Middle East Peace? - Richard Sale

 By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars

     In his 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Tom Friedman wrote that Israel’s far-right “will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza,” explaining, “They are committed to holding forever the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments.”

     Friedman has been proved right, but the reluctance of Zionists to share the Land of Israel with the Arabs stretches far back into the origins of the state. Glints of this ruthless intractability could be seen in a recent CBS Sixty Minutes segment about Israeli settlers racing to build new homes in East Jerusalem, an area of the highest historical and religious value to the Muslims there.  It is my view that such an action amounts to “aggression by settlement” and will destroy any chances of any agreement in this tragic, ancient quarrel. 

     As I have said here before, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned the Jewish settlement of Palestine as giving rise to “a wondrous breed of Jews...the Maccabees will rise again,” and he  talked of the “displacement and transfer” of Palestine’s Arab population, albeit “with full financial compensation,” according to Israeli historian Benny Morris. “We must expropriate gently,” Herzl said. “Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor (Arabs) must be done discreetly and circumspectly.” 

   When the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 its real purpose was not to give the Jews a homeland, but to bolster British ability to fight the Germans. In 1917, British forces were bogged down in a stalemate and the British leadership was fearful of the Russians making a separate peace. Also, many Jews in America favored the Central Powers. To curb this and in an effort to draw America into the war, the declaration promised Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people.” 

     It is an amazing document. Britain was offering to give away land to which it had no claim, nor did it consult with the thousands of Arabs who had lived in it for 700 years. Eight years after the declaration, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a prominent Zionist and a key actor in establishing the declaration warned, “Palestine is not Rhodesia, and 600,000 Arabs who live there have exactly the same right to their homes as we have to our national home.” 

     After pogroms in Russia in 1901, a large influx of Jews into Palestine began and by 1919, tensions between Arabs and the new arrivals were increasing, especially since the Zionists had plans for large scale immigration and settlement. According to Morris, Maj. Gen. Sir Arthur Money of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in April 1919 wrote to Lord George Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, “The Palestinians in fact desire Palestine for themselves, and have no intention of allowing their country to be thrown open to hordes of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe.” To implement the Balfour Declaration “would involve Britain in the use of force in opposition to the will of the majority of the population.” 

     Another who saw the issue with dazzling clarity was future Israeli President David Ben-Gurion. When it came to Arab versus Jewish aspirations, he said, “...Not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf and nothing can bridge it....We as a nation want this country to be ours; the Arabs as a country, want the country to be theirs.” 

     A Ben-Gurion aide said that should the Jews “...allow a partner into our state – all content and meaning will be lost to the enterprise.” 

     The Jews intensified their building of settlements and in 1928 violence between Arabs and Jews erupted in a quarrel over construction at the Temple Mount. 

    Throughout the years until World War II, Jewish purchases of Palestinian land took place, the sales coming from Arab absentee landlords who lived in Turkey or Lebanon and who cared little that Jews were buying it as long as they were paid a good price. But when the Jews bought the land, they evicted the Arab tenants who had lived on it for centuries, Morris says. He adds that the betrayal by absentee Arabs of the Palestinians devastated the Palestinian national movement, and more and more Arabs saw the Jewish immigration as a springboard for Jewish expansion in Palestine. 

    In any case, Morris claims that by 1936, as some ugly tensions continued to build, Ben-Gurion clearly saw their cause. In May, he said, “The Arab fear of our power is intensifying. (It’s) exactly the opposite of what we see. It doesn’t matter whether or not their view is correct. They see immigration on a giant scale...they see the Jews fortifying themselves economically...They see the best lands passing into our hands...They are fighting dispossession...The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people.” 

     Ben-Gurion was also candid enough to acknowledge that in the Arab-Israeli political struggle “...we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.” 

