accord, pledge itself to its
implementation and sustain a tough American leadership until the task is accomplished.
That this would change the character of Israeli politics. It would also embolden the Palestinian
leadership to move against the diehard, zero-sum and terrorist elements in
Palestine.
What about
the internal struggle here? Sure, it
exists, but policy is never fixed, it's never locked in concrete. Policy can change. The State Department of course has fought a
rearguard action for a more activist American policy. In general the White House staff has opposed
it. The Department of Defense has also.
The current bureaucratic, intellectual, conceptual lay of the land within the
administration is not very promising. It
is ultimately up to the president himself.
I regret that I see no signs that there will be a change before the
elections for the reason I mentioned before.
I think
I've said enough, and thank you very much.
George Hishmeh: The next subject for the panel discussion
will be addressed by Dr. Aruri and Dr. Marc Ellis. It's on the subject of the roadmap and the
Geneva initiative not accords, or is it?
Understanding, okay.
Naseer Aruri: Dr. Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus)
of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He is Chair of the Board of Directors of the
Trans-Arab Research Institute (Boston), a member of the Executive committee of
the Palestine Center (Washington, D.C.), and a member of the Board of Directors
of the newly- established international Institute of Criminal Investigations
(The Hague). He is a member of the Independent
Palestinian Commission for the Protection of Citizens Rights (Ramallah)
since its inception in January l994, a Founding Member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights,
Cairo and Geneva in 1982, and a member of the editorial board of Third World
Quarterly (London). He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Human
Rights Watch/Middle East, 1990-1992, and a three - term member of the Board of
Directors of Amnesty International, USA, 1984-1990. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, he holds a Ph.D
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he served on the faculty of
the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (1965-1998). His many publications
include The Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation (1970), Enemy of the
Sun : Poems of Palestinian Resistance, with Edmund Ghareeb (1970), Occupation : Israel Over Palestine (1983),
The Obstruction of Peace : The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians (1995), and
Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return ( Pluto, 2001), Dishonest Broker: The
U.S. Role In Israel and Palestine (March, 2003)
Naseer Aruri:
Actually the title as I have it here is slightly different from what you
have, for my title is "When Stalemate is Diplomatic Progress: From the
Roadmap to the Geneva Understanding."
Of course we have a number of U.S. peace plans that started with the
Rogers Plan in 1969. There are many of
them, I think you probably some of you heard me talk about them before, so I
wouldn't bore you with that. But there's
a pattern to these plans. They seem to
somehow, if you look at every one of them, you find that every plan seems to
have followed either a major war or a domestic uprising. The roadmap, which is the most recent, some
would say it's not an American plan but I think it is pretty much an American
plan at least Sharon wants it to be, in order to ensure its lack of
success. So the roadmap follows the war
against terror, as they call it, and it follows the intifada, which is ongoing.
I think
that I need to place the roadmap in the proper context of the
thirty-six-year-old history of a failed peace process. One helpful way to do that, I think, is to
group these plans into maybe three broad categories. Initially, U.S. plans the first category
U.S. plans for a settlement were the least remote from the requirements of
international law. I think all of them
have really been remote from international law, but the initial ones were the
least remote. The Rogers Plan of 1969 and the Reagan Plan of 1982 expected
Israeli withdrawal in accordance with Resolution 242 so there's some legality
with sovereignty in the West Bank restored to Jordan. Such prescription was implicit in Rogers but
it was explicit in Reagan.
The next
category includes three initiatives: Camp David, 1978; the Shultz Plan, 1988;
the Baker point, his shuttles as well as Madrid we're talking about '89 to
'91. Together this category of plans
rendered the issue of West Bank sovereignty negotiable and gave a measure of
credence to Israel's claims of sovereignty there. Consequently these plans at least legitimized
the notion that the status of the West Bank and Gaza is contested, thus raising
doubts about the validity of 242's applicability to the West Bank and Gaza and
indeed questioning the very fact of occupation. But while these plans refrained
from stating overtly that Israel was sovereign in the West Bank and Gaza, they
did imply rather strongly that the Palestinian inhabitants were entitled to
some sort of autonomy. We must keep in
mind that autonomy was not a term manufactured in Washington. It originated in the Begin Plan, which was
approved by the Israeli Knesset in 1977 and sold to Jimmy Carter the following
year, and it became the centerpiece of Camp David. Carter's contribution of the adjective
"full" full autonomy did not really matter either in the short term
or in the long term.
On the
issue of West Bank sovereignty, U.S. policy and Israeli policy during the
Reagan and Bush period were in closer proximity than ever before. The Shultz Plan and Baker diplomacy all the
way up to Madrid were quite instrumental in marginalizing international law,
rendering existing UN resolutions superfluous, such as on withdrawal, on
Jerusalem, on refugees, even on the settlements, which descended from illegal
to an obstacle to peace. American diplomacy during that decade impaired the
definition of certain basic concepts of international law and confused the
meaning of these concepts. American peace
plans began to incorporate Israeli euphemisms, substituting terms such as
redeployment for withdrawal, Palestinian interests instead of Palestinian
rights, autonomy instead of self-determination.
Under the
influence of such targeted distortion of international law, certain sectors of
civil society in Israel and the Occupied Territories began to embark on a
parallel trend which produced private initiatives, incorporating their own
euphemisms. Consider for example what
they did to the concept of sovereignty.
Everybody who took International Law 101 knows what it means. But somehow sovereignty was rendered
meaningless, with such variants as sub-sovereignty, super-sovereignty, shared
sovereignty and a sense of sovereignty.
This quick
journey back into history is meant to show the serious erosion of Palestinian
rights under the impact of U.S. diplomatic efforts at peacemaking, which was
molded and sustained by Israeli conceptualization and guidance. Needless to say, this trend has had an
adverse effect on the Palestinian negotiating position, which witnesses
mounting concessions in response to Israeli and American relentless pressure to
redefine what used to be a global consensus.
The trend
began to reach new heights with Oslo in 1993, but even newer heights were
recorded as George W. Bush began to make a total reliance on the right-wing
Israeli narrative. However, while Oslo
was crafted by academics and lawyers in the Israeli foreign office, for
Clinton's adoption and for Arafat's signature, the roadmap on the other hand,
which despite a token international sponsorship was actually grounded in a
speech by George W. Bush dated June 24, 2002. That speech of June 24 was
described by Israeli and European journalists, as some of you may remember, as
one that could have been drafted by Sharon's own speechwriters. There were a number of these articles that I
saw in the European press and the Israeli press saying the same thing. If there is any doubt about the validity of
such opinion, just read the speech and look at Sharon's repeatedly expressed
admiration of that speech. In fact,
after Sharon received the text of the roadmap from the U.S. ambassador last
June, he pointed out a number of provisions he deemed inconsistent with the
Bush speech. In other words, Sharon
treated the speech as tantamount to a basic law which must take precedence over
the roadmap, hence his fourteen reservations to the roadmap which invoke the
Bush speech. Just like the Supreme Court
saying that the U.S. Constitution is superior and all laws have to really abide
by this. Sharon demanded that the
Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, surrender the right of return,
accept the U.S., not the EU, as monitor, dismantle the infrastructure of terror
that does not mean actually just the infrastructure of Hamas and Jihad, but
everybody else including the security services which were built under Oslo, and
that they must give up the intifada.
