The Jerusalem Decision

President Trump has said that recognizing Jerusalem a the capital of Israel will advance the peace process. Using the same logic, the fires now threatening Los Angeles might best be fought by dropping gasoline on them instead of water, in order to advance the firefighting process.
While the issue of Jerusalem is largely symbolic, Jerusalem is a powerful symbol.

And the symbol was bizarrely timed. Why now? What possible benefit can be gained that outweighs the damage done by the US acting unilaterally? Despite claims to the contrary, the move gives the impression that the most difficult of the 'final status' issues has been settled, by awarding it to Israel.

This may pass, but I cannot see how it "advances the peace process."

The "What Ifs?" of Yitzhak Rabin, 20 Years Later

Yitzhak Rabin, 1922-1995

Over the past several days Israeli and Western media have been full of appreciations of the late Yitzhak Rabin, shot down by fellow Israeli Yigal Amir 20 years ago tomorrow. Most of what needs to be said has already been said by others, but I want to add a few thoughts of my own.

Speculating about alternative histories, the "what ifs?", is one of the most tempting, but also most futile, of historical enterprises. But in the two decades since Rabin's death, an entire generation of young Israelis and Palestinians has grown up which never knew the heady first years after the Oslo Accords, when so many things seemed possible, even within reach; as opposed to now, when nothing does.

Rabin was an unlikely candidate for peacemaker, but like Richard Nixon going to China or Menachem Begin making peace with Egypt, that may have been an advantage.

Born in Jerusalem in 1922, he would be the first sabra (native-born) Prime Minister (unless one counts a few days Yigal Allon served in an acting capacity between the death of Levi Eshkol and the election of Golda Meir). Chief of Operations for the Palmach during the 1948 War, Rabin soon began to rise through the ranks of the IDF. As Chief of Staff at the outbreak of the 1967 War, an apparent health issue led to controversy, but he overcame it, He served as Ambassador to Washington in 1968-1973, when, as a young grad student, I first saw him speak. In 1973 he was elected to the Knesset and within a year, after Golda Meir's resignation, he was elected leader of the Labor Alignment and found himself Prime Minister.

A religious dispute led to new elections being called in 1977 and a financial controversy saw the victory of Likud under Begin. He returned to office in the 1980s, as Defense Minister in several governments.

During the eighties I was writing on Middle Eastern defense issues and found myself in Israel almost annually and sometimes more. I met Rabin a couple of times and attended several press conferences and may have asked him a question or two, though I surely never "knew" him. He came across as he did to many of his fellow-countrymen: smart and tough but with a rather abrasive personality; crusty, a chain-smoking, raspy-voiced soldier who didn't smile a lot. His personality was a sharp contrast to his longtime Labor rival Shimon Peres, who came across a a nice guy but not that effective, while Rabin was the tough cop who got things done. That may be unfair, but it is how he came across to his audiences.

Rabin won his second term as Prime Minister in 1992 and the following year came the Oslo Accords. The famous handshake between Rabin and Yasser Arafat at the White House says a lot:
Rabin is rather visibly uncomfortable.  In 2013 I compared it to two other uncomfortable Middle Eastern handshakes: that between Generals Giraud and de Gaulle at Casablanca in 1943 and that between Obama and Qadhafi in Italy in 2009.

Oslo seems distant now. The failures which followed, especially the Camp David II collapse, was not one-sided; Arafat and Ehud Barak were both being asked to agree to something neither was ready to do.

What if Rabin had lived? We'll never know. If John F. Kennedy had lived, would he have pulled out of Vietnam as Oliver Stone but few others believe? If Lincoln had lived, would Reconstruction have been different and Jim Crow avoided? If Rabin had, lived, would we have a two-state solution? Thanks to the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, and Yigal Amir, we're never going to know.

Rabin died 20 years ago tomorrow. Oslo died more recently, and many think it's time to take the two-state solution off life support. Would things have been different had he lived? We'll never know, but I want those born or who have come of age since then to know what once, however improbable, once seemed at least possible and even within our grasp. I still want to believe it might have been so.

