What has Israel done with the people it took over in '67 but brutalise them?
An interpretation from The Economist follows the piece from Avi Shlaim
Israeli soldiers arrest a young Palestinian boy in Hebron on June 20, 2014 during Operation Brother’s Keeper. Photo by Thomas Coex / AFP.
Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories
Review: Ahron Bregman’s, Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories, his account of nearly five decades of Israeli occupation, is hard-hitting and rich in telling details
Avi Shlaim, Guardian,
July 18 /19 2014
The purpose of Israel’s current offensive in the Gaza Strip is to protect the status quo – with itself in control of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. In 2005, it carried out a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, but under international law it is still the occupying power because it controls access by land, sea and air. In 2007 Israel imposed an economic blockade, cutting the Gaza Strip off from the West Bank and from the rest of the world. A blockade is a form of collective punishment proscribed by international law.
The death toll is a grim reflection of the asymmetry of the conflict. In the past fortnight, the Palestinians have suffered over 220 fatalities, 80% of whom were civilians; in Israel, only one man was killed by a rocket fired from Gaza. Israel claims that its assault is an act of self-defence to put an end to the Hamas rocket attacks against its civilians. Hamas claims it is engaged in legitimate resistance to Israel’s military occupation. The chain of action and reaction is endless. But the underlying cause of the violence is Israeli colonialism.
Israel’s spectacular victory in the June 1967 war was followed by an occupation of Arab lands that was supposed to be temporary but which, with the exception of the Sinai Peninsula, is now well into its fifth decade. For the Palestinians, Israel’s coercive rule has been a catastrophe at every level and a tragic sequel to the bigger catastrophe, the Nakba in Arabic, of 1948. But as the title of this new book suggests, the victory has also been a curse for the victors: it has transformed a small, united and predominantly socialist society into a colonial empire.
Gershom Gorenberg called his book on the birth of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories in the first decade after the guns fell silent The Accidental Empire. Israel’s postwar policy was indeed muddled, but the end result was one of the most prolonged military occupations of modern times. Within its original borders, Israel had been a democracy, however flawed. Greater Israel, on the other hand, is an ethnocracy, a country in which one ethnic group rules over another. There is another word to describe this situation, a word Israelis do not like to hear: apartheid.
Ahron Bregman is an Israeli scholar with impeccable liberal credentials who teaches in the department of war studies at King’s College London. He served in the Israeli army for six years, but left Israel because of the occupation and because of the military’s violent suppression of the first intifada. He is the author of four books on Israel and its conflict with the Arabs. Two of these – The Fifty Years War and Elusive Peace – accompanied BBC television series that drew on in-depth and remarkably candid interviews with key players from Israel, the Arab world and the US. Full use is made of that earlier oral history in the present book; it is supplemented by additional interviews.
Bregman has also enjoyed unparalleled access to high-level sources that enabled him to quote directly from top‑secret memos, letters, and intelligence reports that are unlikely ever to be made public. These include information obtained by Israeli agents from tapping the phones of President Bill Clinton, Syrian diplomats and Palestinian negotiators. There is also a top‑secret memo from the Shabak, Israel’s general security service, suggesting that a dead Yasser Arafat would benefit Israel.
In Bregman’s reading, the zigzags in Israel’s approach to the occupied territories resulted from two opposing impulses. On the one hand, there was the de facto annexation of the conquered lands by constructing large-scale Jewish settlements and an elaborate infrastructure to serve them. On the other hand, there was the occasional desire to trade land for peace, at least in relation to some of the territories. Israeli governments sometimes pursued both objectives simultaneously. From today’s perspective, however, it is obvious that the appetite for land is far more powerful than the thirst for peace. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, personifies the triumph of land-grabbing over peace-making.
Bregman’s account of the conflict born of the cursed victory is intelligent, informative and rich in telling details. His primary focus is on Israel; on the Palestinian side of this tragic story he is less well-informed. But he does deploy first-hand testimonies to show what it is like to be at the receiving end of the occupation with its trigger-happy soldiers, torture of Arab prisoners, systematic abuse of human rights, curfews and blockades. He also notes that a major feature of the occupation is the recruitment of an army of informers and collaborators as well as the insidious effect of this practice on Palestinian society.
