World
of nuance
Peter
Rodgers 
Jimmy
Carter
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Simon & Schuster, $45 hb, 278 pp, 0743285026
Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in
May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was
asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born
Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’,
came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal
of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a
decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is
highly coloured by circumstance.
The Barak story is pertinent to Jimmy Carter’s account of
the world’s most intractable conflict. Palestine: Peace
Not Apartheid has provoked strong criticism of the former
president by some American supporters of the Jewish state. Their
gripe partly involves the tiresome refrain that questioning that
state’s policies or actions somehow involves being ‘anti-Israeli’
or, worse still, anti-Semitic. It is the familiar tactic used
by Israel’s most strident advocates to shut down debate about
the country. But another, more difficult, element is Carter’s
alleged softness on terrorism. Kenneth Stein, a member of the
Carter Centre who resigned in protest over the book, wrote recently
that its most troubling aspect was ‘Carter’s apparent
willingness to condone the killing of Israelis’.
The charge stems essentially from a comment on page 213. Here,
Carter writes that it is imperative ‘that the general Arab
community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear
that they will end suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism
when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap
for Peace [drawn up by the United Nations, the United States,
the European Union and Russia] are accepted by Israel’. The
problem lies in ‘will’ and ‘when’. Is Carter
really saying that terrorism is a legitimate tool until a peace
deal is done? If so, he would seem to have out-Baraked Barak in
conceding the reality from the other side. But such an interpretation
hardly sits with Carter’s comment earlier in the book that
Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians were ‘morally
reprehensible and politically counterproductive. These dastardly
acts … are almost suicidal for the Palestinian cause.’
One of Carter’s problems is that he has entered the world
of nuance. For fundamentalists on both sides of the divide there
can be no such phenomenon. They prefer Orwellian simplicity and
the superiority of their own two- or four-legged views. Selective
and, at times, deliberately distorted quotation is part and parcel
of this.
So too is the troublingly fine line between terrorism and national
liberation. The message Carter conveys on this is unoriginal but
bears repeating: occupation produces violence. The moral and indeed
politically pragmatic question that follows is the radius of such
violence. Does Israeli occupation – and settlement of the
West Bank – make Israelis in Tel Aviv cafés ‘legitimate’
targets of Palestinian anger? Should that anger be directed only
at those wearing Israeli military uniforms in the West Bank itself?
Or should the settlers be targeted as the practical embodiment
of Israeli usurpation? If Israel eliminates individuals in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip (and elsewhere), should it not expect
retaliation in kind?
 Here,
it is worth noting comments by the former Hamas spiritual leader,
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, assassinated by an Israeli missile in early
2004. In 2003, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising
against the Israelis, which cost more than 5000 lives, the majority
of them Palestinian, Yassin observed that the ‘main battle
is against Israeli soldiers and settlers’. Attacks inside
Israel, he asserted, were a ‘response to Israel’s crimes
against our people’.
This takes us to the broader issue of whether Carter’s criticisms
of Israel lean towards the anti-Semitic. It is truly extraordinary
that those who claim to be ardent friends of Israel often seem
to know so little about the country. As any visitor quickly discovers,
Israelis have made an art form of no-holds-barred wrangling about
the state of the world, the region, the nation, the family and
the individual, and everything in between. There is no more vigorous
criticism of Israeli behaviour than within Israel itself. Debate
in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), elected through a system
of proportional representation generous to smaller parties, makes
Australian parliamentary behaviour look limp by comparison. Carter
notes that, during a presidential visit to Israel in 1979, he
was invited to address the Knesset. ‘Although I was able
to conclude my remarks with just a few interruptions, it was almost
impossible for either Prime Minister Begin or others to speak.’
Such argumentativeness, sadly, seems to sharpen bias rather than
abrade it. Many of the protagonists on either side of the conflict
are programmed to hear and to read only that which suits their
prejudice. To write about the causes of violence is somehow to
endorse terrorism. Yet it is surely possible to support Israel
and to criticise its policies; possible also to sympathise with
the Palestinian predicament and to abhor some Palestinian actions.
