A Secret Letter from the US President to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A Secret Letter from the US President to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

As Published in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, May 2006

By

Gidon D. Remba

Mr. President,

Your country stands on the precipice of a grave international crisis provoked by the growing and well-founded concerns of the International Atomic Energy Agency and many members of the UN Security Council that Iran is concealing a clandestine nuclear weapons program behind the fig leaf of civilian nuclear energy development.

You ask why it is that “any technical and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East is portrayed as a threat” to Israel. Mr. President, for over two decades, your country has been the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism and the most malevolent opponent of Arab-Israeli peace. You yourself announce at every turn that Israel “should be wiped off the map,” and have called Israel a “rotten, dried tree” that will be annihilated by “one storm.” Your predecessor, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has explained that “the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.”

You deny the Holocaust of six million Jews and, declaring Israel’s illegitimacy, brazenly suggest that all Israeli Jews “return to Europe,” including the millions whose families hail from Arab countries, of whom you are apparently ignorant. You represent a nation whose ancient Persian forebears—themselves migrants from Europe—conquered Babylon and freed the Jewish people from captivity, permitting their return to the Land of Israel after the destruction of the first Jewish state. It was Persian kings who granted renewed Jewish political and religious autonomy in ancient Israel, leading to the eventual reconstruction of a Second Jewish Commonwealth. This was followed by centuries of Jewish presence in, attachment to, and ultimately mass return to the Holy Land to build a modern Jewish state with the consent of the League of Nations and the U.N. No, Mr. President: Israel is a thriving oak with deep millennial roots in the land, and strong branches extending in alliance to many nations throughout the world.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States spoke out recently to say that the “horrific genocide of the Holocaust is a historical fact no longer in dispute.” He pointedly reminded you that the Arab world has “made our peace” with the creation of Israel. He emphasized that in 2002 the entire Arab League adopted a Saudi plan committing Arab nations to a peace process that would bring about a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In that plan, the 22 Arab countries unanimously agreed to normalize relations and make a comprehensive peace with Israel once it leaves the territory occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War; they also called for a just and agreed solution to the refugee problem, without explicitly mentioning a “right of return.”

Mr. President, Hamas itself is undergoing a struggle between its hard line and pragmatist factions; no one knows whether or when it will moderate its positions and talk peace with Israel. Yet every day we hear pronouncements from prominent Hamas members, such as that by Khaled Suleiman, the group’s spokesperson in the Palestinian parliament, who said on May 10: “The Hamas movement is ready to recognize agreements signed with Israel, and in fact recognize Israel, but only within the ‘67 borders.” He further promised that Hamas will “not operate to thwart diplomatic negotiations” conducted by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas with Israel.

You ask why we and our European allies oppose a Hamas government that was elected by the Palestinian people and which represents their will. You question how we can “justify pressuring the Hamas elected government to recognize the Israeli regime and abandon [armed] struggle and follow the programs of the previous [Fatah] government” of peace talks and recognition of Israel. You ask: “If the current government had run on such a platform, would the people have elected it?”

Mr. President, opinion polls in recent months have consistently shown that three-fourths of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that Hamas should “change its position on the elimination of the state of Israel,” while as many as 84% want a peace agreement with Israel. Democracy is about much more than elections; it requires respect for the fundamental civil, political and human rights and freedoms of the individual, and by extension, of other states and peoples. It is our moral duty as democrats to sanction those who refuse such elementary respect to their neighbors, or their own citizens, even if they come to power through free elections, as fascists, racists and anti-Semites have in other lands. At the same time, we must apply economic pressures wisely, in a way that balances the promotion of peace with humanitarianism.

It is no small irony that you now invoke democratic elections among Palestinians as reflecting the will of the people, insisting that this popular will be honored. Your allies in government have brutally crushed the reform movement in Iran, which gained the backing of over three-quarters of your people in parliamentary elections. Your government’s security forces and kangaroo courts have violently suppressed the reformers, arbitrarily removing reformist legislators from power and disqualifying their candidates.

Mr. President, you note that “history tells us that repressive and cruel governments do not survive.” I could not agree more. Every human rights organization in the world—even the UN General Assembly—has recognized that Iran under the mullahs is guilty of systematic and wanton human rights and civil liberties abuses, placing Iran among the most oppressive governments on earth.

By threatening a United Nations member state with annihilation—and let no one imagine that one can wipe a country off the map without committing genocidal mass killings of its population; by exporting terrorism, subversion and extremism across the Middle East and the globe; by trampling the human rights of your own people; by flouting the near-universal international state support for a just peace with Israel; and by failing to satisfy the deep concerns of many nations and the IAEA that Iran seeks covertly to develop the world’s most horrific and destructive genocidal weapons—you are transforming a great nation, which bears the historic legacy of Persian civilization, into a loathsome outlaw state.

Mr. President, the world will not stand idly by as Iran exploits the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to hatch doomsday weapons.

Radical Refugees: Hijacking Human Rights
What International Law Really Says About the Palestinian “Right of Refugee Return”

Gidon D. Remba

Among the final status issues explored at the Camp David II summit in July 2000, and at the Taba talks in January 2001—including settlements, territory, Palestinian statehood, Israeli security, water, and Jerusalem—the problem of the Palestinian refugees remains the most nettlesome. The refugee problem cuts to the heart of the national conflict. Palestinians who demand a right of return for as many as four million refugees and their descendants to former villages and homes in Israel subvert the Palestinian claim to accept a two-state solution. The exercise of that right by an appreciable number of refugees would soon sabotage Israel’s Jewish majority, and its character as a Jewish state. Palestinian radicals call for an unfettered right of return under the guise of human rights or international law, which do not sanction these claims. Hussein Ibish, then Communications Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, wrote in the New York Times that “the right of return for refugees is guaranteed by all basic human rights treaties;” those who believe otherwise “would have Palestinians renounce their basic human rights to accommodate Jewish ethno-nationalism.” Ibish’s polemic should be seen for what it is: a new attempt to delegitimize the right of Israel to exist by cynical misuse of the idea of human rights. Ibish charges that maintaining Israel as a Jewish state would be to tolerate a pernicious ideology. In fact, it is to recognize that Israeli Jews insist on the same right to national self-determination in their own political space that Palestinians themselves claim in their bid for independence in the West Bank and Gaza. (Note: Ibish’s position on this has radically changed—he had an epiphany and was politically reborn— and he is now affiliated with ATFP, an ally of ours. I need to check with Rafi Dajani and Ibish on his current view of this to insure we respesent his current views accurately while also criticism his previous more radical incarnation, of which he is himself very critical now.)

Ali Abunimah, Vice President of the Arab American Action Network and Electronic Intifada editor, denounces Palestinian moderates like Sari Nusseibeh who believe that the only practicable and just solution to the refugee problem is to realize the right of return in a new state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. Those choosing not to return to Palestine would be provided options of rehabilitation, citizenship and compensation in the states where they reside, resettlement in third countries, or family reunification in Israel on humanitarian grounds for a limited number. Abunimah dubs such solutions “the shredding of fundamental [Palestinian] human rights.” He claims that “the right of return is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own and return to his country.’ Decades of international jurisprudence support this principle.”

But Lex Takkenberg, who heads the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Gaza, sums up his comprehensive study of The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law, published by Oxford University Press, by concluding: “The refugees do have the legal right to return to their ‘own country,’ Palestine. As long as there is no Palestinian state, this right applies in principle to the entire territory of the former British Mandate. However, now that the PLO, as the representative of the Palestinian people, has recognized the right of Israel to exist, it is obvious that the Palestinian refugees will only be able to exercise their right to return in conjunction with their right to self-determination” in a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel. Many scholars of human rights law cited by Takkenberg agree that the right to return referred to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a “right of nationals to return to the their own country,’ and as the Palestinian refugees are not Israeli nationals, accordingly this does not apply to them.” Most Western and non-Western scholars agree with a UN study of the right to leave and return that the problem of the Palestinian refugees should be solved within the framework of the right to national self-determination in their own state, not through irredentist claims about historic Palestine masked in the lofty rhetoric of human rights.

Renewed political assaults on the legitimacy of Israel, attempts to turn Jews into a minority in a single Palestinian Arab majority-ruled state only move us farther from an end to the national struggle, prolonging the war, and the affliction of both peoples, including Palestinian refugees. No interpretation of human rights law which promised the perpetuation of a national conflict and the destruction of a people’s right to national independence—in this case that of Israeli Jews—could faithfully reflect the tenor of international law, whose overriding goal is peace and justice. Such tactics sabotage the forces of reconciliation in both societies. Israelis refuse to commit national suicide and relinquish their right to a Jewish state, just as Palestinians insist on creating a Muslim, Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza, as reflected in the proposed new Palestinian constitution. The only viable road to peace in our lifetime requires mutual acceptance of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinian people, as Palestinian and Israeli moderates have recognized. The problem of the Palestinian refugees must be solved in a way that is consistent with the national rights of both peoples.

While firing broadsides against the peace plan devised by Palestinian leader Sari Nusseibeh and former Israeli Shin Bet security service chief Ami Ayalon, Abunimah too objects to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, again claiming that both law and justice make such a state illicit: “While virtually all Israelis deny the right of Palestinians to return to their homes, Israel now demands that the Palestinians recognize that Israel has a 'right to exist as a Jewish state.' This has absolutely no basis whatsoever in any law or principle of justice. Even if Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, no one can grant it a right to maintain a specific demographic composition—a Jewish majority—for eternity. To do so would mean that if the natural processes of population growth, immigration and emigration were to change the demographic composition in a way that interfered with Israel's ‘right’ to have a Jewish majority then Israel would be allowed to alter its own demographic composition.”