     By 1936 Morris said that no mainstream Jewish leader thought coexistence with Palestinians to be possible and that the Jewish solution lay with a clear physical separation of the two peoples, achievable only by transfer and expulsion of the Arabs. In fact, the Jewish leadership saw transfer as “a highly moral solution,” in the words of one. Leaders felt that the Arab had no ancestral or religious tie to his land and that Jordan or Egypt or Syria would be the same for them as Palestine. Transfer would be best done “voluntarily,” but, if necessary, force would be used. As one Zionist politician Zingwell had said in 1905, “We must be prepared to

drive out by the sword in possession as our forefathers did,” and added that there was “no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometers,” as if the Jews’ passionate attachment to the land was unique and peculiar to them. 

    (This, of course, echoes the earlier British plan to put all their Jews in Uganda or Abraham Lincoln’s scheme to settle former American slaves in Liberia.) 

     Today, Israel’s hardline far-right is back in power and the persuasiveness of Israel’s Social Democrats is a thing of the past.  Headed by Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, occupying the post for a second time, serious disagreements between the Israeli leader and President Barack Obama over the peace process were quick to emerge and remain in full force. Netanyahu, as usual, stubbornly resists the two-state solution, involving the creation of a viable Palestinian state, which is favored by Obama and his team. 

     It was clear from the first that the real contest of wills would prove to be the question of Israel’s soaring construction of Israeli settlements on the disputed land of the West Bank. Soon after reaching power, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unequivocally called for a halt in the construction of all such settlements.  When Israeli President Shimon Peres met with President Obama, he talked of trying to get a waiver from the U.S. regarding “construction to accommodate natural growth in the settlements.” Peres added that the children of such settlements “are not going to live on roofs,” ignoring the fact that settlements continue to advertise for home purchasers, evidence of ample capacity.

    Secretary Clinton went further by demanding a freeze on “natural growth,” adding, “We want to see a stop to settlement construction – additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity – that is what the president called for.” 

     The reply of the Netanyahu government then became obstinate, a condition, says Schopenhauer, in which the assertive will crowds out the judgment. On the eve of President Barack Obama’s speech at Cairo, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai met with leaders of Israeli settler organizations to announce that all the resources of his office including the ministry’s “impact on local authorities” would be used for “the good of expanding settlements.” 

     When Israeli officials said that West Bank settlement blocs like Gush Etzion, Alfei Menashe, Ariel, Ma’al and others would remain in Israel under a final status agreement so that there would be no point in preventing construction, Obama officials said they just might initiate immediate final talks on the border between Israel and the future Palestinian state, according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. 

     When Netanyahu officials said that the Obama proposals violated unwritten or verbal agreements about settlements reached with the George W. Bush administration, Secretary Clinton replied that there was “no memorialization (sic) of any informal or oral agreements” and in any case, “...they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.” 

     Obama had already drawn the stark line during his speech in Cairo when he said, “We do not accept legitimacy of Israeli settlements,” the first time a U.S. president has discussed the legality of the settlements in terms of international law since President Jimmy Carter. Veteran Mideast former U.S. diplomat David Mack told me that the question of legality of the settlements was important because “Israel takes great pride in being a society of laws,” adding that the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled in 2005 that settlements were illegal “under the Geneva Convention.” 

     When Obama officials recently went further and said that the status of Jerusalem would be determined by peace negotiations, Netanyahu said defiantly, “United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours.”

     All of which sounds so dreadfully familiar. Israeli historian Benny Morris once wrote, “All Arabs were seen by the Zionists as essentially untrustworthy, not to say treacherous,” and in 1946, Ignatius Mubarak, a noted Zionist, made clear this view when he testified before the Anglo-American Committee, and, a year later, before the UN Special Committee in favor of Zionism. “If you oppose Zionism in Palestine, it means returning the people to the domination of savagery and the country to the state of anarchy and bribery in which it existed under the Ottoman Sultans...here is a struggle between civilization and regression, and the Jews represent civilization,” he said. 

      So it would appear Israel and the Netanyahu government are faced with the predicament of deciding what kind of society Israel should become – expansive and pluralistic or narrow and exclusive. In a recent article for Haaretz entitled, “Israel is controlled by religious fanaticism,” by Shulamit Aloni, Aloni quoted a 1902 letter sent by Lord Rothschild to Herzl in which Rothschild explained why he could not support the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, saying that he would “view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple; such a colony would be imperium imperio. It would be a Ghetto with the prejudice of the Ghetto; it would be a small, petty Jewish state, orthodox and liberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.” 

