An Introduction to the Israel–Palestine Conflict

Norman G. Finkelstein teaches political science at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The Rise and Fall of Palestine (University of Minnesota, 1996) and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000). The article below is adapted from the introduction to the new German-language edition of his Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

To resolve what was called the “Jewish question”—i.e., the reciprocal challenges of Gentile repulsion or anti-Semitism and Gentile attraction or assimilation—the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth century to create an overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state in Palestine. Once the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine through Great Britain’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the main obstacle to realising its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on the eve of Zionist colonisation, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish but Muslim and Christian Arab.

 

Across the mainstream Zionist spectrum, it was understood from the outset that Palestine’s indigenous Arab population would not acquiesce in its dispossession. “Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” Zeev Sternhell observes. “If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking … [I]n general both sides understood each other well and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.”¹ “There is no example in history,” David Ben-Gurion declared, succinctly framing the core problem, “that a nation opens the gates of its country, not because of necessity … but because the nation which wants to come in has explained its desire to it.”²

 

“The tragedy of Zionism,” Walter Laqueur wrote in his standard history, “was that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map.”³ This is not quite right. Rather it was no longer politically tenable to create such spaces: extermination had ceased to be an option of conquest. Basically the Zionist movement could only choose between two strategic options to achieve its goal: what Benny Morris has labelled “the way of South Africa”—“the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority”—or the “the way of transfer”—“you could create a homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out.”⁴

‘The Way of Transfer’

In the first round of conquest, the Zionist movement set its sights on “the way of transfer”. For all the public rhetoric about wanting to “live with the Arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honour and together with them to turn the common homeland into a flourishing land” (Twelfth Zionist Congress, 1921), the Zionists from early on were in fact bent on expelling them. “The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings,” Tom Segev reports. “‘Disappearing’ the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its realization … With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer—or its morality.”⁵ The key was to get the timing right. Ben-Gurion, reflecting on the expulsion option in the late 1930s, wrote: “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out—a whole world is lost.”⁶

 

The goal of “disappearing” the indigenous Arab population points to a virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature: what spurred Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism in the sense of an irrational hatred of Jews but rather the prospect—very real—of their expulsion. In his magisterial study of Palestinian nationalism, Yehoshua Porath suggests that the “major factor nourishing” Arab anti-Semitism “was not hatred for the Jews as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine”.⁷

 

From its incipient stirrings in the late nineteenth century through the watershed revolt in the 1930s, Palestinian resistance consistently focused on the twin juggernauts of Zionist conquest: Jewish settlers and Jewish settlements. Apologetic Zionist writers like Anita Shapira juxtapose benign Jewish settlement against recourse to force.⁸ In fact, settlement was force. “From the outset, Zionism sought to employ force in order to realise national aspirations,” Yosef Gorny observes. “This force consisted primarily of the collective ability to rebuild a national home in Palestine.”⁹ Through settlement the Zionist movement aimed—in Ben-Gurion’s words—“to establish a great Jewish fact in this country” that was irreversible (emphasis in original).¹⁰ Moreover, settlement and armed force were in reality seamlessly interwoven. Moshe Dayan later memorialised that “we are a generation of settlers, and without the combat helmet and the barrel of a gun, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house”.¹¹ The Zionist movement inferred behind Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement a generic (and genetic) anti-Semitism—Jewish settlers “being murdered”, as Ben-Gurion put it, “simply because they were Jews”—in order to conceal from the outside world and itself the rational and legitimate grievances of the indigenous population.¹²

 

It bears critical notice for what comes later that, from the inter-war through early post-war years, Western public opinion was not altogether averse to population transfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) for resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe’s Jewish press supported in the mid-1930s the transfer of Jews to Madagascar to solve Poland’s “Jewish problem”. The main forced transfer before the Second World War was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and approved and supervised by the League of Nations, this brutal displacement of more than 1.5 million people eventually came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent. The British cited it in the late 1930s as a model for resolving the conflict in Palestine.

 

The right-wing Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, taking heart from Nazi demographic experiments in conquered territories (about 1.5 million Poles and Jews were expelled and hundreds of thousands of Germans resettled in their place), exclaimed: “The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.”¹³ During the war the Soviet Union also carried out bloody deportations of recalcitrant minorities such as the Volga Germans, Chechen–Ingush and Tatars. Labour Zionists pointed to the “positive experience” of the Greek–Turkish and Soviet expulsions in support of the transfer idea.¹⁴

 

In fact many in the enlightened West came to view displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine as an inexorable concomitant of civilisation’s advance. The identification of Americans with Zionism came easily since the “social order of the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine] was built on the ethos of a frontier society, in which a pioneering–settlement model set the tone”.¹⁵ To account for the “almost complete disregard of the Arab case” by Americans, a prominent British Labour MP, Richard Crossman, explained in the mid‑1940s:

 

Zionism after all is merely the attempt by the European Jew to build his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress.