Abunimah insists that if

a) Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, then this is tantamount to
b) a timeless claim to maintain a Jewish majority; moreover, he argues that this implies that
c) Israel would have the right to engage in “transfer,” or ethnic cleansing and forced sterilization. “After all,” he concludes, “if Israel has a ‘right’ to maintain a Jewish majority, then this right must be enforceable or it is simply meaningless.”

But affirming Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state does not imply acceptance of (b) and (c). Abunimah has simply begged the question by rigging a loaded definition of “Jewish state” which is designed arbitrarily to lead to just the conclusions he seeks to confute. Supporters of Israel as a Jewish state can deny both (b) and (c) and accept that so long as Israel does in fact have a Jewish majority, and as long as this demographic mix is a result of morally defensible policies—which obviously exclude “transfer,” ethnic cleansing or forced sterilization—then it is legitimate, as a matter of both morality and law, for Israel to remain a Jewish state in important respects.

Speaking of the Law of Return, Israel’s ties with the Jewish Diaspora, and the maintenance of a Jewish majority, political scientist Alan Dowty notes that “None of these features is inherently inconsistent with liberal democracy, and none of them are in fact unique to Israel. There are at least two dozen ethnic democracies in the world (among several dozen ethnic states), and a large number of states grant citizenship on the basis of ethnic identity or descent.” Observes Israeli constitutional law scholar Ruth Gavison: “The Jewishness of Israel is, first and foremost, the recognition of the fact that Israel is the state in which the Jewish people exercises its right to national self-determination. Many of the world’s democracies, old and new, have a distinct culture analogous to Israel’s Jewish culture. The constitutions of most European countries reveal that they are nation-states in this sense. These states celebrate their distinct histories, languages, identities, and emblems. Many of their citizens do not share this nationality. But so long as the rights of these citizens are not denied, and so long as they can participate fully in the political and civil life of their societies, we do not deny the democratic nature of the state.” “There is no contradiction between striving to grant the Arabs equality as required by law and decency and the fulfillment of Zionism,” explains Israel’s Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein. “Whoever wants to preserve Israel as a democratic and Jewish state must strive to grant equality to the Arabs.”

There is no clash between Israel's remaining a haven for persecuted Jews, or inviting free Jewish immigration under the Law of Return, and its becoming fully a state of all its citizens, a principle which guides the jurisprudence of Israel’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak. Just as Israel gives preference to Jews wishing to emigrate to it under the Law of Return, so Palestine will have a Palestinian Law of Return, which gives preference to Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, to emigrate into the new polity. Israel is both a Jewish and a liberal democratic state, and liberal democracy requires equality among all citizens, Jewish or Palestinian, in the domestic public sphere where government acts—when it provides education, allocates budget and land, regulates employment, assesses taxes, and imposes the duty on citizens to serve the state through national service. Peace between Israel and Palestine will help remove the main obstacle to equal civic benefits and duties for Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians—the ongoing national conflict. Shawki Hatib, a Palestinian Israeli who serves as chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, told an Israeli audience in Tel Aviv marking the seventh anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder that “Rabin was the only Israeli leader who gave hope to Israeli Arabs, the first prime minister to give them equal rights and to promote their civil status.” In the Jewish republic, Israel, living at peace with a Palestinian state, Palestinian citizens will be more apt to enjoy equal citizenship. Equal civic duties means national service for all citizens, including eventually, when conditions permit, service for all Israeli citizens in the Israel Defense Forces which will, with the evolution of peace between Israel and its neighbors, no longer face an Arab army with which it is likely to be at war.

The UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa from August 28th to September 1st 2001 called for “the reinstitution of UN resolution 3379 determining the practices of Zionism as racist practices.” It termed Israel’s laws of return and citizenship discriminatory, designed to “maintain the exclusive nature of the State of Israel as a Jewish state to the exclusion of all other groups.” But the Palestinian law of return will discriminate against non-Palestinians and non-Arabs, including Jews, in just the same way that Israel’s law of return gives preference to Jews.

Yet the Durban declaration further called “upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state as in the case of South Africa which means the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.” Anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy only of Jewish national self-determination, while tacitly affirming this right for Palestinian Arabs and other peoples, seek to impale Israel on one or another horn of a false dilemma. Only Israel’s wish to maintain a Jewish nation-state is deemed a moral toxin. If such intolerance towards Jews, and anti-Jewish bias, is not anti-Semitic, it’s hard to imagine what is.

"Original Sin," Israel and the Palestinian Refugees: A Response to the Anti-Zionists

by Gidon D. Remba

People on the left, progressives, are committed to the values of liberalism, equality and human rights. They face the dilemma of how to reconcile these commitments to their attachments to particular groups, whether their own families and friends, ethnic groups to which they belong or nation-states in which they are citizens. Progressive Zionists believe that our commitment to the universal values of liberalism and equality can be reconciled in theory and in practice with our particularist attachments to the Jewish people and to Zionism: we are committed to realizing progressive Zionism.

Those on the left who believe that it is impossible to reconcile the particular and the universal often view “ethnically pure states,” or states which privilege a particular ethnic group, as incapable of developing into true liberal democracies where all citizens are treated equally. Some progressives believe that all forms of ethno-nationalism—not only Jewish nationalism or Zionism—are inherently immoral and irreconcilable with liberal values and universalism. They view all such political movements as “blood and soil nationalism,” a form of “tribalism”.[1] They define ethno-nationalism as “the identification of a nation or people as a descent group,” and as involving “the claim that there exists a certain national territory or homeland which members of the descent group are entitled to control.”[2] They believe that ethnically defined states like Israel usually arise through “genocide or what has come to be called ethnic cleansing recently but is a far older practice: driving out the members of an ethnic group by threat (often reinforced by the reality) of violence.”[3] They cleave to their anti-Zionism as a matter of what to them is high moral principle. Such people of the left frequently make the charge that “Israel …[began] its existence with a massive exercise in ‘ethnic cleansing’ by terror.”[4]

They believe that the inner logic of the “ethnic Jewish state” was manifest in founding acts of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian population. Historical-political complexities are reduced in their hands to a simple ideological claim, as complex events are bent to accommodate the demands of their “theory”. Hearing their accounts of Israel and the Palestinians, we scarcely appreciate not only how contested the claim of Jewish-Palestinian ethnic cleansing remains among historians, but the degree to which the revisionist findings of Israel’s “new historians” support a more nuanced assessment.

Benny Morris, the historian who has conducted the most extensive and systematic research of new archival sources on Israel’s role in the Palestinian exodus, has concluded that the “The Yishuv [the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine] did not enter the 1948 war with a master plan for expelling the Arabs, nor did its political and military leaders ever adopt such a master plan. What happened was largely haphazard and a result of the war…there was no grand design, no blanket policy of expulsion.”[5] Hostile Palestinian reviews of Morris’ major studies suggest rather that Palestinian academic opinion continues to cleave to the unsubstantiated view that “Palestine’s Arabs were expelled systematically and with premeditation.”[6] Morris responds that the critics “somehow avoid the rich world of nuance and deny multiple causation, and resist or ignore the variety and localism of which much of history, and certainly the 1948 war, is composed…[T]hey prefer their history simple; prefer a single-cause explanation of the Palestinian exodus, with the Zionists cast as systematic premeditating, expulsive devils. From the first, throughout, the Zionists were bent on transfer and expulsion; throughout the Palestinians were hapless, innocent victims…History is one large morality play, with the protagonists carefully separated into heroes and villains, good and bad.”

Instead, Morris concludes his monumental study, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 with this summation: “[T]he Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war.”[7] While some Palestinians, particularly the middle and upper classes, fled of their own initiative in response to the fighting, it is undeniable that some Palestinians were expelled by Israeli forces; but intent is critical to accurately characterizing such acts and to rendering moral judgment: “The destruction of Palestinian communities and the departure of their inhabitants during this phase of the conflict [Spring 1948] were also a consequence of Zionist military offensives. The first goal of these operations was to block the advance of armies from neighboring Arab states.”[8] Expulsion was decidedly not Israeli policy, as Morris and others have shown, though in some cases orders to remove the population from a battleground originated at the highest levels, and in other cases, particularly in major cities like Haifa and Nazareth, Jewish officials made extensive and successful efforts to persuade Arabs to remain in their homes.[9]

Morris, however, has more recently described some of the Israeli expulsions as “a variety of ethnic cleansing of Arab areas by Jews.”[10] That there were cases in which Israeli forces expelled Palestinians is not contested; what is open to argument is how we should describe and morally assess these acts. Those who view them as morally unjustifiable will deem them instances of “ethnic cleansing.” Those who hold that they admit of some justification will describe these tragic events in different vocabulary. While the Fourth Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 had not yet been adopted at the time of the Palestinian deportations, it is widely agreed that the forcible transfers of population which Article 49 prohibits “regardless of their motive,” were forbidden as a matter of natural law. The question remains whether in light of the circumstances which obtained in Palestine of 1948 the prohibition admits of any exceptions. Morris has noted that “Arab irregulars were based and quartered in the villages, and as the militias of many villages were participating in the anti-Yishuv [anti-Jewish community] hostilities, the Haganah regarded most of the villages as actively or potentially hostile.”[11] In his memoirs, Yitzhak Rabin describes the dilemma of Jewish forces near the villages of Lod and Ramle facing approaching Egyptian divisions during the war: “Clearly, we could not leave Lod’s hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route to the Yiftach (another brigade), which was advancing eastward.”[12]

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal sum up their study of Palestinian history as follows: “The tragedy [of Palestinian refugees] resulted from a convergence of emotions: the Jewish fear, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and with the mounting attacks in Arab countries against Jews, of what the Arabs would do if they prevailed…the anxiety of Jewish commanders having a hostile population behind their advancing lines during the fighting; … and, not least, the Palestinians own image of what the Jews would do to them if Israel prevailed and they were left in its territory.”[13] The war during which such expulsions occurred, and the motives for their commission, would likely have obtained even if mainstream Zionism had been a movement of civic nationalism proposing a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. For as long as Jewish refugees and other persecuted persons emigrated to Palestine when no other countries would have them, the social and demographic bases for power sharing in a civic state in Palestine would have continued to shift toward the Jewish side, arousing Arab fears. This of course is what happened between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon during the 1970’s and 80’s, and what is happening now between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq.

