The Great War for Civilisation (90 page)

In a real battle of wits between equal partners, Arafat might have made a few Netanyahu-like conditions: no continuation of the “peace process” unless Israel renounced its exclusive claim to Jerusalem as a capital—which precluded “final status” talks; no more Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land; no more negotiations until Netanyahu ended Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians. But Arafat could not do that—and Washington would not talk to him if he did. So the Wye talks probably ended any Palestinian hope for a just peace. Israel would be allowed to go on building more Jewish settlements on occupied land, confiscating Palestinian identity papers, demolishing Palestinian homes. And Arafat—for perhaps 14 per cent of the 22 per cent of mandate “Palestine” that was left—had promised to protect the Israelis who were building the settlements, confiscating the identity papers and demolishing the homes.

All the while, U.S. “peace envoys” continued to visit Netanyahu and Arafat as part of America's “impartial” stewardship of the Middle East “peace.” Every Palestinian knew that the four principal members of this team were Jewish. There was no public discussion in the Western press of the ethnic makeup of the American team. Nor, in principle, should there have been. American foreign service officers or appointees—like any other citizens of a democracy—should hold their posts regardless of their ethnic or racial origins. But Dennis Ross, the lead negotiator, was a former and prominent staff member of the most powerful Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was rarely mentioned in the American press, but was surely a matter of vital importance. If the chief negotiator had been the ex-staffer member of an Arab lobby group, Israel would have made its views known at once. And if all four main negotiators had been Muslims, be sure that this would be a matter of legitimate discussion in the world's press. In the Israeli press, however, the membership of the American team
was
a matter of comment. When the Ross delegation came to Jerusalem, the Israeli newspaper
Maariv
called it “the mission of four Jews” and talked about the Israeli connections of the men. Israeli journalists noted that one of them had a son undergoing military training in Israel. It was the Israeli writer and activist Meron Benvenisti who highlighted this in Ha'aretz. The ethnic origin of U.S. diplomats sent to the Middle East to promote peace, he wrote,

may be irrelevant, but it is hard to ignore the fact that manipulation of the peace process was entrusted by the U.S. in the first place to American Jews, and that at least one member of the State Department team was selected for the task because he represented the view of the American Jewish establishment. The tremendous influence of the Jewish establishment on the Clinton administration found its clearest manifestation in redefining the “occupied territories” as “territories in dispute.” The Palestinians are understandably angry. But lest they be accused of anti-Semitism, they cannot, God forbid, talk about Clinton's “Jewish connection” . . .

Nor did we as journalists dare to raise this issue. To do so would have brought the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism, racism, bias. It was quite acceptable for Israel's supporters to raise issues of family or national origin if others criticised its actions. When, for example, the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, instructed his military adviser, Dutch Major General Franklin van Kappen, to conduct an investigation into the Israeli massacre of 106 Lebanese refugees at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996, a pro-Israeli newspaper condemned the decision on the grounds that van Kappen came from a country which had surrendered its Jews to the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet when a former AIPAC staff member was appointed America's top peace negotiator, no questions were asked. Thank God, I often remark, for Israeli journalism.

Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung. “Peace in our time,” it tolls. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. The moment Ehud Barak was elected Labour prime minister of Israel in 1999, the satellite television boys and girls—along with the ever-supine BBC World Service—were putting the “peace process” back “on track” once more, even though Barak had made it clear that Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel, that major Jewish settlements would stay and that no Palestinian refugees from 1948 could expect to return to their original Arab villages.

Barak wanted talks with the Syrians, and the same old negotiating routine was quickly re-established. The Syrians still wanted the return of all of Golan. But why wouldn't the Syrians accept just a bit of Golan? Or Golan with the settlements? Or part of Golan plus an unknown number of Israeli troops to maintain early warning stations? The world was reminded that Syria had “threatened” Israel from Golan before the 1967 war.
⁹⁵
But Assad called Barak an honest and “strong” man, for he, too, did not want to be blamed for any new failures. When Clinton travelled to meet Assad when Labour was previously in power in Israel, Syria had been portrayed as the nation that rejected peace, “the spanner in the works,” in the words of CNN's reporter. In truth, nothing had changed. Israel wanted diplomatic relations and economic links with Damascus before any discussion of how much of Golan might be returned to Syria. Having watched Arafat writhing with this equation— only to find that having recognised Israel and compromised the very idea of statehood, Israel would decide Palestine's future—Assad was not enamoured of the idea that this was, in Clinton's own words, a “golden opportunity” to make peace. It was a familiar scenario. Accept Israel's version of peace and Syria could be overwhelmed by conditions she could not meet. Refuse, and Syria would be blamed for opposing peace and become an enemy of peace and—ergo—an enemy of the United States.

The pumpkin of the Oslo agreement could never be turned into the golden carriage of peace, but it took the collapse of the Arafat–Barak talks at Camp David in 2000 to prove this true. Even then, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the Oslo negotiations were “based” on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338— which was not what Oslo said at all—and even Arafat must have realised that the end had come when Madeleine Albright made her preposterous offer of “a sense of sovereignty” over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem. Only the silly villages that Arafat might have controlled outside his would-be capital would have “virtually full sovereignty,” according to the Americans. There then followed the wilfully misleading leaks to the effect that Arafat had turned down 95 per cent of “Palestine”—in reality around 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” that was left. Barak would not give up Jerusalem or abandon the settlements. Arafat would not make the “concession” of ceding Israeli control over all of Jerusalem. So the sons of Abraham acknowledged what so many Israelis and Palestinians knew all along: that Oslo didn't work. Clinton predictably saw fit to praise the stronger of the two parties; he spoke of Barak's “courage” and “vision,” but merely of Arafat's commitment. So much for America's role as “honest broker” of the Middle East peace. Offered virtual sovereignty to secure virtual peace, the Palestinian leadership—corrupt and effete and undemocratic—preferred failure to humiliation.

