by Robert Fisk
Far from condemning the ever-increasing signs of despotism on the other side of their border, the Israelis lavished only praise on Arafat’s new security measures. U.S. State Department spokesmen, while making routine reference to their “concern” for human rights, welcomed and congratulated Arafat on the vitality of his secret midnight courts—a fact bitterly condemned by Amnesty International. Equally secret meetings of Arafat’s inner cabinet, which led to mass arrests of political opponents, were ignored by the U.S. administration.
That Arafat’s cabinet did meet in secret was revealed only when the Palestinian leader signed a series of harsh new measures against the press on 25 June 1995. Of the fifty Articles, the thirty-seventh stated that it was “strictly prohibited” for journalists to publish “the minutes of the secret sessions of the Palestinian National Council and the Council of Ministers of the Palestine National Authority.” To comprehend these new press laws, it was necessary to visit Marwan Kanafani, special adviser to the president—the president of Palestine, of course—who happened to be the brother of the militant (and murdered) poet Ghassan Kanafani.
“We closed Al-Watan because of the report about the president,” he announced to me. “The editor was arrested for something else—he is under arrest, yes. He is being questioned. We have also closed Al-Istiqlal. They have been involved in disinformation.” And Kanafani glanced at his computer screen as if it contained the very law under which Imad al-Falouji, editor of the Hamas newspaper, was taken from his home the previous Saturday morning by plainclothes PLO security men. Al-Falouji’s sin, it seems, was to have carried a small news item on his paper’s back page which claimed to quote a report from The Independent that Yassir Arafat had sold to a French company the right to use the name of his newly-born daughter Zahwa on its products. In fact, my paper had carried no such report, but its provenance was of no interest to the PLO.
“Hamas only printed this article to hurt the credibility of President Arafat,” Kanafani said with contempt. “Nobody believes it. President Arafat is a very generous man—he’d never do such a stupid thing. This has only been done to discredit the president. Yes, I talked with the president about it. His response was more in sorrow than in anger. I hope the suspension will be temporary. I hope the writers of that paper understand that this kind of ‘news’ has got nothing to do with what is called ‘the people’s right to know.’ Why, I know of three news agencies which refused to carry the story.” Writers on magazines like this were hurting the basis of the development and freedom of the press.
“We don’t have any taboos here,” he said. “Yes, these State Security courts, do you know whom they embarrass most, who complains most? The Palestinians. And me. I don’t like them. Yes, they have passed a lot of sentences, some of them harsh. Yes, there are rules that the public are not allowed to attend. But these are just the regulations that go with these courts. And under current conditions here, we may have certain rules that may not be democratic. But didn’t Britain have special courts when it was at war? We’re almost in a state of war against those who don’t want us to implement peace here. It’s a very critical situation. When 1.2 million Palestinians are punished for what one or two [militants] have done, then we are in a state that calls for extraordinary measures. We are trying to punish justly those who are jeopardising the security, property, lives and human rights of the Palestinian people.”
This was quite a speech. And this, I kept telling myself, was Arafat’s special adviser. But more was to follow:
The Declaration of Principles signed in Washington was based on three words: land for peace. We will do anything humanly possible to satisfy Israel’s security needs. But they must do everything humanly possible to satisfy our need for land. President Arafat knew when he signed this agreement that there were big holes in it. And the Israelis got praise for making peace. Rabin shared the Nobel prize with President Arafat. But now when we come down to the nitty-gritty, the Israelis want both peace and land. And if they want to keep their soldiers in the West Bank to protect settlements and keep most of our land under different pretexts, then we’re not going to have peace. Yassir Arafat took a lot of chances for this. He took personally all the decisions that were necessary, yes, including arrests and unpopular decisions, as well as raising the hopes of our people . . . He did this because he believes in peace. Heads of state don’t take these chances but leaders do—and he is a leader. He wants it to work but he is exhausted. He is worried. He is not satisfied that the peace process is moving.
Which is clearly what al-Falouji also thought. So I paid a call on General Youssef Nasser, commander of the Palestinian police, hero of Golan, PLO fighter in Lebanon, refugee from 1948 Palestine. And when I walk through General Nasser’s door—its Israeli security lock snapping open at the touch of a card— there is the great bespectacled man, all smiles, overweight but smartly uniformed, a big clammy hand extended in welcome. He is an optimist. “How do you think we’re doing in the Palestinian Authority?” he asks. So I mention the endless delays in implementation of the Palestinian agreements with Israel, the continued presence of Israeli troops in Gaza, the suicide bombs, the deaths in custody, Amnesty International . . .
“All peace treaties are imposed by a leverage of power and so is this one,” the general replies. “But look, after 1917, the ‘world order’ of the period gave the Jews a homeland and divided us. In 1948, another ‘world order’ created the state of Israel and nullified the Palestinians from both the geographic and demographic map. But now we have managed to re-locate ourselves on the international map and re-establish our identity as Palestinians . . . The Palestinian entity is now international, created under the same resolutions that created Israel.”
