4
May 2011The Palestine
Center
Washington,
DC
Amb Chas Freeman:
I am honored to
have been asked to give the annual [Hisham B.]
Sharabi [Memorial] Lecture here at the
Palestine Center. As all of you know, Dr.
Hisham Sharabi helped found this Center, as
well as the Center for Contemporary Arab
Studies at Georgetown University. He was
a great figure in the study of Arab politics
and society. He was also an indefatigable
advocate of Palestinian rights. I never
met him, but I feel privileged to speak to you
today in his memory. My topic is the
tragic consequences of the conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians for them, for their
region, for their backers and for the world as
a whole.
The saga of the Holy Land,
ancient and modern, reminds someone with no
personal connection to it of nothing so much as
the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
There seems to be something about Palestine
that afflicts the innocent, tests the righteous
and causes incomprehensible suffering to past
and present inhabitants. Israeli Jews and
Palestinians both claim descent from the
ancient peoples of the lands they now
contest. Their competing narratives are
at the heart of the perverse drama there.
In this drama, the spiritual descendants of
Jews who left Palestine assert a religious duty
to dispossess the biological descendants of
those who chose to remain.
Over the
course of centuries, the Jews of the diaspora
were grievously persecuted by Christians.
This experience helped to inspire
Zionism. It culminated in the horrors of
the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile, under
Byzantium and the Caliphate, all but a few of
the Jews of Palestine sought refuge in
conversion to Judaism’s successor faiths:
Christianity and Islam. As an ironic
result, the homegrown descendants of
Palestine’s original Jewish population – the
Palestinians –now suffer because newcomers
proclaim them to be interlopers in lands they
have inhabited from time immemorial. And
yet another Jewish-descended diaspora – this
time, Christian and Muslim – has been ejected
from Palestine to suffer in exile. Not
even the most imaginative writer of fiction
could have composed an account of traumatic
suffering and human tragedy comparable to that
which Zionists and Palestinians have undergone
and continue to inflict on each
other.
The moral harm that these distant
cousins continue to do to each other is
huge. So is the damage they are doing to
their sympathizers and supporters abroad.
The resort to terrorist acts by Palestinians,
especially suicide bombings in crowded public
places, has caused them to forfeit much of the
international sympathy their cause would
otherwise enjoy. The massacre of
civilians in the West by Arabs enraged by
western support for Israeli mistreatment of the
Palestinians and other affronts has generated
intense European and American suspicion of all
Arabs. The diffusion of Arab rage to
non-Arab regions of the realm of Islam has
aroused global antipathy to Islam even as it
has inspired acts of terrorism among
Muslims.
Similarly, the cruelties
of Israelis to their Arab captives and
neighbors, especially in the ongoing siege of
Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of
Lebanon, have cost the Jewish state much of the
global sympathy that the Holocaust previously
conferred on it. The racist tyranny of
Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the
progressive emergence of a version of apartheid
in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a
growing number of people abroad who have
traditionally identified with Israel.
Many – perhaps most of the most disaffected –
are Jews. They are in the process of
dissociating themselves from Israel. They
know that, to the extent that Judaism comes to
be conflated with racist arrogance (as
terrorism is now conflated with Islam), Israeli
behavior threatens a rebirth of anti-Semitism
in the West. Ironically, Israel –
conceived as a refuge and guarantee against
European anti-Semitism – has become the sole
conceivable stimulus to its revival and
globalization. Demonstrably, Israel has
been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning
out also to be bad for the Jews.
The
early Zionists were mostly secular in
orientation. So was the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO). But, as
the struggle between Jewish settlers and
Palestinians proceeded, it became increasingly
infused with religious fervor. On both
sides, parties espousing sectarian extremism
displaced secular nationalist movements.
Religious dogmatism transformed what was at
first a secular struggle between competing
local nationalisms into a Jewish and Muslim
holy war for land in Palestine. In holy
wars, compromise is equated with heresy.
