By: Noam Chomsky
Z Magazine, October 1993
On August 30, the Israeli Cabinet approved a draft agreement on "Palestinian
self-rule" that had been reached by the government of Israel and PLO chairman
Yasser Arafat's personal representatives. Parts of the agreement have not been
revealed or are not yet settled at the time of writing (September 2), but it is
likely that something much like the published text (NYT, Sept. 1)
will be instituted, and that it will be followed by separate agreements between
Israel and Arab states.
To understand what has been achieved, it is necessary to recall the relevant
background, much of it familiar to readers of this journal, at least.
The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to confrontation,
driving home the importance of a diplomatic settlement. In November 1967, the UN
Security Council passed Resolution 242, which expressed a broad international
consensus on the general terms for a settlement. The current agreement is based
entirely on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses it). Article I of the 1993 draft
agreement, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations," specifies that "the
negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; no other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus
resolving a central issue in the controversy in accord with US-Israeli demands.
UN 242 "emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war
and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the
area can live in security." It calls for "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces
from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and "Termination of all claims
or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the
sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in
the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized
boundaries free from threats or acts of force." It calls for an agreement among
states; Palestinian rights are mentioned only in the call for "a just
settlement of the refugee problem," left unspecified. UN 242 is therefore
thoroughly rejectionist, if we understand the concept of rejectionism in
nonracist terms: as denial of the right to national self-determination of one
or the other of the two contending parties in the former Palestine.
With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the contending
states of the region over the next few years, though their interpretations
differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel rejected full withdrawal.
The phrase "withdrawal from territories" has been a particular bone of
contention. In most of the world (including Europe), it has been understood to
imply Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied during the
war, with at most minor -- and mutual -- adjustments. At first, that was also
Washington's interpretation. UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg informed King Hussein
of Jordan that the US insisted that "there must be a mutuality in adjustments,"
a classified State Department history observes: to both Israel and the Arab
states, "U.S. officials emphasized that any territorial adjustments would be
limited in nature and would not, of necessity, be detrimental to the Arab
states"; there would be at most "minor reciprocal border rectifications" with no
"substantial withdrawing of the [pre-war] map." It was on this understanding,
explicitly conveyed by US government mediators, that the Arab states accepted
the resolution, and the US itself unequivocally held to this interpretation
until 1971. In those years, Israel was alone among major actors in rejecting
this interpretation of the document.
The disagreements over interpretation came to a head in February 1971, when
UN mediator Gunnar Jarring presented a proposal to Egypt and Israel that called
for full peace between them in return for full Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian
territory. Egyptian President Sadat accepted the proposal. Sadat's acceptance of
Jarring's "famous" peace proposal was a "bombshell," Prime Minister Rabin
recalls in his memoirs, a "milestone." While officially welcoming Egypt's
expression "of its readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel," the
government of Israel rejected the agreement, stating that "Israel will not
withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines. The reasoning was explained by Haim
Bar-Lev of the governing Labor Party: "I think that we could obtain a peace
settlement on the basis of the earlier [pre-June 1967] borders. If I were
persuaded that this is the maximum that we might obtain, I would say: agreed.
But I think that it is not the maximum. I think that if we continue to hold out,
we will obtain more."
The crucial question was how Washington would react. The Jarring-Sadat
agreement was consistent with official US policy. There was, however, a conflict
between the State Department and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who
was then engaged in a campaign to undermine and displace Secretary of State
Rogers, as he was soon to do. Kissinger insisted that the US must insist upon
"stalemate": no diplomacy, no negotiations. His position prevailed, and Sadat's
peace offer was rejected.
Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in rejecting the
standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN 242. The basic cause for
the misery and suffering that followed is their conviction, which has proven to
be correct, that "if we continue to hold out, we will obtain more." The
isolation of the US and Israel became still more marked by the mid-1970s, when
the terms of the international consensus shifted to include a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thus departing from earlier rejectionism. In
January 1976, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a
settlement in terms of UN 242, with this amendment. The US veto, repeated later,
excluded the Security Council from the diplomacy. The General Assembly continued
to pass near-unanimous resolutions in similar terms (the US and Israel opposed);
a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The US also blocked initiatives from
Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The last of the regular UN
resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf conflict, in December 1990 (144-2).
Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the rejectionist
camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the Islamic world, justly
termed "extremist." The conclusions being unacceptable, the facts have been
"vetoed" along with numerous peace initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole
together with Sadat's "famous milestone" and much else that is inconvenient.
