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Overview
No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight. Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground.
Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately, she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking - but they are hard to refute.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783714346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Ghada Karmi is a research fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. From 1999 to 2001 she was an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where she led a major project on Israel-Palestinian reconciliation. In 2009, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is the author of In Search of Fatima (Verso, 2004), Married to Another Man (Pluto, 2007) and Return (Verso, 2015).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Cost of Israel to the Arabs
The profound damage done to the Arab world by Israel's creation is a big, untold story in the West. For the Arabs, Israel's presence in their midst has quite simply been an unmitigated disaster. This may come as a surprise to the average Western reader, encouraged over many decades to regard Israel as a natural part of the Middle Eastern landscape and to disregard in equal measure what Arabs feel about it. Likewise Western policy makers traditionally place Arab perceptions low down on their list of priorities. Yet, an understanding of Israel's impact on the Arab world is crucial to the search for a resolution to the conflict. The fact that this complex relationship has usually been dismissed in the most superficial terms – 'Arabs hate Jews', 'they're both as bad as each other', 'wars are not the answer' and the like – is a major factor in the failure to find a solution. To understand the true dimensions of the problem it is necessary at this point for the Western reader to set aside the Israeli narrative of events and its accompanying propaganda image of Arabs as fanatical, backward warmongers bent on destroying the modern, democratic and peaceable state of Israel for no conceivable reason. The following account aims to look at the issue from the Arab point of view.
The reality for Arabs is that Israel confers no conceivable benefit on their lives or wellbeing, but on the contrary, its existence has led to a series of depredations and crises with profound impact on the Arab region. This chapter will describe Israel's deleterious effects on the Arabs and thus set the scene for the basic argument in this book. The term 'Arab states' is ambiguous in this context, since they were not all similarly damaged by Israel's existence, and needs explanation. A disproportionate degree of damage was borne by the frontline states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, and the following account applies mostly to them. However, Iraq, the Gulf States and North Africa have all been affected in various ways, as has Arab society in general.
On each visit there, the Arab world's immense resources, its varied geography, history and customs strike me. One has but to think of the stretch of the Arab region, from Yemen, through the Gulf, to the Levant, then sweeping by way of Egypt and Sudan to its westernmost point in Morocco to appreciate how stunning is its kaleidoscope of landscape and people. Such marvellous diversity that yet retains a collective identity could have made this area the wonder of the world, physically beautiful, self-sufficient and wealthy. I would sometimes think that, in such a region, no Arab need travel anywhere else, so satisfying and broad is its appeal. Instead of which it is a place of backwardness, poverty and divisiveness. This is by no means all Israel's fault, but its existence in their midst has contributed powerfully to the Arabs' decline. Israelis and their apologists dismiss such assessments as conspiratorial and seeking to avoid the Arabs' responsibility for their own backwardness. It has even become fashionable for the Arabs themselves to decry their failure as self-induced. And though, as will be argued later, there are faults endemic to the Arab world, ignoring Israel's signal role in the story is both wrong and misleading. We will discuss in what follows the major ways in which Israel has damaged the Arab region and continues to do so.
In 1948, the Arab world found itself confronted with a new creation which was alien to it in every sense. Its governing ethos was European and the bulk of its population was also European. (The 'Arab' Jews, who augmented the existing Palestinian Jewish community, came later, but were subsumed into the ruling Western structure.) As such, Arabs could neither understand it nor deal with it. That year, 1948, was immensely traumatic for the Arabs. Not only were they powerless to prevent Israel's creation, but they also failed to defeat it in the war that immediately ensued. Their ill-trained, ill-equipped token armies, prevented by the colonialist powers who still dominated them from anything more than a security role at home, stood little chance against the much larger, highly motivated, trained and better equipped Jewish forces. But it made no difference to their sense of failure. They were impotent to protect the Palestinians from dispossession, something that at the time shocked and appalled every Arab who watched it happen, and just as impotent to halt Israel's expansion and growing power in the region. By early 1949, the Israelis had seized over 20 per cent of the land allocated to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan (see Map 1). 'The problem is not that Israel is so great,' an Israeli friend once told me, 'but rather that it's a mirror in which the Arabs see their own weakness.' The implied contempt for Arab sensibilities and welfare of those who helped set up Israel amongst them was an additional insult, which only rubbed salt into the wound. It was especially galling to see the West's most powerful states, having implanted Israel at the heart of the Arab world, devotedly nurturing and indulging it in ways that would have been unthinkable for these powers with any Arab state. Few people, blinded as most Westerners were by widespread projections of Israel's helplessness and vulnerability, realised how extensive and generous that support was, and how, without it, the Zionist experiment might have ended before it had begun.