Guest Post: William R. Polk Offers a Grim Assessment of Prospects for Israel and Palestine

Introductory note by Michael Dunn: On several occasions I have linked to articles by William R.Polk, particularly on Iraq. His extensive experience in the region, as Harvard professor, senior State Department official, founder of the Middle East Studies Department at Chicago, and a author of dozens of books on a wide variety of subjects is always worth listening to. Bill Polk has kindly offered this guest post on the Israel-Palestine issue. It is a grimly pessimistic one. I personally still cling to hopes for a two-state solution,  though clearly, doors are closing. Though I am more optimistic than Professor Polk, his views are clearly expressed and deserve a hearing. As with everything that appears here, the views expressed are those of the author nd do not represent the policy of The Middle East Institute or The Middle East Journal.

Palestine Peace Illusions

by William R. Polk

With the killing of three Israeli teenagers and the apparent revenge murder of a Palestinian youth – possibly burned to death – the hatred between Israelis and Palestinian has reached a new level of obscenity, and it looks like it will get worse. Much worse.

 The major Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in an editorial:

There are no words to describe the horror allegedly done by six Jews to Mohammed Abu Khdeir of Shoafat. Although a gag order bars publication of details of the terrible murder and the identities of its alleged perpetrators, the account of Abu Khdeir’s family — according to which the boy was burned alive — would horrify any mortal. Anyone who is not satisfied with this description can view the horror movie in which members of Israel’s Border Police are seen brutally beating Tariq Abu Khdeir, the murder victim’s 15-year-old cousin.

Or, as Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote about the recent atrocities:

The youths of the Jewish state are attacking Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, just like gentile youths used to attack Jews in the streets of Europe. The Israelis of the Jewish state are rampaging on social networks, displaying hatred and a lust for revenge, unprecedented in its diabolic scope. These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation – Netanyahu’s offspring.

 For five years now, they have been hearing nothing but incitement, scaremongering and supremacy over Arabs from this generation’s true instructor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not one humane word, no commiseration or equal treatment. They grew up with the provocative demand for recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state,’ and they drew the inevitable conclusions.

My own observations accord with these remarks. Over the years since my first visit to what was then the Palestine Mandate in 1946, I have watched the disappearance of the generation of civilized men of the 1930s. Such great Jewish figures as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber who flourished then are forgotten or, if remembered at all, are thought of (by Israelis) to have been naive do-gooders and (by Arabs) to have been just front men for the real Zionists, men like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinians now point out that what the most extreme of their spokesmen told the American investigators (in the King-Crane commission that Woodrow Wilson sent to the Levant in 1919), that they feared what has now happened.

In the words of the then senior British intelligence officer (Kinahan Cornwallis), the Palestinians hold "a deeply felt fear that the Jews not only intended to assume the reins of Government in Palestine but also to expropriate or buy up during the war large tracts of land owned by Moslems and others, and gradually to force them from the country."

The British cabinet already thought something like this was inevitable. It was a price the British were willing to have the Palestinians pay since in 1917-1918 they desperately wanted Jewish support in Germany (where they thought much of the Army was under Jewish officers), In Russia (where they thought Jews were the leaders of the Bolshevik movements for a separate peace that would release large German forces to fight on the Western front) and in America (where they thought Jews could provide financing for their war effort). So, they courted Jewish support in the Balfour Declaration.

In careful compromise they stuck in the Declaration two qualifications — as I recount in two of my early books, Backdrop to Tragedy (with David Stamler and Edmund Asfour) and The United States and the Arab World. They specified their objective as being only "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and emphasized that this was not to denigrate the rights of the Arabs "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Qualifications aside, what has happened was precisely what everyone then knew was likely, the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state.

In a remarkably candid statement on Aug. 11, 1919, Lord Balfour, the titular author of the Declaration, admitted that "so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers [The Allies, Britain and France] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which at least in letter, they have not always intended to violate." (Quoted in my book The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century.)

The history of the past century of Palestine can be summed up in a few words: For their own interests, the British and then the Americans just closed their eyes to the developing tragedy; both were content to have a poor, defenseless Near East people pay the price for Western anti-Semitism.

Predictably, the Jewish community grew, appropriated most of the best land (largely by purchase from absentee owners), and benefited from massive infusions of foreign money (now totaling well over $100 billion, or more than all the aid programs for the rest of the world). Meanwhile, the Jewish fate in Europe moved toward the Holocaust.

What did that actually mean? If I were a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, I certainly would have gone to America and if I could not get in — some could not — to Palestine; if I were an Arab at almost any time from 1920 onward, I would have tried to stop the flood of immigrants. The real culprit is neither the Jew nor the Palestinian. It is us. Anti-Semitism is a Western disease.

