Instead of getting solidly behind the implementation of UN resolutions on the Middle East conflict without fear or favour, Western politicians have allowed themselves to be led up the garden path by the US-initiated, so-called peace process, which climaxed during the presidency of Israel luvvie, Bill Clinton. Embraced in one form or another by every subsequent incumbent of the White House, it goes without saying that the only beneficiary of the PP charade has been Israel, which has essentially used it to divert a gullible West while ramping up its colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories.
I was moved to reflect thus on the whole sorry PP business while flicking through The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009) by Taylor Branch. One passage in particular struck me. But let me first set the scene. The year is 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat are shacked up with Clinton at Camp David and the matter of who gets what in Jerusalem is up for discussion:
"In hard negotiation, said Clinton, the Palestinians were willing to internationalize the walled Old City, but Barak baulked out of distrust of the United Nations. Israelis felt outnumbered and consistently mistreated in most world bodies, especially that one, and Barak floated his own proposal instead. Israel, while retaining formal sovereignty over the Old City, would concede a zone of Palestinian control through its Muslim quarter to the high stone plaza at the heart, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif ('Noble Sanctuary') and to Jews as the Temple Mount. In return Barak proposed a gesture to compensate religious Israelis. On specified occasions, Jews would be permitted to offer prayers on the Temple Mount for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, since Rome had destroyed Herod's Temple after a first-century Jewish rebellion. 'Arafat went berserk,' said the president, and his fellow Palestinians cried that Jews never before had dared such blasphemy. Even during the military occupation since 1967, Israeli police had prevented Jews from congregating to pray on the Temple Mount, where Muslims had managed continuous religious observance since the year 1187." (p 612)
Of course Arafat went berserk. He could see the thin end of a wedge making rapidly for his jugular. Anyhow, so Branch's story goes, Clinton decided to deploy what he thought would be a killer argument with the Palestinian president:
"To Arafat, alone, he pleaded for counterintuitive understanding of a vulnerability that coexisted with Israel's military dominance. Clinton and Arafat belonged to religious cultures fortunate to preserve many ancient shrines. Christians had the Vatican, Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, among others. Muslims revered the Kaaba in Mecca and the Tomb of the Prophet in Medina, plus the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque there on Jerusalem's Haram. Jews, lacking such treasures, centered their faith memories upon a fragment of the Western Wall beneath the destroyed temples of Solomon and Herod. Devout Israelis hoped one day to find their biblical Ark of the Covenant underneath by excavation. Such ruins and relics were all Jews had, but they meant no less than did two of the glorious places sacred to Muslims on that same central spot in the Old City. Surely, the negotiators could figure a way to honor differences born of the same yearning." (ibid p 613)
Now there's no mention in Branch's book of Arafat's response to Clinton. However, my guess is he went berserk - again. After all, he wasn't only hearing a reiteration of Barak's talking point, but as a Palestinian who'd heard it all before, was he perhaps also hearing an echo of one of Zionism's oldest and most enraging talking points. This is from 1946:
"Another line of argument that maddened the Palestine Arabs was what may be called the 'you have so much and I want so little' line. The Arabs had all the Arab world and the Jews only wanted Palestine, a small corner of that world. Was it so much to ask for? Could not the Arabs be generous and let them have it? Could not the Palestine Arabs find a home in Syria or Iraq? To understand how the Palestinian Arabs felt about this argument, it is only necessary to imagine how the people of Devon or Cornwall would greet a suggestion that they should surrender their part of England to the Jews and find a new home in Scotland." (An Arab Tells His Story: A Study in Loyalties, Edward Atiyah, p 202)
Showing posts with label Camp David. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Camp David. Show all posts
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
That Peace Treaty...
"President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) as 'untouchable compensation' for making and maintaining peace with Israel." (From Egypt's strategic importance to the US, cable sent by US ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, on 31/3/09, guardian.co.uk)
For USrael, Egypt is literally nothing if not its 1979 peace treaty with Israel. To understand the absolute centrality of that treaty to what is happening in Egypt today, just click on the Camp David tag below and read my 15/2/09 post A Likud Peace.