Nurturing a Fledgling Israel
The first decade of Israel's existence was seemingly precarious, confronting Arab hostility and international demands to repatriate the Palestinian refugees. But, much as Israelis might not have perceived it like this, in fact there was little actual danger from these quarters, and it looked as if the Zionist project in Palestine, implausible and unreasonable though it was, might really proceed unhampered. Between 1948 and 1964, Arab and Palestinian reaction was confused and ineffective, and opposition beyond the rhetorical, was minimal. The neighbouring Arab states even put out several peaceful feelers towards the Jewish state, as we shall see. At the same time, Western powers, most notably the US, were strongly supportive of Israel. This is hardly surprising, since it was set up with their active participation (as in the case of Britain) and maintained with their military and financial support (Germany, France and later the US). The last is today Israel's staunchest ally and most generous benefactor.
American endorsement of the Zionist project was far from wholehearted at first. Although up until 1947, successive American presidents supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the state and defense departments, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, were opposed to the creation of Israel on the grounds that it would be a source of instability and danger in the future. Indeed the American-inspired King–Crane Commission of 1919 reported that the Zionist project would violate the principle of self-determination and Arab rights. And so the US remained largely detached from the scene before 1947, albeit with periodic expressions of sympathy for Zionism. President Roosevelt in fact disapproved of the plan for a Jewish state and thought Palestine should become a Holy Land for Jews, Christians and Muslims. Subjected to American Zionist pressure for this, he wavered briefly, but in the last year of his life, he returned to his previous conviction.
With President Truman, however, matters changed. Strongly influenced by Judge Brandeis, an ardent American Jewish Zionist, he lent his support to the 1947 UN Partition Resolution that would have created a Jewish state in 55 per cent of Palestine. Six months later, the US under his presidency was the first to recognise this state in 77 per cent of the land and awarded it a sum of $200 million. Though there was an arms embargo on supplying arms to Israel (and the Arab states), a 'Tripartite Declaration' was drawn up in 1950 between the US, Britain and France to protect Israel's frontiers and provide it with armaments up to the level permitted by the arms balance agreement with the Arabs. When Israel started to develop its nuclear programme in 1956, contrary to America's opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the latter turned a blind eye. Recently declassified CIA documents show that, by 1961, the US was certainly aware of Israel's nuclear weapons-making capacity. The American stance of pretending not to know what Israel was up to in the nuclear field has been maintained ever since.
It was France in fact that started Israel on the nuclear path. The French, who had been arming the Jewish state since 1953, gave it its nuclear reactor in that year to be installed in the late 1950s at Dimona in the Negev. Partly in revenge against the Arabs for their support of the Algerian revolution, they co-operated closely with Israel on nuclear arms research, elevating it to the ranks of the tiny number of nuclear states at the time. Consequently, Israel today has a reported 200 nuclear warheads or more. This help was more than matched by Germany's support for Israel, in atonement for the sins committed against the Jewish people in the Second World War. German reparations, which started in 1953, provided the Jewish state with one-eighth of its total revenue and accounted for a third of its investments. Within 14 years, West Germany had given Israel DM3.45 billion as 'global compensation', 2.4 billion of it in the form of goods and services. By 1978, the figure had risen to DM22 billion with an additional 10.47 billion projected for the year 2000. And that was in addition to the annual $130 million given to 500,000 Israeli Jewish individuals in restitution, boosting Israel's economy further. By 1957, 20 per cent of German reparations were made payable in weapons and the building of weapons factories in Israel, and indeed West Germany became a secret conduit for US arms to Israel until the 1960s. The Germans built Israel's commercial fleet and provided 50 per cent of investment in its railways; in 1966, German reparations alone accounted for 4 per cent of Israel's GNP. Within 19 years, German reparations provided a quarter of Israel's imports and 16 per cent of its capital investments. Such payment to the state and to Jewish individuals living there has continued ever since. Germany's unstinting support for Israel has most recently been expressed through the supply of sophisticated nuclear submarines in 2005 without a thought for the threat this poses to the Arab world.
It is noteworthy that this marked generosity to Israel was not matched by an equal obligation towards Poland and Russia, both of which lost many more of their citizens during the war and also lodged claims with Germany. Nor has anything like the same favour been bestowed on any Arab country to date. For Germany, Israel was a very special case and remains so, although, strictly speaking, the Jewish state (as against the Jews whom Nazism harmed) has no legal claim against Germany. It did not exist at the time when the offence was committed. It is also worth remembering that the Zionists collaborated with Nazi Germany during the 1930s over the emigration of German Jews to Palestine through the so-called Haavara agreement whereby German Jews were encouraged to leave for Palestine with a proportion of their assets. Zionism in fact pronounced itself in ideological sympathy with the aims of the Hitler regime at the time, drawing a parallel between the rebirth of national life in Germany and that of Jews in Palestine. But in view of the mass murder of Jews, none of this has made any difference to the German determination to support Israel; indeed to even question it in today's political climate would be seen as tantamount to antisemitism. Yet in trying to atone for its sins against the Jews, Germany has in effect been helping to strengthen Israel against the Arabs. Thus, by improving conditions for Israelis, Germany has worsened them for Arabs.
