Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2014 00:53:37 +0200
One century after World War I and the Balfour Declaration: Palestine and
Palestine studies
<http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/walid-khalidi> Walid Khalidi 3 April
2014
To hug one's identity in an age of globalisation is a global phenomenon
witnessed in the break-up of states and devolution movements worldwide. The
one-staters run counter to this trend. The veteran Palestinian historian
explains how students of this history can best counter a woeful tale of
hubris.
We meet today to celebrate the second anniversary of the establishment of
the SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies. I am honoured to have been asked to
deliver this first Annual Lecture. It is deeply gratifying to be addressing
you on this occasion in the name of a sister institution—Institute for
Palestine Studies (IPS)—which has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary
as an independent, private, non-partisan, non-profit, public service
research institute.
We at IPS look forward to long years of innovative cooperation between our
two institutions. Like other centres of Palestine studies, we are both
researching the same phenomenon: the ever-growing accumulation of debris
generated on that fateful day of 2 November 1917 by the so-called Balfour
Declaration, the
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most destructive political document on the Middle East in the twentieth
century.
How far this university has travelled—and how alien the idea of a Centre for
Palestine Studies would have been to Lord Balfour—can be gauged from the
oft-quoted words, dripping with Olympian disdain, he uttered in 1919:
The Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or
wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in
future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of
the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
The expression ‘Palestine Problem’ is shorthand for the genesis, evolution,
and fall-out of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, which began in the
early 1880s and is ongoing at this very hour.
One century ago this year, the floodgates of World War I opened to usher the
chain of events that led to the Balfour Declaration. By the time it was
issued in 1917, almost 40 years had passed since the beginning of Zionist
colonisation, and 20 since the first Zionist Congress at Basel. Despite the
fervour of the early colonists, the movement of the Jewish masses fleeing
Tsarist rule was not southwards towards the Levant, but westwards across
Europe towards the magnetic shores of North America. A trickle arrived in
Palestine; a flood rolled across the Atlantic.
Portrait of Lord Balfour, along with his famous declaration. Wikimedia
Commons. Public domain.Most Rabbinical authorities throughout the diaspora
were hostile to Zionism for preempting the Jewish Messiah, while the
American and European Jewish bourgeoisie were embarrassed by Zionism and
fearful of gentile charges of dual loyalty.
All this changed when Britannia gave its blessing to the Zionist venture in
the Balfour Declaration. Not only did it give its blessing, it also agreed
to transform this unilateral declaration into a self-imposed obligation
guaranteed under international law in the newly established League of
Nations mandate system.
Uniquely in its governance as an imperial power, it agreed to carry out this
obligation in partnership with a foreign private body, (the World Zionist
Organisation), now elevated, in the guise of an international Jewish Agency,
to an independent actor recognised by the League for the specific purpose of
creating the Jewish National Home in Palestine.
An immediate question leaps to mind. How could London, teeming with
pro-consular expertise ripened during centuries of dealings with
multitudinous races and faiths across the globe, have fallen for the Zionist
plan?
The short answer has two-syllables: hubris. At the end of World War I, with
the US withdrawn behind a wall of isolationism and with the Ottoman,
Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires in ruins, British power was
paramount. King Clovis’s realm across the channel alone could challenge it.
But this was no big deal, because Sir Mark Sykes had found a handy formula
to win French acquiescence: divide the loot!
There is of course a longer answer, which is where our research centres come
in. Setting aside the trees and thick foliage of the mandate period’s White
Papers, Blue Books, and Commissions of Inquiry, our scholars would do well
to look more deeply into how and why imperial London between the two world
wars nurtured a rival imperium in imperio under its governance. The puzzle
deepens when one considers that this imperium was not only local. It had an
external dimension, an imperium ex imperio in the Jewish Agency whose major
central financial institutions and other sources of power were largely
American, putting it beyond London’s control.
Thus, when in 1939 Ben Gurion, the preeminent leader of the Yishuv, decided
to change horses, discarding the British mount (favoured by his political
rival Chaim Weizmann) for an American steed, he did so in deliberate
calculation of America’s potential as a counterweight and successor to
Britain.
