Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  With Israel’s Jihad for Jerusalem now officially over, such programs can be extended there and beyond. The cantonization of Arab regions and the new stamp of legitimacy for the right of closure should also make it possible to refine the long-term program of inducing the population to go somewhere else, except for those who may find a place in industrial parks handed over to Israeli and Palestinian investors, linked to foreign capital.

  During the occupation, the military administration barred independent development. An official order declared that “no permits will be given for expanding agriculture and industry which may compete with the State of Israel,” a device familiar from U.S. practice and Western imperialism generally which typically permitted “complementary development” only. The facts are well-known in Israel. As Oslo II was announced, Ronny Shaked recalled that, in the territories, Israeli governments “were only interested in calm and cheap manpower. Decisions to develop any infrastructures, to create any industrial or agricultural development, were taken only to promote a specific Israeli interest and were forced on the inhabitants. In Hebron, for example, the Civil Administration refused a request to set up a factory for making nails, fearing competition with a factory in Tel Aviv. The health system, on the other hand, was taken care of, because diseases in the West Bank might also endanger residents of Tel Aviv.” The Civil Administration was cheap to run, he adds, because its “minuscule” budget was covered by taxes from the local inhabitants. It effectively continues with little change under Oslo II.

  Under the Israeli regime, the local population was left with few options beyond exile or employment in Israel under terrible conditions that have been bitterly condemned for years in the Israeli press, largely concealed from those who pay the bills. The only comparative scholarly study concludes that “the situation of noncitizen Arabs in Israel is worse relative to that of nonnationals in other countries”—migrant workers in the United States, “guestworkers” in Europe, etc.

  Even these options have now been sharply reduced as Palestinians are being replaced by workers brought in from Thailand, the Philippines, Romania, and other places where people live in misery. Israeli investigative reporters have documented “inhuman” working conditions and treatment, including virtual slavery and “severe sexual harassment,” much as in the Gulf principalities and other client states. The curfews and closures in the territories had “devastated the Palestinian economy and destroyed 100,000 families in Gaza alone,” journalist Nadav Ha’etzni reported in May 1995, a “trauma” that can only be compared with the mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, he added. The situation is likely to deteriorate as imported semi-slave labor displaces the Palestinian work-force from the only employment that had been allowed them. In such ways, “the Oslo Accords have created a truly new Middle East,” Ha’etzni writes, mocking Shimon Peres’s slogan.24

  The rights of Palestinian workers in the “new Middle East” were spelled out in a May 1995 ruling by Justice Y. Bazak of the Jerusalem District court, rejecting a lawsuit brought by the workers’ rights group Kav La’Oved (“Workers’ Hotline,” Tel Aviv). The plaintiffs had requested restitution of $1 billion withheld from salaries for social benefits that Palestinian workers had never received (pensions, unemployment payments, and so on); the funds ended up in the State treasury The Court dismissed the case, accepting the government’s argument that Knesset legislation to implement the Oslo I accords retroactively legalized the robbery, thus removing any legal basis for the suit. The Court also accepted the government’s argument that Israel’s National Insurance Law grants rights only to residents of Israel. The deductions were never intended to ensure equal rights for the Palestinian workers, Justice Bazak ruled, but were designed to keep wages for Palestinians high on paper but low in reality, thus protecting Israeli workers from unfair competition by cheap Palestinian labor. This is “a worthy and reasonable purpose which is recognized by the Court,” Justice Bazak explained, “just as the legality of imposing customs taxes is recognized for the purpose of protecting the country’s products.”

  One can see why the Israeli judicial system must retain veto power over any legislation that the Palestinian authorities might contemplate; and why American taxpayers must be kept in the dark about the use of the huge subsidies they provide to Israel.

  These subsidies, incidentally are opposed by the public even more than most foreign aid, and are the one component that is immune from the sharp reductions now being instituted in the miserly U.S. program, an international scandal and virtually invisible if Israel and other U.S. Middle East interests are excluded. One recent example consists of 25 of “the most sophisticated fighter-bombers in the world,” the British press reports, a deal that “slid through Congress with no objections by legislators and virtually no comment in the American media.” This is “the first time such high-performance military equipment has been sold unrestricted and unamended abroad since the Second World War” (“sold” means funded by U.S. military aid), a “decisive enhancement of Israel’s military capabilities, giving it the power to strike at potentially dangerous nations far beyond its borders: Iran, Iraq, Algeria, and Libya for example.” The U.S. “appears to be reappointing Israel as local deputy sheriff, a role which ended with the disappearance of the communist threat in the Middle East”—which, rhetoric aside, was never the real threat as the extended appointment once again reveals, and has indeed been officially conceded.25

  Though Israel’s barring of development in the territories was well known, its extent came as a surprise even to the most knowledgeable observers when they had an opportunity to visit Jordan after the IsraelJordan Peace Treaty of October 1994. The comparison is particularly apt, Danny Rubinstein observes, since the Palestinian populations are about as numerous on both sides of the Jordan, and the West Bank was somewhat more developed before the Israeli takeover in 1967. Having covered the territories with distinction for years, Rubinstein was well aware that the Israeli administration “had purposely worsened the conditions under which Palestinians in the territories had to live.” Nonetheless, he was shocked and saddened to discover the startling truth.

