How Different Was Peres' Plan From Netanyahu's?

by Richard H. Curtiss

What Binyamin Netanyahu has failed to do this year, reach a freely negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace, Shimon Peres almost pulled off. But in fact, what the suave Peres and the crude Netanyahu hoped to force the Palestinians to accept may have differed hardly at all.

Now Middle East peace may be deferred for at least a generation, and tens of thousands may die as a result of Bibi's bullheadedness. And the final result is much more likely to be a unified, sovereign state in Palestine of Muslims, Jews and Christians, in that demographic order. Whether it's called Palestine, Israel, or both in the manner of some other binational states won't matter much. Either way, to be at peace with itself it will have to evolve into a democratic, secular state, based upon one person, one vote, with religious and racial discrimination banned. That, of course, was the original program of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Israelis and Palestinians could have had it any time over the past 30 years.

On the other hand, had Peres been returned to power in 1996, the result by the year 2000 might have been a Palestinian mini-state, sovereign in little more than name, a secure Israel linked by treaty to its neighbors, and peace in our time. Peres failed because he couldn't explain to the Israelis what he was doing for them without the Arabs realizing what he was doing to them.

In fact, Peres almost won the Middle East pot with a remarkably weak hand. He started with Zionism, an already moribund Jewish variety of early 20th century fascism, which should have been buried during or after World War II along with its siblings, German Nazism, Italian fascism and Spanish falangism.

Zionism prescribed pushing the Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs out of Palestine, a tiny section of the vast Arab world the size of Vermont.

Somehow the Palestinians were supposed to go quietly and their Muslim and Christian co-religionists, nearly half of the human race, were to accept this theft of a nation gracefully. Then what is now a nation of four million Jews was to thrive and prosper in a region now comprising more than 200 million angry Arabs.

The Zionists, who in 1948 became the Israelis, originally came in two ideological varieties. The Revisionists, now the Likud bloc, believed in a greater Israel whose borders would start at the Euphrates River in Syria and Iraq, encompass Jordan as well as Palestine, and extend to the Suez Canal or perhaps the Nile in Egypt.

The mainstream Zionists, now represented by the Labor coalition, have never openly defined their territorial aspirations. However, they clearly hoped, at the least, for uninterrupted borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and including the parts of southern Lebanon controlling the Litani River, and of Syria controlling the headwaters of the Jordan and other rivers and aquifers in Israel.

Zionism's three big breaks were that Europe's Christians were so paralyzed by guilt over the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II that they condoned the theft of Palestine (especially since it didn't occur in Europe, where the original crime had taken place); that Middle Eastern and Asian Muslims, emerging from 400 years of decadence, colonialism or both, had neither the power nor the will to resist the theft of Palestine effectively; and that Americans, who had no role in the persecution of Europe's Jews, also were so remote from the Middle East that they didn't know who or where the Palestinians were. So the Americans could be manipulated by dedicated Zionists in the U.S. media and Hollywood to identify with the Jewish aggressors rather than the dispossessed Muslim and Christian victims.

Although these circumstances kept Zionism alive while the other predatory nationalisms were dying, Israel was being torn apart by its own internal contradictions. Its immigrants initially were sharply divided between Jews of European and of Middle Eastern origin, with the Europeans running things.

Meanwhile an even deeper schism opened between secular Jews, perhaps 80 percent of the population, and religious Jews, who are as stubbornly separatist as any people on earth. The latter are further divided between Orthodox Jews who are Zionist and Orthodox Jews who believe a Jewish state can be created only by divine, not human, will.

This fractured electorate turned Israeli politics into a tribal spoils system, and election campaigns into outbidding contests among demagogues. Corruption flourished, and arms manufactures and sales, based largely on American technology and an international pariah clientele, became Israel's major industry. The rest of the economy was based upon an annual $1,000 per capita infusion of U.S. military and economic aid, almost equal amounts in German reparations payments, and unique tariff quirks and breaks that in effect enabled Israelis to live off the taxpayers of the industrial world.

