A Jewish-American Activist

Even Netanyahu Will Have to Give Up Dreams of a Greater Israel

By Rachelle Marshall

The election of Binyamin Netanyahu to be prime minister of Israel was a painful blow to supporters of Middle East peace, including many Americans and nearly half of all Israeli Jewish voters and 97 percent of Israeli Arab voters who backed his opponent, Shimon Peres. Nearly as worrisome was the solid victory of religious and right-wing parties in elections to the 120-seat Knesset. A combination of three leading Orthodox parties gained 8 seats and now holds a total of 25; the Likud-Gesher-Tsomet coalition won 32 seats; and the extreme right-wing Moledet, which advocates expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza, held firm at 3 seats. Ysrael Ba-Aliya, a new party composed of Russian immigrants led by Natan Sharansky, will have 7. On the left, the Arab Democratic party won 4 seats and Meretz 9. Combined with Labor and the communist Hadash, they will make up an opposition bloc of 51 votes.

According to one Labor party official, the election was “an earthquake.” The results will surely affect secular Jews, whose children will be exposed to more religious studies in school and whose freedom to marry, divorce, and bury their dead will be constricted by Orthodox religious rulings. With Peres’ loss, Arab municipalities are now less likely to receive a badly needed increase in government allocations. Having voted overwhelmingly for Peres, they can expect few favors from Netanyahu.

But the unanswered question is what will happen to the peace process? Like tea leaves in the bottom of a fortune teller's cup, the evidence depends on what you're looking for. During the campaign, Netanyahu tried to soften his image as a right-wing hawk, dedicated to a Greater Israel, by pledging to slow down the peace process, but not to stop it. Reversing an earlier position, he agreed to meet with Yasser Arafat if circumstances required it. But he also pledged to increase Jewish settlements in the West Bank, postpone Israeli withdrawal from Hebron, and retain Israeli sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem. He not only opposed return of the Golan Heights to Syria, but said he would not negotiate with Syria until President Hafez Al-Assad is out of office. Netanyahu's thin veneer of moderation was badly chipped just before the election when retired General Ariel Sharon declared in a widely printed article that "Likud cannot accept the Oslo accords. [It is] a terrible and dangerous agreement."

Nevertheless, despite the hard-line rhetoric of Israel's new leaders, the Palestinians may actually have lost little if anything in the election. The Labor government had done little to fulfill Arab hopes that the Oslo agreement would lead to national independence and a better life. On the contrary, between September 1993 and June 1996 the government confiscated 62,000 acres of Palestinian land on the West Bank for Israeli roads and housing. On the post-Oslo map the West Bank autonomous areas resemble scattered ink blots on a solid background of Israeli-held territory rather than the basis of a future Palestinian state. The still-growing city of Jerusalem and its Jewish suburbs now stretch to the edges of West Bank towns. Although the results of the May election were disappointing, they may produce a sharper sense of reality on the part of Palestinian leaders. Arafat and his negotiators may no longer be willing to grant one concession after another to Israel in the hope of securing gains that never materialize.

At the same time, the Likud government dares not take away what the Israeli government has already granted—the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian towns, and limited autonomy in Palestinian areas—without risking the onset of a new intifada. The new government may have to agree to additional concessions as well, if Israelis are to be safe from terrorism. As Israeli writer David Grossman warned in a New York Times column of May 31, "Anyone who announces to the Palestinians that at the end of the process they will receive only a very limited autonomy is holding a burning match to the gunpowder of Palestinian despair." Since the Jewish settlers who danced at the news of Netanyahu's victory are heavily supplied with real gunpowder, the new government will have to keep tempers on both sides cool if it is to prevent violent confrontations that could scare off foreign investors.

Netanyahu will also be forced to negotiate with Assad. The day after Israel's elections, a Hezbollah ambush that killed 4 Israeli soldiers in Lebanon was followed by an Israeli bombing raid that killed 4 guerrillas and wounded 10. The fighting will continue indefinitely, with increasing bloodshed on both sides, until Israel comes to terms with Syria. Because stability in the Middle East is of international concern, Arab and European leaders are putting pressure on Israel to be more accommodating where Lebanon is concerned. Such pressure was especially evident during and after the escalation of violence last April between Hezbollah and Israel. The French, who strongly support the Lebanese government, played an active role in securing a truce agreement that called on both sides to refrain from attacking civilians, rather than simply requiring Hezbollah to end its attacks on Israeli troops as the U.S. had proposed. Consequently the agreement tacitly recognized Hezbollah's claim that Israeli military units were an occupation force and therefore should not be guaranteed protection.

Shortly afterward, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein, and Arafat, who had made peace with Israel and were therefore embarrassed as well as dismayed by the savagery of its air attacks on Lebanese civilians, called on the Jewish state to renounce its "concepts of expansion, superiority and domination" by withdrawing from all occupied Arab lands. They also demanded that Israel respect the national rights of Palestinians to Jerusalem and the spiritual and legal rights of all Arabs in that city. The three Arab leaders would seriously jeopardize their own positions if they allowed Israel to cancel the peace process and reverse whatever progress has been made.

Netanyahu undoubtedly will slow that process, but in fact Peres showed no signs of hastening it. The Labor government imposed more prolonged blockades on the West Bank and Gaza than any of its predecessors, carried out inflammatory death squad killings, demolished Palestinian homes, and failed to release all Palestinian prisoners or provide safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank as the Oslo accords required. After the Palestine National Council voted in April to delete sanctions of the National Covenant denying Israel's right to exist, the Labor Party in turn agreed to drop its opposition to a Palestinian state. But with highways restricted to Jewish travelers criss-crossing the West Bank, and fortress-like settlements dominating the hills, Labor's gesture seemed a hollow one. The government robbed it of further meaning by deciding to build 6,500 housing units on the last piece of Palestinian-owned space between Um Tuba and Beit Sahour, southeast of Jerusalem. The planned Har Homa project will complete a ring of settlements housing 200,000 Israelis that will isolate more than a million West Bank Palestinians from Arab East Jerusalem, thereby depriving them of access to the center of their religious, political, and cultural life. Emergence of a Palestinian state under these circumstances would be difficult to imagine, no matter who is prime minister of Israel.