The story is as old as history: the revolt of a client against a
metropolitan patron. But the erosion of Anglo-Zionist concord by the late
1930s also illustrates an iron law of politics. No two political entities
remain eternally in sync. There may be a moral here for the current
relationship between Obama’s Washington and Bibi’s Tel Aviv.
1948 onwards
The events of 1948 have stirred up more controversy than any other phase of
the Palestine Problem, giving rise eventually to a new post-Zionist school
of historiography in Israel. Its authors have been designated the New
Historians, as opposed to the Old Historians who articulated a mythical
Zionist foundational narrative.
The old narrative featured a Yishuv David facing an Arab Goliath, with
perfidious Albion bent on strangling the infant state. It also involved
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians leaving their homes, farms, and
businesses in response to orders from their leaders to make way for the
invading Arab armies on 15 May 1948.
Given the role of IPS and this speaker in the articulation of the
Palestinian counter-narrative to that of the Old Historians, it could be
useful, for the record, to share some elements of how it developed.
One of the first authoritative accounts of an early version of the Israeli
orders’ myth is given by the Palestinian historian Arif al-Arif. Arif had
been based in Ramallah as assistant district commissioner during the last
years of the Mandate, and the Jordanians kept him on as de facto civilian
governor.
In mid-July 1948, Israeli forces had attacked the Palestinian towns Lydda
and Ramla while the Arab armies a stone’s throw away stood by. The entire
population of the two towns, some 60,000 people, were forced on a long trek
towards Ramallah. They arrived there in a pitiable condition, after hundreds
had dropped along the way.
Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, arrived in Ramallah the third week of
July. Arif, who was delegated to accompany him, was astonished when
Bernadotte told him that the senior Israeli officials he had just met had
“assured” him that the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramla had left because of
orders given to them by the town leaders.
Arif immediately arranged for Bernadotte to meet these leaders, still living
in caves and under bridges after their expulsion: Muslim and Christian
ecclesiasts, municipal councillors, judges, professionals of all kinds.
There is little doubt that this experience contributed to Bernadotte’s
recommendation to the UN on the return of the refugees, which the General
Assembly adopted after his assassination by Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang.
In the 1950s, the orders myth was all over the British media. By this time
the predominant Israeli version was that the orders had been broadcast by
the top Palestinian leadership, not local leaders. The most aggressive
exponent of this version was the British journalist Jon Kimche, then editor
of the weekly Jewish Observer, the organ of the British Zionist Federation.
The top Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was then living in exile
in Lebanon. I had known him from childhood and he always treated me in a
kindly fashion. When I described to him the impact of the orders’ myth in
the west, he immediately allowed me unrestricted access to his archives
(since destroyed by Phalangist forces during the Lebanese civil war in the
1970s).
I had earlier gone through reams of the BBC monitoring records of the 1948
Arab radio broadcasts kept at the British Museum in London. I added the data
from Haj Amin’s archives to the findings from the BBC records to produce my
article “Why Did the Palestinians Leave?” which was published in 1959 by the
AUB alumni journal Middle East Forum.
Soon after the article’s publication, I received in Beirut a visit from this
young Irish journalist, Erskine B. Childers, who showed great interest in
the BBC records and said he intended to examine them himself upon his return
to London. In early 1960, Ian Gilmour, owner of the Spectator, the
prestigious British weekly had just been to Israel and had heard all about
the orders from senior Israeli officials. Having read the article in Middle
East Forum, he asked many questions and left. On 12 May 1961 the Spectator
published Childers’ article entitled “The Other Exodus,” whose conclusion
was: no orders.
There ensued a crackling correspondence of readers’ letters that lasted
almost three months and in which, thanks to Gilmour, the counter-Israeli
narrative was given unprecedented exposure. An early responder was Jon
Kimche, who loftily opined: “New myths ... have taken place of old ones. The
Israelis ... have contributed their share, but more lately it has been the
Arab propagandists (Walid Khalidi and Childers).”
