11  Nakba Denial

and the ‘Peace Process’

The UN General Assembly resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of or damage to property which, under the principles of international law and in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

UN GA resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948.

The US government supports the return of refugees, democratization, and protection of human rights throughout the country.

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US State Department, 2003

While the Palestinians Israel had failed to expel from the country were subjected to the military regime Israel put in place in October 1948, and those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were now under foreign Arab occupation, the rest of the Palestinian people were scattered throughout the neighbouring Arab states where they had found shelter in makeshift tent camps provided by international aid organisations.

In mid-1949, the United Nations stepped in to try to deal with the bitter fruits of its 1947 peace plan. One of the UN’s first misguided decisions was not to involve the International Refugee Organization (IRO) but to create a special agency for the Palestinian refugees. It was Israel and the Zionist Jewish organisations abroad that were behind the decision to keep the IRO out of the picture: the IRO was the very same body that was assisting the Jewish refugees in Europe following the Second World War, and the Zionist organisations were keen to prevent anyone from making any possible association or even comparison between the two cases. Moreover, the IRO always recommended repatriation as the first option to which refugees were entitled.

This is how the United Nation Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) came into being in 1950. UNRWA was not committed to the return of the refugees as UN General Assembly Resolution 194, from 11 December 1948, had stipulated, but was set up simply to provide employment and subsidies to the approximately one million Palestinian refugees who had ended up in the camps. It was also entrusted with building more permanent camps for them, constructing schools and opening medical centres. In other words, UNRWA was intended, in general, to look after the refugees’ daily concerns.

It did not take long under these circumstances for Palestinian nationalism to re-emerge. It was centred on the Right of Return, but also aimed at replacing UNRWA as an educating agency and even as the provider of social and medical services. Inspired by the drive to try to take their fate into their own hands, this nascent nationalism equipped the people with a new sense of direction and identity, following the exile and destruction they had experienced in 1948. These national emotions were to find their embodiment in 1968 in the PLO, whose leadership was refugee-based and whose ideology was grounded in the demand for the moral and factual redress of the evils Israel had inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948.1

The PLO, or any other group taking up the Palestinian cause, had to confront two manifestations of denial. The first was the denial exercised by the international peace brokers as they consistently sidelined, if not altogether eliminated, the Palestinian cause and concerns from any future peace arrangement. The second was the categorical refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute unwillingness to be held accountable, legally and morally, for the ethnic cleansing they committed in 1948.

The Nakba and the refugee issues have been consistently excluded from the peace agenda, and to understand this we must assess how deep the level of denial of the crimes committed in 1948 remains today in Israel and associate it with the existence of a genuinely felt fear on the one hand, and a deeply rooted form of anti-Arab racism on the other, both heavily manipulated.

11.1 FIRST ATTEMPTS AT PEACE

Despite the 1948 fiasco, the United Nations still seemed to have some energy left in the first two years after the Nakba to try to come to grips with the question of Palestine. We find the UN initiating a series of diplomatic efforts through which it hoped to bring peace to the country, culminating in a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring of 1949. The Lausanne conference was based on UN Resolution 194 and centred around the call for the refugees’ Right of Return. For the UN mediation body, the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees was the basis for peace, together with a two-state solution dividing the country equally between the two sides, and the internationalisation of Jerusalem.

Everyone involved accepted this comprehensive approach: the US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians and Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. But the endeavour was deliberately torpedoed by Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who had set their minds on partitioning what was left of Palestine between them. An election year in America and the onset of the Cold War in Europe allowed these two to carry the day and make sure the chances for peace were swiftly buried again. They thereby foiled the only attempt we find in the history of the conflict at a comprehensive approach to creating genuine peace in Palestine/Israel.

11.1.1 Towards Pax Americana

After the failure of Lausanne, peace efforts quickly subsided: for nearly two decades, between 1948 and 1967, there was an obvious lull. Only after the war in June 1967 did the world wake up to the plight of the region once again. Or so it seemed. The June war ended with total Israeli control over all of ex-Mandatory Palestine. Peace endeavours started immediately after Israel’s blitzkrieg had run its swift but devastating course, and proved at first more overt and intensive than the ones at Lausanne. Early initiatives came from the British, French and Russian delegations at the UN, but soon the reins were handed over to the Americans as part of a successful attempt by the US to exclude the Russians from all Middle-Eastern agendas.

