I mentioned in an earlier post that I just finished Avi Shlaim’s book, The Iron Wall. Shlaim covers five decades of Israeli foreign policy in 500 thickly detailed pages. I can’t do the book justice in a short summary, but here are a few historical points that are quite relevant to the current Sharon-Abbas relationship.
From 1948 to 1967, Israel’s strategy with regard to the Arab world was based mainly on security through deterrence. This is an oversimplification (for example, the Sinai campaign of 1957 obviously had territorial expansion as one of its goals), but I think it is fair to say that the overriding concern of Israel’s leaders during those decades was to maintain the territory it had captured in the War of Independence, and to prevent attacks from its Arab neighbors.
On Israel’s side, the principal obstacle to peace was intransigence on issues like borders and refugees. The Arab countries refused to make peace on Israel’s terms, and Israel refused to compromise. Thus, Israel’s relationship with its neighbors vasilated between fragile armistice and belligerency.
Moshe Dayan probably accurately reflected the perception of Israel’s leadership, if not the actual diplomatic situation, when he said in 1956:
The only choice we have is to be prepared and armed, strong, and resolute, or else our sword will slip from our hand and the thread of our lives will be severed.
This theme remains a favorite rhetorical trope of the right. But the arm that holds the sword - and the reason for fighting - changed fundamentally after 1967.
Shlaim states pithily that “[o]f all the Arab-Israeli wars, the June 1967 war was the only one that neither side wanted.” The lead-in began with threats by Israel to overthow the Syrian regime because of their support for Palestinian guerillas. Egypt, allied with Syria, responded by deploying troops in Sinai and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. When the U.S. declined to act to restore the Straits, Israel commenced the war with an attack on the Egyptian air force. This provoked a counterattack on Israel by Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
Jordanian forces under Egyptian command mounted a serious attack on Israeli targets in Jerusalem on the first day of the war. The next day, the IDF captured all of Jerusalem, as well as the West Bank, which had been under Jordanian control. This had not been one of Israel’s goals in launching the war. On hearing the news that the IDF had occupied the West Bank, Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff, asked “how do we control a million Arabs?” - to which a staff officer replied, “One million, two hundred and fifty thousand.”
Israel’s leaders, up to that time, had known better. Ben-Gurion had, in 1948, declined to press a plan to occupy the West Bank, partly because “he estimated that the inhabitants of the West Bank would not run away, and he was reluctant to include a larger number of Arabs than was strictly necessary within the borders of the Jewish state.” In 1956 the Cabinet turned down a similar proposal from the Defense Minister, for the same reasons.
The 1967 war was undertaken to restore Israeli shipping and eliminate the threat from the Sinai. But, having captured the West Bank, Israel was loathe to give it back. Israel wanted instead to return the larger Arab population centers to Jordan and keep about a third of the territory for strategic reasons. The Arab states insisted on full Israeli withdrawal to pre-war borders. As usual, compromise eluded them.
In the meantime, the possession of Jerusalem had awoken a sleeping dragon in Israel. Dayan’s communique after capturing the Old City read: “We had returned to our holiest of places, we have returned in order not to part from them ever again.”
In his History of Israel, Howard Sachar quotes the folk song by the late Naomi Shemer that became the anthem of the 1967 war. The title was “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (”Jerusalem of Gold”).
We have come back to the deep walls
To the marketplace again
The trumpet sounds on the Mount of the Temple
In the Old City.
In the caverns on the cliff
Glitter a thousand suns,
We shall go down to the Dead Sea again
By the road to Jericho.
In the January 2005 issue of Harpers, Bernard Avishai describes his arrival in Jerusalem a few weeks after the Six Day War.