This tragic mutation of the conflict is now
reflected in increasing global animosity
between Muslims, Jews and their Christian
Zionist supporters. (Christian Zionists
perversely support the Jewish state in order to
hasten the arrival of Judgment Day, when they
expect Israel to be devastated and the world to
be purged of its Jews. Such people,
however Rube Goldberg-like the theology by
which they propose to annihilate the Jews, are
strange allies for Zionists to
embrace!)
The ongoing
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has
killed and wounded many people. It has
done even graver damage to the humane
principles at the heart of both Judaism and
Islam. Among Jews and Muslims in Israel
and Palestine the golden rule has been largely
forgotten. The principle that one should
not do to others what one would not wish done
to oneself had been integral to both
faiths. In the Holy Land, God’s love has
been replaced with murderous indifference to
the rights of others in a sickeningly bloody
bilateral contest to terrorize civilian
populations. Ethical voices on both sides
exist but they are less and less audible.
Amoral and unscrupulous zealots have the
podium. Their right to speak in their
religious community is seldom challenged.
Their utterances blacken the reputations of
both religions.
Obfuscatory euphemisms
are, unfortunately, the norm in the Holy
Land. But rhetorical tricks can no longer
conceal the protracted moral zero-sum game that
is in progress there. A people without
rights confronts a settler movement without
scruples. A predatory state with
cutting-edge military technology battles kids
with stones and resistance fighters with belts
of nails and explosives. Israel’s Cabinet
openly directs the murder of Palestinian
political leaders. There have been about
850 such extrajudicial executions over the past
decade. Israel is vigorously engaged in
the collective punishment and systematic ethnic
cleansing of its captive Arab
populations. It rails against terrorism
while carrying out policies explicitly
described as intended to terrorize the peoples
of the territories it is attacking or into
which it is illegally expanding.
Meanwhile, the elected authorities in Palestine
– indeed, most Palestinians – associate
themselves suicide bombers and unguided
missiles that indiscriminately murder Israeli
civilians. Each side has suspended moral
constraints in order to cause the other to
suffer in the hope that it will capitulate to
such coercion. To a distressing extent,
moreover, each side has also been able to
enlist unreasoning support for its cause and
the indiscriminate condemnation of the other by
powerful supporters abroad.
As always in
such mayhem, truth and the law have been the
first to go missing. Israel regularly
attributes to others the very things it itself
is doing. It has become notorious for its
refusal to accept objective scrutiny or
criticism. It routinely rebuffs
international investigators’ examination of
allegations against it, even when mandated by
the U.N. [United Nations] Security
Council. Instead, it stages
self-indulgent acts of self-investigation
calculated to produce exculpatory
propaganda. As a result, Israeli
government spokesmen – who once were presumed
to represent the intellectual integrity for
which Jewish scholars have always been renowned
– now have no credibility at all except among
those committed to the Zionist cause.
Meanwhile, regional and international respect
for the rule of law, especially humanitarian
law, has been greatly degraded. This is a
special irony.
Humanitarian law and the
law of war are arguably the supreme moral
artifacts of Atlantic civilization.
Jewish lawyers made a disproportionate
contribution to the crafting of both. The
resulting legal principles were intended to
deter the kinds of injuries and injustices that
European Jews and other minorities had long
suffered and to protect occupied populations
from persecution by their occupiers. Both
objectives are very relevant to contemporary
Palestine. It is, however, hard to find
any principle of due process, the several
Geneva Conventions, or the Nuremberg trials
that has not been systematically violated in
the Holy Land. Examples of criminal
conduct include mass murder, extra-judicial
killing, torture, detention without charge, the
denial of medical care, the annexation and
colonization of occupied territory, the illegal
expropriation of land, ethnic cleansing and the
collective punishment of civilians, including
the demolition of their homes, the systematic
reduction of their infrastructure and the
de-development and impoverishment of
entire regions. These crimes have been
linked to a concerted effort to rewrite
international law to permit actions that it
traditionally prohibited, in effect enshrining
the principle that might makes right.