It is thus naïve and dogmatic to suppose that the first Arab-Israeli war was the exclusive product of the Jewish community’s realization of an ethnic Jewish state under the aegis of the United Nations 1947 partition resolution affirming the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Palestinian Arab nationalists, and the UN itself, at the time also advocated an ethnic Arab nation-state, not a civic state, and the same holds for Palestinian nationalists today. A Jewish-Arab civil war had been raging in Palestine, and it is most likely that such a war would have ensued even if the Jewish leadership had favored a binational state (as proposed then by Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, and today by some “post-Zionist” cosmopolitans, and Palestinians like Edward Said). The Arab leadership of Palestine at the time generally opposed even a sharing of power with the Jewish community. Might ethnic war and the creation of refugees have been obviated had both sides embraced the kind of cosmopolitan civic nationalism advocated by anti-Zionist progressives? Perhaps under the most favorable conditions, but in practice all too many non-ethnic states have collapsed into civil war as well, as noted above.

If the “civic nationalism” proposed by anti-Zionist progressives promises no guarantee of avoiding ethnic civil war, it might also be true that under favorable conditions ethnic nation states might avoid such conflicts—particularly ethnic states built around a robust liberal constitutional framework of political and social equality. This possibility, which progressive Zionists believe is both realistically possible and morally necessary, is often overlooked by progressive anti-Zionists. Sixty years later, a two-state solution has again been broached for Palestine-Israel. If it emerges gradually in the coming years, it will result in an ethnic Palestinian Arab state and an ethnic Jewish state, albeit one which has long treated all citizens equally in key spheres of public life (within Israel proper), but is striving to fulfill its founding ideal in other spheres while struggling with ongoing security threats from extremist Muslim groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and hostile states like Iran (please see the response to Claim 6 below for a fuller discussion of this issue). Indeed, Palestinian leaders now adamantly insist on an ethnically pure state; whereas Israel has a Palestinian minority, the polity desired by Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza will not contain a Jewish minority. The proposition that sovereign borders need not mirror the ethnic identity of communities is repudiated by the Palestinians, who are unwilling to consider an arrangement whereby some Jewish settlements would be evacuated to make way for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees, while others might remain under a Palestinian government which would guarantee the rights of Jews as citizens of the new state, at the same time insuring that water and other resources are allocated equitably between Jewish and Arab communities in the new state.

For anti-Zionist progressives, ethnic cleansing is what ethnic states are wont to do, and such acts can only be defended on illicit “historical-theological” grounds (by invoking claims like “the great evil of the Holocaust ostensibly justifies displacing the Palestinian population”). It is true that such justifications are patently immoral. The dispossession of the Palestinians was a tragic and often unintended product of war, and where intentional its purpose was often associated with defensive requirements to remove from battle areas hostile and armed populations supporting guerrillas; to the extent that such expulsions were not dictated by defensive military needs, they were and are unjustified. But they are best explained by the fears generated in the midst of a terrible war involving five armies advancing on a small territory, than by the “inner logic” of ethnic nationalism.

[1]Brian Barry, “Statism and Nationalism: A Cosmpolitan Critique,” Ian Shapiro and Lea Brilmayer, eds., Global Justice, Nomos XLI (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 12-66.
[2]Ibid., pp. 16-17. There are others on the left who believe, inconsistently, that only Jewish nationalism is immoral, while having little or nothing to say about Palestinian or Arab nationalism, or other national ideologies around the globe. Such views will be addressed below in our response to Claim 5.
[3]Ibid., p. 45.
[4]Ibid., p. 37
[5]Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 17
[6]Ibid., p. 37
[7]Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 286.
[8]Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 306-307. Chapter 5, “The Palestinian Disaster and the Basic Issues After 1948,” offers a comprehensive and objective assessment of the literature on the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem. Concludes Tessler: “Overall, it seems necessary to conclude that there is no single cause of the Palestinian refugee problem and, accordingly, that there is a mixture of fact and propaganda in both Arab and Israeli arguments. The factors that led Palestinian civilians to leave their homes varied from one location to another. Even more, they varied from one phase of the war to the next.”
[9]Tessler, pp. 306-7.
[10]See Benny Morris, “Arab-Israeli War,” in Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 28-37, esp. p. 32.
[11]Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 62.
[12]Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 383.
[13]Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 153.

Overview: Progressive Jewish Perspectives on Presbyterian Church Israel Divestment Resolution

Excerpt from a Letter & from Remarks to the Chicago Presbytery from Chicago Peace Now President Gidon D. Remba

Revised and Updated April 17, 2005

What I say below is my own personal view, and not the official position of Chicago Peace Now, the organization I lead, or of Americans for Peace Now, the national organization of which we are a part. But I believe my remarks reflect views and feelings held by everyone I have spoken with on the Chicago Peace Now Board, consisting of rabbis, activists, scholars and other Jews committed to promoting a just Middle East peace. I write as a Jewish peace activist, scholar and community leader who has devoted great efforts for over thirty years, both in Israel-Palestine and in the United States, to promoting peace and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews.

Progressive Jewish Views of the PC(USA) Divestment Resolution

I strongly believe that the decision of the PC(USA) to pursue a policy of selective phased divestment from certain companies doing business with Israel has wrought, and is continuing to wreak, incalculable damage to Presbyterian-Jewish relations in the United States and to the cause of Palestinian-Israeli peace which it was intended to serve. By treating Israel, the Jewish state—a place which, its faults notwithstanding, is regarded by Jews worldwide as a haven from persecution for Jews in distress—as a pariah state in the same class as genocidal Sudan and apartheid South Africa, PC(USA)’s divestment resolution has caused deep pain and anguish among the overwhelming majority of Jews.

The resolution is unreasonably and immorally one-sided in practice, given that the church is not at the same time pursuing divestment from US companies doing business in those Arab countries which aid and abet Palestinian terrorism against innocent Israeli Jews, or against any other countries committing more egregious human rights violations than Israel. Moreover, the original resolution takes no economic steps whatsoever to either encourage moderate pro-peace forces among Palestinians and Arabs, or to discourage extremist views and actions on the part of groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which seriously undermine the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace and which gravely violate the human rights of Israeli Jews (and Israeli Arabs). Every major human rights group—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories—has found that suicide bombings and other attacks against noncombatant Israeli men, women and children—including civilians residing in Israeli settlements which violate international law—are crimes against humanity. Yet the PC(USA) resolution does not see fit to go beyond rhetorical condemnation of these grievous crimes, singling out only Israeli actions, and companies doing business with Israel, for punitive economic sanctions.

Americans for Peace Now’s (APN) official position is to “strongly oppose one-sided actions and statements, including divestment, that appear to solely blame Israel for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. These types of initiatives are morally and historically inappropriate and destructive to reconciliation between the Jewish state of Israel and Palestinian statehood.” Moreover, APN believes that “the process of providing Israel with security and the Palestinians with self-determination should be the primary focus of all those who are concerned about the conflict.”

PC(USA) 2005 Divestment Criteria: Still Egregiously Imbalanced and Inadequate

Since passing the original grossly one-sided divestment resolution in July 2004, PC(USA) has, in December 2004, issued a set of criteria for identifying “multinational corporations in Israel and Palestine and to implement the General Assembly policy of phased selective divestment.” Yet even these divestment criteria, which include the belated addition of a criterion that targets for possible divestment “corporations that provide products and services to Israeli or Palestinian organizations/groups that support or facilitate violent acts against innocent civilians,” thereby including corporations supporting Palestinian terrorism, are egregiously imbalanced and inadequate. Fully five of the six criteria for divestment refer to companies supporting the Israeli occupation and Israeli settlements or the “Israeli Separation Barrier,” making it clear that the focus of the church’s divestment policy remains Israel, and that the church continues to place disproportionate blame on Israel for the lack of peace. Further, the church is not pursuing systematic divestment from US or other companies doing business in those Arab countries which aid and abet Palestinian terrorism against innocent Israeli Jews, or from companies doing business with any of the many other countries committing more egregious human rights violations than Israel. Instead, the list of corporations which are included in the February 2005 updated roster of targeted corporations, the “2005 General Assembly Divestment List”, focuses almost exclusively on US military industries, companies which often provide key defensive weapons systems to Israel as well as to the US armed services (the main exception to this is tobacco companies).

