18 - 24 January 2001
Issue No.517
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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The end of Israel?
By David Hirst
The first, visceral instinct of colonial regimes is to react to the indigenous violence which their own suppressive policies breed with a more effective violence of their own. Israel enjoys an immense military superiority over its adversaries. Just how long it would need to reconquer the territories, disarm the police and militias, is little more than a question of tactics, the number of casualties it would be ready to receive and inflict. And its conventional, let alone nuclear, strength makes it more than a match for any combination of Arab armies. Zionism has been fashioned by its most dramatic military exploits: two wars -- 1948 and 1967 -- were brilliantly successful, yielding fundamental territorial and other gains; others -- like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon -- were much less so.
The Intifada has brought Israel psychologically close to some new exploit of this sort. To listen to the rhetoric is to grasp the depth of the temptation to go for the simple, radical, absolute solution such military superiority presents. It comes not only from the right-wing opposition, but from government figures and the military. It says, in effect, that Israel again faces an existential threat. It spurns any idea that the Intifada grew out of Palestinians' despair at Israel's own behaviour; it contends that they never changed, their aim is what it always was, to "drive the Jews into the sea;" and, for Arafat, the peace process is just a means of "dismantling Israel in stages." "Let the army win," is the rallying-cry of the settlers and their political allies. What that really means, says Zeev Schiff, veteran military analyst of Ha'aretz newspaper, is "the conquest of the territories under Palestinian control, the forced collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of the Palestinian population." According to the same newspaper, the deputy chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, one of Barak's most influential advisers, thinks in rather apocalyptic terms. Israel, he argues, is now engaged in "the most critical campaign against the Palestinians, including Israel's Arab population, since the 1948 war;" indeed, it is "the second half of 1948." Given that, in the first half, Israel committed the original sin from which all its troubles ultimately stem, what the second half might bring is a necessarily grim surmise.
It would also very likely lead to the regional war of which Barak now openly warns. Israeli generals and politicians bemoan the decline of Israel's "deterrent power." Because of the wider Arab identification with Palestine, the arena in which that power must apply "does not" -- as one commentator put it -- "begin and end at the Netzarim Junction (in Gaza), but extends from Tehran to Damascus and Cairo." The obvious flash point for regional conflagration is south Lebanon. Hizbullah, increasingly casting itself as a model for, and accomplice in, the Palestinian struggle, could furnish the pretext any time; it insists it won't refrain from cross-border attacks into a piece of claimed Lebanese territory, the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel, and Israel warns that if it doesn't, Syria, not just Lebanon, will suffer its massive punitive wrath.
But regional war, however successful in the past, could prove disastrously counter-productive today. At the least, it would defer for a generation any prospect of Israel's final, negotiated acceptance in the region. At worst it would create the very existential threat it was supposed to ward off. It would become an open-ended adventure arousing Arab, international, and domestic Israeli reactions to which conventional military strength has no answer. Among its many possible consequences: Iraq, already outbidding everyone else in its support for the Intifada, would complete its comeback in the region as the standard-bearer of rejectionism; turmoil in Jordan would -- at the very least -- force King Abdullah to repudiate the peace treaty with Israel; the US, utterly discredited by its pro-Israel bias, would forsake its protégé in a bid to rescue what is left of its influence in the region, and if it didn't, Saudi Arabia would unsheathe the oil weapon; it would sap Israel's morale and cohesion, depress all those of its people who had thought that it was about to become a normal state at last, alienate those who believe that the real villains are less the Palestinians than the settlers and the aggressive Zionist-colonial ideology they embody.
Yet even if Israel, forgoing all-out military solutions, continues its quest for acceptance through negotiation, it is now less likely than ever to achieve it. If it was going to happen, it would have been before the Intifada broke out. Now, after so much blood, Arafat cannot sell his people's sacrifices short. And the concessions that Barak can sell to his are even less than what they might have been; for, as the expected electoral victory of super-hawk Sharon shows, the whole society has shifted rightwards.
The only alternative is what is already happening: a low-intensity war of attrition waged against a background of diplomatic deadlock. Some believe it could go on for years. Israel will presumably persist indefinitely in the tactics it has already adopted: selective attacks on personnel and installations, harassment, intimidation, economic blockade, designed to exhaust and weaken the Palestinians to the point where they return, on its terms, to the negotiating table. But who will weary first? The pain the Palestinians are enduring is infinitely greater than the Israelis', but so is their capacity to endure it. Accustomed to poverty and privation, imbued with rage and hatred of Israeli oppression, and the energy that such anti-colonial struggles can produce, they face an adversary which has largely forgotten the self-denying zeal of its pioneering years, which quit "the mud" of south Lebanon because it was losing about 20 dead a year, and has lost 43 in three months of Intifada.
The longer this struggle goes on, the more the Palestinians will perceive eventual Israeli retreats as weakness. The more weakness, the more retreats they will press for. To the point where, in the end, they will be tempted to regress to original goals; like Israel's deputy chief of staff, but from a diametrically opposite standpoint, they will come to see it as the "second half" of 1948, and their opportunity to undo the calamity of the first.
The rejectionists already do. But for the still-dominant Arab-Palestinian acceptors, there is still a way to save themselves, and Israel, from the all-out conflict they desperately fear; the arrival in the region last month of the American-led "fact-finding committee" is the first, timid step towards it. There must, they say, be international, as opposed to merely American, sponsorship of an historic compromise; after all, the international conception of a just and lasting peace is not so very different from theirs, and it must if necessary be imposed by force. This is seen as not merely practicable, but historically proper too. Israel has made it plain that it would resist any encroachment on its sovereignty. But the record shows that, like no other state, it was the child of the UN, that the General Assembly's 1947 Partition Resolution was the founding charter of its international legitimacy, and that, as the price of admission to the world body, it formally acknowledged that its sovereignty was subordinate to a higher obligation: internationally sponsored redress for the Palestinians.
Such an outcome is a long way off yet. Meanwhile -- argues Jordanian columnist Rami Khouri -- the longer the Intifada continues "the more self-evident it becomes that the underlying policy of colonial occupation -- outdated, counter-productive, morally and politically rejected by the entire world -- is unsustainable and nearing its end." But what end? One that, through international fiat, preserves this last great exception in the history of European colonialism -- or one that ends the exception itself?
Related stories:
Redrawing the norm 11 - 17 January 2001
Intifada in focus
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