May 9, 2008
A Somber Anniversary
The Nation: The Long Conflict With The Palestinians Casts A Pall On Israel's 60th Birthday
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Israeli air force performs maneuvers to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel, above the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, Thursday, May 8, 2008. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
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Photo Essay Israel Turns 60 State of Israel stages 60th birthday bash with great sense of pride but amid uncertainty.
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Timeline Israel's Emergence Some key events in the history of the State of Israel as it turns 60.
The Oslo Accord was a major breakthrough in the century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. It was the first-ever agreement between the two principal parties to the conflict. Recognition of a sort replaced absolute, mutual rejection. By signing the agreement, the Palestinians conceded the legitimacy of the Jewish state over 78 percent of what had been the British Mandate of Palestine. What they expected to get in return--though this was not written down in the agreement--was independence over the remaining 22 percent: the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
To be sure, the agreement on "Gaza and Jericho first," as the 1993 accord was often described in shorthand, fell a long way short of the Palestinian aspiration to full independence and statehood. But the agreement did set in motion a gradual and controlled Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. In the two years following the signing of the accord, substantial progress was achieved. Cooperation between the security services of the two sides was very close, and also progress was made in empowering the Palestinians to govern themselves, culminating in the Oslo II Accord of September 1995. This period wasn't without tensions--Palestinians were furious that Rabin continued to approve expansion of Israeli settlements. But it was the overall success, not the failure, of the Oslo peace process that provoked a right-wing backlash in Israel and the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish religious fanatic in November 1995. The assassination achieved its purpose: it crippled the peace process. There is no way of telling what would have happened had Rabin survived; history does not disclose its alternatives. But there can be no doubt that in the aftermath of the murder it was much more difficult to follow the course Rabin had charted.
With the murder of Rabin, the peace process began to falter. In a long-term historical perspective, however, the series of agreements between 1993 and 1999 under the auspices of Oslo were not a failure. Nor were they doomed to fail from the start. They did not collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, as critics like to argue. Rather, the peace process failed because Israel, under the leadership of the Likud, reneged on its side of the original deal.
Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was no friend of the Oslo Accord. He regarded it as incompatible with the historic right of the Jewish people to the entire Land of Israel and with Israel's right to security. Netanyahu spent his three years in power, from 1996 to 1999, in a largely successful attempt to arrest and subvert the peace process. By subverting it, he inflicted serious damage not only on the Palestinians but on his own country and on the Middle East as a whole.
As far back as 1988, the Palestinians had made their choice. They offered Israel recognition and peace in return for a minimal restitution of what had been taken away from them by force. Since then the ball has been in Israel's court. Israel had to choose. Netanyahu and his colleagues in the ultranationalist camp chose to go back on the historic compromise struck by their Labor predecessors and to return to confrontation.
In May 1999 the Israeli electorate deposed Netanyahu and replaced him with Ehud Barak in order to give peace a chance. Barak won a clear mandate to return to the path of his mentor and commanding officer, Rabin. Barak was a brilliant soldier but a political novice who quickly frittered away his initial advantages and ended up betraying all the hopes that had been pinned on him. Part of the problem was Barak's clear preference for a peace deal with Syria first in order to isolate and weaken the Palestinians. Another problem was Barak's refusal to fulfill Israel's obligations under previous agreements. But the most fundamental obstacle to peace with the Palestinians was settlement expansion on the West Bank. All Israeli governments, Labor as well as Likud, continued to build settlements after the 1993 accord was signed. This did not violate the letter of the accord, but it most definitely violated the spirit. It was simply not reasonable to expect the Palestinians to go forward toward a peace deal when Israel was expropriating more and more of their land. Land-grabbing and peacemaking do not go well together. This became clear at the Camp David summit in July 2000. The package offered by Barak was not enough to persuade the Palestinian negotiators to give him what he wanted: a formal and final end to the conflict. Following the collapse of the summit, Barak propagated the notion that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. This was not true; there was a Palestinian partner, but not on Barak's terms.
With the collapse of the Camp David summit, the countdown to the outbreak of the next round of violence began. Ariel Sharon, the leader of the opposition, provided the spark that set off the explosion. On September 28, 2000, flanked by a thousand security men and in deliberate disregard of the sensitivity of Muslim worshipers, Sharon ostentatiously walked into Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. His walk-about sparked riots that spread to other Arab areas of East Jerusalem and to other cities. Within a very short time, the riots snowballed into a full-scale uprising--the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The escalating violence, and the belief that there was no Palestinian partner for peace, paved the way to Barak's political demise and to Sharon's Likud victory in the February 2001 election.