But this is not true, I tell the general. Israel was internationally recognised by the United Nations; no UN resolutions safeguard the PLO’s agreement with Israel. “OK,” General Nasser replies. “OK—but no one can shoulder the responsibility of destroying the peace process. The Jewish settlers have two options: to evacuate [Palestinian territory] or to become Palestinian citizens. Israel can’t have both the peace and the land . . . Things are not easy, it’s true. But there is an existing reality—a fact: three million Palestinians are on the ground in the West Bank and in Gaza. Israel has two choices: independence for the Palestinians or a complete merger with the Palestinians—but they can’t keep on with their imperialistic policy . . .”
This was wilful self-delusion, a characteristic normally reserved for Israelis. Israel was backed by the world’s only surviving superpower. No Israeli settler would elect to become a Palestinian and very few settlers would leave the West Bank. The responsibility of “destroying the peace process” would be easy to shift onto Israel’s antagonists, the Palestinians—as indeed it would be in the years to come—the moment Israel decided that the next suicide bombing was one too many.
“Arafat is finding out what it’s like to be Israel’s man,” one of his detractors told me in the cool of one August evening in Gaza that summer of 1995. “The Israelis know that he is a dictator and that the more internal power he has, the more he will do their bidding. So they approve of all this. They don’t want a real democracy because Arafat might lose elections—and a new leader might not obey their wishes. Now they are even turning Arafat against Assad of Syria by persuading the PLO to claim part of the Golan Heights as Palestinian . . . And all the while Jewish settlements continue to be built . . .”
I have sought in vain to discover the origin of our journalistic use of the word “settlements.” By its nature, the expression is almost comforting. It has a permanence about it, a notion of legality. Every human wants to “settle,” to have a home. The far more disturbing—and far more accurate—word for Israel’s land-grabbing in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is colonising. Settlers are colonists. Almost all the Israelis in the West Bank are living on someone else’s land. They may say that God gave them the land, but those Palestinians who legally owned that land— who had propert
y deeds to prove it, since the British Mandate, since the Ottoman empire—are not allowed to appeal to God. Successive Israeli governments have supported this theft of property, and by 2003, 400,000 Israeli Jews were living in the occupied territories in explicit violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention—which states that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
In all the long, fruitless negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis would always maintain that the return of any territory was “giving” land for peace—as if the occupied territories were legally Israeli property of which it could dispose if it was generously minded. So it is important to recall that the policy of implanting Jewish colonists on occupied Arab land since 1967 has been consistently and enthusiastically supported by successive Israeli governments.
As long ago as 1978, the U.S. administration under President Carter was condemning the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, asking why 9,000 Israelis were now living in the occupied territories in thirteen “unofficial” colonies when the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, supposedly wanted to make peace with President Sadat of Egypt. Already, thirty-nine settlements had been built since the 1967 war. In November 1978 the Jewish Agency drew up a plan—and here I will quote from The Guardian’s highly biased report of the time—for “housing 16,000 Israeli families in 84 new villages on the West Bank of the Jordan, and a further 11,000 families in existing outposts” (my italics). The project would cost $1.5 billion and would be completed within five years—the deadline set for what was intended to be the end of a “transitional period” of Palestinian self-rule. Readers must here understand that the language and hopes of “peace” in the Middle East are a debased coinage. This “transitional period” had nothing to do with the later Oslo agreement but applied to the Begin–Sadat Camp David summit of 1977 which ultimately provided no “self-autonomy” for the Palestinians.
In May 1979, President Carter was appealing for Israeli “restraint” in expanding settlements because they were “inconsistent with international law and an obstacle to peace.” But, he said—and here was a refrain that would be used by successive U.S. administrations as successive Israeli governments ignored them— “there is a limit to what we can do to impose our will on a sovereign nation.” In December of the same year, there was a muted protest by Palestinians against an Israeli government decision to move a settlement onto Arab land near Nablus. In his coverage of the demonstration—the Arabs spread prayer rugs over a neighbouring road because the local Israeli military governor forbade the protest to be held in a mosque—The Times of London correspondent in Tel Aviv referred to the West Bank only by its Jewish name of “Samaria.”
There was, in fact, an oddly subdued quality to the reporting of these successive land thefts by Israel. On 14 March 1980, for example, Christopher Walker of The Times was writing that “friction between Israel and Egypt over Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has been increased by the Israeli decision to seize 1,000 acres of land in east Jerusalem to build a new Jewish suburb. Two thirds of the land is owned by Arabs.” That this was a scandal, rather than a cause of mere “friction,” over a “suburb,” scarcely came across. When in the same year Israel passed a “Basic Law” declaring Jerusalem its capital, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 476, stating that Israeli actions to change the status of Jerusalem “constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” It had no effect. In March of that same year, the last Arab family living in the old Jewish quarter of Jerusalem—Ayub Hamis Toutungi’s house overlooked both the Wailing Wall and the Al-Aqsa mosque—was forced to accept compensation for his property and leave. “I am a Jerusalemite,” Toutungi protested in Hebrew. “I want to remain here. When a Jew loves Jerusalem, it is considered a spiritual value. An Arab who loves Jerusalem is suspected of supporting the PLO.” The Israeli writer Amos Elon protested at this “violence.” To no avail.
