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Today's
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January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
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Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
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Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
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J.B.
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True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Berry
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CounterPunch
Wire
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Corrie
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
A Prehistory of the
Latest Proposals
The
Geneva Bubble
By ILAN PAPPE
Even though we live in an age of intensive and
intrusive media coverage, TV viewers in Israel were lucky to
catch a glimpse of the meetings that produced the Geneva Accord.
The clip we watched in November showed a group of well- known
Israeli writers and peaceniks shouting at a group of not so well-known
and rather cowed Palestinians, most of them officials of the
Palestinian Authority. Abba Eban once said that the Palestinians
never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and that,
more or less, was what the Israelis were saying now. This was
their last chance, the Palestinians were told: the current offer
was the best and most generous Israelis have ever made them.
It's a familiar scene. The various memoirs
produced by the major players in the Oslo Accord suggest that
much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from
the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between
Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli tone and attitude
have barely changed since British despair led to the Palestine
question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second
World War. The UN was a very young and inexperienced organisation
in those days, and the people it appointed to find a solution
to the conflict were at a loss where to begin or how to proceed.
The Jewish Agency gladly filled the vacuum, exploiting Palestinian
disarray and passivity to the full.
In May 1947, the Agency handed a plan,
complete with a map, to the UN Special Committee on Palestine
(UNSCOP), proposing the creation of a Jewish state over 80 per
cent of Palestine - more or less Israel today without the Occupied
Territories. In November 1947 the Committee reduced the Jewish
state to 55 per cent of Palestine, and turned the plan into UN
General Assembly Resolution 181. Its rejection by Palestine surprised
no one - the Palestinians had been opposed to partition since
1918. Zionist endorsement of it was a foregone conclusion, and
in the eyes of the international policemen, that was a solid
enough basis for peace in the Holy Land. Imposing the will of
one side on the other was hardly the way to effect a reconciliation,
and the resolution triggered violence on a scale unprecedented
in the history of modern Palestine.
If the Palestinians weren't happy with
the Zionist idea of partition, it was time for unilateral action.
The Jewish leadership turned to its May 1947 map, showing clearly
which parts of Palestine were coveted as the future Jewish state.
The problem was that within the desired 80 per cent, the Jews
were a minority of 40 per cent (660,000 Jews and one million
Palestinians). But the leaders of the Yishuv had foreseen this
difficulty at the outset of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The solution as they saw it was the enforced transfer of the
indigenous population, so that a pure Jewish state could be established.
On 10 March 1948, the Zionist leadership adopted the infamous
Plan Dalet, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the areas
regarded as the future Jewish state in Palestine.
Palestine was not divided, it was destroyed,
and most of its people expelled. These were the events which
triggered the conflict that has lasted ever since. The PLO emerged
in the late 1950s as an embodiment of the Palestinian struggle
for return, reconstruction and restitution. But the refugees
were ignored by the international community and the regional
Arab powers. Only Nasser seemed to adopt their cause, forcing
the Arab League to express its concern. As the ill-fated Arab
manoeuvres of June 1967 showed, this was not enough.
In June 1967, the whole of Palestine
became Israel; the new geopolitical reality demanded a renewed
peace process. At first the UN took the initiative, but it was
soon replaced by American peacemakers. The early architects of
Pax Americana had some ideas of their own, but they were flatly
rejected by the Israelis, and got nowhere. American brokering
became a proxy for Israeli peace plans, which were based on three
assumptions: that the 1948 ethnic cleansings would not be an
issue; that negotiations would only concern the future of the
areas Israel had occupied in 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip; and, third, that the fate of the Palestinian minority
in Israel was not to be part of a comprehensive settlement. This
meant that 80 per cent of Palestine and more than 50 per cent
of Palestinians were to be excluded from the peacemaking process.
The formula was accepted unconditionally by the US, and sold
as the best possible offer to the rest of the world.
For a while - until 1977 - the Israelis
insisted on another precondition. They wanted to divide the West
Bank with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (The 'Jordanian option',
as it was called, was later adopted by the Reagan Administration
as its own peace plan.) When Likud came to power in 1977, the
option dropped from view - the new Government was not interested
in any kind of agreement or compromise - but it was revived in
the days of the national unity government, 1984-87, until the
Jordanians realised that the Israeli Government would not relinquish
the entire West Bank even to them.
The Israeli occupation continued unhindered
in the absence of a proper peace process. From its very first
day - long before the suicide bombers - there were house demolitions,
killings of innocent citizens, expulsions, closures and general
harassment. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of the ever- expanding
settler movement, which brought with it not only land expropriation
but also further brutality. The Palestinians responded with a
radical form of political Islam, which by the end of the first
twenty years had become a force to reckon with. It was bolder
in its resistance to the occupation than anything that had preceded
it, but equally harsh in its attitude to internal rivals and
the population at large. Neither movement, any more than the
Likud Government before them, showed any interest in a diplomatic
effort to resolve the conflict. Frustration in the occupied areas
intensified until, in December 1987, the local population rose
up against the occupiers.
In due course the violence ended and
a new period of peacemaking began, very like the previous ones.
On the Israeli side the team was extended to include academics
as well as politicians. Once again, it was an Israeli endeavour
seeking American approval. Once again, the Americans tried to
put forward some ideas of their own: the Madrid process of 1991
was part of an American attempt to justify the first Gulf War.
There were ideas in it with which the Palestinians could agree.
But it was a long and cumbersome business and in the meantime
a new Israeli initiative was developed.
This initiative had a novel component.
For the first time, the Israelis were looking for Palestinian
partners in the search for their kind of peace in Palestine.
And they aimed at the top - the PLO leadership in Tunis. They
were lured into the process by an Israeli promise, enshrined
in Article 5, Clause 3 of the Oslo Accord, that after five years
of catering for Israeli security needs, the main Palestinian
demands would be put on the negotiating table in preparation
for a final agreement. Meanwhile, the Palestinians would be allowed
to play with independence. They were offered the opportunity
to form a Palestinian Authority, decorated with the insignia
of sovereignty, that could remain intact as long as it clamped
down on any resistance movement against the Israelis. For that
purpose, the PA employed five secret service organisations, which
compounded the occupiers' abuses of human and civil rights with
those of the indigenous Administration. Palestine's quasi-autonomy
had little bearing on the occupation. In some areas it was directly
enforced, in others indirectly. More Jewish settlers arrived,
and harassment continued everywhere. When the Palestinian opposition
retaliated with suicide attacks, the Israelis enriched the repertoire
of collective punishment in such a way that support for the suicide
bombers grew by the week.
Six years after the signing of Oslo,
the 'peace camp' once more came to power in Israel, with Ehud
Barak at its head. A year later he was facing electoral defeat,
having been overambitious in almost every field. Peace with the
Palestinians seemed to be the only salvation. The Palestinians
expected the promise made in Oslo to be the basis for the new
negotiations. As they saw it, they had agreed to wait five years:
it was time to discuss the problem of Jerusalem, the fate of
the refugees and the future of the settlements. The Israelis
once more devised the plan, enlisting even more academics and
'professional' experts. The fragmented Palestinian leadership
was unable to come up with counterproposals without outside help,
and sought advice in such unlikely places as the Adam Smith Institute
in London. Not surprisingly, the Israeli plan alone was on the
negotiating table at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Endorsed
by the Americans, it offered withdrawal from most of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, leaving about 15 per cent of original
Palestine for the Palestinians, in the form of discrete cantons
bisected by highways, settlements, army camps and walls. No capital
in Jerusalem, no solution to the refugee problem and total abuse
of the concept of statehood and independence. Even the fragile
Arafat, who had hitherto seemed to be happy with the Salata (the
perks of power), having never exercised Sulta (actual power),
could not sign a document that made a mockery of every Palestinian
demand. He was immediately depicted as a warmonger.
Unarmed demonstrators showed their dismay
in the autumn of 2000 and were shot by the Israeli Army. The
Palestinian response was not late in coming: the resistance was
militarised. Three years into the second intifada, the peace
effort resumed once more. The same formula was at work: an Israeli
initiative catering to the Israeli public and Israeli needs disguised
as a piece of honest brokering on the part of the Americans.