For USrael, Egypt is literally nothing if not its 1979 peace treaty with Israel. To understand the absolute centrality of that treaty to what is happening in Egypt today, just click on the Camp David tag below and read my 15/2/09 post A Likud Peace.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
A Likud Peace
"[Benjamin Netanyahu] is a hardliner on security. However, when he was prime minister a decade ago, he showed himself, like his Likud predecessor, Menachem Begin, willing to make peace deals involving trading land for peace." (Future unclear as voters go Right, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 12/2/09)
This is what is known as received wisdom - that only hardline Israeli politicians can sell 'peace' deals to security-conscious Israelis. Hardliners like Menachem Begin, for instance, who traded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula (captured along with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967) for 'peace' with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1979. The Camp David 'peace', it should be remembered, came only after a near successful Egyptian-Syrian attempt to win back their respective territories by force of arms in October 1973. But what sort of peacemaker was Likud hardliner Begin, and what was the nature of the 'peace' hammered out under the auspices of US president Jimmy Carter at Camp David? The following snippets from William B Quandt's Camp David: Peacemaking & Politics (1986) give us a pretty good idea:
Carter set out to achieve a comprehensive peace involving Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He had declared that "the third ultimate requirement for peace is to deal with the Palestine problem... there has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years." (p 48 )
Sadat, however, was not quite as forthcoming as Carter on that score: "His views on the Palestine question were the most puzzling, and the Americans were never quite sure how strongly committed to the Palestinians Sadat was. At this stage, however, he had said nothing to indicate that he was prepared for a separate agreement with Israel that offered nothing to the Palestinians." (p 53)
But even if Sadat and Carter had been on the same wavelength regarding the Palestinians, Israel had the Americans by the short & curlies: "[Foreign minister Moshe] Dayan... replied that it was possible to reach an agreement. Israel could go along with the procedures that Carter and [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance had outlined. In return, Carter should say that all previous agreements with Israel remained in force and that there would be no imposed settlement and no pressure in the form of cuts in economic or military aid. Israel should be free to object to a Palestinian state, and the US should say that Israel did not have to withdraw to the 1967 lines... Dayan could then tell the American Jews that there was an agreement and they would be happy. But if he was obliged to say that Israel would have to deal with the PLO or a Palestinian state, then there would be screaming in the US and in Israel. Carter saw the thrust of Dayan's remarks and said a confrontation would not be good for Israel either." (p 129)
Carter had got the message: "[National Security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski at the time worried about the impression left with the Israelis that the president was susceptible to pressure." (p 131)
"Increasingly, Carter and Sadat seemed to be thinking of an Egyptian-Israeli accord, one only loosely connected to an attempt to negotiate an agreement on the Palestinian question. Sadat focused his comments almost entirely on Sinai, where he insisted on a full withdrawal by Israeli forces. He rarely talked in detail about the West Bank or Gaza, preferring to stress general principles such as nonacquisition of territory by force and the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. He did not strongly support the American attempt to mobilise opinion behind a freeze on settlements and the applicability of UN Resolution 242 [which called for 'Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict'] to all fronts. Carter was therefore left in the awkward position of appearing to be more pro-Arab than Sadat, a politically vulnerable position to say the least. Hence the effort was made to get Sadat to put forward a clear proposal on the West Bank and Gaza. When he proved reluctant to do so, Carter apparently began to conclude that Sadat's real interest was a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli deal. This appraisal was probably accurate... " (p 177)
"Turning to the Israeli position, Carter said that even if Israel was not required to withdraw completely from the West Bank, and even if there was no Palestinian state, Begin would still not show flexibility. He would not stop settlement activity; he would not give up the settlements in Sinai; he would not allow the Sinai settlements to remain under UN or Egyptian protection; he would not agree to withdraw politically from the West Bank even if Israel could retain military outposts; he would not recognise that 242 applied to all fronts; and he would not give the Palestinians the right to choose, at the end of the interim period, whether they wanted to be affiliated with Jordan or Israel or to continue the self-rule arrangements." (p 186)
