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ISRAEL, PART ONE |
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[This essay is in two parts. Notes and a bibliography follow the end of Part Two.] A Personal ConfessionIn one of his books American scholar Paul Fussell wrote that his is the point of view of a pissed-off World War II rifleman. In some ways what I write in this essay is from the point of view of a pissed-off former admirer of the state of Israel. # # # Israel has a long, long history in my mental development. Nearly the first thing I can remember is my mother reading me Bible stories from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible. Later I read books of Bible stories myself, and the Bible. By the time I entered university, like most North Americans I was somewhat familiar with the "miraculous" creation and development of modern Israel. The creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 had been opposed by the entire Arab world. Nevertheless, the Jews had stalwartly opposed and strongly defeated the huge invading armies of Arabs, though at terrible cost. During the struggle many Arabs had fled their homes and gone into exile. Since 1948 the heroic, Western-oriented democratic Jews had built a progressive state, transforming desert into gardens. In the early 1960s I had read Leon Uris's Exodus and Mila 18. I had at least heard about the Holocaust and Anne Frank's diary (which had by 1956 been adapted as a play on the New York stage, and, starring American actress Millie Perkins, was made into a 1959 film). I had read numerous novels, several by Uris, about heroic Jews. I began to read popular histories of modern Israel. I had not yet, however, met any Jews. The town of Milton, Ontario, where I lived may not have had any. In the summer of 1967, just before I was to start university, the Six-Day War broke out. Israel was certainly provoked to war by the Egyptians, and its feats in the air and on land were prodigious. But, though I applauded Israel's actions in the war, an uneasy feeling of dismay gradually came over me in the years that followed . . . The Israelis weren't going to give back the land! I had assumed, like many North Americans I think, that, when a final peace treaty was signed (which would certainly be within a few months), Israel would give the land back it had snatched during the Six-Day War. In the war Israel had taken the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. It had taken the Golan Heights from Syria. It had taken the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. These areas had been and still were occupied by non-Jews (the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the people we now call Palestinians). Although some Jewish figures had said -- immediately after the capture of Arab East Jerusalem -- that they would never give up that part of the city -- which they wanted forever united with West Jerusalem and under Israeli control -- other Jewish figures had assured the world that the rest of the West Bank would soon be restored to the Arabs. (No one talked -- interestingly enough -- about Palestinians in those days, only about Arabs. Had Palestinian national self-consciousness yet been aroused?) But months went by, then several years. The restoration of the West Bank . . . did not happen. # # # A Jewish settlement movement on the West Bank began. Settlers (always described as extremists and fanatics in the press) began to build settlements on hilltops in the West Bank. The settlers always seemed to be heavily armed. The Israeli government seldom disbanded or indeed did anything about the settlements. The Israeli government's chief sponsor was the United States. That nation's government sometimes spoke out against Israelis making new settlements, but kept reliably supplying the Israeli Defence Force with its most advanced weapons. Silly me. I still believed in the national rhetoric of the United States. I was still an avid listener to the American rationale for being in Vietnam. Nearly all books we read in Canada came from the United States. Nearly all of these came from New York. Nearly all books about Israel were written by American Jews (though some were by Israeli Jews). These books uniformly adhered to what I now think of as the Official Line About Israel. (I gave you some of it above, in my third paragraph.) Israel occupied a good deal of space in the American press and on American and Canadian television. Always everything published, written, broadcast or available in North America was pro-Israel and -- by implication --"anti-Arab." The implication seemed to be that Arabs were primitives: undemocratic, given to dictatorship and Islam. Wogs, evidently. Not Like Us. No one, at least no one on American or Canadian television or in the newspapers or on the radio who I managed to hear, had a good word to say about "Arabs." Meanwhile, Jewish settlements continued to be started on the West Bank. Many older ones expanded. Many seemed to be grandfathered into Israeli security arrangements. They were pronounced necessary for that security by Israeli army generals. Talk gradually began to shift to the necessity for these settlements, and for many more of them. To the necessity for many, many Israeli bases in the West Bank. To the necessity for keeping control of the hills west of the Jordan, and for building new Jewish settlements there for security reasons. Some Israelis began to call the West Bank "Judea and Samaria", and to advocate that Jews settle "everywhere" there. The Palestinian ResponseMeanwhile, Palestinians began to hijack passenger airplanes, and blow them up spectacularly. They tried to undermine and subvert the regime of King Hussein of Jordan in 1970, got in a war with him, and lost. (It is said that 10,000 Palestinians were killed in this struggle.) Their leadership, the Palestinian Liberation Organization or P.L.O., was expelled to Lebanon. More Palestinians, a group called Black September, I believe, attacked and killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Palestinians began to emerge on the world stage as Palestinians, not Arabs; but with the reputation of being terrorists. The 1973 war broke out, the so-called Yom Kippur War. Although the Egyptians and Syrians lost, they seemed to have gained something by having confronted Israel, by persisting, by remaining a formidable threat. It now appears to some commentators that the 1973 war led directly to the March 1979 agreement between Israel and Egypt to give back the Sinai from Israel to Egypt. Included in this agreement (brokered by American president James Earl Carter, Jr. (1924- ), at Camp David before the eyes of the world) was that the Palestinians on the West Bank were to have autonomy in their towns. After the treaty was signed, nothing came of this. No one mentioned it again. This part of the deal was forgotten. Few remember it today. Had Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister who signed the treaty, ever intended to carry out that provision? (I have since heard that the day after the treaty came in force, Begin repudiated the autonomy provision. True?) Had the Egyptian leader Anwar al-Sadat (1918-1981) or had President Carter ever intended to force Israel to carry out the autonomy provision? Over to you. I don't know. Meanwhile, Jewish settlement continued in the West Bank. Jerusalem was expanded for Jewish settlement. Many Arabs (now often called "Palestinians") were expelled from their homes for new Jewish settlements or the expansion of old ones -- both in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Like most of the world I paid little real attention to what was going on. About 1970 I remember reading that if more than 100,000 Jewish settlers made their homes in the West Bank, it was unlikely that they could ever be removed in an eventual settlement. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza soon climbed over 100,000. Today (October, 2000) I believe the number of settlers is over 300,000. (About two-thirds seem to be located in the expanded borders of suburban Jerusalem.) The number of post-1967 Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza is now nearing 300. Each settlement involves not only its own land, but also a surrounding buffer zone and a grab for the water supply. (Since Ariel Sharon became prime minister in early 2001, about 34 more settlements have been started. Sharon really believes in creating more settlements, more Jewish facts on the ground.) One began to hear of fanatical Jews like Ariel Sharon, the army general and defence minister (in late 2000 he became Israel's prime minister), and the late rabbi Meir Kahane (assassinated in the U.S. by a Palestinian in 1990), the American-born leader of the Jewish Defence League and the Kach political party, who were intolerant of the Palestinians and wanted to expel them all. (In 1982 Sharon was Israel's defence minister and one of the main reasons Israel invaded Lebanon in June that year. Between 1982 and 2000, when Israel was forced completely out of Lebanon, Israel lost 1000 dead in that country. Its "defence forces" slew tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. Most were killed by aerial bombardment.) What the hell had happened? What had happened to the possibilities for peace? The Israeli line was straightforward. The Palestinians did not want peace. They were fanatically dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the Jews, they could not be trusted, and they were unwilling to renounce terrorism for a just peace. (For a sample of this viewpoint, see the ads by a group called Flame in any 1990s issue of Harper's. This group -- of American Jews? -- has been the most strident group still maintaining this position.) Now American linguist Noam Chomsky (1928- ) and a few other commentators disagree with the official Israeli line of the time. They maintain that through this time the Palestinians were always seeking peace, and that their overtures were ignored. For example, Chomsky says, in 1984 Yasser Arafat of the P.L.O. advocated negotiations leading to mutual recognition and a two-state solution.1 Can this be true? Chomsky claims that no mention of this was allowed to appear in the Western press. This was the situation throughout the 1980s. Then, suddenly, at the end of the decade . . . everything changed. Intifada IThe intifada, the popular Palestinian stone-throwing uprising against Israeli rule that broke out in December 1987, suddenly gave the Palestinians credibility, and the sympathy of North Americans. Only during the intifada did many North Americans come to realize (like me, I blush to say)
It was a shock, a shock to me to realize this. Somehow (I think, through Israeli propaganda) I had come to assume for many years
It is my opinion now that the intifada changed everything. Everything. And practically overnight. # # # The intifada caused the Palestinians, a broken and disunified people, to come together. It gave them enormous self-respect. It gave them a purifying anger. It gave them the respect of many of their enemies, including their Jewish enemies. It gave the Palestinians the respect and the pity of most of the world. The intifada may have lost for the Jewish people the pity of the rest of the world that had helped to make them strong. I mean, the pity of the rest of the world for Jews because of the Holocaust. The intifada made the rest of the world look on Israel as just another Middle Eastern country. It made the Israeli army and people look brutal. It made the majority of the Israeli people realize that Israel was going to have to exchange land for peace -- unless they were willing to kill every last Palestinian. The intifada was perhaps the most important development in the Near East since the creation of Israel. When the intifada happened, I realized that the Palestinians were going to get a state, were going to get their freedom. (Well, from the Israelis at least, perhaps not from each other.) It might take fifteen or twenty years -- I thought twelve to fifteen -- but it would happen. Later came the 1993 peace feelers which have led to withdrawals from a portion of the West Bank. It seems to me that we are now a lot closer to peace in Israel and the Near East. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE: The above was written before the outbreak of violence (i.e., Intifada II) in late 2000. But I think it is all still true. Despite over 400 deaths, most of them Palestinian, the Israelis and the Palestinians seem much closer to peace than they have ever been. The issues remaining are difficult. They include the final status and division and administration of Jerusalem, the borders question, the right of return for the Palestinians, and the division of water. But the average Israeli now considers the Palestinians to be, in the European sense, a nation, and everyone, even Sharon (the new prime minister of Israel) believes that the Palestinians will have a state. The only questions remaining are essentially how that state will be fitted into Israel's guaranteed secure existence. This framework has still to be established. FURTHER NOTE: It is now August 2001. The second intifada has lasted about 11 months and is continuing. I am not so sanguine as formerly about the possibility of peace soon breaking out. Logically, peace must come about as both sides weary of killing and absolutism and strive to make a deal. But when this will come about I don't know. Israelis declare that Palestinian Authority president Arafat does not want peace but merely the expulsion or death of all Jews. In the fog of propaganda I have no idea whether this is true. [To Be Revised] Next: Israel, Part Two >> Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail Last slightly modified: 6:28 PM 02/02/2004 |