Israel's policy spectrum with regard to the occupied territories is
illuminated in a study by Peace Now, which compares four different plans for the
territories from 1968 to 1992, asking how many Palestinians would be within
areas annexed by Israel if these plans were enacted today: (I) the 1968 Allon
Plan (Labor); (II) the 1976 Labor Party Settlement Plan (never officially
adopted though "it has informed practical decision-making and action"); (III)
the Ariel Sharon Plan of 1992 (Likud), which created eleven isolated and
discontinuous "cantons" for Palestinian autonomy; (IV) the Defense Establishment
Plan of 1992 (Labor), which deals only with the West Bank. The number of
Palestinians in settlements to be annexed are as follows:
- Allon Plan: 385,000, 91,000 in the West Bank and the rest in Gaza
- Labor Party Settlement Plan: 603,000, 310,000 in the West Bank
- Sharon Plan: 393,000, 378,000 in the West Bank
- Defense Establishment Plan: 204,000 in the West Bank, Gaza unspecified
To these figures must be added the 150,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem, to
be annexed in all plans, the Peace Now study notes. "The Labor Party plan of
1976 would annex the greatest number of Palestinians from the West Bank and
Gaza," while the Sharon Plan "is the maximalist plan with regard to the West
Bank," though ceding self-rule to more Gaza Palestinians than the Labor plans.
As the analysis indicates, the policy spectrum has been narrow, and
invariably rejectionist. The political blocs have differed on West Bank Arab
population concentrations, Labor being more concerned than Likud to exclude them
from areas scheduled for Israeli takeover. Washington has favored Labor Party
rejectionism, more rational than the Likud variety, which has no real provision
for the population of the occupied territories except eventual "transfer"
(expulsion).
After the Gulf war, Europe accepted the US position that the Monroe Doctrine
effectively extends over the Middle East; Europeans would henceforth refrain
from independent initiatives, limiting themselves to helping implement US
rejectionist doctrine, as Norway indeed did in 1993. The Soviet Union was gone
from the scene, its remnants now loyal clients of Washington. The UN had become
virtually a US agency. Whatever space the superpower conflict had left for
nonalignment was gone, and the catastrophe of capitalism that swept the
traditional colonial domains of the West in the 1980s left the Third World mired
in general despair, disciplined by forces of the managed market. With Arab
nationalism dealt yet another crushing blow by Saddam's aggression and terror
and PLO tactics of more than the usual ineptitude, the Arab rulers had less need
than before to respond to popular pressures with pro-Palestinian gestures. The
US was therefore in a good position to advance its rejectionist program without
interference, moving towards the solution outlined by Secretary of State James
Baker well before the Gulf crisis: any settlement must be based on the 1989 plan
of the government of Israel, which flatly bars Palestinian national rights
(Baker Plan, December 1989).
Washington's general goals have been stable for a long period. The basic
concern is the enormous oil wealth of the region. Planning has long been guided
by a strategic conception that assigns local management to an "Arab Facade" of
weak and dependent dictators, who will ensure that profits from Gulf oil flow
primarily to the US (and its British client), not to the people of the region. A
network of regional gendarmes is to keep order; local "cops on the beat" as
Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, described them in the context of the
Nixon Doctrine. The responsibility of the Middle East cops was outlined in 1973
by the Senate's leading expert on the topic, Henry Jackson: to "inhibit and
contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab States...who,
were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal
sources of petroleum in the Persian Gulf" -- more accurately, to the vast wealth
they yield. Senator Jackson was referring specifically to the tacit alliance
between Israel, Iran (under the Shah), and Saudi Arabia.
As for Kurds, Palestinians, slum-dwellers in Cairo, and others who contribute
nothing to the basic structure of power -- they have no rights, by the most
elementary principles of statecraft. Perhaps they can occasionally be used in
one or another power play, but that is where their rights end, as the history of
the Kurds has demonstrated, today once again. The status of the Palestinians has
been even lower than that of other worthless people; their value is not zero,
but negative, in that their plight has had a disruptive effect in the Arab
world, thus interfering with US goals. They must therefore be marginalized
somehow, perhaps under a form of "autonomy" that leaves them to manage their own
affairs under Israeli supervision. That plan, proposed at Camp David, was taken
up when the "peace process" was renewed at Madrid in the Fall of 1991. As the
conference opened, one of Israel's most knowledgeable and acute observers of the
territories, journalist Danny Rubinstein, wrote that the US and Israel were
proposing "autonomy as in a POW camp, where the prisoners are `autonomous' to
cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events."
Palestinians are to be granted little more control over local services, he
wrote, adding that even advocates of Greater Israel never call for literal
annexation of the territories, which would require Israel to provide the
"restricted services" available to Israel's second-class Arab citizens, at
enormous cost.
As discussed here at the time, the best outcome, from Washington's point of
view, would be a settlement that entrenches the traditional strategic conception
and gives it a public form, raising tacit understandings to a formal treaty. If
some arrangement for local "autonomy" can suppress the Palestinian issue, well
and good. Meanwhile security arrangements among Israel, Turkey, Egypt and the
United States can be extended, perhaps bringing others in if they accept the
client role. There need be no further concern over possible Soviet support for
attempts within the region to interfere with such designs.