Some companies are targeted for divestment merely because they are among the “leading military contractors” or depend on “military contracts for more than 60% of their sales.” For example, Northrup Grumman’s offense is that it is “the third largest military contractor, making weapons such as the B-2 [stealth] bomber, surveillance systems and the C-17 [troop] transport.” No distinction whatsoever is made by PC(USA) between the legitimate and just uses of such weapons and military support systems for the self-defense of the United States and Israel and immoral and unlawful uses. In fact, the B-2 bomber played a major role in NATO’s humanitarian intervention against Yugoslavia in Kosovo, helping to stop Serbian atrocities, as well as in missions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Finally, no companies appear on the divestment list at this point for doing business with oil-rich Arab or Muslim countries which support terrorism against Israelis or Americans, such as US-based multinational corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel or the various US, European and other foreign oil and high technology conglomerates operating in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Progressive American Jewish Pro-Israel Groups Unanimously Oppose Divestment

The leadership of the Union for Reform Judaism and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, wrote as follows in their July 27, 2004 letter to Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, who heads PC(USA):

Your support of divestment from Israel creates a worrisome double standard. Are human rights violations by Israel greater than those committed by the Palestinians? By the Syrians? By the Iranians? We have to ask ourselves - and we encourage you to ask yourselves - why this attack focused on the only democracy in the region? Not withstanding her faults and missteps as she wrestles to deal with legitimate security concerns, Israel has been and remains a far more open, tolerant, and democratic nation than any other in the Middle East. Surely one can be critical of specific policies of the Israeli government, as we ourselves have been from time to time, but this blatantly anti-Israel affront stymies legitimate criticism born of a true love for Israel and peace.

Not only has a resolution opposing the PC(USA)’s divestment resolution passed unanimously by the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group representing 155 Jewish Federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America, but every progressive Jewish group in the organized Jewish community has condemned the divestment resolution in forceful terms. These include a host of Jewish groups who are at the forefront of working for Palestinian-Israeli peace and for Palestinian and Israeli civil, human and national rights—including

*Peace Now in Israel and the US, the oldest and largest national Jewish group working in both countries for a comprehensive negotiated Arab-Israeli peace;
*Brit Tzedek v’Shalom: The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, a large grassroots national Jewish group also working for a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli peace;
*The Union for Reform Judaism, the synagogue arm of the Reform Movement in North America, the largest segment of North American Jewry, representing 1.5 million Reform Jews in more than 900 congregations in the United States and Canada. (All other Jewish religious denominations in the US—Orthodox, Conservative and Reconstructionist—concur in their opposition to divestment of every kind.)
*Meretz USA: For Israeli Civil Rights and Peace: the Meretz-Yahad Party in Israel is headed by Yossi Beilin, the lead negotiator on the Israeli side for the Geneva Initiative, the unofficial model peace treaty drafted by a group of leading Palestinians and Israelis;
*Ameinu/Our People: Liberal Values, Progressive Israel works for peace, economic justice and pluralism in Israel and America through a variety of programs and activities and is affiliated with the Labor Party in Israel.
*Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), and RHR-North America, the rabbinic voice of conscience in Israel, giving voice to the Jewish tradition of human rights, promoting justice and freedom, while campaigning against discrimination and inhumane conduct.
*The Shefa Fund, a significant funder of Israeli peace groups.

Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) believes that the resolutions of the Presbyterian Church have violated “the human rights of Jews to respectful equal treatment,” giving “evidence of great difficulty in truly hearing what Jewish voices have to say.” In RHR’s view, PC(USA)’s call to selectively divest from “multinational corporations operating in Israel” results in “discrimination against Jews and their state”. In their open letter to PC(USA), RHR explains its perspective in language so trenchant that I feel compelled to quote it more fully:

Your resolution purporting to support the Geneva Initiative declares without reservation that the “occupation…has proven to be at the root of evil acts committed against innocent people on both sides of the conflict.” Like you, we hate the Occupation, condemn it and work for its speedy end in a peace accord. However, the Occupation cannot be used to excuse the re-awakening of demons. We are appalled that you conceptualize this Occupation in the same one-sided terms that have been applied for so long by Christian Churches to the real or perceived sins of Jews. Your simplistic declaration is inaccurate and inadequate to explain the situation in all its tragic moral complexity. It is not just that your resolution ignores the homicidal ideologies that have so sadly taken hold among some of our Palestinian neighbors. Nor is the problem that it averts its eyes from the attempts to destroy our country that transcend the Occupation and precede it by decades. Its deepest flaw lies in the ramifications of the highly charged language you employ. Particularly insensitive to history and appalling in its potential consequences is the allegation that the Occupation is somehow “at the root of evil acts committed.” This is a restatement of the paradigmatic allegation that Jewish sins are somehow especially significant, especially “at the root of evil.”

You passed a resolution directed as a “call …on the Israeli government,” describing the Occupation in a way that profoundly places Israeli sin alone at the heart of the situation. While we recognize that you deplore terror against Israelis, you direct not one word of criticism to the government of the Palestinian Authority [then led by Yasser Arafat] despite its manifest multitude of profound sins against God and the Human Rights of Palestinians and Jews. You ignore the incontrovertible fact that this catastrophe is the product of many causes and that there is guilt enough to share between all parties. People of conscience must act in awareness that singling out, magnifying and sanctifying Jewish sins has always been at the core of the terrible evil that we know as anti-Semitism. Failing in this awareness, you cross a line that people of good conscience dare not cross…

Finally, RHR criticizes PC(USA) for incongruously endorsing both the Geneva Initiative and divestment, a strategy which flouts the very mutuality and reconciliation on which the Geneva Initiative is predicated. "At the heart of the Geneva Initiative lies the hope of attaining peace and justice in the Land through mutual respectful recognition between Palestinians and Jews. This hope cannot be credibly supported by a group of people who pass resolutions that support missionary activity directed at Jews, revive discredited rhetoric in regard to Jewish sin, and promote collective economic punishment and discrimination against Jews."

Now I do not believe that the leadership of PC(USA) is in fact anti-Semitic. I believe that the leadership and many who support divestment in the Church do so out of a sincere belief that it might help their fellow Christians in the Holy Land. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the resolution is grossly insensitive to Jewish feelings and rights, and that it has indeed demonized Israel by placing the sole culpability for all “evil” in the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy at the feet of the Jewish state.

A second Rabbis for Human Rights letter to Rev. Kirkpatrick of PC(USA), from executive director Rabbi Arik Ascherman, dated January 13, 2005, states that “we remain concerned that your resolution may send you down a slippery slope into collective punishment that will harm innocent Israelis without truly affecting the policies we jointly abhor.” As Meretz USA wrote to Rev. Kirkpatrick, PC(USA)’s resolution overlooks the fact that “the ‘harm’ caused [by Israeli actions using equipment manufactured by US companies] may be in furtherance of legitimate security and defense measures meant to protect innocent life… Sadly, many Israeli actions which result in the spilling of innocent Palestinian blood are directly related to Palestinian actions against innocent Israelis.” With regard to PC(USA)’s use of the term “root of evil” to describe the Israeli occupation, Rabbi Ascherman warns that “there is a great likelihood that others will read your words as we did, even if this was not your intent…However, this is precisely the intent of the caution in Pirke Avot (The Sayings of the Ancestors), that sages must watch their words.” And, while he acknowledges that “ending the occupation will go a long way towards curbing the human rights violations which we struggle against, we again remind you that our conflict began way before the occupation. There are Palestinians who vow to continue their struggle until Israel proper is also eliminated. It is therefore naïve at best to maintain that the occupation is the sole root of the conflict or that ending the occupation will end the conflict.”

Israel’s Barrier

With regard to PC(USA)’s resolution on Israel’s barrier, fence or wall, the leaders of US Reform Judaism have written to the leadership of the church: “We are further dismayed by a separate Overture, also passed at your recent General Assembly, ‘On Calling for an End to the Construction of a Wall by the State of Israel.’ Yet again, this one-sided approach, which fails to recognize the barrier as a defensive mechanism against terrorism, calls into question your genuine concern for Israel's security. We too have been critical of the route of the barrier (though you misleadingly imply that it is a wall for the majority of its path, when in fact, it is a wall for only approximately five miles). But, by opposing the wall in its entirety without consideration for Israeli life and security, just as by endorsing divestment from Israel, you have singled out Israel unfairly and unjustly.…” Had the resolution not called for “an end to the construction of a wall by the state of Israel” but rather for the barrier’s route to be changed so as to realize a better balance between the rights of Palestinians to well-being and the rights of Israelis to security, life and to freedom from acts of terror, the resolution would not have been offensive to so many Jews.

Radical Left Jewish Groups Who Support Divestment

While there are a few progressive Jewish groups who have advocated in favor of divestment, such as a California-based group called A Jewish Voice for Peace, none of these groups are clearly committed to Israel’s existence as a democratic Jewish state living at peace with a Palestinian Arab state. In practice, such radical left Jewish groups often display an egregious lack of support or sympathy for Israel’s security needs, and regularly circulate materials that call Israel a “racist apartheid state.” Despite their claims, they remain in fact a small minority in the American Jewish community. Jewish Voice for Peace claims a membership of 30,000. But its financial statement, which is public under federal law, indicates a much smaller number.