 

Contrasting the “slovenly” Arabs with enterprising Jewish settlers who had “set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East”, Crossman himself professed in the name of “social progress” support for Zionism.¹⁶

 

Come 1948, the Zionist movement exploited the “revolutionary times” of the first Arab–Israeli war—much as the Serbs did in Kosovo during the NATO attack—to expel more than 80 per cent of the indigenous population (750,000 Palestinians), and thereby achieve its goal of an overwhelmingly Jewish state, if not yet in the whole of Palestine. Berl Katznelson, known as the “conscience” of the Labour Zionist movement, had maintained that “there has never been a colonising enterprise as typified by justice and honesty toward others as our work here in Eretz Israel”.¹⁷ The recipients of this benefaction would presumably have a different story to tell.

‘The Way of South Africa’

The main Arab (and British) fear before and after the 1948 war was that the Zionist movement would use as a springboard for further expansion the Jewish state carved out of Palestine. In fact, Zionists pursued from early on a “stages” strategy of conquering Palestine by parts—a strategy they would later vilify the Palestinians for. The Zionist movement acquiesced in British and United Nations proposals for the partition of Palestine but only “as a stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation” (Ben-Gurion).¹⁸ Chief among the Zionist leadership’s regrets in the aftermath of the 1948 war was its failure to conquer the whole of Palestine. Come 1967, Israel exploited the “revolutionary times” of the June war to finish the job. Sir Martin Gilbert, in his glowing history of Israel, maintained that Zionist leaders from the outset conceived the conquered territories as an undesired “burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel”. In a highly acclaimed new study, Michael Oren suggests that Israel’s occupation of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza “came about largely through chance”, “the vagaries and momentum of war”. In light of the Zionist movement’s long-standing territorial imperatives, Sternhell more soberly observes:

 

The role of occupier, which Israel began to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June 1967, was not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realization of Zionism’s major ambitions.¹⁹

 

Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people. Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, for the first time “unequivocally prohibited deportation” of civilians under occupation (Articles 49, 147). Accordingly, Israel moved after the June war to impose the second of its two options mentioned above—apartheid. This proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict.

The ‘Peace Process’

Right after the June war the United Nations deliberated on the modalities for achieving a just and lasting peace. The broad consensus of the General Assembly as well as the Security Council called for Israel’s withdrawal from the Arab territories it occupied during the June war. Security Council Resolution 242 stipulated this basic principle of international law in its preambular paragraph “emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” (emphasis in original). At the same time, Resolution 242 called on Arab states to recognise Israel’s right “to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from threats and acts of force”. To accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, the international consensus eventually provided for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once Israel withdrew to its pre-June borders. (Resolution 242 had only referred obliquely to the Palestinians in its call for “achieving a just resolution of the refugee problem”.)

 

Although Defence Minister Moshe Dayan privately acknowledged that Resolution 242 required full withdrawal, Israel officially maintained that it allowed for “territorial revision”. Israel’s refusal in February 1971 to withdraw fully from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt’s offer of a peace treaty led directly to the October 1973 war. The basic parameters of Israeli policy regarding Palestinian territory were set out in the late 1960s in the proposal of Yigal Allon, a senior Labour party official and cabinet member. The “Allon Plan” called for Israel’s annexation of up to half the West Bank, while Palestinians would be confined to the other half in two unconnected cantons to the north and south. Israel demanded, like all sovereign states, full recognition yet also claimed a right, in the name of unique Jewish suffering and despite international law, to territorial conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of the Nazi holocaust played a crucial role in this diplomatic game.²⁰

 

The United States initially supported the consensus interpretation of Resolution 242, making allowance for only “minor” and “mutual” adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. In heated private exchanges with Israel during the UN-sponsored mediation efforts of Gunnar Jarring in 1968, American officials stood firm that “the words ‘recognised and secure’ meant ‘security arrangements’ and ‘recognition’ of new lines as international boundaries”, and “never meant that Israel could extend its territory to [the] West Bank or Suez if this was what it felt its security required”; and that “there will never be peace if Israel tries to hold onto large chunks of territory”. Referring to it explicitly by name, the United States deplored even the minimalist version of the Allon Plan as “a non-starter” and “unacceptable in principle”.²¹

 

In a crucial shift beginning under the Nixon–Kissinger administration, however, American policy was realigned with Israel’s. Except for Israel and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international community has consistently supported, for the past quarter-century, the “two-state” settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in January 1976 and April 1980 affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and neighbouring Arab states. A December 1989 General Assembly resolution along similar lines passed 151–3 (no abstentions), the three negative votes being cast by Israel, the United States and Dominica.