"... Carter had repeatedly pledged never to cut economic or military aid to Israel as a form of pressure, and he had vowed not to impose an American peace plan. So Begin could anticipate that little more than a verbal disagreement would result if the Camp David talks failed.' (p 208)
"The obvious trade... was to drop reference to withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for Israeli willingness to leave the Sinai completely.' (p 236)
"Sadat's foreign minister was later to write: 'In my opinion, Dayan's discussions with Sadat, which lasted less than an hour, was the straw that broke the camel's back and a turning point towards Sadat's involvement in a series of concessions, arriving at the point of total surrender and, in the end, his signing something beyond Israel's most optimistic dreams'." (p 238)
"Dayan suggested that 242 be referred to only with regard to future Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiations. Since in Begin's view King Hussein [of Jordan] had no valid claim to the West Bank... the issue of withdrawal should not arise. For those areas, Begin would agree to only one of 2 possible outcomes: perpetual autonomy or the imposition of Israeli sovereignty at the end of the 5-year transitional period." (p 244)
"[Attorney General Professor] Barak had little support for [Vance's] desire to continue the Camp David talks until the crucial West Bank and Gaza issues could be fully resolved. So his alternative of finding ambiguous language was implicitly accepted. The central idea, worked out between Barak and Vance was to have 2 synchronised sets of negotiations, one involving Jordan and Israel and one involving Israel and the elected representatives of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, joined by Egypt and Jordan. The draft would say that the principles of 242 applied to 'the negotiations' without spelling out what that meant in reality. Egypt and the US could claim that it meant that 242 did apply to the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel would maintain that it applied only to the peace treaty negotiated between Jordan and Israel, where the question of the future of the West Bank and Gaza would not be raised. Few outside observers would have been able to follow the logic of this arcane discussion, but if they had, they would have seen that a basis for future arguments was being laid." (p 244-245)
"In the end, events outside the immediate scope of the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations broke the stalemate. The shah of Iran fell from power in early 1979, and then everyone flinched, Carter most of all. For political and strategic reasons he concluded that he could not let the chance of peace between Egypt and Israel slip away while Iran was caught up in revolution. Even at some risk to his own reputation, he was prepared to once again make a major gamble to reach an agreement. And if Begin could not be moved, then Sadat would have to be." (p 290) And the rest, as they say, is history.
It is worth dwelling on the significance for the Middle East conflict of Sadat's sell-out at Camp David. Egypt's best known journalist Mohamed Heikal reflected: "The October War [of 1973] was a strategic victory for the Arabs. It was almost a tactical victory for the Arab armies, Egyptian and Syrian, which fought the war, but this in the end eluded them owing to miscalculations in the field and America's determination to rescue Israel, whatever the cost. Yet it is a fact that, as 1973 ended, the world was waiting with bated breath to see what this new political and economic giant, the Arab world, would make of its opportunity. Now, as I write, 9 years later, with the war in Lebanon recently ended, the contrast between original hopes and present reality is almost too bitter to contemplate. If it can be said that in 1967 Arab policies were betrayed by Arab arms, it is no less true that in 1973 Arab arms were betrayed by Arab policies. Israel's invasion of Lebanon [1982] revealed to all the Arabs' total impotence - political, military, economic. It was the moment of their greatest humiliation and shame. How Sadat would have reacted to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is impossible to say [Sadat was assassinated in October 1981]. But what is certain is that, by stating categorically in Jerusalem that there would never be another war between Egypt and Israel, he had given a one-sided pledge of non-belligerence of which Israel was to take full advantage. If there had been no such pledge, if Egypt had still been an active element in the Middle East military equation, the Israelis would never have dreamed of committing a hundred thousand troops to the invasion of their northern neighbour. The fact that Sadat's policies had ensured the total and inevitable isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world did more than anything else to give a clear passage for Sharon's tanks on the road to Beirut. Looked at dispassionately, it can be seen that the siege of Beirut was the logical outcome of the Camp David agreements. From the outset it was perfectly clear that Begin knew exactly what he intended these agreements to mean - no Palestinian state, no independent