WILL ISRAEL SURVIVE BOTH DIPLOMACY AND WAR?

ARAFAT FEARS BEING BENEDICT ARNOLD RATHER THAN GEORGE WASHINGTON

At a time with rampant current events breaking daily, often hourly, there is much need to remember the importance of sometimes taking time for reflection, of sometimes stepping back to contemplate both the past and the future. This is just what the brilliant British journalist David Hirst does in this uniquely insightful article, "The End of Israel?".

Some of the top Israelis might well agree with Hirst -- and that might well explain the desperation with which they pursue their unceasing attempts to find some way to get the Arafat Regime to save themselves in the short run and Israel itself in the long run. Beilin, Peres, and yes Barak as well, do seem to understand that Israel's very future is now on the line as weapons of mass destruction seep into the region and as cohorts of Ariel Sharon speak even in public of Israeli military strikes from Tehran to Aswan. And that is precisely what accounts for the furious pace of political events in recent years, propelled by Yitzhak Rabin himself when he realized that there would never be a better time to strike a political deal based on Israeli strength and imposed on Israeli terms.

The big problem, right from the start, was that Rabin's vision -- nurtured by Beilin and Peres and then adopted as his own by Barak -- was a deal grounded in the power relationships of the moment, not in international law, and certainly not in justice. And the problem is (for the Israelis that is) that the Arafat crowd wasn't in the end able to deliver as they were supposed to in return for lavish VIP treatment and fat foreign bank accounts. In the end while contemplating signing "the final peace" Arafat became aware -- to put things in American historical terms -- that by declaring such an Israeli-made and Israeli-controlled mini-Palestinian Statelet he might not be seen as George Washington, but rather as Benedict Arnold.

THE END OF ISRAEL?
By David Hirst "Regional war, however successful in the past, could prove disastrously counter- productive today. At the least, it would defer for a generation any prospect of Israel's final, negotiated acceptance in the region. At worst it would create the very existential threat it was supposed to ward off."

The first, visceral instinct of colonial regimes is to react to the indigenous violence which their own suppressive policies breed with a more effective violence of their own. Israel enjoys an immense military superiority over its adversaries. Just how long it would need to reconquer the territories, disarm the police and militias, is little more than a question of tactics, the number of casualties it would be ready to receive and inflict. And its conventional, let alone nuclear, strength makes it more than a match for any combination of Arab armies. Zionism has been fashioned by its most dramatic military exploits: two wars -- 1948 and 1967 -- were brilliantly successful, yielding fundamental territorial and other gains; others -- like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon -- were much less so.

The Intifada has brought Israel psychologically close to some new exploit of this sort. To listen to the rhetoric is to grasp the depth of the temptation to go for the simple, radical, absolute solution such military superiority presents. It comes not only from the right-wing opposition, but from government figures and the military. It says, in effect, that Israel again faces an existential threat. It spurns any idea that the Intifada grew out of Palestinians' despair at Israel's own behaviour; it contends that they never changed, their aim is what it always was, to "drive the Jews into the sea;" and, for Arafat, the peace process is just a means of "dismantling Israel in stages." "Let the army win," is the rallying-cry of the settlers and their political allies. What that really means, says Zeev Schiff, veteran military analyst of Ha'aretz newspaper, is "the conquest of the territories under Palestinian control, the forced collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of the Palestinian population." According to the same newspaper, the deputy chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, one of Barak's most influential advisers, thinks in rather apocalyptic terms. Israel, he argues, is now engaged in "the most critical campaign against the Palestinians, including Israel's Arab population, since the 1948 war;" indeed, it is "the second half of 1948." Given that, in the first half, Israel committed the original sin from which all its troubles ultimately stem, what the second half might bring is a necessarily grim surmise.

It would also very likely lead to the regional war of which Barak now openly warns. Israeli generals and politicians bemoan the decline of Israel's "deterrent power." Because of the wider Arab identification with Palestine, the arena in which that power must apply "does not" -- as one commentator put it -- "begin and end at the Netzarim Junction (in Gaza), but extends from Tehran to Damascus and Cairo." The obvious flash point for regional conflagration is south Lebanon. Hizbullah, increasingly casting itself as a model for, and accomplice in, the Palestinian struggle, could furnish the pretext any time; it insists it won't refrain from cross-border attacks into a piece of claimed Lebanese territory, the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel, and Israel warns that if it doesn't, Syria, not just Lebanon, will suffer its massive punitive wrath.