 

Given this record of contempt for world opinion, it’s unsurprising that Israel set as a crucial precondition for negotiations that Palestinians “must drop their traditional demand” for “international arbitration” or a “Security Council mechanism”. The main obstacle to Israel’s annexation of occupied Palestinian territory was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state settlement in the mid-1970s, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organisation bent on Israel’s destruction. Indeed, pressures mounted on Israel to reach an agreement with the PLO’s “compromising approach”. Consequently, in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, where Palestinian leaders were headquartered, to head off what Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv dubbed the PLO’s “peace offensive”.²²

 

Frustrated at the diplomatic impasse caused by US–Israeli obstructionism, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rose up in December 1987 against the occupation in a basically non-violent civil revolt, the intifada. Israel’s brutal repression (compounded by the inept and corrupt leadership of the PLO) eventually resulted in the uprising’s defeat. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinians suffered yet a further decline in their fortunes. The United States and Israel seized on this opportune moment to recruit the already venal and now desperate Palestinian leadership—“on the verge of bankruptcy” and “in [a] weakened condition” (Uri Savir, Israel’s chief negotiator at Oslo)—as surrogates of Israeli power.

Oslo

This was the real meaning of the Oslo accord signed in September 1993: to create a Palestinian bantustan by dangling before Arafat and the PLO the perquisites of power and privilege, much as how the British controlled Palestine during the Mandate years through the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, and the Supreme Muslim Council. “The occupation continued” after Oslo, a seasoned Israeli observer, Meron Benvenisti, wrote, “albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the Palestinian people, represented by their ‘sole representative,’ the PLO”. The “test” for Arafat and the PLO, according to Savir, was whether they would “us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas and other violent opposition groups” contesting Israeli apartheid.²³

 

Israel’s settlement policy in the occupied territories over the past decade points up the real content of the “peace process” set in motion at Oslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study by B’Tselem (Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) released in May 2002 and entitled Land Grab (www.btselem.org/Download/Land_Grab_Eng.doc). Owing primarily to massive Israeli government subsidies, the Jewish settler population increased from 250,000 to 380,000 during the Oslo years, with settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace under the tenure of Labour’s Ehud Barak than Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Illegal under international law and built on land illegally seized from Palestinians, these settlements now incorporate nearly half the land surface of the West Bank. For all practical purposes they have been annexed to Israel (Israeli law extends not only to Israeli but also non-Israeli Jews residing in the settlements) and are off-limits to Palestinians without special authorisation. Fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful Palestinian development.

 

In parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem the only available land for building lies in areas under Israeli jurisdiction, while the water consumption of the 5,000 Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley is equivalent to 75 per cent of the water consumption of the entire two million Palestinians inhabitants of the West Bank. Not even one Jewish settlement was dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing units in the settlements increased by more than 50 per cent (excluding East Jerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts occurred not under Netanyahu’s tenure but rather under Barak’s, in the year 2000—exactly when Barak claims to have “left no stone unturned” in his quest for peace.

 

“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality,” the B’Tselem study concludes. “This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.”

 

During the first eighteen months of Sharon’s term of office, fully forty-four new settlements—rebuked by the UN Commission on Human Rights as “incendiary and provocative”—were established. As settlements multiply, Israel is corralling West Bank Palestinians into eight fragments of territory each surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must load and unload on the borders “back-to-back”), thereby further devastating an economy in which unemployment already stands above 70 per cent in some areas, half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, and one-fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused—according to a USAID report—by transport blockages. “What is truly appalling,” a Haaretz writer lamented, “is the blasé way in which the story has been received and handled by the mass media … Where is the public outcry against this attempt to divide the territories and enforce internal passports … [and] humiliate and inconvenience a population that can scarcely earn a living or live a life as it is?”²⁴

 

After seven years of on-again, off-again negotiations and a succession of new interim agreements that managed to rob the Palestinians of the few crumbs thrown from the master’s table at Oslo, the moment of truth arrived at Camp David in July 2000. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak delivered Arafat the ultimatum of formally acquiescing in a bantustan or bearing full responsibility for the collapse of the “peace process”. Arafat refused, however, to budge from the international consensus for resolving the conflict. According to Robert Malley, a key American negotiator at Camp David, Arafat continued to hold out for a “Palestinian state based on the June 4, 2024 borders, living alongside Israel”, yet also “accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for one swap of land of ‘equal size and value’”—that is, the “minor” and “mutual” border adjustments of the original US position on Resolution 242. Malley’s rendering of the Palestinian proposal at Camp David—an offer that was widely dismissed but rarely reported—deserves full quotation:

 

a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city’s history; preservation of Israel’s demographic balance between Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence.²⁵

 

On the other hand, contrary to the myth spun by Barak–Clinton as well as a compliant media, “Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty”, a special adviser at the British Foreign Office observed, “while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians”.²⁶ Although accounts of the Barak proposal significantly differ, all knowledgeable observers concur that it “would have meant that territory annexed by Israel would encroach deep inside the Palestinian state” (Malley), dividing the West Bank into multiple, disconnected enclaves, and offering land swaps that were of neither equal size nor equal value.

