Israel: after Arafat, the other shoe drops

1. So Sharon ends up in hospital, his brain flooded with too-much blood -- and another giant is felled. With Arafat, the other giant of the Israel-Palestine crisis gone in 2004, it's now up to the pygmies to make peace.
That's the odd thing: even when the giants fall, life goes on. England didn't die with Churchill, and France didn't expire with De Gaulle.

Sharon refused to negotiate; his successors may want to start talks again. Arafat's successors may want to negotiate, even if they turn out to be Hamas.
So something may happen. Pygmies can do good things. (They can also do a lot of harm: witness our US pygmies, Bush/Cheney.)

When will peace come? Only when the Israelis and Palestinians are sick and tired of killing each other, and that day may not be here yet. They still seem to like offing each other -- and oh, how they do enjoy claiming they are the victims, and the others the aggressors.

But if peace could come to South Africa, it can come to these two all-too similar nations, both victims of their own pain, and let's say it out loud, their own racism.
Peace. We can only hope.

HERE'S a good, sensible piece on Sharon by Christopher Hitchens (often a loony, but here terribly sane).

2. What Sharon Did: The Bulldozer's long, brutal career ended better than anyone expected -- by Christopher Hitchens

On the day after Ariel Sharon's massive stroke, it's not difficult to remember a time when the news of his demise would have been, not to be too callous about it, something that would have been welcomed by all Palestinians, many Israelis, and many others with an interest in democracy and human rights. The best way of reminding oneself of this is to take a short refresher course in the 1983 Kahane Commission Report, which investigated the filthy pogrom at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut and which recommended that the prime minister consider removing Sharon from office. (It is also worth looking up Noam Chomsky's mordantly brilliant critique of that report, in his book Fateful Triangle, which disputed the commission's finding of "indirect responsibility" and showed that Sharon had been the effective and conscious author of the massacre.) The events of 1982—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon being one of the most disastrous as well as the most gruesome operations in recent history—did not come as much of a surprise to those who had followed Sharon's career. A notorious unit under his command had been responsible for the mass slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, a village in the then-Jordanian West Bank, in 1953. He had gone on to be one of the most promiscuous participants in the lawless attack on Egypt, in collusion with the most reactionary circles in Britain and France, in October of 1956. After 1967, he was a particularly brutal enforcer of the occupation in Gaza.

In politics as well as in the military field, he was a brutal, blustering demagogic opportunist. Very few people, however, noticed one element of that opportunism. For a very brief period after the 1973 War, he tried to start a party of his own, with a "peace" plank. The rough idea was that only someone like himself, with a record of ruthless unsentimentality toward the Palestinians, could make peace with them. This didn't last long, and he reverted to his natural home on the Likud/Herut right and became the patron of the messianic settler movement: that golem on the West Bank that is the source of so many of our current woes.

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.) Thus, when Ariel Sharon—the Arik who had been the hero of the settlers and of those who believed in "transfer" or expulsion—announced that "occupation" was the only word to describe the situation in the territories, the shock was quite something. When he added that the idea of Eretz or "Greater" Israel was in fact a demographic impossibility, the shock was even greater. Together with his colleague and possible successor, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he publicly told the old Zionist hard-liners that the expansionist dream of Vladimir Jabotinsky was one that would have to be abandoned. He must have been aware of the ideological danger here, because he had always been the first to say that any challenge to the right of settlement anywhere was implicitly a challenge to the legitimacy of the state itself. It didn't cost him too much to let Sinai go—for some odd reason, the meeting place of Moses and his maker isn't included in the God-given territories—but any retreat on the West Bank or Gaza would have been a challenge to his core beliefs.