Palestinian entity, and if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza insisted on claiming to be represented by the PLO, then the PLO would have to be destroyed. The first stage of destruction involved the arrest and expulsion of prominent PLO supporters living under Israeli occupation, seizing land, cutting off water and various other forms of harassment. The second stage took the form of outright war. The Arabs could do nothing to stop Israel because by making a separate peace the state which was the Arab world's natural leader had effectively disarmed all the others as well as itself. The free hand which Sadat gratuitously presented to the Israelis was not exploited by them at the expense of the Palestinians alone; all Arabs east of the Suez Canal thereby became immediately exposed. Lebanon is the most obvious victim, but Syria too has felt the full weight of Israeli weaponry, and even Iraq became the target for the Israeli airforce. Egypt's opting out had a centrifugal effect on all other Arab countries, diverting their attention from what had for long been the dream of unity - however imperfectly understood or pursued, yet a noble and stimulating dream - into barren territorial rivalries, religious conflicts and social strife. The Arab world had become well and truly balkanized." (Autumn of Fury, 1983, pp 284-285)
This is what is known as received wisdom - that only hardline Israeli politicians can sell 'peace' deals to security-conscious Israelis. Hardliners like Menachem Begin, for instance, who traded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula (captured along with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967) for 'peace' with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1979. The Camp David 'peace', it should be remembered, came only after a near successful Egyptian-Syrian attempt to win back their respective territories by force of arms in October 1973. But what sort of peacemaker was Likud hardliner Begin, and what was the nature of the 'peace' hammered out under the auspices of US president Jimmy Carter at Camp David? The following snippets from William B Quandt's Camp David: Peacemaking & Politics (1986) give us a pretty good idea:
Carter set out to achieve a comprehensive peace involving Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He had declared that "the third ultimate requirement for peace is to deal with the Palestine problem... there has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years." (p 48 )
Sadat, however, was not quite as forthcoming as Carter on that score: "His views on the Palestine question were the most puzzling, and the Americans were never quite sure how strongly committed to the Palestinians Sadat was. At this stage, however, he had said nothing to indicate that he was prepared for a separate agreement with Israel that offered nothing to the Palestinians." (p 53)
But even if Sadat and Carter had been on the same wavelength regarding the Palestinians, Israel had the Americans by the short & curlies: "[Foreign minister Moshe] Dayan... replied that it was possible to reach an agreement. Israel could go along with the procedures that Carter and [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance had outlined. In return, Carter should say that all previous agreements with Israel remained in force and that there would be no imposed settlement and no pressure in the form of cuts in economic or military aid. Israel should be free to object to a Palestinian state, and the US should say that Israel did not have to withdraw to the 1967 lines... Dayan could then tell the American Jews that there was an agreement and they would be happy. But if he was obliged to say that Israel would have to deal with the PLO or a Palestinian state, then there would be screaming in the US and in Israel. Carter saw the thrust of Dayan's remarks and said a confrontation would not be good for Israel either." (p 129)
Carter had got the message: "[National Security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski at the time worried about the impression left with the Israelis that the president was susceptible to pressure." (p 131)
"Increasingly, Carter and Sadat seemed to be thinking of an Egyptian-Israeli accord, one only loosely connected to an attempt to negotiate an agreement on the Palestinian question. Sadat focused his comments almost entirely on Sinai, where he insisted on a full withdrawal by Israeli forces. He rarely talked in detail about the West Bank or Gaza, preferring to stress general principles such as nonacquisition of territory by force and the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. He did not strongly support the American attempt to mobilise opinion behind a freeze on settlements and the applicability of UN Resolution 242 [which called for 'Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict'] to all fronts. Carter was therefore left in the awkward position of appearing to be more pro-Arab than Sadat, a politically vulnerable position to say the least. Hence the effort was made to get Sadat to put forward a clear proposal on the West Bank and Gaza. When he proved reluctant to do so, Carter apparently began to conclude that Sadat's real interest was a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli deal. This appraisal was probably accurate... " (p 177)