So by
contrast, the Palestinians embraced the roadmap without amendments despite the
fact that it is more in line with the modified Israeli-American consensus of
the late 1980s and the 1990s. Just as
with Madrid and Oslo, the Palestinian leadership viewed the roadmap as an
extension of their diplomatic lifeline. They did the same with the subsequent
Geneva understanding, or accord, authored by Beilin and Abd-Rabbo, which Sharon
has summarily rejected as an act of treason on the part of Beilin. Such contrast in attitudes, of course,
reflects power in equality, which itself has been a major impediment to a
resolution of the conflict. Meanwhile,
the U.S. peace process which removed all aspects of multilateralism assigned
substantial weight to power in equality, thus setting the pace and obstructing
the global consensus.
We are now
looking, I think, at yet another U.S. plan anchored in the same power calculus,
whose ceiling is autonomy while contiguity has been ruled out by facts on the
ground. Thus it does not matter that the roadmap defines the endgame as
independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state by 2005. Israel's list of reservations includes calls
for what they call a clarification of the term "independent,"
inasmuch as it was omitted from the June 24 speech by Bush. Again, the speech is involved as basic
law. Instead, Israel clings to the
formulation of a state with provisional borders, enjoying "certain
attributes of sovereignty," not the independent, contiguous and viable
state described by the roadmap.
So you
see, actually at face value the roadmap looks like a tremendous improvement
over Oslo. There's endgame, there's
state, the state is contiguous, et cetera.
But look at what's happening with the reservations.
Moreover,
the description of the roadmap as performance-based that's how it's
described, performance-based has given Israel leeway to invoke the
conditionality of the document while sidelining its reciprocal aspects. The threshold of Palestinian compliance has
been raised so high in this roadmap that no Palestinian prime minister,
empowered or not, was destined to meet it.
Not only was Abu Mazen faced with impossible conditions, but the only
empowerment he could have been endowed with was what they call a political
horizon these days, which only Bush and Sharon could have bestowed.
That
conditionality of the roadmap has served as the safety valve which Sharon and
Bush needed to rescue them from success hence, my title. How is one to be rescued from success, it may
be asked. Isn't that an oxymoron? Not in this context. Remember the Oslo gridlock. I mean, Oslo was really known for its
gridlock, which was to ensure that they'll be negotiating forever. It had enabled Israel to utilize perpetual
negotiations as a favorite Israeli strategy.
We now have its equivalent in the roadmap. In other words, the Oslo gridlock has the
equivalent in the roadmap, performance-based and conditionality. Normally diplomatic progress would be assured
by symmetry, by reciprocity and parallelism, not so in this peace process. Not in Oslo and not in the roadmap, where
most of the requirements fall asymmetrically on the weaker party, the
Palestinians, thus guaranteeing their failure to meet unattainable conditions
and assuring the inevitable impasse.
The
Palestinians were also required to stop the incitement, exactly while Israeli Minister
Benny Eilon was on a U.S. tour selling the transfer of land to American
politicians. Palestinians were expected
to stop terror while powerful American forces inside and outside Congress were
supporting settler terrorism against defenseless farmers and civilians. Palestinians were expected to end the
intifada while the peace process tries to normalize the occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the
intifada and all acts of resistance, rather than ending the occupation or
reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resources and
institutions.
What's
really interesting about this whole issue is that the failure of this peace
process was in fact a success. Not only
for the Likud in Israel but also for the American coalition of neoconservatives
and Christian Zionists, if not for Bush himself, whose political fortunes are
linked to these people's approval. There are men and women in Congress across
the partisan divide who have been calling for such failure in order to declare
a success. Some seventy members of the
U.S. House of Representatives signed a statement drafted by the right-wing
Zionist Organization of America, the ZOA, urging Bush not to start any modest
talks until the PA accepts Sharon's interpretation of and reservations for the
roadmap. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the
House Minority Leader, recruited members of Congress to support a call for
stopping all debate in the Democratic presidential primaries. Her premise is that such debate will force
the U.S. to adopt an evenhanded approach to the conflict, itself a violation of
the U.S. commitments to Israel and a roadblock against campaign funding.
Given the
built-in mechanisms of failure and the determined lobbying efforts against the
roadmap, the desired stalemate seems assured.
Stalemate thus becomes the equivalent of diplomatic progress. Herein lays the real context of the Geneva
understanding, billed as a grassroots, bottom-up initiative. In fact I think it is as far away from the
grassroots as anything can be. It is,
however, intended to rescue Israel's Zionist left from irrelevancy. It is an opportunity for the pro-settlement
Israeli forces to capitalize on the rising dissent within Israel and the steady
erosion of Sharon's popularity in the polls.
Dissent is no longer limited to pilot refuseniks who defy orders to bomb
apartment blocks in Gaza or the 600 members of the armed forces who refuse to
serve in the Occupied Territories. It
has brought together four heads of the Shin Bet, a rare occurrence, to warn of
the peril awaiting Israel due to Sharon's policies. The Geneva accord sends a message, in my
view, that the diplomatic paralysis is harmful, just as the Shin Bet people
said, to Israel's security. It restores
the Zionist mainstream and left as actors on the Israeli political scene. It creates the impression that there is
diplomatic progress in the midst of doom and gloom, a la Oslo. But it also waters down European commitment
to Palestinian sovereignty and most importantly I think it expands the margin
of Palestinian concessions, which have been bottoming out during the past two
decades. Having endorsed this initiative
with its required surrender of refugee rights and permanent acceptance of 75
percent of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the PA will not be able to back
away in any future negotiations. After
all, their men who are associated with the draft of the Geneva understanding
have already given that up. It's going
to be difficult for them to back away from it.
No wonder
Amram Mitzna you know who he is, the guy who was defeated by Sharon
extolled the virtues of the accord he helped draft in this way. He said, "For the first time in history,
the Palestinians explicitly and officially recognized the state of Israel as
the state of the Jewish people forever.
They gave up the right of return to the state of Israel and a solid,
stable Jewish majority was guaranteed."
He continues, "The Western Wall, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem,
David's Towers, will remain in our hands.
The suffocating ring was" I'm sorry, my printer didn't do a good
job here. "It was lifted from over
Jerusalem and the entire ring of settlements about it: Giv'at Ze'ev, Old and
New Givon, Ma'ale Adumim, Gush
Etzion, Neve Yaacov, Pisgat Zeev, French Hill, Ramot, Gilo, and Armon Hanatiz will be part of the expected city
forever. None of the settlers in these
areas will have to leave their homes."
