Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has provoked in the last three years increasingly violent resistance from the Palestinians and vocal criticism from inside the country. The most outspoken and uncompromising critics are a group of five young men who have refuse to serve in the IDF because it is an army of occupation.

IDF stands for the Israel Defence Force. Thirty six years of policing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, however, have had a profound effect on the IDF’s character and ethos, turning it into an instrument of territorial expansion and colonial oppression. The only people that the IDF defends in the occupied territories are the Jewish settlers and it is remarkably indulgent towards the extremists among them. Towards the indigenous Arab population of the territories, on the other hand, the IDF behaves with the utmost disdain, callousness, and inhumanity.

In recent months 28 pilots and 13 members of an elite commando unit have joined the refuseniks in the public protest against the army’s conduct in the occupied territories. Yet it is the courage of the young refuseniks that is truly astonishing because of the high price that they are prepared to pay for following the dictates of their conscience. They are the real heroes because they speak their mind without fear of scorn, contempt, and ostracism.

The teenaged conscientious objectors, who have come to be known collectively as ‘the five’, are Noam Bahat, Matan Kaminer, Adam Maor, Haggai Matar, and Shimri Tsameret. The five were sentenced to a year in prison each and the time they spent in detention pending trial will not be deducted from their sentence. All of them had refused to serve in the IDF because of the occupation and all of them were prepared to do civilian service instead of military service but their offer was rejected.

In defence of its draconian sentence, the court pointed out that the five high school seniors did not refuse to serve as individuals, but rather as a group and with the explicit objective of bringing about a change in Israeli policy in the territories. In this respect, the court ruled, their actions strayed beyond the bounds of classic conscientious objection into the realm of civil disobedience. In support of this ruling, the court cited a letter that some of the five had signed while still in high school.

The letter in question was dated 3 September 2001, it was addressed to prime minister Ariel Sharon, and it was signed by 62 six-formers with Haggai Matar at their head. The signatories protested against ‘the aggressive and racist policy pursued by the Israeli government and its army’ and gave notice that they did not intend to take part in the execution of this policy. ‘We strongly resist’, they wrote, ‘Israel’s pounding of human rights. Land expropriations, arrests, executions without trial, house demolition, closure, torture, and the prevention of health care are only some of the crimes the state of Israel carries out, in blunt violation of international conventions it has ratified.’

‘Therefore we will obey our conscience and REFUSE to take part in acts of oppression against the Palestinian people, acts that should properly be called terrorist actions. We call upon persons our age, conscripts, soldiers in the standing army, and reserve service soldiers to do the same.’

A year later a second letter was sent to the prime minister, signed by 320 young men and women aged 16-18. This second letter accused Israel more pointedly of war crimes, of trampling over democratic values, and of blatant abuses of the human rights of the Palestinians. The occupation, it said, is not only immoral; it is damaging to the security of Israel’s citizens.

The letters, and the publicity surrounding them, led the army authorities to adopt a much tougher and more punitive attitude towards draft resisters on grounds of conscience. Draft resisters were no longer released after a few weeks or months in jail but put on trial.

At the trial, the five presented themselves not as pacifists but as conscientious objectors and, more specifically, as opponents of the occupation. They insisted that their conscience left them no choice but to refuse to enlist into an army that, in their view, serves only to perpetuate Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The verdict of the three military judges was pronounced in a crowded courtroom in Jaffa on 4 January. The judges accepted the contention of the defence that Freedom of Conscience is a right under Israel’s Basic Law, not just a privilege granted at the army’s pleasure. But they proceeded to interpret it in such a restrictive and self-serving manner as to nullify its practical value. In essence, the judges accepted the prosecution’s claim that exemption from military service should be granted only to total pacifists and to no one else.

The three judges found the accused guilty of ‘a very grave crime which constitutes a manifest and concrete danger to our existence and our survival.’ This statement is highly revealing of the mindset of the judges. In the first place, it is suffused with sanctimonious self-righteousness, depicting Israel as the victim rather than the aggressor. Second, it conveys a seriously skewed picture of the military balance of power, casting Israel – the fourth greatest military power on earth – in the unlikely role of a little David fighting for his life against a Palestinian Goliath. Third, it shows that the judges, unlike the accused, are unable or unwilling to distinguish between Israel proper and the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.

