By Jeremy Salt
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo Illustratoin: Palestine Chronicle)
There is nothing to negotiate now. It’s winner take all or winner lose all and Israel is confident it will be the former.
For the last half century, the peace talks have come and gone. The Jarring mission and the Rogers plan of 1969; Camp David 1978 and 1979; the Fahd plan 1981; Oslo 1993; the Arab ‘peace initiative’ of 2000 and the return to Camp David the same year.
All were predicated on the same formula, a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and all failed for the simple reason that Israel did not want them to succeed.
It was busy fulfilling the historic Zionist mission, to take all of Palestine, not just part of it. The conquest of 78 percent in 1948 meant the historical mission was only partly accomplished, but it was not just the land to be taken. It was the people who would have to be removed. This was decided long before Plan Dalet was put into action.
“We must expel Arabs and take their place,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in the 1930s. Much earlier, in 1905, Israel Zangwill had spelled out what had to be done: “We must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan, and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” It was, of course, the Zionist settlers who were the aliens, who had no living connection with the land and in fact looked down on the Jews who lived there.
In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund’s development division, summed up Zionist intentions:
“It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples … not one village, not one tribe should be left.” This was the ‘transfer’ to surrounding countries advocated by Ben-Gurion, the euphemism for what he knew could only be removal by force.
Nothing now is left of the ‘peace talks.’ Not even the names are remembered, except by historians raking over the coals to find out ‘what went wrong,’ instead of grasping the point that Israel never wanted these talks to lead to a genuine peace, who refused to acknowledge that Israel, as a colonial settler state established at the very high point of ending settler colonialism wherever it had taken root, was wrong in the first place.
The drive towards the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in the early 20th century with the removal of tenant farmers from the land bought by Zionist purchasing agencies from absentee landowners. The greatest sales were made by the Sursocks, a Greek Orthodox Beirut family that had amassed great wealth from banking, manufacturing and import-export.
The Sursocks bought Marj ibn Amir (the Jezreel valley) from the Ottoman government in the 1870s and by 1925 had sold all of it (400,000 dunums or close to 100,000 acres) to the Zionists. Despite their wealth, during the great famine that gripped Syria in 1915-16, Michel Sursock hoarded grain and sold it at inflated prices to the few who could afford it.
The Ottoman government had restricted land sales to the Zionists, but with the beginning of British occupation in the form of the mandate, and with Britain totally committed to Zionist colonization, all restrictions were lifted.
Tenant farmers were removed by British police, and more than 20 villages were depopulated. Once sold to the Zionists, under the charter of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the land could never be returned to non-Jewish ownership or rent.
A British commission of inquiry found that this ‘extra-territorialization’ of Palestinian land was central to the resistance leading up to the uprising of 1936.
By this time the Zionists, backed by the British government, and allowed to form ‘self-defense’ units while the Palestinians were disarmed, were solidly entrenched in Palestine.
Step by step, ‘one dunum and one goat,’ the Zionists moved steadily towards the final objective of a Palestine cleansed of Palestinians.
They hid their ultimate goal behind the mask of good intentions. They lied, deceived, dissembled and ingratiated themselves with the British until they had nothing more to give and began putting obstacles in their way.
So they bit the hand that had fed them so liberally for twenty years, killing soldiers and assassinating high officials, and turned to the Americans. It was they who now gave the Zionists whatever they wanted.
Step by step indeed, right up to the present day. Not once have the Zionists committed themselves to a genuine peace. No, they have headed in the opposite direction while pretending to want nothing more than peace and repeatedly launching the false accusation that ‘we have no partner for peace,’ when it was they who were never a partner for peace.
What they wanted all along was all of Palestine and all of Palestine in Zionist hands, and peace cannot be reconciled.
They certainly never wanted a partitioned Palestine. They pretended to accept partition when they had no choice in 1949 but to settle for what they had already stolen.
Ben-Gurion made it clear that partition was just a step on the way to the conquest of all of Palestine and territory outside it if the opportunity arose. In 1956 Israel seized Sinai and only retreated when threatened by Eisenhower. It had already been massacring Palestinians in Gaza. Ben Gurion argued for the complete takeover of the strip: the refugees were “a nuisance but we shall drive them out” into the Sinai desert.