But regional war, however successful in the past, could prove disastrously counter-productive today. At the least, it would defer for a generation any prospect of Israel's final, negotiated acceptance in the region. At worst it would create the very existential threat it was supposed to ward off. It would become an open-ended adventure arousing Arab, international, and domestic Israeli reactions to which conventional military strength has no answer. Among its many possible consequences: Iraq, already outbidding everyone else in its support for the Intifada, would complete its comeback in the region as the standard-bearer of rejectionism; turmoil in Jordan would -- at the very least -- force King Abdullah to repudiate the peace treaty with Israel; the US, utterly discredited by its pro-Israel bias, would forsake its protégé in a bid to rescue what is left of its influence in the region, and if it didn't, Saudi Arabia would unsheathe the oil weapon; it would sap Israel's morale and cohesion, depress all those of its people who had thought that it was about to become a normal state at last, alienate those who believe that the real villains are less the Palestinians than the settlers and the aggressive Zionist-colonial ideology they embody.

Yet even if Israel, forgoing all-out military solutions, continues its quest for acceptance through negotiation, it is now less likely than ever to achieve it. If it was going to happen, it would have been before the Intifada broke out. Now, after so much blood, Arafat cannot sell his people's sacrifices short. And the concessions that Barak can sell to his are even less than what they might have been; for, as the expected electoral victory of super-hawk Sharon shows, the whole society has shifted rightwards.

The only alternative is what is already happening: a low-intensity war of attrition waged against a background of diplomatic deadlock. Some believe it could go on for years. Israel will presumably persist indefinitely in the tactics it has already adopted: selective attacks on personnel and installations, harassment, intimidation, economic blockade, designed to exhaust and weaken the Palestinians to the point where they return, on its terms, to the negotiating table. But who will weary first? The pain the Palestinians are enduring is infinitely greater than the Israelis', but so is their capacity to endure it. Accustomed to poverty and privation, imbued with rage and hatred of Israeli oppression, and the energy that such anti-colonial struggles can produce, they face an adversary which has largely forgotten the self-denying zeal of its pioneering years, which quit "the mud" of south Lebanon because it was losing about 20 dead a year, and has lost 43 in three months of Intifada.

The longer this struggle goes on, the more the Palestinians will perceive eventual Israeli retreats as weakness. The more weakness, the more retreats they will press for. To the point where, in the end, they will be tempted to regress to original goals; like Israel's deputy chief of staff, but from a diametrically opposite standpoint, they will come to see it as the "second half" of 1948, and their opportunity to undo the calamity of the first.

The rejectionists already do. But for the still-dominant Arab-Palestinian acceptors, there is still a way to save themselves, and Israel, from the all-out conflict they desperately fear; the arrival in the region last month of the American-led "fact-finding committee" is the first, timid step towards it. There must, they say, be international, as opposed to merely American, sponsorship of an historic compromise; after all, the international conception of a just and lasting peace is not so very different from theirs, and it must if necessary be imposed by force. This is seen as not merely practicable, but historically proper too. Israel has made it plain that it would resist any encroachment on its sovereignty. But the record shows that, like no other state, it was the child of the UN, that the General Assembly's 1947 Partition Resolution was the founding charter of its international legitimacy, and that, as the price of admission to the world body, it formally acknowledged that its sovereignty was subordinate to a higher obligation: internationally sponsored redress for the Palestinians.