The use of the ‘A’ word in the title of Carter’s
book caused offence in some quarters. Yet Carter’s criticisms
pale in comparison to those offered by a few prominent Israelis.
In 2002, for example, a former attorney-general in the Rabin government
of the 1990s, Michael Ben-Yair, wrote that ‘we enthusiastically
chose to become a colonial society … In effect, we established
an apartheid régime in the occupied territories immediately
after their capture [in 1967]. That oppressive régime exists
to this day.’
In the closing summary of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Carter suggests that there are two interrelated obstacles to peace
in the Middle East:
1.
Some Israelis believe that they have the right to confiscate
and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained
subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated
Palestinians;
2. Some Palestinians react by honouring suicide bombers as
martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing
of Israelis as victories.
These two points boil down to two words: land and terror.
As long as Palestinians are denied a viable state of their
own, some of them will resort to violence. Israel argues that
it will never negotiate under fire. Palestinians retort that
Israel will never negotiate unless it is under fire. When
the smoke clears – temporarily – more bodies lie
in the street and new hatred lies in the heart.
Carter
takes particular aim at Israeli settlement policy. So he should.
It beggars belief that Israel and its die-hard supporters cling
to the notion that the problems with peacemaking are all the
fault of the other side. For almost forty years, Palestinians
have witnessed the relentless alienation of the very land that
might have become their state – indeed, must become their
state if it is to have any chance of viability. It is true that
the eight thousand or so Israeli settlers in Gaza have now been
withdrawn. But this was driven by Ariel Sharon’s determination
to keep the bulk of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Not for good reason was Sharon deemed the father of the settlement
movement.
We might recall that the fitful progress of the Oslo peace process
in the 1990s was accompanied by a dramatic increase in Israeli
settler numbers in the West Bank. Oslo did not expressly forbid
settlement expansion but did require the ‘integrity and
status’ of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to be
preserved in the period leading up to final status negotiations.
Sharon’s interpretation of this, as Carter notes, was to
urge Israelis to ‘move, run and grab as many hilltops as
they can to enlarge the settlements’. Israelis certainly
took this to heart. During the ten years after Oslo was launched
in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled,
to around 230,000. Today there are some 250,000. According to
Israel’s Bureau of Statistics, population growth in Israel
proper between 2001–05 averaged just on 1.9 per cent a
year; yet the West Bank settler population continued to grow
by approximately five per cent annually. Little wonder that
Dennis Ross – at the forefront of American peacemaking
efforts during the Clinton years, and no enemy of Israel –
wrote in his hefty memoir that one of the mythologies of Oslo
was ‘that it was only the Palestinians who failed to fulfil
their commitments. Usually [italics added] it was both
sides.’
Another Carter target is Israel’s security barrier, which
he describes as more an ‘imprisonment wall’ than a
‘security fence’. We should all have sympathy with
Israel’s concern to rid its citizens of the scourge of
terrorist attacks emanating from the West Bank (and Gaza). Sharon
could in fact have created both greater security and a realistic
political demarcation between Israelis and Palestinians. But
that would have meant building the wall along the 1967 border.
Instead, it lops off around nine per cent of the West Bank to
encompass Israeli settlements. In the process, Carter notes:
the wall cuts directly through Palestinian villages, divides
families from their gardens and farmland, and includes 375,000
Palestinians on the ‘Israeli’ side of the wall,
175,000 of whom are outside Jerusalem … The area between
the segregation barrier and the Israeli border has been designated
a closed military region for an indefinite period of time.
Israeli directives state that every Palestinian over the age
of twelve living in the closed area has to obtain a ‘permanent
resident permit’ from the civil administration to enable
them to live in their own homes. They are considered to be
aliens...
While
Carter does not draw a direct comparison between these directives
and apartheid South Africa’s infamous pass laws, the thought
hangs on the air. Carter does observe that the motivation behind
the ‘forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that
in South Africa – not racism but the acquisition of land’.