And Mitzna is of course one of the drafters of the agreement which he so
admires as something that helps guarantee to Israel some traditional
goals. Thank you very much.
Marc Ellis: Marc H. Ellis was born in North Miami Beach, Florida
in 1952. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Religion and American Studies at
Florida State University, where he studied under the Holocaust theologian Richard
Rubenstein and the American historian William Miller. He received his doctorate
in contemporary American social and religious thought from Marquette University
in 1980. In 1998 he was appointed Professor of American and Jewish Studies at
Baylor University, where the next year he was named University Professor of
American and Jewish Studies. In 1999 he founded Baylor University's Center for
American and Jewish Studies. Professor Ellis has authored fifteen books and
edited five others, among them: Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation; Unholy
Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time; O Jerusalem: The Contested Future
of the Jewish Covenant, and Practicing Exile: The Religious Odyssey of an
American Jew. His latest book, Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes: The
Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century has just been published
in the United Kingdom and America by Pluto Press.
Marc Ellis:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is filled with detours and
contradictions, so much so that it is difficult to understand the unfolding
drama on its own terms. With Israel and
Palestine, the movement back and forth the various peace processes,
uprisings, truces and wars often disguises the almost relentless march of
both parties to an ending which is quite predictable and indeed very nearly
fated. Our inability to see the overall
picture, the map of Israel and Palestine as it is, is telling and
troubling. It may be that the Jewish and
Palestinian component of the conflict is itself the problem. Both designations carry so much meaning and
symbolism that our judgement becomes clouded.
What is obvious is one area of the world say, the victory of one party
over another is not obvious in Israel and Palestine. Therefore we remain behind the curve of
reality, offering proposals and holding out a hope that is outdated or perhaps
never was a real possibility.
The
tenacity in avoiding reality can be admired as a way of standing one's ground
against the inevitable, a tribute to the human spirit. Yet avoidance of reality also has
consequences, especially when it becomes a substitute for reality or shrinks to
a rescue strategy impossible to accomplish.
This is where we have arrived in the discussion of Israel and Palestine. This is where we have been for decades, stuck
in a rhetoric of despair and hope, as if in a time warp whose very existence
serves to avoid reality.
Today we
discuss the roadmap, the Ayalon-Nusseibeh statement of principles and the
Geneva accords, understandings, almost as we discussed the various peace plans
placed before the world since 1967. Yet
the facts on the ground are so much different, they are surely worse. The window of Palestinian possibility for
land and self-governance has been narrowed, yet within that narrowness the rhetoric
multiplies. In some ways, it is stronger
than it was decades ago. On the Israeli
side, for ghettoization and expulsion of the Palestinians; on the Palestinian
side, for the right of return and the retaking of all of Palestine. Israeli peace groups alongside progressive
Jews in the diaspora call for an end to occupation as if the act of calling
itself carries political weight.
Of these
sensibilities, only the first, the expansion of Israeli power, has a basis in
reality. It has defined the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict from the origins of the state of Israel in 1948 and through the most
recent decades since the 1967 war. It is
this expansion of the state of Israel from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River that is
defining today and will continue to be defining for the foreseeable
future. It is this expansion that few in
the moral and political realms have addressed, because the maps of Israel's
expansion have been ignored or seen as temporary or seen as unsustainable.
At the
same time, the Palestinian struggle has narrowed to a series of futuristic
scenarios that will most likely never come to be. Today a Palestinian political surrender is
couched in the terms of compromise and the ghettoization of the Palestinian people
happens within an autonomy that some insist will somehow blossom into
statehood.
Within
this hope against hope, the expansion of Israel continues. The wall of separation or the apartheid wall
is now being built 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will enclose the Palestinian population in
the West Bank, simply fortifying this Israeli expansion. The wall confirms a haunting fact that moral
and political commentators seem unable to grasp, that alongside the first
Palestinian remnant population within the '67 borders is now a second Palestinian
remnant population in the West Bank. If
one adds the already closed area of Gaza, a third remnant population is
added. More than 4 million Palestinians
within historic Palestine are now encircled by Israel, not to mention and for
their own reasons Jordan and Egypt.
This encirclement is essentially complete. It is not, as some suggest, a temporary,
emotional or security-oriented response.
The encirclement is sophisticated, planned, bureaucratically
administered, well-financed, strategically and politically in place. This is documented in the recent book,
"A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture,"
written and documented by Israeli architects, that sees the occupation of Palestinian
land in Jerusalem and the West Bank as a continuation of the founding
settlement structure of a new state suddenly and purposely emptied of its
Palestinian population. The land cleared of its populace within Israel in 1948
is the same land now "empty" in the West Bank after 1967. The settlements and the infrastructure are
necessary for the security of the Israelis who now people this land as the
"empty interior" of the new state of Israel in 1948 was populated.
So the
occupation should be seen less as an intermittent military adventure than as a
continuity of settlement that is already permanent. Just as a settlement within the recognized
borders of Israel is no longer contested in global political circles or even
within serious internal Palestinian political discourse, so too the settlements
within Jerusalem and the West Bank are for all practical purposes accepted as
permanent.
As
uncontested realities, again in a serious ways, all proposals for negotiation
to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be seen within this framework.
This vantage point allows only a Palestinian negotiation for some small form of
autonomy that will anchor Palestinians in the land and will seek an internal
development that may expand with a changing Israel in the decades ahead. The task is now preventative within the larger
loss, preventing more loss of life, land, resources and power. Preventing a deeper spiral of de-development
and political chaos so that Palestinian life can recover some semblance of
rationality and progress.
Still, the
success of this negotiation from surrender for autonomy within an overall
matrix of Israeli control and power is not at all guaranteed. The political questions are obvious. What does Israel gain by negotiating away its
power? What power can challenge Israel
and force it to negotiate for its own sake?
There are
rescue strategies, six of them, that I've heard for many years. One, Israel cannot rule over a people
forever. Two, Israel is stretched too
thin. Three, Israel's economy is
failing. Four, the world community will
not accept a permanent expansion of Israel.
Five, the United States will stop Israel and force it to its
senses. Six, the Palestinians will make
the cost of occupation too high. We have
heard these rescue strategies since 1967, but the reality is that Israel can
continue its occupation for the foreseeable future.
Proposals
which come in the public view, initiated by governments or the United Nations
or parties outside of governmental structures, should be seen within the
context of the expanded state of Israel.
Since for the foreseeable future Israel will control the territory
between Tel Aviv and the Jordan River, the question remains as to what will
happen within those borders. Will the
ghetto walls being built today be completed?
If so, how will the Palestinians live within those walls? How will the enclosed Palestinian population
relate to Palestinian and Jewish authorities?
How will the enclosed Palestinians relate to Palestinians outside the
walls and to the Israelis they deal with in the political and economic sphere?
