The Road Map to Nowhere - Israel/Palestine since 2003

Introduction[1]

In the present political atmosphere in the US and Europe, anybody who expresses criticism of Israel’s policies is immediately silenced as an anti-Semite. Part of the reason why the pro-Israel lobbies have been so successful in their use of this accusation is the massive lack of knowledge about what is really happening in Israel-Palestine.  Without the facts, the dominant narrative remains that Israel is struggling to defend its very existence. Attention focuses mainly on the horrible, despicable Palestinian terror; hence critics of Israel are often accused of justifying terror. My aim in this book is to provide the facts, as they  unfold – openly - in the Israeli media.

This book covers the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine since 2003; it is framed against  my previous book Israel/Palestine,^[2] which covers the period between 1999 and 2002. At the opening of Israel/Palestine I wrote:

The state of Israel was founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the nakba - the catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time - 1,380,000 people - were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of the refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after the 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not a process unfamiliar in history. Israel’s actions remain incomparable to the massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and government of the United States. Had Israel stopped there, in 1948, I could probably live with it. As an Israeli, I grew up believing that this primal sin our state was founded on might  be forgiven one day, because the founders’ generation was driven by the faith that this was the only way to save the Jewish people from the danger of another holocaust. But it didn’t stop there.^[3]

Since 1967 Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (as well as the Syrian Golan Heights). Today, over three and a half million Palestinians still live in these two areas today under Israeli occupation.  In 1993, it seemed that the occupation was reaching its end. Many believed that the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington that year, would lead to Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories and the formation of a Palestinian state. But this is not how things turned out. As I discussed in Israel/Palestine, the political leadership of the Israeli peace camp turned the Oslo spirit of reconciliation into a new and more sophisticated form of maintaining the occupation. But during all these years Israel’s official line has been that the situation is temporary. According to this line, the Oslo agreements were just interim agreements - necessary steps in the long process required for working out the details of a final agreement. At least the Labour governments kept pledging that at the end of the so-called “interim period” Israel would eventually withdraw, dismantle settlements and end the occupation. In July 2000, a Labour prime minister - Ehud Barak - led the Israelis and the world to believe that Israel was, finally, willing to start this new era of peace. Instead, however, his premiership marked the end of the Oslo period and the return of direct Israeli military control of the occupied territories.

In Israel/Palestine, I described the period between 2000 and 2002 as the darkest period in the history of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. But in the period since, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, it became even worse. Sharon started a massive project of ethnic cleansing in the areas of the West Bank bordering Israel.  His wall project robs the land from the Palestinian villages in these areas, imprisons whole towns, and leaves their residents with no means of sustenance. If the project continues, many of the 400,000 Palestinians affected by it will have to leave and seek their livelihood in the outskirts of cities in the center of the West Bank, as has already happened in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya. The Israeli settlements were evacuated from the Gaza Strip, yet the Strip remains a big prison, completely sealed off from the outside world, nearing starvation and terrorized from land, see and air by the Israeli army.

Nevertheless, as this book goes to press, in April 2006, the Western world seems still under the spell of the legend of Ariel Sharon and the supposed great change he brought about in Israeli policy - from expansion and occupation to moderation and concessions. Since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements, the dominant Western narrative runs that Israel has done its part towards ending the occupation and has declared its readiness to take further steps, but now it is the Palestinian’s turn to show that they are able to live in peace with their well-intentioned neighbor.

How did it happen that Sharon, the most brutal, cynical, racist and manipulative leader Israel has ever had, end his political career as a legendary peace hero? The answer in this book is that Sharon has never changed. Rather, the birth of the Sharon myth reflects the present omnipotence of the propaganda system, which, to paraphrase a notion of Chomsky, has reached perfection in manufacturing consciousness.

As has become commonplace in the recent history of the occupation, the period covered here opened with a new peace initiative – the road map. The Palestinians accepted the plan and declared a cease fire, but as we will see, while the Western world was celebrating the new era of peace, the Israeli army under Sharon intensified its policy of assassinations, maintained the daily harassment of the occupied Palestinians, and eventually declared all-out war on Hamas, killing all its first-rank military and political leaders. Later, as the Western world was once again holding its breath in an eighteen-month wait for the planned Gaza pullout, Sharon did everything possible to fail the newly elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and turned down his offers of renewed negotiations.

I argue that, contrary to the prevailing assumptions, Sharon did not evacuate the Gaza settlements of his own free will.  He cooked up his disengagement plan as a means to gain time, at the peak of international pressure that followed Israel’s sabotaging of the road map. Still, at every moment since then, up until the very moment of disengagement, he was looking for ways to renege on this commitment, as he had done so many times previously. But this time he was forced to follow through with the Gaza pullout by the Bush administration. Though it was kept fully behind the scenes, US pressure on Sharon was massive, and included military sanctions on  Israel.