Three initiatives appeared in 2003. The
first has already won American support: the road map. At the
end of that road, 10 per cent of Palestine will be divided into
two huge prison camps - one in Gaza and the other in the West
Bank - with no solution to the refugee problem and full Israeli
control of Jerusalem. The initiators are still looking for a
prospective Palestinian chief warden. Having lost Mahmoud Abbas,
they are pinning their hopes on Ahmad Qurei.
The second is the Ayalon-Nusseibeh proposal,
based on a total Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories
(apart from greater Jerusalem, which takes up about a third of
the West Bank) in return for a Palestinian undertaking to relinquish
the refugees' right of return. I suspect that Sari Nusseibeh,
the president of al-Quds University and former PA representative
in Jerusalem, is repeating a ploy he attempted in the first intifada,
when he suggested the de jure annexation of the Occupied Territories
to Israel, so as to show the Israelis that Israel could not include
the West Bank and Gaza within its borders and still be at once
Jewish and democratic. He now hopes to expose Israel's unwillingness
to evict the settlements. The Ayalon-Nusseibeh plan has so far
failed to impress the Israelis, but it did depress the refugee
communities and I wonder whether it was worth it. Ami Ayalon,
the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000, lives in the former village
of Ijzim, from which the Palestinian population was expelled
in 1948.
And now we have the Geneva bubble: an
impressive production both as a document and as a Hollywood-style
ceremony. It will probably never become a reality, but it's worth
taking a look at. Its basic features are described by David Grossman
in the introduction to the Hebrew version.
For the first time, there is full Palestinian
recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a state in Israel
and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The document
offers practical and detailed solutions to the refugee problem;
a problem that has caused all efforts until now to fail. There
is also in the document a promise that the majority of the Jews
living beyond the Green Line will remain in their homes and become
part of the state of Israel. There is also a Palestinian commitment
to demilitarise the Palestinian state and allow no foreign troops
to be stationed in it.
What catches the eye, not only in this
preface but in the document as a whole, is that while the refugees'
right of return is an obstacle that has to be removed if peace
and reconciliation are to be achieved, the Jewishness of Israel
- i.e. the Jewishness of the original state with the annexed
blocks of settlements in the Occupied Territories and greater
Jerusalem - is not an obstacle at all. On the contrary, what
is missing according to this logic is Palestinian recognition
of the new greater Israel. And what is offered to encourage the
Palestinians to recognise the state built on the land from which
they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and that was taken from
them in 1967? What is the generous offer the Israeli peaceniks
loudly urged their counterparts on the Geneva campaign not to
pass up? A mini-state, built on 15 per cent of what used to be
Palestine, with a capital near Jerusalem and no army. On close
reading, the authority and power vested in the aforementioned
state bear little relation to any notion of statehood we might
derive from global reality or political science textbooks.
Far more important, the Geneva project
would leave the refugees in exile. The small print says that
the Palestinian refugees would be able to choose either to return
to what's left of their former country or stay in their camps.
As they will probably choose to wait until the international
community fulfils its commitment to allow their unconditional
return under Resolution 194, they will remain refugees while
their compatriots in Israel continue to be second-class citizens
in the remaining 85 per cent of Palestine.
There is no acknowledgment of the cause
of this conflict, the 1948 ethnic cleansing; there is no process
of truth and reconciliation that will make Israel accountable
for what it did either in 1948 or afterwards. Under these circumstances,
neither the Palestinians nor the Arab world at large will feel
able to accept a Jewish state.
In a celebration in Tel Aviv, the architects
of the Geneva Accord played over and over again a popular song
called 'And Tel Aviv Will Be Geneva'. But Tel Aviv is not Geneva;
it is built on the ruins of six Palestinian villages destroyed
in 1948; and it shouldn't be Geneva: it should aspire to be Alexandria
or Beirut, so that the Jews who invaded the Arab world by force
could at last show a willingness to be part of the Middle East
rather than remain an alien and alienated state within it.
Ilan Pappe
teaches political science at Haifa University and is chair of
the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies.
This article originally appeared in the
London Review of Books.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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