The 1993
Oslo Accords featured a segmented, noncontiguous and semiautonomous Palestinian
entity without walls. The 2002 roadmap
process was an attempt to move back toward Oslo amid a Palestinian uprising and
an Israeli interventionism that finished off Oslo itself.
It is from
this place of failure that the latest proposals emerge, the statement of
principles signed by Ayalon and Nusseibeh and the Geneva accords negotiated by
some Israelis and Palestinians. These
proposals are similar in many ways.
First, they call on the Israelis and Palestinians to abandon the
difficulties of Oslo and the roadmap, difficulties ascribed to incrementalism
and the terror that accompanied it.
Second, they seek to jumpstart the peace process by bypassing initial
and tentative steps toward a final agreement.
Final status issues should simply be decided with the details of that
decision to be worked through afterward.
Ayalon and
Nusseibeh see the important issues in much the same way as the Geneva accords. They revolve around two states for two
people, the establishment of permanent borders, Jerusalem and the right of
return. There is broad agreement on how
to handle these issues or at least how to frame them in an acceptable and
livable manner. In essence, both
proposals see an end to Israeli occupation, a sharing of Jerusalem, a
diminution or end of settlements and the limits on the right of return of
Palestinians and Jews to the newly created Palestine and the 1967 borders of
Israel.
William
Pfaff, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, commented on the
Geneva accords. He cited three options
open to the Israeli government. First,
to accept the two-state option as presented in the accords. Two, continue military control of the
territories until the current Palestinian population outnumbers the Jewish
population and Israel has to choose between a democratic Israel that will
"cease to be a Jewish state" or the Jewish state will cease to be a
democracy, dominating, if it can, an enlarged Arab majority deprived of civic
rights. Or three, continue the option
that Sharon has chosen so that Israel, in the words of New York University's
Tony Judt, becomes "the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale
ethnic cleansing as a state project."
And thus to become a permanent "international pariah."
Pfaff
concludes that the two-state solution, even with its modifications in both the
proposals and the accords, deserves international support but has only a
"slim chance of being realized."
For Pfaff, the international mobilization is important to stave off a
disaster for Palestinians, Israel and the United States, yet in some ways the
proposals come within a disaster that is threatening to become permanent.
For all
practical purposes, Israel has already achieved the dubious distinction Judt
warns against. That is, to become the first modern democracy to conduct
full-scale ethnic cleansing. It is
difficult to see either the Ayalon-Nusseibeh proposal or the Geneva accords
being adopted by Israel. It is equally
difficult to see how these proposals offer even a moderate reversal of the
already initiated ethnic cleansing.
Rather, these proposals seek to limit these policies that have been
featured since 1948.
This
overall framework suggested here is controversial. The discussion has been fueled recently by
Tony Judt's article in the New York Review of Books, but the controversy is
actually broader, with recent articles in the London Review of Books and the
Nation. In each of these articles, the
one-state solution is argued, first as an evolved fact Israel's control and
settlement of the territory that stretches from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River is
seen as permanent. Second, as
problematic how can there be a Jewish state with a population that is destined
to be a Palestinian majority? Third, as
a possibility the chance for a redress of Palestinian grievances and a real
democracy in security for Jews and Palestinians.
The vigor
of the debate over the one-state aspect, how the reality as it is on the ground
can generate the vigor of the debate demonstrates how the reality as it is on
the ground can generate a series of abstract scenarios that fast-forward and
reverse the situation without affecting it in any substantial way. So we are left to develop a framework for
viewing proposals that seem rational, in that they essentially conform to an
international consensus on how to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yet
are in the present context nothing short of utopian. Instead of a two-state resolution of the
conflict, we should see these proposals as possibilities within the expanded
state of Israel to create a breathing and living place for Palestinians and
those Israelis who seek a homeland not dependent on permanently oppressing
another people. Thus the political
motivations and possibilities of these proposals actually becoming viable are
less important than their continual suggestion against the tide of political
power, that an alternative path will one day be addressed. Packaged as political compromise, the chances
indeed are slim. Understood as voices
that continually need to be heard as part of the future, the urgent necessity
is clear.
Of course,
this does not address the present, pressing suffering of the Palestinian people
within historic Palestine. Yet the cries
to end the occupation, the demand of the right of return for Palestinians, the
two-state solution as the only ethical and viable reality, also do not address
this suffering, nor does the criticism of the compromises in both the
Ayalon-Nusseibeh and the Geneva accords.
It is almost as if the Palestinians within the land are being argued
over but little attention is being paid to them as they live and suffer and
die.
At this
point, only a counterpower can stop Israel and that power, the United States,
has little or no interest in doing so.
American military intervention can provide the basis for both proposals
to begin their work as a starting point but there is a peculiar silence on this
issue, including from the Bush Administration, an administration that is able
to commit American forces to Afghanistan and Iraq so easily. Do we really believe that Israel will
withdraw its own map of political power simply because the situation "cannot
go on the way it is"? Political and
military power always believes that problems it confronts can be solved through
an extension of its power. Rarely does
power believe that its survival will come only through a thorough revision of
its reach and vision. Political and
military expansion are the venues of empire.
The definition of empire is that the future is always its own.
Still, the
cries of protest seem real. It may be
that a final crisis point has arrived, a place where fundamental decisions will
be made. But I don't believe that they will.
Jason
Vest: Jason
Vest is a Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect specializing in
national security and foreign policy writing. Vest is also a contributor to the
Village Voice and The Nation. Vest has also been the Village Voice's Washington-based
national security correspondent, and a member of US News & World Report's
business, national and investigative staffs. He is an Ochberg Fellow at the
Dart Center for Journalsim and Trauma, and was a 2001 finalist for the Alicia
Patterson Fellowship. He is currently at work on a book for Wiley & Sons on
the neoconservatives and national security, to be published in 2005.
Jason Vest:
A brief round of recognition for a colleague who spoke earlier, Jim
Lobe. Some of us go off and kind of
immerse in what we do then take weeks or months to work on our stories. Jim does it day in and day out and very well,
and has been a very essential roadmap for a lot of people seeking information,
both within the journalistic community and without. So Jim, if you could stand and take a bow,
please. Thanks.
I was
given the topic, "The Israelization of Policy." My response to the Palestine Center was that
it would probably be more apt to talk about the Sharon-ing or Likud-ing of
policy. But I actually want to pick up
on some comments that were made this morning and also by our last panelists,
perhaps trying to explain the nature of the lack of interest or deafening
silence from the administration on taking a more proactive role in the service
of a solution or finding a solution to the Palestine issue. Normally I don't do this. I'm loathe to inflict prose on an audience in
spoken forum.
But I
think that if one wants to understand policy and how policy is made, where it
comes from, it's very essential to look at the people who are making it. Something I have lamented in this
administration from the time of confirmation hearings through events as they
unfold, a very to me at least stunning lack of examination of the histories
and backgrounds and motivations of the people who do make policy and execute
policy. I think it is impossible to
understand and appreciate how this administration views and acts on the
Israel-Palestine issue without looking at certain people, and in particular the
undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon, a gentleman by the name of Doug
Feith. So I'm going in what I hope will
be perhaps answer one of our fellow panelist's questions or try to shed some
light into the silence or lack of interest.