While the negotiations were proceeding without issue, Israel stepped up the
harsh repression in the territories, following the thinking outlined by Defense
Minister Yitzhak Rabin (now Prime Minister). In February 1989, he explained to
Peace Now leaders that the US had granted Israel time to suppress the Intifada
by force, diverting attention by meaningless diplomatic maneuvers: "The
inhabitants of the territories are subject to harsh military and economic
pressure," Rabin said: "in the end, they will be broken" and will accept
Israel's terms. These policies achieved much success, extended with Rabin's
recent "closure" of the territories, a crushing blow to the staggering
Palestinian economy.
From the early days of the Intifada, if not before, it was becoming clear
that the PLO leadership was losing its popular support in the occupied
territories. Local activists from secular nationalist sectors, while still
recognizing the PLO as the sole agent for negotiations, spoke with open contempt
of its corruption, personal power plays, opportunism, and disregard for the
interests and opinions of the people it claimed to represent.
By all indications, the disaffection increased in the years that followed,
while the fundamentalist opposition that Israel had initially nurtured gained
popular support, feeding on this growing discontent and on the demoralization as
Rabin's program was implemented, with constant US support at all levels:
economic, diplomatic, and ideological.
These matters, reviewed with particular detail and depth in Israel Shahak's
regular reports, have received only sporadic and inadequate coverage here.
With its popular support in decline and its status deteriorating in the Arab
world, the PLO became more tolerable to US-Israeli policymakers, particularly as
the growing fundamentalist movement evoked memories of the resistance that had
driven Israel out of much of Lebanon. Informal Israel-PLO contacts were
increasingly reported. These reached their culmination with the August 1993
agreement, which bypassed the delegations engaged in the official "peace
process," and indeed also excluded the PLO, apart from Arafat and a few close
associates.
The agreement was welcomed with great acclaim, marred only by skepticism as
to whether it could hold. "America's own greatest interest," the twin goals of
"enhanced security for Israel and regional peace," both...seem closer to
achievement this morning than ever before," the New York Times
editors observed as the agreement was announced. Apart from omission of the
tacit background understanding that the "regional peace" must ensure US control,
their identification of Washington's highest priorities is accurate, though
automatic identification of US government policy with "America's greatest
interest" takes a leap of faith; it is not obvious that ignoring Palestinian
national rights and the security of others is in the interest of the people of
the United States.
The editors may, however, be right in thinking that long-standing US policy
goals have been advanced. The intended eventual outcome of the 1993 agreement
falls well within the bounds of traditional US-Israeli rejectionism, adopting
essential features of the Sharon Plan as well as the Labor Party's Allon Plan.
That much was spelled out the same day on the facing page of the Times
by Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, a close associate of Foreign
Minister Shimon Peres. He informed his US audience that
"the permanent solution will be based on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and
from most of the West Bank. We agree to a confederated formula between Jordan
and the Palestinians in the West Bank, but we will not return to pre-1967
borders. United Jerusalem will remain the capital of the State of Israel."
In return, "After years of rejection of Israel as part of the Middle East,
the Arabs will accept and recognize Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state
within secure and defined borders in this region" -- as they did, for example,
in the vetoed Security Council resolution of January 1976, gone from history
along with much else like it, so that Beilin's statement will ring true to
American ears.
The reasons for preferring "confederation" to Palestinian independence have
nothing to do with security. As has been understood since 1948, when Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion made the point explicit, an independent Palestinian
state serves Israeli security interests better than "a state linked to
Transjordan [now Jordan], and maybe tomorrow to Iraq." The problem is that an
independent state would be a barrier to eventual integration of parts of the
territories and control of their resources, primarily water. As for "united
Jerusalem," that is a concept of broad and as yet undetermined scope.
"Withdrawal from Gaza" and other territories is understood to exclude Jewish
settlements and the resources they control. And even this "permanent settlement"
lies well down the road.
It is understandable, then, that the Times editors, expressing
the prevailing view, should see the "historic deal" as a great opportunity. It
is "the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall," chief diplomatic
correspondent Thomas Friedman proclaimed. The projected arrangements represent
the "triumph of realism over fanaticism and political courage over political
cowardice." "Realists" understand that in this world, you follow US orders.
Those who are not convinced of the justice of traditional US-Israeli
rejectionism are not only wrong, but are "fanatics" and "cowards," thus excluded
from respectable society. The hysteria of the rhetoric suggests that more is
understood than appears on the surface.
While some Israeli advocates in the US felt that the victory was not
far-reaching enough, more perceptive ones recognized the scale of what had been
achieved. The PLO had been forced "to become more reasonable," acceding to
Israel's demands, as Times columnist William Safire, a
self-described "pro-Israeli hawk," put the matter. "Arafat finally appears to be
ready to accept [Menahem] Begin's approach [of 1978], adding the Gaza-Jericho
twist," Safire comments, "having been softened by 15 years of Israeli hard line"
-- to which we may add US intransigence.