The Israelis knew that Nasser did not want war and was open to negotiations, as he would be in 1967. It was Israel that wanted war. The remarks by the army chief of staff Moshe Dayan are worth quoting in some detail:
“We do not need a security pact with the US: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. In reality, we face no danger at all from Arab military force … the ‘retaliation’ actions are our vital lymph … they make its possible to maintain a high tension among our population and in the army … it is necessary to convince our young people that we are in danger,:
In 1967 Israel seized the opportunity again and attacked Egypt and Syria. The claim of a ‘pre-emptive strike’ was an absurd lie. So was the fear of extermination, repeated every time Israel went to war.
It wanted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine and took it. Then it used withdrawal from occupied Sinai as a bargaining chip to maintain its occupation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank.
This chicanery continued through all ‘peace’ negotiations. The US always ‘negotiated’ from Israel’s corner. The Camp David agreements were a pre-ordained failure as Israel had no intention of giving anything back.
Barak claimed to offer the return of 97 percent of the West Bank, but he was heading for electoral failure, and there was not the slightest chance that the Knesset would accept it. It was a propaganda ploy aimed at western audiences.
Barak solved the question of returning east Jerusalem to the Palestinians by expanding the municipal borders of the city to include the village of Abu Dis. The ‘self-governing’ Palestine Authority would be nowhere near the old city: it would be in Abu Dis.
Not once has Israel engaged in negotiations aimed at a genuine settlement based on the return of Palestinian land. Every single negotiating process broke down under the weight of Israeli objections. Each one was used only to gain further ground and consolidate settlement of the territories seized in 1967.
Arafat was used as a peacemaker and then turned back into a terrorist and tossed aside like a squeezed-out lemon before being murdered, almost certainly on the order of Ariel Sharon. He was followed by Abbas, an arch traitor in the eyes of most Palestinians.
The US and European states could have put a spoke in Israel’s wheel but never did, and why would they when Israel was their baby, a baby grown into a sociopathic monster intent on destroying everything blocking the way to the fulfillment of the Zionist dream that from the beginning has been a nightmare to the victims of this insane ideology.
Its backers seem to take the view that as long as it does not bite them, it can bite whomever it likes.
In the past three years, all lies, dissembling and deceit have been thrown aside. Israel no longer sees any need to hide what it wants, which is not just all of Palestine but large chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is completely brazen. It is openly taking everything it wants with no apparent fear of outside intervention. The violence against Palestinians at all levels is unrestrained.
The appetite is fed by the eating. The more Israel gets away with, the more it will take. It fawns on American and European leaders while regarding them with contempt because of their weakness. It is confident it can push them around endlessly.
There is no commitment to peace. There never was – not a real peace. After decades of deception, the world is now seeing the real Israel. It is primitive and savage behind the facade of the ‘start-up’ nation. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich are just the ugliest faces. Behind them stand the uniformed mass murderers of defenseless men, women and children, loosely called ‘soldiers,’ the post-1967 settler gangs on the West Bank and the majority of the people, who support the genocide while refusing to call it that.
The witch-hunt against those who oppose genocide continues in the US, Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia. Zionist supporters of the genocide outside Israel are complaining because people call them names, which is undoubtedly a small price to pay compared to the tons of rubble toppled onto Palestinian bodies by the army of mass murderers they support. They are implicated in Israel’s crimes, but no one holds them accountable for fear of being called an anti-semite.
The ‘anti-semitism commission’ in Australia is the joint product of the government and Israel’s lobbyists. It has one purpose, which, behind the veil of combating anti-semitism – and Australia already has all the hate laws necessary to deal with this – is to shut down all opposition to Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serial violations of international law.
Israel has deliberately scorched the ground behind it so there can be no retreat – no peace based on the return of any land on which a Palestine state could be built, in short no peace at all, only continuing brutality and resistance.
There is no fallback position. Israel has locked itself into position. It is either Israel’s way or no way, and anyone who disagrees immediately positions themselves in Israel’s line of fire.
East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been so heavily settled that they cannot be handed back. This has been a deliberate continuing process since 1967. The rights of the 1948 generation have never been foresworn by the Palestinians, but in the eyes of the Europeans and the US they don’t even count.
Israel is now closer to the apogee of its triumph. The feebleness of the UN, the successful intimidation by the US of the ICC and the ICJ, encourage Israel to keep going.
There is nothing to negotiate now. It’s winner take all or winner lose all and Israel is confident it will be the former. It has bullied the world into submission. Or so it thinks, even as the ground trembles under its feet wherever it looks.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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