At the same time, what Sharon has brought to perfection was the manufacturing of consciousness, showing that war can be always marketed as the tireless pursuit of peace. He proved that Israel can imprison the Palestinians, bombard them from the air, steal their land in the West Bank, stall any chance for peace - and yet still be hailed by the Western world as the peaceful side in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As the book ends, Sharon had retired from political life, and is currently unconscious in a Jerusalem hospital. But this alone does not portend any change: Sharon may have gone, but his legacy is well alive. It has been nurtured for over a decade in the Israeli military, which is in effect the dominant factor in Israeli politics.

In Israel/Palestine I survey the role of the military in the Israeli democracy. I argue that the current escalation of hostilities that started at the end of September 2000 was not a spontaneous outburst of violence, but rather a calculated and well-prepared move by the Israeli military, which was at the time gaining enormous political power with the appointment of its former chief of staff, Ehud Barak, as prime minister. (The book surveys in detail the close relations of Barak and Sharon both before and during that period.) I contend that the Oslo accords in 1993, and the agreements that followed, were in effect the realization of Labor’s long standing Alon plan, by which Israel would keep about 40 per cent of the West Bank’s land and in the rest, the Palestinians would be allowed to have a functioning autonomy. But in the eyes of the military and the hawks in the Israeli political system even that was too much, because, from a longer-range perspective, it risked leading to the loss of Israel’s control of the territories. Both Barak and Sharon had expressed vociferous opposition to the Oslo agreements from the outset.

On the eve of Oslo, the majority of Israelis were tired of war. In their eyes, the fights over land and resources were over. However, the ideology of the “redemption of land” never died out in the army and the circles of political hawks. In their eyes, Sharon’s alternative of fighting the Palestinians to the bitter end and imposing a new regional order most likely failed in Lebanon in 1982[4] because of the weakness of a self-indulgent  Israeli society, but with Israel’s massive military superiority, it might still be possible to crush Palestinian resistance and gain more land through the use of force. When Barak took power in 1999, the road opened to undo the Oslo agreements. In order to achieve this, it was first necessary to convince the spoiled Israeli society that the Palestinians were not willing to live in peace and were in fact threatening Israel’s very existence. Barak succeed in doing this with his “generous offer” in the July 2000 Camp David summit, which, as I show in detail in Israel/Palestine, was nothing but a fraud. [5] Under Sharon, the process of restoring direct military control of the occupied territories was completed.

The military is the most stable - and most dangerous - political factor in Israel. As an Israeli analyst stated in 2001, “in the last six years, since October 1995, there were five prime ministers and six defense ministers, but only two chiefs-of-staff.”[6]  Israeli military and political systems have always been closely intertwined, with generals moving from the army straight to the government, but the army’s political status was further solidified during Sharon’s premiership. It is often apparent that the real decisions are made by the military rather than the political echelon. Military seniors brief the press (they capture at least half of the news space in the Israeli media), and brief and shape the views of foreign diplomats; they go abroad on diplomatic missions, outline political plans for the government, and express their political views on any subject and occasion.

In contrast to this military stability, the Israeli political system is in a gradual process of disintegration. In a World Bank report of April 2005, Israel was  found to be one of the most corrupt and least efficient in the Western world, second only to Italy in the government corruption index, and lowest in the index of political stability.[7] Together with his sons, Sharon personally was associated with severe bribery charges that have never reached the courts.[8] The new party that Sharon founded, Kadima, which now heads the government, is a hierarchical agglomeration of individuals with no party institutions or local branches. Its guidelines, published in November 22 2005, enable its leader to bypass all standard democratic processes and appoint the list of the party’s candidates to the parliament without voting or approval of any party body.[9]

The Labor party has not been able to offer an alternative. In the last two Israeli elections, Labor elected dovish prime-ministerial candidates: Amram Mitzna in 2003 and Amir Peretz in 2006.  Both were initially received with enormous enthusiasm, but were immediately silenced by their party and campaign advisors and by self-imposed censorship, aiming to situate themselves “at the center of the political map”. Soon, their programs became indistinguishable from that of Sharon. Peretz even declared that on “foreign and security” matters he will do exactly as Sharon, or later Olmert, do,  differing from them only on social matters. Thus, these candidates helped convince the Israeli voters that Sharon’s way is the right way.  In recent years, there has been no substantial left-wing opposition to the rule of Sharon and the generals, since after the elections, Labor would always join the government, providing the dovish image that the generals need for the international show.

