by Noam Chomsky
As in the U.S., the threat to transfer production across the border can be used effectively to undermine unions, lower wages, increase inequality, and diminish the threat of democracy. “If any union even thinks of striking, the manufacturers can close their factories and set up new ones in Gaza,” Histadrut officers explain, a prospect that was particularly appealing to Yitzhak Rabin, who had “never concealed his animosity toward the Histadrut or his free-market leanings”—“free market” U.S.-style, with the economy based on massive state subsidy for wealth and privilege and spin-offs from military industry. A model is suggested by events in Ofakim, where a factory was closed shortly after its owners received a substantial public subsidy and transferred across the border to enjoy much cheaper labor with few benefits, a good illustration of the promise of Peres’s “new order” in the Middle East.46
For the time being, however, Israeli policies continue to contribute to the further collapse of the economies. The territories were not permitted to develop under Israeli rule and are now spinning rapidly downward, though Palestinians “tied to the system” and “with access to loans and political influence” can enrich themselves by robbing foreign aid with Israel’s cooperation. Similarly the U.S. winks at Israel’s rampant corruption, for example, the diversion of billions of dollars of U.S. loan guarantees, theoretically for immigrants, to give “Israel’s banking system (taken over by the government after the bank shares scandal) greater liquidity and willingness to extend credit to corporations, small businesses, and private individuals,” enabling Israelis to “purchase automobiles, foreign travel, or speculate on the stock market” in an artificially rich country that now is competing with its sponsor for the lead in inequality in the industrial world. Widespread corruption in client states is considered no more of a problem than at home, as long as the “significant people” are receiving their due.47
The IMF reported that through 1996, unemployment nearly doubled in the territories since the Oslo process began, and per capita income shrank 20%, while investment halved. The further devastation of the economy results in part from the closures, which were particularly harsh under Labor, and from Israel’s policy of blocking Palestinian exports while maintaining a captive market for expensive Israeli imports, made even more costly as they pass through the monopolies established as pay-offs by the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the IMF reports, total Israeli exports grew by almost half, “nearly doubling in Asian markets opened up by the peace process, while foreign investment in Israel went up sixfold.” The UN agencies in the territories estimate the decline in per capita GNP since Oslo I to be about 40%, accelerating “the retardation of development in the territories that began in 1967.” Other informed observers give still higher estimates of the decline.48
In short, the “peace process” follows a rule of very great generality: it serves the interests of its architects quite nicely while the interests of others are “an incident, not an end,” to borrow the thoughts of Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State on the real meaning of the Monroe Doctrine—to be kept secret, Wilson wisely decided.49 As for the “insignificant people,” the “peace process” has offered the U.S. and Israel new mechanisms to follow the advice of Moshe Dayan, one of the Labor leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, in the early days of the occupation: Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories that “we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.” The suggestion is natural within the overriding conception articulated by former President Chaim Herzog, in 1972: “I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter... But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner.”50 Recall that this is the voice of Labor, the U.S. favorites, towards the dovish end of the spectrum of the political leadership. Nothing fundamental has changed in the conception of these sectors or their U.S. sponsors, apart from new modalities. The right-wing nationalist/religious blocs tend to take a harsher line.
After Oslo II, Peres informed a gathering of ambassadors in Jerusalem that “this solution about which everyone is thinking and which is what you want will never happen.” He continued to act resolutely to ensure that outcome with U.S. funding and support—for example, in February 1996, when his Housing Minister Binyamin (“Fuad”) Ben-Eliezer announced the construction of 6500 units for Jews only in the area of Southeast Jerusalem that Israel calls “Har Homa,” with groundbreaking scheduled to begin in a year, just when it took place, though now under Likud.