At the time I was on sabbatical from the AUB at Princeton, checking the CIA
monitoring records of the 1948 Arab broadcasts at the Firestone Library.
>From there, I wrote to the Spectator disclaiming acquaintance with Childers
(which was untrue), but expressing great delight that he had independently
arrived at the same conclusion as myself (which was true). I also noted that
my latest findings in the CIA records corroborated my earlier findings in
the BBC records.
As it happened, while at Princeton I had also been looking at the Hebrew
sources with the help of a sympathetic elderly Sephardic lady scholar. The
result of my research was “Plan Dalet: The Zionist Master Plan for the
Conquest of Palestine,” soon to be published, again in the Middle East
Forum. As the Spectator correspondence increasingly involved the Palestinian
exodus more generally—I weigh in with a summary of my findings. My letter
stated, inter alia:
A Zionist master-plan called Plan Dalet for the forceful occupation of Arab
areas both within and outside the Jewish State “given” by the UN to the
Zionists was put into operation. This plan aimed at the de-Arabisation of
all areas under Zionist control.
Plan Dalet aimed at both breaking the back of Palestine Arab resistance and
facing the UN, the US, and the Arab countries with a political and military
fait accompli in the shortest time possible – hence the massive and ruthless
blows against the centres of Arab population. As Plan Dalet unfolded and
tens of thousands of Arab civilians streamed in terror into neighbouring
Arab countries, Arab public opinion forced their shilly-shallying
governments to send their regular armies into Palestine.
It is the considered opinion of this writer that it was only the entry of
the Arab armies that frustrated the more ambitious objective of Plan Dalet,
which was no less than the military control of the whole of Palestine west
of the Jordan.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first public mention of Plan Dalet
in the west.
1967 onwards
Just as World War I gave birth to the Balfour Declaration, the 1967 War gave
birth to another momentous document: UN SC Resolution 242. And just as the
Balfour Declaration is, in a sense, the fountainhead of all developments in
the Palestine Problem/Arab Israeli conflict in the twentieth century up to
and including the 1967 War, so is SC Res. 242, in a sense, the ultimate
fountainhead of all developments in the conflict throughout the balance of
the twentieth century and to this day.
Oddly, many observers look with favour on Res. 242, largely because its
preamble talks about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by
war.” But in its operative paragraphs, Res. 242 does the precise opposite.
True, it talks about “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories
occupied” (in the French version, “des territories occupés”), but it does
not specify the time when the withdrawal should begin, the line to which
Israel should withdraw, or how long the withdrawal should take. Nor does it
mention by name the territories to be withdrawn from.
The resolution calls for peace and “secure and recognised borders” between
all the protagonists, but it does not indicate who decides the security or
location of these borders. There is no mention of the Armistice lines. The
resolution affirms the need for a “just settlement of the refugee problem,”
but does not indicate who decides the justice of the settlement or who these
refugees are. The word “Palestinian” is totally absent, and there is no
reference to the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the occupied
territories.
This remarkable text should be seen against the background of decisions
taken by the Israeli cabinet on 18-19 June, soon after the hostilities
ended.
Briefly, the Israeli cabinet consensus was on
(1) withdrawal only on condition of peace agreements;
(2) peace treaties with Egypt and Syria on the “basis “ of the international
frontiers and Israel’s security needs; (3) annexation of the Gaza Strip, and
(4) the Jordan River as Israel’s “security border,” implying permanent
control over the West Bank.
You don’t have to be a cryptographer to see the concordance of Res. 242 with
these specifications—or rather instructions—of the Israeli cabinet. The
focus on peace treaties with Egypt and Syria to the exclusion of Jordan is,
of course, designed to de-couple these countries from the Palestine problem
and to isolate both the Palestinians and Jordan.
On 28 June 1967, ten days after this cabinet meeting, Israel revealed its
true intentions by annexing the 2.5 sq. miles of Jordanian municipal East
Jerusalem together with an additional 22.5 square miles of adjacent West
Bank territory in an obscene territorial configuration sticking northwards
at Ramallah.
