How Pinkwashing Critics Go Wrong: Why I oppose the new move to boycott Israel

Advocates of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) have ratcheted up charges that Israel and American LGBT groups are attempting to “pinkwash,” or deflect attention from, Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians by mounting programs in the US about the country’s many gay rights achievements.  BDS forces in the anti-pinkwashing campaign call for boycotting events with visiting Israeli Jewish LGBT activists, even succeeding in shutting down several recent events in Seattle.  
 

Arthur Slepian is a gay American Jew who founded a group called A Wider Bridge, which seeks to build stronger ties between the LGBT communities of Israel and North America.  A Wider Bridge was the lead sponsor of the Israeli LGBT leaders’ two-week West Coast visit with their American counterparts.

Slepian has just published a landmark essay in Tikkun, “An Inconvenient Truth: the Myths of Pinkwashing,” now the single most-read article in Tikkun online.   Read it here. 

His essay explodes the top five myths of pinkwashing, sparking a volley of critical responses from four prominent pinkwashing opponents.  

But the critics miss the mark, misrepresenting Slepian's arguments, attacking easy straw man versions instead.  And some continue to show a blatant disregard for the facts, making leaps of illogic that would astound the trapeze artists at Cirque du Soleil.  

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A few examples of how Slepian's critics get it wrong:  

1.   Pinkwashing as the new straw man of the BDS movement.  Columbia University professor Katherine Franke declares that not only the Israeli government and American LGBT and Jewish groups, but the Obama administration too is guilty of pinkwashing.  How so?  Because it supposedly uses its “good gay rights record” to deflect attention from its other “objectionable policies… like using drones to execute civilians.”  This only seems to confirm Slepian’s observation that anti-pinkwashers are reminiscent of those who once saw “communists” under every bed.  They see pinkwashing everywhere, even where it isn’t.

2.    Israeli gay rights can’t be separated from Palestinian human rights?  Slepian never suggests, as his critics suppose, there weren’t some connections between the African-American civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam war.   Saying the two can be separated isn't the same as saying that they have no relationship at all.  The disproportionate fatality rate among black soldiers in Vietnam, rectified only in the later phases of the war, reflected discrimination against African-Americans versus whites in the draft and in combat roles.  

Slepian did maintain that we were right to celebrate civil rights advances pushed forward by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, even as these same administrations were prosecuting a war in Indochina that many considered wrong (if not immoral).  By the same token, we should celebrate gay rights advances in Israel even though its government is maintaining what many view as an immoral occupation, and committing human rights abuses against Palestinians.  Boycotting civil rights programs supported by the US government over Vietnam would have been a mistake, much it is equally objectionable to boycott gay rights programs supported by the Israeli government because of the occupation.

3.  The Israeli government doesn't fund visits to the US of Israeli speakers or artists who oppose the occupation and its mistreatment of Palestinians?  Then there’s Wendy Elisheva Somerson’s claim that it’s “unlikely that any of the [Israeli Jewish LGBT activists visiting the US] would speak out against the Occupation on a tour being financed by the Israeli government,” despite much evidence to the contrary.

A case in point:  In late June, anti-pinkwashing protesters disrupted the introduction to a San Francisco screening of Israeli filmmaker Yariv Mozer’s documentary “The Invisible Men,” which cast a critical light on harsh Israeli government policies towards gay Palestinian men seeking asylum in Israel.                                                                                                                                                    “When [Mozer] tried to say something counter to the protest, someone in the audience spoke up and said, ‘That wasn’t aimed at you.’ He very forcefully replied ‘Yes it was. My film was partially funded by the Israeli government, my visit here was funded by the Israeli government. I am a leftist and I oppose many of the policies of my government, but I am proud to be an Israeli, and calls for boycott are wrong.’”

Somerson assures us that “Anti-pinkwashing activists [just] want to include the voices of queer Jewish Israelis and Palestinians critical of the Occupation.”    Why then don’t they, together with the Jewish and Palestinian groups they support, help sponsor more events that highlight the lives and struggles of LGBT Palestinians, instead of working to boycott and shut down programs with visiting Israeli Jewish LGBT activists?    Why not build instead of tearing down?  

4.  Truth, and going too far.   Still, neither side in this debate has a monopoly on truth.   Anti-pinkwashing advocates do have important things to say about the suffering of West Bank Palestinians living under Israeli rule.  They offer reasonable and valid critiques of real, as opposed to imagined, misuses of Israel’s gay rights record and the demonization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims by the Israeli and American Jewish right. 

But all too often they foul their case by painting with far too broad a brush, smearing everything in their path, doling out guilt by association.  Some of the key players who were involved in the cancellation of Israeli LGBT events in Seattle, and now participants in the Tikkun debate, are lead endorsers of the “Open Letter to LGBTIQ Communities and Allies on the Israeli Occupation of Palestine,” a manifesto for anti-pinkwashing activism released earlier this year.

Their appeals are burdened by extremist rhetoric, like calls for queer solidarity with the most radical, anti-peace factions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the occupied territories.  These groups agitate for realizing refugee demands to return to Israel, and do not represent moderate Palestinian voices in the West Bank. 

American queer Palestine solidarity advocates defend BDS tactics that are at best symbolic and ineffectual, and at worst counterproductive, likely to drive a fearful Israeli public further to the right.  

They embrace a Palestinian radicalism that confuses “full self-determination for Palestinians” with boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, an end to all US security aid to Israel now, and fulfillment of the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.  (See the “Open Letter” which links to The Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS - note especially the last three paragraphs.)  These are reckless steps which would undermine the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – two states for two peoples – and turn Israelis away from taking risks for the difficult compromises which will have to be made for any chance at peace.  

Much as progressive Jewish groups like J Street, Americans for Peace Now and the New Israel Fund work to promote justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians, while opposing calls to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel and those who do business with it, I believe that we can work for equality for Palestinians, Bedouin and Jews in Israel, for a just Israeli-Palestinian peace and an end to Israel’s occupation while resisting efforts to quash public dialogue with Israeli Jewish LGBT leaders visiting the US. 

Global BDS “tends to penalize collectively academics, artists and others who actually oppose the occupation, while leaving untouched those responsible for Israel’s most destructive decisions,” as the New Israel Fund so eloquently showed in A Leftist’s Critique of BDS.   Now add to that list the many Israeli Jewish LGBT heroes who are fighting for equal rights for gay Israelis and Palestinians.  