 

Consider in this regard Israel’s reaction to the March 2002 Saudi peace plan. Crown Prince Abdullah proposed, and all twenty-one other members of the Arab League approved, a plan making concessions that actually went beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal, it offered not only full recognition but “normal relations with Israel”, and called not for the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees but rather only a “just solution” to the refugee problem. Were Israel truly committed to a comprehensive withdrawal in exchange for normalisation with the Arab world, the Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement by the Arab League summit ought to have been met with euphoria. In fact, after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was quickly deposited in Orwell’s memory hole. Nonetheless, Barak’s—and Clinton’s—fraud that Palestinians at Camp David rejected a maximally generous Israeli offer provided crucial moral cover for the horrors that ensued.

Resistance and Repression

In September 2000, Palestinians embarked on a second intifada against Israeli rule. Israel, having failed in the carrot policy it initiated at Oslo, reached for the big stick. Two preconditions had to be met, however, before Israel could bring to bear its overwhelming military superiority: a “green light” from the United States and a sufficient pretext. Already in summer 2001, the authoritative Jane’s Information Group reported that Israel had completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of the occupied territories. But the United States vetoed the plan and Europe made equally plain its opposition. After 11 September, however, the United States came on board. Sharon’s goal of crushing the Palestinians basically fitted in with the US administration’s goal of exploiting the World Trade Center atrocity to eliminate the last remnants of Arab resistance to total US domination. Through sheer exertion of will and despite a monumentally corrupt leadership, Palestinians have proven to be the most resilient and recalcitrant popular force in the Arab world. Bringing them to their knees would deal a devastating psychological blow throughout the region.

 

With a green light from the United States, all Israel now needed was the pretext. Predictably it escalated the assassinations of Palestinian leaders following each lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks. Once the Palestinian terrorist attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to declare war and proceed to annihilate the basically defenceless civilian Palestinian population.

 

To repress Palestinian resistance, a senior Israeli officer in early 2002 urged the army to “analyze and internalize the lessons of … how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto”.²⁷ Judging by Israeli carnage in the West Bank culminating in Operation Defensive Shield—the targeting of Palestinian ambulances and medical personnel, the targeting of journalists, the killing of Palestinian children “for sport” (Chris Hedges, New York Times former Cairo bureau chief),²⁸ the rounding up, handcuffing and blindfolding of all Palestinian males between the ages of fifteen and fifty, and affixing of numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity and medical assistance to the Palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate air assaults on Palestinian neighbourhoods, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes with the occupants huddled inside—it appears that the Israeli army followed the officer’s advice. When the operation, supported by fully 90 per cent of Israelis, was finally over, 500 Palestinians were dead and 1,500 wounded.

 

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation of the Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 found that “Israeli forces committed serious violations of humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes”. Some 4,000 Palestinians, more than a quarter of the camp’s population, were rendered homeless in “destruction [that] extended well beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued”. Typical of the Israeli atrocities HRW documented in Jenin were these: a “thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man was killed when the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home”; a “fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man … was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp … even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair”; “IDF soldiers forced a sixty-five-year-old woman to stand on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle of a helicopter battle”.²⁹ A senior HRW researcher further observed that what happened at Jenin was “not so different from any of the attacks” during Operation Defensive Shield, with Nablus and Ramallah suffering worse depredations.³⁰

 

To be sure, Ehud Barak did disapprove of Operation Defensive Shield. Sharon, he scolded, should have acted “more forcefully”.³¹ In the meantime, dismissing criticism of Israeli atrocities as driven by anti-Semitism, Holocaust Industry CEO Elie Wiesel lent unconditional support to Israel—“Israel didn’t do anything except it reacted … Whatever Israel has done is the only thing that Israel could have done … I don’t think Israel is violating the human rights charter … War has its own rules”—and went on to stress the “great pain and anguish” endured by Israeli soldiers as they did what “they have to do”.³²

 

A B’Tselem investigation found that, typically,

 

in the Ministry of Education … not only was the computer network taken, so were overhead projectors and video players. Other equipment, including televisions and file cabinets full of records, such as student transcripts, were simply destroyed … Hard disks were taken from civil society organizations that had invested years of work and millions of dollars to compile this material.³³

 

Haaretz reported that Israeli soldiers occupying Ramallah “destroyed children’s paintings” in the Palestinian ministry of culture, and “urinated and defecated everywhere” in the building, even “managing to defecate into a photocopier”³⁴—no doubt with “great pain and anguish”.

 

In July 2002, Israel moved quickly to avert yet another political catastrophe. With assistance from European diplomats, militant Palestinian organisations, including Hamas, reached an accord to suspend all attacks inside Israel, perhaps paving the way for a return to the negotiating table. Just ninety minutes before it was to be announced, however, Israeli leaders—fully apprised of the imminent declaration—ordered an F-16 to drop a one-ton bomb on a densely-populated civilian neighbourhood in Gaza, killing, alongside a Hamas leader, eleven children and five others, and injuring 140. Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and Palestinian terrorist attacks resumed with a vengeance.