Unyielding Negotiators

In the final round of talks called for in the Oslo accords, Likud negotiators will be unyielding on the question of Jerusalem, and, like Peres, unwilling to dismantle any settlements. Settling the issues of water allocation and the right of Palestinian refugees to return or to receive compensation will be more difficult than if Peres were in office. Otherwise, Palestinian may see little difference between the two government teams. Likud negotiators insist, as Labor officials did, that security is Israel's overriding concern. But if this were so, the Arab-Israeli conflict would have ended years ago when the Palestinians joined major Arab nations in accepting U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and the exchange of land for peace. With a nuclear arsenal, an impressive air force, and a high-tech army, Israel is secure against any military threat from its neighbors. As for terrorism, neither collective punishment nor electronic fences can deter a suicide bomber. A just peace is the only solution.

Despite the claims of its spokesmen, Israel's continued occupation of southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and parts of Gaza seems motivated less by security concerns than by the desire for economic advantage and access to water. Israeli governments have differed over the years in their style and domestic policies, but they have been remarkably similar in seeing to it that Israel retains ultimate control over Palestinian activities, receives a disproportionate share of available water, and reaps the maximum economic benefits.

Israel's recent actions are revealing. The ferocity of the April attack on Lebanon suggests the bombing was aimed less at subduing the Shi'i guerrillas, who had killed a total of 12 Israeli civilians since 1982, than at demonstrating to the Lebanese that Israel can halt their economic recovery at will. Commenting on Israel's destruction of roads, bridges, power stations, and reservoirs, Riad al-Rayyes, a Lebanese political commentator and publisher, told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, "They want to destroy Lebanon so it cannot become the banking and financial center it would become. They want to cut off the competition."

Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza also are driven by economics rather than security. A major reason for Israel's refusal to withdraw from the West Bank is that it appropriates more than 80 percent of the West Bank's water for its own use. Prohibiting Palestinian farmers from digging new wells, and depriving Palestinian villages of adequate drinking water, have nothing to do with security and everything to do with monopolizing a scarce resource.

An almost equally strong incentive for Israel's continued control of Gaza and the West Bank is the opportunity to use Palestinians as a source of commercial profit as well as cheap labor. Trade restrictions and a web of red tape force Palestinians to buy almost exclusively from Israel and make it difficult for them to produce or export their own products. In the April-May issue of The Other Israel, and Israeli peace magazine, Half Alajub expressed the frustrations Palestinians feel as a captive market: "If only we could import from Jordan. In Amman you could buy a sack of flour for 10 shekels but we are not allowed to bring it here and for Israeli flour we have to pay 90 shekels. The same is true for rice and other foodstuffs; everything costs here 10 times more than in other Arab countries. When we have to pay in the shop we are part of the Israeli economy but when we want to work in Israel we are not."

Israel's restrictions on the Palestinians have effectively nullified the Oslo economic protocol calling for "reciprocity, equity, and fairness" in trade relations, and for the free flow of goods and capital. Israeli officials held up construction of a new airport in Gaza last spring until the developers agreed to import all equipment and materials from Israel rather than Egypt. Work also was delayed on a new port because Israel blocked entry of Dutch equipment. When Palestinians are permitted to buy cheaper foreign products, they are forced to go through Israeli middlemen, who siphon off up to 35 percent of the profits.

Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath pointed out in an interview reported by the Jerusalem Times last April that the need for security did not explain Israel's trade barriers. "What has security to do with deliveries of sacks of flour to Gaza?" he asked. "What is the security problem involved in exporting flowers to Egypt? Why are fishermen not allowed to fish in their territorial waters?" The most plausible explanation is that Israelis want to keep down competition that could reduce their profits. The Labor government's solution was to continue the occupation but under a different name, and with cooperative Palestinians doing the enforcing rather than Israeli soldiers. In his New York Times column of May 13, Anthony Lewis quoted an attorney in Ramallah as saying, "Now it looks as though the Labor government wants a Palestinian regime that lets Israel have everything it wants in the West Bank. It may even allow a 'Palestinian state' if the result is really to maintain the status quo." The status quo, Lewis reported, had left Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with a pervasive sense of humiliation.

In the past three years the Israeli economy has grown by a healthy 7 percent a year while the Palestinian economy plummeted by 17 percent and more than half the work force became unemployed. These figures describe what can only be called a colonial relationship, in which one side exploits the other. Any agreement resulting from the final round of negotiations must provide for major changes in this relationship if there is to be peace between the two sides. Shimon Peres sincerely wanted peace, but neither he nor his predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, made an effort to root out the deeply embedded conviction of many Israelis that Jewish lives are sacrosanct and Arab lives are not. It was this sense of racial superiority that allowed cruelty and dehumanization to become principal features of the occupation and led the Israeli government last April to evacuate Jews but not Arabs from areas of northern Israel targeted by Hezbollah rocket fire.

The greatest favor the Clinton administration could do for Israel is to convince the new prime minister that Israelis cannot continue to dominate and exploit the Palestinians indefinitely and at the same time achieve security. Regardless of which party is in charge of the government, the framework for Palestinian self-rule that emerges from the current round of negotiations must be more than a facade for a Greater Israel if there is to be peace in the Middle East. This is a reality that even the most hard-line Israeli government will have to face.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance writer living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.