Is this the end of Palestine?
Jul. 3rd, 2007 12:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malenkiyscotLast Act
By Martin Peretz - editor-in-chief of The New Republic
Think back two years. Ariel Sharon was not only alive but healthy and staking his place in history on an idea he had never truly believed: that the Arabs of Palestine might be ready for peace with the Jewish state. This idea may have run against both his deepest convictions and his basic instincts. But somehow he carried many of his old comrades with him: comrades from Israel's old wars and comrades from the political right--where, after a brief parliamentary stint on the left, he had positioned himself.
Carrying comrades to a place they had not been before also entailed making enemies, and Sharon's enemies were bitter and vindictive. Nonetheless, he carried out the withdrawal of all 8,000 or so Israelis from Gaza unconditionally and without making explicit demands on the Palestinians--or inexplicit ones, for that matter. He also dismantled four settlements in the West Bank, from what he and his friends called Samaria. No one thought that these would be the last to be vacated, no one. And Israel's entire security establishment (army, intelligence, the diplomatic corps) laid out various maps for discussion that were uncannily reminiscent of the (overly generous) proposals put forward by Ehud Barak in the waning days, the pathetic waning days, of the Clinton administration.
Condoleezza Rice even persuaded a few American Jewish zillionaires to ante up roughly $15 million to buy, as a parting gift from the Jews at once symbolic and practical, for the Gaza Arabs the hothouses that had helped make local agriculture, for the first time in history, so abundant and also valuable. Ask about the hothouses of Gaza now, and people will laugh. Ask about the rest of Gaza, and people will cry.
They cried even before Gaza was put through the trauma of civil war. For what was unraveling was the whole idea of the Palestine nation itself. Of course, some said, "I told you so." (I count myself among those entitled to say that.) I was never taken in by the dream of Palestine, although I realized that Israeli dominion over so many Arabs did somewhat dim the incandescence of the Zionist reality, a free Jewish people, free in politics and in spirit, in arts and in science and above all in literature, in law, and in the press, free from the religious coercion of the rabbis, a nation speaking its own language at home at last.
No people moves without an elite committed to the whole. That the Palestinian elites were and are corrupt is a historic reality, a shabby reality. It was the Palestinian aristocracy that sold off its lands for Jewish settlement from the very beginning of the Zionist experiment. And the last act broadcast on television: the dismantling of the gaudy riches of Palestine's "revolutionaries" in Gaza.
Contrast this with the secular, although economically impoverished, aristocracy of the kibbutz, created by the early Zionists, which, as Dorothea Krook has shown, shaped the ethos of both the movement and the state. There was an exhilarating and learned asceticism to the Jewish pioneers, an asceticism that has almost altogether vanished but remains as contingent reproach. It is needed now.
Most of the Arabs of Palestine resented the Jews. But resentment is not a foundation for a nation. In some uncanny way, Yasir Arafat grasped the guilefulness of Palestinian peoplehood and so was always inventing new myths (e.g., Jesus was the first Palestinian). There has been a big to-do in academic circles over the last quarter-century about "imagined communities" as nations. This was meant to help legitimize groups whose coherence was incoherent. But, alas, even Benedict Anderson, in fitting his lax definitions with history, does not refer at all to the Palestinians. The British Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm does allude to the Palestinians in his book on nationalism, but only to dismiss them as a nationalist movement.
One of the harsh truths that we have learned is that terrorism may be the prime expression of a fledgling nationalism, perhaps even its only collective expression. But it does bring a certain dread to its adversaries, and Palestinian terrorism has over the decades brought that dread to Israel. A suicide bomb also makes a big and incredulous splash, and with that comes to its instigators the sense that they can no longer be ignored. Of course, their hapless but willing instrument is dead. Poor man, increasingly we can also say poor woman, poor pregnant woman.
