A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Little publicized has been the virulently anti-Christian dimension of the intifada. In Christian towns such as Bethlehem, a campaign of violence, firebombings, and blackmail has been directed against Christians, with the intention of forcing them to sell their holdings to Moslems and leave the Holy Land. In an article in the Catholic journal Terra Santa, Father Georges Abou-Khazen wrote that Arab states have been pouring money into the effort to “Islamicize” the country, and that he feared the complete eradication of the Christian presence in the Holy Land. According to Father Abou-Khazen, Christians have been too terrified to speak out, fearing for their lives. 56

  Not that any of these horrors reached most of the programs of the international television networks covering the intifada. As in the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, no one seemed to care when Palestinian Arabs were being harmed unless Israel was doing the harming. Ignoring the Arab reign of terror in the Palestinian streets, the media created for themselves nightly installments of a popular romance-drama: heroic underdog in search of self-determination taking on a terrifying Israel tyrant. This drama was not too difficult to create since democratic peoples do not like violence, and they do not like soldiers. They are especially revolted by the sight of a soldier beating a nonsoldier or glaring at a child. Since viewers were being told that this was an “army of occupation”—that is, it had no right to be there in the first place—the media managed to transform even the most necessary aspects of maintaining law and order into unforgivable crimes.

  Utterly lost from the images on the screen was the organized nature of the rioting, the internecine violence, and the terrorized lives of the innocent Arabs (and Jews) who were ground under the intifada’s heel. Similarly lost were the restrictive firing orders that stayed the hand of every Israeli soldier, and the swift trials of the 208 Israelis who in any way disobeyed these orders 58 —as against the tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers and reservists who followed the regulations with impeccable restraint.

  The bashing that Israel received in the media was particularly instructive, given that next to nothing was said, either now or at the time, about the way the Arab governments of Jordan and Egypt had put down their intifadas in these very territories before 1967. We can, for instance, compare the actions taken by the Israeli military to that of the Jordanian Legion during the period when Jordan was the occupying power in the West Bank (which it had invaded in 1948 and illegally annexed in 1950). In October 1954, Beirut radio reported the outbreak of riots and demonstrations in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jordanian-held Jerusalem. The army was called in, and a state of emergency was declared. The official Jordanian announcement said that fourteen were killed and 117 injured. Unofficial media reports claimed that ninety were killed. 59 In April 1957, riots in Jerusalem and Ramallah led King Hussein to resort to emergency measures: A curfew was imposed on Jerusalem and Ramallah, newspapers were closed, municipal councils were dismissed in Bethlehem, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin, and there were widespread arrests, including 169 UN teachers. 60 In April 1963 in Jerusalem, eleven were killed, 150 wounded (including seventeen schoolgirls); in Ramallah one person was killed and thirty-five were wounded; in Jenin and Irbid dozens more were wounded; 120 politicians were arrested. 61 On November 19, 1966, riots broke out in Nablus and Hebron and police opened fire into the crowds. The next day tanks were brought in and opened fire. Fifty were killed or wounded in Nablus alone. More were killed at the funerals. 62

  Similar treatment was accorded the residents of Gaza by the Egyptian army. In fairness, it should be noted that Jordan had at least given most of the Palestinian Arabs Jordanian citizenship. But Egypt refused them even this elementary amenity, deliberately keeping the entire population of Gaza in a humiliating condition of statelessness, almost half of them as passportless refugees.

  With such summary treatment, it is not surprising that none of these intifadas lasted very long or amounted to very much. For the Jordanians and the Egyptians were willing to resort to means of “restoring order” in the territories that Israel would never dream of using—the Israeli army did not roll tanks in front of crowds and fire away. But the Jordanian Legion was free from such restraint: Its soldiers used not rubber bullets but lead ones. Nor were they under orders to fire only when their lives were in danger. If Israel had used the Jordanian methods, casualties would have climbed to twenty-five or fifty per day rather than the much smaller rate that did result from mass encounters with the IDF. In all likelihood, Israel’s intifada would have died the same quick and bloody death as did its precursors under Arab regimes. But Israel, of course, was unprepared to adopt such methods, knowingly prolonging the intifada and taking upon itself punishing political costs (including claims about the inhumanity and depravity of Israeli methods) in order to avoid the use of uninhibited force.

  When such a comparison is raised, Western diplomats and journalists commonly respond by claiming that Israel must be held to a higher standard than the Arab dictatorships. True enough. Undoubtedly a democracy should be judged by the standards of democracies. Indeed, during the years of the intifada several violent outbreaks occurred in democratic countries, the most noteworthy in Venezuela and India. In Venezuela, in two days of rioting in 1987, the government put down the violence with a toll of 119 dead and 800 wounded, while in India during the ten-day siege of the Golden Temple, 133 people died in clashes between secessionist Sikhs and the government. 63 (These were greater than the number killed in a full year of intifada confrontations with the IDF.) When violent looting, the stoning of vehicles, or the firebombing of shops occurs in a democracy, it must take forceful action, since the first obligation of government—of any government—is to keep the peace. When such rioting occurred in America’s major cities in the mid-1960s, the death toll in eruptions of rioting lasting only a few days was thirty-four in Los Angeles, twenty-six in Newark, forty-three in Detroit, and scores of others elsewhere. Tens of thousands were arrested. When renewed rioting in 1968 hit 125 cities, the American government had no choice but to apply massive force: 55,000 soldiers and policemen were brought in to quell the disturbances. In all, forty-six were killed and over 21,000 arrested. 64 Lest anyone believe that these explosions were a thing of the past, rioting in Los Angeles in May 1992 left fifty-one dead in three days—and resulted in widespread criticism of the Los Angeles police for not having responded with enough force.