The American effort totally relied on the prevailing balance of power as the main avenue through which to explore possible solutions. Within this balance of power, Israel’s superiority after 1948 and even more so after the June war was unquestionable, and thus whatever the Israelis put forward in the form of peace proposals invariably served as the basis for the Pax Americana that now descended on the Middle East. This meant that it was given to the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’ to produce the ‘common’ wisdom on which to base the next stages and provide the guidelines for a settlement. All future peace proposals thus catered to this camp, ostensibly the more moderate face of Israel’s position towards peace in Palestine.

Israel drafted new guidelines after 1967, taking advantage of the new geopolitical reality its June war had created, but also mirroring the internal political debate that emerged inside Israel itself, following what Israeli PR quickly dubbed the ‘6-Day War’ (purposely invoking biblical overtones), between the right wing, the ‘Greater Israel’ people, and the left wing, the ‘Peace Now’ movement. The former were the so-called ‘redeemers’, people for whom the Palestinian areas Israel had occupied in 1967 were the ‘regained heartland’ of the Jewish state. The latter were dubbed ‘custodians’, Israelis who wanted to hold on to the Occupied Palestinian Territories so as to use them as bargaining chips in future peace negotiations. When the Greater Israel camp began establishing Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, the ‘custodian’ peace camp appeared to have no problem with the building of settlements in particular areas that immediately became non-negotiable for peace: the Greater Jerusalem area and certain settlement blocks near the 1967 border. The areas the peace camp initially offered to negotiate over have shrunk gradually since 1967 as Israeli settlement construction progressed incrementally over the years in the consensual areas of ‘redemption’.

The moment the American apparatus responsible for shaping US policy in Palestine adopted these guidelines, they were paraded as ‘concessions’, ‘reasonable moves’ and ‘flexible positions’ on the part of Israel. This is the first part of the pincer movement Israel now executed to completely eliminate the Palestinian point of view – of whatever nature and inclination. The second part was to portray that point of view in the West as ‘terrorist, unreasonable and inflexible’.

11.2 THE EXCLUSION OF 1948 FROM THE PEACE PROCESS

The first of Israel’s three guidelines – or rather, axioms – was that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was an agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In other words, as these areas constitute only twenty-two per cent of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded – and continues to demand today – further territorial compromises, either consonant with the business-like approach the US favoured or as dictated by the map agreed upon by the two political camps in Israel.

Israel’s second axiom is that everything visible in these areas, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, can again be further divided and that this divisibility forms one of the keys to peace. For Israel this division of the visible includes not just the territory, but also people and natural resources.

The third Israeli axiom is that nothing that occurred prior to 1967, including the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing, will ever be negotiable. The implications here are clear: it totally removes the refugee issue from the peace agenda and sidelines the Palestinian Right of Return as a ‘non-starter’. This last axiom totally equates the end of Israeli occupation with the end of the conflict, and it follows naturally from the previous two. For the Palestinians, of course, 1948 is the heart of the matter and only addressing the wrongs perpetrated then can bring an end to the conflict in the region.

To activate these axiomatic guidelines that so clearly meant to push the Palestinians out of the picture, Israel needed to find a potential partner. Proposals put forward to that end to King Hussein of Jordan, through the mediation skills of the American secretary of state at the time, Henry Kissinger, read: ‘The Israeli peace camp, led by the Labour party, regards the Palestinians as non-existent and prefers to divide the territories Israel occupied in 1967 with the Jordanians.’ But Jordan’s king deemed the share he was allotted insufficient. Like his grandfather, King Hussein coveted the area as a whole, including East Jerusalem and its Muslim sanctuaries.

This so-called Jordanian option was endorsed by the Americans up to 1987, when the first Intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising, erupted in December of that year against Israel’s oppression and occupation. That nothing came of the Jordanian path in the earlier years was due to lack of Israeli generosity, while in later years King Hussein’s ambivalence was at fault as well as his inability to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, as the PLO enjoyed pan-Arab and global legitimacy.

Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat suggested a similar path in his 1977 peace initiative to Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Menachem Begin (in power between 1977 and 1982). The idea was to allow Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian territories it held under occupation while granting the Palestinians in them internal autonomy. In essence this was another version of partition as it left Israel in direct possession of eighty per cent of Palestine and in indirect control over the remaining twenty per cent.

The first Palestinian uprising in 1987 squashed all ideas of the autonomy option as it led Jordan to remove itself as a partner from future negotiations. The upshot of these developments was that the Israeli peace camp came around to accepting the Palestinians as partners for a future settlement. At first Israel tried, always with the help of the Americans, to negotiate peace with the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories, which was allowed to take part, as an official peace delegation, in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. This conference was the award the American administration had decided to hand out to the Arab states for backing Washington’s military invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf War. Openly stalled by Israel, Madrid led nowhere.

Israel’s ‘peace’ axioms were re-articulated during the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the same Yitzhak Rabin who, as a young officer, had taken an active part in the 1948 cleansing but who had now been elected as prime minister on a platform that promised the resumption of the peace effort. Rabin’s death – he was assassinated by one of his own people on 4 November 1995 – came too soon for anyone to assess how much he had really changed from his 1948 days: as recently as 1987, as minister of defence, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stones in the first Intifada; he had deported hundreds of Palestinians as prime minister prior to the Oslo Agreement, and he had pushed for the 1994 Oslo B agreement that effectively caged the Palestinians in the West Bank into several Bantustans.

At the centre of Rabin’s peace efforts stood the Oslo Accords that began rolling in September 1993. Again, the concept behind this process was a Zionist one: the Nakba was totally absent. The architects of the Oslo formula were Israeli intellectuals who, of course, belonged to Israel’s ‘peace camp’ and who ever since 1967 had played an important role in the Israeli public scene. Institutionalised in an ex-parliamentary movement called Peace Now, they had several political parties on their side. But Peace Now has always evaded the 1948 issue and sidelined the refugee question. When they did the same in 1993, they seemed to have found a Palestinian partner in Yassir Arafat for a peace that buried 1948 and its victims. The false hopes Israel raised with Oslo were to have dire consequences for the Palestinian people, all the more as Arafat fell into the trap Oslo set for him.

The result was a vicious circle of violence. Desperate Palestinian reactions to Israeli oppression in the form of suicide bomb attackers against both the Israeli army and civilians led to an even harsher Israeli retaliation policy that in turn prompted more young Palestinians – many coming from 1948 refugee families – to join the guerrilla groups advocating suicide attacks as the only means left to them of liberating the Occupied Territories. An easily intimidated Israeli electorate brought a right-wing government back into power, whose policy differed little, at the end of the day, from the previous ‘Oslo’ government. Netanyahu (1996–1999) failed in every aspect of governance, and Labour was back in power in 1999 and, with it, the ‘Peace Camp’, this time led by Ehud Barak. When within a year Barak was facing electoral defeat for having been over-ambitious in almost every field of governmental policy, a peace with the Palestinians seemed the only way of safeguarding his political future.

11.3 THE RIGHT OF RETURN

What for Barak was no more than a tactical move to save his skin, the Palestinians – erroneously – envisaged as the climax of the Oslo negotiations. And when US president Clinton invited Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to a summit meeting in Camp David in the summer of 2000, the Palestinians went there in the expectation of genuine negotiations over the conflict’s end. Such a promise was indeed embedded in the Oslo rationale: the original document of September 1993 promises the Palestinian leadership that if they were willing to agree to a waiting period of between five to ten years (during which Israel would partially withdraw from the Occupied Territories), the essentials of the conflict as they saw them would be on the table in the final phase of the new peace negotiations. This final phase, they thought, had now come and with it the time to discuss the ‘three essentials of the conflict’: the Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the future of the Israeli settlements.

A fragmented PLO – the organisation had lost all those who had seen through Oslo, including the more radical Islamic movements that began emerging in the late 1980s – had to come up with a counter peace plan. Tragically, it felt unable to do the job itself and sought advice in such unlikely places as the Adam Smith Institute in London. Under its guidance, naïve Palestinian negotiators put the Nakba and Israel’s responsibility for it at the top of the Palestinian agenda.