"Palestine" is not the only place where the very idea of the nation is so weak that its violent eruptions seem to be dismal admissions of failure. But, however impoverished the reality, it has caught the fancy of many outside Palestine. The fact is that, had these outsiders--some cynical, some hopelessly muddle-headed--not embraced the cause, the cause already would have perished from its own exhaustion.
So what is Palestine? It is an improvisation from a series of rude facts. Palestine was never anything of especial importance to the Arabs or to the larger orbit of Muslims. Palestine was never even an integral territory of the Ottomans but split up in sanjaks that crossed later postWorld War I borders, a geographical and political jumble. When General Allenby captured Jerusalem, it was a great happening for believing Christian Europe, not a tragedy for Islam. When the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine was passed, envisioning a "Jewish" state and an "Arab" (not, mind you, Palestinian) state, even the idea of a separate Arab realm was met at best with a yawn. Though almost no Arab wanted Jewish sovereignty in any of Palestine, virtually no Arab seemed to crave Arab sovereignty, either. Foreign Arab armies did the fighting against the Haganah, and foreign states sat for the Palestinians at the cease-fire negotiations, as they had sat for decades at the international conferences on Palestine convened by the powers. Palestine was being fought over to be divvied up by Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. The Syrian army was overwhelmed by the Israelis. No rewards there. It was different for King Farouk and Abdullah I, who got land in reward for their soldiers' combat.
Indeed, from 1949 through 1967, what was the West Bank of Arab Palestine was annexed--yes, annexed--by Jordan, and what was the Gaza Strip was a captive territory of Egypt, unannexed so that Gazans had no rights as Egyptians (whereas the West Bankers had rights as Jordanians). The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964, was not founded to liberate these territories. It was founded to liberate that part of Palestine held by Israel.
We are long past this history, and Israel had become accustomed to the idea--if not exactly the precise reality--of an independent Palestine for the Palestinians, the name of their desire. Ehud Olmert gladly would have signed on the dotted line if the Palestinian Authority could bring itself to realize it would get what it could get (and perhaps even a little more) if the Palestinians would finally stop their war against the Jews. And their rage.
But the Palestinians' war against the Jews is actually also a war against one another. While Mahmoud Abbas probably would have settled for being president of a cartographically realistic Palestine, there were integral parts of Fatah, and particularly its fighting gangs, that still held out for the grand irredentist map--if not "from the river to the sea," something more than was ordained in 1967. Could Abbas, in the end, rein them in? Not when Hamas had set the terms of the intra-Palestinian conflict as all or nothing. Those are characteristic Hamas conditions, with other Arabs as with the Jews. It is true that Fatah men of com- bat were battling for their lives. But they were not battling for peace with Israel.
The disintegration of Gaza began as soon as the Israelis departed. This was not an issue of what Israel did or did not do. The ur-religious and the ur-nationalist were in psychological control of the strip from the beginning. Hamas did not shoot (many) rockets across the border into enemy territory. But its surrogates did. Hamas did nothing about this, and Fatah really couldn't. They couldn't, although Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the American coordinator in the area, assured they could, especially after supplying arms to Fatah and persuading Olmert to supply more weapons, which, as luck would have it, are now in Hamas's possession. The ordinary Gazans clearly were not pleased by the chaos and the haphazard murders on the streets. They were and are objects not subjects, victims not victimizers. But Hamas is also bitter, embittered by its costly victory. For them, there remains the project of Reconstruction, in the American Civil War sense, of the souls of their neighbors.
The final fall of Gaza to Hamas puts the whole question of Palestine and the Palestinians into a new perspective. There are now three cohorts of Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. (Four, if you count the Palestinian majority under Hashemite rule.)