"Turning to the Israeli position, Carter said that even if Israel was not required to withdraw completely from the West Bank, and even if there was no Palestinian state, Begin would still not show flexibility. He would not stop settlement activity; he would not give up the settlements in Sinai; he would not allow the Sinai settlements to remain under UN or Egyptian protection; he would not agree to withdraw politically from the West Bank even if Israel could retain military outposts; he would not recognise that 242 applied to all fronts; and he would not give the Palestinians the right to choose, at the end of the interim period, whether they wanted to be affiliated with Jordan or Israel or to continue the self-rule arrangements." (p 186)
"... Carter had repeatedly pledged never to cut economic or military aid to Israel as a form of pressure, and he had vowed not to impose an American peace plan. So Begin could anticipate that little more than a verbal disagreement would result if the Camp David talks failed.' (p 208)
"The obvious trade... was to drop reference to withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for Israeli willingness to leave the Sinai completely.' (p 236)
"Sadat's foreign minister was later to write: 'In my opinion, Dayan's discussions with Sadat, which lasted less than an hour, was the straw that broke the camel's back and a turning point towards Sadat's involvement in a series of concessions, arriving at the point of total surrender and, in the end, his signing something beyond Israel's most optimistic dreams'." (p 238)
"Dayan suggested that 242 be referred to only with regard to future Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiations. Since in Begin's view King Hussein [of Jordan] had no valid claim to the West Bank... the issue of withdrawal should not arise. For those areas, Begin would agree to only one of 2 possible outcomes: perpetual autonomy or the imposition of Israeli sovereignty at the end of the 5-year transitional period." (p 244)
"[Attorney General Professor] Barak had little support for [Vance's] desire to continue the Camp David talks until the crucial West Bank and Gaza issues could be fully resolved. So his alternative of finding ambiguous language was implicitly accepted. The central idea, worked out between Barak and Vance was to have 2 synchronised sets of negotiations, one involving Jordan and Israel and one involving Israel and the elected representatives of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, joined by Egypt and Jordan. The draft would say that the principles of 242 applied to 'the negotiations' without spelling out what that meant in reality. Egypt and the US could claim that it meant that 242 did apply to the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel would maintain that it applied only to the peace treaty negotiated between Jordan and Israel, where the question of the future of the West Bank and Gaza would not be raised. Few outside observers would have been able to follow the logic of this arcane discussion, but if they had, they would have seen that a basis for future arguments was being laid." (p 244-245)
"In the end, events outside the immediate scope of the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations broke the stalemate. The shah of Iran fell from power in early 1979, and then everyone flinched, Carter most of all. For political and strategic reasons he concluded that he could not let the chance of peace between Egypt and Israel slip away while Iran was caught up in revolution. Even at some risk to his own reputation, he was prepared to once again make a major gamble to reach an agreement. And if Begin could not be moved, then Sadat would have to be." (p 290) And the rest, as they say, is history.
It is worth dwelling on the significance for the Middle East conflict of Sadat's sell-out at Camp David. Egypt's best known journalist Mohamed Heikal reflected: "The October War [of 1973] was a strategic victory for the Arabs. It was almost a tactical victory for the Arab armies, Egyptian and Syrian, which fought the war, but this in the end eluded them owing to miscalculations in the field and America's determination to rescue Israel, whatever the cost. Yet it is a fact that, as 1973 ended, the world was waiting with bated breath to see what this new political and economic giant, the Arab world, would make of its opportunity. Now, as I write, 9 years later, with the war in Lebanon recently ended, the contrast between original hopes and present reality is almost too bitter to contemplate. If it can be said that in 1967 Arab policies were betrayed by Arab arms, it is no less true that in 1973 Arab arms were betrayed by Arab policies. Israel's invasion of Lebanon [1982] revealed to all the Arabs' total impotence - political, military, economic. It was the moment of their greatest humiliation and shame. How Sadat would have reacted to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is impossible to say [Sadat was assassinated in October 1981]. But what is certain is that, by stating categorically in Jerusalem that there would never be another war between Egypt and Israel, he had given a one-sided pledge of non-belligerence of which Israel was to take full advantage. If there