The draft agreement makes no mention of Palestinian national rights,
the primary issue on which the US and Israel broke with the international
consensus from the mid-1970s. Throughout these years, it was agreed that a
settlement should be based on UN 242.
There were two basic points of contention: (1) Do we interpret the withdrawal
clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus (including the US,
pre-1971), or in accord with the position of Israel and US policy from 1971? (2)
Is the settlement based solely on UN 242, which offers nothing to the
Palestinians, or 242 and other relevant UN resolutions, as the PLO had
proposed for many years in accord with the nonrejectionist international
consensus. Thus, does the settlement incorporate the right of refugees to return
or compensation, as the UN has insisted since December 1948 (with US
endorsement, long forgotten), and the Palestinian right to national
self-determination that has repeatedly been endorsed by the UN (though blocked
by Washington)? These are the crucial issues that have stood in the way of a
political settlement.
On these issues, the agreement explicitly and without equivocation adopts the
US-Israeli stand. As noted, Article I states that the "permanent status will
lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338," nothing
more. Furthermore, as Beilin made explicit, the withdrawal clause of UN 242 is
to be understood in the terms unilaterally imposed by the US (from 1971). In
fact, the agreement does not even preclude further Israeli settlement in the
large areas of the West Bank it has taken over, or even new land takeovers. On
such central matters as control of water, it speaks only of "cooperation" and
"equitable utilization" in a manner to be determined by "experts from both
sides." The outcome of cooperation between an elephant and a fly is not hard to
predict.
The victory of the rejectionists is complete, even in the ideological sphere;
given US global power, the version of history designed by its doctrinal
institutions becomes the general framework for discussion in most of the world,
including Europe.
For Palestinians in refugee camps and elsewhere outside the territories, the
agreement offers little hope, and they have expressed understandable bitterness.
Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon also "criticized the PLO for making concessions with
Israel that could jeopardize Palestinian national rights and undermine the joint
Arab negotiating strategy," Lamis Andoni reported from Amman, giving "Israel the
upper hand in imposing its conditions on each Arab country separately."
A separate matter entirely is whether the two sides would be well-advised to
accept the agreement devised by Israel and Arafat. For the US and Israel, the
question hardly arises: the agreement falls within the framework on which they
have insisted.
For the Palestinians, the question is more complex. The agreement entails
abandonment of most of their hopes, at least for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, realistic alternatives may be much worse.
Given US power, refusal to accept US-Israeli terms is at once translated into
a demonstration of the worthlessness of such "fanatics" and "cowards," who
thereby cede any rights they might have been thought to have. Palestinians were
once "the darling of many Western liberals," Thomas Friedman writes (meaning,
presumably, that some Western liberals regarded them as at least semi-human);
but they are beloved no more, and unless they toe the line their former admirers
may abandon them to their fate. Furthermore, the agreement should offer
Palestinians some relief from the barriers to development imposed by the
military administration, no small matter. And it moves beyond Rubinstein's
"autonomy of a POW camp" in that Palestinians are assigned control over "direct
taxation." An Israeli-supervised "strong police force" of Palestinians might, at
worst, be the local counterpart of Israel's South Lebanon Army, subduing the
population by terror and threat while the masters observe closely, ready to move
if the iron fist is needed. But it might turn out that Palestinian police will
treat the population less harshly than the Israeli army and border police, and
settler depredations should reduce. Though the agreements say nothing about the
matter, there may be a decline in Israeli settlement and in the development
programs designed to integrate the extensive areas designated for Jewish
settlement into the Israeli economy, leaving Palestinians on the side. Many
issues can be debated, but not -- at least not seriously -- within a doctrinal
framework that identifies "realism" as what the US and Israel demand, and
dismisses critical analysis in advance as "fanaticism" and "cowardice."
The respected head of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul Shafi, had
some observations on these matters in a talk in Bethlehem on July 22, 1993, just
as Arafat was secretly moving to take matters into his own hands, bypassing
local Palestinians. Abdul Shafi held out little hope for the "peace process,"
which excludes entirely the possibility "that Palestinians must be the main
authority in the interim period for the people and for the land," leading to
true national self-determination. He stressed, however, that
"the negotiations are not worth fighting about. The critical issue is
transforming our society. All else is inconsequential... We must decide
amongst ourselves to use all our strength and resources to develop our
collective leadership and the democratic institutions which will achieve our
goals and guide us in the future... The important thing is for us to take care
of our internal situation and to organize our society and correct those
negative aspects from which it has been suffering for generations and which is
the main reason for our losses against our foes."
His remarks seem to me apt, and of much broader import, ourselves included.