Res. 242 was an Israeli diplomatic and political victory no less momentous
than its victory on the battlefield. But it was only possible because of
President Lyndon B. Johnson. What really motivated LBJ remains a field of
study for all centres of Palestine studies. As a senator in 1956, Johnson
had adamantly opposed Eisenhower’s decision to force Israel to restore the
status quo ante and give back its “acquisition of territory by war.”
In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel’s foreign minister Abba Eban worked
closely with LBJ’s inner circle, including US ambassador to the UN Arthur
Goldberg. (As a member of a pre-Saddam Iraqi delegation to the UN General
Assembly right after the war, I had to listen to Eban weave his spider web
of falsehoods, but I also got the chance to rebut him).
Eban reveals in his memoirs that he urged his American counterparts to
“eradicate” from their minds the very concept of “armistice,” and to link
Israeli
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boundaries would be fixed by agreement.” This meant that the starting point
for the negotiations would be the farthest foxholes reached by Israeli
armour deep in Arab territory. It also meant that Israel could—as indeed it
did—use the full weight of its conquests and its military superiority to
dictate the time, tempo, scope, sequence, and extent of its withdrawal.
The “regime” established by Res. 242 has been acquiesced in, if not abetted,
by successive American administrations since Johnson’s presidency. The
resolution’s opaqueness and permissiveness made possible the settlement
policy ongoing to this very hour. It is this regime that sent Sadat to
Jerusalem and Arafat to Oslo.
The 1967 War dealt the coup de grace to secular pan-Arabism, already in its
death throes. But it catapulted the Palestinian guerrilla movement to the
front ranks because it symbolised resistance for the entire Arab world after
the humiliating rout of the Arab armies. The war’s most profound and
potentially catastrophic impact, however, lies in the inspiration it gave to
neo-Zionist religious fundamentalist Messianism, and to its creation of
conditions conducive to a clash over Jerusalem’s holy places between Jewish
and Christian evangelical jihadists on the one hand and Muslim jihadists on
the other.
Palestine today
When one looks at the Palestinian scene today, one sees a people hanging by
their fingernails to the rump of their ancestral land. In such dire straits,
the topmost Palestinian priority should surely be to close ranks. This is
why the Fatah Hamas rift is so scandalous. You need your two fists to
survive. Both sides are equally to blame and both sides should be
tirelessly, relentlessly urged to reconcile. Of course the very act of
reconciliation between them would be pounced on by Netanyahu as an act of
war. But surely Israel knows that intra-Palestinian reconciliation is a must
for any Palestinian-Israeli peace.
The gap between Fatah and Hamas on the mode of struggle is wide. Abbas is
committed to non-violence. This commitment is not philosophical: as a
practitioner of violence in his guerilla days, Abbas was quietly absorbing
its cost and consequences. It is no coincidence that he was the first within
the Fatah leadership to propose a dialogue with sympathetic Israeli
interlocutors.
Abbas’ commitment to non-violence is strategy, not tactics. I know this for
certain, having listened to him and to his three predecessors: Arafat,
Shuqairi, and Haj Amin. In many ways, Abbas is a tragic figure. He is a
guerilla leader wittingly turned “collaborationist”. Every night his
security forces keep to their barracks, while Israeli commando squads prowl
the by-lanes of Kasbahs, refugee camps, and West Bank villages hunting young
militants. This is a terrible price to pay for moral high ground.
How long can Abbas maintain this policy without real progress towards peace?
How long can the Palestinians put up with his leadership?
Nevertheless it should not be forgotten that the BDS movement could not have
progressed so far without Abbas. Wide though it is, the gap between Abbas
and Hamas on the issue of armed struggle is not unbridgeable. There is
evidence of pragmatism within the Hamas leadership. And if it thinks
theologically, it can also conceive of a theological exit strategy from its
declared commitment to the armed struggle. Besides, Abbas’ commitment to
non-violence does not preclude civil disobedience. This could be the meeting
ground once the will to reconcile takes over, and the time for civil
disobedience comes.
