Chapter 3: Where to?

"Israel began to build a barrier— mostly fence, in small parts wall—separating Israel proper from about 93 percent of the West Bank in order to lay the ground- work for a two-state denouement, either through an agreement or, in its absence, unilaterally. This, the demographic imperative, as well as the desire to keep out Arab suicide bombers, was the logic behind the barrier, not discrimination or the desire to steal Arab land (though in delineating the barrier, the planners incorporated in Israel slightly more territory than the Clinton proposals had earmarked for Israel as a cession from the West Bank)

But the possibility of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank was subsequently complicated by the fact that, following the withdrawal from Gaza, the Muslim fundamentalists who dominated the area went on to use it as a launching pad for constant, terroristic rocketing of Israel’s border settlements, including the towns of Sderot and Ashqelon (population 120,000). Israel’s leaders quite naturally feared that a similar unilateral pull- back from the West Bank would be followed by a far more dangerous rocketing of the state’s main population centers, Jerusalem and the greater Tel Aviv area"

"Although such polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.)

Such has been Zionism’s political evolution. The evolution of the Palestinian Arab national movement has been radically different. In effect, there has been no evolution in terms of attitudes toward Zionism and Israel. The years 1937, 1947, 1978—when Arafat rejected the Sadat-Begin Camp David Agreements, which provided for Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and West Bank—and 2000 were all of a piece, with no real movement or change in final objectives. Haj Amin al-Husseini and Arafat were as one in seeking a one-state solution "

"Secular democratic Palestine"

"Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in an- other version, to limit it to those fifty thousand-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.

The Palestinian vision was never, as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to Western journalists, of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so- called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.

Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims,
Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.”1 And Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”2

This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”

The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion”— that is, 1917."

"True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. It was, like all hypocrisy, “a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently (vide the departure from Palestinian areas of most Christian Arabs; vide the recent killing of a Christian Arab bookshop owner in Gaza and the torching of the library of Gaza’s YMCA)? Western liberals like or pretend to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural, and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances. (Why, for example, have black Africans, who over the centuries have suffered infinitely more at Western—and, indeed, Muslim Arab— hands than the Arabs ever did, never resort to international terrorism and suicide bombings against Western—or Arab—targets?)

So where did the slogan of “a secular, democratic Palestine” originate? That goal was first explicitly proposed in 1969 by the small Marxist splinter group the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.3 According to Khalidi, “It was [then] discreetly but effectively backed by the leaders of the mainstream, dominant Fatah movement . . . The democratic secular state model eventually became the official position of the PLO.”4 As I have said, this is pure invention. The PNC, PLO, and Fatah turned down the DFLP proposal, and it was never adopted or enunciated by any important Palestinian leader or body—though the Western media during the 1970s were forever attributing it to the Palestinians.5 As a result, however, the myth has taken hold that this was the PLO’s official goal through the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

And today, again, and for the same reasons—the phrase retains its good, multicultural, liberal ring—“a secular, democratic Palestine” is bandied about by Palestinian one-state supporters. And a few one-statists, indeed, may sincerely believe in and desire such a denouement. But given the realities of Palestinian politics and behavior, the phrase objectively serves merely as camouflage for the goal of a Muslim Arab–dominated polity to replace Israel. And, as in the past, the goal of “a secular democratic Palestine” is not the platform or policy of any major Palestinian political institution or party.

Indeed, the idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance"

Rejection of two states

"Various Palestinian bodies and leaders continued through the 1990s to explicitly enunciate the one-state goal. Only under continuous Israeli and American pressure, the PLO very reluctantly appeared to inch away from it. Throughout the period, Arafat, in his speeches in Arabic, persisted in employing terminology—such as “we shall plant the Arab flag on the walls of Jerusalem,” “with blood and fire we shall redeem Palestine,” and “the sanctity of the Return”—that, for Palestinians, was code for the elimination of Israel and the conquest of all of Palestine. In all, as many Israelis saw it, the Palestinians’ prevarication, stonewalling and semantic manipulations in the course of the Oslo process were not so much tactical means to garner the support of a radical public as candid expressions of a will to avoid abandoning the traditional, one-state ideology. Arafat’s Johannesburg sermon was both symbol and reality."

