Gershon Baskin: 'It's the occupation, stupid!'

Many voices here are already pondering the question how are we going to deal with at least three more years of an anti-Israel administration in Washington. These are the people who think that pressuring Jerusalem to meet its road map obligations is empowering the Arabs and weakening the country. ...

But the government knows that it is obligated to the road map, which states quite explicitly it must "immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001... and consistent with the Mitchell Report, freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." While it is true that the Sharon government issued 14 reservations to the road map, the US never accepted them, except for what appears to be an unwritten understanding between Sharon and president George W. Bush regarding growth in the settlement blocs and in Jerusalem. But the Bush administration was voted out of office and with it those unwritten understandings, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has indicated so clearly.

WHAT'S ALL the fuss anyway? Who really cares about a few more houses and school classrooms in settlements? Well, the whole world. At the outset of Oslo, the world, including the Arab world (and also including the supporters of peace in Israel and in Palestine), actually believed that the peace process was about ending the occupation, peace between two states living side-by-side, building cross-boundary cooperation in every field possible, ending violence and ending the conflict.

During those optimistic days, several countries without diplomatic relations with Israel established them, and several Arab countries even allowed it to open commercial interests offices in their countries. Some Arab countries even opened their own representative offices in Israel. This was possible because they believed the Oslo peace process would bring an end to the occupation.

They had good reason to believe that. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of September 1995 stated clearly: "The two sides agree that West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, except for issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations, will come under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Council in a phased manner, to be completed within 18 months from the date of the inauguration of the council." The agreement further stated: "Redeployments of Israeli military forces to specified military locations will commence after the inauguration of the council and will be gradually implemented."

The interpretation of these sections was that prior to the beginning of permanent status agreements Israel would have withdrawn from more than 90 percent of the West Bank. The US and the Palestinian calculated then that the land area connected to permanent status negotiations, meaning the settlements, accounted for 2%-5% of the West Bank (counting the built-up areas of the settlements with a radius of about 100 meters from the last home in each settlement). The "specified military locations" was estimated to account for about 2% of the West Bank.

WHEN BINYAMIN Netanyahu was first elected in 1996, a "conflict" of interpretation developed between the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Ministry. At that time I saw a document produced by the legal department of the Foreign Ministry explaining that the new interpretation of the Prime Minister's Office was incorrect. It stated the following: According to the Prime Minister's office, the settlement areas in question are based on the statutory planning maps of the civil administration and not on the built-up areas. Those zoning maps provide the settlements with about 40% of the West Bank.

Furthermore, the Prime Minister's office stated that instead of "specified military locations" the real intention was "security zones" - meaning that the entire Jordan Valley is a security zone, all of the areas around settlements are security zones, the bypass roads to settlements are security zones, and so are all of the lands adjacent to the Green Line. In other words, 60% of the West Bank would remain in Israeli hands, and in the negotiations with the Palestinians Israel would retain well above 10% of the West Bank, and if possible more.

This, according to the Palestinians and even the US, was a major breach of the agreement and it was one of the significant reasons for the failure of the entire process. ...

Ehud Barak understood that he would have a very tough negotiation on the territorial question. When I asked his chief of staff Gilead Sher why the prime minister was building even more settlements than Netanyahu, his answer was "the story of the goat" - meaning it would appear that Israel was making larger concessions than it really was. ...

Yet the entire international community, with the exception of Iran, Libya and perhaps Israel (look at the club of nations we have joined), believes that a Palestinian state must be established on the basis of the June 4, 1967 borders. ...

Netanyahu, Barak and other members of the government think that if they agree to a three-month settlement freeze, not including Jerusalem, the world will consent. The EU and the US in private meetings with Netanyahu and in public statements have insisted that Israel must focus on the settlement issue and not on tricks to avoid making the difficult decisions. All settlement building must stop. ...

Yes, Judea and Samaria are our historical, religious and national lands, and the argument is not about our right to be there, whether the world accept[s] that right or not. The reality is that there is no other way to achieve peace with our neighbors. ...

Gershon Baskin, Ph.D., is the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. This entire article can be read online at the Jerusalem Post Internet Edition.

'Two States, Still One Exit' by Gershom Gorenberg

Is the two-state solution an obsolete strategy? (Web-only content at The American Prospect Web site.)

Let's face it: When Barack Obama said in Cairo that "the only resolution" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two separate states, he was courageously insisting -- well, on what's become conventional wisdom.