The judges wrote in their ruling that the sentence was intended to serve a warning to others, especially in the light of the recent spate of reservists from elite units refusing to serve in the occupied territories. In other words, by inflicting such a savage sentence on the idealistic young refuseniks, the judges hoped to silence criticism of the army and deter other Israelis from following in their footsteps. If the judges had ever heard of the rules of natural justice, there was no sign of this knowledge in their ruling. Their reasoning betrayed their provenance as little cogs in a huge and heartless bureaucratic-military machine.

In an impromptu press conference outside the courtroom, the refuseniks declared that they were proud of their actions and that they will continue to challenge the occupation until it ends. ‘We are being punished for saying the word o-c-c-u-p-a-t-i-o-n. So here I say it again: occupation, occupation, occupation’, said Matan Kaminer. ‘They commit war crimes and they expect us to keep silent,’ added Haggai Matar. ‘But we will not be silent. We will speak out against the occupation even when we pay a price.’

The lucidity, the wisdom, and courage of these young Israelis are impressive by any standard. All of them are patriots who love their country and are anxious to serve it, but only in a constructive civilian capacity and only inside its legitimate borders. They have chosen the hard way to fight for their ideals when an easy way out was available to them. They are a beacon of honesty, decency, and sanity in a society that has lost its soul as a result of the prolonged and brutal occupation of another people’s land.

The refuseniks hold out hope that Israel will return to its senses whereas Ariel Sharon’s brand of Zionism can only lead to more violence and bloodshed. They are surely right to single out the occupation as the root of all evil. For the occupation not only negates the right of the Palestinians to national self determination; it also undermines the democratic foundations of the state of Israel. Young and inexperienced as they are, the refuseniks instinctively grasp the truth of Karl Marx’s dictum that a people that oppress another cannot itself remain free.

Supporters of the five COs have prepared a petition to prime minister Ariel Sharon, stating that his government is jailing them for their convictions, and calling on him to set them free: ‘The Israeli Army should exist for one purpose only - that of genuine defence. But … by maintaining the seemingly endless occupation of the Palestinian Territories… it also destroys the Israeli society, its moral values, its economy, and yields terror attacks. This is no defence army.’ Signatures to this petition may be added by visiting the CO’s website www.refuz.org.il. These conscientious objectors deserve all the sympathy and support they can get for their struggle is not on their own behalf but on behalf of a much higher ideal: recovering their country’s humanity.

Avi Shlaim is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2000).

16 March 2004, (1,433 words)

‘A nation’, said the French philosopher Ernest Renan, ‘is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.’ Throughout the ages, the use of myths about the past has been a potent instrument of forging a nation. It is interesting to observe how often the phrase ‘forging a nation’ is used because all nations are forgeries.

The Zionist movement, the forerunner of the State of Israel, was the second greatest success story of the twentieth century known to me. The first was the Beatles. Yet this movement was not unique in propagating a simplified and varnished version of the past in the process of promoting its nationalist agenda. On the contrary, like all nationalist versions of history, the standard Zionist version of the emergence of the State of Israel in 1948 was selective, simplistic, and self-serving.

This version of history served a dual function. First, it instilled a sense of nationhood in Jews from various countries of origin. Second, it enlisted international sympathy and support for the fledgling State of Israel. The one cause it emphatically did not serve is that of mutual understanding and reconciliation between Jews and the Arabs.

The last decade has witnessed slow and halting progress towards peace between Israel and its traditional enemies but it has also witnessed the emergence of a new kind of war, the war of conflicting narratives. This war is between the traditional Zionist historiography and the ‘new history’ which started to challenge the Zionist rendition of the birth of Israel and of the subsequent fifty years of conflict and confrontation. The work of the ‘new historians’ has had some impact on Israeli perceptions of the historical roots of the conflict. In the last three years, however, since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the new history has come under renewed attack. But it may still have a part to play in facilitating progress on the road towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East.

