How to break cycle of violence Allister Sparks

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

How to break cycle of violence

Allister Sparks

The Daily Star on Thursday, 25 September 2003

It is said that countries get the governments they deserve, yet it is hard to believe that the people of Israel really deserve the regime of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The statement last week by Sharon's deputy, Ehud Olmert, that assassinating Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was an option to be considered, surely marked a new level not only of political folly but of moral degradation that threatens the core values on which the state of Israel was founded.

Do Sharon and Olmert really imagine that the "removal" of Arafat, by bullet or physical expulsion, would make the Palestinian people who elected him more compliant and more likely to accept the Israeli point of view in this long drawn-out struggle, any more than the "removal" of Nelson Mandela for 27 years made black South Africans more willing to accept apartheid?

Do they not realise that this would simply intensify Palestinian bitterness? That it is folly to try to mould the Palestinian leadership to their own liking, because in the end they will need someone with credibility among the Palestinian people, especially the most militant among them, with whom to negotiate if there is ever to be peace in that land? That you cannot negotiate with puppets or dead men?

It seems not. Otherwise they would not be trying to wipe out the leadership of Hamas by targeted assassinations. They killed Ismail Abu Shanab the other day, a man who reportedly believed that Hamas could trade its ideological rejection of the state of Israel for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders.

In other words a man with whom Sharon's undercover agents should have been having secret talks, as PW Botha's agents did with Mandela even as the township fighting continued in the 1980s; and as Britain's MI6 did with the IRA's Martin McGuiness to start the process that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

The Israelis followed up their assassination of Shanab with a bungled attempt to kill Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Yassin. They dropped a bomb on his apartment which killed a number of other people but only lightly wounded the paraplegic Sheikh. The result was a horrendous retaliation by Hamas that left 15 Israelis dead and effectively ended the so-called roadmap to peace.

It is surely self-evident that all this is the height of political folly. To say that is not to condone the Palestinian terrorist attacks, which are appalling in their indiscriminate slaughter. But the Palestinians have nothing to lose in this conflict; they are in the position of weakness with neither homeland nor resources, and the brute fact of the modern world is that terrorism is the weapon of the weak.

Israel, on the other hand, has everything to lose. It was founded as a safe haven for the Jewish people after their two millennia of homelessness and persecution that culminated in the Holocaust. Yet the terrible truth is that Jews are in greater danger in Israel today than anywhere else on earth.

But Israel was also founded as something more than a safe haven. Its founding fathers, the likes of Theodor Heizl, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, were idealists, socialist humanitarians who wanted to build a state based on equalitarianism and the highest ethical standards; one that, in the words of Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, would be "a light unto nations".

But today the sons of those idealistic founders are shooting children and bombing apartment buildings. That is the danger of inner corrosion that is perhaps even greater than the political folly.

Israel's present-day dilemma began, ironically, with its victory in the 1967 war when it repelled the attack launched on it by Arab states and occupied both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

That confronted Israel with a tough decision. It could either annex the territories it had occupied, claiming the right of conquest in a war it did not start, or it could withdraw after a stabilising period redrawing its own borders in the process to make them safer.

The first option might have been the best. To annex the territories, grant equal rights to everyone living there and rule it all as a single democratic nation-state.

There was one snag. The demographics of the consolidated state would have led in time (about 2010) to its having a Palestinian Arab majority. A South African situation, in other words, where Israel would either have to deprive the Palestinian majority of voting rights or the country would cease to be a Jewish state.

This raises the question of whether Israel has to be a "Jewish state" in order to be a Jewish homeland. Constitutionally, it is not a theocracy. It is a democracy. Could it conceivably be a secular democracy with a Palestinian majority and a government elected by universal suffrage and still be regarded as a Jewish homeland to which both Jews and Palestinians had a right of return?

If not, why not?

The point, of course, is academic. The Israeli government baulked at the idea and did not exercise that option. But nor did it exercise the alternative of withdrawal. By doing neither it took the worst possible course by default. It remained an occupying power - and international law recognises the right of people to take up arms against an occupying force.

Worse than that, Israel - and Sharon in particular - encouraged Jewish settlers to establish settlements in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These settlements now constitute the greatest single stumbling block in the way of a negotiated two-state settlement.

The Palestinians will not - indeed on any reasonable judgment cannot - accept that a strip of territory with heavily populated enclaves of another country within its borders constitutes a viable nation-state of their own. Moreover, Israel has highways encircling and interconnecting these settlements which it insists it must have the right to patrol and control militarily.

It means the Palestinian homeland would be like fragmented Bantustans.

Not until Israel agrees to forsake the settlements can there be a proper two-state peace deal. There may be Oslo Agreements and Roadmaps and even temporary ceasefires, but until Israel demonstrates in some visible way that it is prepared to remove the settlements, all will break down.

Israel keeps saying the Palestinians must first end their terrorism, but the Palestinian militants will not abandon their struggle until they believe they are really going to get a viable homeland. That is the deadlock. It can be broken only by negotiating with the militants - a tradeoff of peace for an unoccupied homeland without settlements.

Sharon can't bring himself to do that. The settlements are largely his creation, besides which he is locked into a coalition with religious extremists to whom the concept of a Greater Israel is sacred.

So the cycle of violence and the corrosion continues.

As Burg puts it bitterly in an article in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot: "It turns out that the 2 000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements - run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies."

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).