But not the unanimous wisdom. The hardliners on each side aren't alone in questioning the two-state idea. On the street in Jerusalem, I've run into old friends, veterans of Israeli peace and human-rights activism who say we've passed the tipping point: There are too many settlements; Israeli withdrawal is impossible; negotiations on two states have repeatedly failed; the only solution is a single, shared Jewish-Palestinian state. I've heard Palestinian intellectuals, former supporters of a two-state solution, who say the same. Among writers outside the conflict zone, British Jewish historian Tony Judt may be best known for suggesting -- back in 2003 -- that as a nation-state, Israel is "an anachronism" and should be replaced by a binational state. Ironically, Obama himself may have given this idea a bit more traction among American progressives -- his election proving, perhaps, that multiculturalism within one polity can work, perhaps not just in America but elsewhere. So is he pursuing an obsolete strategy?

Actually, no. ... Difficult as reaching a two-state agreement is, it is still a more practical solution than a single state. It has more political support on both sides. And in a very basic way, more psychological than philosophical, most Israeli Jews and most Palestinians are nationalists: Their personal identity is rooted in a national community for which they want political independence.
Click here for entire article online.

Comparing Likud to South Africa's National Party

At first, I objected when our friend, Thomas Mitchell, sent in this historical comparison between Likud and the politics of South Africa's Afrikaner National Party, both defining the mainstream right of their respective national political cultures. But he is specifically not trying to feed into the “Israel is an apartheid state” argumentation of the extreme left: “I think that you are better off defusing it with precise comparisons rather than leaving it as the 800 lb. guerrilla in the room,” he said.

So, without further ado, here is this “precise comparison” by Dr. Thomas Mitchell:

Is Bibi ‘n verlig ou ‘n verkramp?

In the late 1970s, the Afrikaner journalist Willem de Klerk, older brother of future state president F.W. de Klerk, coined the term verlig (plural verligte), literally "enlightened," for more pragmatic Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals within the National Party camp and the term verkramp (plural verkrampte) literally "narrow-minded" or “cramped” for the conservatives. The National Party was then going through a slow evolution that would result in the overthrow of President P.W. Botha as party leader a decade later and his replacement by De Klerk’s older brother Frederick Willem. The verligte believed in eliminating petty apartheid, maybe even eliminating grand apartheid—the homelands, and possibly doing a deal in Namibia. But they did not get their chance until P.W. Botha’s overthrow. Botha himself looked like a verlig when he brought in a new constitution with separate chambers in parliament for mixed-race “coloreds” and Indians, although whites still maintained overall control by determining which matters would be relegated to those chambers and which would be decided collectively where the whites had a majority.

The Israeli Revisionist right has been undergoing a similar evolution since the mid-2000s, when Ariel Sharon began to realize that the dream of greater Israel was not feasible as a reality. Instead of “Jordan is Palestine,” Sharon began to speak of ending the occupation and creating a Palestinian state, albeit only on about 42 percent of the territory of the West Bank—something that no Palestinian leader could agree to. At that time Benyamin Netanyahu decided to position himself to the right of Sharon, when he had previously been on Sharon’s left. The Likud rejected Sharon’s plan for a disengagement from Gaza, so in the end Sharon left the party he had midwifed 32 years before and created a new party, the third in his long political career. When Sharon founded Kadima, only months before his incapacitating stroke, he left the Likud with all the true-believer ideologues and career hacks and took the pragmatists and opportunists with him.

When Bibi speaks of a demilitarized Palestinian state now, we have to ask: Has he changed back again? Like Churchill who quit the Tories for the Liberals and then returned a decade later, has Bibi returned to the camp of the pragmatists? In the old South Africa with its two-party system, the verligte and the verkrampte were creatures not only restricted to Afrikaner politics but to internal National Party politics as well. No one ever accused liberal opposition leader Frederick van Zyl Slabbert of being a verlig. No, he was a real liberal. Willem de Klerk’s terms were reserved for differentiating the various shades of Afrikaner opinion in the only party likely to ever hold power for the next twenty or thirty years. With the collapse of the Labor Party some Israeli political journalist may have to invent Hebrew terms for the different shades of opinion within the Likud.

The Israeli verligte at present reside within Kadima and believe in negotiations with Fatah for a real Palestinian state. Their leader is Tzipi Livni, who is more of a real liberal than Labor leader Ehud Barak at present. The South African equivalent was Wynand Malan and Dennis Worrall who left the National Party in late 1986 to run as independents in the 1987 election along with an Afrikaner businesswoman. Malan, an incumbent MP, was the only one of the three to be elected. The two formed their own separate political parties and Malan was joined by defectors from the liberal Progressive Federal Party. Two years later the two parties (re)united with the PFP to form the Democratic Party, which won a record number of seats for a liberal party in South Africa in the election. This was the political background to F.W. de Klerk’s decision to legalize the ANC and PAC liberation movements and the Communist Party and release their leaders from prison.