Such an outcome is a long way off yet. Meanwhile -- argues Jordanian columnist Rami Khouri -- the longer the Intifada continues "the more self-evident it becomes that the underlying policy of colonial occupation -- outdated, counter-productive, morally and politically rejected by the entire world -- is unsustainable and nearing its end." But what end? One that, through international fiat, preserves this last great exception in the history of European colonialism -- or one that ends the exception itself? [A-Ahram Weekly On-line: 18 - 24 January 2001]

Note: A second version of this article was published by The Guardian in England over the weekend:

ISRAEL'S SURVIVAL IS FAR FROM ASSURED
By David Hirst in Beirut

Israel has existed for 52 years. It would surely by now be as secure a nation-state as any other but for the way it came into existence. As a response to European anti-semitism, Zionism may have been a very special, high-minded kind of European colonialism but, in its consequences for an indigenous people, it was as bad as any other.

The settler-state to which it gave birth has also been very special, indeed unique, in that it continues to exist at all. All other such polities have disappeared during European decolonisation. Those who peopled them have either been driven out in a bloody liberation war or yielded their political supremacy to majority rule.

The supreme measure of this success has been the official acceptance of its right to exist the enterprise eventually won from its indigenous victims. The achievement is all the more remarkable in that these victims are not just the Palestinians, who were directly dispossessed in the ethnic cleansing that accompanied Israel's birth, but a much larger community, the Arabs, who identified with them in their anti-colonial struggle.

There were always rejectionists in the region, now most potently typified by Hamas or Hizbullah, but the dominant players are accepters. Their acceptance is an accomplished fact in the case of Egypt and Jordan, who have made formal peace with Israel; it remains an intent with Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, who have yet to do so. But all subscribe to a broad consensus of what constitutes a "just, lasting and comprehensive" settlement.

Clearly, however, the success cannot be permanently assured until those for whom acceptance is still an intent convert it into an accomplished fact. Short of that, the risk is not merely that the enterprise will remain incomplete; it is that, sooner or later, the success it has achieved will be challenged and, in the end, instead of its consolidation as the great exception in the annals of European colonialism, it will suffer the same fate as all the rest.

The al-Aqsa intifada has the makings of that challenge. It is no accident that it erupted just when, on the face of it, Zionism's ultimate triumph had come within its grasp. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had laid his historic, take-it-or-leave-it compromise before the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, at Camp David in July. In return for "generous concessions" by Israel, the Palestinians were to have renounced all further claims on it. He failed, because the concessions fell so far short of the Arab-Palestinian accepters' consensus.

At the heart of the consensus is a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, in the West Bank and Gaza. Mr Arafat first proclaimed it in 1988, and in the 1993 Oslo agreement, he agreed to work towards it through a series of "interim" arrangements paving the way for "final status". Though it was the fruit of Arab/Palestinian weakness, the offer was by any reckoning a magnanimous one. Mr Arafat had begun his career at the head of a "popular liberation struggle" whose objective had been full recovery of the homeland and dismantling of the settler-state. Here he was offering to yield up a full 78% of original Palestine. But throughout the "interim" stages, Israel spurned the offer.

In the Camp David "final-status" talks Mr Barak may have ceded more than ever before, but he was still demanding much more than the 78%, plus a whole array of other gains, ideological or security-related, making the compromise even more imbalanced than the one the Arab-Palestinian consensus had already acquiesced in. From this Israeli rejection grew the intifada. To what extent Mr Barak triggered it for his own ends, or Mr Arafat manipulated it for his, is detail. To the Palestinians, its purpose has become clear. This is their "war of independence".

Liberal Israelis liken it to their own of 52 years ago. "The tanzim [young Palestinian fighters]," forecast one, "will no more demobilise before Israel recognises the borders of the Palestine state than the pre-1948 Jewish underground would have done before Israel was established."

The Palestinians have therefore regressed, in some degree, to the methods with which Mr Arafat began his career. But their aims are still essentially Oslo by other means. Hamas, believers in "complete liberation", have ceded the main role to Mr Arafat's Fatah. And Fatah proclaims no ambitions beyond that 22%. It wants its state to co-exist with Israel, not to destroy it. But can this restraint withstand the rising violence, passions and chaos that the intifada threatens to unleash?

The first instinct of colonial regimes is to react to indigenous violence with a more effective violence of their own. Israel enjoys military superiority over its adversaries. Just how long it would need to reconquer the territories is little more than a question of tactics, and its strength makes it more than a match for any combination of Arab armies. Zionism has been fashioned by its most dramatic military exploits; two wars - 1948 and 1967 - were brilliantly successful. The intifada has brought Israel psychologically close to some new such exploit. To listen to the rhetoric is to grasp the depth of the temptation to go for the absolute solution which such military superiority presents.

