The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  So much for the Palestinian state. But outside Number 10, the networks were telling their viewers—in the words of the man from the BBC—that Netanyahu had “little room for compromise” because of his divided cabinet. There was no hint in his broadcast that Israel was not abiding by the terms of the signed Oslo agreement. Bar Ilan spelled out the situation all too well. Israel wanted more security from Arafat and demanded that he reduce the number of his Palestinian policemen. Better security, fewer policemen. Who dreamed up these crazy formulas?

  There was a moment that captured the hopelessness of the Middle East “peace process.” On a sofa just outside the coffee salon of the Churchill Hotel in London on the second day of the talks, I came upon a familiar figure slumped on the sofa. There was no obvious security, no policemen, just the tall, dark-haired State Department spokesman and the woman sitting white-faced with exhaustion in the corner of the settee. Madeleine Albright looked on the point of collapse. Only hours before, she had telephoned Arafat to plead her excuses. She could not come to see him as agreed, she said. She was simply too tired to drive over to Claridge’s for their meeting. Arafat burst into laughter when the call was over. Never mind that his own state of health—shocking to behold when only a few feet from him, his right hand clutching his shaking left hand, his lower lip moving helplessly when he wasn’t speaking—was far worse than Mrs. Albright’s. But when it came to Netanyahu a few hours later, Albright was off in her limousine to meet the Israeli prime minister at his own hotel.

  What came over most strongly—even more shocking than the state of Arafat’s health—was Albright’s fear of Netanyahu, indeed perhaps of Israel. Arafat and the PLO had already accepted America’s conditions for the 11 May 1998 invitation to meet President Clinton in Washington. Netanyahu had not responded. He was flying back to Israel to “consult” his cabinet. But when Albright talked to us all later—hesitant and sometimes confusing or forgetting questions—she was all praise for the Israeli leader who was forging ahead with Jewish settlements on the land Arafat wanted as part of his Palestinian state. Netanyahu was “encouraging.” He had produced “new ideas.” He was enthusiastic. He was “helpful.” She was very grateful to Netanyahu. “It is obviously up to Israel to decide what its security demands are”—goodbye, then, to those Palestinian policemen. But when we asked Albright what all those “new ideas” were, we were informed that “more details do not help us to move forward.”

  This was meaningless. Yet still she talked of “progress”—I counted the word at least eighteen times in just a few minutes. And so did Tony Blair in his own appearance before the press. Here was another of those verbal punctuation marks, its increasing frequency making its use ever more suspect. Arafat said he had “heard” from Albright that there had been “progress.” It was when I asked him if he did not now regret signing the Oslo accords that the old man’s eyes suddenly widened and his voice took on its old strength. “The peace agreement I signed was the peace of the brave,” he replied. “I signed with my partner Yitzhak Rabin, who paid for his life with this peace. It is our firm duty that we continue with the just endeavour we signed with Mr. Rabin and Peres.” There was no mention of Netanyahu. And in what Netanyahu and Albright said, there was no mention of the “peace of the brave”; with inappropriate flippancy, Albright remarked of America’s peace-making efforts that “it’s up to the parties [to decide] as to whether we are serving the vegetables well.” Perhaps that would be written on Oslo’s tombstone.

  At an autumn 1998 private dinner party in the White House with junior members of the Jordanian royal family, President Clinton unburdened himself of a few thoughts on Benjamin Netanyahu. There were fewer than a dozen guests and he was talking to men and women who would sympathise with his remarks. “I am the most pro-Israeli president since Truman,” he announced to his guests. “But the problem with Bibi is that he cannot recognise the humanity of the Palestinians.” Stripped of its false humility—Clinton was surely more pro-Israeli than Truman— the president had put his finger on Netanyahu’s most damaging flaw: his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans, his conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book A Place Among the Nations, which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu’s policies but of the whole Netanyahu government.

  Yet within just a few days, he was presiding over yet another “peace” accord— at Wye—which effectively placed the Palestinians in the role of supplicants. The main section in the Wye agreement was not about withdrawals but about “security”—and this was liberally laced with references to “terrorists,” “terrorist cells” and “terrorist organisations,” involving, of course, only Palestinian violence. There was not a single reference to killers who had come from the Jewish settler community.

  Arafat’s torture was exquisite. Each new accord with Israel involved a subtle rewriting of previous agreements. Madrid—with all its safeguards for the Palestinians—turned into Oslo—no safeguards at all, and a system of Israeli withdrawal that was so constructed that deadlines no longer had to be met. This turned into the 1997 Hebron agreement—which allowed Jewish colonists to stay in the town and made an Israeli withdrawal contingent upon an end to anti-Israeli violence. In 1998 the Wye agreement even dropped the “land for peace” logo. It was now billed as the “Land for Security” agreement, “peace” being at least temporarily unobtainable. Peace means respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence—but it also means prison, hatred and, as we already knew, torture. In return, the Palestinians could have 40 per cent of their territory under their control—as opposed to the 90 per cent they expected under Oslo. And the CIA, that most trustworthy and moral of institutions, would be in the West Bank to ensure that Arafat arrested the usual suspects.