  “Despite Jordan’s unstable economy and its being part of the Third World,” he found, “its rate of development is much higher than that of the West Bank, not to mention Gaza,” administered by a very rich society which benefits from unparalleled foreign aid. While Israel has built roads only for the Jewish settlers, “in Jordan people drive on new, multiple-lane highways, well-equipped with bridges and intersections.” Factories, commerce, hotels, and universities have been developed in impoverished Jordan, at quite high levels. Virtually nothing similar has been allowed on the West Bank, apart from “two small hotels in Bethlehem.” “All universities in the territories were built solely with private funding and donations from foreign states, without a penny from Israel,” apart from the Islamic University in Hebron, originally supported by Israel as part of its encouragement of Islamic fundamentalism to undermine the secular PLO, now a Hamas center. Health services in the West Bank are “extremely backward” in comparison with Jordan. “Two large buildings in East Jerusalem, intended for hospitals and clinics to serve the residents of the West Bank, which the Jordanians were constructing in 1967, were turned into police buildings by the Israeli government,” which also refused permits for factories in Nablus and Hebron under pressure from Israeli manufacturers who wanted a captive market without competition. “The result is that the backward and poor Jordanian kingdom did much more for the Palestinians who lived in it than Israel,” showing “in an even more glaring form how badly the Israeli occupation had treated them.”

  Electricity is available everywhere in Jordan, unlike the West Bank, where the great majority of Arab villages have only local generators that operate irregularly “The same goes for the water system. In arid Jordan, several large water projects…have turned the eastern bank of the Jordan valley into a dense and blooming agricultural area,” while on the West Bank water s
upplies have been directed to the use of settlers and Israel itself—about five-sixths of West Bank water, according to Israeli specialists.26

  As reported by the London Financial Times, ‘Nothing symbolises the inequality of water consumption more than the fresh green lawns, irrigated flower beds, blooming gardens and swimming pools of Jewish settlements in the West Bank” while nearby Palestinian villages are denied the right to drill wells and have running water one day every few weeks, polluted by sewage, so that men have to drive to towns to fill up containers with water or to hire contractors to deliver it at 15 times the cost. In Summer 1995, the Israeli national water company Mekorot, cut supplies to the southern and central parts of Gaza for 20 days because people had no money to pay their bills. While a handful of Israeli settlers run luxury hotels with swimming pools for guests and profit from waterintensive agriculture, Palestinians lack water to drink—or, increasingly, even food to eat, as the economy collapses, apart from wealthy Palestinians, who are doing fine, on the standard Third World model.

  Individual cases clarify the general picture. For example, the village of Ubaydiya, where 8000 Palestinians were deprived of running water for 18 months while the nearby Jewish settlements were “flourishing in the desert” (though Mekorot did promise to restore service to deter a hearing at the High Court of Justice, with the outcome unknown at the time of writing). Or Hebron, where thousands of people had no water from their pipes in August 1995. Journalist Amiram Cohen reports that in “the hot days of summer,” 1995, each Arab of Hebron received less than one-fourth of the water allotment of a resident of the nearby allJewish settlement of Kiryat Arba.

  The radically discriminatory use of water resources should persist under Oslo II, which “continues the old policy of keeping [Palestinians] from thirsting to death,” one analyst in Israel observes, while “not allowing the increases that would be necessary for economic growth.” Water is denied for Arab industry or agriculture, restrictions that do not hold for Jewish settlers. Meanwhile Israel will continue to use the waters of the West Bank under its claim of “historic use” since the 1967 occupation. The Oslo II accords provide that “both sides agree to coordinate the management of water and sewage resources and systems in the West Bank during the interim period,” basically preserving the status quo. Only the waters of the occupied territories are subject to discussion, consistent with the general framework of capitulation.27

  The Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty has provisions on “achieving a comprehensive and lasting settlement of all the water problems between [Israel and Jordan].” They are outlined by David Brooks of Canada’s International Development Centre, a specialist on water resources of the region and a member of Canada’s delegation to the Middle East Multilateral Peace Talks on water and the environment. He observes that the terms are not “particularly remarkable as water agreements go,” with one exception: “what is omitted, or, more accurately, who is omitted. Not a word is said about water rights for the Palestinians, nor about giving them a role in managing the waters of the Jordan valley.” “Palestinians are not even party to the negotiations,” Brooks observes: “Their omission is staggering given that most of the Lower Jordan River (from Kinneret to the Dead Sea) forms the border between Jordan and what is likely in the near future to be Palestinian, not Israeli, territory.”28

  His basic point is correct, but the omission becomes less staggering when we depart from the rhetoric about what lies down the road and attend to its factual basis: specifically to the fact that Israel has always made very clear its intention to retain the Jordan Valley within Greater Israel, so that Palestinian cantons that may some day be called “a state” will be largely cut off from the outside. Effective control over Palestinian enclaves by Jordan and Israel, if that proves to be the outcome, will bring to a natural conclusion the cooperative efforts of Israel and Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy that go back to the post-World War II origins of these states, including the 1948 war.29

  The Jordan-Israel Treaty is a component of the “truly new Middle East” that does receive attention in Western commentary being far more significant than $1 billion stolen from Palestinians laboring under subhuman conditions or the assignment of crucial Palestinian resources to important partners in the peace process. Its major achievement is the integration of Israel within the U.S.-dominated Middle East system. Longstanding tacit relations among participants are now becoming more overt and efficient, and Israel is taking on its intended role as a militaryindustrial-technological center for the region (possibly a financial center as well).