    What Rothschild wanted was an Israel that would “ensure complete equality and political rights to all its inhabitants regardless of religion, race or sex,” and “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language and culture” as stated in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State. 

     But the present spectacle of deadlock and the unbridled race by Israelis to build homes on territory whose ownership is still in dispute makes one heavy of heart. 

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Not Sophie's Choice but the choice of Sophists?

[Matthew]

Successive USG have operated a thinly disguised shell game: Pretend to "oppose" settlements while unflinchingly supporting Israel.

Now that American power is waning, our government hopes that its decades of dishonesty will not be noticed by the Arabs--as distinct from their useless Sunni kings.

And we wonder why China is making inroads everywhere.

[Rider]

Expect to be emptying your pockets, taking your shoes off, and having your wife frisked every time you board a plane for the foreseeable future.

[samuelburke]

this is from the website jeremiahhaber dot com...the magnes zionist.

excellent reading on this issue.

"Israel’s “Arab Problem” – Part One
Zionism was intended to solve Europe's "Jewish Problem," the supposed inability of the Jews to assimilate and become equal citizens of the European states. In the late nineteenth century, which saw the rapid rise of nationalism and political anti-Semitism, some European Jews, especially in Russia and Poland, considered their main nationality to be Jewish (and were considered to be such in some of the multi-national empires), and even later, when the age of empire ended, they distinguished between their citizenship and their nationality in their own self-consciousness."

[Jackie]

Is being Jewish a nationality? And if so, where did their nationality originate? And why bother with the Hebrew religion if the Jews are a nationality?

In recent years this has confused me. Or is it just a way to obfuscate and confuse the whole issue?

As I have stated here before, using the bible to settle land disputes is really antiquated and doesn't work for this Irish/Swiss kid.

A sincere response is really appreciated dear commenters.

[b]

Two issues with this piece:

"When the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 its real purpose was not to give the Jews a homeland, but to bolster British ability to fight the Germans."

That is not the real background. Britain urgently needed money to continue the war and the Rothschild bankers demanded signing of the Balfur declaration to extend Britains credit line. Most of the Rothschild family were eager Zionists and the bought land in Palestine and financed a lot of the first Zionist state structures there.

"the question of Israel’s soaring construction of Israeli settlements on the disputed land of the West Bank."

That is Zionist propaganda. The West Bank land is not disputed at all. All international law says it is Palestinian land and that Israel has no rights to it. That is also the official position of every government in this world except Israel's current one.

To call this "disputed" is taking the Zionist site.

[Castellio]

Jackie: A book you might find useful is Michael Stanislawski's "Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky".

For some, Jewish is a nationality, for others a religion, for some it is both and to separate them is to harm both.

There were early Zionists of all stripes. Some were about the religion, most, in fact, were secular and were concerned with a state. Israel, increasingly, is about the fusion. (When there was no state, the fusion at a state level was impossible.)

Fusing nationalism and faith, however, has very severe and unavoidable repercussions. It immediately leads to legal inequalities within the state based on birth as belief, and acts to restrict belief to birth. There is neither equality among people nor true freedom of belief.

To claim that Israel is of necessity a Jewish state is to enforce that fusion.

That America, internationally, now completely defends and acts to enforce a fusion of state and religion in Israel is an historical mistake of gigantic implications and consequence. I am surprised that America didn't have the intellectual vigour and moral strength to have withstood such a self-destructive act, one that is contrary to the very deepest beliefs on which the USA was founded.

[RAISER William]

Very informative summary historical overview of the development of Israel. Thanks. Always good to be reminded of context.

I particularly appreciated the statements attributed to Rothschild.

I did have to frown a little at your early statement about: "...the reluctance of Zionists to share the Land of Israel... " What about the Palestinian reluctance to "share" the Land of Palestine?

[Clifford Kiracofe]

1. Jackie,

for historical reference, this online encyclopedia resource is useful:

http://www.palestine-
encyclopedia.com/EPP/Start.htm

see also the reference for Chazars in the Jewish Encyclopedia:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=402&letter=C

2. b,

British policy in its modern phase in Palestine began under Palmerston in 1839. The strategic concept was to get a foothold there and back Turkey against Russia.