It's usual at this point to make comparisons with Charles de Gaulle in Algeria or Richard Nixon in China: that bizarre political alchemy whereby it's supposed to be easier for hard-liners to make concessions. The comparison here is inexact: Sharon's policy was in fact one of what de Gaulle might have termed "reculer pour mieux sauter"—to regroup or retrench in a strategic manner. Any fool looking at the map can see that Sharon's endgame was the permanent retention of huge chunks of the West Bank, together with considerable control over what had ostensibly been "given up" and with near-absolute ownership of Jerusalem. As for Gaza, I never forget what I was told by Ilan Halevi, one of the few Jews in the upper ranks of the PLO, when the swap was first mooted at Oslo. "I proposed we should tell the Israelis, OK, we accept Gaza. Now—what will you give us in return?" That terrible strip of isolation and misery is, in short, no bargain.

However, once a concession is made in principle, it is harder to resist in practice. There are, and always have been, only four alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian quadrilateral. The first is the status quo of mingled apartheid and colonization that would eventually see the Israelis ruling without consent over a people as large as or larger than themselves and that is now almost universally seen as intolerable and unsustainable. The second is a state where those under its jurisdiction are equal citizens with the right to vote, which would be the end of Zionism. The third is the destruction or removal of one people by the other or their common ruin in a catastrophic war. The fourth is a partition between two separate states. All have their disadvantages, but the fourth appears to have the fewest and is supported officially by the PLO and endorsed by a probable majority of Israeli and diaspora Jews. For most of his career, Sharon supported the first option and conducted occasional flirtations with the expulsionist supporters of the third option. His conversion to the fourth may have taken unpleasing forms—a wall is a wall is a wall—but it did begin to acknowledge the contours of Palestinian statehood, and this counts as one of the better ironies of history.

A month ago, I described the new Kadima party, created by Sharon's departure from Likud and Shimon Peres' resignation from Labor, as "dead men walking." Actuarially, it is not a good proposition (Peres won't see 80 again) as recent events have demonstrated. The person who seems to benefit most in the short run is Benjamin Netanyahu. However, the quadrilateral has been altered forever, and to a great extent by Sharon, and this seems to call for some recognition.

(Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. With Edward Said he co-edited Blaming the Victims, recently republished. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.)


HERE'S a typical rant from the Jewish side. Not even the Israeli side -- the American-Jewish armchair side. I should look for another rant from the Palestine side, but to tell you the truth, both sides are equally boring in their self-righteousness. The fact is that the Israelis have been giving the Palestinians hell, and the Palestinians have been most unfortunate in their leaders, who are corrupt beyond belief. There is not one Nelson Mandela on either side, and until one appears, they'll both be bogged down in self-righteousness which, like self-pity in an individual, is the most useless and meagre emotion in a group. So read this rant by Martin Peretz for its self-righteousness, and imagine a self-righteous rebuttal from an armchair Arab, sitting in London, say. It won't be difficult. In their mutually inflicted pain, Israelis and Palestinians are quite similar: one day, when there's peace, the notion of their similarity will hit them like a blinding flash. Meanwhile, if you're Jewish, you might enjoy this rant, and if you're Arab, you might find your own self-righteousness given a good shot in the arm.

3. MAYHEM IN GAZA AND THE FUTURE OF PALESTINE: Warning Shots -- by Martin Peretz

"The only thing that's going to solve this," Steven Spielberg told Time magazine, "is rational minds, a lot of sitting and talking until you're blue in the gills." This, I suppose, is what goes for heavy thinking in Hollywood. Imagine Dreamworks negotiating with Paramount if the latter were continually shooting up the former. So maybe before the Israelis and Palestinians sit down with each other--as they've done innumerable times over the years, at Camp David and Oslo and secret hideouts for very long periods, even producing hopes that many credulous folk took for real--the Palestinians should sit down just with one another and decide whether they truly are a nation and what that nation promises its people. And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd have been a pushcart. The fact is that, as no-nonsense Golda said many years ago, the Arabs of Palestine don't behave like a nation. No, this doesn't mean they shouldn't have a state. All kinds of rumps have states, and just about every one of these states is represented at the United Nations--where many of them cover for each other over the mortal crimes they inflict on their own populations, like Libya for Sudan, or, for that matter, China for virtually every violator of human rights on the planet. Actually, a fictive Palestine has already been counted as a virtual member state for decades, and this has given first Arafat and now his successors the standing to hijack the proceedings of the General Assembly so that much of its business has been devoted to how awfully the Jews treat the Arabs. And, in any case, haven't the Palestinians already declared their independence at least twice?