What we see today is that the people who really agree with the Jewish terrorists are the Arab terrorists — with the religious fanatics among both peoples increasingly taking the lead. Between them, there is little if any room for people of moderation, much less for decency. Tit-for-Tat is a game played with blood and steel in which no one is or will be immune. There is no end in sight.

So how have we viewed these events? I have listened for my whole professional life to a false dialogue. For years, policymakers and opinion leaders have argued over "solutions" that are unreal or at last tangential. We keep chanting the dirge — one can almost put it to music — one state or two states. Neither is realistic and even if feasible would not solve the fundamental problem. But we seem to believe that, if we can say one or the other often enough, one of them might become acceptable.

It is time to drop the nonsense and face the simple facts. They are these:

In the "one state," the Arabs will be the subjugated minority with few rights and little or any security — they will be the "Jews" of an Israeli Germany or the "Jews" of an Israeli Imperial Russia, cooped up in ghettos, imprisoned, driven into exile or subjected to a final partition. They, their children and their grandchildren will sporadically resist. Their resistance will call forth more hatred and more reprisal. The cycle will continue.

In the "two states," those living in the truncated remnants of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) will be condemned to perpetual poverty and humiliation. They will have almost no usable agricultural land and virtually no water. They will be cut off from possible markets for what little they can produce. They can have no hope of manufacturing because their draw on electricity will be squeezed. Even the limited money they can earn will be closely controlled and often blocked by the Israeli Central Bank as it now is. They will have limited access to health facilities, educational institutions and even contact with one another, segregated as they are and will be by restricted zones, walls and standing security and military forces. They too would periodically resist or strike out in fury and so draw upon themselves reprisals. And so too the cycle of violence will continue or even escalate.

Even those who think of themselves as "Israeli Arabs" will remain, in the eyes of the real Israelis, just Arabs. They will have marginally better, but still limited, lives as they do today. As hatred grows ethnically they too will be drawn into the struggle. They are likely to lose what they have so far kept.

Is there an alternative? Yes, there are three. Which is worse depends upon who does the evaluation.

The one the Israelis want is for the Palestinians to just leave. To go where? To refugee camps or wherever, the Israelis don't care. A reading of all Israeli policies underlines the Israeli intention to make life as unattractive for the Palestinians as world opinion allows. The Israelis admit that the conditions they are creating are worse than South African apartheid was for the Bantu. And always the threat of ethnic cleansing hangs high.

The second alternative, which of course the Palestinians want, is for the Israelis "to go back where they came from." The Arabs day-dream of their relations with the Israelis in parallel to the Crusades. The Crusaders stayed a long time but finally left. The more recent parallel is to the "French" (many of whom were not French at all) pieds noirs in Algeria. It took a century but they too finally left.

The Palestinians keep track of the immigration statistics and observe that in some years more Israelis leave than immigrants come. They also note that a large part of the Israeli population keeps dual citizenship which gives them the option of leaving. New York is said to have a larger Israeli population than Jerusalem.

The third alternative is Armageddon. Israel has a huge store of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and at least once in the past came close to using nuclear weapons. The Arabs, of course, don't (now) have nuclear weapons, but at least two Arab states are thought to be capable of getting (producing or buying) them quickly. More immediate, the Palestinians, divided and relatively unarmed as they are, have the capacity to inflict pain on Israelis (and so to bring about retaliation). Sooner or later, that capacity will grow.

Here the analogy with the Crusades may make some sense. One can envisage a scenario in which acts by Arabs could either make life in Israel unattractive or, alternatively, cause the Israelis — in frustration, fear or fury — to destroy the Middle East and all its people. They have the means to do so.

Should we care? Forget the pious statements. If the past is any guide, we didn't much care about anti-Semitism when it affected the Jews in Europe and don't much care about it when today it makes life horrible for many Arabs in the Middle East. There is much cynical (but covert) anti-Zionist feeling even among politicians who rush to benefit from Jewish donations. Privately, many admit that much of what the Israelis are doing is illegal and even more is immoral, but it is the rare politician who says anything publicly. And those who have done so have usually paid a politically mortal price.

Meanwhile, as a nation, we Americans keep on doing what we know how to do — giving money and arms. And, in a destructive and self-defeating gesture to "even-handedness" giving them to both sides. It is not so important that we don't incur favor by this policy — neither side is smitten by affection for us and  the Israeli government almost daily goes out of its way to humiliate our government. But it could be, and in my judgment eventually will be, significant that we are moving toward Armageddon.