Anti-pinkwashers insist that they aren’t trying to silence Israeli Jewish LGBT leaders visiting the US or their American supporters.  They say they’re merely trying to broaden the conversation.   

But their actions are hard to distinguish from censorship, and the one-dimensional caricatures of Israel by many “Palestine solidarity” people, both straight and gay, are deeply troubling.   That’s why I can’t support so much of what the anti-pinkwashing Global BDS Movement says and does.    There are decent and effective ways to combat occupation and injustice.   This isn’t one of them.

I'm proud to stand with A Wider Bridge and its allies in the LGBT community in Israel in their struggle for equality and inclusion for LGBT Israelis. 

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A Response to Jerry Haber's objections to "For the Sake of Zion," by Gidon D. Remba

Dear Jerry,

I read your thoughtful and incisive analysis of the “For the Sake of Zion” statement before I decided to circulate and endorse it. In fact, I had considered writing a response to your post along with the endorsement, but in the end I felt that this wasn’t the proper place and time for such a discussion. My considered opinion is that it does far more good than harm to encourage as many American Jews as possible to read and sign this statement.

I reached this conclusion despite the fact that I agree with most of your substantive criticisms of the statement. In some respects, it is decidedly not the statement that I would have written. In fact, if you were to write a different statement reflecting your own view of what should be done now, I would probably agree with much, and might be willing to endorse it and encourage others to do so as well.

I too was disappointed with the statement’s failure to call for pressure on both Israel and the Arabs to make the necessary concessions to reach a peace deal. In fact, I support blunt and brutal pressure – at the appropriate times and in the right ways – on Israel and the Arabs of just the kind that Carter, Kissinger, Ford and Bush pere employed to help achieve breakthroughs for peace which have greatly served Israel’s security and well-being (as I’ve advocated in detail in a number of my published opinion essays - for example, "Israel, Settlements and the 'P' Word," and "What Bush and Olmert Could Learn from Begin and Sadat" ). I find the JCall statement preferable on these and other grounds.

On the other hand, "For the Sake of Zion" endorses pressure using a euphemism that will be less dissonant to most American Jewish ears: “we endorse the American government’s vigorous encouragement of the parties to make the concessions necessary for negotiations to advance.” (As in "Mr. Netanyahu, we encourage your government to accept x if you'd like the United States to do y - where y might represent vetoing certain anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council, or taking certain steps on sanctioning Iran or on enhancing US-Israeli security cooperation: I call this the "mailed carrot" approach.)

The statement appropriately calls on Israel to “immediately to cease construction of housing in the disputed territories” – which includes East Jerusalem, since its status is clearly disputed, despite Israel’s claims of eternal and exclusive sovereignty over it all. Diplomatic pressure is one issue on which you’ve not fairly represented the “liberal Zionist” statement – and failed to recognize the value of choosing language in the present political context which will be politically effective in appealing to the American Jewish center, which liberal Zionist groups like J Street seek to mobilize in support of the Obama administration’s peace efforts.

You observe that “the call to immediately cease construction in the occupied territories” can’t be taken very seriously “when that call was already made years ago by George W. Bush." I disagree entirely. When George W. Bush made such statements he was viewed in many precincts of the American Jewish community as throwing a sop to the Arabs – to the Saudis and America’s other Arab allies. These Bush statements were not viewed by such Jews as pro-Israel. The point of a statement that has all the hallmarks of a deep attachment to Israel and to Zionism is that it is prominent pro-Israel American Jews who are calling for an immediate end to construction in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem – the area which, when Obama called for a settlement freeze there, prompted loud protestations from Netanyahu and various American Jewish leaders, including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations under Obama’s Hyde Park pal Alan Solow (leading to much – unfounded, but noisy - talk of disappointment with Obama on Israel by some American Jews). So yes, it is important for American Jews - and American and Palestinian leaders - to hear other American Jews say what George W. Bush has already said: because for prominent American Jews to say it is still quite controversial in the organized American Jewish community, sparking protests in major segments of the "Jewish establishment."

I would even go so far as to say that it is politically valuable for there to be statements in which prominent American Jews call for the Palestinians to disavow their claimed right of refugee return to Israel, while also decrying the occupation and the settlements and calling for an immediate and comprehensive freeze on Israeli construction not only in the West Bank but even in Arab neighborhoods in Israel’s ostensibly “unified capital” of Jerusalem. I am thoroughly convinced of the political utility of such statements in building American Jewish support for peace efforts, even though I agree entirely that the Palestinians cannot be expected to disavow their claimed right of return until a final, comprehensive peace agreement is achieved.

But here’s the rub. You’ve invited writers of the petition to show you where you have offered an implausible reading of the petition. I am not a writer of the petition, only an endorser, but I’m convinced that you’ve misread the line about where the statement suggests the Palestinian capital will be situated. The statement says that it will be located in the Arab neighborhoods of an expanded Jerusalem; that is accurate and unobjectionable, and reflects the principle animating the Clinton parameters that Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem will become part of the Palestinian state, while Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem will become part of Israel. The Jerusalem referred to in those parameters is obviously “the expanded Jerusalem” – Jerusalem as defined by something like its current expanded municipal boundaries.

Nothing in this statement implies that the Palestinian capital would be located outside of Jordanian East Jerusalem. The statement implies that the capital will be in the Arab neighborhoods of an expanded Jerusalem, which does not preclude its being located in Jordanian East Jerusalem. The language here simply includes all Arab neighborhoods in the expanded Jerusalem – encompassing the inner and outer neighborhoods – as the likely locus of the capital of the Palestinian state. I don’t agree with your reading that “Sheikh Jarrah or the Damascus Gate or Silwan are not in ‘expanded’ Jerusalem (expanded by Israel); they are in Jerusalem.” These neighborhoods are indeed in the expanded Jerusalem – Jerusalem as defined by the expanded Israeli municipal boundaries.

To be sure, there is an ambiguity in the wording which permits your reading, but it is an uncharitable interpretation of the wording which is not mandated by the language used, and very probably not the intent of the statement. It’s possible, on the other hand, that the statement’s crafters wanted this sort of ambiguity to make the statement palatable to more Jews; if so, I see it as a legitimate effort to appeal to a broad Jewish public, since it in no way precludes what I suspect you and I would consider a just allocation of sovereignty in Jerusalem if there is to be a two-state solution.