  Not only rioting but stone-throwing has its parallels in other countries. In 1991, two Maryland teenagers were caught hurling rocks at passing cars, sending a fifteen-year-old girl who was a passenger in one car into a coma. (In the territories several Jewish passengers have lost their lives and others have been crippled for life by rocks hurled through the windshields of their vehicles.) Although the average person in the West is not accustomed to thinking in such terms, a rock the size of a baseball hurled into a car traveling at sixty miles per hour is a weapon at least as deadly as a knife or an ax. The offenders in Maryland were charged with ninety counts, including “assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to maim, assault with intent to disable, assault and battery, and malicious destruction of property.” They were sentenced to five hundred years in prison, assuring that they will spend the rest of their adult lives behind bars. 65 The “harsh” military administration in Judea and Samaria naturally insists on similar penalties, though it should be pointed out that the penalty for those rock throwers who do not succeed in inflicting substantial damage is a modest fine.

  That Israel was not judged according to these international norms indicates that there is not a double standard at work, but a triple one—one standard for the Arab dictatorships, a second for the democracies, and still a third—separate and special—for Israel. This third standard rests on the oft-repeated assumption that Israel is morally wrong to be in the territories at all, and that its every act there is therefore a derivative wrong. Based on this premise, the Israeli army is held to be wrong in its every use of force, no matter how restrained or prop
ortional, no matter how necessary. It is a standard against which no country can possibly be judged favorably, and as such it has been used with consummate skill by Arab propagandists to demonize Israel during the intifada riots, obliterating for many both the history and causality of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For like the Arab campaign of international terrorism before it, the intifada’s purpose soon evolved to serve as a stage in the PLO’s media war against Israel. After the first weeks of spontaneous rioting, the intifada’s “main events” were increasingly calculated purely from manipulating public opinion: the use of crowds of children in confrontations, the staging of riots for the press, the orders against the use of firearms, the prominent display of English-speaking Palestinian advocates of “civil disobedience,” the silencing of dissent which might harm the image of “unity”—all combined with the PLO’s pronouncements that no one had the power to stop the intifada, and that only a Palestinian state (under its rule) could end the violence by giving the Palestinian people in the “Israeli-occupied West Bank” their just deserts, i.e., self-determination. (Some correspondents obligingly explained that the “Palestinian people” had been “occupied for centuries” by the Byzantines, the Turks, the British, and the Israelis and were now “finally” prepared to seize their destiny and their independence.)

  Despite the decline in the widespread rioting that characterized the beginning of the intifada, the years of bombardment by the carefully crafted Arab media blitz took their toll, and in the minds of many in the West the Reversal of Causality is now an established fact. For them, it is clear that the Israelis have dispossessed and oppressed the Palestinian people. After all, they saw them doing it on television.

  But no matter how potent the intifada has been as a stage for political and journalistic attacks against Israel, it had a limited media-life and therefore limited political usefulness. The campaign against Israel’s “usurpation” of Palestinian self-determination therefore focused on another controversy between Israel and the Arabs: the settlements. These, at least, had the benefit of not going away. They could be brought up again and again as proof of Israel’s continuing efforts to “steal” the land away from its rightful owners, the Palestinians. And they had the added benefit of being opposed by a faction within Israel itself that agitated for a curtailment of settlement activity.

  The right of Jews to live in Hebron, Nablus, and East Jerusalem (that is, the “West Bank”) was recognized by the nations of the world at the same time as the right of Jews to live in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and West Jerusalem—in the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations Mandate. At the time there was no such thing as the West Bank, and no one had ever suggested that Samaria and Judea could somehow be distinguished from the rest of Palestine, certainly not from western Palestine. On the contrary, Judea and Samaria were the very heart of the land, in which virtually every event of importance in pre-exilic Jewish history took place: Elon Moreh, where Abraham was promised the land, and Hebron, where he buried Sarah; Beth El, where Jacob dreamed of the ladder to heaven, and Bethlehem, where he buried Rachel; Jericho, where Joshua entered the land, and Shechem (Nablus), where he read the people the law and buried Joseph; Shiloh, which housed the tabernacle and served as the center of the Jewish people for four centuries before Jerusalem; Beth Horon, where the Maccabees defeated the Seleucids; and Betar, where the second great Jewish revolt against Rome was finally crushed. Above all, there was the Old City of Jerusalem (today, “East Jerusalem”), the physical Zion of the Jews, the heart and breath of the Jewish people since the time of David and the prophets, and the center of its spiritual and political aspirations. At Versailles, when the Zionists claimed Palestine and when Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau recognized the claim, it was places such as these of which they thought above all others.