Let's deal first with the easiest of these to grasp: the Arabs of Israel, citizens of Israel with freedoms--legal and social--that are unimaginable in any Arab country. Their loyalties are always tested by kin and undermined by the residual discriminations of the Jewish state. But their loyalties are also the subject of an inevitable internal struggle. They are, after all, the privileged Palestinians, the Palestinians who live in a decent society. But one thing of which they will not hear--and that is a perfectly logical proposal--is that some of them, together with their land and homes, become part of whatever Palestine will be. The hostility to this idea will, by way of compensation, radicalize these Israeli Arabs and thus make them more and more suspect by their Jewish fellow citizens.
Then, there is the West Bank. The optimism about peace prospects there is, at least, very much premature. And, frankly, from what I know about locales like Jenin and Hebron, I wonder why commentators think that the Judea and Samaria territories are so different from Gaza. In fact, these Palestinian cities historically have been centers of Arab extremism, although--and this is a curious characteristic of Arab extremism--this rarely ties one locale to another. So what you have is the bane of fanaticism without the bonds of community. Indeed, the defining loyalty among many Palestinians is loyalty to family, clan, and tribe, not progressive social formations, as they say. But Rashid Khalidi does not focus on these persistences in his book Palestinian Identity, which he optimistically subtitled The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. In fact, the persistence of these antique ties is another reason why the Palestinians are far from being a coherent people. But, then, Pakistan is also not a nation, and neither is Iraq. I recall that Palestinian embroidery differs in every town and city. That is quaint, and it makes for pretty dresses in many styles. But it is not a model for a nation-state.
The initiative remains with the Gaza Palestinians, which is to say, Hamas. It will not be tempted, as many of the journalistic prophets informed us when the group won the parliamentary elections, to become responsible. Rage is actually its way in the world, and it is a shrewd, if not wise, tactic. Your adversary becomes uncertain and jittery, afraid to provoke but loath to ignore. Rockets will continue to land in the towns and kibbutzim of the Negev and further into Israel. More advanced weapons will be smuggled into Gaza--alas, from Egypt, which did not, over the past years, demonstrate either the will or the capacity to stop the running of war materials from the Sinai to the Strip.
Israel must now make choices that will determine Egypt's responsibilities. Given the fact that Hamas has declared war on Israel, Jerusalem could decide to simply seal its border with Gaza. Enemies at war do not generally supply one other with food and medical provisions, let alone gas and electricity. What should persuade Israel to make such arrangements? To win goodwill? Nonsense.
Of course, Egypt could assume greater responsibility, including the shepherding of endangered Fatah Palestinians to safety. But a corollary to that would be the obligation to truly bar weapons from being sent underground to Hamas. So what if Israel responds to Hamas rocket and missile assaults harshly and with the precision that its air power permits? Is not Mubarak afraid of Hamas's cousins in the streets of Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood, already chafing under the regime's heavy hand? Israel might also recapture the Philadelphia Corridor and police the Gaza border with Egypt.
There is at least one assumption that we can make: Israel will not permit attacks without appropriate response. The abandonment of Sderot by a third of its population is a stain on Zionism. It will not occur again. And, with Israel under such intense pressure from Gaza, it is hardly possible to imagine that even Fatah will be able to resist the temptation of armed mischief. And why do I say even Fatah? I shouldn't.
Then, of course, Hezbollah may be tempted, and Syria, too. The resulting combination--assaults from the north, the east, and the west--would be a peril for Israel. But the most serious near-term danger actually comes from the West Bank. For rockets and more precise weapons aimed at the thickly populated heart and narrow waist of Israel from almost any place in what is now Fatah land would revive both the anxieties and military reflexes of the state and its population. Surely that would not be good for the Arabs.
That is why U.S. policy must not assume that there are facile ways to render the West Bank peaceful. Almost everyone has admitted, some with bitterness, that what keeps that area of Palestine more orderly than Gaza is the proximate presence of Israeli troops near Arab population centers.
Would that there were a mature national will among the Palestinians. It might even be able to temper the rage of the Arabs against one another. Not until their sense of peoplehood conquers their rage against one another will they be in the psychological position to think of peace with Israel. I doubt this will happen any time soon. This is the end of Palestine, the bitter end.
