OK, I'm kidding a little with that title. While the original thread, here, has grown to an unwieldy 770 comments, traffic has mostly died down; this isn't a true 2nd thread in the sense that it is being created for the overflow. But I decided to revisit the topic, for a couple of reasons:
The issue of ethnic cleansing took over large parts of the comments. This controversy snuck up me. It's not that I think that most people share my views on the conflict. Instead, I made the classic mistake of an expert (in my case an amateur expert); assuming a level of fluency with the subject that the audience does not possess.
Another issue that emerged in the comments and deserves a fuller answer is the issue of whether Israeli actions, while sometimes brutal, were a necessary response an Arab effort to destroy the Jewish settlers. In other words, that the Zionists had no one to talk to, and no choice but to fight, brutally and successfully, to survive. As I'll argue, the Palestinians were always prepared to talk to the Jewish community; what made conflict inevitable, and what continues to sustain it, is not Palestinian hostility to Jews but Zionists' determination to establish sole control over the land.
So for those just joining us, the Zionist movement, outnumbered two-to-one by the native Palestinians, who opposed the seizure of their homeland for the purposes of settling Jews from Europe, ethnically cleansed the Palestinians, completely emptying most Palestinian villages of their population through a mixture of threats (the so-called "whisper campaigns"), terrorism, and forced expulsions. Sources are to be found in the body of the original diary.
But what I didn't discuss was how the recognition of Israel's ethnic cleansing serves the practical aim of bringing peace closer (I did touch on our moral obligation to speak the truth of what happened, but there is a practical side as well). The practical benefits are: it contributes to our understanding of why the Palestinians are fighting with the state of Israel; it helps us understand why Israelis are reluctant to make peace; it helps us understand that one does not have to be an anti-Semite to believe that Zionism, whatever it may have set out to be, became in practice a species of colonialism, and set into motion a conflict which can never end until Israel's original sin of the expulsion of the Palestinians has been confronted and in some measure redressed. All of these things are important for us here -- as many commentators remarked, on a democratic website -- because America's friendship with Israel is a keystone of America's foreign policy, and right now, that friendship is enabling our friend in some very self-destructive behavior. Not only should that concern us as friends, but it is likely -- as often happens when our friends are self-destructive -- that we will pay a price as well. Then there is our moral responsibility. Dov Weisglass, the senior Sharon adviser who once boasted of applying "formaldehyde" to the peace process, and said it would not move forward "until Palestinians become Finns," described in a recent editorial the American support that makes that possible:
President George W. Bush’s administration brought America’s friendship with Israel to new heights: Decisive support for Israel’s strategic deterrence capabilities and generous financial assistance in order to maintain Israel’s military advantage; broad diplomatic support for most of Israel’s positions; generous sharing of security and intelligence know-how; diplomatic backing for self-defense activity in the face of the Palestinian terror offensive, and more.
All of the above were undertaken while displaying sensitivity, understanding, and showing consideration to developments within Israel, internal political constraints, and Israeli public opinion. The above are supreme diplomatic assets . . . In Washington we see growing voices claiming that Israel’s diplomatic assets, described above, are a growing burden on American foreign policy in light of their price and influence on the United States’ ties with the Muslim and Arab world.
As progressives, we can join with those voices which concern Weisglass, and add to their chorus of concern for the cost to Americans of our rubber-stamp policy with an account of the unacceptable costs to Israelis and Palestinians. Whether and in what way we make this stand is the issue that concerns us, here on a democratic website. To answer that question, we have to understand what really happened when the Palestinians' turned to the two-state solution.
Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the PLO, lead by Yasser Arafat, begin to move towards a startlingly generous historic compromise. If we really understand that ethnic cleansing took place, if we understand the forced colonization that preceeded it and the racist regime that followed, we will understand the scale of the compromise: the PLO offered to partition the land between the two peoples, on the basis of the lines of June 4th, 1967; Israel's internationally recognized boundaries. This was to be an unequal division: 22% of the land for the natives. 78% of the land for the "Jewish state."
Certainly, Arafat had not fallen in love with Zionism. Instead, he made a decision based on the political realities: America and Europe's backing of Israel, Israel's military superiority, the detente between Israel and Egypt following Sadat's visit in 1978. The Palestinians decided that a small state in the West Bank and Gaza -- land no one believed belonged to the state of Israel -- was better than a continued struggle to establish a single democratic state in all of Palestine.
This diary is not about whether this was the correct decision or not. It's about the practical importance of recognizing that Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people, and hence that the Palestinians have a claim over all of the Mandate -- not just the lands captured in the Six Day War.
