by Noam Chomsky
Washington’s general goals have been stable for a long period. The basic concern is the enormous oil wealth of the region. Planning has long been guided by a strategic conception that assigns local management to an “Arab Facade” of weak and dependent dictators, who will ensure that profits from Gulf oil flow primarily to the U.S. (and its British client), not to the people of the region. A network of regional gendarmes is to keep order; local “cops on the beat,” as Nixon’s Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, described them in the context of the Nixon Doctrine. The responsibility of the Middle East cops was outlined in 1973 by the Senate’s leading expert on the topic, Henry Jackson: to “inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab States…who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal sources of petroleum in the Persian Gulf”—more accurately to the vast wealth they yield. Senator Jackson was referring specifically to the tacit alliance between Israel, Iran (under the Shah), and Saudi Arabia.
As for Kurds, Palestinians, slum-dwellers in Cairo, and others who contribute nothing to the basic structure of power—they have no rights, by the most elementary principles of statecraft. Perhaps they can occasionally be used in one or another power play but that is where their rights end, as the history of the Kurds has demonstrated, today once again. The status of the Palestinians has been even lower than that of other worthless people; their value is not zero, but negative, in that their plight has had a disruptive effect in the Arab world, thus interfering with U.S. goals. They must therefore be marginalized somehow, perhaps under a form of “autonomy” that leaves them to manage their own affairs under Israeli supervision. That plan, proposed at Camp David, was taken up when the “peace process” was renewed at Madrid in the Fall of 1991. As the conference opened, one of Israel’s most knowledgeable and acute observers of the territories, journalist Danny Rubinstein, wrote that the U.S. and Israel were proposing “autonomy as in a POW camp, where the prisoners are ‘autonomous’ to cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events.” Palestinians are to be granted little more than control over local services, he wrote, adding that even advocates of Greater Israel never call for literal annexation of the territories, which would require Israel to provide the “restricted services” available to Israel’s second-class Arab citizens, at enormous cost.3
The best outcome, from Washington’s point of view, would be a settlement that entrenches the traditional strategic conception and gives it a public form, raising tacit understandings to a formal treaty. If some arrangement for local “autonomy” can suppress the Palestinian issue, well and good. Meanwhile security arrangements among Israel, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States can be extended, perhaps bringing others in if they accept the client role. There need be no further concern over possible Soviet support for attempts within the region to interfere with such designs.
While the negotiations were proceeding without issue, Israel stepped up the harsh repression in the territories, following the thinking outlined by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (later Prime Minister) in February 1989, when he explained to Peace Now leaders that the U.S. had granted Israel time to suppress the Intifada by force, diverting attention by meaningless diplomatic maneuvers (see p. 845). These policies achieved much success, extended with Rabin’s “closure” of the territories, a crushing blow to the staggering Palestinian economy
From the early days of the Intifada, if not before, it was becoming clear that the PLO leadership was losing its popular support in the occupied territories. Local activists from secular nationalist sectors, while still recognizing the PLO as the sole agent for negotiations, spoke with open contempt of its corruption, personal power plays, opportunism, and disregard for the interests and opinions of the people it claimed to represent. By all indications, the disaffection increased in the years that followed, while the fundamentalist opposition that Israel had initially nurtured gained popular support, feeding on this growing discontent and on the demoralization as Rabin’s program was implemented, with constant U.S. support at all levels: economic, diplomatic, and ideological.
With its popular support in decline and its status deteriorating in the Arab world, the PLO became more tolerable to U.S.-Israeli policymakers, particularly as the growing fundamentalist movement evoked memories of the resistance that had driven Israel out of much of Lebanon.4 Informal Israel-PLO contacts were increasingly reported. These reached their culmination with the August 1993 Oslo agreement, which bypassed the delegations engaged in the official “peace process,” and indeed also excluded the PLO, apart from Arafat and a few close associates.
The agreement was welcomed with great acclaim, marred only by skepticism as to whether it could hold. “America’s own greatest interest,” the twin goals of “enhanced security for Israel and a durable regional peace,” both “seem closer to achievement this morning than ever before,” the New York Times editors observed as the agreement was announced.5 Apart from omission of the tacit background understanding that the “regional peace” must ensure U.S. control, their identification of Washington’s highest priorities is accurate, though automatic identification of U.S. government policy with “America’s greatest interest” takes a leap of faith; it is not obvious that ignoring Palestinian national rights and the security of others is in the interest of the people of the United States.
The editors may however, be right in thinking that long-standing U.S. policy goals have been advanced. The intended eventual outcome of the 1993 agreement falls well within the bounds of traditional U.S.-Israeli rejectionism, adopting essential features of the Sharon Plan as well as the Labor Party’s Allon Plan. That much was spelled out the same day on the facing page of the Times by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, a close associate of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He informed his U.S. audience that
the permanent solution will be based on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from most of the West Bank. We agree to a confederated formula between Jordan and the Palestinians in the West Bank, but we will not return to pre-1967 borders. United Jerusalem will remain the capital of the State of Israel.