It may be that Bibi is really like P.W. Botha, trapped between the verligte and the verkrampte and shunned by the outside world. If Bibi tries to maneuver between the Uzi Landaus, the Benni Begins, and the Avigdor Liebermans on one hand and the Tzipi Livnis on the other, he might end up like Botha. Netanyahu had already suffered from a party coup once already. Maybe Obama can save Bibi in the same way that American and European sanctions saved De Klerk. But, then again, De Klerk had a real negotiating partner in the ANC -- Nelson Mandela. Because of domestic political constraints, neither Olmert nor Abbas were free to negotiate so constructively.

Hint of Olmert's peace proposal to Abbas

Until things literally blew up with the Gaza war and Israel's recent electoral campaign, we at Meretz USA were hearing for a long time -- even from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat -- that a peace deal between the Palestinian Authority and Ehud Olmert's government was in the works. A report in New York's Jewish Week newspaper suggests what happened: it was Mahmoud Abbas who may have left a deal on the table. What follows is part of this article:

Stephen Cohen, a national scholar of the Israel Policy Forum who recently met with Palestinian officials, said "this is a very active time" in terms of discussions about how to move the peace process forward.

He pointed out that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was not responsive to Ehud Olmert’s offer of more than 93 percent of Palestinian territories, in negotiations last year, in part because Fatah "hadn’t resolved internal problems" with Hamas. ...

Olmert had proposed placing Jerusalem’s Holy Basin — the areas containing the Old City and surrounding holy sites — under Divine sovereignty and having it administered by a consortium of Saudis, Jordanians, Americans, Israelis and Palestinians.

In addition, he proposed offering the Palestinians 93.5 to 93.7 percent of the Palestinian territories, along with a land swap of 5.8 percent and safe passage between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And the Palestinian refugee issue would be resolved by permitting a small number of Palestinians into Israel as a "humanitarian gesture."

After Olmert revealed his offer last month, Livni said through a spokesman that she disapproved of the offer. ...

New book on Israel lobbies (in the plural)

My review of Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change by Dan Fleshler (Potomac Books, 2009, 267 pp., $24.95) was published last week at InTheseTimes.org. There were a few nuances that were lost in the ITT Web article, but readers should understand that I regard Dan's book as an important contribution to the “Israel Lobby” issue, not least being that there is more than one "lobby" concerning Israel. This post is about points on Mearsheimer and Walt's "Israel Lobby" writings that were edited out:

[J. J. Goldberg] ... published an unsigned Forward editorial (“In Dark Times, Blame the Jews,” March 24, 2006) associating the two professors’ work with classic anti-Semitic tropes. This probably went too far, but Professors Mearsheimer and Walt were remarkably insensitive in not understanding that as members of a historically oppressed and vulnerable minority group, many Jews would see hatred in the single-minded intensity of their arguments. (Yossi Beilin, then chair of Israel's dovish Meretz party, announced at a World Union of Meretz conference that even he saw “hate” in their initial article.)

Fleshler likes to quote Daniel Levy, an Israeli peacenik who helped draft the unofficial Geneva Accord of 2003 and now works on Middle East peace issues for think tanks in Washington, D.C. But he would have done well to also quote Levy’s Haaretz newspaper review of Mearsheimer and Walt’s book in 2007. Levy was scathing in criticizing much of the organized Jewish community for “outsourcing” foreign policy issues to the neocons; but he also criticized Mearsheimer and Walt for confusing cause and effect. Levy regarded support for the Iraq war by some Jewish organizations as a sales job for a decision that was already made by the Bush administration for its own reasons. ... Click here to read the piece posted at InTheseTimes.org.

'Borat' and a new film on Antisemitism

“Look Into My Eyes” is a personal exploration into antisemitism (mostly in Hebrew) by the Israeli filmmaker, Naftaly Gliksberg. I saw it last week at the International Human Rights Film Festival at New York's Lincoln Center.

It helped that Mr. Gliksberg did a Q & A after the screening. Before learning his intent directly, the film seemed disjointed and self-indulgent. Gliksberg wants it seen by non-Jews; he says that he's bringing a mirror to Christians, helping them to see the conscious and subconscious elements of prejudice in how they view Jews. (He deals only with Christian antisemitism, nothing about Muslims or the Arab-Israeli conflict.)