It says, in effect, that Israel again faces an existential threat. It contends that the Palestinians never changed, their aim is still to "drive the Jews into the sea" and, for Mr Arafat, the peace process is just a means of "dismantling Israel in stages".

"Let the army win," is the rallying cry of the settlers and their political allies.What that really means, says Zeev Schiff, military analyst of Ha'aretz newspaper, is "the conquest of the territories under Palestinian control, the forced collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of the Palestinian population".

According to the same newspaper, the deputy chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, thinks in rather apocalyptic terms. Israel, he argues, is now engaged in "the most critical campaign against the Palestinians, including Israel's Arab population, since the 1948 war"; indeed, it is "the second half of 1948". Given that, in the first half, Israel committed the original sin from which all its troubles ultimately stem, what the second half might bring is a necessarily grim surmise.

It would also very likely lead to a regional war. Because of the wider Arab identification with Palestine, the arena in which Israel's "deterrent power" must apply "does not" - as one commentator put it - "begin and end at the Netzarim Junction [in Gaza], but extends from Tehran to Damascus and Cairo."

But regional war could prove disastrously counter-productive. At the least, it would defer for a generation any prospect of Israel's final acceptance in the region. At worst it would create the existential threat it was supposed to ward off.

Among its possible consequences: Iraq would complete its comeback in the region as the standard-bearer of rejectionism; turmoil in Jordan would force King Abdullah to repudiate the peace treaty with Israel; the US would forsake Israel in a bid to rescue what is left of its influence in the region, and if it failed to do so Saudi Arabia would unsheath the oil weapon; it would sap Israel's cohesion.

Yet Israel is now less likely than ever to achieve acceptance through negotiation. If that was going to happen, it would have done so before the intifada broke out. Now, after so much blood, Mr Arafat cannot sell his people's sacrifices short. And the concessions Mr Barak can sell to Israel are even fewer than they might have been, for society has shifted rightwards.

The only alternative is what is already happening: a low-intensity war of attrition waged against a background of diplomatic deadlock. Some believe it could go on for years. Israel will presumably persist in its tactics: selective attacks on personnel and installations, harassment, economic blockade, designed to weaken the Palestinians to the point where they return on Israel's terms to negotiations.

But who will weary first? The pain the Palestinians are enduring is infinitely greater, but so is their capacity to endure it. Accustomed to privation and imbued with hatred of Israeli oppression, they face an adversary which has largely forgotten the self-denying zeal of its pioneering years, which quit "the mud" of south Lebanon because it was losing about 20 dead a year - and has lost 47 in three-and-a-half months of intifada.

The longer this struggle goes on, the more the Palestinians will perceive any Israeli retreats as weakness. The more weakness, the more retreats they will press for, to the point where they will be tempted to regress to their original goals. The rejectionists already think this way. But for the still-dominant accepters, there is still a way to save themselves and Israel from all-out conflict; the formation of an American-led "fact-finding commission" was a first, timid pointer towards it.

There must be, they say, international - as opposed to merely American - sponsorship of an historic compromise; and it must if necessary be imposed by force. This is seen as not merely practicable, but historically proper too. Israel has made it plain that it would resist any encroachment on its sovereignty. But the record shows that it was the child of the UN, that the general assembly's 1947 Partition resolution was the founding charter of its international legitimacy, and that it formally acknowledged that its sovereignty was subordinate to a higher obligation - internationally sponsored redress for the Palestinians.

Such an outcome is a long way off yet. Meanwhile, argues the Jordanian columnist Rami Khouri, the longer the intifada continues, "the more self-evident it becomes that the underlying policy of colonial occupation - outdated, counter-productive, morally and politically rejected by the entire world - is unsustainable and nearing its end". But, if so, what end? One that, through international fiat, preserves this last great exception in the history of European colonialism - or one that ends the exception itself? [The Guardian, UK, 27 January]