The question is whether Israel wants peace — any kind of peace. Of course, the resolution of any struggle in international relations is ultimately a function of the correlation of forces at that point of time. The difficulty arises from the difference of perceptions of this correlation between the protagonists. Where the difference becomes qualitative, the rapport tends to be surreal, interrupting the search for a settlement.
The correlation is composed of four factors in the following order of importance — political, economic, military and diplomatic. All these are variables. In short, time is the fifth factor in the correlation. Therefore, the side which is strong at a point of time wants an immediate settlement, while the other side procrastinates, if it hopes to grow stronger or in common parlance, “If it has the time on its side.” Thus, what may appear as fait accompli to one side may be only a stage in the struggle to the other.
The Jews were stronger than the Palestinians from 1918 on, because they were backed by the British, who had planted them on the imperial highway to guard the route to India and the newly-discovered oil deposits in the Arab East. The Nazi persecution of European Jews brought an element of human sympathy, too, for them. The British scheme seems to have envisaged the establishment of a Jewish state over the whole of Palestine and the turning of the Trans-Jordanian territory into a new Palestine. They, therefore, crushed the Arab revolt of 1936, in Palestine, while keeping the Jews out of Trans-Jordan. However, they found their scheme was not feasible and so decided upon a division of Palestine between Israel and Jordan. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 was practically managed by them. They prevented the Iraqi army from breaking through to the Mediterranean Sea, which would have cut Israel into two and induced Israel to leave the old city of Jerusalem and the part of the West Bank populated by the Arabs to Jordan.
It was hoped that an Arab-Israeli peace would be made along these demarcations. However, this calculation, which rested upon the continued rule of the Arab monarchs, mostly put in place by the British and of the Arab landed class, was upset by the entry upon the political stage of the middle class in the shape of the army officer corps. Their leader and model was Nasser. This putschist-populist leadership refused to either fight Israel or to make peace with it.
Both the inabilities flowed from the Arabs’ internal politics. Nasserism or Arab nationalism, expressing itself through the officer-corps, adamantly refused both an autonomous political action of the masses and any movement to change the society radically. It, therefore, crushed the Left and the existing political parties. The ‘mass movements’ organized by the military leadership were only bunches of claquers controlled by the secret police, and turned on and off at will by the government. This exclusion of the masses from political participation rendered the Arab side, in the contest with Israel, decisively weak. Israel already had advantage in other factors of the correlation of forces — such as economic, military and diplomatic — thanks to the sympathy and massive supplies of credit, technology and arms from the West. It had political strength too, being solidly united internally because of the pioneer nature of its population and its functioning democracy.
The Arabs, with far greater population, could make up for their other weaknesses by their political strength. However, having decided not to do that, they were in a state of permanent weakness against Israel. That explains their reason for not choosing war. And the same factor was responsible for their inability to choose peace, as only a leadership which was politically strong at home could persuade the masses to go along with it on an unpopular decision. Genuine autonomous movements can give legitimacy to a leadership. Neither the guns can do that, nor the claquers.
However, a situation of neither war nor peace is unstable. Therefore, Israel chose the moment to break it and inflict a decisive defeat upon the Nasserist Arabs-decisive in the sense of the old correlation of forces. Sadat’s Camp David was the logical result of Nasserist power-structure. It was as natural as Mubarak’s recent statement that Egypt would fight only if it is itself attacked.
The surprising development after 1967, however, was not the defeat of the Arab juntas, but the ability of these juntas to retain power, though after getting rid of Nasserist pretensions. Palestine was, however, different. Not having been a state, its middle class had had no opportunity to express itself through the juntas. So the rout of the Arab armies in 1967 left the Palestinian masses free to organize themselves politically and say “No” to occupation.
It is the emergence of this new factor on the Palestinian side that has baffled Israel (and Arafat only slightly less). Israel has more arms than ever before. The doses of foreign economic assistance received by it are beyond imagination. And the US’s blind backing has rendered it immune to any consideration of world opinion. Yet, the political strength of the Palestinians’ united masses has reduced Israel’s power to naked force, which is the simplest statement of a state’s political and diplomatic bankruptcy.