Only a few days before Netanyahu was elected, dozens of Palestinians tried to block Peres’s bulldozers paving the way to the planned settlement at Har Homa. Ben-Eliezer also announced other building plans that appear to be more significant, particularly those to the east of Jerusalem (Plan E-1). These developments will effectively split the West Bank into two cantons when Ma’ale Adumim is incorporated into “Greater Jerusalem,” in accord with the plans announced and implemented by the Rabin-Peres Administrations after the Oslo agreements and now pursued by their Likud successor. While attention was focused on the Har Homa/Jabal Abu Ghneim constructions, falsely attributed to Likud initiatives, Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai announced that Labor’s E-1 program would be implemented, with new housing construction and road-building. Knesset Member Michael Kleiner, the head of the expansionist “Land of Israel Front” (“Hazit Eretz Yisrael”), greeted the announcement with appreciation, observing that this plan, which “was the initiative of the former Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer with the authorization of Yitzhak Rabin,” is “the most important” of the Front’s demands, more so than Har Homa.
“Fuad” Ben-Eliezer also explained that “Fuad does everything quietly with the complete protection of the Prime Minister,” using such terms as “natural growth” instead of “new settlements” when he implements Labor’s policies of expanding Greater Jerusalem to include Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, and Beitar as the “first circle” of settlements surrounding Jerusalem, to which another “chain of settlements” is to be added in a second circle.
According to Labor dove Yossi Beilin, the Rabin government “increased settlements by 50%” in “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) after Oslo, but “we did it quietly and with wisdom,” whereas you, Netanyahu, “proclaim your intentions every morning, frighten the Palestinians and transform the topic of Jerusalem as the unified capital of Israel—a matter which all Israelis agree upon—into a subject of world-wide debate.” The statement is only partially accurate, since the “quiet wisdom” extends well beyond Jerusalem.51
The differences of style can presumably be traced to the constituencies of the two political groupings. Labor, the party of educated professionals and westernized elites, is more attuned to Western norms and understands that the sponsors should be offered a way “not to see” what they are doing. Likud’s brazen and crude methods of achieving basically the same results are an embarrassment to Western humanists, and sometimes lead to conflict and annoyance.
The Labor/Likud program of establishing a Bantustan-style settlement cannot be accused of violating the “peace process.” Oslo I says nothing relevant, apart from the stipulations about the “permanent status” already mentioned, which establish the basic principles of the Peres-Shamir-Baker plan and long-term U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. Oslo II, in contrast, is quite explicit about many important topics. I have reviewed the details elsewhere and will not repeat them.52 In brief, it grants Israel permanent control over most of the crucial water resources and imposes purposefully humiliating conditions on Palestinians, even with regard to such matters as transit of Palestinian police on “Palestinian roads.” These abominations are designed to make life for Palestinians as miserable as possible while Israelis and tourists speed to their destinations on the modern “bypass” highways that free them f
rom the need to see the Arab population who are to survive somehow, isolated from their families, workplaces, and institutions. With regard to land, the agreement allows Israel to do virtually what it likes. Oslo II even states that Palestinians “shall respect the legal rights of Israelis (including corporations owned by Israelis) related to lands located in areas under the territorial jurisdiction of the [Palestinian] Council”—that is, the whole of the occupied territories—specifically their rights related to Government and Absentee land, an indefinite category that expands at Israel’s whim, reaching perhaps 70% of the territories, according to the Israeli press.53 Oslo II thus abrogates the stand of the entire world, including technically the United States, that legal rights cannot be attained by conquest, and rescinds even the post-1971 U.S. interpretation of UN 242.
Palestinians and others are only deluding themselves and others when they say that Israel committed itself to “withdraw from occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem,” in accord with UN 242, or anything remotely like it; or that they agreed to grant Palestinians “control over water, telecommunications and transport, among other things”; or that George Bush’s Madrid initiative “involved the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions on Palestine” (Palestinian Foreign Minister Farouk Kaddumi). Or that “the terms of reference” for the “peace process” are given by UN 242, the Oslo Accords, and the Madrid Conference, “which enshrine the land-forpeace principle” (Egyptian diplomat Abdelaleem El-Abayad).54 Nothing of the sort is true, as the documents make clear and the consistent practice even more so, unless we interpret such phrases as “land-forpeace” with the cynicism that would have welcomed the South African homelands policy.