Three Key Objections to Divestment

There are many other problems, both moral and practical, with the PC(USA)’s divestment strategy, and they are highlighted well in the statements on this subject by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling of the Shefa Fund and from Meretz USA, among others. I would like to draw your attention to three which I regard as among the most serious.

Divestment Prevents a Presbyterian-Progressive Jewish Alliance for Peace

By pursuing the divestment strategy, PC(USA) has not only alienated a great many American and Israeli Jews but placed an insurmountable obstacle in the way of an alliance between the Presbyterian Church and the many national American Jewish groups who are working together on a common strategy to promote a just Middle East peace. By building a national alliance with progressive Jewish groups, PC(USA) might have been able to coordinate its lobbying in our nation’s capital with the seven major American Jewish organizations that comprise the American Jewish Geneva Initiative Coalition. The voices of many Presbyterians, when added to the tens of thousands of progressive American Jews who are actively engaged in making their own voices heard to the White House and to their members of Congress, could magnify the impact of the message which the progressive Jewish community works to convey to our elected officials. We regularly communicate to these officials our views on what the United States must do to help Palestinians and Israelis move forward towards peace and to end the violence and suffering. Instead, PC(USA) has opted for a strategy that puts it at odds with virtually the entire Jewish community, preventing alliance and cooperation, a course of action which has only injected much new bitterness and divisiveness into our communities over a conflict that is already terrible and bitter. And as both Yossi Beilin, the chief Israeli architect of the Geneva Initiative and Yariv Oppenheimer, the director of Peace Now in Israel, have noted, divestment is more likely to generate anger and mistrust among Israeli Jews and to drive more away from supporting the Israeli peace camp.

Divestment is a Misguided Approach to Socially Responsible Investing

Rabbi Mordechai Liebling of the Shefa Fund has written, “The divestment movement has the potential to undermine the reputation of socially responsible investing. US industry has ties with repressive regimes around the world. Why, at a time when the world is becoming increasingly fundamentalist, is Israel being singled out? Socially responsible investing, including the strategy of shareholder activism, is an increasingly important and effective method of working for political, social and economic justice. If the public perceives that the socially responsible investment movement is unfairly targeting Israel, it becomes vulnerable to charges of anti-Semitism and its reputation will be tarnished.”

Second, there are wiser and more just ways to practice socially responsible investing with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Brit Tzedek v'Shalom observes: “there are many ways to support the Palestinian people that contribute positively to the goal of a negotiated solution to the conflict. We support investment in economic support and development projects that have the potential to bring people together rather than driving them apart. Donating to organizations that invest in Palestinian businesses, loan money to development banks involved in micro-lending, help rebuild the infrastructure of the West Bank, invest in promoting dialogue and understanding or provide humanitarian relief for victims of violence are a few examples of how individuals, corporations, organizations and the United States government can support the Palestinian people and activists for a just peace.” As Meretz USA points out, “It would have been far more appropriate for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to invest in one or several of the many non-governmental organizations in Israel and the Palestinian territories which are actively trying to promote justice, relief, and reconciliation.”

Divestment Ignores Key Distinctions Between Moral and Immoral Uses of Weapons

Third, objects and equipment are morally neutral; this includes weapons (and barriers), which can be used (and situated) legitimately and lawfully in self-defense or wrongly in acts of unlawful aggression and in the unwarranted violation of human rights. The D-9 bulldozer manufactured by Caterpillar used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes will also be used to demolish those homes of Israeli settlers and other infrastructure of the Israeli occupation not wanted by the Palestinian Authority when Israel disengages from Gaza and part of the Northern West Bank, a first and unprecedented move in what most Israelis hope and believe will be a series of far-reaching de-occupation steps. By attempting to discourage sales of these bulldozers to Israel by Caterpillar, selective divestment would also, if successful, discourage the sale of the very equipment which Israel will use to remove some of the trappings of settlements and occupation.

An Appeal for a Presbyterian-Jewish Alliance for Middle East Peace

I think the divestment resolution a great strategic and moral mistake on the part of the church, however well-meaning its proponents may be. It will do far more damage than good. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to renounce it. Rev. Kirkpatrick has stated that “I don’t want the money that pays my pension and medical benefits to be invested in companies that profit from bulldozers that demolish Palestinian homes or are building parts of this wall.” (PC(USA) News Service, September 30, 2004, “High-level Presbyterians and Jews Discuss Israel Divestment”). In renouncing divestment, I invite you to make it clear that you regard the building of alliances with the many American Jews who are working for Middle East peace, and the pursuit of a common, truly effective and morally balanced peace strategy, as a higher value than your own desire for moral purity and integrity. The act of choosing rapprochement with your Jewish neighbors would be a bold act of peace which the peoples of Israel and Palestine could view as a model for reconciliation. It would further serve as a model for compromise in a world where there is no perfect justice and where we face many tragic and imperfect choices between competing rights and imperatives. Moreover, such an act would mirror and reinforce what a group of brave Israelis and Palestinians did in forging the Geneva Initiative. Instead of seeking out groups on the fringe of their neighbor’s community, they sought to engage with the moderate mainstream on the other side. I urge you to do the same with the Jewish community. Instead of taking punitive steps, take positive steps. Work in tandem on a national scale with the many American Jews who truly care about Israel and its people’s security and whose concern for Israel’s well-being impels them to support Palestinian national and human rights.

In conclusion, I am gratified that we have had several opportunities for genuine dialogue and for frank and heartfelt exchanges of ideas and feelings in our various conversations and group meetings. These include, most recently, the opportunity I was afforded, along with several other Jewish leaders, to address 300 church leaders at the Chicago Presbytery Assembly meeting in April 2005. I believe that you and many in the Presbyterian community are genuinely committed to healing relations between Presbyterians and Jews and to seeking peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians. I look forward to continuing the dialogue, as do my colleagues from Chicago Peace Now, in other forums, both public and private, large and small.

Shalom v’Salam, In Peace,

Doni

(Gidon) Doni Remba
President
Chicago Peace Now
Email: dremba@comcast.net
http://www.chicagopeacenow.org/

Republican Jewish Attack Ads Push Spinning into Sinning, by Gidon D. Remba

Republican Jewish Attack Ads Push Spinning into Sinning

By

Gidon D. Remba

Published by Jews for Kerry, October 22, 2004

An anti-Democratic attack ad run in the Jewish press by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) attempts to smear Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and the Democratic Party with distortions about their views on Israel. The RJC, which describes itself as the “sole voice of Jewish Republicans to Republican decision makers and the Jewish community,” and boasts such board members as President George W. Bush’s former spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, seeks to portray Kerry and the Democratic Party as failing to stand up for Israel’s right to self-defense against terrorism, as anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic.

The ad, which culls statements attributed to various Democrats from the last ten years, often relies on misleading quotes taken out of context, twisted to convey the opposite of their speakers’ plain meaning. And it attempts to demonize the Democrats by tarring Kerry and his party through association with extreme statements made by a handful of politicians whose views have been roundly repudiated by the Democratic mainstream and by Senator Kerry himself, a crucial fact that the Republican Jewish Coalition conceals from its audience. A former top Republican strategist has said of President George W. Bush’s senior campaign advisor Karl Rove that his “goal is never just to win, it is to destroy your opponent, [use] character assassination, whatever it takes. There is almost nothing Karl would not do. For example, religion was not part of Karl’s life but he viewed it as a political tool to be manipulated.” (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2004) The Republican Jewish Coalition has followed the lead of its non-Jewish Republican mentors.

For dishonesty, this ad indeed surpasses Rove himself: the insinuation that leading Democrats, including John Kerry, are anti-Semitic rises to the level of libel. The RJC brandishes quotes from two Democrats, including Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA), which suggest that Jews pushed the US into war with Iraq against America’s own national interests for Israel’s sake. But, in the first place, Democratic congressional leaders—including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)—excoriated Moran, as did the National Jewish Democratic Council. Democratic as well as Republican Jewish members of Congress called on Moran to resign. Moran then apologized repeatedly and withdrew his statement.

And in the second place, grouping Democratic leaders like Kerry together with Jim Moran is a highly dishonest way of insinuating that all Democrats share Moran’s bigotry. Were Democrats willing to use such reprehensible methods, the RJC’s own tactics could easily have been aimed against Republicans to even more devastating effect. Democrats can easily cite blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements by various prominent Republicans, while pretending that such remarks had not been rejected by the party’s mainstream. It was, after all, President George H. Walker Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker (still an important advisor to George W. Bush) who famously said: “F*** the Jews. They don’t vote for us anyway.” Republican President Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitism is legendary. Patrick Buchanan, who worked for three Republican presidents and ran in the Republican presidential primaries three times, has praised Hitler, denied that thousands of Jews were gassed at Treblinka, and defended Nazi war criminals. He has also referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory” (St. Louis Post Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1990), and was outspoken last year in charging that Jewish officials in the Bush Administration are “colluding with Israel” to “ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in our national interests.”

But such offensive anti-Semitic and anti-Israel remarks—whether from Buchanan or from Moran —are irrelevant to the Bush-Kerry contest. Neither Buchanan nor Moran are representative of their parties. Both are, rather, embarrassments to their parties — as is a Republican Jewish ad which seeks to discredit the Democrats by associating their leadership with an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel fringe. Such dishonesty serves only to distract American Jews from the real issues we face as we go to the polls. It serves as a smokescreen designed to deflect us from thinking seriously about the differences between Kerry and Bush, and about which of them is really better for Israel and America.

