The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (42 page)

This is how the United Nation Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) came into being in 1950. UNRWA was not committed to the return of the refugees as UN General Assembly Resolution 194, from 11 December 1948, had stipulated, but was set up simply to provide employment and subsidies to the approximately one million Palestinian refugees who had ended up in the camps. It was also entrusted with building more permanent camps for them, constructing schools and opening medical centres. In other words, UNRWA was intended, in general, to look after the refugees’ daily concerns.

It did not take long under these circumstances for Palestinian nationalism to re-emerge. It was centred on the Right of Return, but also aimed at replacing UNRWA as an educating agency and even as the provider of social and medical services. Inspired by the drive to try to take their fate into their own hands, this nascent nationalism equipped the people with a new sense of direction and identity, following the exile and destruction they had experienced in 1948. These national emotions were to find their embodiment in 1968 in the PLO, whose leadership was refugee-based and whose ideology was grounded in the demand for the moral and factual redress of the evils Israel had inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948.
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The PLO, or any other group taking up the Palestinian cause, had to confront two manifestations of denial. The first was the denial exercised by the international peace brokers as they consistently sidelined, if not altogether eliminated, the Palestinian cause and concerns from any future peace arrangement. The second was the categorical refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute unwillingness to be held accountable, legally and morally, for the ethnic cleansing they committed in 1948.

The Nakba and the refugee issues have been consistently excluded from the peace agenda, and to understand this we must assess how deep the level
of denial of the crimes committed in 1948 remains today in Israel and associate it with the existence of a genuinely felt fear on the one hand, and a deeply rooted form of anti-Arab racism on the other, both heavily manipulated.

Despite the 1948 fiasco, the United Nations still seemed to have some energy left in the first two years after the Nakba to try to come to grips with the question of Palestine. We find the UN initiating a series of diplomatic efforts through which it hoped to bring peace to the country, culminating in a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring of 1949. The Lausanne conference was based on UN Resolution 194 and centred around the call for the refugees’ Right of Return. For the UN mediation body, the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees was the basis for peace, together with a two-state solution dividing the country equally between the two sides, and the internationalisation of Jerusalem.

Everyone involved accepted this comprehensive approach: the US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians and Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. But the endeavour was deliberately torpedoed by Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who had set their minds on partitioning what was left of Palestine between them. An election year in America and the onset of the Cold War in Europe allowed these two to carry the day and make sure the chances for peace were swiftly buried again. They thereby foiled the only attempt we find in the history of the conflict at a comprehensive approach to creating genuine peace in Palestine/Israel.

After the failure of Lausanne, peace efforts quickly subsided: for nearly two decades, between 1948 and 1967, there was an obvious lull. Only after the war in June 1967 did the world wake up to the plight of the region once again. Or so it seemed. The June war ended with total Israeli control over all of ex-Mandatory Palestine. Peace endeavours started immediately after
Israel’s
blitzkrieg
had run its swift but devastating course, and proved at first more overt and intensive than the ones at Lausanne. Early initiatives came from the British, French and Russian delegations at the UN, but soon the reins were handed over to the Americans as part of a successful attempt by the US to exclude the Russians from all Middle-Eastern agendas.

The American effort totally relied on the prevailing balance of power as the main avenue through which to explore possible solutions. Within this balance of power, Israel’s superiority after 1948 and even more so after the June war was unquestionable, and thus whatever the Israelis put forward in the form of peace proposals invariably served as the basis for the Pax Americana that now descended on the Middle East. This meant that it was given to the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’ to produce the ‘common’ wisdom on which to base the next stages and provide the guidelines for a settlement. All future peace proposals thus catered to this camp, ostensibly the more moderate face of Israel’s position towards peace in Palestine.

Israel drafted new guidelines after 1967, taking advantage of the new geopolitical reality its June war had created, but also mirroring the internal political debate that emerged inside Israel itself, following what Israeli PR quickly dubbed the ‘6-Day War’ (purposely invoking biblical overtones), between the right wing, the ‘Greater Israel’ people, and the left wing, the ‘Peace Now’ movement. The former were the so-called ‘redeemers’, people for whom the Palestinian areas Israel had occupied in 1967 were the ‘regained heartland’ of the Jewish state. The latter were dubbed ‘custodians’, Israelis who wanted to hold on to the Occupied Palestinian Territories so as to use them as bargaining chips in future peace negotiations. When the Greater Israel camp began establishing Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, the ‘custodian’ peace camp appeared to have no problem with the building of settlements in particular areas that immediately became non-negotiable for peace: the Greater Jerusalem area and certain settlement blocks near the 1967 border. The areas the peace camp initially offered to negotiate over have shrunk gradually since 1967 as Israeli settlement construction progressed incrementally over the years in the consensual areas of ‘redemption’.

The moment the American apparatus responsible for shaping US policy in Palestine adopted these guidelines, they were paraded as ‘concessions’, ‘reasonable moves’ and ‘flexible positions’ on the part of Israel. This is the first part of the pincer movement Israel now executed to completely
eliminate the Palestinian point of view – of whatever nature and inclination. The second part was to portray that point of view in the West as ‘terrorist, unreasonable and inflexible’.

The first of Israel’s three guidelines – or rather, axioms – was that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was an agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In other words, as these areas constitute only twenty-two per cent of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded – and continues to demand today – further territorial compromises, either consonant with the business-like approach the US favoured or as dictated by the map agreed upon by the two political camps in Israel.