The dividing line between these two elements, however, appears
almost as paper-thin as that between terrorist and freedom fighter.
Ethnic cleansing, relocation or the gentler euphemism of ‘transfer’
has bobbed around in Israeli thinking since long before the creation
of the modern state. The roll-call of Israeli notables hankering
after the idea includes Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon.
One of its most energetic and vulgar advocates is Avigdor Lieberman,
founder of the Yisrael Beytenu (Israel Is Our Home) party, which
won eleven seats in Israel’s 2006 election. Among Lieberman’s
contributions over the past several years to a resolution of the
conflict has been a description of Israel’s Arab citizens,
who make up nearly twenty per cent of the country’s total
population, as its ‘number one problem’; that these
citizens should ‘take their bundles and get lost’; and
that Palestinian prisoners held by Israel should be bussed to
the (perhaps aptly named) Dead Sea and drowned. In late 2006 Lieberman
called for the execution of any Arab Israeli parliamentarian who
met with representatives of the Hamas-led Palestinian government.
These might be dismissed as the dribble of the deranged, except
that Lieberman is now Israel’s deputy prime minister and
minister for strategic affairs. An opinion poll published in September
2006 placed Lieberman second, after Benjamin Netanyahu, as the
preferred Israeli prime minister. (The current incumbent, Ehud
Olmert, came fifth.) One of Israel’s finest writers, David
Grossman, described Lieberman’s political elevation as a
‘brutal kick’ to Israeli democracy: the ‘appointment
of a compulsive pyromaniac to head the country’s firefighters’.
What is curious about Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – and
the reception it received – is that for all the book’s
readability it is a mostly unremarkable account of the forces
at work in this troubled part of the world. Carter’s admiration
for Anwar Sadat, who led Egypt into a peace treaty with Israel
and paid with his life; his wariness about the then Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin; his respect for Jordan’s King Hussein
and indeed the Syrian President Hafez al-Assad (both now dead);
and his despair over America’s approach to the Middle East
are of interest but hardly earth-shaking. Carter’s way out
of the mess is firmly rooted in the decades-old land-for-peace
formula that he helped put into practice in the Camp David Accords,
paving the way for Israeli–Egyptian peace in the late 1970s.
Carter sketches three key requirements for a resolution of the
conflict. First, the ‘security of Israel must be guaranteed’,
with the Arabs acknowledging openly and specifically that Israel
is a reality and has a right to exist in peace. Second, the internal
debate within Israel ‘must be resolved in order to define
Israel’s permanent legal borders’. This is code for
no more Greater Israel and for a Jewish state confined to its
pre-1967 borders, unless ‘modified by mutually agreeable
land swaps’. Third, the ‘sovereignty of all Middle East
nations and sanctity of international borders must be honoured’.
On this, Carter writes there is little doubt ‘that accommodation
with the Palestinians can bring full Arab recognition of Israel
and its right to live in peace’.
The great difficulty of course is turning these worthy ideas into
realities. Carter offers little on this, other than a hope that
his book might provoke debate over how a lasting peace might be
attained. In the longer term, he might achieve that debate. In
the short term, reaction to the book has again exposed the bunker
mentality that too often passes for discussion about the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict. Henry Siegman, senior fellow for the Middle East on
the Council on Foreign Relations and a former head of the American
Jewish Congress, observed that criticism of Carter’s book
was ‘noteworthy only for what it reveals about the ignorance
of the American political establishment, both Democrat and Republican,
on the subject of the Israel–Palestine conflict’.
One question that should now scratch our minds is whether in fact
it is too late for a land-for-peace deal leading to a two-state
solution. This is not just because of the loss of significant
tracts of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements and their supporting
infrastructure. It is also whether the underlying dynamic has
shifted irreversibly. For much of the twentieth century, the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict was nationalist in character. The struggle was about
a line on a map. We all know now where to draw that line –
roughly along Israel’s pre-1967 borders. But the rise of
Islamism and the election by the Palestinians of a Hamas government;
the American débâcle in Iraq; an emboldened Iran
pursuing both a nuclear weapons capability and a divisive Shia-outreach
programme; and the limits of Israeli military power illuminated
by its failure to destroy Hezballah have made Israeli–Palestinian
peacemaking even more problematic.