He is at his best when dealing with the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially in 1999-2000 when Ehud Barak was prime minister. Barak was a former chief of staff, and his country’s most highly decorated soldier, but he was no diplomat. In a curious inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum, he regarded diplomacy as the pursuit of war by other means. For Barak, Syria was a major military threat to Israel whereas the Palestinians were not. By making peace with Syria, Barak hoped to change the entire strategic landscape of the region and to leave the Palestinian Authority so weak and isolated that it would have no alternative but to accept his paltry terms.
A peace deal with Syria was indeed possible but it carried a price tag: complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, which left the Syrians with access to the north-eastern shore of Lake Tiberias. A meeting between Barak and the Syrian foreign minister under American patronage at Shepherdstown, in January 2000, collapsed when Barak refused to pay that price. Despite this failure, Barak persuaded Clinton to do his bidding at a make-or-break summit with President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva two months later. It was a fool’s errand. Once again Barak got cold feet, fearing the electoral consequences of withdrawal from the Golan Heights. On the morning of the meeting, he gave Clinton a script that insisted on Israeli sovereignty over a 400-metre-wide strip of land between Syria and the lake. So the summit was doomed before it even started and the much-vaunted breakthrough turned into a spectacular setback. Clinton discovered to his cost that there was no sweet-talking Hafez al-Assad.
Having implicated the US president in two entirely predictable failures on the Syrian track, Barak belatedly and grudgingly turned his attention to the Palestinian track, to “the other woman”. Once again, he prevailed on the US president to embark on a make-or-break summit, and once again the president tended to behave not as an honest broker but as Israel’s lawyer. Arafat warned Clinton that the positions of the two sides were too far apart, that more time was needed to prepare the ground, and that failure at the top would make matters worse. Clinton urged Arafat to come anyway and promised that, in the event of failure, there would be no finger-pointing.
Clinton takes his guests for a walk in the woods at Camp David, Maryland – acting more like Israel’s lawyer than an honest broker. Photo by AFP.
The summit convened at Camp David on 11 July 2000; it lasted 14 days. Honouring a secret pledge, the American peace processors did not present to the Palestinian delegation any papers without consulting the Israelis first. The first American paper tabled at Camp David had Israel’s fingerprints all over it and only served to confirm Arafat’s suspicion that the whole summit was an Israeli-American ruse to trap him. His suspicions were not eased by Barak’s refusal to meet with him face-to-face to negotiate over the “final status” issues: borders, security, the right of return of the 1948 refugees, and Jerusalem.
The sticking point was Jerusalem. Arafat insisted, as he had done all along, on Palestinian sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in the Old City of Jerusalem. Barak’s rejection of Palestinian sovereignty over the Muslim Noble Sanctuary sealed the fate of the summit. Violating his pledge to Arafat, Clinton immediately blamed him for the failure. Although Arafat contributed to the diplomatic deadlock by his aggressively passive posture, the additional evidence unearthed by Bregman confirms the view I have long held – that the two principal reasons for the collapse of the summit were Barak’s intransigence and Clinton’s mismanagement.
In the heady days after the resounding victory in the six-day war, Israel’s spokesmen used to boast that theirs was a liberal occupation. But a liberal occupation is a contradiction in terms, like a quadrilateral triangle. The occupation turned Israel into a colonial power and colonialism has the habit of brutalising not only the occupied but the occupier as well. Some colonial powers, such as the British in India and the French in the Levant, learned the value of building schools and providing other amenities for the colonised. Israel, by contrast, never really thought it had any duty to protect the people under its rule or to improve the quality of their lives.
Bregman describes Israel as “a heavy‑handed and brutal occupier”. He regards the four decades of occupation chronicled in this book as a black mark on Israeli, and indeed, Jewish history. He finds it depressing that a people that has suffered such unspeakable tragedies of its own can behave so cruelly towards another. The only sign of hope in this otherwise bleak picture is that the occupation may carry within it the seeds of its own demise. By forcing the Palestinians to live in squalor, Bregman concludes, Israel has “hardened those under its power, making them more determined to put an end to the occupation, by violent means if necessary, and live a life of dignity and freedom”.