In return, “After years of rejection of Israel as part of the Middle East, the Arabs will accept and recognize Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state within secure and defined borders in this region”—as they did, for example, in the Security Council resolution of January 1976, vetoed by the United States and gone from history along with much else like it, so that Beilin’s statement will ring true to American ears.
The reasons for preferring “confederation” to Palestinian independence have nothing to do with security. As has been understood since 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the point explicit, an independent Palestinian state serves Israeli security interests better than “a state linked to Transjordan [now Jordan], and maybe tomorrow to Iraq.” The problem is that an independent state would be a barrier to eventual integration of parts of the territories and control of their resources, primarily water. As for “united Jerusalem,” that is a concept of broad and as yet undetermined scope. “Withdrawal from Gaza” and other territories is understood to exclude Jewish settlements and the resources they control. And even this “permanent settlement” lies well down the road.
It is understandable, then, that the Times editors, expressing the prevailing view, should see the “historic deal” as a great opportunity. It is “the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall,” chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman proclaimed on the same day. The projected arrangements represent the “triumph of realism over fanaticism and political courage over political cowardice.” “Realists” understand that in this world, you follow U.S. orders. Those who are not convinced of the justice of traditional U.S.-Israeli rejectionism are not only wrong, but are “fanatics” and “cowards,” thus excluded from respectable society. The hysteria of the rhetoric suggests that more is understood than appears on the surface.
While some Israeli adv
ocates in the U.S. felt that the victory was not far-reaching enough, more perceptive ones recognized the scale of what had been achieved. The PLO had been forced “to become more reasonable,” acceding to Israel’s demands, as Times columnist William Safire, a self-described “pro-Israeli hawk,” put the matter. “Arafat finally appears to be ready to accept [Menachem] Begin’s approach [of 1978], adding the Gaza-Jericho twist,” Safire comments, “having been softened by 15 years of Israeli hard line”—to which we may add U.S. intransigence.6
The draft agreement makes no mention of Palestinian national rights, the primary issue on which the U.S. and Israel broke with the international consensus from the mid-1970s. Throughout these years, it was agreed that a settlement should be based on UN 242. There were two basic points of contention: (1) do we interpret the withdrawal clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus (including the U.S., pre-1971), or in accord with the position of Israel and U.S. policy from 1971? (2) is the settlement based solely on UN 242, which offers nothing to the Palestinians, or 242 and other relevant UN resolutions, as the PLO had proposed for many years in accord with the nonrejectionist international consensus? Thus, does the settlement incorporate the right of refugees to return or compensation, as the UN has insisted since December 1948 (with U.S. endorsement, long forgotten), and the Palestinian right to national self-determination that has repeatedly been endorsed by the UN (though blocked by Washington)? These are the crucial issues that have stood in the way of a political settlement.
On these issues, the agreement explicitly and without equivocation adopts the U.S.-Israeli stand. Article I states that the “permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338” (which endorses 242), nothing more.
Furthermore, as Beilin made explicit, the withdrawal clause of UN 242 is to be understood in the terms unilaterally imposed by the U.S. (from 1971): partial withdrawal, as determined by the U.S. and Israel. In fact, the agreement does not even preclude further Israeli settlement in the large areas of the West Bank it has taken over, or even new land takeovers. On such central matters as control of water, it speaks only of “cooperation” and “equitable utilization” in a manner to be determined by “experts from both sides.” The outcome of cooperation between an elephant and a fly is not hard to predict.
The victory of the rejectionists is complete, even in the ideological sphere; given U.S. global power, the version of history designed by its doctrinal institutions becomes the general framework for discussion in most of the world, including Europe.
For Palestinians in refugee camps and elsewhere outside the territories, the agreement offers little hope, and they have expressed understandable bitterness. Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon also “criticized the PLO for making concessions with Israel that could jeopardize Palestinian national rights and undermine the joint Arab negotiating strategy,” Lamis Andoni reported from Amman, giving “Israel the upper hand in imposing its conditions on each Arab country separately.”7
A separate matter entirely is whether the two sides would be welladvised to accept the agreement devised by Israel and Arafat. For the U.S. and Israel, the question hardly arises: the agreement falls within the framework on which they have long insisted, in international isolation. For the Palestinians, the question is more complex. The agreement entails abandonment of most of their hopes, at least for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, realistic alternatives may be much worse.