Of course they had completely misread the tone of the US peace scheme: only Israel was allowed to set the items of a peace agenda, including those for a permanent settlement. And it was exclusively the Israeli plan, totally endorsed by the Americans, that was on the table at Camp David. Israel offered to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, leaving the Palestinians about fifteen per cent of original Palestine. But that fifteen per cent would be in the form of separate cantons bisected by Israeli highways, settlements, army camps and walls.

Crucially, the Israeli plan excluded Jerusalem: there would never be a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem. Nor was there a solution to the refugee problem. In other words, the way the proposal defined the future Palestinian state amounted to a total distortion of the concepts of statehood and independence as we have come to accept them in the wake of the Second World War and as the Jewish state, with international support, had claimed for itself in 1948. Even the now frail Arafat, who until then had seemed happy with the salata (perks of power) that had come his way at the expense of the sulta (actual power) he never had, realised that the Israeli diktat emptied all Palestinian demands of content, and refused to sign.

For nearly four decades Arafat had embodied a national movement whose main aim was to seek legal and moral recognition of the ethnic cleansing Israel had perpetrated in 1948. The notion of how this might come about changed with time, as did the strategy and, definitely, the tactics, but the overall objective remained the same, especially since the demand for the refugees to be allowed to return had been internationally acknowledged already in 1948 by UN Resolution 194. Signing the 2000 Camp David proposals would have amounted to a betrayal of the achievements, however few, the Palestinians had won for themselves. Arafat refused to do so, and was immediately punished for this by the Americans and the Israelis who quickly moved to depict him as a warmonger.

This humiliation, further compounded by the provocative visit of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem in September 2000, triggered the outbreak of the second Intifada. Like the first Intifada, this was initially a non-militarised popular protest. But the eruption of lethal violence with which Israel decided to respond caused it to escalate into an armed clash, a hugely unequal mini-war that still rages. The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanks and bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population of civilians and impoverished refugees, among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.

Baroud’s Searching Jenin contains eyewitness accounts of the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp between 3 and 15 April 2002 and the massacre Israeli troops committed there, searing testimony of the cowardice of the international community, the callousness of Israel and the courage of the Palestinian refugees.2 Rafidia al-Jamal is a 35-year old mother of five; her sister Fadwa was twenty-seven when she was killed:

When the army first entered they took over the roof tops of high buildings and positioned themselves on the top of mosques. My sister is a nurse. She was assigned to work in one of the field hospitals that were set up in every area being invaded.

Around 4 in the morning, we heard the explosion of a shell. My sister was supposed to go to the hospital right away to help care for the wounded. This is why she left the house – especially after we heard people screaming for help. My sister was wearing her white uniform and I was still in my nightgown. I put a scarf on my head and went to escort her as she crossed the street. Before we left I asked her to wash for prayer. She had so much faith, especially in times like these. When the shell fell we did not feel any fear, we just knew that some people were in need of rescue.

When we went outside, some neighbors were also out. We asked them who was wounded. As we were talking with them, Israeli bullets began to fall on us like rain. I was wounded in my left shoulder. Israeli soldiers were positioned on the top of the mosque, and that was the direction from which the bullets came. I told my sister Fadwa that I was wounded. We were standing under a light post, so it was very clear who we were from the way we were dressed. But as she tried to help me, her head fell on me. She was showered with bullets. Fadwa fell on my leg and now I was lying on the ground. The bullet broke my leg. With her head resting on me I told her, ‘Make your prayers’, because I knew she was going to die. I didn’t expect her to die so fast, though – she couldn’t finish her prayers.3

On 20 April the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1405 to send a fact-finding mission into the Jenin camp. When the Israeli government refused to cooperate, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan decided to abandon the mission.

For the Palestinians, the only positive thing to come out of the Camp David episode was that their leadership succeeded, at least for a brief moment, in bringing the catastrophe of 1948 to the attention of a local, regional and, to a certain extent, global audience. Not only in Israel, but also in the United States, and even in Europe, people genuinely concerned about the Palestine question needed to be reminded that this conflict was not just about the future of the Occupied Territories, but that at its heart are the refugees Israel had cleansed from Palestine in 1948. This was an even more formidable task after Oslo, because then it had seemed that the issue had simply been pushed aside with the agreement of ill-managed Palestinian diplomacy and strategy.