  Hence it comes as no surprise that Jewish immigrants chose to come to these places during the period of the British Mandate. In Jerusalem and Hebron there were already large Jewish communities that were joined by new immigrants, and the immigrants founded new ones as well; Kalia and Beit Ha’arava in the Jordan River Valley; Atarot and Neve Ya’akov in Samaria; Ein Tzurim, Re-vadim, Massuot Yitzhak, Kfar Etzion, and Ramat Rachel in Judea; and Kfar Darom in Gaza. All of these “West Bank settlements” were founded before there was such a thing as a “West Bank,” and no one knew that they were different from any of the other Jewish villages and towns sprouting all over western Palestine. No one questioned the right of Jews to live in any of these places—except for those who rejected the right of Jews to live anywhere in the land at all.

  Any fair-minded observer must be moved to ask: If the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria was recognized by the League of Nations and was undisputed by most of the international community when Jewish communities were being founded there before the establishment of Israel, just when did Jews lose the right to live in these places?

  In fact, they never did lose that right—only the practical ability to exercise it. The disappearance of that capacity can be dated to Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. The Jordanian Legion of King Abdullah crossed the Jordan River unprovoked and uninvited and seized Judea, Samaria, and the eastern reaches of Jerusalem (including the Old City, with its ancient Jewish community). Everywhere the Jordanians came, they destroyed what they could of the Jewish presence. In East Jerusalem, the Jewish quarter was almost completely leveled by the invading Jordanians. Thousands of Jews were expelled from their homes, synagogues destroyed, and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. * The Jewish settlers of Kfar Etzion were not so lucky. Their attempts to raise a white flag and surrender were ignored, and the Jordanians kept firing until they had killed 240 people. The communities themselves were destroyed and abandoned.

  In 1950, Abdullah formally annexed what he now called the “West Bank” to Jordan. This was so obviously the spoils of an illegal and aggressive war that only two countries, Britain and Pakistan, ever recognized the annexation. In 1954, a year after Hussein succeeded to the throne, Jordan formally promulgated the law prohibiting Jews from living there—a law which is on the books to this day. And while the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel stipulated that Jews should be allowed into Jordanian-held Jerusalem to visit their holy sites, the agreement was systematically violated to prevent Jews from entering the kingdom.

  When Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, it captured land that was almost entirely empty. Outside of the small urban centers such as Shechem (Nablus), Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, there was a scattering of villages along the crude roads connecting them, and an occasional Bedouin farther afield. The Jordanian government took direct control of most of the open space and for the nineteen years of Jordanian control made virtually no effort to develop it. Hussein’s policy was to develop the East Bank alone, and he in fact was successful in moving what little industry there had been on the West Bank before 1948 across to the other side of the Jordan River.

  In 1967 Jordan again attacked Israel. This time it lost all the land it had won in 1948. The Israeli army reentered the Old City of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Shechem, and Israel reasserted the right of Jews to live in these cities and towns, which the discriminatory Jordanian law had obstructed for nineteen years. The ruined Jewish communities in the Old City, Hebron, and Gush Etzion were rebuilt, in some cases by the children of those who had been driven from their homes by the Arabs in 1948. Over time, close to 300,000 Israelis have chosen to exercise their right to return to these communities and the new ones built next to them. This figure includes 150,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, 10,000 on the Golan, 3,000 in Gaza, and another 150,000 in the Old City and the sprawling suburbs of East Jerusalem. (On occasion, the U.S. explains that it considers any Jewish real estate purchases, construction, and habitation in the Old City and eastern Jerusalem to be West Bank settlement. At other times, it stresses that Jerusalem will not be divided again.) 66 But as is evident from the historical and political facts, these communities, whether called “settlemen
ts” or “suburbs” or anything else, represent no new Jewish claim and no new Jewish right. They are firmly founded on the same right that was recognized by the international community at Versailles and freely exercised by the Jews up until the Jordanians forcibly suppressed that free exercise in 1948.

  Nevertheless, many Western leaders have grown increasingly strident about Jewish “settlement activity”—despite the fact that their own governments were signatories at Versailles and party to the decision to grant the Mandate recognizing the right to Jewish settlement. “Never mind that,” they say. “You have no right to be tossing Arabs off their land.”

  This remarkable example of diplomatic and historical forgetfulness might conceivably be justified if Jews were taking land away from Arabs. Careful manipulation of the media by the Arabs has left many Westerners with the indelible impression that Arab paupers are being kicked out of their hovels in droves to make way for Jewish suburbs in the “densely populated West Bank.” Yet the West Bank is anything but densely populated. It is in fact sparsely populated: Its population density of 150 people per square kilometer is less than 2.5 percent (one-fortieth) of the population density of Tel Aviv (6,700 per square kilometer). 67 This density is equivalent not to that of the suburban areas outside New York, London, or Paris, but to that of rural regions beyond the metropolitan belts of such cities. Four Arab cities located along the crest of the mountains, together with East Jerusalem, account for the bulk of the Arab population, while taking up only a small fraction of the land. The rest remains in large part vacant.