By WWI era, oil became a factor in British strategic planning. Thus, the objective of Haifa as a port through which Iraqi oil could be obtained.

I explain all this in my book Dark Crusade: Christian Zionism and US Foreign Policy (London: Tauris, 2009).

[Robert R. Rock]

Those of us who are too familiar with the utterances of Tom Friedman appreciate his penchant to shoot from the hip, in order to coin some new catchy designer expression of questionable wisdom.
The entire "peace process" has no solid foundation. Is there at least an agreement on the definition of terms? How about something as fundamentally basic as the meaning of the word "peace" or "Palestinian State".

[Rider]

Jackie, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom has written several columns over the years addressing that question of nationality. Search the archives on his website for "Jewish state" and I think you'll find some clear and sensible answers. Here's a recent example:

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1287228746

As to using the Bible to settle a land dispute, I concur, although I would say that if one wants to appeal to the Bible then let's at least be fair. God's covenant, sealed with the promise of the land, was with "the seed of Abraham." And Abraham had two sons, the eldest of which was Ishmael. The younger son, Isaac, was the favored, but Ishmael was not disinherited, but given a lesser share according to Jewish laws of inheritance. The intent, according to Scripture, would seem to be that all the sons of Abraham would share the land; not that it would belong exclusively to the descendants of Isaac, as so often claimed by "settlers" (land-grabbers).

[Jake]

Middle East Peace? Now there is a contradiction in terms..

[William R. Cumming]

ONce again the US should never support or appease those that refuse to support the concepts embedded the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. To do otherwise is slow-motion suicide or our Democracy (Republic)! As far a I am concerned the Hemlock has already been drunk with respect to the Middle East and Israel and the followers of Islam.

[Sidney O. Smith III]

Prof. Kiracofe

Glad to see you back. One reason I enjoy your insights so much is that you appear to have "left behind" (oblique rapture reference) the anachronisms of tiresome pre 9-11 labels such as Democrat and Republican. Clearly, you have taken your analysis into uncharted territory. And as your latest book establishes, you certainly have done so for something greater than promotion within conventional group think of academia. So your contributions are significant, imo.

With that in mind, while trying to identify historical patterns and trends in our US foreign policy, I, like so many others, want to place the role of the America First Committee in its proper context. Justin “War Eagle” Raimondo weighed in yesterday.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/10/28/anti-interventionism-then-and-now/

If I remember correctly, you have a less favorable view of the AFC.

Since I respect both your work as well as that of War Eagle Raimondo, do you have any comment to make about Raimondo’s latest?

May as well create a cognitive dissonance on the role of the AFC in US history!

[Clifford Kiracofe]

Sidney Smith, thanks for the kind words. Been extremely busy with teaching at two schools this Fall.

Glad you liked my recent book. Some friends hope I will do another with a broad US foreign policy/strategic focus. But I'm semi-retired and that's several years work. My perspective is not partisan politics/party oriented as my commitment (and oath) is to defend the Constitution.

Briefly, I think our War with Spain in 1898 was a strategic error. This is the point at which the Wall Street-based US imperial faction became a decisive factor in modern US foreign policy. The Election of 1900 had Imperialism/Anti-Imperialism as a major theme. I believe vigorous public debate between those with contending perspectives on our foreign policy to be a good thing.

Once can speculate that WWI could have been brought to a close in 1916 and thus no US involvement and AEF, no Bolshevik Revolution, no Mussolini, no Hitler, etc.

As to WWII, I am aware of the Libertarian perspective and Raimundo is certainly a bold and lively character.

However, I think it became a strategic necessity for us to enter WWII. Certainly not to defend British imperial interests, but rather to defend our own global position. I think the Fall of France was a shock to Americans and it woke many up to the European situation and nightmare which may have seemed so far away.

Glancing at a world map, IMO a Nazi dominated Europe and a Japanese militarist dominated Asian "co-prosperity sphere" would have left us very vulnerable indeed squeezed betwen two giant fascisms. Not a few influential Brits wanted to align with Nazi Germany...then where would we have been?