When the world was unimpressed by the “Basic Law” which upheld Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its capital, the Israeli authorities proceeded to seize land— 1,000 acres for a $600,000 settlement (or “suburb” as The Times called it again)— in March 1989. By now, 60,000 Jews lived in “Arab” East Jerusalem, more than 50 per cent of the area’s 100,000 Arab population. In the following year, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said he would hold onto occupied Arab land for the new wave of Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel, explaining that “past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep the land of Israel from the [Mediterranean] sea to the River Jordan for the generations to come . . .”
The moment the Oslo accord was revealed, the Israeli Likud party foresaw the end of Jewish colonies on Palestinian land. Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that “these Israeli islands, isolated in a PLO sea, will not last long.” He need not have worried. On 27 September 1994—when 140 Jewish colonies already existed in the West Bank but when the Oslo agreement was only a year old—Israeli prime minister Rabin approved the construction of an extra 1,000 apartments at the settlement of Alfei Menache close to Jerusalem. By 1996, 86.5 per cent of East Jerusalem had been removed from Palestinian residents’ control and use; 34 per cent of East Jerusalem land was expropriated for the building of Jewish colonies. The Jerusalem municipality announced plans to build another 70,000 new housing units over the next ten years. Then came the opening of the “archaeological tunnel” from the Wailing Wall—attended by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida multimillionaire who owns hospitals and a bingo parlour in California—which ran beneath Muslim East Jerusalem; violent protests against the opening of the tunnel, which was paid for by the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, left 43 Palestinians and 11 Israeli soldiers dead.
In February 1997, Israel approved the construction of a massive new Jewish colony at Jebel Abu Ghoneim, with 3,546 houses and a population of 25,000 Israelis in just the first stage of the project. The hill upon which the settlement was subsequently built is outside East Jerusalem—which Palestinians had once hoped would be their capital. Palestinian protests were ignored and the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to abandon construction. In the same month, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced the sale of land for 5,000 new Jewish homes inside existing colonies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the Jebel Abu Ghoneim colony—its identity changed to Har Homa in Hebrew—would be matched by the construction of 3,015 houses for Palestinians was denounced as “disinformation” by human rights groups. They pointed out that 18,000 permits for Palestinian homes had been promised in 1980—yet not a single one had been honoured seventeen years later.
Nor was this huge illegal colonial expansion—which continued throughout the Oslo “peace process”—without active encouragement from within the United States. On 18 April 1997, The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement signed by ten Christian “spiritual leaders”—including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell—all supporting “the continued sovereignty of the State of Israel over the holy city of Jerusalem . . . we believe that Jerusalem or any portion of it shall not be negotiable in any peace process. Jerusalem must remain undivided as the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” This “spiritual” message claimed that Israel had “demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns and needs of all Jerusalem’s residents, including the Palestinians’ and that Israel’s right to Jerusalem as a sovereign capital came by “divine mandate.”91
Under Netanyahu, the Israeli authorities seemed almost anxious to enrage their Palestinian opposite numbers and to further undermine Arafat. When in 1997 the UN proposed a new resolution urging member states to “actively discourage” settlement-building on Arab land, Netanyahu’s spokesman, the piano-playing David Bar Ilan, described the proposal as “shameful” and “morally bankrupt” because it ignored world dangers while condemning what he mischievously called “the building of apartments for young couples.” U.S. secretary of state M
adeleine Albright was positively mouselike when in September 1997 she urged Israel to “refrain from unilateral acts, including what Palestinians perceive as the provocative expansion of settlements.” Such words were clearly understood. If the continued building of Jewish colonies on stolen Arab land during the Oslo “peace process” was merely “what Palestinians perceive” to be provocative, then what on earth did the United States perceive them to be?
If they weren’t building homes for Israelis on Palestinian land, the Israelis were busy demolishing Palestinian houses. Between the signing of the Oslo accord in 1993 and March 1998, 629 Palestinian homes were destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, 535 in the West Bank and 94 in Jerusalem, more than a third under an Israeli Labour government and the rest under Likud. Another 1,800 demolition orders were waiting to be carried out. Palestinian outrage at this wholesale attempt to force them out of Jerusalem—in many cases because Israel would not issue building permits for Arabs living there—was merely exacerbated by the April 1999 decision of an Israeli ministerial committee to recommend building an additional 116,000 houses for colonists over the next twenty years.