Even the most hardheaded and cynical among us should be concerned since there is a considerable danger of a spillover of any Middle Eastern war into our lives — both abroad in other areas, particularly Islamic areas, and at home. At minimum it long-term and perhaps escalating hostilities in the Middle East would hurt our economy. Additionally, it they could further damage our already fragile ecology, possibly trigger a wider conflict and certainly damage the sense of law, morality and order by which we live.

Even short of actual war, the contagion of instability, hatred and violence is likely to spread and so affect us in other areas and on other issues about which we care.

Perhaps, if our leaders could even slightly raise their eyes above their immediate interests and pay a little attention to the river of events in which we float, we could grab a handhold and stop before we reach the waterfall.

Does anyone see any such leader anywhere? I confess I do not.

I am afraid, not for me, since I am now 85 years old, but for mine and yours and everyone's.

Another Memory of Pete Seeger

Thanks to MEJ Managing Editor Jake Passel for this as we all remember Pete Seeger: Pete Seeger, that other great folksinger Theodor Bikel, and Palestinian-Israeli poet Rashid Hussain sing about peace in Hebrew on Seeger's Rainbow Quest show in 1965. The song is "Hineh Mah Tov," meaning "How good and pleasant it is to sit as brothers together" (taken from Psalm 133). Unfortunately its audio only.

Pete Seeger and Israel

Pete Seeger has died at the age of 94. Besides being one of the founding fathers of the American folk music revival of the mid-20th Century, he was a lifelong activist even during the depths of the McCarthy Era, and an avid advocate for peace, opposing the US wars in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan. As various Israeli and Jewish appreciations of his career are noting, however, his views on Israel remained somewhat ambivalent. As Ha'aretz notes:

Three years ago, Seeger came out in support of a boycott against Israel, according to a press release from the Israel Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD).

He later clarified his position, telling JTA that his position on Israel was constantly evolving.

Seeger told JTA by phone in 2011 that he “probably” made comments that supported a boycott of Israel, but added that he was still learning a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his opinions wavered "with each piece of information.”

Seeger also took part in a 2010 online peace rally “With Earth and Each Other,” in support of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in southern Israel.

The Times of Israel also notes Seeger's shifting views.

He seems to have been attracted to the socialist ideals of the early Israeli state, but opposed to the occupation after 1967.

Ironically, as Richard Silverstein reminds us, one early 1950s hit by Seeger and his group The Weavers was an Israeli song, Tzena, Tzena, Tzena; there was subsequently a court battle over the rights in which the original Israeli author was vindicated. It was released as the flip side of Good Night, Irene, which rose to the Number One hit in the US.

Seeger (second from left) and The Weavers:

Shulamit Aloni, 1928-2014

Shulamit Aloni (Wikipedia)

It's been a busy weekend in the Mideast and I have some catching up to do.On Friday, Shulamit Aloni died in Tel Aviv at the age of 85. Her passing will get a lot less attention than the death two weeks earlier of Ariel Sharon, and that is, in my definitely biased opinion, too bad.  The inveterate warrior for peace will be less remembered than the warrior with arms. May her name be a blessing.

This veteran political leader of the Israeli Left and advocate of peace with the Palesinitans had good Zionist credentials: in 1948 she served with the Palmach in the battle for Jerusalem and was taken prisoner by the Jordanians. Elected to the Knesset as a Labor MK in 1965, she left Labor in 1973 to form the Citizens' Rights Movement (Ratz). She opened dialogue with the Palestinians and in 1992 Ratz joined with  Mapam and Shinui to form a new Left/Peace Bloc known as Meretz, and held several ministerial posts in governments in the 1990s, including Education and Communications. In 1996 she was replaced as leader of Meretz by Yossi Sarid. She retired from the Knesset but remained an active advocate for peace.

Oslo at 20: Two Views on the Two-State Solution

The 20th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords (left) has of course generated a lot of commentary, including the now inevitable debate over whether the two-state solution is dead.

Two informed commentaries that reach (largely) opposite conclusions are worthy of your attention. In Sunday's New York Times Ian Lustick offered a post-mortem on the "Two-State Illusion." Sample:

Yet the fantasy that there is a two-state solution keeps everyone from taking action toward something that might work.