Nothing prepared me for the atmosphere of the country when I arrived. It seemed that an entire people had done spontaneously what every human being should do deliberately - defend one’s life, touch one’s roots, spread progress, show magnaminity…
Only one moment, several weeks later, gave me pause. On a visit with my cousins to the new campus ot Tel Aviv University, I noticed huge posters with a puzzling map, which seemed exactly like the Arabic map of Palestine in which Israel had been effaced, only this was a Hebrew map of Israel on which the West Bank and Gaza were effaced. The posters, my cousins told me, were from a new organization, the Whole Land of Israel movement, which opposed returning any part of the conquered West Bank, even for peace since (as their statement read) “no government in Israel is entitled to give up this entirety, which represents the inherent and inalienable right of our people from the beginning of its history…”
When I asked others about the Whole Land of Israel Movement, I was reasssured to find that few people took it seriously. Fewer still (myself included) noticed that this movement was merely proposing for the West Bank as a whole what the government, with almost universal acclaim, had already enacted in Jerusalem.
Israel had been founded on the basis of Herzl’s political Zionism - the argument that the Jews, as a persecuted people, needed a homeland for their protection and survival. But after 1967, some parts of the Rabbinic community began formulating a new religious Zionism. This is well outlined in an issue of The Jerusalem Report, which Jonathan Edelstein helpfully cited on his site, The Head Heeb.
Shortly after the 1967 war, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook… published a list of biblical passages to demonstrate that withdrawal from “the eternal land of our forefathers” was illegal and unacceptable. Members of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement declared that “in the Jewish tradition lies the key to the understanding of the uniqueness and mission of the people and the Land of Israel….Forfeiting Jewish roots puts into question the very value of the people of Israel’s survival and their adherence to the Land of Israel.”
Messianic Zionism goes back to the destruction of the temple by the Romans. Jewish tradition holds that the return to Jerusalem will occur with the coming of the Messiah. Some religious Jews initially rejected the modern state of Israel exactly because it was founded by men, and thus cannot be the Israel of the End of Days. But Kook and others solved this problem by asserting that God was acting directly through Israel’s leaders to create the modern state.
The Israeli military successes are interpreted in terms of miraculous divine intervention, precisely in order to implement the commandment of settlement in the Land of Israel. Major leaders of this movement include former Chief Rabbis of Israel such as Rabbi Avraham Shapira; Rabbi Haim Druckman, who headed the religious youth group Bnei Akiva; and Rabbi Yitzhak Levy, head of the NRP (National Religous Party) and a cabinet minister from 1996 to 2000. In addition, some ultra-Orthodox groups, such as the Lubavitch movement, have taken a similar position.
After the Six Day War, the policy of the Labor government remained one of land for peace. The trouble was that Israel, under Golda Meir, would neither give land nor accept peace on terms that were at all palatable to the Arab states. In 1973, six years of failed diplomacy was capped by the Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria. Israel was taken by suprise and suffered heavy losses. The public blamed Meir and Dayan.
Politically, this marked the end of Labor at the dominant party. After the 1973 election, the Labor Alignment eked out a one-seat majority in the Knesset. The same election saw the formation of the Likud from a merger of several right-wing parties. Ariel Sharon was “the main driving force behind the merger,” according to Shlaim. For the next four years, the Palestinian problem continued to fester, since Israel still could not come to terms with its neighbors on returning the occupied territories.
In the 1977 election, Likud emerged with a strong majority and quickly joined with the religious parties to form a government. The Likud platform included the following (from Colin Shindler, 1995, quoted by Shlaim):
The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal, and is an integral part of its right to security and peace. Judea and Samaria shall therefore not be relinquished to foreign rule; between the sea and the Jordan, there will be Jewish sovereignty alone.
Any plan that involves surrendering parts of Western Eretz Israel militates against our right to the Land, would inevitably lead to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” threaten the security of the civilian population, endanger the existence of the State of Israel, and defeat all prospects of peace.
It was after Likud came to power that Jewish settlement of the occupied territories began in earnest. For all practical purposes, Likud’s intent was the gradual annexation of the territories. To the problem of the resident Palestinian population, no one in Likud offered any solution - except for Sharon, who felt the Palestinians should cross the river, overthrow the Hashemite dynasty, and establish a Palestinian state in Jordan.
To the best of my knowledge, Likud’s policy has not changed significantly since 1977. 1984 saw a Labor/Likud coalition goverment, with Shimon Peres and Yizhak Shamir taking turns as Prime Minister. Peres, who had the first rotation, came very close to concluding an agreement with Jordan to return the West Bank and sign a peace treaty. Shamir quickly tabled it when he took over.
