A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  You would want to see immediate action by the Quartet … to stop the demolition of the houses, and that is going to take the kind of action and will and resources and confrontation that quite frankly, today, I don’t see anybody in the international community willing to take.

  Anwar said, ‘That tells us pandering to Israeli killers is more important than protecting Palestinian civilians. Soon after came the usual “compensation” – guilty governments donating millions to rebuild homes. But you can’t resurrect the dead with donations.’

  Anwar’s blood pressure rose perceptibly as I recalled my private view, in November 2008, of Tony Blair’s three armoured vehicles in their cordoned-off corner behind Jerusalem’s American Colony hotel. To the man and woman in the street such monster machines symbolise aggression and mistrust while ensuring that the Quartet’s leader can have no real contact with those he is being overpaid to help. Their cost (more than US$400,000) came in 2007 from the UN Development Programme’s ‘Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People’. They are little used; Blair has many fish to fry and the Palestinian People are mere minnows – for whom $400,000 could do a lot if invested in a refugee camp.

  The Quartet’s headquarters, where Blair appears now and then for a few days, occupies a whole floor of one of Jerusalem’s most expensive hotels and Britain’s taxpayers foot most of this seriously astronomical bill. ‘But doesn’t Britain have austerity now?’ said Anwar. ‘Do the taxpayers know …?’

  I guesstimated. ‘Perhaps 0.5 per cent know and even they may not care. In democracies people who work hard and pay taxes are conditioned not to fret about how their money is wasted. Unless some media person goes on the trail of who is wasting it. Then citizens become indignant – in a passive way, and not for long.’*

  During my residency in Balata refugee camp Blair briefly visited the neighbouring city of Nablus, allowing me to glimpse the Quartet’s methodology. For security reasons, only the staffs of the city’s various UN agencies were aware of his presence among us. Not until he was safely back in his American Colony nook did the word get around – ‘Blair’s been here!’ Balata’s 26,000 refugees (four generations of them by now) were not on his agenda. In recent years, while the unemployment statistics become ever more harrowing, most UNRWA camps have suffered a reduction in funding. How come another UN agency can afford to spend $400,000 on three vehicles to assist the Palestinian People?

  My breakfast visit had extended into the afternoon. ‘Come again!’ said Anwar. ‘I want to talk about the future.’ We fixed a day, then I left him with a cheering observation. In Israel and on the West Bank, I had found at least one sentiment uniting Israelis and Palestinians – scorn for Tony Blair.

  * * *

  On the Quartet’s first appearance in 2002 I pounced on the name as a fudge probably presaging new rounds of fake ‘peace talks’. (The reality is worse.) Russia, the US, the EU, the UN (always represented by its Secretary-General) – how to unravel that knot? Russia, the US, the EU’s member states – all are among the UN’s 191 member states. So what’s going on here? Ten years later, we know.

  This international sponsor for the fictional ‘Peace Process’ is another tool with which the US shapes the Palestinians’ destiny for Israel’s benefit. An ad hoc committee, with no mandate from anyone, it has been led since his retirement from No. 10 by Tony Blair who uses it to collect an astounding selection of valuable feathers for nesting purposes.

  In April 2003 President George W. Bush unrolled his Quartet-endorsed ‘Road Map to Peace’ which aroused tremendous international enthusiasm amongst those Middle East commentators who know not of what they speak or write. Apparently everyone was heading towards ‘a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict by 2005’.

  Within a year Bush Jnr had in effect torn up his lovely new map by writing to Ariel Sharon (then prime minister) assuring him the US would never expect Israel to quit the West Bank’s city-sized settlements. This merely echoed President Clinton’s 2001 letter to Palestinian and Israeli leaders, approving ‘the incorporation into Israel of settlement blocks’. Yet to some eyes it brought tears of disillusionment.

  In 2005 Quartet statements misinterpreted the withdrawal from Gaza and more than 5,000 journalists arrived in Gaza City to report on this momentous event and write up ‘Ariel Sharon, Man of Peace’. The Quartet had made no mention of the blockade and a few months later were embarrassed when James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, complained after visiting Gaza, ‘Israel is almost acting as though there has been no withdrawal.’

  Meanwhile the Quartet’s leader had a few other things on his mind. A private firm, Tony Blair Associates (remember Kissinger Associates?) feeds on very private consulting contracts linked to the sort of Arabs you get to meet if Israel favours you. The Emir of Kuwait paid $40 million for advice on ‘reforms’. More millions came from UAE coffers. Tony Blair Associates enjoyed an annual $2 million retainer from JP Morgan for ‘strategic’ advice. In 2007 JP Morgan arranged a $2 billion loan for Qatari telecoms company Q-Tel to buy the mobile company Wataniya. Wataniya wanted to operate on the West Bank and in November 2009 Blair successfully persuaded Israel to release the necessary frequencies – in exchange for the PA’s promise to forget the Goldstone Report on Cast Lead war crimes.

  The Strip’s territorial waters hold an estimated $6 billion worth of natural gas fields and for their exploitation Blair tried to fix a deal between British Gas and Israel. This would be ‘good for Gaza’, he proclaimed. Yet all negotiations were with Netanyahu, not a prime minister known for giving Gazans their fair share.

