ISRAEL AND PALESTINE ISRAEL AND PALESTINE Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations Avi Shlaim V VERSO London • New York Earlier versions of the chapters included in this volume have appeared in the following publications: Chapter #1, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed.. Yet More Adventures with Britannia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005); #2, in Mary Coll, ed., Faithful Companions: Collected Essays Celebrating the 25th Anniversary o f the Kate O’Brien Weekend (Limerick: Mellick Press, 2009); #3, #5, #8, #15 Journal o f Palestine Studies; #4, #6, #7, #9, #10, #12, #13, #18, #20, London Review o f Books', #11, #29, Guardian; #14, in Jane Davis, ed., Politics and International Relations in the Middle East (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995); #16, in Louise Fawcett ed.. International Relations o f the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); #17, #26, New York Review o f Books; #19, Israel Studies; #21, The Nation; #22, in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne eds., Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future ofWorld Order (London: Palgrave, 2002); #23, Logos; #25, Islámica; #27, in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, eds., Emancipation and Representation: On the Intellectual Meditations o f Edward Said (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); #30, Jewish Chronicle First published by Verso 2009 © Avi Shlaim 2009 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3579 10 8642 V erso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-366-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Vail To Tamar Contents Introduction ix Chronology xvii M aps xxii Partit 1948ifldAfta 1 T h e Balfour Declaration and its Consequences 3 2 Hie Civil War in Palestine 25 3 The Rise and Fall of the All'Palestine Government in Gaza 37 4 D id They Leave or Were They Pushed? 54 5 Husni Zaim and the Plan to Resettle Palestinian Refugees in Syria 62 6 All the Difference 77 7 Israels Dirty War 84 8 The Struggle for Jordan 93 9 Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal 104 10 Sleepless Afternoons 114 P a rt l i t To Oslo and Beyond 11 Hie Pace that Launched a Thousand MiGs 123 12 Arab Nationalism and its Discontents 128 viii CONTENTS 13 Israel and the Gulf 141 14 Changing Places: The Madrid Peace Conference 152 15 Prelude to the Oslo Accord: Likud, Labour and the Palestinians 168 16 The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process 187 17 Woman of the Year 210 18 Overtaken by Events 224 19 The Likud in Power: The Historiography of Revisionist Zionism 235 20 Capital Folly 253 Part III: The Breakdown of the Peace Process 21 The Lost Steps 263 22 George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 277 23 Ariel Sharons War Against the Palestinians 285 24 Palestine and Iraq 296 25 Israels War Against Hamas: Rhetoric and Reality 307 Part IV: Perspectives 26 His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel 321 27 Edward Said and the Palestine Question 343 28 Four Days in Seville 357 29 Benny Morris and the Betrayal of History 361 30 Free Speech? Not for Critics of Israel 366 Notes 373 Acknowledgements 381 Index 383 Introduction he Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most bitter, protracted, violent and seemingly intractable conflicts of modern times. This book brings together my writings on T the Palestine question over the last quarter of a century. With the exception of the chapter on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the time span of this volume begins with the Palestine War of 1948 and ends with the savage war launched by Israel on Gaza in December 2008. Between these melancholy dates fall nearly all the events discussed in the following pages. The chapters in this book, although they were written at different times, have one thing in common: they are a testimony to an alternative view, to a more critical way of looking at the past. They are also grounded in the belief that the past is our best guide for understanding the present and for predicting the future. Only by coming to grips with the tangled and tortured history of this conflict can we make sense of it. Alongside the political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians runs a parallel conflict between two distinct national narratives. Only by taking full account of these two narratives can we form a true picture of the character and dynamics of this tragic conflict, and of the prospects for its resolution. X ISRAEL AND PALESTINE I belong to a small group of scholars who are sometimes labelled the ‘revisionist Israeli historians* and sometimes the new historians’. The original group included Benny Morris of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and lian Pappé of Haifa University. We were called the new historians’ because we challenged the standard Zionist version of the causes and course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. More specifically, we challenged the many myths that have come to surround the birth of Israel and the first Arab—Israeli war of 1948. Benny Morris, who coined the term ‘the new historiography, radically changed his views on the nature of this conflict following the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 and the Palestinian resort to violence and suicide attacks. He began to lay virtually all the blame for the failure to reach a political settlement at the door of the Palestinians. lian Pappé and I, on the other hand, held on to our belief that Israel bears the primary responsibility for both the persistence and the escalation of the conflict. Many different issues are explored in the chapters that follow, which are arranged in only a rough chronological order. As such, it might help the reader to know at the beginning of the journey that much of what follows turns on three main watersheds: the creation of Israel in May 1948; the Six-Day War of June 1967; and the Oslo Accord signed on 13 September 1993. Each of these episodes is the subject of heated debate among scholars, and among the protagpnists on both sides. The first debate is about 1948. I believe that the creation of the State of Israel involved a terrible injustice to the Palestinians. But I fully accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. My critics claim that these two statements are contradictory, that a state based on injustice cannot be legitimate. My reply is as follows. As a result of the creation of Israel, the Palestinians suffered dispossession and dispersal. Over 700,000 Palestinians, roughly half of the indigenous Arab population, became refugees. The name Palestine was wiped off the map. This outcome of the war constituted not merely an injustice but a profound national trauma, a catastrophe or al-Nakba, as it is called in Arabic. But the Jews also suffered an injustice, perhaps the greatest injustice of the twentieth century - the Holocaust. The Jews are Introduction x i a people and, like any other people, they have a natural right to national self-determination. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the moral case for a Jewish state became unassailable. In the circumstances of 1948, after the hideous suffering inflicted on the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany, it was an inescapable fact that something on a titanic scale had to be done for them and there was nothing titanic enough except Palestine. This was the background to the UN resolution of 29 November 1947 for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The UN resolution provided an international charter of legitimacy for the Jewish state. True, the Arabs were not responsible for the barbaric treatment of the Jews in the heardand of Christian Europe. Most Arabs consequendy felt that the gift of part of Palestine to the Jews was illegal. However, a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly by a large majority cannot be illegal. It may be unjust but not illegal. Injustice and illegality are not the same thing. What is legal is not necessarily just. Moreover, in 1949 Israel concluded armistice agreements with all its Arab neighbours: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. These are the only internationally recognised borders that Israel has ever had. And these are the only borders that I regard as legitimate. The second great watershed in the modern history of the Middle East was June 1967. In the course of its spectacular victory in the Six-Day War, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. On 22 November 1967, the UN Security Council passed resolution 242. The preamble emphasised the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, and the resolution itself called on Israel to give up the territories it had captured in return for peace with its neighbours. For the first time in its history Israel had something concrete to offer the Arabs in return for recognition and peace. But Israel preferred land to peace. Within a matter of months after the guns fell silent, Israel began to build civilian setdements in the occupied territories in blatant contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel became a colonial power. For my part, as I have said, I still accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.