By Martin Peretz - editor-in-chief of The New Republic
Think back two years. Ariel Sharon was not only alive but healthy and staking his place in history on an idea he had never truly believed: that the Arabs of Palestine might be ready for peace with the Jewish state. This idea may have run against both his deepest convictions and his basic instincts. But somehow he carried many of his old comrades with him: comrades from Israel's old wars and comrades from the political right--where, after a brief parliamentary stint on the left, he had positioned himself.
Carrying comrades to a place they had not been before also entailed making enemies, and Sharon's enemies were bitter and vindictive. Nonetheless, he carried out the withdrawal of all 8,000 or so Israelis from Gaza unconditionally and without making explicit demands on the Palestinians--or inexplicit ones, for that matter. He also dismantled four settlements in the West Bank, from what he and his friends called Samaria. No one thought that these would be the last to be vacated, no one. And Israel's entire security establishment (army, intelligence, the diplomatic corps) laid out various maps for discussion that were uncannily reminiscent of the (overly generous) proposals put forward by Ehud Barak in the waning days, the pathetic waning days, of the Clinton administration.
Condoleezza Rice even persuaded a few American Jewish zillionaires to ante up roughly $15 million to buy, as a parting gift from the Jews at once symbolic and practical, for the Gaza Arabs the hothouses that had helped make local agriculture, for the first time in history, so abundant and also valuable. Ask about the hothouses of Gaza now, and people will laugh. Ask about the rest of Gaza, and people will cry.
They cried even before Gaza was put through the trauma of civil war. For what was unraveling was the whole idea of the Palestine nation itself. Of course, some said, "I told you so." (I count myself among those entitled to say that.) I was never taken in by the dream of Palestine, although I realized that Israeli dominion over so many Arabs did somewhat dim the incandescence of the Zionist reality, a free Jewish people, free in politics and in spirit, in arts and in science and above all in literature, in law, and in the press, free from the religious coercion of the rabbis, a nation speaking its own language at home at last.
No people moves without an elite committed to the whole. That the Palestinian elites were and are corrupt is a historic reality, a shabby reality. It was the Palestinian aristocracy that sold off its lands for Jewish settlement from the very beginning of the Zionist experiment. And the last act broadcast on television: the dismantling of the gaudy riches of Palestine's "revolutionaries" in Gaza.
Contrast this with the secular, although economically impoverished, aristocracy of the kibbutz, created by the early Zionists, which, as Dorothea Krook has shown, shaped the ethos of both the movement and the state. There was an exhilarating and learned asceticism to the Jewish pioneers, an asceticism that has almost altogether vanished but remains as contingent reproach. It is needed now.
Most of the Arabs of Palestine resented the Jews. But resentment is not a foundation for a nation. In some uncanny way, Yasir Arafat grasped the guilefulness of Palestinian peoplehood and so was always inventing new myths (e.g., Jesus was the first Palestinian). There has been a big to-do in academic circles over the last quarter-century about "imagined communities" as nations. This was meant to help legitimize groups whose coherence was incoherent. But, alas, even Benedict Anderson, in fitting his lax definitions with history, does not refer at all to the Palestinians. The British Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm does allude to the Palestinians in his book on nationalism, but only to dismiss them as a nationalist movement.
One of the harsh truths that we have learned is that terrorism may be the prime expression of a fledgling nationalism, perhaps even its only collective expression. But it does bring a certain dread to its adversaries, and Palestinian terrorism has over the decades brought that dread to Israel. A suicide bomb also makes a big and incredulous splash, and with that comes to its instigators the sense that they can no longer be ignored. Of course, their hapless but willing instrument is dead. Poor man, increasingly we can also say poor woman, poor pregnant woman.