For you see, the PLO's great compromise was met by two great myths promoted relentlessly by Zionists to the detriment of peace. One was that by offering this great concession, the Palestinians had conceded that they had no right to any part of the other 78% of Palestine. From this distortion were born others: that the 1967 borders were "100%" of what the Palestinians wanted (and hence they had better be prepared to compromise further, and not get "everything" they wanted); that prior to the change of policy, the PLO and Palestinians generally had been bent on the destruction of the Jews generally, and there had been "no one to talk to"); that by agreeing to discuss recognizing Israel in the context of partition, Arafat had already recognized Israel, and Israel's "right to exist as a Jewish state," and hence even to articulate, even to allow other Palestinians to articulate the history of their people -- that they had been expelled by Israel, that this was wrong, that they had a right to resist it then and now -- were presented as a betrayal and as backsliding into the bad old ways of the "fanatics."
If we understand that ethnic cleansing happened, we are closer to understanding the basis for the Palestinians' claims, and their resistance, and their refusal -- in some cases -- to "recognize" Israel's "right to exist as a Jewish state." With the benefit of background, I hope that if I accomplish nothing else, I will convey to causal students of the conflict why this "recognition" is a hugely difficult thing for the Palestinians (much more so than simply agreeing to end the fighting.) It may sound to us like they are being asked to recognize the Jews' right to self-determination. But another way of looking at it, is that they are being asked to place the stamp of approval on the violent theft of the homeland.
What about that other myth, while we're on the subject -- the myth of having no one to talk to? That came up in the original diary too. Let's examine it with the benefit of sources:
At what stage was there a Palestinian leadership with which to talk about peace? Is all Israeli violence -- including the expulsion of the Palestinians -- the result of irrational Palestinian hostility to Israel? [Note: some of this material was posted elsewhere on the web, many moons ago. Sadly, little has changed that would require it to be updated.]
The birth of Palestinian nationalism came in the aftermath of the Young Turks revolution, when nationalist movements sprang up throughout the Ottoman empire. Prior to that, there was a Palestinian people, which resented and resisted Zionism, but there was no central "address" for talks. That quickly changed after 1908. Smith:
The editors of the papers most empathically opposed to Zionism were . . . al’Karmil, created in 1908, and, significantly, Filastin (Palestine), . . . Filastin backed the committee of union and progress, but as the name indicates, it stressed local nationalism rather than Ottoman allegiance; it referred to Palestine as an entity and to its readers as "Palestinians." The importance of this press is indicated by the fact that when Filastin was first founded, Jews (under Arab pseudonyms) submitted articles to it supporting Zionism (45, Ibid).
So the Zionist movement quickly realized that Palestinian nationalism was significant, but chose not to dialogue with it, or, more precisely, not to dialogue with it honestly, preferring to publish articles under fake names, hire informers, bribe journalists and religious leaders, circulate the names of Palestinian notables who sold land, and generally wage a propaganda war against Palestinians and against the whole idea of Palestinian nationalism (see Segev’s One Palestine, Complete).
In part, dialogue was prevented by deliberate, premeditated deception by the Zionist movement. In 1918, for example, Weizmann met with a delegation of Palestinian "notables" and told them "Zionists did not intend to create a Jewish government in Palestine or ‘to get hold of the supreme power and administration’" (Smith, 80).
That, of course, was untrue, but it reflects a strategy expressed by Ben-Yehuda in 1881: "The thing we must do now is to become as strong as we can, to conquer the country, covertly, bit by bit . . . We can only do this covertly, quietly . . . We will not set up committees so that the Arabs will now what we are after, we shall act like silent spies, but we shall buy, buy, buy."
Avoiding dialogue with the Palestinians also played into several aspects of the Zionist strategy. For one, they wished to pretend, to the British and to future immigrants, that opposition to Zionism was not shared by most Palestinians, but was the position of a disgruntled few. This position (which they knew was untrue) precluded serious talks (Morris, 104).
Zionists also wished to avoid anything which gave the appearance that the 95% of the population which was anti-Zionist in 1917 had any right to a say in Palestine’s future. For that reason, they sought to deal with the British, and told the British it was their obligation to control the Arabs and impose (the Zionist interpretation of) the Balfour Declaration.
Most of all, Zionists fear the reality of the Palestinian majority. When, in 1933, the Palestinian community turned around on the subject of an advisory body composed of Jews and Arabs (which they had rejected in the 20s because of the humiliating conditions of the deal) the Zionist movement adamantly opposed the idea, as they continued to throughout the remainder of the Mandate (Smith, 133).
Some Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion, had conversations with leading Palestinians, conversations which usually lead nowhere for one of two reasons; the Zionists maintained that Zionism wasn’t going to hurt anyone, that everyone would benefit, that no one would to dispossessed, etc. -- things Zionists since Hertzl have known to be untrue. Or the Palestinians would maintain their democratic right as a majority to govern their homeland, and the Zionists would state their intention to take the country by force if necessary, the Palestinians would say they would resist, and in the future that Palestinian would by chalked up as "an enemy of the Jewish people." This is how the conversation between the mayor of Jerusalem and Menachem Ussishkin went, for example (Segev, 129). Ben Gurions' talks with various Arabs in the 30s went similarly (Segev, 376).