On one issue after another—Democratic and Republican positions on Israel’s security barrier, targeted killing of terrorists, negotiating with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders, US aid to Israel, anti-Semitism and blaming Jews for the war in Iraq—the Republican Jewish Coalition ad campaign bears only the most tenuous relationship to the truth.

Kerry and Bush on Israel’s Security Barrier

The Republican Jewish Coalition claims that “Senator John Kerry incredibly questioned Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism by condemning Israel’s construction of a security fence and calling it a ‘barrier to peace.’” In fact, Kerry has consistently and strongly supported Israel’s right to build a security fence. He has described Israel’s barrier as “a fence necessary to the security of Israel until they have a partner to be able to negotiate” (New York Times transcript, February 29, 2004) and has affirmed his support for the security fence repeatedly in public forums. Following a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in February, Senator Kerry issued the following statement: “It is ironic that this act of terror takes place on the eve of consideration by the International Court of Justice of Israel's security fence. The Court does not have and should not accept jurisdiction over this case. Israel's security fence is a legitimate act of self defense. No nation can stand by while its children are blown up at pizza parlors and on buses. … The fence only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel.” (February 23, 2004)

President Bush himself, moreover, has voiced concerns about the fence. In a White House press conference Bush said: "I think the wall is a problem and I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank. And I will continue to discuss this issue very clearly with the prime minister [Ariel Sharon]." (July 27, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Kerry, Dean and Bush: Moral Equivalency Between Israel and Terrorists?

The Republican Jewish Coalition charges that former governor Howard Dean called Hamas terrorists “soldiers,” to which the RJC retorts: “No Gov. Dean, they aren’t soldiers; they are terrorists.”

But in the interview quoted by the RJC, Dean was in fact defending Israel’s right to engage in targeted killings of Hamas terrorists. The full quote (CNN Transcript, Sept. 10, 2003) shows that he regards Hamas as aggressors who are waging war on Israel. In describing Hamas terrorists as soldiers, Dean was taking a strongly pro-Israel stance as against the anti-Israel “human rights” organizations who claim that when Israel kills a suspected terrorist, it is engaging in an “illegal extra-judicial execution” of a civilian. Some human rights groups claim that suspected Palestinian terrorists are civilians who should be arrested and proven guilty of terrorism in a court of law before they can be deprived of their right to life. Dean, rightly, will have none of this. Hamas terrorists are soldiers, combatants in a war against Israel, insisted Dean, and therefore Israel can legitimately target them for killing.

John Kerry holds the same view. When asked whether he supported Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Rantisi, he declared: “I believe Israel has every right in the world to respond to any act of terror against it. Hamas is a terrorist, brutal organization.” (“Meet the Press,” NBC, April 18, 2004)

By contrast, many members of the Bush Administration have been critical of Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders. For example, the Bush Administration's ambassador to the United Nations at the time, John D. Negroponte, told the UN Security Council that "the United States was 'deeply troubled' by the killing of Sheik Yassin and believed Israel's action had escalated tensions in the region" (New York Times, March 26, 2004). And when asked about Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, White House spokesman Scott McClellan remarked, “We are deeply troubled by this morning's actions in Gaza.” (Reuters, March 23, 2004) The conservative National Review opined: “The Bush administration's initial reaction to Israel's act of self-defense has been mealy-mouthed, pathetic, and morally offensive. ... Why … won't the Bush White House proudly stand side-by-side with Israel as a strategic ally against a radical Islamic jihad?” (March 22, 2004)

Bush and Kerry on Arafat: Terrorist or Statesman?

The Republican Jewish Coalition charges that Kerry called Arafat a “statesman” in 1997 “despite Arafat’s past and continued support for terrorists who have killed both Americans and Israelis.” But in 1997 many leading politicians on all sides, both in America and in Israel, paid compliments to Arafat, at least in public. As recently as April 2002 President Bush himself “said he would not label Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat a terrorist … despite a week of devastating suicide bombings within Israeli cities. The president said that Arafat's involvement in negotiating a peace settlement prevented him from designating him a terrorist” (UPI/United Press International, April 1, 2002). Since the failure of all efforts to end the intifada that year, both Bush and Kerry have changed their stance on Arafat. The RJC ignores Kerry’s many negative statements on Arafat since then. Kerry, like Bush, has ruled out Arafat as a legitimate negotiating partner for Israel. In March, 2004 he said, "As far as I'm concerned he's an outlaw to the peace process...and he's proved himself to be irrelevant" (Associated Press, March 10, 2004).

Carter and Negotiating with Palestinian Terrorists

Under the heading “Moral Equivalency Between Israel and Terrorists,” the RJC upbraids former President Jimmy Carter for criticizing President George W. Bush, in Carter’s words, for making “no effort to have a balanced negotiating position between Israel and Palestinians.” The Jewish Republicans responded: “President Carter, you should know that there is no negotiating with terrorists.” But President Carter didn’t advocate negotiating with terrorists; he advocated negotiating with Palestinians. Unless you assume that all Palestinians are terrorists, the charge is baseless.

The RJC overlooks a host of inconvenient facts:

*A number of Palestinian leaders have been sharply critical of both terrorism and the intifada, including Mohammed Dahlan, the former Gaza security chief to whom thousands of Palestinian security forces in Gaza remain loyal.

*Polls consistently show that 69% of Israeli Jews favor negotiating with the Palestinian Authority (see the most recent opinion survey by Tel Aviv University, as reported in Ha’aretz, Oct. 20, 2004).

*Three major Israeli political parties—Labor, Meretz-Yahad and the centrist Shinui which is part of Sharon’s coalition government and the third largest party in the Knesset—support negotiations with Palestinians now in order to reach a cease-fire.

*Even the Bush Administration has reportedly encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to negotiate with any Palestinian leader who is able and willing to take security responsibility from areas that Israel plans to evacuate under the Israeli government’s disengagement plan. (Ha’aretz, May 31, 2004) And the Bush Administration continues to stand behind its own peace plan, the Road Map, which involves a return to negotiations by Israel with a reformed Palestinian leadership.

So Carter’s advocacy of negotiations with Palestinians is widely held among Israeli Jews, and by the Bush Administration itself. It is decidedly not the same as “negotiating with terrorists,” as the RJC maintains.

Has Bush’s War in Iraq Helped or Hurt the War on Terror?

Jewish Republicans have run a smear campaign against John Kerry and the Democrats to distract American Jews from thinking about the really serious question at stake in this election: Has President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq helped or hurt American and Israeli national security? Prominent Israeli security analysts, including Major General (ret.) Shlomo Brom at the highly respected Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, believe Bush’s war in Iraq, and diplomatic incompetence, have harmed the security of both countries, sabotaging the war on international terror (Associated Press, October 11, 2004).

Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as chief US Middle East envoy under both Republican and Democratic administrations, charges in his memoir, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, that “The [Bush] administration…ultimately failed to act in a way that made it possible for” Palestinian moderates opposed to terror to remain in power, strengthening Arafat and contributing to the failure of its own Road Map peace plan. John Kerry has proposed a smarter, more comprehensive approach to the war on terror, combining an ideological campaign and major public diplomacy push in the Muslim world against extremist Islam and in support of moderate Muslims and Arabs, along with an expansion of US Special Forces. This will enable the US to confront “jihadists in nations where large or conspicuous U.S. incursions are politically impossible—i.e., most of the approximately 60 countries where Al Qaeda operates.” Kerry will prosecute a more effective “classic counterinsurgency campaign where political and military measures reinforce one another against a shadowy and dispersed enemy.” (“Kerry Would Fight Terrorism Better,” The New Republic, Oct. 25, 2004) He will pursue a more engaged approach to diplomacy in the region, and many believe he can do a better job than Bush in moving towards an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Perhaps that is what scares the Republican Jewish Coalition: enough to promote their candidate with an outrageously duplicitous ad.

Gidon D. Remba, a political analyst specializing in the Arab-Israel conflict, is currently co-editing an anthology titled From Gaza to Jerusalem: A New Road to Middle East Peace? He served as Senior Foreign Press Editor in the Israel Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process.

His essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Nation, the Jerusalem Report, Tikkun: A Bi-Monthly Critique of Jewish Politics, Culture and Society, Chicago Jewish News, The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, JUF News and other periodicals. He has appeared as a featured guest on various radio interview programs devoted to the Middle East, including National Public Radio’s Worldview.

Why Camp David and Oslo Failed: Myth and Reality, by Gidon D. Remba

September 24, 2004

We continue to hear the familiar canard that the Palestinians made no counter-offer at Camp David in response to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's unprecedented concessions. This myth arose from the self-serving story put out by Barak and President Clinton in an attempt to place the entire blame for the summit's failure on Arafat. It was accepted uncritically by much of the American and Israeli media at the time. Since then, fuller, more accurate accounts of the negotiations have recently emerged. These more nuanced accounts of the ill-fated Camp David summit and the failure of the Oslo peace process suggest that the story of the nay-saying Arafat is part fact and part fiction.