If the Fatah/Hamas rift is dangerously detrimental to the Palestinian cause,
so is disagreement about its political goal. It is no secret that the
one-state/two states issue is a major topic of debate, not only within the
Palestinian camp, but also within a much wider circle of allies and
supporters.
As you may have surmised, I am not a congenital advocate of the partition of
Palestine—i.e., the two states formula. In fact I came to it pretty late. It
was only in 1978 that I espoused it in an article in Foreign Affairs
entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable.”
I am still a two-stater, and this is why: there is global support for a two
state solution—with the possible exception of the Federated States of
Micronesia. It would be irresponsible to forgo this invaluable asset. We
have already tried the one-state framework during the 30 years of the
British Mandate, and we know what happened even though the balance of power
was at first massively in favour of the Palestinians.
The balance of power today is crushingly in favour of the other side. Israel
is the superpower of the Arab Mashreq, thanks to the rottenness of the Arab
states system and its incumbent political elites. In a one-state framework,
Israel would have the ideal alibi to remove whatever constraints remain on
settlement. Within a twinkling the Palestinians would be lucky if they had
enough land to plant onions in their back gardens and to bury their dead
alongside.
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence pledged to ensure, “complete
equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants, irrespective of
religion, race, or sex”. Now Netanyahu is insisting on prior recognition of
the Jewish character of Israel as an absolute condition of a peace
agreement.
Of the 37 signatories to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, only
one was born in Palestine. The others came mostly from Poland and the
Russian Empire: from Plonsk, Poltava, & Pinsk, from Lodz and Kaunas. These
men were mostly left of centre, but they had not come all the way to
Palestine to share their new home with its inhabitants.
When Netanyahu speaks of a Jewish state he is speaking in the name of a vast
and growing religious fundamentalist right wing nationalist constituency,
which splits Israeli Jewish society, right down the middle. The division in
the Jewish population of Israel today is no longer between left and right,
but between the secularists and the religious. Many of the secularists are
liberal and post-Zionist, but they are not in the ascendant.
In the ascendant is a neo-Zionist Messianic triumphalist religious right
settler movement allied to US Christian apocalyptic evangelism, fired by the
1967 conquest of the whole of Eretz Israel and the return of the “Temple
Mount” to Jewish military possession. This coalition considers Palestinians
Canaanites whose doom is Biblically predestined. It does not look much more
favourably on the secular Jewish Israelis. There is no consensus in Israel
on who is a Jew. Indeed we should ask Bibi for a definition of “Jewish.”
Many proponents of BDS are one-staters looking to the success of sanctions
against South Africa, but between the start of the sanctions against South
Africa in the early 1960s and Mandela’s election in 1994 there were 30
years. Time is not an asset for Palestinians in a one-state framework
despite the demographic factor.
I am not against BDS. I want it to succeed. To succeed it needs the Jewish
post-Zionists and the liberal Zionists. Delegitimise the occupation and your
chances are bright. Delegitimising Israel itself will cost you the bulk of
your Jewish allies and most of the friendly world’s capitals.
Let us have two BDS campaigns
BDS one, to end the Occupation, and BDS two, to implement the pledge to its
Arab citizens in Israel’s Declaration of Independence—in that sequence.
To hug one’s identity in an age of globalisation is a global phenomenon
witnessed in the break-up of states and devolution movements worldwide. The
one-staters run counter to this trend.
A Palestinian state is a Palestinian imperative. Palestinians need to
maintain their own link to what is left of their own ancestral soil. They
need an umbilical cord to the collective memories of their parents and
grandparents.
They need a tribune who will stand up for those of them who will remain in
their diaspora. They need to pass an inheritance to their grand children and
great grand children. They need a spot under God’s sun where they are not
aliens, stateless ghosts, or second class citizens.
Israel and the US
Just how sorry the state of the “Arab Nation” is can be gauged from the fact
that the future of Palestine hinges more on “the desires and prejudices” of
Benjamin Ben Zion Nathan Netanyahu than on those of any incumbent in the
proud Arab capitals of Umayyad Damascus, Abbasid Baghdad, Ayyubid Cairo, or
Wahhabi Riyadh.