Israeli doves may prefer what some observers have called a state of “collective self-denial,” avoiding the documents and the historical context that gives them meaning, or taking refuge in the wording introduced to spell out the fact that these are “interim” agreements, hence in principle open to change—which would be true even if they were “final agreements,” of course. They may choose even not “to see” what is happening a few miles from where they live—not a phenomenon unique to Israel, needless to say. The funders and supporters elsewhere may also find the stance convenient. But the realities remain.
The realities go beyond the occupied territories, including also Israel within the Green Line, where South African analogies are again unfortunately not inappropriate, if by no means exact. And crucially they extend to the Palestinian diaspora, particularly now that Clinton has broken with official U.S. policy since 1948 and now (alone with Israel) rejects UN resolution 194, which spells out the concrete meaning of Article 13 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted the preceding day. Since a negative U.S. vote is effectively a veto, the right of Palestinians to return or receive compensation is thereby formally abrogated. The endorsement was always hypocritical. There was no intention of implementing resolution 194, even the right to compensation, which Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett estimated at $1 billion in 1950 (50% more than German reparations to Israel), amounting to $6 billion in current dollar value even without interest.55
If current plans succeed, the predictions of Israeli government Arabists in 1948 might be fulfilled: the refugees would either assimilate elsewhere or “would be crushed” and “die,” while “most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries.”56 Apart from privileged sectors that accommodate to the “neo-colonial” settlement, those remaining in the territories can look forward to the bright future of Haitians toiling in U.S. assembly plants for a few cents an hour or the semi-slave laborers in China’s foreign-controlled export industries. And Palestinians within Israel may expect to live as American Jews and Blacks would if the U.S. were to become “the sovereign State of Christian Whites” throughout the world (to paraphrase Israeli law), not the state of its citizens.
Such consequences need not come to pass, but they might, and if they do, privileged sectors of American, Israeli, and Palestinian society will have a lot to answer for, in my opinion.
Notes—Chapter 10
Washington’s “Peace Process”
1. See chapter 3, and sources cited. Also see references of chapter 9, note 30.
2. See chapter 9, section 3, and sources cited.
3. Ha’aretz, Oct. 24, 1991.
4. See articles by Lamis Andoni and Shmuel Toledano in Middle East
International, Aug. 28, 1993 (Toledano reprinted from Ha’aretz, Aug. 13). Landoni is reporting from the Arab world. Toledano, an Israeli dove, advised the government to exploit the PLO’s decline to impose a peace settlement of its choice—as it was doing, though secretly.
5. Aug. 31, 1993.
6. NYT, Sept. 2, 1993.
7. Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 2, 1993.
8. NYT, Aug. 31, 1993.
9. News from Within, Alternative Information Center, Jerusalem, Aug. 5, 1993.
10. Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 6; Serge Schmemann, NYT, Nov. 17; editorial, Ha’aretz, Oct. 6 (Middle East International), 1995. Rubinstein, Palestine-Israel Journal, Winter 1995. Report on Israeli Settlement, Foundation for Middle East Peace (Washington), 5.6, Nov. 1995.
11. Ibid. Benvenisti, Ha’aretz, May 12, 1994 (Israel Shahak, “Translations from the Hebrew Press,” June 1994). For further details on Oslo II, see World Orders, Epilogue.
12. For recent reviews and updates, see my Necessary Illusions (South End, 1989); World Orders; Powers and Prospects (South End, 1996). Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995) and The Rise and Fall of Palestine (Minnesota, 1996). Naseer Aruri, The Obstruction of Peace (Common Courage, 1995). On 1993-95, see Edward Said, Peace and its Discontents (Vintage, 1995), Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis (Pluto, 1995), and Nick Guyatt, The Absence of Peace (Zed, 1998). One recent standard source is Mark
Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Indiana, 1994), one of the better histories, though not without serious flaws, particularly with regard to the topics considered here; see Powers and Prospects on one crucial case.
13. Usher, Middle East International, Jan. 6, 1995.
14. Rabin, Yediot Ahronot, Sept. 3, 1993, quoted in The Other Front (Jerusalem, Sept. 9, 1993). Kissinger, Australian Financial Review, Nov. 13, 1995.