As
the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’
(IDF) Legal Department has argued:
“If you do something for long enough
the world will accept it. The whole of
international law is now based on the notion
that an act that is forbidden today becomes
permissible if executed by enough countries . .
. . International law progresses through
violations.”
A colleague of his has extended
this notion by pointing out that:
“The more often Western states apply
principles that originated in Israel to their
own non-traditional conflicts in places like
Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the
chance these principles have of becoming a
valuable part of international
law.”
These references to Iraq and
Afghanistan underscore the extent to which the
United States, once the principal champion of a
rule-bound international order, has followed
Israel in replacing legal principles with
expediency as the central regulator of its
interaction with foreign peoples. The
expediently amoral doctrine of preemptive war
is such an Israeli transplant in the American
neo-conservative psyche. Neither it nor
other deliberate assaults on the rule of law
have been met with concerted resistance from
Palestinians, Arabs, or anyone else, including
the American Bar Association. The steady
displacement of traditional American values –
indeed, the core doctrines of western
civilization – with ideas designed to free the
state of inconvenient moral constraints has
debased the honor and prestige of our country
as well as Israel.
American
determination to protect Israel from the
political and legal consequences of any and all
of its actions has also taken its
toll, not just on the willingness of others to
credit and follow the United States, but also
on the authority of international organizations
and the integrity of international law.
The United Nations Security Council was
conceived as the ultimate arbiter and enforcer
of an international order in which law could
protect the weak and vulnerable from the
depredations of the strong. The world has
occasionally allowed its sympathy for
Palestinians, as underdogs, to override its
legal judgment, but the U.S. has routinely
exercised its veto to prevent the application
of well-established principles of international
law to Israel. The Security Council has
been transformed from the champion of the
global rule of law into the enemy of legality
as the standard of global governance.
Repeated American vetoes on behalf of Israel
have reduced the United Nations and other
international fora to impotence on fundamental
questions of justice and human dignity.
Confidence in these institutions has largely
disappeared. Thus, the Israel-Palestine
dispute has shaped a world in which both the
rule of law and the means by which it might be
realized have been deliberately degraded.
We are all the worse off for
this.
Israel’s
strength and prosperity depend on American
government and private subsidies as well as
Washington’s political and legal
protection. For Israelis, the moral
hazard created by such irresponsible indulgence
and unsparing American support has been a
tragedy. It has enabled Israel to follow
its most self-destructive inclinations by
relieving it from the requirement to weigh
their consequences. It has bred hubris
that encourages the Jewish state to pursue
short-term advantage without consideration of
the resulting risks to its long-term
viability. For the Palestinians,
America’s slavish support of Israel has meant
an unending nightmare, trapping them in a limbo
in which the protections of both law and human
decency are at best capriciously applied.
For the United States, deference to Israel’s
counterproductive policies and actions has
become a debilitating drain on American power
to shape events by measures short of war.
The United States is now so closely identified
with the Jewish state that Americans cannot
escape perceived complicity with any and all of
its actions, whether we agree or disagree with
them. In the eyes of the world, Israel’s
behavior is a reproach to the American
reputation as well as its own.
Perceived American double standards and
hypocrisy on matters related to the
Israel-Palestine conflict account for much of
the recent decline in international admiration
and deference to U.S. leadership in the Middle
East and elsewhere. In 2006, when free
and fair elections in Palestine produced a
government that Israel detested and feared, the
United States joined Israel in seeking to
isolate and overthrow that government, thus
setting aside and discrediting America’s
long-professed dedication to the spread of
democracy in the Middle East and
elsewhere. In 2006 and 2008, the United
States encouraged Israeli military actions
against Lebanese and Palestinian civilians that
were both more brutal and sustained than those
that Col. [Muammar] Gaddafi has recently
carried out against his fellow Libyans.