had been no such pledge, if Egypt had still been an active element in the Middle East military equation, the Israelis would never have dreamed of committing a hundred thousand troops to the invasion of their northern neighbour. The fact that Sadat's policies had ensured the total and inevitable isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world did more than anything else to give a clear passage for Sharon's tanks on the road to Beirut. Looked at dispassionately, it can be seen that the siege of Beirut was the logical outcome of the Camp David agreements. From the outset it was perfectly clear that Begin knew exactly what he intended these agreements to mean - no Palestinian state, no independent Palestinian entity, and if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza insisted on claiming to be represented by the PLO, then the PLO would have to be destroyed. The first stage of destruction involved the arrest and expulsion of prominent PLO supporters living under Israeli occupation, seizing land, cutting off water and various other forms of harassment. The second stage took the form of outright war. The Arabs could do nothing to stop Israel because by making a separate peace the state which was the Arab world's natural leader had effectively disarmed all the others as well as itself. The free hand which Sadat gratuitously presented to the Israelis was not exploited by them at the expense of the Palestinians alone; all Arabs east of the Suez Canal thereby became immediately exposed. Lebanon is the most obvious victim, but Syria too has felt the full weight of Israeli weaponry, and even Iraq became the target for the Israeli airforce. Egypt's opting out had a centrifugal effect on all other Arab countries, diverting their attention from what had for long been the dream of unity - however imperfectly understood or pursued, yet a noble and stimulating dream - into barren territorial rivalries, religious conflicts and social strife. The Arab world had become well and truly balkanized." (Autumn of Fury, 1983, pp 284-285)
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Junk Journalism
Where are you when we need you, Ed O'Loughlin? In his feature on Gaza for today's Sydney Morning Herald, All bets are off, Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Jason Koutsoukis reveals a clear inabilty to fill his predecessor's shoes.
Take this thumbnail sketch of Gaza's history, for example: "Gaza first hit the headlines in the time of Samson who, before falling in love with Delilah, apparently destroyed a Philistine temple there in a powerful fit of pique. In the middle ages, Gaza was famous for linen, so fine that it gave its name to the English word gauze. Gaza has fallen to Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Arab warrior Saladin, Napoleon, the Ottomans and Britain. For each conqueror, the coastal strip was a coveted gem in their imperial crowns. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Gaza was occupied by Egypt, but in 1967 Israel conquered the strip in the Six Day War. At first a spoil of victory, it wasn't long before Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden. The Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords, but his counterpart, Anwar Sadat, refused it because he regarded Gaza as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. By 2005 Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, elected on a right-wing platform, decided to uproot all Israeli settlements in Gaza and withdraw, leaving the strip dangling, as it were, between an Egypt that feared Gaza, and an Israel that wished it would go away. Home to 1.5 million Palestinians - nearly a million of them registered by the UN as refugees - Gaza was an orphaned strip 40 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide."
Just pathetic! If Koutsoukis (and/or his editor) think that that is an adequate backgrounder for a feature on what is possibly the worst act of external armed aggression - and we're only half way there yet - ever perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza, then he has no right masquerading as an investigative journalist. Samson & Delilah, gauze, and an assortment of historical conquerors are in, but the key event in Gaza's modern history, without which we cannot understand the present juncture, is out. True, there's a mention of the "Arab-Israeli war of 1948," and an acknowledgment that most Gazans are "refugees," but that's it. So, what has he left out? This: the vast bulk of Gaza's population are the descendents of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from southern Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 and caged up there ever since (except for a period of Egyptian rule - 1948-67) under a brutal Israeli military occupation. For 60 years now, these people, part of the Palestinian refugee diaspora, have clung to their internationally-recognised right of return to their homes and lands in Israel (im)proper, a key Palestinian right largely ignored by Arafat and his successors, but still upheld by Hamas. For Koutsoukis, however, a pair of Biblical lovers is more relevant to the matter under discussion than the Great Ethnic Cleansing - or Nakba - of 1948, and its ongoing relevance to the lives of Palestinian refugees in Gaza today.