"But given his past beliefs and behavior, a more logical interpretation of his behavior in 2000—and, it should be noted, none of his aides (Abu Mazen, Abu Alaa, Nabil Sha‘at, Sa‘ib Erikat) stood up at the time and dissented from Arafat’s “nos”—is that he was still wedded to the one-state solution and wanted all of Palestine. His responses on the Temple Mount issue—“no” to every proposed compromise and his denial of Jewish history and rights—was indicative of his wider mindset: there was no legitimacy to Zionism and Israel or their claims. Arafat rejected the terms offered in July and December 2000 not because of their detail but because of their underlying principle: two states for two peoples."

"Arafat and his aides consistently declined to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State,” a refusal still characteristic of the PNA leadership. In November 2007, Sa‘ib Erikat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator (and a Palestinian “moderate”), said: “The Palestinians won’t accept Israel as a Jewish state.”6 Mahmoud Abbas, the PNA president, put the same idea succinctly a few days later, in Cairo, on his way home from the Annapolis peace summit: “The Palestinians do not accept the formula that the State of Israel is a Jewish State . . . We say that Israel exists and in Israel there are Jews and there are those who are not Jews.”7 So much for two states for two peoples."

"Nothing has changed since 1937. Or, more accurately, things have changed mainly in directions that make the establishment of a viable binational state even less likely than seventy years ago. During the intervening decades, the fear and hatred of the “other” in each community have grown considerably—as a result, on the Jewish side, of the bouts of Arab terrorism, which have progressively increased in viciousness and scope, and the growing Islamization and political radicalization of the Palestinian Arabs; and, on the Arab side, as a result of their violent defeat, displacement, and dispossession in 1948, the subsequent bouts of Israeli counterterrorist operations that have often resulted in substantial civilian death, and the grinding, stifling Israeli occupation of the territories that has contributed substantially to the psychological, political, and economic misery of the inhabitants since 1967. If Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic, today—in view of what has happened—they are very real. And if Jewish fears in the 1930s of Arab intentions to push them “into the sea”—to destroy the Zionist enterprise and perhaps slaughter the Yishuv—were, if heartfelt, unrealistic (as it turned out), today they are very real, as are Jewish fears of a nuclear Holocaust at Islamic hands. These fears and hatreds make a shared binational state, in which each community inevitably would seek to dominate the other, if only to prevent the other’s domination of itself, inconceivable."

Tilley

"Tilley argues, on the contrary, that “although Arabs are certainly not immune from anti-Semitism, Arab language against ‘the Jews’” is a response primarily to the explicit Zionist “privileging of ‘the Jews’ and to the Palestinians’ expulsion and dis- possession.” No, Arabs do not really hate the Jews, she writes. For example, take the suicide bombers, who for more than a decade now have haunted Israel’s buses and restaurants: “Relative to the scope of the military occupation and the size of the Palestinian population under occupation, suicide bombings and other attacks—despite their broadly terrifying impact—have remained a tiny fringe phenomenon,” she writes.14 But Tilley ignores the broad popularity that these suicide bombings enjoyed—and still enjoy—in the Palestinian cities, ignores the crowds that swamped the streets of Ramallah and Gaza and Nablus when news arrived of a “success” in Tel Aviv or Haifa; ignores the Fatah/Hamas custom of handing out sweets to passersby with each “successful” bombing; and ignores the veneration the bombers are accorded in all West Bank and Gaza schools, their postered faces looking down from the walls in every classroom. Second, the relatively small number of successful suicide bombings during the years 1993–2008 was a function more of Shin Bet and IDF prevention and interdiction (and the security fence) than of Palestinian inhibitions or restraint. The suicide bombings, as every poll among Palestinians has shown were, and remain, immensely popular.

...She compares Palestine/Israel to what happened in Algeria in the 1960s and says that the Arab societies in both deemed settler colonization “illegitimate”—but she fails to note that in the Algerian case, the Arabs ended up driving out the country’s million-odd white settlers, lock, stock, and barrel."

Demography

"But to return to demography. Regarding the potential for a binational solution, matters have changed for the worse since the 1930s in other ways. As the Muslim proportion of the Palestine Arab population has grown, and grown more devout, so the proportion of Christians—the more Westernized and “liberal” sector among the Arabs—has steadily diminished (it now stands at less than 5 percent); Christian Arab families have tended to have fewer children and, proportionately, have emigrated in far greater numbers to the West and out of the conflict.