The point of departure in the debate is the events that unfolded in 1948 and there are two very different narratives of what happened in that fateful year. Each side has its own distinctive version of events. The Palestinians regard the Israelis as foreign conquerors and themselves as the victims of the first Arab-Israeli war that they call al-Nakba or the catastrophe. Palestinian historiography reflects these perceptions. The Israelis, on the other hand, were the victors in the 1948 war which they call the War of Independence. Because they were the victors, among other reasons, they were able to propagate more effectively than their opponents their version of this fateful war. History, in a sense, is the propaganda of the victors.

But in this case, both sides regard themselves as the victims. The claim to be the true victim is a major component of both national narratives. The new history is not identical with the Palestinian narrative – far from it. But the new history does help, to some extent, to bridge the gulf between the Palestinian and the Israeli national narratives. The late and much lamented Edward Said put it rather aptly when he described the Palestinians as ‘the victims of victims’. Indeed, he went as far as to claim that it is essential for Arabs to understand the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish psyche, and more specifically the obsession with security, if they are to make sense of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians – the victims of the victims.

The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 War goes roughly as follows. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on 29 November 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which called for the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the UN plan despite the painful sacrifices it entailed but the Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab states, and the Arab League rejected it. Great Britain did everything in its power towards the end of the Palestine Mandate to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged in the UN plan. With the expiry of the Mandate and the proclamation of the State of Israel, five Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful co-existence was possible. After the war, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that was not broken until President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem thirty years later.

For many years the standard Zionist account of the causes, character, and course of the Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. The fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1988, however, was accompanied by the publication of four books by Israeli scholars who challenged the traditional historiography of the birth of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. The four books are Simha Flapan’s The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities; Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949; Ilan Pappé’s Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-51; and my own Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Collectively the authors came to be called the Israeli revisionists, or the new historians.

The first point to make about the new history is that it was not entirely new. Dissenting voices from within the camp had been a feature of the Zionist movement since its birth at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the ideas of the new history had been foreshadowed in one form or another in earlier publications and polemics. Moreover, other writers, such as Tom Segev, Ze’ev Sternhell, and Motti Golani, brought out books that were highly critical of Israel’s conduct in the conflict without being labelled new historians. Critical or new sociologists also contributed to the debate on Israel and the Arabs though this important body of literature lies outside the scope of the present essay. Nevertheless, the publication of four major revisionist histories in one year constituted something of a critical mass.

Two factors help to account for the emergence of the new historiography: the release f the official documents on 1948 by the government of Israel and the change in the political climate in Israel in the aftermath of the Lebanon War of 1982. Israel adopted the British thirty-year rule for the review and declassification of foreign policy documents. Under this rule, a vast amount of primary source material was released for research in the Central Zionist Archives, the Israel State Archives, the Haganah Archive, the IDF Archive, the Labour Party Archive, and the Ben-Gurion Archive. Arab countries have nothing remotely resembling a thirty-year rule. Arab governments only give access to their records, if they give any access at all, in a limited, haphazard, and arbitrary manner. Most Arab countries have no national archives at all.

So there is a serious problem of asymmetry between the documentation available on the Israeli side and that available on the Arab side. It is very much to Israel’s credit that it allows researchers access to its internal documents thereby making possible critical studies of its own conduct such as those that I have written. I am grateful for that. The lack of equivalent access to records on the Arab side is deplorable but it is not a good enough reason for not writing history. We have to make the most of the primary sources that are available. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

If the release of rich new sources of information was one important reason behind the advent of historical revisionism, a change in the general political climate was another. For many Israelis, especially liberal-minded ones, the Likud's ill-conceived and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked a watershed. Until then, Zionist leaders had been careful to cultivate the image of peace-lovers who would stand up and fight only if war were forced upon them. Until then, the notion of ein breira, of no alternative, was central to the explanation of why Israel went to war and a means of legitimizing her involvement in wars. But while the fierce debate between supporters and opponents of the Lebanon War was still raging, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a lecture to the IDF Staff Academy on wars of choice and wars of no choice. He argued that the Lebanon War, like the Sinai War of 1956, was a war of choice designed to achieve political objectives. With this admission, unprecedented in the history of the Zionist movement, the national consensus round the notion of ein breira began to crumble, creating political space for a critical re-examination of the country's earlier history.