Israel’s defenders are right to argue the unfairness of blaming
all the woes of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the unresolved
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is a good excuse
but a bad justification for many of those woes. Fixing it would
not make the problems goes away. In fact, a resolution could make
life more difficult for sclerotic Arab dictators by removing an
‘external’ reason for their own glaring shortcomings.
But they should not be overly con-cerned. The reality is that
Israelis and Palestinians are singularly adept at giving each
other reasons for continuing bad behaviour. Settlements, terrorism,
targeted killings, collective punishment, arbitrary detention
– the envelope of excuses may not be all that thick, but
its contents are deadly. Israel and the United States preached
the virtues of Palestinian democratisation, then spurned the Hamas
government it delivered. Understandable perhaps, but possibly
short-sighted and certainly hypocritical. A senior Hamas figure
recently stated that the problem was not ‘that there is an
entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state
is non-existent.’ Perhaps he was merely playing with words.
Perhaps, though, it was a chink in the door for negotiations between
enemies. We are unlikely to find out any time soon. It is much
more comfortable for Israel to hide behind the mantra of there
being no partner for peace.
It is hardly any better on the Palestinian side, where victimhood
provides cover for the most self-contradictory behaviour. Qassam
rockets fired from Gaza are poorly aimed at individual Israelis
but score direct hits on Israeli popular opinion. Carter notes
that ‘following policies of confrontation and inflexibility,
Palestinians have alienated many moderate leaders in Israel and
America and have not regained any of their territory or other
basic rights’.
Carter writes that a lasting and comprehensive peace will not
be possible unless Israel reverses ‘colonizing the internationally
recognised Palestinian territory, and unless the Palestinians
respond by accepting Israel’s right to exist, free of violence’.
Those who follow events on the ground have known that for a very
long time, as do the protagonists themselves. If anything, peace
today is even more of a mirage. And books such as Palestine: Peace
Not Apartheid quickly become yet another plea for reasonableness
in a demonstrably unreasonable world.
Peter
Rodgers is a former award-winning journalist and diplomat who
served as Australia’s ambassador to Israel in the mid-1990s.
His book on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Herzl’s
Nightmare: One Land Two People, was published in 2004.
|
|
|
|
|
More
current reviews
Brenda
Niall: B.A. Santamaria: Your Most Obedient
Servant
'The
Santamaria letters do much to illuminate the ideas and personality
of someone who has been demonised and idealised to a degree
which obscures his individuality. They record sixty years of
ceaseless thinking and striving.'
Read
full review
Hugh
White on
America's Bind in
Francis
Fukuyama's After the Neocons and
Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman's Ethical Realism
'Beyond
American failure in Iraq lies a second, deeper failure. America’s
Iraq project was always intended by its proponents not just
to fix Iraq and transform the Middle East, but also to demonstrate
a new grand policy concept for the twenty-first century.'
Read
full review
Heroic
poses: Peter
Pierce on Tom Keneally's The Widow
and Her Hero
The
depiction of Grace in her role as narrator is one of Keneally’s
subtlest portrayals, an exercise in craft that compels admiration.
For if the life of the hero in action is unproblematic, even
if it might be fatal – ‘each detonation enlarged their
legend’ – the life of the woman left behind with a
cherished store of memories is not. Read
full review
Michael
Fullilove on UN Bashing - David
M. Malone's The International Struggle over Iraq: Politics
in the UN Security Council 1980–2005
'Malone’s
narrative will challenge both camps. UN groupies will not enjoy
his accounts of the cold mathematics of Security Council politics.
A case in point was the weak response from Council members to
Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran – a direct attack on
a member state – which left Tehran mistrustful and Baghdad
contemptuous of the world body. ' Read
full review
|
|
AUSTRALIAN
BOOK REVIEW: