An Israeli Shift Towards Withdrawal?

by Jeremy R. Hammond Jeremy R. Hammond

October 15, 2008

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories. “What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” he said. “The time has come to say these things.” A closer look, however, reveals that his remarks are not anything dramatically different from what other Israeli leaders have said. Nor is it any consideration for international law or concern about the rights of the Palestinian people that is driving any potential shift in Israeli policy.

Olmert criticized defense strategists for remaining mired in the considerations of the 1948 war that left Israel with expanded borders. “With them,” Olmert said, “it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic security?”

Saying that he had changed his mind over time on the issue of Jerusalem, he said, “I am the first who wanted to enforce Israeli sovereignty on the entire city. I admit it. I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth.” He explained his shift towards realism by saying that maintaining control over all of Jerusalem would mean including 270,000 Palestinians within the demographics of what Israel considered to be its territory.

It is considerations like these that are leading some Israeli analysts and decision makers to reconsider the policy of continuing the occupation of the Golan Heights and West Bank, which it has illegally occupied since the June 1967 war. Israel has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, but still maintains a virtual siege of that territory, controlling who and what is allowed enter or leave.

Olmert lamented in his interview that “A decision has to be made. This decision is difficult, terrible, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our innermost desires, our collective memories, the prayers of the Jewish people for 2,000 years”, an apparent reference to the belief that all of the land of Palestine, including the occupied territories, belongs to the Jewish state of Israel.

“We face the need to decide but are not willing to tell ourselves, yes, this is what we have to do,” Olmert said. “We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni at the same time insisted that Olmert’s words were not binding. Olmert is set to leave office to face charges of corruption.

An article by former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in Foreign Affairs helps shed some light on the driving force behind what has appeared to many to be a paradigm shift for policy analysts.

Ben-Ami begins by noting that “Throughout history, nations have been born in blood and frequently in sin. This is why, as the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote, they tend to lie about their pasts.”

He then proceeds to review the history of the creation of the state of Israel, a “noble Jewish dream of statehood” that “was stained by the sins of Israel’s birth”, by noting that historians have challenged “the Zionist mythology surrounding Israel’s birth” and “the conventional view of the war as a clash between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath.”

IIn his analysis, Ben-Ami relies heavily upon the work of noted Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 “recounts the often violent expulsion of 700,000 Arabs as Jewish soldiers conquered villages and towns throughout Palestine.”

“Morris shows,” Ben-Ami observes, “that the Zionists committed more massacres than the Arabs, deliberately killed far more civilians and prisoners of war, and committed more acts of rape.”

As for the military strategy of these actions, besides terrorizing the Arab population and ethnic cleansing Palestine, Jewish leaders sought to secure the main roads against Arab invasion and “demarcate the boundaries of a new state.” While many Arabs “fled for fear of military attacks”, Ben-Ami continues, “far more Palestinians were expelled on explicit orders from commanders in the field”. He adds that “in some cases, Ben-Gurion personally authorized such orders”.

These “population transfers”, Ben-Ami’s euphemism for ethnic cleansing, were “not surprising” given that the idea “had a long and solid pedigree in Zionist thought.” While “Zionist leaders differed on many issues,” he writes, “they generally agreed, as Morris points out, on the benefits of a ‘transfer’ — a euphemism for ‘expulsion.’”

“The Arabs of the Land,” he quotes Ben Gurion as saying at the time, “have only one function left to them — to run away.”

“And they did,” Ben-Ami observes. “[P]anic-stricken, they fled in the face of massacres in Ein Zeitun and Eilabun, just as they had done in the wake of an earlier massacre in Deir Yassin. Operational orders, such as the instruction from Moshe Carmel, the Israeli commander of the northern front, ‘to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages,’ were carved into the collective memory of the Palestinians, spawning hatred and resentment for generations.”

At the same time, he notes that Morris wasn’t condemning Israeli actions in his account: “In January 2004, Morris famously lamented that the architects of Israel’s 1948 war strategy had not more thoroughly purged the Jewish state of its Arab population. Morris told the Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit, ‘If [David] Ben-Gurion [Israel's first prime minister] had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country — the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River …. he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations…. If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948.”

Ben-Ami criticizes Morris’s analysis on a few points. Morris, for instance, “is unconvincing in his attempt to pardon some of Israel’s original sins” and his “characterization of the conflict of 1948 as an Islamic jihad against Jewish-Western infidels in Palestine is also unpersuasive.”

Yet Morris’s “scrupulous research” shows how the ethnic cleansing of Arab Palestinians “was in no small measure driven by a desire for land among Israeli settlers, who grabbed it and then actively pressured the Israeli government to prevent the Arab refugees from returning to their villages.”

“The hunger for land,” Ben-Ami notes, “persists to this day, as settlers lobby politicians to allow the expansion of outposts in the West Bank.” This “hunger for land” was “always central to the Zionist enterprise.”

Having thus outlined the history, Ben-Ami turns to his critical analysis of present Israeli policy, saying that “Unfortunately, Zionist thinking got fossilized” and that the same policy of land-grabbing did not offer the same “military advantage” as it had in 1948. Moreover, this “Zionist tradition” should “be challenged on political grounds as well; after all,” he observes, “a normal state is not supposed to occupy land beyond its legitimate borders.” (A “normal state” is supposed to respect international law.)

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst whose articles have been featured in numerous print and online publications around the world. He is the founder and editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), an online source for news, critical analysis, and opinion commentary on U.S. foreign policy. He was a recipient of the 2010 Project Censored Awards for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Read more articles by Jeremy R. Hammond.
http://www.jeremyrhammond.com
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist and editor of Foreign Policy Journal, an online source for news, critical analysis, and opinion commentary on U.S. foreign policy. He was among the recipients of the 2010 Project Censored Awards for outstanding investigative journalism, and is the author of "The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination", available from Amazon.com.