Jerusalem
One of the many casualties of the Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories, now entering its third month, is the alliance between the Palestinian national movement and many members of the Israeli “peace camp.” These links were forged in the first intifada between 1987 and 1992, when Israeli peace activists defied army curfews imposed on Palestinian villages and Israel’s Peace Now movement called publicly for negotiations with the then-outlawed PLO–a call eventually adopted by the Israeli government in the 1993 Oslo accords.
But the initial response of the Israeli peace camp to the present uprising was “silence, recrimination, even a sense of betrayal,” admits Arie Arnon, a leader of Peace Now. As for the Palestinians, they have looked instead for solidarity with the million or so Palestinian citizens of Israel and with the rest of the Arab world.
One reason for the breach has been the increasingly military cast of the conflict. The Israeli Army has sought to quell the revolt since its outbreak on September 28 through blockades on Palestinian Authority-controlled areas and aerial bombardments of Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps. It has also deployed snipers, using live ammunition and sometimes silencers, against what remain overwhelmingly unarmed demonstrations.
In response, Palestinians–especially the cadre from Yasir Arafat’s Fatah movement–have resorted to guerrilla warfare, targeting army bases, Jewish settlements and the roads that connect them. These have been joined by attacks on civilians inside Israel proper, with bomb blasts in West Jerusalem on November 2 and the Israeli town of Hadera on November 21, the first claimed by the Islamic Jihad movement.
The character of the war is reflected in the body count. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, by the end of November 247 Palestinians had been killed by army or settler fire and 9,640 wounded. The Israeli toll was thirty-three, with 230 wounded. Overall, this amounts to 80 percent of the total fatalities from the 1987-92 intifada. The difference is, that revolt lasted almost six years; this one, two months.
But a second reason for the breach between Israeli and Palestinian peace activists is that, to a large swath of the Israeli left, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Camp David proposals of this past July “were a huge step forward in the direction of peace,” says Arnon. Because of this perception many on the Israeli left bought the Israeli government’s line–voiced most eloquently by acting Foreign Minister and former peace activist Shlomo Ben-Ami–that Arafat had orchestrated the uprising to evade the “difficult historical decisions” placed before him at the summit.
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It was a charge that outraged the Palestinians, including those secular leftist intellectuals who had been the Israeli peace camp’s natural allies during the first intifada. But they were not surprised by it. “It was the culmination of a process we had been witnessing for a long time,” says Rema Hammami, a Palestinian feminist researcher at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
That process was called Oslo, which the Israeli peace camp embraced as a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “The Israeli left was preoccupied with defining themselves vis-à-vis the anti-Oslo right,” she says. “They never bothered to look at what Oslo meant on the ground for the Palestinians, which was not peace but a new form of Palestinian dispossession.”
The clearest instance of that dispossession was Israel’s ongoing settlement policies throughout the Oslo era, whether by pro-Oslo Labor or anti-Oslo Likud governments. The scale of colonization has been “amazing,” admits Arnon of Peace Now, which has tracked Israel’s settlement construction in the occupied territories. According to Peace Now, such construction has increased 52 percent since September 1993, including 17 percent (some 2,830 housing units) during the eighteen-month tenure of Barak’s “One Israel” government. The expansion has swelled the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by 72 percent, from 115,000 in 1993 to 195,000 today and a projected 200,000 by the end of the year. In addition, 180,000 Jewish settlers reside in occupied East Jerusalem, making an overall settler population of 380,000 amid 3.4 million Palestinians.
The settlers live in 145 official settlements and fifty-five unofficial outposts scattered throughout the territories and connected by a web of settlers-only bypass roads, totaling nearly 300 kilometers in length. During periods of quiet, the roads and settlements prevent any contiguous urban or rural development of the 700 Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza. During periods of war–such as now–they effectively become Israel’s new military borders in the occupied territories, not only severing Gaza and the West Bank from each other, and both from East Jerusalem, but also each Palestinian conurbation from others within the West Bank and Gaza.
For Palestinians it was these apartheid realities that caused the intifada, far more than the “very generous offers” Barak allegedly made at Camp David. And it was to address them that on November 10 Hammami and more than 120 other Palestinian intellectuals dispatched an “Urgent Statement to the Israeli Public.”
As “firm believers in a just and equitable negotiated peace between Palestinians and Israelis,” the signatories warned their Israeli peers that the “critical situation that confronts us now” will be “revisited again and again.” The only lasting exit is for Israel finally to recognize Palestinian national rights as granted by international law. This would mean Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a “just and lasting resolution of the refugee problem in accordance with relevant UN resolutions.”
It is a message that appears at last to be hitting home. On November 17, twenty-four Israeli academics–including the writer Amos Oz and the former army general Shlomo Gazit–called on the Israeli government to “freeze its settlement policy and recognise the border of 4 June 1967 as the basis for the border between Israel and Palestine.” And on December 1, Peace Now made perhaps its clearest call yet for the dismantling of the settlements and the “establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel along the 1967 borders.”
Arnon admits that the armed dimension of this intifada has brought a “reality check” to the Israeli public. “Above all, it has destroyed perhaps the greatest of all Oslo’s illusions: that the historical reality of the Green Line could somehow be erased and a solution could be achieved based on a new division of the West Bank rather than on Israel’s withdrawal from it.”
But he also believes it essential that a renewed dialogue be attempted between the Israeli peace camp and the Palestinian national movement. This is not only because “the two sides have never been closer in their positions,” he says, but because “it is vital for the left to demonstrate to the wider Israeli public that there is still a partner.”
Hammami is less sanguine. “How can you have alliances with people who fundamentally misunderstand you?” she asks. “Throughout the Oslo years, the Israeli left acted as though all that was needed for ‘peace’ was to use Israel’s balance of power to impose an agreement on Arafat. It never accepted that there was such a thing as a Palestinian public opinion, a Palestinian national consensus–which is a pretty sad commentary on a constituency that prides itself on its progressive and democratic credentials. We can have shared interests, not political alliances,” she concludes.
One of those shared interests appears to lie in restoring the borders of June 4, 1967. There is no longer any alternative, says Arnon, “acceptable to both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.”