In 1988, with the first Palestinian Intifada underway, Jordan’s King Hussein formally ruled out any future option of Jordanian rule of the West Bank. The Palestinians offically became Israel’s problem.
The next time Labor came to power, in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin concluded the Oslo Agreement. Much maligned by both sides because of subsequent events, the Oslo Accord nonetheless contained two critical steps forward in what had become the Palestinian-Israeli (rather than the Arab-Israeli) conflict. Each side formally recognized the other; and, more importantly, both recognized the principle of the partition of Palestine into an Israeli and a Palestinian state.
Final status negotiations never took place, because Rabin was assassinated by a young religious Zionist named Yigal Amir. According to Shlaim,
At his trial, Amir confessed that he murdered Rabin in order to derail the paece process, and he invoked Jewish religious law in support of the murder. He questioned the legitimacy of the government, denied the right ot Israel’s Arab citizens to play a role in Israeli democracy, and denounced Rabin for abandoning the settlers. Amir told the court that according to Halacha, a Jew who gives his land to the enemy and endangers the life of other Jews must be killed.
(Amir) belonged to a subculture infected by feverish messianism generated by the Six Day War… The conquest of the West Bank… convinced many Orthodox Rabbis and teachers that they were living in the Messianic era and that salvation was at hand… Amost immediately, these rabbis began to sanctify the land of their ancestors and to make it an object of religious passion. They made the sanctity of the land a central tenet of religious Zionism. From this it followed that anyone who was prepared to give away parts of this sacred land was perceived as a traitor and enemy of the Jewish people.
The next initiative, which most readers will recall, came from Ehud Barak in 2000. Arafat rejected Barak’s proposal at Camp David in July - but talks continued, first at Camp David and then at Taba, for the next seven months. In January of 2001, as reported by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, the Israeli and the Palestinian negotiators issued this joint statement:
the two sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections.
Ariel Sharon, who became Prime Minster after the election, discontinued the talks.
Right now, Mahmoud Abbas is scoring points for taking firm measures to beef up security. Sharon has every reason to support these efforts, since they benefit Israel. He is thus making concrete moves to address Palestinians concerns. Israel has pledged to stop targeted killings, to release more political prisoners, and to coordinate the Gaza handover with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon has agreed to a summit meeting with Abbas.
However, it is not suprising to find the Associated Press reporting that
…crucial differences on what can be expected from the summit have begun to emerge.
Palestinian officials said Saturday they expect a wide-ranging agenda that will include the declaration of a formal truce, a large-scale release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and the resumption of peace negotiations.
Israel however appears reluctant to move from security concerns into political matters.
Ultimately, there are three options with regard to the occupied territories, but only two potential solutions.
The first solution would be for Israel to keep the West Bank and Gaza, and offer citizenship to the Palestinians. Sharon has unequivocally rejected this.
The second solution would be to partition the land in some way, and create two states. No matter what negotiations precede it, or what hoops the Palestinians are asked to jump through, at the end of the day this would require Israel to cede territory once and for all to the Palestinians. This is what the Road Map envisions.
The third option is to procrastinate. Sharon can refuse to meet Abbas, or meet with him; contemn him or praise him; make gestures and rescind them; negotiate until the cows come home - without getting anywhere. This is exactly what will happen if Sharon hasn’t come to grips with the first two options.
Sharon has clearly decided that Israel’s security needs are best served by ending the active policing of Palestinian cities and towns. He has been willing to tangle with the settlers in the interest of disengaging from areas the IDF cannot reasonably secure. And, if the Palestinian Authority can police them effectively, so much the better. But disengaging from these areas is a far different thing than ceding them to another entity.
Whether Sharon is willing to reverse Likud’s policy that “Judea and Samaria shall…not be relinquished”, is very much an open question. So far, I have not seen any sign that he is willing to part with a square inch of territory. If that is the case, negotiations are a non-starter.
But… as I’ve said, I’d be happy to be wrong.