When the United States and European countries boycotted South African goods, the Israelis imported and resold them. Diamonds mined in South Africa were cut and polished in Israel, and re-exported to the United States and Europe. Similarly, thanks to free-trade arrangements with both North America and Europe, Israel served as the "springboard" for South African goods into economies where they otherwise would have been contraband. In fact, Israel increasingly served as a two-way customs-exempt trade channel between the United States and Europe.

For 50 years Israel maintained this parasitic existence, protected by unprecedented media influence in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. This in turn made possible deals with American and European presidents and politicians which the media would routinely have exposed had they involved any other small country.

Peres assumed, however, that such foreign toleration of shady or downright illegal Zionist practices could not endure forever. Israel already has lost its hold on Europe's public opinion and most of its politicians. And while its hold on organized American Jewry, and therefore on the mainstream U.S. media and the Congress, looks as firm as ever, it is not so strong on young American Jews.

Many, dedicated to separation of church and state and liberal social and economic policies at home, increasingly question their expected allegiance to a country overseas which has legalized economic exploitation based on racial and religious discrimination, where non-Jews are excluded from owning, employment on and even spending the night on 90 percent of Israel's land, and it is legal for the police to torture and imprison non-Jews without charges or trial.

The first chance to end the Arab world's ostracism of Israel, and thus Israel's excessive dependence upon the United States, came with Arab League acceptance in the early 1980s of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of Nov. 22, 1967. The resolution mandated Arab acknowledgement of Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries" in return for Israeli withdrawal "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" of June 1967. Many Israelis would have leaped at the chance to "normalize" their relations with their Arab neighbors. But Likud insisted on keeping all the land and by that time Labor wanted to keep as much as it thought it could, though as usual it wouldn't say how much that would be.

The Gulf war, which fractured the Muslim world, seemed to present an opportunity to Israel to reach an even more favorable settlement to which Arab leaders might agree. This was because when Yasser Arafat picked the losing side, he lost the support of his only serious financial backers, the Gulf Arabs. So Peres, then Israel's foreign minister, offered him the Oslo accord, a vague agreement almost totally dependent upon Israeli goodwill. Arafat, broke and desperate, seized on it, allegedly without even showing it to a Palestinian lawyer.

When that happened it was easy for Peres to sell the accord to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who overnight changed from Labor's hawk to Israel's peacemaker. Here at last was a deal which could leave Israel in de facto if not nominal control of the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but with the acquiescence of the leader of the Palestinians, who would become the head of a demilitarized Palestinian mini-state under Israel's economic control.

Peres began negotiating agreements whereby Arafat would consent to his people's long-term disenfranchisement, and the Arab states, one by one, would accept the Jewish state into regional security and economic arrangements whether or not the Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese ever regained total control over all of their lands.

By this time Peres' goal was more than mere regional acceptance. He fully expected Israel to use U.S. military and economic clout to insert itself into the very center of Middle East economic activity. He envisioned Tel Aviv assuming the role Beirut once had as the regional commercial and financial hub, with Israeli brokers, bankers and lawyers officiating as U.S., European and Far Eastern companies signed petroleum and gas exploration and extraction agreements with the states of the Arabian Gulf and Central Asia.

Whether this grandiose Zionist dream could ever have become reality became moot with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, whose job was to sell it, bit by bit, not only to the world but to the Israeli people themselves.

Instead Netanyahu returned to power, bringing his medieval vision of a permanent Jewish overclass owning everything in Israel. It in turn would exploit all non-Jews as disenfranchised hewers of wood and drawers of water who would own nothing, receive no benefits for their taxes, and be sent back to their home countries or Palestinian Bantustans when they became sick or old.

Meanwhile Israel would continue to receive its annual subsidy from the United States, which would remain permanently dominated by the talented Jewish 2 percent of its population which has been so extraordinarily effective to date on Israel's behalf.

Peres' dream is to co-opt the Arabs. Netanyahu's is to crush them. But both dreams are based upon a Zionist ideology of religious/racist exploitation out of tune with the times. With the United States seemingly mesmerized as Israel and the Arab countries head for their next collision, how soon the Israelis are awakened from their dream depends solely on when the Arabs awake from theirs.