  The Quartet spends vast sums of public money but because of its peculiar genesis Blair can forget all about the normal ‘conflicts of interest’ and ‘disclosure’ regulations that bind British government officials and UN employees.

  This committee’s main task seems to be to make it easier for Israel to breach the Geneva Conventions with impunity – a function so obvious that one of President Abbas’s senior aides, Nabil Shaath, has gone public to denounce Blair for acting as Israel’s ‘defence attorney’. A French diplomat agrees with this. Anis Nacrour, once a senior advisor to Blair in the Quartet’s Jerusalem office, now talks of ‘… a smokescreen for the actions of the Americans and the tandem between Americans and Israelis. At the end of the day, all this was for buying time for allowing the Israeli government to do whatever they wanted to do.’

  This explains why Ban Ki-moon accepts directives from the Quartet rather than from an authorised UN agency. The UN Human Rights Council in September 2010 agreed with the finding of the ICRC – Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza is illegal. Ignoring that, a UN Secretary-General, who has taken an oath to uphold international law, wrote in May 2011 to the relevant Mediterranean governments urging them to ‘use their influence’ to stymie the 2011 Freedom Flotilla II (in which I had invested quite a lot of energy and some money, hoping to arrive in Gaza by boat). Ban Ki-moon referred to the Flotilla as ‘not helpful’ because ‘assistance and goods destined to Gaza should be channelled through legitimate crossings and established channels’. This semi-literate wording is taken from a Quartet statement put out as part of the US/Israel manoeuvre to avoid another confrontation on the high seas.

  As Ali Abunimah has noted, nobody knows who hired Blair or who can fire him. Anwar had told me his Ramallah contacts were reporting rumours of a move to sack him – politely, of course, by sending formal requests to the United Nations Development Programme and the British government. Anwar sighed and shook his head. ‘I told my PA friends that won’t work, the Quartet is too valuable, he’ll never let go.’ I remembered this prediction on 6 October 2011 when The Financial Times reported:

  Mohammed Ishtayeh, a top member of Fatah and confidant of Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview: ‘I call on Tony Blair to resign. There is a consensus among the Palestinian leadership that people are dissatisfied with his performance’ … Nabil Shaath, another aide to Mr Abbas, said, ‘He simply d
oes not want to do anything that angers the Israelis, which sometimes makes him sound like them.’

  A spokesman for Mr Blair denied the envoy had a pro-Israel bias. A Western diplomat said the Quartet was unlikely to dismiss him. ‘At the highest levels, Blair retains the confidence of the political leadership of the Quartet, except maybe Russia, which I can’t see wanting a massive fight over him.’

  Take heed – how the political leadership of the Palestinians views this envoy counts for nothing.

  * * *

  The British glanced at a one-state solution, binationalism, before Partition in 1947. Finding themselves unable any longer to contain the guerrilla war in Mandatory Palestine, they proposed a temporary international trusteeship with local autonomy for both Arabs and Jews and a generously subsidised binational state as the eventual reward for living happily together. Enthusiastic backing for this plan came from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the then president of the Hebrew University, Judah Magnes; most Zionists and Palestinians didn’t even stop to consider it.

  In 1967, a few weeks after the Six Day War, a distinguished French Jew, Maxime Rodinson, felt worried and wrote:

  How is Israel to keep the conquered territories under her dominion? Either the system becomes democratic, or even remains simply liberal and parliamentary – in which case the Arabs will very soon be in the majority, and that will be the end of the dream of a Jewish State for which so many sacrifices have been made. Or else the Arabs will be treated as second-class citizens, discrimination will become institutional, a kind of South African policy will be introduced. This, together with the necessarily increasingly savage repression of increasingly bold acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare, will lose Israel the support of world public opinion.

  This Sorbonne professor of Old South Arabian languages may have been the first outsider to discern the underlying affinity between South Africa’s white Nationalists and political Zionism’s Ashkenazi leaders. In 2012 his foresight seems quite uncanny.

  In the late 1960s Fatah toyed with the notion of binationalism but were soon cowed by the height of the hurdles. Then Yasser Arafat took it off everyone’s agenda by clumsily presenting it, in his 1974 address to the UN General Assembly, as a secular ploy for undermining the Jewishness of the State of Israel. In 1988 the PLO reluctantly recognised Israel’s ‘right to exist’ and formally adopted the ‘two-state solution’.

  Digging deep in my Palestine/Israel file, I came upon a long essay (‘Where is Israel Going?’, New York Review of Books, 7 October 1982) by Nahum Goldmann, for many years president of the World Jewish Congress. Written shortly before his death, at the age of 87, it is a sad and angry reaction to Israel’s ‘presumptuous invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut’. Thirty years on, it remains relevant.