Needless to say, the link between Gaza 2008 and Palestine 1948 is seldom made in the Zionised corporate media. The overcrowded Gaza Strip is always a given, it just is. The why and wherefore of its refugee population is almost never explored. Except, on rare ocassions, by serious and informed investigative jornalists such as Britain's Robert Fisk: "How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians," he writes, "to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza. That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who live in Ashkelon and the fields around it... were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80% of whose families once lived in what is today Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of its people don't come from Gaza. But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the 5 sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story." (Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony, The Independent, 30/12/08)
In addition to Koutsoukis' first and major failing, he also misrepresents the historical record when he claims that "Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden" and "the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 [Camp David] peace accords..." In 1977 when Begin became prime minister and announced his intention to negotiate peace treaties with Arab leaders, he was asked by a journalist about the fate of the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. HIs response? "What occupied territories? If you mean Judaea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories. They are part, an integral part, of the land of Israel." (quoted in Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, Michael Palumbo, 1990, p 132) At the time, Begin ruled out both the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories and a freeze on settlement construction, a position he maintained during the Reagan administration's push for a settlement freeze in 1982. (See Palumbo, Chapter 5, Camp David) So much for the Israelis wanting to lay their "burden" down!
Then there's the bit about Sadat "refusing [Gaza] because he regarded [it] as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon." Certainly, the Palestinian resistance in Jordan had been attacked and driven out by the Jordanian army(1970-71), and, during the initial phase of the Lebanese civil war (1975-82), had sided with Lebanese national and progressive forces in their bid to break the monopoly on power exercised by right-wing Maronite forces. However, baldly asserting that "regimes in Jordan and Lebanon" were "threatened" by the Palestinians is a gross oversimplification at best and completely false at worst. But there's more: to suggest, as Koutsoukis does, that "Palestinian nationalism" in any way, shape or form "threatened" the Asad regime in Syria is a complete and utter nonsense from a 'journalist' who simply hasn't done his homework.
And speaking of failure to do one's homework, cop a load of this: "Israel's other key concern was to put an end to the use of Qassam rockets, more than 10,000 of which have landed in the farmlands and cities that surround Gaza over the past 6 years, killing about 20 people." Ten thousand rockets? Did Koutsoukis simply pluck this out of the air? According to a 12/07 study by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence, Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), available at mfa.gov.il, "[a]s of the end of November 2007, there has been a total of 2,383 identified rocket hits in and around the western Negev settlements, with the southern city of Sderot as a priority..."
Something Koutzoukis does get right, however, is how the current hostilities began, an account that runs counter to current USraeli propaganda, which pins the blame squarely on Hamas :"The situation began to deteriorate rapidly on November 4 when Israeli troops entered Gaza to prevent what it claimed was a planned abduction of Israeli soldiers by Hamas using a tunnel it had dug under the security wall. Seven Hamas members were killed prompting immediate retaliation. Over the next 6 weeks Hamas fired more than 300 rockets and mortar shells at Israel, which again sealed its borders. By December 19 - the expiry date of the truce - Hamas, hoping to force Israel into opening the borders, announced it would renew aggression. By Christmas Eve, when Hamas militants fired 70 rockets into Israel, Israel had had enough." Thank God for small mercies.
Take this thumbnail sketch of Gaza's history, for example: "Gaza first hit the headlines in the time of Samson who, before falling in love with Delilah, apparently destroyed a Philistine temple there in a powerful fit of pique. In the middle ages, Gaza was famous for linen, so fine that it gave its name to the English word gauze. Gaza has fallen to Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Arab warrior Saladin, Napoleon, the Ottomans and Britain. For each conqueror, the coastal strip was a coveted gem in their imperial crowns. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Gaza was occupied by Egypt, but in 1967 Israel conquered the strip in the Six Day War. At first a spoil of victory, it wasn't long before Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden. The Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords, but his counterpart, Anwar Sadat, refused it because he regarded Gaza as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. By 2005 Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, elected on a right-wing platform, decided to uproot all Israeli settlements in Gaza and withdraw, leaving the strip dangling, as it were, between an Egypt that feared Gaza, and an Israel that wished it would go away. Home to 1.5 million Palestinians - nearly a million of them registered by the UN as refugees - Gaza was an orphaned strip 40 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide."