  The Palestinian Authority had not prevented Hamas from attacking Israelis— any more than Israel could prevent it from doing so before Oslo—but now, miraculously, they would succeed with the help of the CIA. Palestinians holding illegal weapons would be disarmed. The thousands of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land who had weapons—and who condemned even the watered-down version of Wye as “treachery”—would not be disarmed. Israelis should have been able to live without fear. So should Palestinians. But security comes from peace, not the other way round. And 3 per cent of the Palestinian land from which Israel would now withdraw was to become—perhaps the most farcical of Oslo’s many manifestations—a “nature reserve” upon which Palestinians could not build homes. One wondered what kind of wild animals were supposed to roam inside this protected area. And what kind of wild animals would now roam outside its walls.

  No word in Wye, then, of the Jewish “terror organisations,” no hope of controlling settler groups that would attack Palestinians in the future. In July 2001, for example, one such group—a “terror” group by Israel’s own definition, although the international press called them “guerrillas” or “vigilantes”—fired dozens of bullets into a car carrying eight Palestinians home from a pre-wedding party in the small town of Idna on the West Bank. Mohamed Salameh Tmaizeh and his relative Mohamed Hilmi Tmaizeh died on the spot. Five others were wounded. The third fatality was Diya Tmaizeh, a baby just three months old. This is not an excuse for Palestinian violence or “terror”—a Palestinian sniper also killed a Jewish baby at a settlement in Hebron—but there was a vital difference. Palestinians were to be disarmed. Jewish colonists were not.

  How did the United States allow this to happen? Ignorance, weakness in the face of Israel’s powerful American lobby groups, intellectual idleness when confronted by issues of massive complexity: all these may provide a clue. But it was a general irresponsibility that pervaded U.S. policy. Clinton wanted to be the author of a “peace” that he stubbornly refused to guarantee. We heard the old refrain from Clinton, that while Washington could “bring the parties together,” i
t was for “the parties themselves” to take the “hard decisions.” Thus Israel, infinitely the more powerful of the two parties—Palestinian tanks, after all, were not occupying Tel Aviv—could act as it wished within or outside the framework of the Oslo accord. Off the record, we would be told—like the Jordanian dinner guests at the White House—of Clinton’s exasperation with Netanyahu.94 Publicly, he would be silent. Yet when Palestinian violence was inflicted on Israelis, Clinton was in lionlike mode, calling the killers “yesterday’s men” in Amman, and at Wye lecturing the world on the “hate” that would undoubtedly greet the latest success for “peace.”

  Sloppy use of language was also one of the most dangerous aspects of successive American “peace” accords. Clinton was good on cliché and rhetoric but— ironically, in view of his pedantry in responding to the grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky—lazy when it came to points of detail. Despite all the handshakes and platitudes at Wye, for example, both Palestinians and Israelis went home with diametrically opposite ideas of what had been achieved. Netanyahu was able to assure Jewish colonists that there would be no Palestinian state, while Arafat’s men could persuade their few remaining supporters that another Israeli withdrawal would be another step towards statehood. No sooner had Netanyahu returned to Israel than his foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, urged settlers to “seize every hilltop they can” in the West Bank.

  In a real battle of wits between equal partners, Arafat might have made a few Netanyahu-like conditions: no continuation of the “peace process” unless Israel renounced its exclusive claim to Jerusalem as a capital—which precluded “final status” talks; no more Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land; no more negotiations until Netanyahu ended Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians. But Arafat could not do that—and Washington would not talk to him if he did. So the Wye talks probably ended any Palestinian hope for a just peace. Israel would be allowed to go on building more Jewish settlements on occupied land, confiscating Palestinian identity papers, demolishing Palestinian homes. And Arafat—for perhaps 14 per cent of the 22 per cent of mandate “Palestine” that was left—had promised to protect the Israelis who were building the settlements, confiscating the identity papers and demolishing the homes.

  All the while, U.S. “peace envoys” continued to visit Netanyahu and Arafat as part of America’s “impartial” stewardship of the Middle East “peace.” Every Palestinian knew that the four principal members of this team were Jewish. There was no public discussion in the Western press of the ethnic makeup of the American team. Nor, in principle, should there have been. American foreign service officers or appointees—like any other citizens of a democracy—should hold their posts regardless of their ethnic or racial origins. But Dennis Ross, the lead negotiator, was a former and prominent staff member of the most powerful Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was rarely mentioned in the American press, but was surely a matter of vital importance. If the chief negotiator had been the ex-staffer member of an Arab lobby group, Israel would have made its views known at once. And if all four main negotiators had been Muslims, be sure that this would be a matter of legitimate discussion in the world’s press. In the Israeli press, however, the membership of the American team was a matter of comment. When the Ross delegation came to Jerusalem, the Israeli newspaper Maariv called it “the mission of four Jews” and talked about the Israeli connections of the men. Israeli journalists noted that one of them had a son undergoing military training in Israel. It was the Israeli writer and activist Meron Benvenisti who highlighted this in Ha’aretz. The ethnic origin of U.S. diplomats sent to the Middle East to promote peace, he wrote,