At the same time, the massive immigration of Jews from Islamic lands to Israel in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s has increased the Sephardi proportion of the Jewish population. This has had a double effect. On one hand, the country’s Jewish community to a degree has been orientalized, for example, in cuisine and various aspects of public behavior. This might have helped pave the way to binationalism (via some shared values—the centrality of family and clan, for example—among Israeli Sephardis, at least of the first, immigrating generation, with the Palestine Arabs). But these “orientalizing” factors have been offset by the psychological and ideological baggage these immigrants brought with them and which they passed down to their children and grandchildren—which contained an essential hatred for the Arabs, stemming from the discrimination and occasional violence they had suffered in the Muslim-majority countries from whence they came, and commensurate hard-line, anti-Arab politics and voting patterns once in Israel. At the same time, the second, third, and fourth generations of Sephardi descent have gradually been Westernized, distancing them, in terms of values, from the Arab societies of their familial origin. Today, most Israeli Jews, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, look to the West for their values, ideas, markets, holidays, books, movies, music, and television shows.

A second demographic change on the Jewish side, speeded up by the events of 1967, was the vast increase in the proportion of ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews in the overall population and the decline in the proportion of secular Jews, who are generally more liberal and open-minded than their religious compatriots. This change has been reflected in the steady growth of ultra- Orthodox and Orthodox political representation and power in both Labor- and Likud-led coalition governments. (For example, in Jerusalem, Israel’s most populous city at 650,000 inhabitants, the demographic changes have resulted in the election for the first time, in 2003, of an ultra-Orthodox mayor with an ultra- Orthodox–Orthodox majority in the municipal council.) The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox are generally hard-liners on Arab- related issues and prone to expansionist and racist thinking.

The large, one-million-strong wave of immigrants who arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union and its former component republics in the late 1980s and 1990s, with the collapse of communism, injected a large, secular population into the Jewish demographic tableau. But this has not appreciably aided the cause of binationalism. The Soviet olim tended to bring with them hard-line, right-wing political instincts. Among the Russian Jews in Israel there will be few takers for the binational paradigm; they and their parents endured anti-Semitism and saw quite enough of life among, alongside, and under the Gentiles. For them, the Arabs are just a new version of Gentiles—and ones for whom they generally have contempt."

"Despite some of the foregoing, Israeli Jewish society remains largely secular, with Western, democratic values predominating. These can hardly dovetail with the authoritarian and religious values of Palestine Arab society, which is moving steadily toward greater religiosity. Forty years ago few Arab women in the territories and inside Israel wore scarves or veils; today they are the norm. Decades ago, there were functioning cinema houses in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (and East Jerusalem); to- day there are none. The second-class status of women and the ostracism, indeed vilification, of homosexuals are norms in West Bank and Gaza society (as in most of the Arab world), and honor killings, both in Israeli Arab society and in the Palestinian territories—of wives, sisters, daughters—for infringing traditional behavioral or dress codes or for flirting with the wrong males, let alone for sleeping with them, are common. These are not the norms of Israeli Jewish society."

"The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds. The value placed on human life and the rule of (secular) law is completely different—as exhibited, in Israel itself, in the vast hiatus between Jewish and Arab perpetration of crimes18 and lethal road traffic violations.19 Arabs, to put it simply, proportionally commit far more crimes (and not only ones connected to property) and commit far more lethal traffic violations than do Jews."

Peel Commission

"The Peel Commission had no historical precedent to go by in looking at the nature of a possible one-state solution with a Jewish majority and an Arab minority. There had never been such a polity. But, to be sure, the commissioners understood that the Arabs of Palestine, and perhaps those of the surrounding states, would never acquiesce in such an arrangement and that it would be a recipe for perpetual violence and warfare, whether or not the Jews treated the Arab minority fairly.

But the commission certainly had plenty of historical precedents for the opposite arrangement, of states with Arab Muslim majorities and Jewish minorities. And the history of such states gave no grounds for optimism about the possible fair treatment of the minority by the majority. Indeed, Islamic history was replete with empires and states controlled by Arab Muslim majorities with Jewish (and other) minorities—and the minorities had always been discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, expelled and repeatedly slaughtered, or subjected to forced conversions (contrary to what Arab propagandists, eager for a one-state, Muslim majority–Jewish minority solution in Palestine, are wont to tell gullible audiences in the West). That is why the Arab Middle East and North Africa, which were Christian- majority areas before the Islamic conquests, now have almost no Christian or Jewish populations (the sole exceptions being Egypt, with its cowed Coptic Christian minority, and Sudan, with its em- battled Christian communities in the south, which over the decades have suffered more than a million deaths at Muslim hands).">)