Of course, the masses have their own way of resisting: demonstrations, sabotage, ambush and the suicide bombings. Israel’s calling that terrorism is tautology. Unarmed people have always resisted foreign occupation with these methods. The term ‘guerrilla’ was born in the Spanish people’s resistance to French occupation. And the masses will continue to use these methods as long as any state attempts to impose its will on another people by force. Guns speak in Palestine because the Israeli leadership, unused to dealing with a movement thrown up by the Arab masses, refuses a political dialogue on the basis of the new correlation of forces between Israel and the Palestinians.
Only this can explain the deal that it has in mind for the Palestinians, whose contours its various leaders have let out from time to time. According to it, Palestine would be a “state” without its own armed forces and with its foreign relations guided by Israel. It will have Israel itself on its three sides, with permanent Israeli military bases separating it from Jordan on the fourth. Its police and intelligence agencies will work in collaboration with the Israeli security agencies. In short, at a time when the smallest nations and nationalities demand self-determination, the Palestinians will have to be content with an old-style protectorate, and this in the name of Israel’s security. Israel must be the most insecure nation in history.
Israel’s insecurity is partly historical, as the Jews have lived under one foreign ruler or another since the beginning of our era. They were forced into money-lending in Europe and then prevented from converting to Christianity since the society needed money-lenders but the scriptures did not allow the Christians to practice the profession. The rise of capitalism brought pogroms in the biggest of which, organized by the Nazis, over six million Jews were annihilated.
But the main source of the Israelis’ insecurity is that the Palestinians and, by extension, the Arab masses have not accepted the Jewish settlers in Palestine, at least not on the terms the Israelis want. Although the Jews now constitute an overwhelming majority in Israel, the Palestinians still regard them as colons.
The Zionist leadership, with its psychological heritage of East Europe’s rejection of Jewry and its intellectual baggage reflecting various European fascistic trends, may genuinely believe that “the natives understand only force” and “relish having their heads bashed in”. So, the proper reply to the Palestinian resistance is tanks and more tanks. And their racist attitude may have acquired a broader base with the recent arrival in Israel of Shcharansky and his followers. But the ordinary Israeli people, engaged in peaceful labour, are beginning to suspect that the Palestinians may not be basically different from themselves, that they may not like prolonged military occupation any more than the Israelis would. The more perceptive among them may also perceive the sea of Arab masses beyond the Palestinians.
The fact is that the region was at a crossroads after the Israeli military victory of 1967. Israel had the chance to choose peace and seek to become a Middle Eastern state. Instead, it wanted both, what it regarded as “Ersetz Israel” and peace, which turned out to be a mirage. The reason for its inability to seize the moment, probably, was that it was still led by the Zionists who had experienced the humiliations and pogroms of Eastern Europe, who still regarded the Arabs, indeed, all non-Europeans as racially inferior, who could be displaced at will. Nahum Goldmann, the then President of the World Zionist Congress, said in June 1967, in answer to a journalists question, that it had not been a coincidence that the great Israeli military victory had been won on the 50th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
Here was the 19th century European view of the non-Europeans as inert, who could be handled by the “active” Europeans as they pleased. This notion could perhaps be valid for a while when the Arab ruling juntas kept the Arab masses outside politics, though not even then. It has lost validity with the entry of the people of Palestine on the stage of history. As a result, the Israeli victory of 1967 has led not to a settlement but to a period of protracted war, causing a frightened Israeli people into voting Sharon into power. Their deep feeling of insecurity drives the Israeli state into a violence, which is increasingly ineffective in the face of the new correlation of forces. This renders them ever more insecure.
The question is whether Israel wants peace — any kind of peace. Of course, the resolution of any struggle in international relations is ultimately a function of the correlation of forces at that point of time. The difficulty arises from the difference of perceptions of this correlation between the protagonists. Where the difference becomes qualitative, the rapport tends to be surreal, interrupting the search for a settlement.