Clearly, the statement sought to avoid specifics on the allocation of sovereignty on the Temple Mount/Haram A-Sharif, along with other aspects of what it will take to close the deal (such as dismantling most West Bank settlements). Again, you and I might agree on where the Palestinians should have sovereignty – I support a peace treaty which allots to the Palestinians sovereignty over the Haram, excluding the Kotel. "For the Sake of Zion," like the Ayalon-Nusseibeh principles, skirts this issue.

Why did I decide to endorse the statement, these objections to your reading notwithstanding? The statement consists of seven paragraphs; all of your objections revolve around the specifics contained in a single paragraph – the fifth. But for that paragraph, I suspect that you would find the statement largely positive and worthy of support. To reiterate, I am in agreement with your criticisms of paragraph five – except for the point about Jerusalem, as noted above. But I disagree entirely that the problems with paragraph 5 outweigh the good that the other 6 paragraphs can do in setting an example for, and contributing to the process of persuading and educating, centrist and moderately rightist American Jews, and in reflecting a mainstream moderate pro-Israel Jewish voice supportive of the Obama administration.

Much as states sometimes sign treaties and diplomatic agreements while noting their reservations, I would have preferred to sign the statement with an enumeration of my reservations and objections to the language in paragraph 5, which panders to the American Jewish right. But American Jews need to hear

• that a group of prominent American Jews who care deeply about Israel believe that the occupation, the settlements and Israeli construction in East Jerusalem are endangering Israel and its quest for security and a peace agreement with its neighbors;


• that the Obama administration’s “vigorous encouragement of the parties to make the concessions necessary for negotiations to advance” is good for Israel;


• that the future security and welfare of the State of Israel depends on achieving a two-state solution soon;


• that Israel faces apartheid and the end of the Zionist dream of as Israel as a Jewish democratic state if it does not achieve a two-state solution in the near term;


• that despite the skeptics, there is hope in the current round of indirect negotiations, particularly if the Obama administration plays the proper constructive role in overseeing and guiding the talks, offering both tasty carrots and very sharp sticks to both sides when appropriate;


• and finally, that even while Israeli citizens will ultimately decide their future, American Jews have the right and the obligation to express their views, and to critique decisions of the Israeli government which, in their view, undermine the prospects for Middle East peace and the future of the largest Jewish community in the world and of the Jewish state (along with America’s national security).

While I realize that you may not endorse the statement’s affirmation of the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” I am confident that you recognize that no statement in support of Palestinian-Israeli peace can be politically efficacious, both in the American Jewish community and in the international arena, if it does not affirm the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. And I say this, and am convinced of its truth, despite my own opposition to right-wing demands that the Palestinians should be required to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state – an unreasonable and unnecessary demand, in my pragmatic Zionist view. (In this regard, I concur wholeheartedly with an oped in the Forward by Rabbi Eric Yoffie - "How Not to Protect the Jewish State" - which argued against such demands.)

In sum, I believe you’ve attached too much weight to the problems in paragraph 5, and not enough to the strengths in the other six paragraphs. Had I been asked to contribute to the formulation of this statement, I would have vigorously protested some of the language in paragraph 5. It goes against what I believe is needed to help the parties advance towards peace, and reach a just and viable solution.

But now that the statement is out, I am convinced that it does more political good – however much good a statement of this sort can achieve – to encourage American Jews to support this statement for the considerable value it bears. You and I and others can object on our blogs to points in the statement; but to fail to support a petition which says what the other six paragraphs say is politically unwise and does a disservice to the project of building American Jewish support for Israeli-Arab peace.

Best,

Doni Remba

Jerry Haber acknowledged the validity of some of my points in a response he posted on his Magnes Zionist blog: http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2010/05/further-thoughts-on-the-sake-of-zion.html

An Open Letter to ADL Leader Abe Foxman: A Response to Obama's Critics on Israeli-Arab Peace, by Gidon D. Remba

Dear Abe,

You've been at the forefront of American Jewish criticism of President Obama's renewed push for Israeli-Arab peace. After a recent meeting with the President along with 15 other Jewish leaders, you confessed that you continue "to feel uncomfortable with the assumptions that underlie President Obama's approach" to Israel and the Middle East.

You've charged that President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world is being conducted "at Israel's expense." For Obama, you say, "there is a need for the US to demonstrate that it can be tough with Israel to win back credibility with Muslims. We are seeing it already on the settlement issue..."

But being tough on Netanyahu about settlements is not at "Israel's expense." It is a blessing to Israel, given the grave threat which many Israeli military and political leaders have said the settlements pose to Israel's security, to the very possibility of a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, and to Israel's ability to remain a democratic Jewish state. For the last eight years, we've had a president who recklessly squandered American prestige. He had no credibility to broker an Israeli-Arab accommodation. He made little more than token efforts to do so, when not trumpeting his outright opposition to negotiations with Syria, despite the unanimous advice of Israel's intelligence and military brass, and its political leadership. An American president who has regained the confidence of the Arab and Muslim worlds is quite simply a strategic asset to Israel. American pressure over settlements is an investment in Israel's future, a gift to the Zionist project.

Nor does pressure need to be applied simultaneously and in equal doses to satisfy some artificial notion of even-handedness. As Larry Derfner points out in the Jerusalem Post, "The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it's enforcing the law in city after city... If the PA wasn't giving us peace and we were giving it land - we'd be right to demand that Obama put all the pressure on the Palestinians and none on us. But the fact is that Abbas and the PA are giving us about as much peace as they're capable of, while we aren't planning on giving them an inch; instead, we're thinking only about how much more conquered land Obama will let us build on."

You've said that President Obama's "notion that we have to pressure Israel to show our bona fides to the Arabs is to buy into their distorted version of history." You've accused the president of ignoring the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. But such criticisms stand reality on its head. Obama understands all too well why past peace efforts have failed. His new way is designed to overcome the errors and missteps of the past. By adopting a regional approach, he is more likely to gain wide Arab backing for historic Palestinian compromises on Jerusalem and refugees, issues which resonate throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. By enlisting the help of Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he stands a better chance of bringing about a unified Fatah-Hamas Palestinian government that will hew to the international and Arab consensus: a government that will have both the will and the wherewithal to honor its commitments under a peace accord with Israel.