The title comes from the final episode in Gliksberg's journey through Europe and the USA when he confronts neo-Nazis in Germany. He is cordial, seemingly almost becoming friends with an old man named Mahler, on trial for Holocaust denial, a criminal offense in Germany. (Mahler was, in fact, recently convicted.) One of his supporters tells Gliksberg that he cannot look a Jew in the eye, because of the pure evil that lurks behind his gaze. Gliksberg plays with the Nazi, even good-naturedly embracing him as he encourages him to look. But the man backs away in disgust and anger.

The Israeli's foray into Germany also involves a visit to a couple with a teenage daugher, all of whom were ex-neo-Nazis. The interaction with the girl is especially illuminating; it becomes clear that the “movement” had given them a sense of identity and belonging – more important than the actual ideology of hate. She recalls the movement songs and activities with genuine longing.

Gliksberg began his film with his visit to a Passion Play in Poland, where members of the mob and the Sanhedrin are clearly identifiable as Jews responsible for the persecution of Jesus. The Poles he interviews profess no antipathy toward Jews, but some reveal their belief in stereotypes about how rich, clever and clannish Jews are.

He also makes a painful visit to Kelce, where in 1946, a pogrom started by a blood libel rumor, cost the lives of over 40 Jews brutally murdered by their Polish neighbors. A liberal Pole tells Gliksberg of how a Catholic priest, years later, repeated this age-old fantasy that Jews murdered and bled a boy to make matza.

By way of contrast, a Passion Play at a rural American pentecostal church, where worship includes “speaking in tongues,” provides no such antisemitic imagery. In fact, the congregation enthusiastically welcomes their guest from Israel and the pastor professes his love for Israel and the Jewish people.

Toward the end of his visit, however, the pastor is caught on camera in an outburst against Israelis for being rude – in the way that Israelis often are because of their habit of directness. The pastor concludes that in the future the “Jewish people” would miss “Christian money” if this coarseness deters Christian tourists from coming in great numbers. This bursts out as a sudden stream of consciousness, with the minister ruminating at the end of a long day, too tired perhaps to filter his thoughts.

Then I saw “Borat” on TV over the weekend. This farce by the incredibly talented English-Jewish comic and actor, Sacha Baron Cohen, includes an outrageous dose of antisemitism in the plot. Cohen plays a faux-TV journalist from Kazakhstan, who is incredibly primitive, crude and bigoted. If you're familiar with Hebrew, you may notice that much of his faux-Kazakh dialogue is Hebrew. (Cohen was a member of the Labor-Zionist youth group Habonim Dror and spent a year in Israel on kibbutzim.) His Scottish fiancee (or wife by now) converted to Judaism and says that she is quite observant.

Chutzpa defines Cohen's technique, as his Borat personna confronts real people. Some of these confrontations are shocking. For example, he gets a straight answer without so much as a blink of an eye from a gun dealer he consults on the best choice of weapon for shooting a Jew.

An outtake from the movie, at least the version shown on cable television, viewable on 'You Tube', is of Borat accompanying himself on guitar as he entertains the crowd at an Arizona bar with a "charming" tune called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” Words to the rousing chorus, which the patrons sing enthusiastically, include: “Throw the Jew down the well, so my country can be free … then we have a big party [pronounced par-tee].” (Gliksberg's mirror anyone?)

Tony Judt on settlements

I can certainly understand NYU historian Prof. Tony Judt's pique at Israel. Without being one-sided, as he always is regarding Israel, we would surely agree with him that the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements policies of succeeding Israeli governments are obstacles to peace and illegal under international law. And he makes an excellent point in his most recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, June 22, that existing settlements are zoned with an outrageous amount of real estate to fill in with additional construction for “natural growth,” so that these new “neighborhoods” are not defined as new settlements.

Still, Judt leaves out a critical fact: that any reasonable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would include a swap of territories, with all or most settlements closest to the pre-1967 border being annexed to Israel in exchange for a comparable amount of Israeli land going to the new Palestinian state. Most peace-oriented parties have advocated this since the mid-1990s, when it was discovered that the most thickly-populated settlement blocs would only require moderate border adjustments (2-3 percent) to be included in Israel.

Moreover, while it's an embarrassment to me as an American and a progressive Zionist that the US gives as much economic aid as it does to Israel, despite the ongoing expansion of settlements, it is probably not accurate to continually say, as Judt does, that Israel is the number one recipient of US foreign aid. Iraq surely has that honor in spades, and Afghanistan may well join Iraq in this category soon. And when you add the very substantial aid programs to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and the Palestinians (the latter to the tune of several hundred million a year), US aid dollars to Arab and Islamic countries far outweigh the total provided to Israel.