15. Barak, Benvenisti, Ha’aretz, Oct. 12 (The Other Front, Jerusalem, October 1995); “The Taba Interim Agreement, Another Capitulation by Arafat,” Ha’aretz, July 6 (Shabak, “Translations,” Sept. 1995). Sharon, Ethan Bronner, Boston Globe, Nov. 17; Harel, Schmemann, op cit.; Beilin, Ma’ariv, Sept. 27 (Shahak, “Translations”); Rabin, Report on Israeli Settlement, Nov. 1995; Rabin and press reports, Ha’aretz, Oct. 6 and Kol Ha’ir, Oct. 13 (Challenge, Jerusalem, Dec. 1995).
16. Reinhart, Ha’aretz, May 27, 1994. Avineri, cited by John Battersby, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 28, 1995.
17. Interview, Ha’aretz, June 4, 1982.
18. See Necessary Illusions, and my “Israel’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Zachaiy Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada (South End, 1989).
19. The Other Front, Oct. 1995; News from Within, Nov. 1995. For further details and sources, see World Orders, chapter 3, Epilogue.
20. Shahak, MEI, 17 Nov. 1995; Ideology as a Central Factor in Israeli Policies (Hebrew), May-June 1995.
21. Yifat Susskind, Challenge, No. 32; Shahak (see note 23, this chapter); Gid’on Levy, Ha’aretz, Apr. 23, 1995.
22. B‘Tselem Report, May 1995, citing Sarah Kaminker; summary and excerpts in Ha’aretz, May 15; News from Within, June 1995. Also Aaron Back and Eitan Felner, senior staff members of B’Tselem, Tiklun 10.4, 1995. Graham Usher, MEI, 12 May 1995. See also Clyde Haberman, NYT, May 14, 15, 1995. More recently, Kollek has expressed his “pride” in having expanded Jewish settlement in areas of East Jerusalem that are now being falsely attributed to his ultra-right successor, including the initial planning for what Israel cal
ls “Har Homa,” handled clumsily by Netanyahu, Kollek says. Letter, Ha’aretz, July 27, 1998.
23. Sarah Kaminker and Associates, Planning and Housing Issues in East Jerusalem, June 1994. For more extensive discussion, see World Orders, Epilogue, based on a later study by Kaminker for the St. Yves Legal Resource Center.
24. Israeli Ministry of Defense, JP, Feb. 15, 1985; cited by Anthony Coon, Town Planning Under Military Occupation (Al Haq, Ramallah, 1992). Shaked, Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 13, 1995. Moshe Semyonov and Noah Lewin-Epstein, Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water (Cornell, 1987). Shlomo Abramovitch, Sheva Yamim, Mar. 3; editor Hanoch Marmari, Ha’aretz, Mar. 9 (Shahak, “Translations,” April); Ha’etzni, Ma’ariv, May 5, 1995.
25. Kay La’Oved Newsletter, Oct. 1995. Aid, see Powers and Prospects. Said Aburish and Tim Llewellyn, Independent, June 23, 1995.
26. Rubinstein, “Two Banks of the Jordan,” Ha’aretz, Feb. 13, 1995 (Shahak, “Translations,” April). See World Orders and Powers and Prospects for further discussion.
27. Julian Ozanne and David Gardner, FT Aug. 8; Stephen Langfur, Allegra Pachecho (Society of St. Yves), Challenge, Nov.-Dec. (also MEI 3 Nov.); Cohen, Ha’aretz, Aug. 21, 1995. For further details from the Oslo II accords and other sources, see World Orders, Epilogue.
28. Outlook (Vancouver), Oct./Nov. 1995.
29. See particularly Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan (Columbia, 1988).
30. Amy Dockser Marcus, WSJ, Nov. 2; Julian Ozanne, FT Oct. 24, 1995. On the tacit alliance, see my April 1977 article in Le monde diplomatique, reprinted in Towards a New Cold War. It is most illuminating, but beyond the scope of this discussion, to see how these facts are finally entering mainstream scholarship.