I'm going to read from a work in progress about Feith that I think also
may tease out some of the previous panels' points.
An
in-depth review of Feith's activities, including his involvement with groups
devoted to the furtherance of settlements through the spiritual and financial
largesse of far-right Jewish and Christian Zionists, more clearly shows him to
be far outside the mainstream when it comes to Israel, buttressing a former
Washington Jewish Week correspondent, Larry [Holleriss'?] assessment of Feith
as a figure defined by an opposition to peace and Palestinian sovereignty that
is not just "bristling and deeply ideological" but is also
personal. Similarly, a review of Feith's
former business partner Marc Zell's history also leaves one wondering how his
activities in occupied Iraq fit in the context of actions by senior Bush
Administration officials like Feith, who as Haaretz columnist [Akvey Elder?]
noted earlier this year will do anything to make sure Ariel Sharon is insulated
from pressure to hew to the Quartet's roadmap or anything that leads to a
viable Palestinian state.
Out of
government during the first Bush Administration, Feith, on record as saying he
believes Palestinians belong in Jordan, was furious with Bush, Sr.'s 1991
attempts to withhold loan guarantees to the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir
in an attempt to get Shamir to the negotiating table in Madrid. The more prudent course of action, he
believed, was to tell the Palestinians to "abandon the principle of land
for peace, as such an arrangement would see the inevitable shattering of
Israel." Conversely, for Feith any
successful conciliation with the Palestinians by an Israeli government is
either impossible or tantamount to a betrayal. The notion that a peace could
ever be achieved has always been preposterous to Feith, who writing in 1991
held that a process like Oslo simply couldn't happen. After it did, he advised that Israel reoccupy
all of the Palestinian Authority's land, wanly noting that "the price in
blood would be high but worth it."
Despite his status as a loyal Likudnik, Feith also opposed the Wye River
and Hebron agreements signed by Netanyahu.
Though
long active with the Center for Security Policy and the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, two highly ideological policy-oriented groups, less
well known are Feith's activities in the milieu where Zionist right and
Christian dispensationalism join forces to ensure the survival of robust
Israeli settlements. In the wake of
Oslo, Feith became active in the National Unity Coalition For Israel, adding
his name to the group's speakers bureau and serving as an honorary policy
committee chairman. According to the New
Jersey Jewish News, NUCFI is best characterized as follows: "Just as there
are Palestinian groups that still dream of wiping the criminal Zionist entity
off the map, there are Jews who speak in a similar vein about the
Palestinians." Benignly described
and often venerated in the opinion pages of the Jerusalem Post as an umbrella
group representing over 200 Christian and Jewish organizations across the U.S.,
NUCFI's members include, from Abilene, Texas, the Biblical Faith Ministries,
publishers of the Prophetic Roundup, which reprints NUCFI epistles arguing
against a Palestinian state on the basis of both Israeli security and God as
the divine granter of the children of Israel's land for everlasting
possession. Recently NUCFI launched the
Save Israel Campaign to, among other things, "solidify and chart future
strategy for the emerging alliance of Jewish and Christian Zionists" and
to fight the latest Quartet roadmap, which it holds will do nothing more than
create "another potential terrorist state called Palestine."
NUCFI grew
out of Voices United for Israel, an early fusion of Christian conservative and
Likudnik groups with a common interest in "vilifying Rabin and centrist
left-wing Jewish organizations," as Washington Jewish Week reported. Though a number of conservative Jewish
organizations, like the National Jewish Coalition, pulled out of the group's
1995 pro-Israel summit, due to the inclusion of evangelical missionary groups
devoted to proselytizing Jews the NJC's then-president characterized this as
a determined effort to destroy the Jewish people. Feith, along with the Center for Security
Policy's Frank Gaffney and then-Christian Coalition President Ralph Reed,
joined with dispensationalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to address
the throng, while the Israeli Embassy, then under the loathed-by-Likud
government of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, boycotted.
By 1997,
the group had morphed into NUCFI, an organization that, reported the Baltimore
Jewish Times, "describes itself as a coalition of Christian and Jewish
groups but in reality is comprised largely of conservative Christians who are
among the most enthusiastic U.S. backers of Likud icon Benjamin
Netanyahu." After Netanyahu's
restoration to power, the group co-hosted him at a January 1998 rally,
advertised as an opportunity to "make clear to Clinton and the
anti-Israeli Arabists of the State Department" by name, Indyk, Berger
and Albright "that they have no support for their war against
Israel." Present at the rally as a
member of the organizing committee was Dwight Parrish, an evangelical activist
only too happy to share his vision of the future in which Christ returns to
Jerusalem and the Jews realize Christ is the redeemer.
On its web
site, NUCFI has in the past approvingly posted the columns of former Meir
Kahane's spokesman Gary Cooperberg. A
Hebron settler with a yen for force, he loves the idea of unleashing a "Jewish
fist" on Arabs and holds that "if we really wanted to spend money for
peace, it would be better spent relocating Arabs to Arab countries." Cooperberg also runs Project Chauffeur, an
endeavor devoted to collecting money from Christian Zionists to facilitate the
return of American Jews or "the most endangered species in our
exile," as Cooperberg puts it, to Israel, which he hopes will then be
ethnically cleansed. "The first
step to real peace will be to negotiate with Arafat on his terms and ruthlessly
destroy him and his followers. All lands
under his present control must be taken back and the PLO must be completely
driven out from our homeland, with no exceptions."
Given the
ostensible devotion of Feith and other neoconservatives to the support of
democracy in Israel, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, it's worth examining
Cooperberg's views of the Israeli polity as articulated on one of his web
sites. There is a built-in conflict
between democracy and biblical Zionism.
Democracy declares that man is the ultimate authority to determine his
future. Biblical Zionism declares that
there is a greater authority, the living god of Israel, which will determine
our future in spite of the blunders of man. [where quote begins not
specified] History, if we are honest
about it, has clearly proven the veracity of biblical Zionism as opposed to
democracy. The concept of trading parts of our homeland for a peace agreement
is foreign to authentic Judaism and a violation of the Torah law."
Cooperberg's
posts can also be found on the site of the One Jerusalem Fund, the group Feith
helped found that enthusiastically courts Christian dispensationalist
support. Incorporated in 2002 and
co-founded with others, including Natan Sharansky and Yehiel Leiter, a long-time
hardcore settlement activist, the group formed when the possibility of a shared
Jerusalem was raised at Camp David. In
January 2001, Jerusalem's Likud Mayor Ehud Olmert turned to One Jerusalem to
underwrite a massive anti-Camp David rally.