Obama recognizes that the US cannot help forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians while allowing Syria and Iran to continue to stoke Hezbollah and Hamas extremism. While Bush's policies added fuel to the fires of Arab and Muslim radicalism, Obama is cutting off their oxygen supply, sapping Hezbollah's political power and reinforcing the impetus towards pragmatism in Hamas. Obama is finally ending the practice, perfected under Bush, of saying one thing--whether about settlements or the president's commitment to help negotiate an accord--and then doing something else.

You hold up President Bush's "enunciation of the need for a Palestinian state, the road map, Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the Annapolis process in 2007" as having "provided opportunities for progress toward peace if the Palestinians were truly interested." You highlight what "Israel has done in recent years to advance peace: Israel's offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, also in 2000, and its disengagement from Gaza were all steps upon which there could have been building toward peace." Instead, you conclude, "the Palestinians responded with rejection, suicide bombs and kidnappings, extremist politics and rockets."

But this Manichean narrative of righteous Israelis and evil Palestinians - the stock-in-trade of right-wing hasbarah - is a cartoon version of what went wrong, ignoring true causes and effects. Annapolis did not fail because the Palestinians refused to accept another "generous Israeli offer," but because President Bush did nothing to help the parties bridge the gaps, failing to apply diplomatic tools to encourage their agreement to a US-proposed compromise, as President Carter successfully did with Egypt and Israel. Similarly, Bush did nothing to hold either party accountable for their commitments under the Road Map, even after promising to "ride herd" on both as he left the company of Sharon and Abbas at Aqaba.

The Road Map and Annapolis were built not only on the wobbly foundation of isolating and excluding Hamas and Gaza, but on an unrealistic, and ultimately failed, American-Israeli bid to topple Hamas by besieging Gaza and its entire population. This siege, more than anything else, coupled with the lack of real progress on the ground in the West Bank--and not Israeli "concessions"--were responsible for the attacks which Israel has endured on its southern communities. Had Sharon truly wanted to promote peace by withdrawing from Gaza, rather than to simply cut Israeli losses and bury any serious peace plan in "formaldehyde"--as his chief aide Dov Weissglas put it--he would have withdrawn Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip as part of an agreement with Abbas, rather than unilaterally. In this way, he would have enabled the PA and Fatah moderates to take credit for a diplomatic achievement, rather than allowing Hamas to gain bragging rights before the Palestinian public that Israel had been pushed from Gaza only by its "resistance"--much as Hezbollah did with its Lebanese audience when Barak unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon.

By the same token, Barak's move was largely motivated by Israel's need to cut its ongoing losses from guerrilla attacks while Israeli troops remained entrenched in Lebanese territory. It was a gift to Hezbollah, not a step towards peace, after Barak had walked away from a potential peace treaty with Syria, an act of political cowardice for which President Clinton and his chief Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, have criticized him harshly. Barak balked on a Syrian-Israeli deal after Assad had committed to the US that under a land-for-peace bargain, Syria would insure that Hezbollah, its client, would be reined in, according to Ross.

You claim that the Arab world wasn't ready to reach an agreement with Israel when Carter and Brzezinski were in the White House, and that the same is true now--as if nothing has changed in thirty years and there were no Arab peace initiative offering Israel recognition, normal ties and peace with the entire Arab world today; as if the rise of Iran were not providing powerful new incentives for the Sunni Arab states to end the conflict and form a close alliance with Israel and the US.

Nothing's changed? Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal has recently said that his group would not stand in the way of a peace deal between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel. Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin told the Israeli government that "Hamas rhetoric has changed in recent weeks. ‘Public statements by leaders attest to efforts by Hamas to appear interested in ending the conflict with Israel, based on the model of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in exchange for a long-term hudnah'" or truce--until Netanyahu silenced him. Netanyahu's spokespeople claim that these changes in rhetoric are purely "cosmetic" and that Hamas "remains rooted in an extremist ideology which fundamentally opposes peace and reconciliation."

But the great Jewish historian Walter Lacqueur was closer to the mark when he observed in the 1970's that "even in the war aims of religious or quasi-religious movements a discrepancy often exists between the desirable and the possible. . . All such movements have come at one stage or another to the realization that with an enemy who cannot be defeated, temporary compromises have to be made. The old enmity, the odium theologicum, is itself subject to gradual erosion as such compromises become permanent; the formulas of hatred may linger on but they no longer carry the same conviction."

The latest poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, conducted jointly by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, between May 21-June 3, 2009, showed that “59% of the Israelis support and 36% oppose a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, 61% support the two-state solution while 23% support a one-state solution and 9% support other solutions.” Are you imposing an idealistic, romantic definition of what constitutes acceptance of Israel by Palestinians, rather than a practical and realistic view of what it takes for there to be peace between two countries—whether Israel and Egypt, Palestine or Syria?

It is a categorical mistake to suggest that the Arabs aren't ready to make peace with Israel because some, notably the Saudis, are unwilling to start the normalization process in exchange for the partial settlement freeze Netanyahu will finally offer. His government has been unwilling to come to a full stop on settlement construction, as requested by the US and the international community, and as required by the Road Map. Instead, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue building Jewish housing in Palestinian Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, regarded by the Arab world as the future capital of a Palestinian state. Does this strike you as a wise way to inspire confidence in Israel's good intentions about a future peace?

As any schoolchild knows, but so many Jewish leaders pretend not to, there can be no two-state solution without sharing Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis. What's more, Netanyahu remains adamant about continuing to build in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including those in heavily populated Palestinian areas which have no chance of becoming part of Israel under a future peace accord. To genuinely promote peace, Israel needs to start offering economic incentives to settlers deep in the West Bank to begin returning to Israel, rather than erecting yet more housing for continued settler growth in areas that Israel will most certainly have to leave in any peace deal.

The Saudis want to begin a normalization process only once there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Even if Netanyahu adopts a partial freeze on settlement building, they are rightly skeptical that he will countenance the establishment of a Palestinian state on fair terms. Netanyahu's long-standing opposition to a viable two-state solution, with a territorially contiguous Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, justifies their skepticism. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Netanyahu has failed to engender the kind of trust and good faith that would enable Arab leaders to begin an incremental process of normalization with Israel now. Still, some Arab states--including Qatar, Tunisia, Bahrain and others--will probably agree to further normalization steps in exchange for a settlements moratorium.

Now let's turn to what may be your biggest concern: that President Obama is pursuing Israeli-Arab peace with a genuine sense of urgency. I'll address this issue, within the context of the dangers Israel faces with Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and the Palestinians, in the second part of this open letter, which is available here.