Indeed, the Nakba had been so effectively kept off the agenda of the peace process that when it suddenly appeared on the scene at Camp David, the Israelis felt as if a Pandora’s box had been opened in front of them. The worst fear of the Israeli negotiators was the looming possibility that Israel’s responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe would become a negotiable issue. Needless to say, this ‘danger’ was immediately confronted. The Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, lost no time in formulating a wall-to-wall consensus: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes that had been theirs before 1948. The Knesset swiftly passed a law to this effect,4 with Barak publicly committing himself to upholding it as he climbed the steps of the plane that was taking him to Camp David.

Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear vis-à-vis any debate over 1948, as Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. This makes it crucial for Israelis to keep a strong mechanism of denial in place, not only to help them defeat the counter-claims Palestinians were making in the peace process, but – far more importantly – so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundations of Zionism.

For Israelis, to recognise the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli actions is deeply distressing, in at least two ways. As this form of acknowledgement means facing up to the historical injustice in which Israel is incriminated through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, it calls into question the very foundational myths of the State of Israel, and it raises a host of ethical questions that have inescapable implications for the future of the state.

Recognizing Palestinian victimhood ties in with deeply rooted psychological fears because it demands that Israelis question their self perceptions of what ‘went on’ in 1948. As most Israelis see it – and as mainstream and popular Israeli historiography keeps telling them – in 1948 Israel was able to establish itself as an independent nation-state on part of Mandate Palestine because early Zionists had succeeded in ‘settling an empty land’ and ‘making the desert bloom’.

The inability of Israelis to acknowledge the trauma the Palestinians suffered stands out even more sharply when set against the way the Palestinian national narrative tells the story of the Nakba, a trauma they continue to live with to the present. Had their victimhood been the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ outcome of a long-term and bloody conflict, Israel’s fears of allowing the other side to ‘become’ the victim of the conflict would not have been so intense – both sides would have been ‘victims of the circumstances’, and here one may substitute any other amorphous, non-committal concept that serves human beings, particularly politicians but also historians, to absolve themselves from the moral responsibility they otherwise would carry. But what the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognised as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also – perhaps far more critically – would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognise that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.

At Camp David Israel need not have feared. After the attacks on 11 September 2001 in the United States and, the year before, the outbreak of the second Intifada in Palestine and the suicide bombings that Israel’s horrific repression helped provoke, any courageous attempt to open the discussion evaporated almost without a trace, and the past practices of denial re-emerged with a vengeance.

Ostensibly, the peace process was revived in 2003 with the introduction of the Road Map, and even a somewhat bolder initiative, that of the Geneva Accord. The Road Map was the political product of the Quartet, the self-appointed body of mediators comprising the US, the UN, Britain and Russia. It offered a blueprint for peace that happily adopted the consensual Israeli position as embodied in the policies of Ariel Sharon (prime minister in 2001 and again from 2003 until his illness and departure from political life in 2006). By turning the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005 into a media bonanza, Sharon succeeded in fooling the West that he was a man of good intentions. But the army still controls Gaza from the outside even today (including from the air, as it continues its ‘targeted assassinations’, Israel’s way of applying death squads) and will probably remain in full control of the West Bank even when some Israeli settlers and soldiers in the future are removed from certain areas there. Symptomatic, too, is that the refugees of 1948 are not even mentioned in the Quartet’s peace agenda.

The Geneva Accord is more or less the best offer the Israeli Jewish peace camp proved able to come up with in the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is a proposal concocted by people who were no longer in power on either side by the time they presented their programme. It is, therefore, difficult to know how valid it would be as a policy, even though they launched their initiative with a PR fanfare. The Geneva document recognises the Right of Return of the Palestinians provided their ‘return’ is confined to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It does not acknowledge the ethnic cleansing itself, but suggest compensation as an option. However, since the territories the document has set aside for a ‘Palestinian state’ contain one of the most densely populated areas in the world – the Gaza Strip – it immediately undercuts its own claim of offering a practical recipe for Palestinian return.

As strange as it may sound, from its partner Palestinians the Geneva document secured recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, in other words, an endorsement of all the policies Israel has pursued in the past for maintaining a Jewish majority at all cost – even ethnic cleansing. The good people of the Geneva accord are thus also endorsing Fortress Israel, the most significant obstacle on the road to peace in the land of Palestine.