Chomsky on Israel and Palestine

The topic is: Where do we go from here? The answer to that is largely up to us. Evidently, it requires some understanding of how we got here. The question of where we're going now has a clear answer. It's given accurately by the leading academic specialist on the occupation, Harvard's Sara Roy, as she writes that under the terms of disengagement, Gazans are virtually sealed within the Strip, while West Bankers, their lands dismembered by relentless Israeli settlement, will continue to be penned into fragmented geographic spaces, isolated behind and between walls and barriers.

Her judgment is affirmed by Israel's leading specialist on the West Bank, Meron Benvenisti, who writes that 'the separation walls snaking through the West Bank will create three Bantustans (his words): north, central and south, all virtually separated from East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian commercial, cultural and political life. And he adds that this, what he calls the soft transfer from Jerusalem, that is an unavoidable result of the separation wall, might achieve its goal. Quoting still, 'the goal of disintegration of the Palestinian community, after many earlier attempts, have failed.' 'The human disaster being planned,' he continues, 'will turn hundreds of thousands of people into a sullen community, hostile, and nurturing a desire for revenge.' So, another example of the sacrifice of security through expansion that's been going on for a long time.

A European Union report concludes that U.S.-backed Israeli programs will virtually end the prospects for a viable Palestinian state by the cantonization and by breaking the organic links between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Human Rights Watch, in a recent statement, concurs.

There was no effort to conceal the fact that Gaza disengagement was in reality West Bank expansion. The official plan for disengagement stated that Israel will permanently take over major population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel in the West Bank. That was endorsed by the U.S. ambassador, as it had been by the President, breaking sharply with U.S. policy.

Along with the disengagement plan, Israel announced investment of tens of millions of dollars in West Bank settlements. Prime Minister Sharon immediately approved new housing units in the town of Maale Adumim--that's to the east of Jerusalem--the core of the salient that divides the southern from the central Bantustan, to use Benvenisti's term, and also announced other expansion plans.

There is near unanimity that all of this violates international law. The consensus was expressed by U.S. Judge Buergenthal in his separate declaration attached to the World Court judgment, ruling that the separation wall is illegal. In Buergenthal's words, "The Fourth Geneva Convention and International Human Rights Law are applicable to the occupied Palestinian territory and must therefore be fully complied with by Israel. Accordingly, the segments of the wall being built by Israel to protect the settlements are ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law," which happens to mean about 80% of the wall.

Two months later, Israel's high court rejected that judgment, ruling that the separation wall, quoting, "must take into account the need to provide security for Israelis living in the West Bank, including their property rights." This is consistent with Chief Justice's Barak's doctrine that Israeli law supersedes international law, particularly in East Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders. And practically speaking, he is correct, as long as the United States continues to provide the required economic, military and diplomatic support, as it has been doing for 30 years, in violation of the international consensus on a two-state settlement.

You can find detailed documentation about all of this in work of mine and others who have supported the international consensus for 30 years in print, explicitly. In Israeli literature, like Benny Morris's histories, you can find ample evidence about the nature of the occupation. In Morris's words, "founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers and daily intimidation, humiliation and manipulation, along with stealing of valuable land and resources." Like other Israeli political and legal commentators, Morris reserves special criticism for the Supreme Court, whose record, he writes, "will surely go down as a dark day in the annals of Israel's judicial system."

Keeping to the diplomatic record, the first -- both sides, of course, rejected 242. The first important step forward was in 1971, when president Sadat of Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. That would have ended the international conflict. Israel rejected the offer, choosing expansion over security. In this case, expansion into the Egyptian Sinai, where General Sharon's forces had driven thousands of farmers into the desert to clear the land for the all-Jewish city of Yamit. The U.S. backed Israel's stand.

Those decisions led to the 1973 war, a near disaster for Israel. The U.S. and Israel then recognized that Egypt could not be dismissed and finally accepted Sadat's 1971 offer at Camp David in 1979. But by then, the agreement included the demand for a Palestinian state, which had reached the international agenda.

In 1976, the major Arab states introduced a resolution to the U.N. Security Council calling for a peace settlement on the international border, based on U.N. 242, but now adding a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories. That's Syria, Egypt, Jordan and every other relevant state. The U.S. vetoed the resolution again in 1980. The General Assembly passed similar resolutions year after year with the United States and Israel opposed.

The matter reached a head in 1988, when the PLO moved from tacit approval to formal acceptance of the two-state consensus. Israel responded with a declaration that there can be no, as they put it, "additional Palestinian state between Jordan and the sea," Jordan already being a Palestinian state -- that's Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir -- and also that the status of the territories must be settled according to Israeli guidelines. The U.S. endorsed Israel's stand. I can only add what I wrote at the time: "It's as if someone were to argue the Jews don't need a second homeland in Israel, because they already have New York."

In May 1997, for the first time, Peres's Labour Party agreed not to rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty in areas excluding major Jewish settlement blocks, that is, the three cantons that were being constructed with U.S. support. The highest rate of post-Oslo settlement was in 2000, the final year of Clinton's term and Prime Minister Barak's.

Maps of the U.S.-Israel proposals at Camp David show a salient, east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and a northern salient virtually dividing the northern from the central canton. I have the maps if you want them. The current map considerably extends these salients and the isolation of East Jerusalem. My maps are from the leading Israeli scholars, Ron Pundak, the Director of the Shimon Peres Center. The crucial issue at Camp David was territorial, not the refugee issue, for which Arafat agreed to a pragmatic solution, as Pundak, the leading scholar, reveals. No Palestinian could accept the cantonization, including the U.S. favorite, Mahmoud Abbas.

Clinton -- we don't have to debate it, because Clinton recognized that Palestinian objections had validity, and in December 2000 proposed his parameters, which went some way toward satisfying Palestinian rights. In Clinton's words, "Barak and Arafat had both accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations."

The reservations were addressed at a high level meeting in Taba, which made considerable progress and might have led to a settlement, but Israel called them off. That one week at Taba is the only break in 30 years of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. High-level informal negotiations continued, leading to the Geneva Accord of December of 2002, welcomed by virtually the entire world, rejected by Israel, dismissed by Washington. That could have been the basis for a just peace. It still can. By then, however, Bush-Sharon bulldozers were demolishing any basis for it.

Every sane Israeli hawk understood that it was absurd for Israel to leave 8,000 settlers in Gaza, protected by a large part of the army, while taking over scarce water resources and arable land. The same conclusion was to withdraw from Gaza while expanding through the West Bank, and that will continue as long as Washington insists on marching on the road to catastrophe by rejecting minimal Palestinian rights. I'm quoting the warning of the four former heads of Israel's Shin Bet Security Service. "There are clear alternatives, and if that march to catastrophe continues, we will have only ourselves to blame."