B'virkat shalom,

(Gidon) Doni Remba

Part 2 of An Open Letter to ADL Leader Abe Foxman: A Response to Obama's Critics on Israeli-Arab Peace, by Gidon D. Remba

Continued from Part 1

The Urgency of Peace: Palestinians, Syria and Iran

Abe, you're worried that "the administration is putting too much weight on solving the conflict"--as if the malign neglect of the Bush Administration was good for Israel. True, you aren't opposed to "the administration view that the US must be much more engaged to achieve progress." What troubles you is "when the president says that he expects the problem to be resolved in two years." But you can't have it both ways. If you think that President Obama is ignoring the lessons of recent Palestinian-Israeli history, don't begrudge him for grasping that one of the reasons peace efforts have failed was that the US and its allies were unwilling to press both sides to make the compromises needed to bridge the remaining gaps in the way of an agreement. And don't object when the President holds both sides' feet to the fire about fulfilling their Road Map obligations, as Bush promised to do.

If the president announces a two-year deadline--a real deadline, not the kind of fluffy time-lines we've had until now--and if the parties fail to move towards a deal, he may signal that the US and its allies will present a plan, backed by virtually the entire world and by real diplomatic muscle.

You would be among the first to remind us that the clock is ticking on Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. But that clock is also ticking on the very possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace; and there is indeed a palpable link between the two. A solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with Hamas' support, and a comprehensive peace with the entire Arab world including Syria and Lebanon, will put an end to the chronic plague of attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel. An Iran that can no longer exploit these tensions by fueling radical Arab forces will be far less a threat to Israel. An Iran that can no longer exploit Arab anger at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, no longer living under Israeli occupation, will lose much of its appeal in the Arab world, where those who stand up for Arab and Muslim dignity and rights are viewed as heroes. A Hezbollah that has forfeited its arms flow from Syria will be far less dangerous to Israel, as will a Syria which has moved out of Iran's orbit into the US-Israeli-Sunni Arab camp. An Iran that no longer has Syria as its main ally and collaborator will be weaker than ever before.

You doubt that these things can happen? We have yet to find out by putting the full range of US, international, Arab and Israeli political, military and economic incentives on the bargaining table with Syria. Israel alone cannot lure Syria away from its Iranian embrace; it needs our help to loosen that hold. If Iran does acquire a latent capacity to produce nuclear weapons in the coming year or two, it will redound to Israel's benefit if that comes about once Arabs and Israelis are moving towards rapprochement, not mired in perpetual confrontation. Israel's northern and southern borders would no longer erupt in periodic attacks on its towns and cities, prompting repeated Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza. It would, in short, pave the way to a more secure Jewish state, able to focus a greater share of its resources on renewing Jewish culture and education, both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

Perhaps you would rather see Israel preemptively strike Iran to delay its nuclear program. But as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen have both warned, an attack on Iran will be profoundly destabilizing, with very grave and upredicatable consequences. That's "diplospeak" for the fact that an Israeli strike on Iran will drag the US into an unwinnable, devastating new Mideast war which will engulf the region, jeopardizing the lives of many US troops along with innumerable Israeli and Arab civilians. Nor is such an Israeli assault likely to succeed even in delaying Iran's nuclear program, according to many military analysts. It would give a giant boost to Iran's hardliners, further undermining the reformist movement, while driving underground a newly accelerated nuclear program, as Secretary Gates has warned. And when Iran does reach nuclear weapons capacity, its hardline leaders will now be bent on revenge against Israel.

Israel's former chief of military intelligence, Major General Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, recently gave voice to the majority view of its intelligence community that Israel is in fact not the primary motive, or target, for Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. Israeli intelligence believes that Iran seeks a nuclear weapons capability mainly to deter any American move to overthrow the Islamic regime; they oppose a preemptive Israeli attack. An Israeli strke would create a self-fulfilling prophecy, making vengeance and retaliation on Israel a more central priority for Iranian leaders.

By insisting that the Obama administration close the door to nuclear negotiations with Iran's "delegitimized government," you are ignoring the history of successful US negotiations with other even more repressive and unrepresentative governments like those of post-Tianenmen China and Soviet Russia, with whom we achieved détente or arms control agreements, clearly serving America's national security. What's more, you would hamper the president from showing China, Russia and our European allies that he had indeed afforded Iranian leaders every reasonable chance for dialogue, truly exhausting the diplomatic option. By insisting on prematurely removing diplomacy from the president's arsenal, you would undermine the prospects for broader international cooperation on more painful sanctions on Iran, without which such measures stand little chance of bearing real economic sting.

And there is yet another ticking clock in Israel and Palestine. The window is rapidly closing on the very possibility of a two-state solution. Every month that goes by without a solution, Israel's settlements grow, as its hold on Palestinian areas of the West Bank becomes harder to reverse. Before Obama, Israelis and Palestinians were rapidly losing hope, Hezbollah and Hamas radicals were gaining strength, as the chance for workable compromise grew more remote.

President Obama is right to impose a two-year deadline on his push for peace. Without both stringency and urgency, and a willingness to make demands on both Israeli and Arab leaders, Obama cannot overcome the deep cynicism engendered by the Bush administration's showboat diplomacy. Under Bush, "commitments were routinely ignored without consequences," as the Center for American Progress notes in a new report. "The president should affirm that there is a short time-frame for negotiations," concludes the report, "and that there will be rigorous monitoring and enforcement of any agreement."

Abe, are you really against the US, European Union, Russia and the Arab League telling the Palestinians that once Israel has displayed, in both word and deed, a genuine willingness to create a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the time has come for them to give up on claims of a "right of refugee return" to Israel? The time is approaching when the US will work with its allies to pass a binding new UN Security Council resolution putting to rest, once and for all, claims by Palestinian refugees and their descendants that they are entitled to return to homes in Israel. As you know, such demands are incompatible with the very notion of partitioning the land into a Jewish and an Arab state.

A new resolution will also make clear that Israel must, for its part, remove Israeli settlements from a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. Just as an influx of Palestinian refugees is inconsistent with a viable Jewish state, so too hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers, living in Israeli settlements throughout Palestinian territory, are incompatible with a viable, and even smaller, Palestinian state poised to absorb Palestinian refugees. A new resolution will affirm that Israel must share sovereignty with a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, ceding Arab neighborhoods to the new Palestinian polity, while Jewish neighborhoods will remain part of Israel, as reflected in the Clinton parameters.