  This goal was difficult to achieve as long as the Palestinian issue remained a festering sore, a source of unrest in the Arab world. But Arafat’s acceptance of “the peace of the victors,” in the apparent hope of salvaging some shreds of his waning authority by becoming an agent of the powerful, has helped to suppress the Palestinian issue, at least for the present (there are other factors, including the disintegration of secular Arab nationalism and the disarray of the South generally). One notable consequence of this success is “the real peace dividend for Israel,” as the Wall Street Journal describes the fact that “the barriers are now down in the fastest-growing markets in the world, which are in the Far East, not the Middle East.” The Middle East is already pretty much in Washington’s pocket, but for a U.S. outpost to position itself in the contested Asia-Pacific region is a useful further accomplishment.

  These consequences of the Oslo peace process are reflected in the rapidly rising level of foreign investment in Israel, which is increasingly seen as “the fulcrum of economic development in the region” (Lord Sterling, chairman of a major U.K. shipping company). “Israel will look back on 1995 as the year when international finance and business discovered its thriving economy” the Financial Times observed— “thriving” in the usual manner of “economic miracles,” mimicking its patron by achieving unusually high rates of inequality and dismantling social services.30

  Another important component of the “peace of the victors” is the end of even a gesture towards Palestinian refugees. The Oslo settlement effectively abolishes their “right of return,” endorsed unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 1948 as the most direct application of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted the previous day) and reiterated regularly since. Immediately after Oslo I, in another “visionary” pronouncement, Rabin had dashed any hopes that refugees might return to the areas of Palestinian autonomy (let alone anywhere else). That is “nonsense,” he explained: “If they expect tens of thousands, they live in a dream, an illusion.” Perhaps some “increased family reunification,” nothing more. While the Clinton Administration offered $100 million to the PA, mostly for security forces (in contrast to $3 billion to Israel, perhaps twice that if we add other devices), it cut by $17 million the U.S. contribution to UNRWA, the largest single employer in the Gaza Strip and responsible for 40% of its health and education services as well as for Palestinian refugees elsewhere. Washington may be planning to terminate UNRWA, which “Israel has historically loathed,” Graham Usher observed. Breaking with earlier policies, the Clinton Administration voted against all General Assembly resolutions pertaining to Palestinian refugees in 1993 and 1994, on the grounds that they “prejudge the outcome of the ongoing peace process and should be solved by direct negotiations,” now safely in the hands of the U.S. and its clients. As a step towards dismantling UNRWA, its headquarters are to be moved to Gaza, which should effectively terminate international support for the 1.8 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The next step may be to defund it completely, UN sources report.31

  The signing of Oslo II and the Rabin assassination shortly after received enormous attention and coverage. Typical headlines after the signing give the flavor. “Israel agrees to quit West Bank.” “Israel Ends Jews’ Biblical Claim on the West Bank” in “Rabin’s historic trade with Arabs,” a “historic compromise.” “Israelis, Palestinians find a painful peace,” establishing an “unde
niable reality: The Palestinians are on their way to an independent state; the Jews are bidding farewell to portions of the Holy Land to which they have historically felt most linked.” “Score One for Clinton.” “At White House, symbols of a Day of Awe.”

  Editorials added that “the latest Israeli-Palestinian accord is a big one, making the historic move toward accommodation of the two peoples all but irreversible.” A Reuters chronology identified the Day of Awe, September 28, 1995, as the day on which “Israel and the PLO sign agreement extending Palestinian rule to most of West Bank.” The New York Times lead story after the assassination reported that Rabin had “conquered the ancient lands on the West Bank of the Jordan” and then “negotiated the accord to eventually cede Israeli control of them to the Palestinians.” The major Times think-piece on Rabin focused on the “evolution” in his thinking that was “taking place before your eyes,” as “his language underwent a remarkable transformation and so did his ideas about peace with the Palestinians”; “it was astonishing how far he had roamed from where he stood in 1992.” The former Jerusalem bureau chief of the Washington Post reported that “when Rabin offered Israelis the possibility of ‘separation’—of walling off the Gaza Strip and West Bank and getting Palestinians out of sight and out of mind—the majority responded with enthusiasm.” “Those who murdered Rabin, and those who incited them, didn’t do so because they opposed plans to create a Palestinian Bantustan,” the New Statesman correspondent reported from Jerusalem, chiding Edward Said for thinking otherwise. “No: they knew that the course Rabin was charting would lead, unless stopped, to a Palestinian state.”32