Still, the current tripartite discourse between Netanyahu, Kerry and Abbas
is in reality a façade for the arm-wrestling marathon that has been going on
between Bibi and Obama for five years. I listed Bibi’s parentage advisedly.
His ideological template was forged by and embodied in the teachings of his
grandfather Rabbi Nathan and his father Professor Ben Zion.
Rabbi Nathan, a contemporary of Herzl’s, was a National Religious Zionist (a
rare species at the time). He was an ardent follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky,
the founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement, so named because from the
early 1920s it sought to “revise” the gradualist, dissembling strategy of
Chaim Weizmann and Ben Gurion.
Jabotinsky insisted on an unabashed assertion of the end point of the Jewish
National Home—a Jewish state through which the river Jordan flowed, not one
in which the river was the border. This goal was to be achieved, in the
shortest possible time by massive immigration, by means of an “Iron
Wall”—i.e. overwhelming military force. Ben Gurion routinely referred to
Jabotinsky as “Vladimir Hitler.”
Ben Gurion’s ardour for Jabotinsky was no less intense than Nathan’s. He
joined the Revisionist party at 18 and later edited a Revisionist daily,
entitled Jordan, which relentlessly criticised Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Ben
Zion followed Jabotinsky to the US where he became his secretary. He stayed
there for ten years spreading the Revisionist ideology, but returned to
Israel to blast Begin for his peace treaty with Egypt.
Recently, not long before his death, Ben Zion told an Israeli daily that by
“withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating
electrical power and more, the Arabs won’t be able to exist and will run
away from here.”
Bibi’s Israeli biographers report that Ben Zion tutored his sons in history
and Judaism and that they held their father in “holy reverence.” As a boy
Bibi often wanted to discuss “the two banks of Jordan principle.” If Bibi’s
grandfather and father were his formative ideological influences, his role
model in life was his older brother Jonathan, the hero of Entebbe where he
was killed in action. This is where Bibi’s swagger comes from.
Jonathan’s death traumatised father and son. To honour him they established
the Jonathan Institute in Jerusalem for the study of “international
terrorism.” Appropriately, one of its conferences was addressed by Prime
Minister Menachem Begin, though he apparently refrained from sharing his
reminiscences about Deir Yasin, or about how his organisation, the Irgun,
had introduced the letter bomb, the parcel bomb, the barrel bomb, the market
bomb, and the car bomb to the Middle East.
For Bibi, the US is as much home ground as Israel. He knew the country from
age seven: elementary school, high school, MIT, a Boston Consulting firm.
During this period he honed a Philadelphia accent and mastered baseball
vocabulary. At least three of his uncles had emigrated to the US where they
became steel and tin tycoons.
After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Yitzhak Shamir, then foreign
minister, sent Bibi as an attaché to the Washington embassy to help repair
Israel’s image.
Bibi was an instant success: ubiquitously glib in the media, lionised by the
major Jewish organisations. As ambassador to the UN from 1984 to1988, he
consolidated his stardom with the pro-Israeli public in the US. In 1991
Shamir, now Prime minister, made Bibi deputy minister, further feeding his
Himalayan political appetite. By 1993 Bibi was the Likud leader, by 1996,
prime minister.
A major source of insights into the relationship between Washington and Tel
Aviv is the memoirs and autobiographies of successive presidents and
secretaries of state. The space devoted to the Arab/Israeli conflict in
these writings has grown enormously in the last few decades. Curiously, to
date there has been no serious attempt to collate this information with the
other sources— another field of study for Palestine centres.
Since his Washington embassy days, Bibi has dealt in various capacities with
five US administrations. He considers the American political arena as
legitimately open to him. He believes that his writings on terrorism
convinced President Reagan to change American policy on how to deal with it.