President Obama is right to pursue these goals with a genuine sense of urgency. For Israel's sake, for the Palestinians and our Arab allies--and for America's need to promote stability in a region that is vital to US and global security, as Admiral Mullen has recently emphasized.

Is Israel's insecure status quo, scarred by chronic conflict, really preferable?

B'virkat shalom,


(Gidon) Doni Remba

A Reply to Disco Stu's Jewcy comment on my Open Letter to Abe Foxman

Dear Disco Stu,

In your comment on my Open Letter to Abe Foxman on Jewcy, you wrongly suggest that I (and Obama, whose Mideast policies I support) want to “force Israel to cease all settlement building without expecting anything in return.” You appear to have read a different article than the one I wrote—in fact, I argued nothing of the kind. Throughout my letter I say things like: “don't object when the President holds both sides' feet to the fire about fulfilling their Road Map obligations, as Bush promised to do,” and talk about how Obama, the Arab League and the international community must pressure the Palestinians to give up on their claims of a right of refugee return to Israel as part of a final treaty in which Israel will evacuate those West Bank settlements which won’t become part of Israel’s final borders.

From what you say about settlements, it seems to me you’ve not learned about how the world really works, as you claim; nor have you drawn the right conclusions from the failure of Oslo which a realistic understanding of what actually happened would require. Israeli Security Expert and Former Mossad Official Yossi Alpher has pointed out that “Settlement expansion was a key catalyst of the first Intifada, the popular rebellion of Palestinian youth [against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the settlement enterprise there] that broke out in late 1987 and continued until the early 90’s, as well as of the al-Aqsa Intifada, in fall 2000. More than any other factor, the spread of settlements on what they considered to be their lands was seen by Palestinian youth as a reason for urgent, even reckless action: to continue to struggle passively, as their elders advocated, was to cede Palestine to the settlers. This dramatic expansion of settlement building to a state of critical mass, set against a backdrop of agonizingly slow progress in the Oslo process over a seven-year period, constituted a major catalyst for the al-Aqsa Intifada.”

And: “One of the major flaws of Oslo was that it did not explicitly prohibit continued expansion of settlements. This settlement growth established ‘facts on the ground’ that were used to preempt negotiations on territory and seriously eroded Palestinian trust in the peace process itself.” In fact, the number of West Bank settlers nearly doubled from 100,000 to almost 200,000 from the beginning of the Oslo peace process until its failure in 2000.

How then do we help Israelis and Palestinians create the mutual confidence needed to revive peace negotiations in a way that will be likely to succeed, taking into account how the great gap between what happened on the ground and what was said at the negotiating table was among the major causes for Oslo’s failure? To that end, the Road Map required of Israel to immediately implement a settlement freeze, including all natural growth, and dismantle the dozens of settlement outposts which had been built in recent years, further expanding the geographic footprint of the settlers in the West Bank. The Palestinians were to “undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conduction and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere."

In my letter I quote Larry Derfner’s Jerusalem Post column, which points out that "The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it's enforcing the law in city after city... If the PA wasn't giving us peace and we were giving it land - we'd be right to demand that Obama put all the pressure on the Palestinians and none on us. But the fact is that Abbas and the PA are giving us about as much peace as they're capable of, while we aren't planning on giving them an inch; instead, we're thinking only about how much more conquered land Obama will let us build on."

In short, the reality is that so far the Palestinians have actually done a great deal to comply with what they need to do to rebuild Israeli trust and confidence in their commitment to fighting anti-Israel terror; but Israel has done very little on the ground to inspire confidence among Palestinians that it is sincere about ultimately granting them the right to a state free of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Netanyahu now claims to support a two-state solution, but while professing fealty to peace he continues to do the very opposite of what’s required to convince any fair-minded observer, let alone the Palestinians, that he intends to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state.

So this has nothing to do with what Europeans, academics and the “Arab side” say, or with how often some “meme” is repeated, and everything to do with what has been, and is, objectively undermining the chance for a two-state solution to the conflict, and what is objectively necessary to build confidence among both Israelis and Palestinians in order to restart a peace effort on new and more sound footing. And it has everything to do with what both sides committed to do and what they have and haven’t done. But Obama is not stopping with insuring that the Palestinians are fulfilling their security obligations to Israel. He is also pressing the Arab countries to begin normalizing relations with Israel in several areas. So the notion that I or Obama are advocating forcing Israel to do anything without Palestinian and Arab reciprocation is pure invention on your part.

You also seem not to grasp that a settlement freeze is simply a first step towards a two-state solution in a multi-step process in which both sides have obligations to the other. A settlement moratorium is a very minimal step which ensures that Israel finally lives up to its promise—as codified in the Wye Accord and other agreements it signed—to stop taking actions which clearly prejudice the outcome of the negotiations by putting more Jewish housing on more land that the Palestinians claim for their state—whether in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem or in the West Bank.

As part of a deal in which Arabs and Israelis agree on the final borders of Israel and Palestine, both the Palestinians and the Arab states will be expected to make major concessions to accommodate Israel’s needs on a wide range of issues once we reach the point where Israel begins to actually remove tens of thousands of settlers from the area which it will have agreed will become a Palestinian state. They will, and should, be pressured by Obama and the international community to accept demilitarization of their state—no heavy weapons or air force—unlike almost every other state in the world; they will be pressured to accept a host of security arrangements to accommodate Israel’s requirements, and to give up on their claim of a right of refugee return to Israel, among other concessions.

The other point you raise is whether “If building new settlement houses suddenly ceases” the Palestinians will “suddenly acquire the requisite abilities to both build and govern a functioning state and accept Israel living like a (relatively) rich, glamourous, successful prince right next door?” There are really two different issues here: whether the Palestinians accept Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, and whether they have the ability to build and govern a state.

But the fact that you could write such a sentence suggests that you are not the pragmatist or realist you claim to be. No pragmatist would impute such powers to a mere settlement freeze; only someone out to build a straw man and then tear it down would say such a thing. To gain the capacities to build and govern a functioning state that Palestinians will need, and deserve, significant international help—something like an international trusteeship (even if we don’t call it that) which will, over a period of years after Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians has ended, help them develop the requisite political capacities and institutions to govern their state. This will need to be coupled with a “Marshall Plan” for the economic development of the new state; Obama should press the Saudis and other wealthy Gulf states to make major contributions to this economic package.