 

Yet, having headed off another dastardly Palestinian “peace offensive”, the murderous assault made perfect sense. Small wonder Sharon hailed it as “one of our greatest successes”.

Expulsion Redux

The Oslo process was premised on finding a credible Palestinian leadership to cloak Israeli apartheid: a Nelson Mandela to act the part of a Chief Buthelezi. Camp David signalled the defeat of this strategy: Arafat refused—or, owing to popular resistance, wasn’t able—to play the assigned role. Without such a legitimising Palestinian facade, the reality of Israeli apartheid stands fully exposed and subject to the same withering criticism as its South African precursor. “If Palestinians were black, Israel would be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States,” the London Observer editorialised after the outbreak of the new intifada.

 

Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-proclaimed “bantustans”, with “whites” monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa’s white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel’s treatment of Israeli Arabs—flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education—would be recognised as scandalous too.³⁵

 

Mainstream figures across the political spectrum, from President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to South Africa’s Anglican archbishop and Nobel laureate, Desmond Tutu, have since issued similar denunciations. “I have been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land,” Tutu declared. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”³⁶

 

But paradoxically, whereas apartheid is no longer a tenable Israeli option, expulsion once again may be. Israel adopted the apartheid strategy after new precedents in international law and public opinion barred ethnic expulsions. In recent times, however, there has been a dramatic loosening of such juridical and moral constraints. Especially since 11 September, the United States has even ceased honouring international law in the breach, but rather effectively declared it null and void. Unlike its 1991 devastation of Iraq, its assault on Afghanistan was launched without any direct UN sanction—not because it couldn’t get such a sanction but because it wanted to make the point of not needing one. Unlike its use in the past of covert operations and legitimising facades, like the Nicaraguan Contras, to overthrow nettlesome foreign governments, the United States now brazenly talks about “regime change”. And in proclaiming the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, the Bush administration has dealt a “mortal blow” to Article 51 of the UN Charter prohibiting armed attack except in the face of an imminent threat.

 

With crucial US backing, Israel is likewise now able totally to flout international conventions—as evidenced by its contemptuous and humiliating treatment of the UN’s fact-finding mission on Jenin, and its shredding of the Oslo accord with the reoccupation of Palestinian-administered areas in the West Bank. Influential Israeli policymakers openly contemplate expulsion. According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, nearly one-half of Israelis support expulsion of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, and nearly one-third support expulsion of Israeli Palestinians (three-fifths support “encouraging” Israeli Palestinians to leave).³⁷

 

There’s yet another cause for alarm. Throughout its history the Zionist movement has wagered against daunting odds. Victory always seemed beyond reach. At each crucial juncture a “miracle”—this word constantly recurs in Zionist historiography—saved it: the “miracle” of the Balfour Declaration (Ben-Gurion); the “miracle” of the partition resolution (Chaim Weizmann); the “miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks” in the 1948 war (Weizmann, referring to the Arab flight); the “miracle” of the June 1967 war; the “miracle” of Soviet Jewry. A close reading of the documentary record shows, however, that these weren’t really miracles. Rather, in each instance the Zionists maximally exploited a slender historical opportunity—“revolutionary times”—by a comprehensive marshalling of their material and human assets. September 11 may yet prove to be another such occasion. The world has granted—or, has been coerced into granting—the United States a kind of grace period to carry on openly like a lawless state. This means for Israel a window of opportunity to resolve the Palestine question, once and for all: it’s a “miracle” waiting to happen. Short of a full withdrawal, Israel’s only alternatives are to continue tolerating the terrorist attacks or expel the Palestinians. One is hard-pressed to imagine, however, that Israel will absorb these attacks indefinitely. Their relentlessness might also temper the ensuing international condemnation of an expulsion.

 

Should Israel attempt expulsion, it can probably count on support from powerful sectors in American life. House majority whip Tom DeLay and House majority leader Dick Armey sponsored a resolution supporting Israel’s claim to the whole of “Judea and Samaria”, while Armey explicitly upheld that “the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there”. Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma intoned that “the most important reason” the United States ought to support Israel was that “God said so … Look it up in the book of Genesis … This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true”. When Senator Hillary Clinton, a liberal Democrat from New York, visited Israel earlier this year, she was hosted and embraced by Benny Elon, leader of Moledet, a party officially committed to “transferring” the Palestinians.

 

Turning to organised American Jewry, the picture becomes yet bleaker. A respected Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader, Nathan Lewin, called for the execution of family members of Palestinian suicide bombers. Reproaching critics of Lewin, prominent Harvard University Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, deemed Lewin’s proposal a “legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism”. In what might be termed the “Lidice gambit”, Dershowitz himself recommended a “new response to Palestinian terrorism”: the “automatic destruction” of a Palestinian village after each terrorist attack (as well as the legalisation of the torture of terrorist suspects). Dershowitz’s proposal, however, lacks novelty. Israel pursued this strategy of murderous reprisals against Arab civilians in the early 1950s. A massacre perpetrated in 1953 by Ariel Sharon at the village of Qibya, which left some seventy villagers dead (the majority women and children), was compared by American newspapers to Lidice.