Israel’s second axiom is that everything visible in these areas, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, can again be further divided and that this divisibility forms one of the keys to peace. For Israel this division of the visible includes not just the territory, but also people and natural resources.

The third Israeli axiom is that nothing that occurred prior to 1967, including the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing, will ever be negotiable. The implications here are clear: it totally removes the refugee issue from the peace agenda and sidelines the Palestinian Right of Return as a ‘non-starter’. This last axiom totally equates the end of Israeli occupation with the end of the conflict, and it follows naturally from the previous two. For the Palestinians, of course, 1948 is the heart of the matter and only addressing the wrongs perpetrated then can bring an end to the conflict in the region.

To activate these axiomatic guidelines that so clearly meant to push the Palestinians out of the picture, Israel needed to find a potential partner. Proposals put forward to that end to King Hussein of Jordan, through the mediation skills of the American secretary of state at the time, Henry Kissinger, read: ‘The Israeli peace camp, led by the Labour party, regards the Palestinians as non-existent and prefers to divide the territories Israel occupied in 1967 with the Jordanians.’ But Jordan’s king deemed the share he was allotted insufficient. Like his grandfather, King Hussein coveted the area as a whole, including East Jerusalem and its Muslim sanctuaries.

This so-called Jordanian option was endorsed by the Americans up to 1987, when the first Intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising, erupted in December of that year against Israel’s oppression and occupation. That nothing came of the Jordanian path in the earlier years was due to lack of Israeli generosity, while in later years King Hussein’s ambivalence was at fault as well as his inability to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, as the PLO enjoyed pan-Arab and global legitimacy.

Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat suggested a similar path in his 1977 peace initiative to Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Menachem Begin (in power between 1977 and 1982). The idea was to allow Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian territories it held under occupation while granting the Palestinians in them internal autonomy. In essence this was another version of partition as it left Israel in direct possession of eighty per cent of Palestine and in indirect control over the remaining twenty per cent.

The first Palestinian uprising in 1987 squashed all ideas of the autonomy option as it led Jordan to remove itself as a partner from future negotiations. The upshot of these developments was that the Israeli peace camp came around to accepting the Palestinians as partners for a future settlement. At first Israel tried, always with the help of the Americans, to negotiate peace with the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories, which was allowed to take part, as an official peace delegation, in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. This conference was the award the American administration had decided to hand out to the Arab states for backing Washington’s military invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf War. Openly stalled by Israel, Madrid led nowhere.

Israel’s ‘peace’ axioms were re-articulated during the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the same Yitzhak Rabin who, as a young officer, had taken an active part in the 1948 cleansing but who had now been elected as prime minister on a platform that promised the resumption of the peace effort. Rabin’s death – he was assassinated by one of his own people on 4 November 1995 – came too soon for anyone to assess how much he had really changed from his 1948 days: as recently as 1987, as minister of defence, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stones in the first Intifada; he had deported hundreds of Palestinians as prime minister prior to the Oslo Agreement, and he had pushed for the 1994 Oslo B agreement that effectively caged the Palestinians in the West Bank into several Bantustans.

At the centre of Rabin’s peace efforts stood the Oslo Accords that began rolling in September 1993. Again, the concept behind this process was a Zionist one: the Nakba was totally absent. The architects of the Oslo formula were Israeli intellectuals who, of course, belonged to Israel’s ‘peace camp’ and who ever since 1967 had played an important role in the Israeli public scene. Institutionalised in an ex-parliamentary movement called Peace Now, they had several political parties on their side. But Peace Now has always evaded the 1948 issue and sidelined the refugee question. When they did the same in 1993, they seemed to have found a Palestinian partner in Yassir Arafat for a peace that buried 1948 and its victims. The false hopes Israel raised with Oslo were to have dire consequences for the Palestinian people, all the more as Arafat fell into the trap Oslo set for him.

The result was a vicious circle of violence. Desperate Palestinian reactions to Israeli oppression in the form of suicide bomb attackers against both the Israeli army and civilians led to an even harsher Israeli retaliation policy that in turn prompted more young Palestinians – many coming from 1948 refugee families – to join the guerrilla groups advocating suicide attacks as the only means left to them of liberating the Occupied Territories. An easily intimidated Israeli electorate brought a right-wing government back into power, whose policy differed little, at the end of the day, from the previous ‘Oslo’ government. Netanyahu (1996–1999) failed in every aspect of governance, and Labour was back in power in 1999 and, with it, the ‘Peace Camp’, this time led by Ehud Barak. When within a year Barak was facing electoral defeat for having been over-ambitious in almost every field of governmental policy, a peace with the Palestinians seemed the only way of safeguarding his political future.

What for Barak was no more than a tactical move to save his skin, the Palestinians – erroneously – envisaged as the climax of the Oslo negotiations. And when US president Clinton invited Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to a summit meeting in Camp David in the summer of 2000, the Palestinians went there in the expectation of genuine negotiations over the conflict’s end. Such a promise was indeed embedded in the Oslo rationale: the original document of September 1993 promises the Palestinian
leadership that if they were willing to agree to a waiting period of between five to ten years (during which Israel would partially withdraw from the Occupied Territories), the essentials of the conflict as they saw them would be on the table in the final phase of the new peace negotiations. This final phase, they thought, had now come and with it the time to discuss the ‘three essentials of the conflict’: the Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the future of the Israeli settlements.