Now, it's not as if the Palestinians agree as to who represents them, not by a long shot. A significant percentage believes there is nothing to talk about anyway, except possibly the practical details of Israel's dissolution. Of course, the Israeli government negotiates with the Palestinian Authority, mostly under the auspices of Washington, although for some reason Russia, the European Union, and even the United Nations are occasionally made to feel that they are also playing hostess. But the P.A. has very little authority, and it seems sometimes to revel in its helplessness, likely as an explanation of why it can't enforce the few arrangements to which it has agreed. It's not surprising that, in such a circumstance, the peace-process interlopers are always looking for someone else to jump start the process. For years, the liberal professoriat in America had anointed Edward Said in the role. But he turned out to be a yarn spinner: His much retailed personal history of exile was intricately fabricated. Then there was Hanan Ashrawi who has plumb disappeared, more or less, with the death of Peter Jennings and the disappearance of Ted Koppel.

All through this period, there was also the truly upright personage of Sari Nusseibeh, made to compete with these two unguent-incendiaries. Nusseibeh is, after all, a serious intellectual (B.A. from Christ Church, Oxford; PhD from Harvard) and a genuinely moderate man. He shows up at whatever meeting is convened to advance the peace process with Israel. Alas, he carries little weight among his own. He knows this himself, the point having been amply made when he was beaten up at his own Bir Zeit University during the first intifada. So, in the year when the Palestinians were finally sorting out what happens after Yasir Arafat, Nusseibeh was my neighbor in Cambridge crafting a memoir with some trusted scribe at the Radcliffe Institute. His alleged sins are not all his own. His family was widely respected through the ages, which is why its members have been custodians of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since the twelfth century. They were especially trusted by the British and the Jordanians, in itself transgressions according to the other dominant locals, especially the Husseinis--from which tree both Arafat and Haj Amin, the notorious Hitler ally installed by the Crown's ever-accommodating Jewish High Commissioner as the first "Grand" Mufti of Jerusalem, hailed. The Husseinis still carry enormous weight among the clans and tribes of Palestine, sort of capo de capo.

You don't hear much about these bewildering social formations until a long-festering inter-family (or intra-family) feud suddenly erupts and blood is shed, as it has recently with special regularity in Gaza. Journalists and academics somehow think it patronizing to recognize these antiquarian kinship groups with their raw emotions as political actors when their rhetoric strains so pompously to modernity. It would be especially insulting since their Jewish antagonists are the quintessential carriers of progress in the Middle East, those damned Zionists with their advanced science-based economy, independent judiciary, free press, hi-tech military in which individual soldiers still take responsibility and command respect, and promotion in the ranks by competence and ingenuity in the defense activities of the state. But political allegiances among the Palestinians are cemented by just those more primitive--which is to say, primal--ties. God only knows why you can talk about these with regard to Sicily but not when it comes to Palestine. In any case, the truth is that Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa, the Popular Resistance Committee, and other armed gangs and ganglets of the national movement, such as it is, are each defined partly by ideology, partly by bloodlines. A whole village may vote for the headman's pick, which until he tells you is anyone's guess.