All sides have reasons to cling to this illusion. The Palestinian Authority needs its people to believe that progress is being made toward a two-state solution so it can continue to get the economic aid and diplomatic support that subsidize the lifestyles of its leaders, the jobs of tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, police officers and civil servants, and the authority’s prominence in a Palestinian society that views it as corrupt and incompetent.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.

American politicians need the two-state slogan to show they are working toward a diplomatic solution, to keep the pro-Israel lobby from turning against them and to disguise their humiliating inability to allow any daylight between Washington and the Israeli government.

And the alternatives? Lustick continues:

In such a radically new environment, secular Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank could ally with Tel Aviv’s post-Zionists, non-Jewish Russian-speaking immigrants, foreign workers and global-village Israeli entrepreneurs. Anti-nationalist ultra-Orthodox Jews might find common cause with Muslim traditionalists. Untethered to statist Zionism in a rapidly changing Middle East, Israelis whose families came from Arab countries might find new reasons to think of themselves not as “Eastern,” but as Arab. Masses of downtrodden and exploited Muslim and Arab refugees, in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself could see democracy, not Islam, as the solution for translating what they have (numbers) into what they want (rights and resources). Israeli Jews committed above all to settling throughout the greater Land of Israel may find arrangements based on a confederation, or a regional formula more attractive than narrow Israeli nationalism.

It remains possible that someday two real states may arise. But the pretense that negotiations under the slogan of “two states for two peoples” could lead to such a solution must be abandoned. Time can do things that politicians cannot.

A less grim assessment from Hussein Ibish and Saliba Sarsar at The Daily Beast: "Israel and Palestine Vs. 'Blood and Magic'." They strongly disagree:

However, as the latter part of his article makes clear, his "new ideas" are mainly an incoherent jumble of imaginary scenarios, all of which require an alternative reality to emerge at some point in the future. Nothing he suggests can be built on under present circumstances. None of it holds together as a coherent or even semi-coherent counterproposal.

Worse still, most of what he envisages requires by his own admission decades, if not centuries, to become possibilities, and further Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inevitable.

So not only would we have to wait scores of decades, if not centuries, for any of these "alternatives" to begin to emerge, they could only be the product of further wide-scale bloodshed.

Despite Prof. Lustick's passionate dismissal, the two-state solution remains the only viable option for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His counterfactual musings don't provide any practicable, coherent or implementable alternatives. It's an interesting thought experiment to dismiss the global consensus, stated position of all relevant parties, logical implementation of international law, and only practicable means of achieving the minimum goals of each party in favor of flights of fancy. But it has no political value whatsoever. Indeed undermining the only plausible conflict-ending scenario, while not suggesting any serious, practicable alternatives, is actually harmful.

Although realizing a two-state solution faces serious and growing obstacles, it alone allows both Palestinians and Israelis to avoid an ongoing struggle with no end in sight. Yes, “Time can do things that politicians cannot,” as Prof. Lustick writes, but the goal must be to achieve a solution in our lifetime—not in 120 years as with Irish independence, or 132 years as with Algerian independence, two of the key examples he cites.

The occupation is an emergency, not a macro- or trans-historical problem, particularly for the millions of Palestinians living under its oppressive rule. They, especially—but we too—do not have the luxury of waiting to see what the next hundred years of history will bring us, good or bad. On the contrary, we must have the courage to act now, and with urgency, within the existing realities, however difficult, to try to create a working solution to a situation that is both intolerably unjust and regionally (and to some extent even globally) destabilizing.

The debate over the two-state solution is growing in recent years. These two articles, I think, encapsulate the opposing arguments rather well. Ibish and Sarsar seem to recognize the urgency of a solution, while Lustick feels the opportunity has already been missed. For those of us without the patience to wait for the long-term historical evolution Lustick describes, I hope the two-state solution can still be salvaged. But given the present leaderships on three sides (including Hamas in Gaza), I fear that Lustick may prove right.

In any event, both of these thoughtful analyses deserve a full and careful reading, not just my brief excerpts.

Zunes on Nonviolence in Syria

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of San Francisco and also a specialist in Nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution, has a piece at Foreign Policy called "Supporting Nonviolence in Syria." Neither the major powers nor the various sides of the conflict in Syria are likely to heed his advice, but it is a timely reminder (at a time when many of us try to imagine peace on earth and goodwill among men, before we resume our usual habits) that there are still voices crying in the wilderness who believe in nonviolence and peace. I wish I thought it would happen, but I'm glad there are those still determined to remind us of the option.