He brags that he successfully lobbied Congress to end Secretary Baker’s
attempts to open a dialogue with the PLO, explaining that “All I did was
force him (Baker) into a change of policy by applying a little diplomatic
pressure. That’s the name of the game....”
On his first visit to the US as PM in 1996, Bibi addressed Congress,
receiving tumultuous jack-in-the-box, bipartisan ovations. A tycoon uncle
whom he had invited to the session told a US newspaper that he believed his
nephew could beat Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in a presidential race.
President Clinton complained that when Bibi came to the White House for a
visit, “evangelist Jerry Falwell was outside, “rallying crowds.... praising
the Israeli government’s resistance to phased
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agents in the US joined Republicans to stir up suspicion against his Middle
East diplomacy.” Clinton believed that Bibi “recoiled at heart from the
peace process.” His favourite tactic was to “stall” and “filibuster” and
when challenged he would cry “national insult.”
Enter Barak Obama. Bibi, born in 1949, is 12 years older. By the time Obama
ran for the US senate in 2003, Bibi had already been UN ambassador, leader
of the Likud, prime minister, foreign minister, and was then, the incumbent
finance minister. It was probably only after Obama’s 2004 speech at the
National Democratic Convention that Obama began to loom on Bibi’s political
radar screen. Where on earth did this guy come from, and with that middle
name?? It is tempting to speculate that Bibi feels Obama is impinging on
Bibi’s own turf.
There is no time to go into the various rounds of the Obama-Bibi arm
wrestling match—the settlement freeze, Iranian nuclear ambitions, the 1967
lines, UN recognition, Hamas-Fatah agreement. Some observers believe Bibi
has “humbled” Obama. I think they are at deuce.
In the last 100 years
Since 1914, Zionism rode piggy-back first on Pax Britannica, then on Pax
Americana to establish a Pax Israeliana at the expense of the Palestinian
people. How long can it persist in its refusal to seriously address what it
has done to the Palestinians?
My hunch is that Bibi will acquiesce to Kerry’s framework proposals, but
only with the intention to stall. He thinks he can get away with it. He sees
himself as more than the prime minister of Israel. In 2010 and 2012, the
Jerusalem Post ranked him first on a list of the World’s Most Influential
Jews.
To Bibi, the Atlantic flows through Eretz Israel. Bibi knows he will outlive
Obama politically. In Israel, once a PM always a PM. Obama has less than 3
years to go. Meanwhile Bibi knows he can outflank Obama in the Congress. He
certainly has more bipartisan support there than the incumbent of the Oval
office.
All the other protagonists are committed to a peaceful resolution. Kerry is
his master’s voice, and Obama’s understanding of the Palestine problem far
surpasses that of all his predecessors. Abbas’ commitment to peace is
genuine. At his age, peace would be the crowning achievement of a lifetime.
The Gulf dynasts are panting for a resolution. They want to focus on the
real enemy: Pan-Islamic, anti-monarchical Tehran.
Bibi will never share Jerusalem. Continued occupation and settlement, while
tightening the noose around East Jerusalem, is a sure recipe for an
apocalyptic catastrophe sooner or later over the Muslim Holy Places in the
Old City. With the continued surge in religious fundamentalist zealotry on
both sides, the road to Armageddon will lead from Jerusalem.
That is why, Benjamin Ben Zion ben Nathan Nathanyahu is the most dangerous
political leader in the world today.
Professor Walid Khalidi is the Chairman of the Institute for Palestine
Studies, USA, based in Washington DC. This is the text of the speech that he
gave on 6 March 2014 as First Annual Lecture of the SOAS Centre for
Palestine Studies. The video of the lecture as well as a presentation of the
CPS are available <http://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cps/podcasts-and-papers/>
here.
<http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_
preset/wysiwyg_imageupload/537772/640Balfour.png> Portrait of Lord Balfour,
along with his famous declaration
<http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_
preset/wysiwyg_imageupload/537772/un50-051.gif>
http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/article_medium/wysiwyg_imageup
load/537772/un50-051.gifThe UN adopts SC Res. 242. Wikimedia Commons. Public
domain
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