The
Evil Conspiracy
Of The Peacemongers!
By Uri Avnery
19 September, 2006
Gush Shalom
Guess whose words these are:
"Starting this war
was a scandal...It was possible to solve the problem of the missiles
in South Lebanon by diplomatic meansThe offensive of the last two days
of the war, in which 33 soldiers were killed after the cease-fire resolution
had already been accepted, was a spin of the Prime MinisterThe Prime
Minister, the Minister of Defense and the Chief-of-Staff must resign"
Right, it was Gush Shalom,
the Israeli peace group.
But that's not new. What
is new is that yesterday, the former Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Ya'alon,
repeated these statements, almost word for word.
"Bogie" Ya'alon
is the very opposite of Gush Shalom. Nobody could say that he belongs
to a "marginal group". He comes from the very center of the
establishment. He is a Rightist. He was responsible for some of the
most cruel acts of the occupation.
There is another difference:
Gush Shalom spoke out when the events were actually happening, in the
midst of the war, when it was still possible to save the lives of those
33 soldiers. At that time, these statements were unpopular in the extreme,
bordering on treason. Because no Israeli medium was prepared to publish
them, the Gush had to pay for them as advertisements. Now Ya'alon comes
and repeats them, after the wind has changed and they have become popular.
Ya'alon's motives are not
important. (As will be remembered, Ariel Sharon removed him from office
and replaced him with Dan Halutz a year ago, in order to ease the way
for the "Disengagement"). What is important is that the things
have now been said by a person with supreme military credentials. When
such a person declares that 33 soldiers were sacrificed for no military
purpose, for the personal interests of Ehud Olmert, that the war itself
was quite unnecessary, and that the problem of Hizbullah's rockets could
have been solved by diplomatic means - these things carry weight.
This is not important only
in regard to what happened a few weeks ago, when the leadership spoke
of a terrible danger looming on our northern border, but even more so
today, when the same leadership is warning of an even more acute "threat"
somewhere else.
* * *
IN THE corridors of power
in Jerusalem the cry is going up: "Help! Peace is upon you, Israel!"
A terrible enemy is conspiring
to impose peace on us. He is advancing against us from two sides, in
a giant pincer movement.
One arm of this offensive
is the Palestinian Unity Government that is about to be set up.
The other is the decision
of the Arab League to revive the Arab Peace Plan.
From the point of view of
the Government of Israel, this offensive is far more dangerous then
all of Hassan Nasrallah's rockets put together.
* * *
THE PALESTINIAN Government
of National Unity is designed to solve, first of all, domestic Palestinian
problems.
Since the Palestinians elected
Hamas, a state of anarchy has prevailed on the Palestinian street. The
constant clashes between the President, who is the head of Fatah, and
the Prime Minister, who belongs to Hamas, have created a state of paralysis,
just when the Palestinian people need unity in the face of existential
challenges.
Fatah has dominated the modern
Palestinian national movement since its foundation by Yasser Arafat
almost 50 years ago. It is not resigned to defeat. But a people fighting
for its very existence cannot allow its two main factions to fight against
each other, instead of cooperating in the struggle for national liberation.
To this must be added the
blockade imposed on the Palestinian Authority by Europe and America,
by order of President Bush. This is an unprecedented attempt to literally
starve a whole people into removing its democratically elected government.
The National Unity Government
is designed to restore public order and to break the international blockade.
For this to happen, the government
must circumvent several obstacles. For religious reasons, it is difficult
for Hamas to recognize Israel officially. This has nothing to do with
anti-Semitism, as alleged, but with the fact that according to Islam,
Palestine is a "Waqf" (religious endowment) belonging to Allah
(similar to the Jewish fundamentalists' belief that God has promised
us the country, so that giving away any part of it is a mortal sin.)
But the Muslim religion opens a back door here by allowing for a long-term
"hudnah" (truce) that can last for decades or even centuries.
The way to solve this problem
is to get the Unity Government, headed by Hamas, to declare that it
is committed to the "prisoners' document", the UN resolutions,
the agreements signed between Israel and the PLO and the Arab peace
plan - all of which are based on the recognition of Israel. That should
suffice for anybody who really wants to promote Israeli-Palestinian
peace.
As far as our government
is concerned, there precisely is the rub.
