Avi Shlaim
Unabridged text of article published in the New Statesman under the title 'Sharon's iron wall',
Special Issue: Israel, Monday, 31st October 2005
In
1923 Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism,
published an article entitled ‘On the Iron Wall’. He argued
that Arab nationalists were bound to oppose the establishment of a
Jewish state in Palestine. Consequently, a voluntary agreement between
the two sides was unattainable. The only way to realise the Zionist
project was behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength. In other
words, the Zionist project could only be implemented unilaterally and
by military force.
The
crux of Jabotinsky’s strategy was to enable the Zionist movement
to deal with its local opponents from a position of unassailable
strength. The iron wall was not an end in itself but a means to an end.
It was intended to compel the Arabs to abandon any hope of destroying
the Jewish state. This was to be followed by a second stage:
negotiations with the Arabs about their status and national rights in
Palestine. In other words, Jewish military strength was to pave the way
to a political settlement with the Palestinian national movement which
laid a claim to the whole of Palestine.
The
history of the State of Israel is a vindication of the strategy of the
iron wall. The Arabs – first the Egyptians, then the
Palestinians, then the Jordanians -- learnt the hard way that Israel
could not be defeated on the battlefield and were compelled to
negotiate with her from a position of palpable weakness. The 1993 Oslo
accord between Israel and the PLO was a major turning-point in the
100-year old history of the conflict over Palestine. It marked the
transition from the first to the second stage of iron wall strategy,
the transition from deterrence to negotiations and compromise. By
signing the Oslo accord, Israel and the PLO recognised one another and
agreed to settle their outstanding differences by peaceful means. The
Palestinians believed that by giving up their claim to 78% of pre-1948
Palestine, they would gradually gain an independent state stretching
over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem.
Twelve years on, the Palestinians are bitterly disappointed with the
results of the historic compromise that they had struck with Israel.
The
Oslo peace process broke down partly because the Palestinians reverted
to violence but mainly because Israel, under the leadership of the
right-wing Likud, reneged on its side of the bargain. The most blatant
transgression against the spirit, if not the letter of the Oslo accord
was the constant expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements on the
West Bank and the construction of more and more roads to connect them
with Israel. These settlements are a symbol of the hated occupation, a
constant source of friction, and a threat to the territorial contiguity
of a future Palestinian state. To the Palestinians, settlement
expansion suggested that Israel had not been negotiating in good faith
and that its real intention was to repackage rather than to end the
occupation.
With
the election of Ariel Sharon in 2001, Israel regressed to the first
stage of the iron wall strategy with a vengeance. Sharon has nothing to
offer the Palestinians on the political front. The two main pillars of
his long career were mendacity and the most savage brutality towards
Arab civilians. He had always been the champion of violent solutions, a
kind of Jewish Rambo. He consistently opposed all the earlier attempts
at reconciliation with the Palestinians, including the Oslo accords.
His sole response to the Al-Aqsa intifada consisted of employing
military force on an ever growing scale, culminating in the use of F-16
warplanes against the Palestinian people. Throughout his five years in
power, Sharon adamantly refused to resume the negotiations on the final
status of the territories until the Palestinian Authority delivers an
end to the violence. He knows that this condition is impossible to
meet; that is why he insists on it. He treats the Palestinian Authority
not the government of a state in the making but a sub-contractor who is
failing in his primary duty - to safeguard Israel’s security.
While
using the rhetoric of peace, Sharon’s real purpose is politicide:
to deny the Palestinians any independent political existence in
Palestine. In June 2003, to inject some life into the comatose peace
process, the Quartet launched the “road map”: a plan in
three stages leading to an independent Palestinian state alongside
Israel by the end of 2005. Sharon’s government pretended to go
along with the road map but its policies remained completely unchanged.
It continued to order IDF incursions into the Palestinian territories,
targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, demolition of houses,
uprooting of trees, curfews, restrictions, and the deliberate
inflicting of misery, hunger, and hardship to encourage Arab migration
from the West Bank. At the same time, settlement activity continued on
the West Bank under the guise of ‘natural growth’ but in
blatant violation of the provisions of the road map.
Last
but not least there is the so-called security barrier that Israel is
building in the West Bank. Its declared purpose is to prevent terrorist
attacks but it is as much about land-grabbing as it is about security.
By building the wall Israel is unilaterally redrawing the borders at
the expense of the Palestinians. It is “in your face”
violence against the Palestinians. It separates children from their
schools, farmers from their land, and whole villages from their medical
facilities. The wall is a flagrant violation of international law. It
was condemned by the International Court of Justice and by the UN
General Assembly but construction continues regardless. It is not for
nothing that Sharon used to be called “the bulldozer”. For
Jabotinsky the iron wall was a metaphor for military strength, in the
crude hands of Ariel Sharon it is turning into a hideous physical
reality and an insurmountable barrier to reconciliation and peace.
Realising
that time and demography were not on Israel’s side, Sharon began
to look for ways of distancing Israel from the main Palestinians
population centres while keeping as much of their land as possible. The
plan he came up with was not a peace plan but a plan for a unilateral
Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip and four isolated settlements
on the West Bank. Characteristically, the plan ignored Palestinian
rights and interests and it was not even presented to Palestinian
Authority as a basis for negotiations. To the world Sharon presented
the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to the road map and to the
building of peace based on a two-state solution. But to his right-wing
supporters he said: “My plan is difficult for the Palestinians, a
fatal blow. There’s no Palestinian state in a unilateral
move.” The real purpose behind the move was to redraw
unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating Jerusalem
and the four main settlement blocs the West Bank. Anchored in a
fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the
withdrawal from Gaza is part of a long-term Likud effort to deny the
Palestinian people an independent political existence on their land. It
undermines the very basis for a two-state solution.
Ariel
Sharon is the last in a long line of Israeli leaders to invoke spurious
arguments of security in order to defend policies that are
indefensible. The Palestinians do not pose a threat to Israel’s
basic security but the other way round. The contest is an unequal one
between a vulnerable Palestinian David on the one hand and a heavily
armed and heavy-handed Israeli Goliath on the other. Israel is not
fighting for its security or survival but to retain some of the
territories it conquered in the course of the June 1967 war. Israel
within the Green Line is legitimate; the Zionist colonial project
beyond that line is not. The war that Israel is currently waging
against the Palestinian people on their land is a colonial war. Like
all other colonial wars, it is savage, senseless, directed mainly
against civilians, and doomed to failure in the long run.
An
independent Palestinian state is bound to emerge sooner or later over
the whole of Gaza, most of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. It would
be weak, crowded, burdened with refugees, economically dependent, and
insignificant as a military force. The choice facing Israel is between
accepting the inevitable with as much grace as it can muster and
continuing to resist, restrict, and frustrate the emergent Palestinian
state. Considerations of self-interest as well as of morality point to
the first option because the longer Israel persists in denying the
Palestinians the right to self-determination, the more its own
legitimacy would be called into question. Israel should withdraw from
the occupied territories not as a favour to the Palestinians but as a
huge favour to itself. For, as Karl Marx observed, a nation that
oppresses another cannot itself remain free.