Just pathetic! If Koutsoukis (and/or his editor) think that that is an adequate backgrounder for a feature on what is possibly the worst act of external armed aggression - and we're only half way there yet - ever perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza, then he has no right masquerading as an investigative journalist. Samson & Delilah, gauze, and an assortment of historical conquerors are in, but the key event in Gaza's modern history, without which we cannot understand the present juncture, is out. True, there's a mention of the "Arab-Israeli war of 1948," and an acknowledgment that most Gazans are "refugees," but that's it. So, what has he left out? This: the vast bulk of Gaza's population are the descendents of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from southern Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 and caged up there ever since (except for a period of Egyptian rule - 1948-67) under a brutal Israeli military occupation. For 60 years now, these people, part of the Palestinian refugee diaspora, have clung to their internationally-recognised right of return to their homes and lands in Israel (im)proper, a key Palestinian right largely ignored by Arafat and his successors, but still upheld by Hamas. For Koutsoukis, however, a pair of Biblical lovers is more relevant to the matter under discussion than the Great Ethnic Cleansing - or Nakba - of 1948, and its ongoing relevance to the lives of Palestinian refugees in Gaza today.
Needless to say, the link between Gaza 2008 and Palestine 1948 is seldom made in the Zionised corporate media. The overcrowded Gaza Strip is always a given, it just is. The why and wherefore of its refugee population is almost never explored. Except, on rare ocassions, by serious and informed investigative jornalists such as Britain's Robert Fisk: "How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians," he writes, "to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza. That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who live in Ashkelon and the fields around it... were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80% of whose families once lived in what is today Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of its people don't come from Gaza. But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the 5 sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story." (Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony, The Independent, 30/12/08)
In addition to Koutsoukis' first and major failing, he also misrepresents the historical record when he claims that "Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden" and "the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 [Camp David] peace accords..." In 1977 when Begin became prime minister and announced his intention to negotiate peace treaties with Arab leaders, he was asked by a journalist about the fate of the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. HIs response? "What occupied territories? If you mean Judaea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories. They are part, an integral part, of the land of Israel." (quoted in Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, Michael Palumbo, 1990, p 132) At the time, Begin ruled out both the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories and a freeze on settlement construction, a position he maintained during the Reagan administration's push for a settlement freeze in 1982. (See Palumbo, Chapter 5, Camp David) So much for the Israelis wanting to lay their "burden" down!
Then there's the bit about Sadat "refusing [Gaza] because he regarded [it] as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon." Certainly, the Palestinian resistance in Jordan had been attacked and driven out by the Jordanian army(1970-71), and, during the initial phase of the Lebanese civil war (1975-82), had sided with Lebanese national and progressive forces in their bid to break the monopoly on power exercised by right-wing Maronite forces. However, baldly asserting that "regimes in Jordan and Lebanon" were "threatened" by the Palestinians is a gross oversimplification at best and completely false at worst. But there's more: to suggest, as Koutsoukis does, that "Palestinian nationalism" in any way, shape or form "threatened" the Asad regime in Syria is a complete and utter nonsense from a 'journalist' who simply hasn't done his homework.
And speaking of failure to do one's homework, cop a load of this: "Israel's other key concern was to put an end to the use of Qassam rockets, more than 10,000 of which have landed in the farmlands and cities that surround Gaza over the past 6 years, killing about 20 people." Ten thousand rockets? Did Koutsoukis simply pluck this out of the air? According to a 12/07 study by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence, Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), available at mfa.gov.il, "[a]s of the end of November 2007, there has been a total of 2,383 identified rocket hits in and around the western Negev settlements, with the southern city of Sderot as a priority..."
Something Koutzoukis does get right, however, is how the current hostilities began, an account that runs counter to current USraeli propaganda, which pins the blame squarely on Hamas :"The situation began to deteriorate rapidly on November 4 when Israeli troops entered Gaza to prevent what it claimed was a planned abduction of Israeli soldiers by Hamas using a tunnel it had dug under the security wall. Seven Hamas members were killed prompting immediate retaliation. Over the next 6 weeks Hamas fired more than 300 rockets and mortar shells at Israel, which again sealed its borders. By December 19 - the expiry date of the truce - Hamas, hoping to force Israel into opening the borders, announced it would renew aggression. By Christmas Eve, when Hamas militants fired 70 rockets into Israel, Israel had had enough." Thank God for small mercies.
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