Israel-Palestine: what can be done to avert a deepening tragedy? Nothing
Out of tragedy, a new beginning. A terrible war had just ended. Great cities had been shattered. Millions had been slain, millions displaced, millions more enslaved. Mankind crawled away from the abyss and emerged into peace, only to tremble under the shadow of the atomic bomb. Yet in all this darkness, there did appear to be one reason for hope. In defiance of those who had tried to exterminate them, the Children of Israel, whom one might describe as the surviving children of the Holocaust, created a state.
The early photographs are reminiscent of pioneers in the American West. There was little in the way of sophisticated machinery. Violinists and professors of mathematics would be digging irrigation ditches, labouring to extract a harvest from barren and stony soil. They more than succeeded – and for many years, the harvest has not only been agricultural.
Today, Israel has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other country. The same is true of scientific papers, and as a proportion of GDP, its civilian research and development expenditure is the highest in the world. Israel has become a vibrant and highly-cultured democracy. The birth of the state of Israel was one of the few inspiring events in early post-war history.
But there was a problem. Tragedy has never left the agenda, for the Jews’ territory of refuge was contested. The Balfour Declaration, Israel’s 20th century title deeds, was a thoroughly weaselly document. Although the Jews were to have a homeland in Palestine, “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the…rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” A hundred years later, no one has yet worked out how to reconcile those flatly contradictory objectives.
The original title deeds, the Jehovah Declaration in Exodus, had no such ambiguity. The Children of Israel were to take possession of a land of milk and honey. Moreover: “I shall deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hands; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.” Truly the Lord is a Man of war – but also a tactician. He advised the Jews to enter Palestine by a route which would not bring them into contact with the Philistines. Such stratagems were not always successful. The milk and honey could rarely be enjoyed in tranquillity.
Within a few chapters, the Children of Israel were up to their armpits in Amalekites, where they have remained more or less ever since. Instead of milk and honey, it is probably a skinny latte and the stock-prices these days, but anyone wanting to relax with those at a pavement cafe in Tel Aviv has to worry about rockets. A few years ago, it was suicide bombers.
So what is to be done? There is a frustrating paradox. Outside the conflict zone, there is widespread agreement as to the basis of a solution: two states, one of them primarily for Jews, the other a Palestinian homeland. Simple – and seemingly impossible. There are two territorial problems. The first is Gaza, which has become a rubbish-dump full of embittered inhabitants. If there were a Palestinian state, could Gaza become an economically viable part of it, perhaps connected to the West Bank by a fast rail link? Even in a land which has been a cradle of faiths, that prospect would appear to demand of the faithful an almighty optimism. So does a Palestinian state.
After 1967, there was a tragic missed opportunity. In the Six Day War, Israel had not only won a crushing victory. It had demonstrated that it was here to stay. Immediately, the rest of the world started talking about pre-’67 boundaries and post ’67 ones. That was the moment for Israel to act, and trade land for peace. This did not happen, for three reasons. The first was caution. Before the Israelis captured the West Bank, Israel was only twelve miles wide at its narrowest point. A tank thrust would have cut the country in two. Even Israeli generals, sophisticated though they are, may have a tendency to plan for the last conflict. Tank warfare was about to give way to asymmetrical warfare, and that required pol-mil, a political-military solution. But the Israelis did not want to take the risk of compromising their security by handing back the West Bank to their enemies.
They were also led into temptation. Israel is a small country. In almost every previous war, the victors had felt entitled to territorial aggrandisement at the expense of the losers, who were killed, enslaved or merely driven out before their conquerors. These days, Vae Victis has gone out of fashion in most advanced countries, and those Balkan leaders who tried to inflict it on their foes have mostly been put on trial. Even so, a section of the Israeli electorate appeared to entertain a covert nostalgia for that sanguinary aphorism.
Obviously, Israel was going to annex the Old City of Jerusalem, which included Temple Mount and the Western (or Wailing) Wall. But a lot of Israelis wanted to go further and take land in the West Bank. Israel’s population was growing. Although no one would have used the word “lebensraum,” some thought in similar terms. Others argued that Biblical Israel, as conceived by Jehovah, included the West Bank and that the modern state of Israel should respect His wishes. Hence the settlements, though that is a misleading term. To a Western ear, it might sound like a tented encampment, but in considering a “settlement” like Ariel, think Milton Keynes or Leighton Buzzard. We are dealing with a town, whose inhabitants have no wish to be re-settled.
The Israelis who wanted to incorporate most – or even all – of the West Bank into Israel have succeeded in altering the facts on the ground. Even if Western critics did prevail on Israel to halt the settlement programme, the ones already in existence would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state.
The Israelis themselves are not solely to blame for this impasse, which brings us to the third reason. Over the years, the Palestinian leadership has been a principal author of its people’s misfortunes. There was a basic difficulty. Any peace treaty would have required a basic concession from the Palestinians: to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Yasser Arafat was not prepared to do that. As corrupt as he was unrealistic, he seemed happy for the situation to go on deteriorating while he nourished his fantasies about the destruction of Israel. No one seems to be certain which Israeli politician first said that Arafat never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. No doubt the thought occurred to many of them, and to many non-Israels as well.
Military historians have come up with a clumsy-sounding but indispensable phrase: species pseudo-differentiation. If you regard your opponents as a different and less than fully-human species, it is easier to kill them, and harder to negotiate with them. When the Palestinians sent suicide bombers to murder Israeli civilians, even political moderates in Israel were appalled. They asked what sort of people it was who would send their children to blow up our children.
Prince Hassan of Jordan, one of the wisest observers of the region over many years, has said that there will not be peace until the Palestinians take account of the Holocaust: the Israelis, of the Palestinians’ sufferings. All that seems further away than ever.
In time, the third Intifada will no doubt be followed by the fourth one, and so on: world without end. But that despairing conclusion may not be despairing enough. Factor in the spread of nuclear technology plus the miniaturisation of nuclear weapons plus millions of angry people: In Yeats’s words, “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” There could be sacrifices and terrors to come, which will make all previous travails seem negligible. The world, or at least large parts of it, might indeed come to an end.
Yeats also wrote a history of Ireland’s woes, equally applicable to Israel-Palestine, in four words: “Great hatred: little room.” So what can be done? There seems to be only one answer to that question. Nothing.