Far from calling for no-fly zones over Lebanon
and Gaza, however, the U.S. government
continued to supply Israel with gifts of
ammunition, including cluster bombs and white
phosphorus, as the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]
expended its stocks of them on Lebanese and
Palestinian civilian population centers,
facilities and infrastructure.
U.S. sponsorship of
the late, lamented “peace process” began as a
demonstration of American diplomatic power, the
indispensable role of the United States in
Middle Eastern affairs, and the necessity of
all interested in peace to defer to
America. The “peace process” has ended by
discrediting American power and
diplomacy. It has failed to deliver
either the self-determination for Palestinians
or the acceptance of Israel by its neighbors
envisaged in the Camp David Accords.
Instead, Israel’s deepening commitment to
“settler Zionism” has uprooted ever greater
numbers of Palestinians while alarming and
affronting other Arabs and Muslims. Four
decades of American diplomacy is now seen in
the region as having been an elaborate
diplomatic deception, yielding nothing but the
continual enlargement of the Jewish state at
Palestinian expense.
This failure of the
American-led “peace process” is all the more
telling because it occurred despite the
existence of a compelling, existential interest
in the achievement of a formula for
cohabitation on the part of both Israelis and
Palestinians. This interest is clearly
reflected in the eagerness of Palestinian
officials to negotiate a basis for peaceful
coexistence with Israel that is revealed in the
official record of the Israel-Palestine
negotiations recently leaked to and by
Al-Jazeera. The abject pleading of
Palestine’s negotiators for peace, to which
these documents attest, contrasts with the
callous determination of their Israeli
counterparts not to take yes for an
answer. Yet the security and prosperity
of Israelis and Palestinians alike is dependent
on each accepting the other. Without
Palestinian agreement, Israel cannot define its
borders or enjoy acceptance by any of its
neighbors. Without Israel’s agreement,
Palestinians cannot achieve self-determination
within a defined territory. Without
mutual respect and tolerance, neither Israel
nor Palestine can hope to live in peace for
long. Animosity breeds threats, and no
military hegemony is forever.
The
inability of the United States to build on the
obvious shared interests of Palestinians and
Israelis is, at best, damning testimony to the
incompetence of those Americans who have made a
career of processing peace without ever
delivering it. At worst, it is compelling
evidence of the extent to which they have
functioned as “Israel’s lawyers,” rather than
as mediators sincerely attempting to produce a
mutually respectful and therefore durable modus
vivendi between Israelis, Palestinians
and other Arabs. As such, it is a
reflection of the inordinate influence of
right-wing Israelis on American policies and
the people chosen to implement them. I
have had personal experience of this on more
than one occasion.
In late November
1988, shortly after the election of George H.
W. Bush as [United States] president, I was
invited to lunch by a senior Israeli official
with whom, in pursuance of U.S. policy, I had
worked closely to expand Israel’s diplomatic
and military presence in Africa. I had
come to like and respect this official.
He wished to thank me, he said, for what I had
done for his country. I was
pleased. Over lunch, however, he asked me
what I planned to do in the new administration,
adding, “Tell me what job you want. We
can get it for you.” The casual arrogance
with which this representative of a foreign
power claimed to be able to manipulate the
staffing of national security positions in the
U.S. government was a stunning belittlement of
American patriotism. Twenty years later,
I was to be reminded that agents of foreign
influence who can make appointments to national
security positions in the United States can
also unmake them.
Under the
circumstances, the consistent pro-Israel bias
of American officials charged with the
management of the Israel-Palestine conundrum
and their lack of empathy for the Palestinians
are in no way a surprise. A passionate
attachment to one side is inconsistent with
mediation of its disputes with another.
The absence of empathy is fatal to the craft of
diplomacy. Such disabilities account, at
least in part, for the failure of the
decades-long labors of American officials to
produce anything but political cover for the
ongoing displacement of Palestinians from their
homes. The ultimate achievement of
American peace processors has been to bring
great discredit upon themselves and the United
States. American diplomacy on the
Israel-Palestine issue is becoming less and
less relevant to events in the region and
increasingly unacceptable to the world as a
whole.