Circles in the US on Wall Street etc. were pro-Nazi as the historical record shows. Some "Isolationists" were just isolationist in general while others were pro-Nazi in philosophy.

I grew up directly across the street from General Wood (1879-1969) and the Stuarts were just down the block. I remember seeing the elderly general while peddling my bicycle around the neighborhood and he would wave cheerfully.

My book covers the pro-Fascist "American Liberty League" not the AFC. The American Liberty League, and its present day successors were and are a threat to our Constitutional order, IMO.

[William R. Cumming]

Dr. K! Have German contributions to defeat FDR in 1940 ever been established or closely analyzed?

Even today although foreign contributions to Presidential campaigns are illegal are they also for subordinate elective positions in the Congress for example?

[Sidney O. Smith III]

Prof. Kiracofe

Thanks much for the clarification.

[walrus]

How do you say "This is my last territorial demand" in Yiddish and Hebrew?

[Clifford Kiracofe]

WRC,
Have not heard about any foreign money to the 1940 campaign. The matter to which I refer is at a different level than Congress as it involves US business and financial elites.

As I indicated, some Wall Streeters and Big Business interests had deep connections to fascist business interests in Europe. The Bush-Walker clan were business partners of Fritz Thyssen, for example.

Some of this is explained in Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy, The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983). I have met the author, a veteran journalist and writer based in Hollywood. He did a good job presenting some of the basics.

Sidney Smith,
I would suggest the above noted book and also, in particular reference to your question: James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1950). I would strongly suggest this book. Together they present the picture from this era pretty well. Unfortunately, there are certain continuities...

[Russ Wagenfeld]

Pat,
Did I really see Lani Kass listed as a visitor to your blog a few minutes ago?
Russ

[Patrick Lang]

all

I did not go. I don't like crowds. pl

[YT]

"using the bible to settle land disputes is really antiquated"

"That America, internationally, now completely defends and acts to enforce a fusion of state and religion in Israel is an historical mistake of gigantic implications and consequence"

"I am concerned the Hemlock has already been drunk with respect to the Middle East and Israel and the followers of Islam"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Religion: the WORST of all hallucinogens. What was it a former Jew once said; "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes".

From the fryin' pan into the fire:

Add proselytizin' neo-con dreams of "spreadin' democracy in mid-east" (what DEFINITION of democracy??) & doses of modern Westphalian state-buildin' to the (already) lethal mix of racial/religious antagonisms that is the dynamics of cursed region.

Domestic violence writ large (though parties do not wish to be reminded of blood ties).

[Sidney O. Smith III]

Prof. Kiracofe

Thank you for the recommendations and I will give them a look. Presently, I am attempting to examine more closely the intellectual current that Weiss, courageously, has defined as “Progressive except Palestianians” or the acronym PEP.

I place this intellectual tradition in a somewhat larger context than Weiss, and I am finding it rooted in what Robert Kagan calls the American tradition of “ideological conquest” in his book “Dangerous Nation”.

Kagan of course celebrates the US as a dangerous nation. I believe it is leading us to a catastrophe.

And contrary to Kagan, I find this aspect of the American character also woven into the long history of Northern racism that has always been denied and never been properly revealed or dissected. This aspect of the American character is fully realized, today, in the Zionism of Goldberg, Chris Matthews, and others "progressives" of this ilk.

Again, thanks.

[Jackie]

Castellio, Clifford and Rider,

Thank you for your responses.

Castellio, I ordered the book you recommended. Clifford, since I had been curious about your book already, it's on the way, also. And Rider I appreciate the links.

[Robert R. Rock]

"...Secretary Clinton replied that there was “no memorialization (sic) of any informal or oral agreements” and in any case, “...they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

The Obama's bad faith refusal to recognize the assurances President George W. Bush made to Israel in writing,"The Bush Letter", in return for Israel's good faith unilateral complete withdrawal from Gaza,was a blunder of huge proportions.
Obama and Clinton have been "protected by the enormity of their stupidity" for too long.
Let's see what happens tomorrow when we go to the polls.