* * *
THE SECOND arm of the peace
offensive is the renewal of the Arab Peace Plan.
This plan was originally
devised by Abdallah, then the Crown Prince and now the King of Saudi
Arabia. It was adopted by the summit meeting of the Arab heads of state
in Beirut in March 2002.
This plan says, roughly:
the entire Arab world will recognize Israel and make peace with it,
if it withdraws to the 1967 borders and makes it possible to establish
the State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The government of Israel
has rejected the initiative, as the Hebrew expression goes, "on
the threshold" (every peace initiative is rejected "on the
threshold", so as not to allow it, God forbid, to put a foot in
the door.) The plan was consigned to a pigeon hole and has been collecting
dust ever since. Now the evil Arabs have decided to dust it off and
slap it back on the table.
* * *
AGAINST THIS danger of the
Arab peacemongers, the Olmert government is calling up all its forces.
In spite of the fact the entire political and military leadership is
now busy fighting for its survival after the Lebanon fiasco, it is uniting
in the face of this frightening menace.
Tzipi Livni was sent head
over heels to the United States, in order to avert the danger. She went
to convince President Bush (who happened to "pass" the room
when she was talking with Condoleezza Rice and who calls her "Tsiffi")
to use the deadly American veto against any Security Council resolution
that might support peace. She is going to meet with some 20 heads of
governments and foreign ministers to enlist their support against this
menace.
For this, she took down from
the Foreign Office attic a diplomatic rag called "the Road Map".
It has never even entered the mind of the Israeli government to carry
out this agreement, whose sole purpose was, right from the beginning,
to create the impression that President Bush has achieved something
in the Middle East. From its inception, all the parties knew that this
was a document that cannot be implemented.
Israel and the US will, therefore,
declare that the Arab peace plan is damaging peace, because it contradicts
the Road Map. The Palestinian unity government, when it is set up, must
be boycotted, because it does not explicitly state that all its members
recognize the State of Israel (as if all the members of the Israeli
government were prepared to recognize the State of Palestine and its
government, not to mention foreswearing violence and accepting all the
existing agreements.) Therefore, the blockade of the Palestinian population
must go on, until it sinks to its knees.
* * *
WHY DOES the peace offensive
frighten the Israeli government?
If somebody had come to us
on June 4, 1967, and told us that the entire Arab world was ready to
make peace with us within the borders existing on that day, and that
the Palestinian leadership, too, was prepared to declare an end to the
historic conflict, we would have felt that the Messiah had come.
But on June 5, 1967, we started
a war that changed everything. We were soon in control of the whole
of Palestine and huge additional territories. We declared that we were
holding them temporarily in order to trade them in, but, as is well
known, appetite comes with eating. We started to annex territories (East
Jerusalem with its surroundings and the Golan Heights), and to cover
the West Bank with settlements.
In the eyes of the Israeli
leadership, the peace initiative - any peace initiative - is nothing
but an evil conspiracy of the peacemongers to rob us of these territories.
It would compel us to put an end to the settlement enterprise - which
has not stopped for a moment since 1968, and which is even now in full
swing - and to dismantle the existing settlements.
The pincer movement of the
peacemongers could gather momentum and generate international pressure
that would be difficult to withstand. That's the reason for the panic
in Jerusalem.
* * *
THE ARAB peace initiative
could be successful if it puts in front of the Israeli public the straight
and unequivocal choice: peace without the occupied territories - or
the occupied territories without peace.
After six major wars and
several minor ones, we may be inclined to suspect that the price in
blood and money is too heavy, and - more importantly - that it does
not bring victory, but multiplies the burdens on Israeli society.
In the six years of folly
between the 1967 and the 1973 wars, Moshe Dayan coined the phrase: "Better
Sharm al-Sheikh (on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula) without
peace than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh!"
Such slogans cost the lives
of some 2700 Israeli soldiers (and who knows how many Egyptians and
Syrians) in the Yom Kippur war. Afterwards we returned Sharm al-Sheikh
and all of Sinai and got peace with Egypt. Dayan himself played a role
in achieving this peace.
How many soldiers and civilians,
Israeli and Arab, must die before we finally understand that peace with
the Palestinian people and the entire Arab world is immeasurably more
important to Israel than trying to hang on to the occupied territories
and the settlements?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli
writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.