"Palestine" is not the only place where the very idea of the nation is so weak that its violent eruptions seem to be dismal admissions of failure. But, however impoverished the reality, it has caught the fancy of many outside Palestine. The fact is that, had these outsiders--some cynical, some hopelessly muddle-headed--not embraced the cause, the cause already would have perished from its own exhaustion.
So what is Palestine? It is an improvisation from a series of rude facts. Palestine was never anything of especial importance to the Arabs or to the larger orbit of Muslims. Palestine was never even an integral territory of the Ottomans but split up in sanjaks that crossed later postWorld War I borders, a geographical and political jumble. When General Allenby captured Jerusalem, it was a great happening for believing Christian Europe, not a tragedy for Islam. When the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine was passed, envisioning a "Jewish" state and an "Arab" (not, mind you, Palestinian) state, even the idea of a separate Arab realm was met at best with a yawn. Though almost no Arab wanted Jewish sovereignty in any of Palestine, virtually no Arab seemed to crave Arab sovereignty, either. Foreign Arab armies did the fighting against the Haganah, and foreign states sat for the Palestinians at the cease-fire negotiations, as they had sat for decades at the international conferences on Palestine convened by the powers. Palestine was being fought over to be divvied up by Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. The Syrian army was overwhelmed by the Israelis. No rewards there. It was different for King Farouk and Abdullah I, who got land in reward for their soldiers' combat.
Indeed, from 1949 through 1967, what was the West Bank of Arab Palestine was annexed--yes, annexed--by Jordan, and what was the Gaza Strip was a captive territory of Egypt, unannexed so that Gazans had no rights as Egyptians (whereas the West Bankers had rights as Jordanians). The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964, was not founded to liberate these territories. It was founded to liberate that part of Palestine held by Israel.
We are long past this history, and Israel had become accustomed to the idea--if not exactly the precise reality--of an independent Palestine for the Palestinians, the name of their desire. Ehud Olmert gladly would have signed on the dotted line if the Palestinian Authority could bring itself to realize it would get what it could get (and perhaps even a little more) if the Palestinians would finally stop their war against the Jews. And their rage.
But the Palestinians' war against the Jews is actually also a war against one another. While Mahmoud Abbas probably would have settled for being president of a cartographically realistic Palestine, there were integral parts of Fatah, and particularly its fighting gangs, that still held out for the grand irredentist map--if not "from the river to the sea," something more than was ordained in 1967. Could Abbas, in the end, rein them in? Not when Hamas had set the terms of the intra-Palestinian conflict as all or nothing. Those are characteristic Hamas conditions, with other Arabs as with the Jews. It is true that Fatah men of com- bat were battling for their lives. But they were not battling for peace with Israel.
The disintegration of Gaza began as soon as the Israelis departed. This was not an issue of what Israel did or did not do. The ur-religious and the ur-nationalist were in psychological control of the strip from the beginning. Hamas did not shoot (many) rockets across the border into enemy territory. But its surrogates did. Hamas did nothing about this, and Fatah really couldn't. They couldn't, although Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the American coordinator in the area, assured they could, especially after supplying arms to Fatah and persuading Olmert to supply more weapons, which, as luck would have it, are now in Hamas's possession. The ordinary Gazans clearly were not pleased by the chaos and the haphazard murders on the streets. They were and are objects not subjects, victims not victimizers. But Hamas is also bitter, embittered by its costly victory. For them, there remains the project of Reconstruction, in the American Civil War sense, of the souls of their neighbors.
The final fall of Gaza to Hamas puts the whole question of Palestine and the Palestinians into a new perspective. There are now three cohorts of Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. (Four, if you count the Palestinian majority under Hashemite rule.)
Let's deal first with the easiest of these to grasp: the Arabs of Israel, citizens of Israel with freedoms--legal and social--that are unimaginable in any Arab country. Their loyalties are always tested by kin and undermined by the residual discriminations of the Jewish state. But their loyalties are also the subject of an inevitable internal struggle. They are, after all, the privileged Palestinians, the Palestinians who live in a decent society. But one thing of which they will not hear--and that is a perfectly logical proposal--is that some of them, together with their land and homes, become part of whatever Palestine will be. The hostility to this idea will, by way of compensation, radicalize these Israeli Arabs and thus make them more and more suspect by their Jewish fellow citizens.