 

Inspired by Dershowitz, a group of former Israeli military officers and settlers supported by a pro-Israel charity in New York posted on its website this ingenious proposal to facilitate “transfer”:

 

Israel issues a warning that, in a response to any terrorist attack, she will immediately completely level an Arab village, randomly chosen by a computer from a published list … The use of a computer to select the place of the Israeli response will put the Arabs and the Jews on a level footing. The Jews do not know where the terrorists will strike, and the Arabs will not know which one of their villages or settlements will be erased in retaliation. The word “erased” very precisely reflects the force of Israel’s response.³⁸

 

Maintaining that Sharon “has always harboured a very clear plan—nothing less than to rid Israel of the Palestinians”, respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has posited two alternative pretexts for expulsion: (1) the diversion of a global crisis such as an “American attack on Iraq”; (2) a spectacular terrorist attack that “killed hundreds”. Apart from the regrettably real prospect that Palestinians might commit such an atrocity, judging from the historical record it’s plainly not beyond possibility that Sharon would provoke it.

 

Although “some believe that the international community will not permit such an ethnic cleansing”, van Creveld plausibly concludes,

 

I would not count on it. If Sharon decides to go ahead, the only country that can stop him is the United States. The United States, however, regards itself as being at war with parts of the Muslim world that have supported Osama bin Laden. America will not necessarily object to that world being taught a lesson.³⁹

 

The main US fear is that expulsion would trigger a reaction in the “Arab street”, toppling its client regimes. But twice before, on the eve of the assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan, elite American opinion harboured a similar fear. In both cases it proved unfounded. The Bush administration might try its luck again in the expectation that the “Arab street” is a chimera.

Averting Disaster

The question remains, What would it take to effect a full Israeli withdrawal and avert this possibly impending catastrophe? “The basic tendency of Israeli policy and people,” observes the perceptive Israeli writer Boas Evron, “is to solve problems by means of force and to see force as the be-all and end-all, rather than trying diplomatic and political solutions,” and to view borders with neighbouring Arab states as “nothing but a function of power relations”. Likewise, Zeev Sternhell argues that a Zionist tenet is “never giving up a position or a territory unless one is compelled by superior force”. In this regard it also bears keeping in mind what van Creveld calls “the unique position” occupied by the military and martial values in Israeli society: “It is comparable, if at all, only to the status the armed forces held in Germany from 1871 until 1945.”⁴⁰ The reasonable inference is that Israel will withdraw from the occupied territories only if Palestinians (and their supporters) can summon sufficient force to change the calculus of costs for Israel: that is, making the price of occupation too high.

 

The historical record sustains this hypothesis. Israel has withdrawn from occupied territory on three occasions: the Egyptian Sinai in 1957 after Eisenhower’s ultimatum, Sinai in 1979 after Egypt’s unexpectedly impressive showing in the October 1973 war, and Lebanon in 1985 and 2000 after the losses inflicted by the Lebanese resistance. In addition, it seems that Israeli ruling elites seriously contemplated withdrawal during the initial years (1987–9) of the first intifada because of the international and domestic costs inflicted on Israel by the Palestinian revolt.

 

Neither a conventional nor a guerrilla war seems a viable Palestinian option. Terrorism—apart from being morally reprehensible (if unsurprising)—will probably not budge Israel. Israeli elites accept civilian casualties as a necessary, if regrettable, price of power. They pay heed only when the Israeli military suffers losses or its deterrent capacity is undermined. Consider in this regard Sternhell’s assessment of the impact on Israel of the new intifada:

 

The number of Israeli civilian casualties in the past year is far greater than the number of soldiers who have been killed or wounded. When all is said and done, the army is waging a deluxe war: it is bombing and shelling defenceless cities and villages, and that situation is convenient for both the army and the settlers. They are well aware that if the army were to sustain casualties on the same scale as occurred in Lebanon, we would now be on our way out of the territories.⁴¹

 

Ample historical evidence—from the indiscriminate Allied bombing of Germany to the indiscriminate US bombing of Vietnam—similarly attests that Israel’s civilian population is unlikely to succumb to terrorism. Jewish terrorism no doubt catalysed the British decision to terminate the Mandate in 1947, but the fundamental reason was Britain’s financial insolvency after the war.