A prevailing explanation as to why Israeli political leadership has made no progress on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that in Israeli society there exists no majority backing for sweeping concessions. Hence, even the most well-intended and dovish of Israeli leaders have to restrain themselves and offer only what the majority can swallow. This may have been true in the past, but since at least the early 1990 this claim has no basis in reality. In fact, there is a wide consensus in Israeli society that peace with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbours requires withdrawal from the occupied territories and the evacuation of settlements. The first Palestinian uprising or intifada (1987–1993) brought about a substantial change in Israeli public opinion. Israeli society discovered that its military occupation of Palestinian land came with a heavy price attached. Many could no longer accept the occupation on moral grounds; others were just unwilling to pay its economic and human cost. This shift of view was reinforced by a parallel change in Palestinian society. Since the first intifada, the Palestinian struggle for independence was also based on explicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist in its pre-1967 borders. The intifada meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers in 1988 called, for the first time, for the partition of the historical Palestine into two independent states.[10]

Since the early 1990s, Israeli public-opinion has formed a clear pattern. About one third is firmly against the occupation and the settlements on moral and ideological grounds; another third believes in Israel’s right over the whole land and supports the settlements; the middle third is people with no fixed ideological view on the matter - people whose sole concern is their ability to lead a normal life. At the time of the Oslo accords, the middle third joined the end-the-occupation camp: two-thirds of Israelis supported Oslo in all polls, though it was conceived as leading to an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the evacuation of the settlements. This pattern has remained essentially unchanged in the years since, with all polls showing that close to two thirds of the Israelis support withdrawal and evacuation of West Bank settlements.[11] Nevertheless, this majority has not been able to enforce its will. Since 1999, all Israeli leaders (including Sharon, as we shall see) have promised huge concessions for peace in their election campaigns, only to do the opposite when elected.

With the collapse of the political system, the army remains the body that shapes and executes Israel’s policies and, as is already obvious in the few months since Sharon left office, is determined to implement his legacy, together with Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert. This legacy, as it unfolds in the period covered in this book, is eternal war, not just with the Palestinians, but with what the Israeli army views as their potential network of support, be it Iran now, or Syria tomorrow. The book ends close to where it started, with a new “peace plan” promoted by Olmert. As we will see in chapter 7, the goal is to obtain international approval for Israel to annex unilaterally 40 per cent of the West Bank. But Olmert is Israel’s new man of peace.

Nevertheless, the period covered here was not just a chronology of victories for the politics of power and the manufacturing of consciousness. From the perspective of maintaining Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, evacuating the Gaza settlements was a defeat, forced on Israel by international pressure. In chapter 5, I argue that the reason the US exerted pressure on Israel for the first time in recent history, was because at that time it was impossible to ignore the widespread global discontent over Israel's policies and unswerving US support of them. For example, despite the apparent success of pro-Israel lobbies in silencing any criticism of Israel in Europe, in a comprehensive European poll the majority viewed Israel as the country most threatening to world peace. The US had to yield to public opinion.

This turn of events shows the limits of propaganda – it appears possible to manufacture silence or consent, but it may be impossible to manufacture consciousness. Basic concepts like justice, international law, solidarity with the oppressed, have disappeared from mainstream political discourse, but they are present in people’s minds. Chapter 8 is devoted to some of the history of the struggle to keep these concepts alive.

The story of the Gaza evacuation also shows that international pressure can lead Israel to concessions. I believe that this provides hope both to the Palestinians and to the Israelis. Israel’s policies threaten not just the Palestinians but also the Israelis themselves. In the long run, this war over land is suicidal. A small Jewish state of 7 million residents (5.5 million Jews), surrounded by two hundred million Arabs, is making itself the enemy of the whole Muslim world. There is no guarantee that such a state can survive. Saving the Palestinians also means saving Israel.

My major source of information in constructing the history of this period is the Israeli media. In the Israeli newspapers much more information is available about what is happening and what is being planned than appears in any foreign coverage. One often hears statements interpreting this as signifying that the Israeli media is more liberal and critical of Israel’s policies than other Western media.  This, however, is not the explanation. With the notable exception of courageous and conscientious journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levi and a few others, the Israeli press is as compliant as elsewhere, and it faithfully recycles military and governmental messages. But part of the reason it is more revealing is its lack of inhibition. Things that would look outrageous in the Western world are in Israel considered natural daily routine.[12]

While the Israeli media remains the best source for government and military plans, a change I have noted since the writing of Israel/Palestine is that its reporting of the Israeli army’s actions in the territories has substantially shrunk. Often, daily atrocities are either ignored, or pushed to the back pages with minimal coverage. A reliable alternative source of information during this period has been the British Guardian. But to get a full picture of the daily reality of the occupation one also needs to read the Palestinian internet media.

Of the Israeli Hebrew papers, only Ha'aretz has an Internet English version, which I have used for most quotes from Ha’aretz in this book.[13] For the other Israeli papers, the quotes are my translation of the original Hebrew. In a few cases, where I could not find the English version of a piece that appeared in Ha’aretz in Hebrew, the quote is marked as ‘author’s translation.’ I try to bring as much of the story as possible in the direct voice of the media sources I use, because often the tone is no less revealing than the content. I also try to give some of the stage to alternative critical voices in Israeli and international media.