You say that “for those of us who feel the Pals. were the ones who dropped the ball or were never on it during Oslo, any move that is unilaterally demanded of Israel that doesn't also address the true weak link in the two-state solution (Palestinian inability to come to terms with a legitimized Israel living free and prospering while they worry about building their own state) is merely sweeping the dust under the rug.”

A true pragmatist would recognize that in fact a majority of Palestinians have for many years supported a two-state peace deal with Israel. The latest poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, conducted jointly by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, between May 21-June 3, 2009, showed that “59% of the Israelis support and 36% oppose a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, 61% support the two-state solution while 23% support a one-state solution and 9% support other solutions.” What’s more, you seem to me to have an unrealistic, messianic definition of what constitutes acceptance of Israel by Palestinians, rather than the kind of pragmatic, realistic view of what it takes for there to be peace between two countries—whether Israel and Palestine, or Israel and Egypt or Syria.

Despite your insistence of being a pragmatist and a centrist, on the question of Palestinian acceptance of Israel it seems to me you’ve bought into the right-wing hasbara mythology of what went wrong during Oslo. My letter wasn’t intended as an antidote to that particular hallucinogen. Gaining a realistic understanding of what’s actually happened over the last 10 – 20 years, and why, will require you to actually read—not skim—some serious articles. I’ve tried to sum up some of this material in two places: “Why Camp David and Oslo Failed: Myth and Reality” and "Barak's Chief Negotiator Explodes the Myth of Camp David."

But I would suggest you start with David Grossman’s “Fictions Embraced by An Israel at War”.
There he wrote this bracing passage: ”The story that now reigns nearly unchallenged in the media and political discourse obliterates more than 33 years of roadblocks, thousands of prisoners, deportations, and killings of innocent people. It's as if there were never long months of closures in cities and villages, as if there had been no humiliations, no incessant harassment, no searches of houses, no bulldozing of hundreds of homes, no uprooting of vineyards and olive groves, no filling up of wells and, especially, no construction of tens of thousands of housing units in settlements and large-scale confiscation of land, in violation of international law.

“The new narrative leaps back through the manipulative fog created by the prime minister and his cabinet, his supporters and his various spokesmen straight to the Six-Day War, our pinnacle of justice. And looking forward from that point in 1967 there is a kind of desert devoid of history, devoid of responsibility, devoid of blame, until we suddenly emerge from the miasma right at the Oslo accords, the proposals that Ehud Barak made to Yasir Arafat at Camp David and, after Camp David, like thunder on a bright and sunny day, the second intifada.

"According to this story, the Palestinians suddenly exploded in September 2000 in an uncaused natural eruption, spewing out lava and ash and igniting the entire region. They had no logical reason for exploding and there was no prior Israeli provocation. Ehud Barak made them a generous offer, and they betrayed him with an outburst of violence because they, by their nature, are motivated solely by destructive, irrational forces that make impossible any future compromise with them.

“This theory is also the basis of another right-wing claim that now seems to be accepted by the majority of Israelis. It is that the Oslo accords, and their supporters, were what in fact caused the second intifada. In other words, it wasn't the intolerable conditions in which the Palestinians lived for more than three decades. It wasn't the tacit support that most Israelis lent to the ongoing occupation, all the while persuading themselves that it was such an enlightened occupation that it was barely an occupation at all. It wasn't the refusal of every Israeli government before the second administration of Yitzhak Rabin to try to reach a true, if painful, accommodation with the Palestinians. It wasn't the doubling of the number of Israeli settlers in the territories in the years after Oslo. Nor was it the way in which Ehud Barak conducted the Camp David talks, presenting to Yasir Arafat as ultimatums proposals that, while they were generous compared with Israeli positions in the past, were entirely insufficient in Palestinian eyes.

“None of these factors are now viewed as sufficient reason for a popular uprising by a subjugated and despairing people. No, it's the Oslo accords that are to blame, as if in the absence of Oslo the Palestinians would have come to terms with the Israeli occupation, accepting it tranquilly, even lovingly, to this very day; as if the Oslo agreements were a match, not a fire extinguisher.”

So Disco Stu, I would give your comment a D- for cogency, an F for conscientiousness (to pass, you have to actually read what the person you are criticizing has written), and an A for ad hominem irrelevancies.

Obama's Grand Plan for the Middle East, by Gidon D. Remba, The Jerusalem Report

As published in the Jerusalem Report, June 8, 2009 and online in Jewcy, May 18, 2009

With the maiden visit of newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington set for May 18, signs of an immanent clash between U.S. President Barack Obama and the hardline Israeli leader abound.

While both leaders will look to find common ground, papering over differences with diplomatic formulas, the rift may be unavoidable. The impending tension recalls previous encounters between Likud leaders and U.S. presidents from both parties. This time the tremors will center not only on the Palestinian fault line, but also on Iran.

Netanyahu views the development of an Iranian uranium enrichment capacity as an existential threat to Israel that must be squelched. He is certain that Obama’s “dialogue” with Iran is bound to fail, rendering inevitable an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear sites. An Israeli attack will be preceded by more punishing economic penalties on Iran of the kind mooted lately on Capitol Hill, and backed by AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel lobby. But sanctions-on-steroids are unlikely to blunt Iran’s quest to join the nuclear club, serving only to clear away the final hurdles blocking a final push for preemptive Israeli military action.

Obama’s way represents nothing less than a revolution in the Middle East: not the stillborn new Middle East the Bush Administration imagined could be midwifed by the force of American and Israeli arms, but a new order that will arise from the centripetal forces unleashed by a political earthquake. How does Obama hope to set in motion this tectonic realignment? Reading the tea leaves, one can divine an unfolding pattern whose contours will only be more fully revealed when Obama delivers a major speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds in Egypt on June 4, following meetings with Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

With the backing of the Pentagon’s top brass and his Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama’s administration is convinced that a military strike against Iran will engulf the region in a raging firestorm. It believes that an Israeli air attack on Iranian nuclear sites will fall far short, accelerating the Iranian nuclear weapons program, part of which will remain intact underground. Netanyahu hopes to persuade Obama that, if all else fails, the U.S. must turn its gunsights on Iran. But Obama will be immovable: he will not launch the next catastrophic Mideast war.