Avi Shlaim’s Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations is published by Verso. To order Cursed Victory for £20 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
How to explain the toxic atmosphere in Israel and the occupied territories
By The Economist
July 12, 2014
ONE of the products of Israel’s half-century of military rule is the surfeit of literature it has produced about Jews bullying Arabs. Ahron Bregman’s account, “Cursed Victory”, is better than most. He unmasks the administrative brutality beneath Israel’s claim to “enlightened occupation”. He recalls how in the aftermath of the 1967 conquest Israel’s government trucked a quarter of Gaza’s population to Jordan; how General Moshe Dayan’s celebrated “Open Bridges” policy, which gave Palestinians a respite from occupation and the chance to travel to Jordan, opened only in one direction for many; and how the Golan Heights were emptied of their 138,000 people, bar a few thousand Druze. The more people Israel displaced, the more land became available for Jewish settlements.
A former Israeli soldier in Lebanon, Mr Bregman knows his subject first-hand. In 1988 he left Israel, unhappy about the country’s policy towards the Palestinians. As an academic at King’s College London, he has accumulated copious documents, many of them secret and unpublished. He details transcripts of telephone calls that President Bill Clinton had with Syria’s former president, Hafez al-Assad. The source apparently was Israeli intelligence and it debunks official claims that Israel does not spy on America.
Armed with such files, the author builds his case, arguing that for five decades Israel has sought to keep and colonise as much territory as its Western allies would let it get away with. Only when foreign pressure became overwhelming and the “bribes” irresistible, he maintains, did Israel retreat. America cajoled Israel into withdrawing from Sinai by 1982 after threatening to stop aid and arms sales if it refused, and guaranteeing five years’ supply of American oil if it accepted.
But since then, he writes, America has been less resolute. In the 1990s the then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, assured Israel of “a thorough consultation process” before America presented its peace plans to the Palestinians, in essence giving it a veto over the content. In 1999 Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, lured Mr Clinton, Mr Bregman suggests, into one failed summit after another, providing Mr Barak with enough cover to allow him to claim that Israel had no partner for peace.
After persuading Mr Clinton to tempt President Assad to Geneva in March 2000 with the promise of ground-breaking proposals, says the author, Mr Barak back-pedalled on an earlier Israeli promise of a full withdrawal. Hours before the summit was due to start, Mr Barak insisted that Israel should keep a sliver of land, 400 metres wide, on the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Mr Assad withdrew.
Four months later Mr Barak persuaded Mr Clinton to try again, cajoling a wary Yasser Arafat to negotiate a final settlement at Camp David. Contrary to received wisdom, Mr Bregman claims both sides were prepared to be flexible. Mr Barak proposed that the Palestinians retain the Christian and Muslim quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City. The Palestinians acquiesced to Israeli retention of their settlements in East Jerusalem and the western wall of the Temple Mount (known to Arabs as the Haram al-Sharif). But the dynamics went awry. A truculent Mr Barak urged Mr Clinton to give Mr Arafat a “sharp shaking”, and threatened “war” if Mr Arafat failed to submit. “Do you want to leave and kill it all?” demanded Mr Clinton, when Mr Barak refused to meet Arafat.
Not all would accept Mr Bregman’s rather conventional view that American pressure alone can make Israel end its occupation. He gives short shrift to the Palestinian belief that Israel is more amenable to diplomacy and land-for-peace deals when confronted by violence. On this view, Israel uses times of quiet to expand settlements, but it took war across the Suez Canal to dislodge Israel from Sinai, a guerrilla campaign to get it out of South Lebanon and two intifadas to persuade Israel to end its administration of Gaza and the cities of the West Bank.
There are also disappointing lacunae. Mr Bregman dismisses the devastating past decade in a handful of pages. He insists that Israel’s colonisation has been harsher and crueller than that of the great powers of the 19th century, arguing that other colonialists built universities and took pride in cultivating local elites, whereas Israel coveted their land and rejected their people. That is unconvincing.
“Israel, helped by the Jewish diaspora, particularly in America, proved that nations which have suffered unspeakable tragedies of their own can act in similarly cruel ways when in power themselves,” Mr Bregman concludes. In the tortuous story of the relationship between Israelis and their neighbours—a relationship whose flaws have become all too clear again in recent days—a proper analysis of how abused peoples often come to abuse others would have been useful. In an otherwise detailed and well thought-out book Mr Bregman lets his readers and himself down by mentioning it as just a flippant throwaway at the end.