In short order the group funneled funds from the U.S. to Israel,
skirting the edge of Israel's campaign finance laws.
The group
Feith helped start has apparently been of some use in Olmert's relatively
recent fundraising activities with American evangelicals. In 1999, peeved that he wasn't offered total
control of the Jerusalem Foundation, a nonprofit in Jerusalem that does urban
infrastructure work, Olmert set up the New Jerusalem Foundation in the U.S.,
located in the same Manchester, New Hampshire, address as the Gush Etzion
Foundation, a nonprofit run by ex-AIPAC treasurer Gary Walling that raises
money for the continuing support of Israel's first settlement. According to NJF's 2000-2001 tax returns,
Olmert's efforts were initially modest and geared toward minor civil
improvements. But last year, Olmert with
Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose, another One Jerusalem Fund founder,
announced NJF's participation in the newly created Jerusalem Prayer Team, the
group whose founding was trumpeted on One Jerusalem's web site. Olmert's partners in the Team, noted Israeli
journalist Hersham Gorenberg in a very neglected Jerusalem Report Dispatch, are
kind of hard to characterize as truly friends of the Jewish people. Pat Robertson, who Gorenberg recalls has
written that "the Jews will soon begin to see their god," a stock
fundamentalist phrase for Jews accepting Jesus.
Mike Evans, who "asserts that an apocalypse is near in which rivers
of blood will flow in Israel," and urges readers to pray for that to
happen. Moral Majority cofounder Tim
LaHaye, whose best-selling "Left Behind" series promotes a radically
right-wing political agenda and predicts that "Jews will either be
slaughtered in a new Holocaust or become Christians."
The
motivations of the company one keeps apparently are secondary to said company's
ability to raise money for the betterment of Jerusalem settlements. In the last six months of 2002, Olmert picked
up at least $1 million from evangelicals in Texas and California alone. Exactly how that money will be spent isn't
clear, but if the addresses on the tax return extensions of One Jerusalem and
One Israel Fund are any indication, it's likely to be on the settlements and
not just their physical upkeep. One
Israel has functioned as the American fundraising arm of the Yesha Council, the
governing body of the Israeli settlements.
In addition to underwriting the purchases of emergency medical equipment
for the settlements, One Israel also runs a "children's bulletproof vest
campaign" and supplies the settlements with armored vehicles and
surveillance equipment. Both One
Jerusalem and One Israel share a tax return address with B'nai Zion, which
among other projects also supports building in the Ma'ale Adumim settlements,
where nearly 100 Bedouin nomads were evicted.
Feith's
pre-administration law practice as well as the extracurricular activities of
Feith's law partner also indicate a likely future devoted to shaping policy
reflective of neocon and Likudnik tenets.
In 1986, Feith and L. Marc Zell founded the law firm of Feith &
Zell. The firm became something of a nexus for national defense
neoconservatives young and old, including Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
assistant director Michael Mobbs, now serving as a deputy in Iraq, [Michella
Van Cleve?], George [Mirun?], and by way of the firms dedicated to lobbying for
Turkey affiliate International Advisers, Inc., Richard Perle. Happy and poised to handle
military-industrial clients like Loral and Lockheed, various firm partners also
did extracurricular or pro bono work ranging from the Committee on U.S.
Interests purpose, attack the Bush Administration over holding up Israeli
loan guarantees to filing a bizarre suit on behalf of pro-Star Wars
legislators angry the Clinton Administration had not begat scientific
breakthroughs quickly enough to field a working theater missile system as
mandated by Congress.
But
appreciative of Israel both as concept and business opportunity, Feith named a
nebulous consultancy spin-off of the firm Beaconsfield, in homage to the Earl
of Beaconsfield, the author of politician and early Zionist Benjamin
Disraeli. Feith and Zell would spend
most of the 1990s handling the transactional affairs of numerous Israeli and
U.S. defense contractors. The firm even
opened offices in Israel and added to its staff there Meyer Rosen, the former
Israeli ambassador to the U.S. who is today a close Sharon adviser and Sharon's
special envoy to Turkey.
Marc Zell
certainly developed a good legal reputation. He's also become well known as one
of the most ardent pro-settlement, pro-Likud activists in Israel. A resident of one settlement in Gush Etzion,
Zell has also been a member of the Likud Party Central Committee, chairman of
the Gush Etzion Likud Party, and is still remembered by some for his role in
the march of armed settlers through the West Bank in 1999. "This is a walk to show that Jews can
walk through the land of Israel without fear, that this is our country,"
Zell told the AP from behind a cordon of IDF and police personnel, who to
ensure the settlers' stroll barred Palestinians on their way to Friday prayers
from their mosques.
Zell's
name is recalled with rancor by some in Republican circles, who remember his
role in organizing the Heartland Political Caucus effort in 1992, aimed at
getting Americans in Israel to cast absentee ballots against George Bush for
Bush's refusal to rubber stamp Israel's loan guarantees. Praising Bill Clinton for stating that
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Zell nonetheless characterized his
activities as primarily a protest against the policies of Bush rather than full
endorsement of Clinton.
More
enthused about the prospects of a George W. Bush administration, in 2000 Zell
chaired Republicans in Israel, exhorting Americans in Israel in an election day
Jerusalem Post column to vote for Bush, as we would be "a welcome change
after nearly a decade of unprecedented interference in Israel's domestic
policies" and would herald the beginning of a foreign policy "that
appreciates the role of military security in world affairs as crafted by
figures including Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney and Doug Feith."
Most
recently, Zell was back in the United States to talk to a Maryland
congregation. Characterizing his
comments as a rejoinder to a recent column by Israeli left-wing activist David
Newman, Zell zealously championed the settlements, declaring that the Jews of
Gush Etzion are not interlopers or trespassers, just as their counterparts all
over Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not. "They
are the Indians who have returned to their ancient homes. I say to the world that if you deny the
legitimacy of our habitations in the hills of Gush Etzion and Judea and Samaria
and Gaza, you deny the legitimacy of the entire Jewish state. More than that, you deny our very legitimacy
as a people in the face of the Arabs of Eretz Israel who are engaged in a
relentless campaign to make Judea Judenrein."
George Hishmeh: I think when Douglas Feith leaves office, I'm
going to apply for that job. What are my
chances? Actually on that note, I want
to mention an episode I had. I worked in
the early '70s at the Washington Post, on the foreign desk. I was very much interested to move to the
Op-Ed pages, the editorial section. I
was told by a senior staffer there, you are a Palestinian, it's very hard to
get your work there.
Anyway,
before I turn the session to questions and answers for our panelists, I wonder
whether the panelists would like to have any further comments on their subjects
or each other's subjects. Okay.
Question:
One to Ambassador Wilcox and the other one to Dr. Ellis. Ambassador Wilcox, you present a rather rosy
scenario as to what the United States as a government can do. What does prevent it from doing so? If that is a possibility, why does not the
United States take some action? The
other to Dr. Ellis, this is a doomsday scenario that you present. It sounds to me that Israel today is really
as insecure as it ever was, in the sense that there is in Europe, all over the
world, a picture of Israel as an apartheid state that [inaudible] and many Jews
in the United States and all over the world are now worried about it. What
solution do you have?