Then, there is the West Bank. The optimism about peace prospects there is, at least, very much premature. And, frankly, from what I know about locales like Jenin and Hebron, I wonder why commentators think that the Judea and Samaria territories are so different from Gaza. In fact, these Palestinian cities historically have been centers of Arab extremism, although--and this is a curious characteristic of Arab extremism--this rarely ties one locale to another. So what you have is the bane of fanaticism without the bonds of community. Indeed, the defining loyalty among many Palestinians is loyalty to family, clan, and tribe, not progressive social formations, as they say. But Rashid Khalidi does not focus on these persistences in his book Palestinian Identity, which he optimistically subtitled The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. In fact, the persistence of these antique ties is another reason why the Palestinians are far from being a coherent people. But, then, Pakistan is also not a nation, and neither is Iraq. I recall that Palestinian embroidery differs in every town and city. That is quaint, and it makes for pretty dresses in many styles. But it is not a model for a nation-state.
The initiative remains with the Gaza Palestinians, which is to say, Hamas. It will not be tempted, as many of the journalistic prophets informed us when the group won the parliamentary elections, to become responsible. Rage is actually its way in the world, and it is a shrewd, if not wise, tactic. Your adversary becomes uncertain and jittery, afraid to provoke but loath to ignore. Rockets will continue to land in the towns and kibbutzim of the Negev and further into Israel. More advanced weapons will be smuggled into Gaza--alas, from Egypt, which did not, over the past years, demonstrate either the will or the capacity to stop the running of war materials from the Sinai to the Strip.
Israel must now make choices that will determine Egypt's responsibilities. Given the fact that Hamas has declared war on Israel, Jerusalem could decide to simply seal its border with Gaza. Enemies at war do not generally supply one other with food and medical provisions, let alone gas and electricity. What should persuade Israel to make such arrangements? To win goodwill? Nonsense.
Of course, Egypt could assume greater responsibility, including the shepherding of endangered Fatah Palestinians to safety. But a corollary to that would be the obligation to truly bar weapons from being sent underground to Hamas. So what if Israel responds to Hamas rocket and missile assaults harshly and with the precision that its air power permits? Is not Mubarak afraid of Hamas's cousins in the streets of Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood, already chafing under the regime's heavy hand? Israel might also recapture the Philadelphia Corridor and police the Gaza border with Egypt.
There is at least one assumption that we can make: Israel will not permit attacks without appropriate response. The abandonment of Sderot by a third of its population is a stain on Zionism. It will not occur again. And, with Israel under such intense pressure from Gaza, it is hardly possible to imagine that even Fatah will be able to resist the temptation of armed mischief. And why do I say even Fatah? I shouldn't.
Then, of course, Hezbollah may be tempted, and Syria, too. The resulting combination--assaults from the north, the east, and the west--would be a peril for Israel. But the most serious near-term danger actually comes from the West Bank. For rockets and more precise weapons aimed at the thickly populated heart and narrow waist of Israel from almost any place in what is now Fatah land would revive both the anxieties and military reflexes of the state and its population. Surely that would not be good for the Arabs.
That is why U.S. policy must not assume that there are facile ways to render the West Bank peaceful. Almost everyone has admitted, some with bitterness, that what keeps that area of Palestine more orderly than Gaza is the proximate presence of Israeli troops near Arab population centers.
Would that there were a mature national will among the Palestinians. It might even be able to temper the rage of the Arabs against one another. Not until their sense of peoplehood conquers their rage against one another will they be in the psychological position to think of peace with Israel. I doubt this will happen any time soon. This is the end of Palestine, the bitter end.