Contrary to popular belief and American-Israeli spin, the Palestinians did in fact make a counter-offer at Camp David, according to a new blow-by-blow account published in Israel by former Israeli prime minister Barak’s own chief negotiator, Gilad Sher. It was Barak who rejected the Palestinian proposal, only to come much closer to Palestinian positions six months later in the final belated round of peace talks at Taba. In Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999-2001, Sher reports that on July 21, 2000 the Palestinians presented a map at Camp David consenting to Israel’s annexation of settlements in 2.5% of the West Bank and a more equitable division of Jerusalem, in exchange for an equal land swap from within Israel. At Taba, the Palestinian map proffered on January 23, 2001 showed a 3.5% Israeli annexation, reports Sher, compared with an Israeli offer reflecting a 5% annexation. Sher notes that “this [Palestinian] map was a great improvement over what had been presented to us six months previously at Camp David. The improvement was in its being based on the principle of [settlement] blocs, rather than isolated settlements.” American readers will find his testimony in Charles Enderlin’s Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002, which evolved from interviews with the negotiators aired nationwide in a PBS Frontline TV documentary.

President Bill Clinton, in his memoir, My Life, documents a second Palestinian counter-offer from Arafat at Camp David. The Palestinian leader proposed a division of sovereignty in Jerusalem whereby the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City would become part of Israel, while the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif with its mosques would become part of the Palestinian state. This idea was adopted five months later in Clinton’s December 2000 bridging proposal, accepted (albeit with some reservations) by the Barak government as a basis for the Taba talks. Clinton reports that on the sixth day of the Camp David summit, July 16, “Arafat gave me a letter that seemed to say that if he was satisfied with the Jerusalem question, I could make the final call on how much land the Israelis kept for settlements and what constituted a fair land swap. I took the letter to Barak and spent a lot of time talking to him…Eventually Barak agreed that Arafat’s letter might mean something.”

Ambassador Dennis Ross, chief US peace negotiator under the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, amplifies on the Arafat counter-offer in his just published memoir, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, dubbing it “a serious counterproposal from the Palestinians.” Barak’s rejection of Arafat’s Camp David proposal meant that any possible concord over territory, settlements and Palestinian statehood was overshadowed by discord over the fate of the holy city, on which the summit foundered. With two Palestinian counter-offers now on record from no less than three unimpeachable American and Israeli sources, it is increasingly apparent that the facile tale often told about the failure of the peace process—“Barak made a generous offer and Arafat said no and responded with terror”—is more the artifice of spin doctors than the fruit of historiography.

These three testimonials by Arafat skeptics suggest that the Palestinian leader’s behavior at Camp David defies the familiar narrative of Arafat as chief saboteur of peace. But even had Barak been willing to accept Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram—an improbable concession given widespread opposition among Israeli Jews—Arafat was unwilling to compromise on the demand for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian right of refugee return to Israel, a principle that is overwhelmingly unacceptable to Jews. Sher maintains that most Palestinian negotiators—but probably not Arafat—would have accepted, and would today accept, a face-saving creative formula on the refugee issue, while strictly limiting the number of refugees that would be allowed to return according to Israel’s sovereign discretion. In the end, the Arafat-as-demon fixation has led to a wholesale flight from negotiations of every kind with any Palestinians. But Israeli disengagement from Gaza and the West Bank can’t work without the rehabilitation of a Palestinian partner from the current crop of democratic reformers and pragmatists.

When Barak failed to achieve a peace accord at Camp David, he sought to place exclusive blame on Arafat for the summit’s outcome. President Clinton rallied behind the Israeli leader in the hope of boosting Barak’s sagging political fortunes back home with early elections increasingly likely. The summit took place on the eve of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. As the Clinton Administration entered the US election season, with Vice President Gore as the party’s candidate, Clinton could ill afford that the summit’s breakdown would be viewed as the product of mismanagement of his Administration’s Middle East diplomacy. Both Barak and Clinton desperately needed the fault to be Arafat’s—who alone was not at risk of losing power at the polls in the coming months. Barak soon declared that Arafat was not a partner for negotiations of any kind, a mantra that was quickly adopted by Sharon and the right, whose long-standing anti-Oslo policies it suited just fine.

Arafat’s proposed 2.5% annexation was of course no more viable an opening proposal at Camp David than Barak’s 12%, or the 8% which followed it. Viability, after all, in a negotiation, means the likelihood that the other side will accept a proposal, and that both sides will ultimately be able to generate adequate public support needed for realizing a treaty embodying it. But there was every reason for Barak to have believed his Camp David proposals on Jerusalem and territory were not viable from the standpoint of Palestinian politics, and could not gain acceptance by the other side. A few weeks before Camp David, Major General Amos Malka, then chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, reviewed MI’s picture of Arafat's positions for the Israeli cabinet. In a recent interview in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Malka recounts telling the assembled ministers that “there was no chance that [Arafat] would compromise on 90 percent of the territories or even on 93 percent. He is not a real-estate trader, and he is not going to stop midway. Barak said to me: ‘You are telling me that if I offer him 90 percent, he isn't going to take it? I don't accept your assessment.’ I said to him that indeed, there is no chance that he would accept it.”

Col. (res.) Shaul Arieli, who commanded Israeli forces in Gaza in the mid-nineties and became military secretary to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and head of his “Peace Administration,” explained in an interview in Ha’aretz:

"The Palestinians entered into the Oslo agreement on the understanding that through diplomacy, they could attain the goal they had set themselves since 1988: a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital [with one-for-one land swaps to accommodate Israeli annexation of settlement blocs near the Green Line]. In their view, their great concession was their willingness to make do with 23 percent of the land of Palestine [Israel and the territories]. They thought a solution would be found to the problem of the right of return by means of a trick that would remove its sting. From their point of view, any proposal that fell short of this would not enable them to make concessions on other issues."

In the weeks before Camp David, when asked by a journalist about Barak’s non-negotiable “red lines,” which included a refusal to negotiate based on the 1967 lines or to divide sovereignty in Jerusalem, Arafat responded in a press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose visit to Ramallah and Jerusalem was designed to explore the feasibility of a summit:

“Why did [Barak] implement [UN Security Council] Resolution 425 in South Lebanon? [Israel unilaterally withdrew all the way to the international border between Lebanon and Israel in May 2000, two months before the Camp David summit.] Why did [Israel fully] implement Resolution 242 with the Egyptians and the Jordanians? [Israel relinquished all of the Sinai as part of its peace treaty with Egypt.] Even with Syria [in the Syrian-Israeli negotiations prior to Camp David] they committed themselves to the restoration of all the territories and the evacuation of all the settlements, as was the case in the Sinai…”

Arafat said much the same thing to Clinton at Camp David about why he is unwilling to agree to Israeli sovereignty in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem or over the Muslim holy sites in the Temple Mount/Haram A-Sharif: “The Egyptians insisted on getting the last kilometer of the Sinai at Taba. Between Israel and Lebanon, there are heated discussions about each house in the village of Rajar in South Lebanon. And I’m supposed to give up on Jerusalem?” Dennis Ross reports that most of the American peace team (himself excluded) believed “that the Palestinians were entitled to 100% of the territory” with equal land swaps, not only “on the basis of right, but on the basis that every other Arab negotiating partner had gotten 100 percent. Why should the Palestinians be different?” Unsurprisingly, Arafat recognized the precedents set in all previous peace talks and territorial arrangements between Israel and Arab states. This hardly reflected an unwillingness on Arafat’s part to make peace with Israel or to reach agreements with it, as many now suppose, but rather an insistence on negotiating based on Israel’s own prior conduct.

One can only wonder why Barak arrogantly ignored this familiar history, some of which he himself had been responsible for. Indeed, the Egyptian-Israeli peace process which culminated in the Camp David Accords of 1978, owed its success in no small measure to then Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan’s commitment to President Sadat’s deputy, prior to Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, that Israel would return the entire Sinai peninsula to Egypt—a full withdrawal—in exchange for a full peace. That commitment was reiterated by Prime Minister Begin during Sadat’s Jerusalem visit. Both Clinton and Ross report that Rabin made a similar offer to Clinton regarding peace with Syria; Barak’s own territorial offer to Syrian president Asad in the negotiations preceding Camp David, involving a virtually complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights, did not seriously deviate from this principle. Yet Barak managed somehow to pretend that all these precedents would be ignored when the Palestinian turn finally came.

Agreement or Bust?

General Malka has stated that it was the assessment of Military Intelligence, shared with Barak well before Camp David, that to do a peace deal Arafat required Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram. Dennis Ross reports that at a meeting in Washington, D.C. on April 11, 2000 to discuss the final status summit over which Barak importuned Clinton, the Israeli leader acknowledged that he could “not see how a deal could be done on Jerusalem now… he did not see his public or theirs capable of compromise at this stage on Jerusalem.” At the same time, Barak was insistent that the summit would be predicated on “an end-of-conflict deal—with no more claims.” Ross objected: “But there was a logical inconsistency in [Barak’s] approach…How could he proclaim that all claims and grievances were [to be] resolved [by the final accord he sought to negotiate at a summit] when differences would all be riveted on Jerusalem?” Both before and during the summit, Barak was warned by Israeli security and intelligence officials that Arafat regarded himself as representing the entire Muslim world over the mosques on the Temple Mount/Haram.