A new milestone in this journey
to diplomatic ignominy was reached on February
18 this year, when the United States vetoed a
resolution in the U.N. Security Council that
had been cobbled together from earlier official
American statements. The resolution
condemned the expansion of Israeli settlements
and called for it to end. In doing so, it
echoed numerous previous Security Council
resolutions as well as the “Road Map.”
All fourteen other members of the Council,
including America’s closest allies, spoke
vigorously in favor of the resolution, which
had been sponsored by 130 member states.
The debate and the vote on that resolution were
an unambiguous vote of no confidence in
American as well as Israeli policy.
This repudiation of U.S. leadership and
Israeli expansionism seems certain to be
reiterated even more unmistakably when the
[U.N.] General Assembly convenes in
September. The international community
will then take up the question of whether to
underscore its near-unanimous rejection of
Israel’s claim to any territory beyond its
pre-1967 borders by recognizing an independent
Palestinian state there and admitting that
state to the United Nations. The United
States no longer has the political credibility
necessary to control the diplomatic context in
which Israel operates.
The displacement
of the United States from its previously
unchallenged primacy in Middle Eastern
diplomacy comes amidst other momentous changes
in the strategic landscape in the region.
The U.S. government’s failure to stand by its
longtime protégé, [former Egyptian President]
Hosni Mubarak, convinced leaders elsewhere who,
like Mubarak, had linked their fate to America
that Washington is a faithless friend and
impotent protector. The decades-long
inclination of conservative Arab rulers to
curry favor with Washington by acquiescing in
American policies has been gravely impaired,
perhaps irreparably. But the deep
disenchantment with America of the dissidents
who overthrew Mubarak was not overcome by the
Obama administration’s belated abandonment of
him. A majority of Egyptians want to
annul the Camp David Accords. Whether
Egypt does so or not, a much larger majority of
Egyptians want their country generally to
decouple its foreign policy from that of the
United States. As goes Egypt, so very
likely goes Jordan. Arab deference to
American – and hence to Israeli – interests and
dictates will manifestly be much less in future
than in the past.
There is a great deal
of apprehension in Israel over these
developments and not a little consternation in
Washington’s think tanks and belief tanks about
them. The storm warnings are up, and for
good reason. Had Israel and the United
States planned it, we could hardly have
contrived a status quo less likely to be
accepted as legitimate by a democratized Middle
East. If contemporary Israel
represents the future, it is certainly
problematic. But as is so often the
case with clouded situations, there may be a
bright side to the changes in
progress.
Given the protracted failure
of U.S. diplomacy in the Israel-Palestine
arena, Palestinians and others may be forgiven
for believing that it is time to entrust
peacemaking to other parties who are more
objective, less politically constrained and
less emotionally biased. Others in Europe
and elsewhere have taken alarmed note of the
adverse effects of the unending conflict on
Israel, on the Palestinians, on Arab politics,
on regional stability, on inter-religious
relations, on the moral standing of global
Jewry and Islam, on Arab and Islamic relations
with the West, on international law and
organizations and on world order. Media
outside the United States have taken
progressively more balanced and nuanced note of
the human suffering in the Holy Land.
Europeans and others now evidence a
considerably greater sense of urgency about
these problems than Americans have done.
The notion that only Americans have the
capacity to manage conflict resolution in the
Middle East will no longer withstand
scrutiny. One recalls the role of Norway
in crafting the Oslo Accords. Perhaps,
now that the United States has struck out, it’s
someone else’s turn at bat.
