THE ENDLESS, DECEPTIVE PEACE PROCESS We Cannot Negotiate

CHAPTER 8

THE ENDLESS, DECEPTIVE PEACE PROCESS

We cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable. -RKQ)LW]JHUDOG.HQQHG\1 To plunder, to butcher, to steal: These they falsely name empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace. Tacitus We win every battle, but we lose the war. Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet

Eve’s Story

The first time I visited Palestine my hosts, who were forbidden to enter Israel, called a yellow-plate taxi to take me directly from Ramallah to Ben Gurion Airport. We passed many checkpoints en route, the first of which was Qalandiya, where every car was stopped and searched. As we pulled into one of the lanes I remarked to the driver, a retired engineer who spoke impeccable Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English that the 18 year old IDF soldier motioning us to halt probably had more rights in Palestine than he did, although she was clearly a recent Ethiopian immigrant while he and his ancestors had been born in Palestine. When it was our car’s turn to be searched, this young woman, communicating mostly in gestures, demanded that we open the trunk and both of my suitcases. When she finished inspecting them, she turned to me and with a clearly ironic grin said: “Have a nice day” in halting English. Tense though I was, this parody of American politeness surprised a chuckle out of me, and without thinking much about it, I said: “Oh my god, you are so ready for the streets of New York.” I saw the shock of that remark go through her: she inhaled sharply and stood stock still, looking completely startled. Then, very gently, she laid her hand on my arm and, in the most plaintive voice imaginable, said: “Oh, do you really think I could?”

:KHQ,ZURWHWKHILUVWGUDIWRI&KDSWHULQWKHILUVWHGLWLRQ,HQGHGWKH introduction by saying I would cover four time periods each of which, “(except perhaps the most recent one), ends in a conflagration, after which all three parties continue to pursue the same fixed ends without better prospects of achieving them.” Sadly, by the time the first draft of this chapter was written Israelis were perpetrating yet another massacre in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, so the pattern of conflagration continues to hold. Now, as the final draft for the second edition is being written, we have just seen the high civilian casualties in Gaza inflicted by Israeli snipers, followed by an increase in rocket fire from Gaza, and increasing calls for harsh retaliation coming from the Israeli political sector. Those who do not learn anything from history appear truly doomed to repeat its mistakes.

THE ISRAELIS AND THE “PEACE PROCESS” For the Israelis, the period from the first Intifada to the present can be characterized as one in which they played out the hand they dealt themselves in the context of a changing world. By the time the first Intifada wound down, the Israelis were in possession RIDVWURQJVWDWHRIWKHLURZQDOPRVW\HDUVROG7KH\DOVRKDGH[HUFLVHG IXOOFRQWURORYHUDOOWKH:HVW%DQN(DVW-HUXVDOHP*D]DDQGWKH*RODQ Heights for more than two decades. The Israelis’ dream was and is to take all of this land with none (or as few as possible) of the Palestinians on it, and the Zionist project continues to see how close it can come to making that dream come true. The first challenge in the post-Intifada period was posed by the fact that an entire generation of Israeli control of Palestinian land and Palestinian SHRSOH ± KDG QRW SURGXFHG WKH SDFLILFDWLRQ WKDW WKH ,VUDHOLV sought. Land expropriation via the Custodian of Absentee Property inside Israel, or settlement building/colonization inside the Occupied Territories, PLOLWDU\UXOHWKHOHJDOFRGLILFDWLRQRI-HZLVKFXOWXUHODQJXDJHHGXFDWLRQ as the law of the land – none of these instruments, alone or together, had produced a Palestinian population docile and resigned to living on Israeli terms. The Intifada, from the Israeli point of view, clearly required additional new strategies of control. Initially, of course, the physical confrontations that were part of the Intifada, the rock-throwing Palestinian children and the Israeli tanks that confronted them, elicited the most repressive tactics, the era of “break their bones”4 Israeli conduct in the Occupied Territories. In choosing violent repression,

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