Phil Wilcox:
I didn't mean to present a rosy scenario. The obstacles to what I've advocated are very
strong. But there is a way out if the
United States wanted to grasp that, because we have enormous influence, I
believe. I think we could change the
dynamic there if we were strong and wise enough to do so. That will require a
more perfect exercise of our own political system, a better educated public, a
more informed and assertive media. As I
said, a change in the dynamics of Jewish politics in this country, which is
possible. I don't foresee that happening
anytime soon, I regret to say. It could
happen. Remember in 1992 perhaps it
was '91, it was '92, I think the government of Yitzhak Shamir, a right-wing
government which vigorously opposed the Bush-Baker diplomacy that led to the
Madrid Conference, which from a historical standard was vigorous American
diplomacy, hardly adequate and it was not sustained but because Yitzhak
Shamir was seen by the Israeli public as opposing a good faith, sensible
American initiative which promised peace, he was voted out of office by the
Israeli people. I don't despair of the
ability of the Israeli public to do the right thing if they have the right
stimulus, indeed the right support from the United States. I do not think that Zionism is indelibly,
primordially, an expansionist force that must inevitably continue its advance
into the Occupied Territories, the dispossession of the Palestinians, creating
a permanent bloody, hopeless conflict between the two peoples. It isn't necessary. History does not ordain that. We can change history if we want to. We're not doing so, I regret to say, but we
could.
Marc Ellis:
If you look at the maps which I actually bring around now, which I
didn't bring today because we didn't have enough time, you can see that every
proposal by every Israeli prime minister since Oslo we can go back beyond
that it's the same map. The map is
really simple. It's a very simple
map. Outside the '67 borders, Israel.
Jordan Valley, Israel. Israel in between
and around everything else. It's the
same map. Same exact map.
If we had
a map, I've been looking for one, I wish somebody could help me, of
Palestinians within '67 borders and get a map of how Palestinians live there
and put the map, how Palestinians live in the West Bank, same map. If we were to look at this map together on
any other issue, say South Africa, whatever, any other place in the world, we
could look at the map and we'd all say, look what's happened since 1948. Isn't this obvious? Look, we've got these people here, we've got
these people here, and we have these other people with all this power, we all
agree on it. 98 percent of us. It is the most obvious map that I've ever
seen, but we don't believe it. We can't
accept it. We see it as fatalistic. We can change.
How long
have I heard from those who want to do good, write to your congressperson, form
lobbies. How many times have I heard and
how many times have those who are older than I am heard the same scenario? Of course it's possible to change. There is one possibility. My view?
American military I didn't say peacekeepers okay, wait a minute. Push Israel back to the '67 borders. Everyone says, what are you nuts? Never happen.
Well, that tells you why it isn't going to happen. When you say, whether you're for American
intervention or not, let's leave that aside.
America intervenes all over the world.
Right? There is nothing in the
world that would raise our prestige to a higher level than that intervention,
in the world nothing you could tell me, not one policy could anyone tell me
that would raise our prestige in the world more than that. You look at me and say, it is totally absurd
to even suggest it. When we unravel why
it's absurd, you'll realize why the Palestinians have been and will continue to
be in this situation.
Last
comment. It's not fatalistic to look at
a map and ask, what are we to do? If I
have a disease, I can tell you I do not have it. Some people actually counsel that. But I think the best thing to do is to say,
you know what? I got this. What am I going to do? Dr. Aruri said it in his paper. Narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, narrowed. Predictably.
You can see the maps of it narrowing.
The Israeli and Jewish progressives need these possibilities to bolster
our own resolve while narrowing the possibilities. If you look at Jewish progressive groups
Im Jewish, Im a Jewish progressive, okay I'm telling you think about this,
and this is where I will end. What are
Palestinians allowed to say about their own freedom? With their good friends, and some Jewish
progressives are good friends. What are
they allowed to say? I want all of
Palestine? Oh, no. I want one democratic state? No.
All they're allowed to say is, we'll take the 22 percent but we'll be
demilitarized, we will not have an army.
You can protect us, security, all right, we'll patrol the borders
too. [inaudible] that Jewish
progressives who have been some of the best friends of Palestinians have put on
this debate. If you look at it, you see
it. So let's look at the map and say,
what are we going to do, rather than pretend there's no map. Somehow what
hasn't happened over many years, and where there's no political need to do it
Israel's not confronted by any power, America doesn't seem to want to confront
Israel.
Question:
My name is Miryam Rashid, American Muslims for Jerusalem. I have a question for Professor Aruri. I haven't heard anybody you talked about
the new developments of the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state that I
don't believe was a part of Oslo but is now becoming part of these new
initiatives. Yesterday I heard Yusuf
Jabbereen, a Palestinian lawyer from Israel, talk about the Palestinians,
they're constantly struggling for equal rights.
Are there any Palestinian voices inside Israel who are saying that what
mandate do Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza have to call for Israel as
a Jewish state and shouldn't that be a decision of Israel's citizens? Is anyone talking about this?
Naseer Aruri:
Yes, someone is talking about this.
There is a movement in Israel among the Palestinians in Israel that is
interested in the issue of refugees and the status of villages that are not
recognized on the Israeli map. The
villages that have no infrastructure, no roads, nothing at all. They are actually on record stating that
that's going back to the 1994 Abu Mazen-Beilin agreement, this is the first one
of the so-called grassroots which are, as I said, as far away from the
grassroots I mean, that's not grassroots.
At that time, at least my awareness of it is that it was raised at that
time and continued beyond it. They're
objecting to the fact that first of all the right of return is being
surrendered, because it was surrendered in 1994 in Abu Mazen-Beilin and of
course it is surrendered now in the Geneva understanding and in the
Ayalon-Nusseibeh accord as well. Because
they want to return. Secondly they
object to Israel being recognized as a Jewish state. What does that say about their status in
Israel and those who call for equality?
So there is.
Question:
I'm Clay Swisher, I'm a grad student at Georgetown University. I have a question for Jason. You mentioned a few groups, the One Israel
Fund comes to mind, and I've looked at their web site myself. I'm wondering, when we have this debate right
now about cutting U.S. aid for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, if it can't somehow be woven into the debate that we should stop
indirect U.S. subsidies, namely allowing nonprofit 501(c)(3) and (c)(4)
organizations here in the U.S. to funnel money that directly subsidizes these
settlements. I wonder if you had any
opinions on that.
Phil Wilcox:
I think any strategy which depends on congressional initiative and
support is probably doomed. The executive branch must lead the Congress in this
country. The Congress is not going to do
it on its own. Advocates of terminating
aid to Israel, economic sanctions, other penalties, are going to fail, because
of the dynamics of congressional politics.