  Undoubtedly, Israel will gain a military victory. However, up to now every military victory has only resulted in new political difficulties … Despite their arrogance and stubbornness the Israelis are smart enough to understand that without the support of the US they have no chance to succeed with their politics of aggression … Many members of the Jewish elite in America have protested to Begin against his policies … An Israel whose main achievements are military ones – an Israel that concentrates all its energies on military superiority – would deeply distort the image of the Jewish people in the eyes of non-Jews … If Israel’s martial characteristics continue to prevail for a long time, the Jewish people will lose their unique character. In the long run this would endanger no less than the very foundations of its existence.

  Seven years later, in the International Herald Tribune (14 March 1989), Steven Pearlstein, one of ‘the Jewish elite in America’ deplored Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

  American Jews once could be counted on to give Israel everything it wanted … most of all, help in gaining the unwavering support of the greatest military and economic power on earth. These attitudes have begun to change … and I wonder whether it isn’t time to think about giving Israel one last thing – its independence. Not an easy gift to deliver … Like any stepparents, American Jewry finds it difficult to cut the cord but Israel seems to need such a new relationship … US support has enabled the country to make itself into the overwhelming military power in the Middle East, creating for its leaders a false set of choices as they attempt to make peace with enemies outside their border and within.

  Fast forward to 6 December 1997 when The Economist reported that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had agreed to withdraw its troops from the West Bank. However, this decision

  prompted gratified winks and nods as the ‘greater Israel’ loyalists in the cabinet and the Knesset assured each other that nothing would happen as a result of the peace initiative announced on November 30th and designed only to head off mounting American pressure on the Prime Minister.

  Sure enough, nothing did happen.

  Ten months later Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi (a Palestinian writer and negotiator) flew a kite in Prospect (October 1998). Following the Oslo debacle, he noted:

  A small but increasingly influential circle of Palestinians is posing binationalism as a practical alternative … This solution may emerge faute de mieux. Most Israelis see it as a threat … but a credible and peacefully articulated Palestinian campaign for binationalism and ‘one man, one vote’ will demand a better response than the mere reiteration of faith in exclusivist ‘blood and soil’ nationalism … A concept of citizenship whereby every individual has the same rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of the other’s enemies.

  Since that powerful intervention the debate had become vigorous though chiefly confined to the New York Review of Books, the Boston Review, the Arab World Geographer and Al-Ahram Weekly. In the last-named, Sharif S. Elmusa, professor of political science at Cairo’s American University, has argued persuasively (27 April–3 May 2006) for a binational state in Greater Palestine: Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. For complicated reasons, lucidly explained by Professor Elmusa, the inclusion of Jordan (which has a majority Palestinian population) could solve more problems than it creates by catering for the needs of very many refugees. It’s easy to forget those millions in al-Shatat – in exile, not allowed to return to any part of Mandatory Palestine. They have been shamefully neglected since Oslo spawned the PA, which concerns itself only with the West Bank and Gaza.

  The ancillary argument, about an end to the US annual subsidy of $4 billion (from government and private donors), is heard wherever people gather to discuss this conflict. In a review of Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion (London Review of Books, 23 June 2005), James Wood put it thus:

  … one might wonder whether a key to it all would be the cessation of indiscriminate economic and political support of Israel by the United States. If the task is to persuade Israel to get in touch with its own demons, this might speed up the process …

  Those demons have been unflinchingly diagnosed by David Shulman in the New York Review of Books (24 February 2011):

  There is a studied blindness to the cumulative trauma that we Israelis have inflicted upon the Palestinians in the course of realising our own national goals … This is no ordinary blindness; it is a sickness of the soul that takes many forms, from the silence and passivity of ordinary decent people to the malignant forms of racism and proto-fascist nationalism that are becoming more and more evident and powerful in today’s Israel, including segments of the present government.

  In What Does a Jew Want? (2011, ed. Udi Aloni), Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, promotes the use of ‘binational’ rather than ‘one-state’:

  People have reasonable fears that a ‘one-state’ solution would ratify the existing marginalisation and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence … ‘Binationalism’ raises the question of who is t
he ‘we’ who decides what kind of polity is best for this land. The ‘we’ has to be heterogeneous … Everyone who is there and has a claim – and the claims are various.

  Another sort of warning came in 2002 from one of Israel’s most eminent historians, Ilan Pappé, who in 2007 was forced out of Haifa University because he had referred to Zionism’s ‘ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion’. He cautioned:

  We should be very careful now in adopting the American, the Israeli ‘Peace Now!’, and I’m sorry to say, the PA discourse about a two-state solution which nowadays would be not the end of the Occupation but continuing it in a different way with no solution to the refugee problem and the complete abandonment of the Palestinian minority in Israel.

  Yet in January 2009 we find Olivier Roy writing in the International Herald Tribune that the two-state solution, though ‘dead on the ground, remains on the diplomatic agenda’. Sadly, it still remains there, though the bleatings coming from its putative supporters sound increasingly feeble. The binational alternative is never discussed in polite diplomatic circles where collective inertia Rules OK. Its advocacy would involve taking action, being daring, telling the Zionists, ‘You can’t have your pretend “democratic” Jewish state, breaking international law every day of the week. But you could have a shared Land of Canaan, a real democracy in which all have equal rights and responsibilities.’