A new game
is clearly beginning. A self-confident,
religiously tolerant but secular Turkey has
emerged as a major influence on regional
affairs and as an inspiration to its
democrats. Arab diplomacy is being
invigorated by the aftereffects of the
revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere. There
is mounting pressure on all Arab governments to
accord greater deference to popular opinion in
both domestic and foreign policy. The
Middle East will no longer allow itself to be
the diplomatic playground of great powers
outside it. There will, however, be new
opportunities for interested outside parties to
forge diplomatic partnerships with those in the
region. Most are looking for new
beginnings, new relationships and new
ideas. All see an urgent need to end the
racist oppression and humiliation of Arabs in
the Holy Land. These injustices are at
the root of regional instability. They
empower extremist and terrorist movements in
the Middle East and beyond. They threaten
the future of the Jewish
state.
Diplomatic partnerships between
outside powers and Arab governments for the
purpose of crafting a durable peace in
Palestine – as opposed to stabilizing the
iniquitous status quo – have long been
conspicuous by their absence. In 2002,
the Arab League announced a revolutionary peace
proposal in Beirut. Israel and the United
States shelved it with minimal
acknowledgment. Its potential remains
unexplored. It has a limited shelf life
but there may still be an opportunity to make
use of it.
The Arabs are thinking
anew. It is time for Israel to engage in
new thinking of its own. Israel has shown
great skill at deflecting the peace proposals
of others and subjecting them to campaigns of
diplomatic attrition. It has never made
its own specific proposal of peace to the
Palestinians. It has demanded respect for
the dignified autonomy of its Jewish identity
but has offered no reciprocal recognition of
Palestinian identity. Perhaps it is time
for Israel to do these things. Its
changed strategic environment, the diminished
capacity of the United States to protect it
from the political and legal consequences of
its conduct and changing attitudes toward it in
the Jewish diaspora foretell an end to the
moral hazard from which the Jewish state has
suffered. For the first time in decades,
Israel will have to take into account the risks
to its future as it contemplates actions in the
present. In the interest of its own
survival and prosperity, it may begin to make
wiser and more farsighted decisions. We
must hope so.
There can, of course, be
no peace between Israelis and Palestinians
unless there are governments that can commit
both sides to terms. Part of the Israeli
strategy of deferring peace so as to seize more
land for settler Zionists has been a
multifaceted effort to ensure that no one has
the authority to speak for all
Palestinians. The United States has
effectively colluded in this strategy of divide
and rule, especially since the 2006 elections
brought Hamas to power. If Israel is to
have peace, however, rather than perpetual
rejection by both Palestinians and other Arab
and Muslim neighbors, it needs a unified
Palestinian leadership with which to strike a
deal. Thanks to the skill of Egyptian
diplomacy, such a Palestinian government of
national unity is now a real prospect. In
the interest of peace, the region and the world
should welcome and encourage Palestinian unity
rather than succumb to Pavlovian impulses to
condemn it.
However
distasteful they may find it to do so after all
that they have suffered at Israeli hands,
Palestinians, including Gazans, must
collaborate with Israel to achieve peace.
But it is equally true that there can and will
be no peace for Israel until there is peace for
the Palestinians, including those in
diaspora. The United States has proven
incapable of creating strategic circumstances
conducive to serious, as opposed to
make-believe negotiations between the warring
parties in the Holy Land. Perhaps,
however, such circumstances are nonetheless
finally emerging, allowing Palestinians and
Israelis to attempt a fresh start at achieving
peaceful coexistence. They must look to
themselves, to others in the region, and to
new, non-American mediators to accomplish this.
That Palestinians and Israelis
find a mutually agreeable basis for peaceful
coexistence is essential not only to their own
well-being but to that of the wider
world. Only they can make the decisions
necessary to achieve this. But, in our
own interest, the rest of us must help them as
best we can. The adverse consequences of
the Israel-Palestine conflict have penetrated
and extended far beyond the two parties to the
holy war now raging in Palestine. The
benefits of peace there would be equally deep
and wide.
This
transcript may be used without permission but
with proper attribution
to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do
not necessarily reflect
the views of The Jerusalem
Fund. 
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