The withdrawal from Gaza by Israel was supposed to be a test. OK, not of everything but of something. Take your pick. That the hudna (ceasefire) would hold. It didn't. Islamic Jihad hadn't even signed on to the contract. It carried out several successful terrorist attacks and day in, day out launched rockets from Gaza deeper and deeper into pre-1967 Israel. But, in a way, even more serious is the fact that the most protracted war by Qassam projectiles was waged by armed elements of Fatah, the P.A. president's own political party. What about security undertakings with regard to Gaza's border with Egypt? Again a failure. Weapons and terrorists have surged, not seeped, through the frontier that is also "guaranteed" by various European well-wishers. Is there elemental public order on the streets? Not at all. What about the assumption that there would be sufficient pressure from the Palestinian public for the P.A. to feel obliged to take control of the streets? Not enough pressure or not enough will to take control. The P.A. is still the most heavily armed force in Gaza. No matter: Militias battle police, police battle other police, gangs brawl with other gangs; there are revenge killings, aimless killings, kidnappings, bombings, clubbings, mutilations, some pointless, some unmistakably pointed. Chaos rules in Gaza, utter mayhem. "It appears as if Gaza has degenerated into anarchy," explains CNN. There has been a steady outflow of pro-Palestinian NGO personnel from the Strip, some out of panic, some from a realization that the Palestinian revolution, so called, is animated by bloodlust. According to The Times of London, one British aid worker who was recently held hostage by gunmen for three days told her kidnappers, "I came to work with these people and I feel like I've been stabbed in the back." Is this the future of Palestine?

The present P.A. seems desperately to want to find an excuse for postponing parliamentary elections in Gaza and the West Bank. It may have found a pretext in Israel's stated refusal to allow voting to take place in Jerusalem since Hamas, which fundamentally rejects the existence of Israel, would be on the ballot. But the real reason is that the Abbas crowd fears that it will be utterly upended by Hamas. Another reason is that, even if Fatah wins, the habitually corrupt present leadership will be demoted by the younger (not so young, actually) cadres who forced their way on to the party's slate by threatening to run their own if they were not given favored spots. At the head of their list is Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for as many acts of mass murder.

How has all this registered in Israel? The fact is that almost no one any longer believes in a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. Not because sensible and humane Israelis can't imagine a fair divide of the land between the river and the sea. But because Gaza has truly shown them that there are--let's be perfectly frank--no Palestinians with whom to treat. Oh, Israel will bargain on this point and that, so far as George Bush insists and pushes Jerusalem. So, even when Palestinian rockets slam into Israeli towns and villages and army bases, the Sharon government will agree to some formula for Palestinian travel between Gaza and the West Bank, as it is about to do. But the government knows that, whatever security assurances are given for this unprecedented passage, they will not hold--as not a single security assurance from the Palestinians has ever held. There is no dispute: This is the record.

The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was a wager on the sanity of the Palestinian polity. The betters lost. I still believe that it was a wise move, but for purely Israeli reasons. Still, Israel may find that its forces will have to re-enter Gaza to deliver punishing blows to the Palestinians who cannot win but hold their own population hostage to their bellicosity. It even may be that Israel will decide to pit the local inhabitants against their captors, which it could do by turning off--for an hour or many hours a day--the electricity it has continued to provide to Gaza despite unrelenting provocation. It is remarkable that Israel has resisted so long taking what must be a very tempting step.

All this has consequences for the West Bank. Sooner or later, and particularly if there is a withdrawal from the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, rockets and missiles will be as common there as they are in Gaza and Lebanon. Already, Al Qaeda has claimed (and Israeli intelligence has confirmed) that it was responsible for at least one rocket attack on Israel proper. The Hezbollah tie to Iran, with its imminent nuclear designs and delirious president, only exacerbates a very precarious situation. In any case, those who casually promote the notion that Israel should disengage from here, there, nearly everywhere close to the 1949 lines are proposing that the Jewish state commit suicide. Virtually the entire country, including Ben Gurion Airport, would be vulnerable to even simple weaponry. I'm afraid that sitting and talking until you're blue in the gills won't quite do. Fortunately, the Israeli population is as undeceived as its present government--and its future one, too.

(Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of The New Republic.)