 

In many respects, the current Palestinian resort to terrorism bears uncanny resemblance to the post–Second World War Zionist terror campaign against the British occupation. Although officially denouncing anti-British terrorism, Ben-Gurion and the Zionist authority he headed, the Jewish Agency, didn’t co-operate with the British in apprehending terrorist suspects or even in calling upon the Jewish community to respect the law. On the one hand, Ben-Gurion maintained that on principle he couldn’t assist in enforcing an unjust occupation. On the other, he pleaded that he had lost control over the Jewish community, which no longer accepted occupation. A contemporary British assessment concluded that there was “some evidence” that Zionist officials had “pre-knowledge of most [terrorist] incidents which have taken place”. Later revelations confirmed this suspicion of co-operation. For example, the Jewish Agency publicly deplored the major terrorist attack on the King David Hotel that killed some ninety people, although it had approved in advance targeting the hotel. The official Zionist condemnation, one historian has written, “contained more than a smattering of hypocrisy and opportunism”.⁴²

 

When the British imposed martial law in retaliation for multiple Zionist terrorist attacks, Ben‑Gurion passionately condemned the draconian measures for both inflicting collective punishment on the Jewish people and effectively hindering the struggle against terrorism. It also merits recalling, however, that although Jewish terrorist attacks (nearly twenty per month) left hundreds of British dead and wounded, the British “never deliberately fired into crowds”, and “a Jewish large-scale massacre never took place and entire Jewish settlements were not demolished with explosives”. The reason behind this relative British restraint, according to van Creveld, was “British recognition that Jews constituted a ‘semi-European’ race”.⁴³ By contrast, Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israel the lethal fate of non-Europeans.

 

A non-violent Palestinian civil revolt creatively building on the lessons of the first intifada and synchronised with international—in particular, American—pressure probably holds out the most promise in the current crisis. It could bog down and neutralise Israel’s army. Among Israel’s chief worries during the first intifada was the IDF’s loss of morale and élan as it sought to quell violently a civilian population, and the army’s diminishing capacity to fight a “real war” as it trained for and engaged in “police-type operations” (emphasis in original).⁴⁴ A reservoir of Palestinian support for such a strategy of civil disobedience perhaps already exists. Should a Palestinian leadership successfully harness this constituency, there are reasonable grounds for hoping that its message will resonate among many Israelis. The refusenik movement among Israeli conscripts has prompted a national debate and, although registering massive support for Sharon’s brutal repression, Israelis have supported in roughly equal numbers withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

 

The United States will impose on Israelis a full withdrawal only when its vital interests are at stake or public pressure compels it to do so. Such pressures may yet be exerted. Support for Israel among ordinary Americans has markedly declined.⁴⁵ Already a divestment campaign of the scale and depth of the anti-apartheid movement is gathering momentum on American college campuses. Lending his moral stature to this campaign, Archbishop Tutu urged that “average citizens again rise to the occasion, since the obstacles to a renewed movement are surpassed only by its moral urgency”.⁴⁶ In fact, Europeans are contemplating a spectrum of actions from consumer boycotts to arms embargoes, while scores of courageous international volunteers (including many Jews) have journeyed to the occupied territories to shield Palestinian civilians from attack and publicise Israeli atrocities.

 

Israel’s apologists like Elie Wiesel deplore these initiatives as evidence of a resurgent anti-Semitism. Disparaging similar allegations after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the respected Israeli academician Uriel Tal responded:

 

The bitter cries about anti-Semitism which allegedly raises again its head all over the world serve to cover up the fact that what is disintegrating in the world is Israel’s position, not Jewry’s. The charges of anti-Semitism only aim to inflame the Israeli public, to inculcate hatred and fanaticism, to cultivate paranoid obsession as if the whole world is persecuting us and … all other peoples in the world are contaminated while only we are pure and untarnished.⁴⁷

 

To be sure, world Jewry’s position will disintegrate if it doesn’t publicly dissociate from Israel’s crimes. In a passionate denunciation of current Israeli policy for “staining the Star of David with blood”, Gerald Kaufman, a veteran British Labour MP and prominent Jewish parliamentarian, lamented that “the Jewish people … are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatila camp and now involved in killing Palestinians once again”.⁴⁸

 

“Every morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding,” the insightful Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reflected this past year. “There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.”⁴⁹ Apart from being a moral abomination, expulsion of the Palestinians can set off a chain reaction in the Arab world that will make 11 September look like a pink tea. But it’s yet within our grasp to seize these fraught times and achieve a just and lasting peace for Israel and Palestine.

Endnotes

1. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 43–4.

 

2. Quoted in Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 143. For further discussion and documentation, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict (London and New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 98–110 (hereafter: I&R).

 

3. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 597. For discussion, see I&R, p. 198, n. 13.

 

4. Benny Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948”, in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 39–40.

 

5. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (London: Little, Brown, 2000), pp. 404–5; cf. pp. 403, 406–7, 508.

 

6. Quoted in Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus”, p. 42.

 

7. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), p. 62.

 

8. See I&R, chap. 4.

 

9. Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 176. For detailed analysis of Gorny’s study, see I&R, chap. 1.

 

10. See Shabtei Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 155.

 

11. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 312. For discussion, see I&R, p. 106.