  may be irrelevant, but it is hard to ignore the fact that manipulation of the peace process was entrusted by the U.S. in the first place to American Jews, and that at least one member of the State Department team was selected for the task because he represented the view of the American Jewish establishment. The tremendous influence of the Jewish establishment on the Clinton administration found its clearest manifestation in redefining the “occupied territories” as “territories in dispute.” The Palestinians are understandably angry. But lest they be accused of anti-Semitism, they cannot, God forbid, talk about Clinton’s “Jewish connection” . . .

  Nor did we as journalists dare to raise this issue. To do so would have brought the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism, racism, bias. It was quite acceptable for Israel’s supporters to raise issues of family or national origin if others criticised its actions. When, for example, the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, instructed his military adviser, Dutch Major General Franklin van Kappen, to conduct an investigation into the Israeli massacre of 106 Lebanese refugees at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996, a pro-Israeli newspaper condemned the decision on the grounds that van Kappen came from a country which had surrendered its Jews to the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet when a former AIPAC staff member was appointed America’s top peace negotiator, no questions were asked. Thank God, I often remark, for Israeli journalism.

  Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung. “Peace in our time,” it tolls. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. The moment Ehud Barak was elected Labour prime minister of Israel in 1999, the satellite television boys and girls—along with the ever-supine BBC World Service—were putting the “peace process” back “on track” once more, even though Barak had made it clear that Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel, that major Jewish settlements would stay and that no Palestinian refugees from 1948 could expect to return to their original Arab villages.

  Barak wanted talks with the Syrians, and the same old negotiating routine was quickly re-established. The Syrians still wanted the return of all of Golan. But why wouldn’t the Syrians accept just a bit of Golan? Or Golan with the settlements? Or part of Golan plus an unknown number of Israeli troops to maintain early warning stations? The world was reminded that Syria had “threatened” Israel from Golan before the 1967 war.95 But Assad called Barak an honest and “strong” man, for he, too, did not want to be blamed for any new failures. When Clinton travelled to meet Assad when Labour was previously in power in Israel, Syria had been portrayed as the nation that rejected peace, “the spanner in the works,” in the words of CNN’s reporter. In truth, nothing had changed. Israel wanted diplomatic relations and economic links with Damascus before any discussion of how much of Golan might be returned to Syria. Having watched Arafat writhing with this equation— only to find that having recognised Israel and compromised the very idea of statehood, Israel would decide Palestine’s future—Assad was not enamoured of the idea that this was, in Clinton’s own words, a “golden opportunity” to make peace. It was a familiar scenario. Accept Israel’s version of peace and Syria could be overwhelmed by conditions she could not meet. Refuse, and Syria would be blamed for opposing peace and become an enemy of peace and—ergo—an enemy of the United States.

  The pumpkin of the Oslo agreement could never be turned into the golden carriage of peace, but it took the collapse of the Arafat–Barak talks at Camp David in 2000 to prove this true. Even then, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the Oslo negotiations were “based” on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338— which was not what Oslo said at all—and even Arafat must have realised that the end had come when Madeleine Albright made her preposterous offer of “a sense of sovereignty” over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem. Only the silly villages that Arafat might have controlled outside his would-be capital would have “virtually full sovereignty,” according to the Americans. There then followed the wilfully misleading leaks to the effect that Arafat had turned down 95 per cent of “Palestine”—in reality around 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” that was left. Barak would not give up Jerusalem or abandon the settlements. Arafat would not make the “concession” of ceding Israeli control over all of Jerusalem. So the s
ons of Abraham acknowledged what so many Israelis and Palestinians knew all along: that Oslo didn’t work. Clinton predictably saw fit to praise the stronger of the two parties; he spoke of Barak’s “courage” and “vision,” but merely of Arafat’s commitment. So much for America’s role as “honest broker” of the Middle East peace. Offered virtual sovereignty to secure virtual peace, the Palestinian leadership—corrupt and effete and undemocratic—preferred failure to humiliation.

  Arafat thus returned to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. For once, the old man had not offered another capitulation. He had stood up to the United States. And Israel. He was a “Saladin.” “Saladin of the century,” no less. It was all sorry stuff. This Saladin was not going to gallop into Jerusalem. Instead, the city was to be the scene of repeated carnage as Jew and Arab Muslim attacked each other in the coming months. In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places—above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount—accompanied by about a thousand Israeli policemen. Within twenty-four hours, Israeli snipers opened fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians “were felt to be endangering the lives of officers.” Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly ten years after armed Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War.