Leadership has to come from the president. If the president wants to lead, the Congress
will follow. But I wouldn't advocate
that. It would produce a lot of wheel
spinning, a waste of time and effort, where the real effort ought to be put
into a broad, bold American peace initiative whose objective would be to change
the climate in the political environment in Israel and Palestine, to restore
hope and to bring about the resurrection of a pragmatic, liberal, peace-minded
majority in Israel that would replace the current Israeli government. If that doesn't happen, the current Israeli
government will run its course and there may be yet another right-wing,
retrograde, anti-peace Israeli government.
Question:
I think Dr. Ellis was right when he talked about the progressives in
Israel not coming through. In fact, when
the intifada started in September 2000, it was really the progressive part of
Israel just collapsed, because really it showed that the maximum they would
give the Palestinians was too little for the Palestinians themselves. Right now
in Israel you have had this terrible economic situation which has affected the
Israeli public and it's not going to get better until they've settled things
more with the Palestinians. They also
have the insecurity from these suicide bombings. That has affected them. You've got a lot of demoralization in Israel
right now with what the government is doing, and of course Sharon also has his
corruption problems. It seems now as if
there is a new coming out of the anti-Sharon forces in Israel. You've got these army officers but you also
have like Avraham Burg's letter about we need to reexamine the ethics of
Zionism, to go back to our beginning there.
You've also had this worry of anti-Semitism around the world. Do you see
those forces from all of this maybe having an effect on the Israeli side of the
equation and maybe it'll be some kind of a balance to all of this American
policy we have today?
Marc Ellis:
One of the things that I think we have to come to grips with as Jews,
but others looking at this issue, is that dissent, of which there's plenty in
the Jewish community, doesn't necessarily carry the day. There's dissent in America about the policy
in Iraq. Governments do things, elites
in power are able to do things. The
infrastructure is already there. So it's
not a question that there's no dissent, although we can question about the
limits of dissent. There are some Jews
who are dissenting at another level, in Israel and outside. But Jews have never come to grips with the
fact that we don't control the state.
That the state can actually operate without a majority of public
opinion. We know it from here. I just don't understand why we if we look
at the map, it has been built bureaucratically, technologically the wall, for
instance, is very interesting.
Impossible to build. Oh,
really? It's not possible in the 21st
century. Israel will become an
international pariah. Oh, really? Is the wall stopping? By the way, they don't even need the wall, so
if they ever stop it, it will just be another way of narrowing what
Palestinians can demand.
What I'm
saying is, we have to look at political power. That power in Israel can do what
it's been doing. You mentioned several
rescue strategies which have been mentioned many times before. Sometimes I think I should retire from this,
because people say it's too pessimistic.
I see something very clearly for myself.
I know that history is open. I
know that history can change. But if you
look at this map, it will change within that map. That's my view. So halting it, stopping it, changing it back,
is something that is worthwhile to consider.
But my own sense is, we have to work on changing it from within.
First
question, how many Palestinians live within the wall that's being built? How many Palestinians live within that
wall? Nobody seems to talk about that. That wall is being built. It's not an idea. The first thing we have to ask is, how will
Palestinians survive in that wall, within the wall? It's a ghetto. As a Jew, I know a little bit about ghettoes
historically. That's what we have to figure we talk about changing it, moving
it back, the anti-Semitism in Europe. My
own sense is that it's going to get worse.
I've been saying this for years.
People yell at me. It's been
getting worse, it's going to get worse.
What are we going to do about it?
I don't have any better solution than anyone else. But the old arguments and slogans to me are
dead.
Question:
Azmi Bushara was here in that seat a few months ago and he said
something very surprising. He said we
are winning. I went up to him afterwards
and said, what do you mean? He said, we
are here and we're going to stay here.
He's a Palestinian and an Israeli citizen. I wonder, in connection with Ambassador
Wilcox's statements, you're not going to change Congress except over a very
long period of time. You're not going to
change the elections, because regardless of who gets elected, Democrat or
Republican, doesn't seem to make much difference. Maybe we could sell, market to the White
House what we call shock and awe diplomacy, instead of shock and awe war. In July, Zogby did a poll of 1,000 Americans,
a very scientific poll, asking them, since Harry Truman made a mistake in
recognizing only one-half of Palestine as a state without specifying borders
and didn't recognize a Palestinian state, would you, the American public, agree
to recognize a Palestinian state now without recognizing borders, just de
facto, just the way Israel was recognized.
56 percent of the Americans came back saying yes. Half of the born-again Christians said yes,
which was a surprise.
I guess my
longwinded question here is, aren't there some things that can be done? The president could recognize Palestine now
without going to Congress. He is
commander in chief but he's also commander in chief of diplomacy, of foreign
affairs. I know it seems impossible, but
if he gets in deep enough problems in Iraq maybe he will come to the conclusion
that the winner in the coming election would be an advance on the
Israel-Palestine and Israel-Syria problem.
Phil Wilcox [?]: Whether he recognizes a Palestinian state,
the question is, what does that mean? We
can talk about Palestinian autonomy or a Palestinian state. We have to recognize what it means. Bushara is wrong, Palestinians are not
winning. It may ultimately bring about
ultimately, after many, many, many years some kind of reconciliation and
justice. That's a possibility. But the occupation's not going to end. It will have to happen that Israel Jews and
Palestinians, including here, ultimately working together may change it
ultimately within this area. But the
occupation is not going to end. Nobody
wants it to end. My own belief is that
the Arab world doesn't want it to end, for other reasons. Yeah, of course for if we have an Israel
that's changed and a Palestine that is strong and empowered, this is a whole
other series of challenges, I don't think for a second that in general the Arab
world, other than rhetorically, wants the occupation to end. They want the situation to be normalized.
This they want. This the United States wants.
This Israel wants. This the Arab
world wants. Yes, they want it
normalized, but that doesn't mean they want justice. These are two different aspects. They want it stable, as all powers want when
they have the advantage. They want stability. That doesn't mean freedom for
Palestinians. These are two different
things.
Question: I think that Marc Ellis is right to point to the map and say, what is real, and we can't have any illusions in our work. But I would pose as a comment and a question, on the issue of what do we do about that, which is I think what we need to talk about, not how bad is it. Yeah, it's very bad, okay, next. The question is, what do we do? I think organizations like the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation, of which the Palestine Center is a founding member, have the right idea when we talk about education. That's what's key. I don't think the U.S. president is going to lead. I'm sorry, Ambassador Wilcox, I don't think that is ever going to happen. Nor is Congress. The American people are going to have to take it back for ourselves. Now, how is that going to happen, because right now people in this country are really badly educated on this issue as well as a bunch of others. But that is what we can change. Until we do that, I don't think we're going to see a change in policy. So the question is, how do we change people's understanding? How do we educate people? It can't be education in the abstract. It's got to be grounded in real world politics. So when we talk about writing le