 

12. David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (New York: Third Press, 1973), p. 3. For Ben-Gurion’s private recognition of the real motives behind Arab attacks, see I&R, pp. 108, 110.

 

13. Segev, One Palestine, pp. 406–7.

 

14. See I&R, p. 103.

 

15. Sasson Sofer, Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 367.

 

16. Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission: A Personal Record (London and New York: Harper and Bros., 1947), pp. 33, 152, 167. For a detailed comparison between Zionist and American conquests, see I&R, pp. 89–98, and especially Norman Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 104–21 (hereafter: R&F).

 

17. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 173 (for Katznelson’s effective support of forced transfer, see p. 176).

 

18. Teveth, Ben-Gurion, p. 101. For copious evidence that, even in the absence of Arab aggression, the Zionist leadership never intended to respect the 1947 partition resolution borders, see Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 144, 150–1.

 

19. Gilbert, Israel: A History, p. 393. Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 312. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 330.

 

20. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 47–8.

 

21. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 20 (Washington, D.C.: 2001), pp. 619, 634–5 (“meant”/“never meant”), 639 (“large chunks”/“non-starter”), 641, 654 (“unacceptable”), 655, 699.

 

22. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the Israeli Experience in Lebanon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 20 (“compromising”), p. 70 (“peace offensive”). For further discussion and documentation, see R&F, pp. 44–5.

 

23. Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 218, 232. Uri Savir, The Process: 1,100 Days That Changed the Middle East (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 147.

 

24. Thomas O’Dwyer, “Nothing Personal: Parts and Apartheid”, Haaretz, 24 May 2002.

 

25. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak)”, New York Review of Books, 13 June 2002.

 

26. David Clark, “The Brilliant Offer Israel Never Made”, Guardian (London), 10 April 2002.

 

27. See Amir Oren, “At the Gates of Yassergrad”, Haaretz, 25 January 2002, and Uzi Benziman, “Immoral Imperative”, Haaretz, 1 February 2002.

 

28. Chris Hedges, “A Gaza Diary”, Harper’s, October 2001 (the quoted phrase comes from a National Public Radio interview).

 

29. Human Rights Watch, “Jenin: IDF Military Operations” (May 2002).

 

30. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Across West Bank, Daily Tragedies Go Unseen”, Guardian (London), 27 April 2002. Nablus was hardest hit, with seventy-five Palestinians dead, including fifty civilians, as against one Israeli soldier.

 

31. See Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)”, New York Review of Books, 13 June 2002.

 

32. See Megan Goldin, Reuters, 11 April 2002; Greer Fay Cushman, “Wiesel: World Doesn’t Understand Threat of Suicide Bombers”, Jerusalem Post, 12 April 2002; CNN, 14 April 2002; Caroline B. Glick, “We Must Not Let the Hater Define Us”, Jerusalem Post, 19 April 2002; Elie Wiesel interview with Gabe Pressman on “News Forum”, 21 April 2002.

 

33. Jessica Montell, “Operation Defensive Shield: The Propaganda War and the Reality” [www.apomie.com/propagandawarandreality.htm].

 

34. Amira Hass, “Someone Even Managed to Defecate into the Photocopier”, Haaretz, 6 May 2002.

 

35. “Israel Must End the Hatred Now”, Observer (London), 15 October 2000.

 

36. Desmond Tutu, “Apartheid in the Holy Land”, Guardian (London), 29 April 2002.

 

37. “Many Israelis Content to See Palestinians Go”, Chicago Sun-Times, 14 March 2002.

 

38. Boris Shusteff, “The Logistics of Transfer”, 3 July 2024 (section E: “Israel’s Actions in Yesha and the Relocation Itself”) [www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2002/july/b1e.htm].

 

39. Martin van Creveld, “Sharon’s Plan Is to Drive Palestinians across the Jordan”, Sunday Telegraph (London), 28 April 2002.

 

40. Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 169, 237. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 331. Martin van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Force (New York: PublicAffairs, 1998), pp. 123–5, 154.

 

41. Zeev Sternhell, “Balata Has Fallen”, Haaretz, 8 March 2002.

 

42. Michael J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945–1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 69, 79, 90–1, 230, 238–9.

 

43. Van Creveld, Sword, pp. 57–61.

 

44. Ibid., pp. 361–2.

 

45. Janine Zacharia, “Poll Shows Americans’ Support for Israel in Decline”, Jerusalem Post, 13 June 2002.

 

46. Desmond Tutu, “Build Moral Pressure to End the Occupation”, International Herald Tribune, 14 June 2002, and Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina, “Against Israeli Apartheid”, Nation, 15 July 2002.

 

47. See Evron, Jewish State, p. 96.

 

48. Nicholas Watt, “MP Accuses Sharon of ‘Barbarism’ ”, Guardian (London), 17 April 2002.

 

49. Robert Fisk, “There Is a Firestorm Coming, and It Is Being Provoked by Mr Bush”, Independent (London), 25 May 2002.