During the Nakba, the Zionist movement, the king of Jordan, and the British government made a secret deal to partition Palestine and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state (Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan). This is important to the question of talks because it reflects a time-honored Zionist strategy of avoidance, denial, and attempts at the destruction of the Palestinian people (which, whenever they have felt those efforts have been successful, they have pronounced over the ruins that the Palestinian people never existed to begin with.)
After the war, there was a brief period in which the shocked Palestinians had no national leadership, and allowed the Arab governments to advocate for them. These efforts were sabotaged by a deliberate policy of provocation and aggression by Israel, designed to stave off peace (that period is another discussion, but see Morris’ Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956 and Shlaim’s The Iron Wall)
In 1959, Our Palestine was first published, announcing the birth of Fatah, the first post-war independent Palestinian entity. It was an angry, sometime bitter, strident call to arms: "Israel says, ‘I am here by the sword.’ We must complete the saying -- ‘and only by the sword shall Israel be driven out.’"
This magazine marks the beginning of the first, and so far the only, period in which Israel might truly have been said to have "no one to talk to." The embryonic Fatah held two positions that could reasonably be considered deal-breakers; they themselves held that a settlement would come by fighting, not negotiations, and; they held that every Jew who had immigrated post-1917 had to leave -- a Nakba in reverse.
This is the kind of position most people attributed to the Palestinian national movement for the first 30 years of its existence. In fact, it didn’t survive Fatah’s first success, at Karameh. This philosophy of vengeance lasted seven or eight years at the most. By 1969 there was no trace of it left:
There is a large Jewish population in Palestine and it has grown considerable in the last 20 years. We recognize that it has the right to live there and that it is part of the Palestinian people. We reject the formula that the Jews must be driven into the sea. If we are fighting a Jewish state of a racial kind, it is not so as to replace it with an Arab state which would in turn drive out the Jews. What we want to create in the historic borders of Palestine is a multi-racial democratic state (One Country, 108).
With the concept of a single democratic state, Fatah returned to the same basic position the Palestinian notables had held during the period of the Mandate: yes to the Jews population, no to unchecked Jewish immigration, yes to democracy. Compare, for example, the poet Ma'ruf al-Rasafi’s explanation the Palestinian position:
We are not hostile to the Israelites as some accuse us, neither secretly or publicly./
How can we be while they are our paternal uncles, and while the Banu Fihr are related to Ishmael?/
But evacuation is what we fear, and being ruled by force is what we try to avoid.
Seems like someone one could talk to. This in the 1920s, while Jabotinsky, ideological father of the Likud, was explaining that "Judea will be reborn in blood and fire."
Following the development of the democratic state concept, the Palestinian movement offered Israel an "olive branch" as Arafat put it in 1974 -- they were ready for talks. The two sides might have disagreed about the kind of peace they wanted, but nothing prevented them from sitting down together and talking about it -- except Israel’s refusal to do so.
Chomsky puts the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution in the late 70s, but I loaned out my copy of Fateful Triangle, so put it in 1988, when Arafat accepts it in a speech to the UN. Also in 1988; Rabin announces his "peace plan" of "Force, might, beatings" in the West Bank and Gaza; Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed that Palestinians "would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." Also in 1988: 318 Palestinians were killed, 20,000 wounded, 15,000 arrested, 12,000 jailed, 34 deported, and 140 houses demolished (8 Israelis were killed (6 civilians, 2 soldiers)).
With the exception of some Palestinians shifting from unarmed to armed resistance (gee, I wonder why), Israeli demands for quiet and insincere promises of a surrounded, dismembered, hamstrung mini-state, that has been the dynamic ever since. It’s not that there’s no one to talk to, it’s that when your dream is to convince the world Palestinians don’t exist, or to kill them like insects, or to control them with "force, might, beatings" there really isn’t much more to say.
UPDATE: The Economist has some excellent articles on the website, starting with this one, about HR 185. Also interesting is this review of books about Israeli soldiers, then and now:
First published in 1949, a year after the declaration of independence and 57 years before the publication of "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappé, perhaps the most controversial of Israel's historians, "Khirbet Khizeh" describes in detail one such act of ethnic cleansing. It is based on the experiences of its author, S. Yizhar (pen-name of Yizhar Smilansky), who was an intelligence officer in the newborn state's army.
There's also an entire special report on Israel at sixty. Excellent coverage of the secular/religious tension within the Jewish community, which was discussed in the original diary.