JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 12, 80

Special Report

Palestine’s Dismemberment

by Paul Findley

When President George Bush stood firm in the fall of 1991 in a showdown that months later put Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir out of office, he unwittingly made possible a series of momentous political changes. These events have arguably strengthened Israel's grip over the occupied territories and especially East Jerusalem far beyond anything Shamir himself could have accomplished.

Arab states, one after the other, are now establishing peaceful relations with Israel. The latest example is Jordan. On Oct. 26 King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, amid great rejoicing, concluded a peace treaty at a newly opened border crossing between the Israeli town of Eilat and Jordanian town of Aqaba.

Meanwhile, behind the handshakes and smiles, Israel is proceeding with the dismemberment of Palestine, a quiet but inexorable process that unfolds almost unnoticed and with hardly a murmur of protest from any quarter.

In historic Arab East Jerusalem, Jews are taking up residence and Palestinians are being squeezed out so rapidly that Jews now outnumber Arabs in that part of the city 160,000 to 155,000.

The entirety of the Holy City is now ringed with large and expanding Jewish suburbs that effectively isolate the remaining Arab population in East Jerusalem from other Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

Zionists no longer need to sound their ancient battle cry, "Tomorrow Jerusalem." Their tomorrow has arrived. How long they will control the city may be another question.

Meanwhile, Rabin's administration is building new settlements elsewhere in the occupied territories, despite his pledge to the contrary, and is completing a $600 million highway project there, in each instance ordering the confiscation of Palestinian land and the destruction of Palestinian property, including many homes and farms.

The new highways enable Jewish settlers to bypass Palestinian cities and villages as they move swiftly to and from Jerusalem and from one settlement to another. These links serve to strengthen the status of the settlements as integral parts of Israel's body politic.

At the same time, the highways and the settlements they serve form barriers that advance the dismemberment of Palestine. They help to cut Palestine into six substantially isolated parts, or cantons. Nablus and Jenin are the largest communities in one of them. Ramallah is the heart of another. Hebron dominates still another. The Gaza Strip can be considered two Palestinian cantons, as it can swiftly be cut in two parts by Israeli forces stationed in the central settlement called Netzarim. East Jerusalem is the sixth Palestinian canton.

Thanks to dismemberment, Palestine is becoming six isolated pieces.

This dismemberment process is inspired by the ancient doctrine of divide-and-conquer. Israel no longer needs to confront Palestinians as a two-million-strong unit. Thanks to dismemberment, Palestine is becoming six isolated pieces, each with a population ranging from 150,000 to 400,000. This makes common cause among Palestinians extremely difficult, but it simplifies enormously Israel's task of maintaining its subjugation of all two million.

Rabin has gained these fundamental advances for Israeli goals partly because of his success in orchestrating the so-called peace process.

While the ugly dismemberment of Palestine proceeds, public attention in America and elsewhere is focused on happy faces and handshakes—a process that is packaged in the misleading euphemism called peacemaking. Rabin receives universal plaudits for extending small measures of self-rule to Palestinians in the Gaza District and Jericho area, while he quietly chops up Palestine and makes the reunion of the parts practically impossible.

President Bush, without realizing what would lie ahead, began this chain of events in 1991 by having a highly publicized showdown with Prime Minister Shamir and Israel's U.S. lobby over Shamir's demand for $10 billion in U.S.-guaranteed loans. On the same day that Israel's lobby—one thousand strong—was swarming over Capitol Hill on behalf of the loan guarantees, Bush called a news conference and said he would oppose the loan guarantees until Israel stopped building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

American public opinion rallied almost universally to Bush's side on this issue, and loan guarantees were put on the congressional shelf. Shamir's response was defiant.

The result was the most publicized breach between Israel and the U.S. since the Eisenhower administration. The standoff between Jerusalem and its main benefactor troubled Israeli voters so deeply that they turned Shamir's party out of office a few months later. They gave control to Yitzhak Rabin, who had campaigned on the promise that he could re-establish cordial relations with the United States.

As soon as Rabin took office, Bush, anxious to be re-elected that same year and wanting to placate Jewish voters, switched his position on loan guarantees. He urged an eager Congress to approve the guarantees, even though Rabin's promise to freeze settlement construction was craftily hedged. In fact, Rabin slowed construction hardly at all. He insisted that some 11,000 settlement units already under construction be completed and said that the building of "political" settlement construction would be halted, but he reserved a free hand to himself on the question. He alone would decide which settlements were "security" ones and which were "political."

The Best of Both Worlds for Israel

This meant that Rabin got the best of both worlds. He got the loan guarantees plus complete freedom to build and expand settlements.

Even more momentous for Israel, Bush lost his bid for re-election, replaced by a president, Bill Clinton, who has turned out to be more receptive to Israel's demands than any U.S. chief executive in history. Under Clinton, there is no longer even the slightest U.S. pressure to restrain Israel from building settlements. Under Bush and all of his predecessors, East Jerusalem and the rest of the territories had always been described as "occupied." Now the U.S. administration has stopped using the term. Not even the Gaza Strip or the West Bank are so described. Administration spokesmen now refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip simply as territory that is disputed—not occupied .

East Jerusalem, sadly, is not even cited as disputed. The Clinton administration no longer challenges Israel's claim to all of Jerusalem. Nor does the Congress.

In a letter to the White House, more than 200 members of the U.S. House of Representatives—still completely terrorized by Israel's U.S. lobby—endorse this exclusive claim in a unique way. They urge Clinton to use his influence to keep the Palestinian Authority headed by Yasser Arafat from holding any official meetings in East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Rabin, who only months ago publicly pledged a freeze on settlements, has announced publicly that Israel will expand the construction of settlements in the West Bank. The Associated Press reported on Sept. 26 that the Rabin government's purpose is "to bolster its territorial claims in future talks with Palestinians."

The Housing Ministry will permit the construction of 1,000 apartments in the Alfei Menashe settlement in northern Israel to begin in six months. Israeli newspapers report that construction will begin in other settlements as well. An Israeli official spokesman, in a surprising bit of candor, said "enlarging and strengthening some existing settlements would make it easier to argue that they should be retained" as the so-called peace process takes shape.

Historians may well ponder whether the election of Yitzhak Rabin and the defeat of George Bush made possible the quiet, inexorable dismemberment of Palestine.