Given U.S. power, refusal to accept U.S.-Israeli terms is at once translated into a demonstration of the worthlessness of such “fanatics” and “cowards,” who thereby cede any rights they might have been thought to have. Palestinians were once “the darling of many Western liberals,” Thomas Friedman writes (meaning, presumably that some Western liberals regarded them as at least semi-human); but they are beloved no more, and unless they toe the line, their former admirers may abandon them to their fate, as they have already done, he adds.8 Furthermore, the agreement should offer Palestinians some relief from the barriers to development imposed by the military administration, no small matter. And it moves beyond Rubinstein’s “autonomy of a POW camp” in that Palestinians are assigned control over “direct taxation.” An Israeli-supervised “strong police force” of Palestinians might, at worst, be the local counterpart of Israel’s South Lebanon Army subduing the population by terror and threat while the masters observe closely, ready to move if the iron fist is needed. But it might turn out that Palestinian police will treat the population less harshly than the Israeli army and border police, and settler depredations should reduce. Though the agreements say nothing about the matter, there may be a decline in Israeli settlement and in the development programs designed to integrate the extensive areas designated for Jewish settlement into the Israeli economy, leaving Palestinians on the side. Many issues can be debated, but not—at least not seriously—within a doctrinal framework that identifies “realism” as what the U.S. and Israel demand, and dismisses critical analysis in advance as “fanaticism” and “cowardice.
The respected head of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul Shafi, had some observations on these matters in a talk in Bethlehem on July 22, 1993, just as Arafat was secretly moving to take matters into his own hands, bypassing local Palestinians.9 Abdul Shafi held out little hope for the “peace process,” which excludes entirely the possibility “that Palestinians must be the main authority in the interim period for the people and for the land,” leading to true national self-determination. He stressed, however, that
the negotiations are not worth fighting about. The critical issue is transforming our society. All else is inconsequential... We must decide amongst ourselves to use all our strength and resources to develop our collective leadership and the democratic institutions which will achieve our goals and guide us in the future... The important thing is for us to take care of our internal situation and to organize our society and correct those negative aspects from which it has been suffering for generations and which is the main reason for our losses against our foes.
His remarks seem to me apt, and of much broader import, ourselves included.
2. Oslo II*
O
n September 28,1995, Israel and the PLO initiated the second major step in the peace process (Oslo II), dividing the West Bank into three zones, with extensive further arrangements. The Palestinian National Authority (PA) is to exercise total control in
Zone A while Israel exercises total control in Zone C. Zone B is the region of “autonomy”: here the PA administers Palestinian villages under overall Israeli “security control.” Zone A consists of the municipal areas of towns populated exclusively by Palestinians. Zone C includes all Jewish settlements. Zone B is a collection of scattered sectors, about 100 of them according to Israeli maps.
In addition to Zones A, B, and C there is a fourth zone that incorporates part of the occupied territories: Jerusalem, which is implicitly assigned to Israeli control, including formerly Arab East Jerusalem and an indefinite region beyond. Arafat’s announcement of a “Jihad” to seek Palestinian rights in Jerusalem (in accord with the terms of Oslo I) aroused much fury in the United States, demonstrating that the devious old terrorist had not changed his stripes. Rabin’s announcement that Israel’s Jihad had been completed and that Jerusalem will be the eternal and undivided capital of Israel elicited no reaction; nor did the maps published after Oslo II, implicitly ratifying that announcement. Official rhetoric aside, Israel’s decision accords with U.S. intentions, and is therefore legitimate by definition.
The delimitation of the three zones is not precisely clear, and is to be modified in later negotiations. According to the analysis accompanying Israeli maps, Zone C covers two-thirds of the West Bank and Zone B
*Taken from “A Painful Peace,” Z Magazine, January 1996. another 30%, with 3% in the Palestinian Zone A. Other official statements and analyses differ inconsequentially. Of the Palestinian towns, one was disputed, Hebron, with 450 Jewish settle
rs among some 100,000 Palestinians; Israel therefore retains substantial control. Zone C includes 140,000 Jews, Zones A and B 1.1 million Arabs. “About 300,000 Israelis are living in the areas conquered by Israel in 1967,” veteran Israeli correspondent Danny Rubinstein observes, about 150,000 of them “in the municipal area annexed to Jerusalem after 1967.”10
Oslo II reaffirms the provision of the Cairo accords of May 1994 that Palestinian legislation cannot “deal with a security issue that falls under Israel’s responsibility” and cannot “seriously threaten other significant Israeli interests protected by this agreement.” The basic terms of the Cairo accords apparently remain in force for all three zones, including their provision that the Israeli Military Administration retains exclusive authority in “legislation, adjudication, policy execution” and “responsibility for the exercise of these powers in conformity with international law,” which the U.S. and Israel interpret as they please. The meaning, as the knowledgeable Israeli analyst Meron Benvenisti observed after Cairo, is that “the entire intricate system of military ordinances…will retain its force, apart from ‘such legislative regulatory and other powers Israel may expressly grant”’ to the Palestinians, while Israeli judges retain “veto powers over any Palestinian legislation ‘that might jeopardize major Israeli interests’,” which have “overriding power” (his quotes are from the text of the Cairo agreement).