If Barak was unwilling, or politically unable, to divide sovereignty in Jerusalem and over the holy sites in a way that would allow Arafat to save face before the Muslim world, one can join Ross in wondering why he insisted on an all-or-nothing, make-or-break summit, and failed to adequately explore possible alternatives to a final comprehensive agreement. To be sure, none of the leaders—American, Palestinian or Israeli—were interested at this juncture in another small-scale limited interim agreement. But a nonbelligerency accord resolving the issues of territory, settlements and Palestinian statehood, allowing Israel to erect a border fence on an agreed international line, might well have been doable. Such an agreement would have left the question of final sovereignty over the Jerusalem holy sites and the resolution of the refugee problem in abeyance for future state-to-state talks. For Barak, who had opposed Oslo from the outset and eschewed most interim steps and confidence-building measures, such an arrangement was out of the question. But it clearly would have been far more advantageous to Israel from a political and security vantage point than a go-for-broke summit with no fallback options, where the only alternative, as Barak repeatedly emphasized, was a violent conflagration—in his own ironic metaphor, “collision with the iceberg.” Barak’s navigation of the Israeli ship of state—his Titanic—left much to be desired.

A solution on Jerusalem’s holy sites and the refugees may be more likely with the more pragmatic negotiators who surround Arafat, the next generation of Palestinian leadership, many of whom Clinton, Ross and Sher agree would have braved the necessary compromises on the level of symbolism and principle, allowing for a mutually acceptable practical solution. This logic militates against Barak’s push for a binary black-or-white peace-or-war outcome, his quest to reveal Arafat as either “the Palestinian Sadat” or a terrorist still bent on Israel’s destruction. Barak, Arafat and Clinton, it can only be said, all egregiously misread the strategic tea leaves.

Barak had been publicly warned by various prominent figures in the Israeli political and security establishment, including cabinet ministers Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Yossi Sarid and MI chief General Amos Malka, that Arafat could not sign a final status peace agreement with him based on his proposals. In his The Jerusalem Problem: The Struggle for Permanent Status, Menachem Klein, an Israeli political scientist and advisor to Israel’s Foreign Minister during the negotiations, elaborates: These ministers presciently believed that “it would be best to make do with an interim agreement or with an arrangement that excluded Jerusalem…[They] claimed that the Jerusalem question would be difficult to solve and that discussing it would bring the entire track to a dead end.” Moreover, “a careful reading of Gilad Sher’s book, notes Klein, “reveals that its author tried, throughout the negotiations, to promote ideas that had one common denominator: the achievement of something less than a permanent settlement. He sought to postpone the permanent settlement as a whole…and to put off certain issues in the permanent settlement, such as Jerusalem and the refugee problem, or to set aside agreeing on parts of these last two issues.”

In The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004, Barak’s Justice Minister Yossi Beilin describes his efforts to persuade the Israeli prime minister to develop a fallback option in the event that a final agreement proved elusive. Barak is said to have approved of this tack for a time, but clearly abandoned it—unwisely—as he orchestrated the end-game for the Camp David summit. On July 8, 2000, Beilin handed Barak a detailed proposal for just such an “alternative to a framework agreement, in case it turned out that the preferred agreement could not be concluded.” Under the partial agreement suggested by Beilin, both sides would commit to some general principles for the permanent agreement, but

"in the meantime, the third [Israeli] withdrawal [from the West Bank] would be carried out; and on January 1, 2001, Israel would recognize the Palestinian state on all the territories (comprising Area A and B) then in Palestinian hands [representing 42% of the West Bank]; from that point the negotiations would continue between the two states. A multinational force would supervise the border crossings and operate alongside the IDF, which would remain in Area C, still under Israeli control. The Palestinian side would commit to combat terror and violence, and the Israeli side would commit to freezing settlements, in accord with Rabin’s negotiations with Arafat…[C]ommittees would be established to deal with everyday matters related to the city of Jerusalem, while negotiations on the city’s future would begin as soon as the interim agreement was signed, to determine a special status for the Holy Basin—the half-square-mile area that contains sites holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians."

After reviewing Beilin’s proposal, Barak summarily rejected it later the same day, insisting that the Palestinians will “prefer it to the painful permanent settlement”—a settlement which Barak, had he listened to Israeli military intelligence and to his more realistic Cabinet ministers, would have known was not within reach at this stage. Concludes Beilin: “Ehud Barak was about to swing on the trapeze without a safety net, because I was still holding his safety net I my hand.”

Nor was it the case that only Israeli politicians sought to avoid a risky lunge for the brass ring of a final agreement. “There were also Palestinian political leaders who called for deferring the subject of Jerusalem,” notes Klein, including PLO Executive Committee Secretary Abu Mazen, who “estimated that the gaps between the two sides were unbridgeable.” He believed the Palestinians should sign an interim agreement on Jerusalem, and until concluding a permanent status accord over the city, he felt that the Palestinians should work to strengthen their position in the eastern Arab sector. Klein notes that “At the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000, members of the Palestinian leadership demanded that Israel prepare an alternate program in case a permanent settlement, or a framework agreement for the permanent settlement, was not achieved.”

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Ben Kaspit reports that Fatah Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti was among those Palestinians who urged Israeli leaders to pursue a near-term interim agreement to stave off a collapse of the peace process into bloodshed:

In the night between 14 and 15 May 2000, on the eve of Nakba Day and before Camp David, Yossi Beilin sat at Larom Hotel in Jerusalem. Opposite him were Marwan Barghouti, Fares Kadoura and Mamduh Nofel, the three most prominent leaders of Fateh and the Tanzim in the West Bank. “If we don’t reach an agreement by September,” said Barghouti and his colleagues to Beilin, “horrible violence will break out. The situation is like a pressure cooker. You are making a laughing stock out of us. We represent the people in the street, the Tanzim, the released prisoners. We promised our people results, and we brought them nothing. The Hamas is rearing its head. Arafat has become the mayor of Gaza. Israel got everything: international recognition, a growing economy, a financial boom, an opening to the Arab world. We got a visa to Washington for Arafat and that’s it. You keep on expropriating and settling. Only an agreement, even a partial one, can save the situation.”

Beilin adds further to this account, recounting Barghouti’s skepticism over Arafat’s ability to conclude a permanent agreement with Barak by September 2000: “In Netanyahu’s time,” complained Barghouti, “we could say: this rightist government opposes peace and when a Labor government comes to power it will resume the process. Today we have nothing to say to the street. Everything is stuck, and it is because of your government…There is no framework agreement, no third phase [of the redeployment/withdrawals from the West Bank]…But if prisoners are released, the settlements frozen, and the interim agreement implemented, the situation on the ground could calm down even if there were no permanent settlement. If that does not happen, and a permanent agreement is not signed, the disappointment and the frustration are liable to lead to an explosion.” Mamduh Nofel added that “the Palestinian people are disappointed with Barak because…he does not keep agreements, is continuing with the settlements, and is not releasing [Palestinian] prisoners. The fact that he has not transferred Abu Dis, Azariyeh, and Anata [three Palestinian villages] is seen as an admission of his inability to carry out what he has promised. ‘Rabin was a man of honor. He signed and he did. Arafat trusted him. He does not trust Barak to the same extent.’”

The Palestinian Resort to Violence

The “history” of the Palestinian resort to violence, as told by many Jews today, equally illustrates the adage, “truth is the first casualty in war.” The popular slogan that Israel tried land for peace and got only war and terror is doubly misleading. After failing to stem their violent assaults in Oslo’s early years, Arafat’s forces effectively reined in the terrorists and cooperated on security with Israel for the three years leading up to Camp David, according to Israel’s own security officials at the time. In fact, Israel suffered only a single casualty from Palestinian terrorism from October 1997 until October 2000, when suicide attacks resumed in the months following Camp David’s collapse and the outbreak of the intifada.

But Israel never stood up to the radical Jewish Greater Land of Israel movement, continuing to build settlements at breakneck speed and to strengthen its hold in areas where millions of Palestinians live and seek an independent state. And far from having granted Palestinians real mastery over their own lives, Israel allowed them full control over only 18% of the West Bank during the Oslo decade. It gave little land even in Oslo’s heyday, and got much peace and security from 1997 until late 2000 when the final status peace talks crashed, due not only to Arafat’s intransigence and complicity in violence but to Barak’s own flawed negotiating strategy.

Col. Arieli explains that the Palestinians “did not give up terrorism in order to get a redeployment here and a redeployment there. The cessation of terror was conditioned from the start on achieving their [national] goal. Therefore, when they understood that Israel did not intend to bring them there [through negotiations], they returned to terrorism. The members of the Peace Administration knew from the start that there was no chance of Yasser Arafat becoming the Israeli security services' subcontractor in exchange for anything less than a state in the 1967 borders, with border adjustments and exchanges of territory.”

Palestinians turned to violence not in response to Israel’s “generous” offers at Camp David, as the conventional trope has it. Rather, as the chasm deepened between the high hopes kindled by Oslo for occupation’s end and the dismal reality of the 90’s, Palestinian faith in a negotiated solution gradually waned. At the same time, support for violence as a means of coercing Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza rose steadily, peaking after the failure of the long overdue final status talks at Camp David, according to Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.

Dennis Ross reports in his memoir that in the year before Camp David, then IDF Chief of Staff Lt. General Shaul Mofaz (now Sharon’s Defense Minister) and Admiral Ami Ayalon, head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service, implored him to drop US efforts to reach a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty and “put all our emphasis on reaching an agreement with the Palestinians—and to convince Barak of the importance of this.” “Both feared,” Ross writes, “that at some point Palestinian frustrations, especially on the street over corruption in the Palestinian Authority and the failure of Oslo to end the Israeli occupation, would boil over and there would be an eruption of violence. Once that happened, support within the Israeli public for a deal with the Palestinians would disappear.”