Not all the major Western powers supported Israel so strongly. Relations with the now defunct USSR were not always smooth. But in the beginning, the USSR was amongst the Zionist project's supporters. In 1947, it voted for the UN partition plan, which might not have been passed otherwise, and, in 1948, sent arms to the Zionists via Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. The Soviets sought to weaken the Anglo-American hold on the region by helping to create in Israel a state loyal to them. For the same reason they recognised Israel in 1948, immediately after the Americans. But relations soon soured over Israel's overt approaches to America and the Western capitalist camp, although they improved again in 1953, and a year later the Soviets signed a trade agreement with the new state. However, matters deteriorated once more during the 1956 Suez campaign, which the USSR formally opposed, and the agreement was suspended. In 1967, the Soviets severed all relations with Israel and adopted a hostile policy towards it, although the Soviet Union always maintained the right of Israel to exist. With the appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev on the scene and the demise of the USSR in 1989, free exit for Soviet Jews to Israel was instituted and diplomatic ties with Russia were restored in 1991. Today, the two states enjoy good political and diplomatic relations, and Russia is a major sponsor of the 'peace process'. Many agreements on trade, tourism and cultural exchange have been drawn up between the two sides.
Overall, therefore, Israel enjoyed enormous support from the major Western powers, which crucially enabled the Zionist project to 'bed down' in a hostile and alien region. The fact that this Western stance was motivated more by self-interest than an endorsement of Zionism as such was irrelevant for Israel; the important point was that the West provided the means necessary to the project's survival. The same reasoning underlies the alliance between Zionism and the Christian right in the US today. While the latter sees the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the annihilation of those who fail to convert to Christianity as a necessary prelude to the Messiah's second coming and hence support Israel, the Zionists are happy to go along with this in exchange for their vigorous defence of the Jewish state. This is not difficult to understand, since Zionism always had to be opportunistic in order to ensure Israel's survival.
Israel's Damage to the Palestinians
The deleterious effects of Israel's establishment on Palestinian soil are well documented. It is not the purpose of this book to detail once again that dismal story with its seemingly endless ramifications that have blighted the lives of generations of Palestinians and continues to this day. The cardinal factor, which started the Palestinians on a tragic and downward course, was their dispossession. Between 1947 and 1949 most of them lost their homes. This terrible event ensued on a protracted indigenous struggle that started in the early 1920s against the Zionists and the British, who ruled the country under the Mandate, during which Palestinian hopes for independence were crushed and subordinated to the needs of the incoming Jews. Some early Zionists, perhaps foreseeing some of this, imagined a different scenario for Jews and Arabs in Palestine. They included such figures as Judah Magnes, the Hebrew University's first president, Martin Buber and Arthur Ruppin representing a small Zionist minority which saw Arab–Jewish co-existence as possible and desirable. They established Brit Shalom in the 1930s, an organisation devoted to these ideas. (At one point, its members invited my father, an official in the Mandate's education department at the time, to join them in the struggle for Arab–Jewish co-operation.) They envisaged a shared state between Jews and Arabs, and were interested in unification between the Arab states, in which the Jews could become a component. As will be seen in Chapter 7, some of this group did not want a Jewish state at all, but rather the freedom to express their culture. David Ben-Gurion himself put forward a plan in 1934 for a union of Arab states to which the Palestinians could be linked, allowing for a Jewish majority to develop in Palestine without conflict (and become a state, though he did not communicate this to his Palestinian interlocutors).
But the majority Zionist drive towards statehood (in which Ben-Gurion became a prominent leader) overtook these attempts at accommodation and co-existence. Long before the UN Partition Resolution was passed in 1947 (which the Zionists eagerly accepted), Ben-Gurion was clear on his ultimate goal of a Jewish state to replace Palestine. In 1937 he wrote in a letter, 'Erect a Jewish state at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.' It is tempting to speculate how differently things might have turned out had it been the Brit Shalom faction and not Ben-Gurion's that succeeded.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Married to Another Man"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Ghada Karmi.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction
1. The Cost of Israel to the Arabs
2. Why Do Jews Support Israel?
3. Why Does the West Support Israel?
4. The 'Peace Process'
5. Destroying the Palestinians
6. Solving the Problem
7. The One-State Solution
Epilogue: The End of the Zionist Dream
Bibliography
Index