Arafat thus returned to a hero's welcome in Gaza. For once, the old man had not offered another capitulation. He had stood up to the United States. And Israel. He was a “Saladin.” “Saladin of the century,” no less. It was all sorry stuff. This Saladin was not going to gallop into Jerusalem. Instead, the city was to be the scene of repeated carnage as Jew and Arab Muslim attacked each other in the coming months. In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places—above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount—accompanied by about a thousand Israeli policemen. Within twenty-four hours, Israeli snipers opened fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians “were felt to be endangering the lives of officers.” Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly ten years after armed Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War.

Sharon showed no remorse. “The state of Israel,” he told CNN, “cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around the world.” He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen this moment—immediately after the collapse of the “peace process”—to undertake such a provocative act. Stone-throwing and shooting spread to the West Bank. Near Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot dead an Israeli soldier and wounded another—they were apparently part of a joint Israeli–Palestinian patrol originally set up under the terms of the Oslo agreement. “Everything was pre-planned,” Sharon would claim five weeks later. “They took advantage of my visit to the Temple Mount. This was not the first time I've been there . . .”

JUST OUTSIDE JERUSALEM, a Jewish settler from Efrat was screaming abuse at a group of Israeli soldiers. His car had been stoned by Palestinian children on a nearby hill. He demanded military intervention at once. “Are you one of the journalists that lies like CNN?” he rounded on me. “You people should write that a rock is like unto a lethal weapon. It's the same as a bullet. Someone who throws a rock at a bus is trying to murder fifty people.” It was an instructive little outburst, for it turned the children on the hill behind Beit Jalla into mass murderers, gunmen without guns, worthy of the biblical fury so beautifully captured in that phrase “like unto a lethal weapon.” It was obviously not only Palestinians who believed in “days of rage.” The anger was just as palpable among Israelis this October of 2000, even if the sense of proportion—or lack of it—was profoundly disturbing. Again and again, in Israel, the bestialisation—and fear—of Palestinians betrayed a total inability to grasp reality: you might think that Israel was under Palestinian occupation, that Israelis were being shot down in their dozens by Palestinian “security forces,” that Palestinian tanks and helicopters were blasting away at Israeli towns, that Yassir Arafat had taken time out from diplomacy, something that Barak had publicly declared his intention to do.

What was going on now in the occupied territories was a form of low-intensity warfare which was, week by week, creeping into an armed conflict between two peoples. The Palestinians now believed they had nothing to lose by fighting the Israelis. Trapped in their autonomous villages, a whole society under town arrest, they no longer had anything to gain by their silence or their acquiescence. A young Palestinian woman who worked for one of Arafat's security outfits explained it with candour. “Arafat has to go on fighting—he mustn't give in now. The intifada will force the Israelis to understand that Oslo is dead and that only a total withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem will bring peace.” When I pointed out to her that Arafat was not doing the “fighting”—that it was the Palestinians and their various satellite organisations that opposed Oslo that were providing “Palestine” with its dead—she changed her argument. “We must make sure that the people and the Palestinian Authority are together and united,” she said, “when the real fighting starts.”

“Real” fighting? What did that mean? Ten years ago, Ariel Sharon—then the outcast ex-defence minister shamed by Sabra and Chatila—said that Israeli tanks might one day have to shell Nablus or Ramallah. How we roared with laughter then. Yet now, a decade later, with Sharon on the verge of returning to the Israeli cabinet, those tanks were indeed shelling Palestinian towns. Tanks fired into Ramallah. Helicopter gunships rocketed Palestinian towns so frequently that their attacks no longer made headlines. And in those towns and in the foetid streets of Gaza, I found not a soul who wanted the new intifada to end. Nor did I find a Palestinian family that did not watch the Lebanese Hizballah's Manar television station, satellited from Beirut, beaming into the occupied territories a constant message: in Lebanon, Israel was driven from occupied land because its people fought for liberation; they believed in God; they were not afraid to die. And now Lebanon is free. Why not the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem?

This was a powerful but dangerous lesson to send to the Palestinians. For Gaza is not southern Lebanon, and Ramallah and Beit Jalla are not Tyre and Sidon. Jerusalem is not Beirut. But Oslo had proved so great a betrayal for the Palestinians, their trust so perverted by Israel's continued settlement building and land confiscation and its refusal to allow the Palestinians a capital in part of Jerusalem, that politics was no longer a viable instrument of progress. Faithfully continuing the bankrupt policy of beating the Arabs into submission—the policy that destroyed Israel in Lebanon—the Israelis responded to stones with bullets, to bullets with missiles. But in their hovels, the Palestinians of Gaza could absorb this punishment. They knew that if the Israelis wanted to invade Palestinian land, all of it—an idea floated by the less balanced Jewish settlers but later to be adopted by Sharon himself—then they would have perpetual war.

Nor was there much doubt that the terrible threats of Islamic Jihad to resume their war of suicide bombs were real. Nabil Arair might have failed to kill any Israelis with a bicycle bomb in Gaza but there were many others ready to take his place. Jerusalem's buses were already travelling three-quarters empty. The suicide bombers had struck—even before setting off their bombs. Hamas now ruled Gaza. Needless to say, Israel's once close relations with Hamas were no longer mentioned in news reports from Jerusalem.