On the contrary, Obama believes a negotiated solution to the nuclear issue may be in the cards if the U.S. treads an untried path with Iran. He may offer to create a multinational consortium to produce enriched uranium inside Iran under international management and supervision, with an enhanced verification system to ensure that weaponization does not take place. Israel too may be pressed to declare its nuclear capabilities, subjecting them, along with those of India and Pakistan, to international oversight and inspection. In return for a mutually acceptable resolution of the nuclear impasse, Iran may be willing to scale back its military aid to the Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian Hamas militant organizations and accept a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace accord, which could include Lebanon. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now offered, on American television, to support whatever peace plan is accepted by the Palestinian people and the international community.

Should U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations fail, Obama hopes to transform the regional landscape in which Iran would emerge with a nuclear arms capacity in such a way that deterrence would be most likely to succeed. Even without a “grand bargain,” the U.S. will seek to foster cooperation with Iran in as many areas as possible, replacing confrontation with détente, from a position of greater regional leverage. Those in the regime who seek to project Iran’s influence in the Arab and Muslim worlds by backing Hizballah and Hamas “resistance” against Israel will have the rug pulled out from under their feet.

Obama hopes to woo Syria out of Iran’s orbit with economic and political incentives and a determination to broker a peace treaty between Israel and Syria as part of a grand rapprochement between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds. The U.S. will loosen Iranian bonds with Syria and Hamas – which has now offered a long-term truce with Israel – while depriving Hizballah and its Iranian backers of the tinder for their incendiary tactics. Contrary to pundits who cry that Israel will be sacrificed on the altar of American reconciliation with the Islamic world, Obama’s aim is the creation of a new regional political architecture in which Israel’s vital needs, and American national security, will be more firmly anchored than ever before.

For Obama, the Israel-Arab conflict, including the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, can and must be moved towards resolution under American stewardship. Press reports suggest that the U.S. and Arab allies Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are working on revising the Arab League Peace Initiative, making explicit key compromises on Jerusalem and the refugee problem. They would make Israel an offer it will be hard pressed to refuse: Palestinian refugees would return only to the new state of Palestine or be rehabilitated within the Arab states or other countries. This would insure that refugee repatriation could not undermine Israel’s Jewish majority or the principle of “two states for two peoples” affirmed in the original 1947 U.N. partition resolution calling for an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine. Gaining Arab unanimity on this radioactive issue may prove impossible. But even engineering the sponsorship of a group of leading Arab states for so far-reaching a change to the historic Arab position would represent a coup for Obama.

Jerusalem’s Old City, with its holy sites sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, objects of both Israeli and Palestinian national identification, would come under international supervision, as proposed in the partition resolution. Arab and Muslim states would begin normalizing relations with Israel, in exchange for concrete Israeli steps like a comprehensive settlement building freeze, and a time-table for removing most West Bank settlers, designed to send the message to Palestinians and the Arab world that Israel is committed not only in word but in deed to realizing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Arab League, together with the Palestinians, and the U.S.-led Quartet, together with Israel, will become the primary interlocutors in the new negotiations. By adopting a novel holistic, regional framework, and clarifying the parameters of the Arab peace initiative and the way forward to its realization, Obama raises the odds higher than ever before that the players will at last overcome four great obstacles which have thus far stood in the way of a Palestinian-Israeli accord:

1. With the Arab League as the primary Arab interlocutor, Obama’s way helps bypass one consequence of Palestinian weakness and division, creating an environment in which the Palestinians are brought to the table hand in hand with the entire Arab world. By providing broad Arab and international public legitimacy for just compromises on Jerusalem and the refugees, as well as on borders and security, the regional approach eases the way towards Palestinian popular acceptance of the deal. Contrary to those skeptics who see only guile in Hamas’ offers of a long-term truce with Israel, ignoring the larger political context in which the movement operates, Hamas will feel enormous Palestinian public pressure to end terrorism against Israel, and to play its part in a Palestinian government that will sign on.

2. By the same token, the U.S. role in the new constellation helps compensate for the endemic weakness in the Israeli political system which has prevented shaky Israeli coalition governments from credibly offering a viable Palestinian-Israeli bargain. Former prime minister Ehud Barak’s government was already a minority coalition by the time he went to Camp David in 2000, and when he dispatched negotiators to Taba in early 2001. Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and their Kadima party were on their way out the door when they renewed final status talks with the Palestinians this past year under the Annapolis umbrella, in the shadow of a Pyrrhic victory in Lebanon and corruption allegations against the prime minister.

3. Instead, the U.S., the Quartet, and the Arab League may ask Israeli and Palestinian leaders to present to their publics a complete outline for peace incorporating already ongoing Arab concessions and concrete steps to build Israeli confidence, paired with unfolding Israeli concessions and concrete steps to build Palestinian trust. Israeli and Palestinian plebiscites will take place with a full understanding on both sides that pushback from either Israeli or Palestinian governments will be met with the firm hand of their American and Arab patrons, who will be loath to see their monumental efforts fail. Israelis and Palestinians are bound to demand that their governments seize the opportunity for a breakthrough.

The Arab League, the U.S. and NATO will oversee the implementation of all aspects of the regional peace treaty: U.S.-led and Arab multinational peacekeeping forces will guarantee Palestinian and Israeli security in the West Bank and Gaza as Israel removes most settlers and phases out military control. An international trusteeship will guide the economic and institutional baby steps of the newly de-occupied demilitarized Palestinian state.

4. The U.S. will help broker Israel’s peace talks with Syria – and possibly Lebanon, if Iran and Hizballah can be co-opted. Should Iran and Hizballah prove unwilling, they will find themselves isolated in a new Middle East order, facing a far more united Israeli-American-Sunni Arab and international front.

Obama will no longer tolerate the slogans of American or Israeli obstructionists who claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not “ripe” for resolution – it never is by their lights – or that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. Nor will he countenance an Israeli strike on Iran, as he will make clear to Netanyahu. But Obama refuses to accept the status quo, which has proven far too dangerous for the U.S., Israel and our Arab allies. The risks of rejectionism now dramatically outweigh the risks of peace.


Gidon D. Remba is executive director of the Jewish Alliance for Change (http://www.jews4change.com/), a nonprofit organization which supported Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and advocates for a progressive domestic and foreign policy agenda. A veteran Middle East analyst and pro-Israel peace advocate, he served as senior foreign press editor and translator in Israel's Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process.

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.