The rise to power of Sharon, the champion of violent solutions, marked the end of any serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Sharon personified the most xenophobic, aggressive, expansionist and racist brand of Zionism. He could boast--and he would have regarded it as a reason for boasting--that he remained in power for five years without ever resuming negotiations on the final status of the territories. His policy toward the Palestinians consisted of the iron fist inside the iron glove. Under Sharon's leadership Israel reverted to unilateralism in its purest and most unrestrained form. His objective was to set aside the Oslo Accords, to fragment and mutilate the Palestinian territories, to reassert total Israeli control over the West Bank and to deny the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. His long-term aim was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel. The unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was a step in that direction, not a prelude to an overall agreement but to the de facto annexation of major West Bank settlement blocs. Sharon will therefore go down in Israel's history not as a peacemaker but as the proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict.
The trouble with unilateral action is that it holds no hope for peace. On the contrary, it is a recipe for never-ending bloodshed. The Israeli right thus provided both the paradigm for solving the conflict with the Palestinians and the politicians who are unable or unwilling to act on it. Consequently, on its sixtieth anniversary, Israel still faces the same dilemma it was faced with forty-one years ago, after seizing new territory in the 1967 war: it can have land or it can have peace. It cannot have both.
During the past forty-one years Israel has tried every conceivable method of ending the conflict with the Palestinians except the obvious one: ending the occupation. The occupation has to end, not simply because the Palestinians deserve no less but in order to preserve the values for which the State of Israel was created. In any case, whether Israelis like it or not, an independent Palestinian state is inevitable in the long run--when the game is no longer worth the candle. The moral, political and psychological cost of the occupation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Just as Israel withdrew under duress from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, so, eventually, will it be compelled to relinquish all but a tiny fraction of the West Bank.
To its credit, the Israeli public has never been as implacably opposed to an independent Palestinian state as the politicians of the right. The question now is whether Israel will give the Palestinians a chance to build that state or strive endlessly to frustrate it. That is the real test of statesmanship as Israel enters its seventh decade. At the time of writing there is precious little evidence to suggest that Israel's leaders are willing to rise to the challenge. They appear united in their determination to preserve Israel's military and economic control over the West Bank. Yet there is some ground for optimism. The Palestinians learned from their own mistakes: they put rejectionism behind them, moderated their program and opted for a two-state solution. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Israelis will one day learn from their mistakes and elect leaders who recognize the need for a genuine two-state solution. Nations, like individuals, are capable of acting rationally--after they have exhausted all the alternatives.
By Avi Shlaim
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
You would think for the purposes of public relations the Jews would cut America a break, it being a country that took them in, treated them with equality and opportunity and understanding that no other country ever has. And yet they are destroying us, turning the whole world against us, causing 9/11 and possibly a future nuclear attack, dragging down our culture and our currency. If the US doesn''''t deserve a break, I wonder who does. Perhaps they imagine after they have particpated in the ruin of this country they will all go to magical Bible playland "Israel" and laugh at us from there. I wonder how long Bible playland "Israel" will survive without trillions in US support and our countless dead sacrificed to AIPAC - about as long as the historical crusader kingdoms in that area, I''''m thinking.
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Posted by SharnCedar
WE ARE FIGHTING THE SUNNIS IN IRAQ? OR WHO EVER THREATENS OUR OIL...
WE ARE FUNDING THE SUNNIS IN LEBANON TO DESTABLIZE THAT COUNTRY???
BUSH IS SENDING AID TO ISRAEL IN THE BILLIONS...
BUSH IS SENDING AID TO THE PALESTINIANS IN THE MILLIONS THRU ISRAELI BANKS???
16 OF THE 19 HIJACKERS WERE FROM SAUDI...
CHENEY AND HALIBURTON ARE TIGHT WITH THE SAUDIS...
RUMFELD BROKERED CHEMICAL WEAPONS TO SADDAM IN THE 80S...TO FIGHT IRAN
WE ATTACHED IRAQ TO GET RID OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS...
RICHARD PEARL A DUEL PASSPORT HOLDING ISRAELI AMERICAN NEOCON IS BROKERING AN OIL DEAL WITH THE KURDS...
TURKEY IS FIGHTING THE KURDS...
BILLIONS OF AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING TO THE MIDDLE EAST!
4000 PLUS AMERICANS HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FIGHTING A CHANGING ENEMY WHO ONE DAY CHANGES FROM ONE SIDE TO THE NEXT...AND WHOS POLITICIANS ARE ON THE TAKE AS BAD AS AMERICAN POLITICIANS ARE?
MISS NO ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE CONDI RICE IS RUNNING THE STATE DEPARTMENT!
WHO IS RUNNING THIS MIDDLE EAST TRAIN?
START WAR CRIMES NOW!
AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!
If the Arabs were to give up their arms there would be no more war in the middle east. If the Isrealis gave up their arms there would be no more jews in the middle east.
That''s the only purpose of a Palestinian "state" its a pure sham while the bigot racists who rule the fake Jewish state try to figure out how to genocide the Christiansa nd Arabs in the region.
QUIT GIVING BOTH SIDES WEAPONS!
START WAR CRIMES TRIALS NOW ON THE IRAQ WAR!
GET THE DUEL PASSPORT HOLDING ISRAELIS NEOCONS OUT OF AMERICAN POLITICS!
AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!