The appearance of the first wave of revisionist studies of the 1948 war excited a great deal of interest and controversy in the Israeli political arena, in academic circles, and in the media. The initial reaction was one of discomfort and even dismay at what looked like the deliberate targeting of the sacred cows that all Israeli school children had been educated to respect and revere. Some commentators felt that the new books constituted a well-orchestrated attack on Israel’s reputation, an attack that must not be allowed to go unanswered. Others were more sympathetic to the attempt to re-examine time-hallowed truths in the light of fresh evidence. Even when the initial shock subsided, opinion remained sharply divided on the merits of the new historiography. Veterans of the 1948 war and members of the old guard, especially the old guard of the Labour Party, continued to bristle with hostility towards the new interpretations.

Among the critics of the new historians, the most strident and vitriolic was Shabtai Teveth, a journalist and biographer of David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister. Teveth’s attack entitled ‘The New Historians’ appeared in four successive full-page installments in the independent daily Ha’aretz in May 1989. In September 1989, Teveth published an abridged version of this series in an article entitled ‘Charging Israel with Original Sin’ in the American-Jewish monthly Commentary. In this article, Teveth described the new history as a ‘farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.’ Teveth had two main criticisms. First, he claimed that the new historiography ‘rests in part on defective evidence, and is characterised by serious professional flaws.’ Second, he alleged that the new historiography was politically motivated, pro-Palestinian, and aimed at deligitimising Zionism and the State of Israel. Teveth’s polemics generated more heat than light. Like so many members of the Labour Party old guard, he showed himself to be incapable of distinguishing between history and propaganda.

Interestingly, individuals on the political right in Israel, whether scholars or not, responded to the findings of the new historiography with far greater equanimity. They readily admit, for example, that Israel did expel Palestinians and even express regret that she did not expel more Palestinians since it was they who launched the war against her. Right-wingers tend to treat the 1948 War from a realpolitik point of view rather than a moralistic one. They are therefore spared the anguish of trying to reconcile the practices of Zionism with the precepts of liberalism. It is perhaps for this reason that they are generally less self-righteous and more receptive to new evidence and new analyses of the 1948 War than members of the Mapai old guard.

The latter put so much store by Israel's claim to moral rectitude that they cannot face up to the evidence of cynical Israeli double-dealings or brutal dispersal and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an axiom of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the thirty pieces of silver, these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown of thorns. And it is their concern with the political consequences of rewriting history that largely accounts for the ferocity of their attacks on the new historiography.

Whereas the initial debate revolved around the methods, sources, and alleged political motives of the new historians, the subsequent debate related to some of their specific findings. Five major bones of contention can be identified in the debate between the traditional and the new historians: British policy towards the end of the Palestine Mandate; the Arab-Israeli military balance in 1948; the causes of the Palestinian exodus; Arab war aims; and the reasons for the persistent political deadlock after the guns fell silent.

The traditional Zionist version maintains that Britain’s aim in the twilight of its Mandate over Palestine was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; that the Jews were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned; that the Palestinians left of their own accord and in the expectation of a triumphal return; that there was an all-Arab plan to destroy the infant Jewish state as soon as it came into the world; and that Arab intransigence was the sole cause of the political deadlock that followed the war.

The revisionist version maintains, in a nutshell, that Britain’s aim was to prevent the establishment not of a Jewish state but of a Palestinian state; that the Jews outnumbered all the Arab forces, regular and irregular, operating in the Palestine theatre and, after the first truce, also outgunned them; that the Palestinians, for the most part, did not choose to leave but were pushed out; that there was no monolithic Arab war aim because the Arab rulers were deeply divided among themselves; and that the quest for a political settlement was frustrated more by Israeli than by Arab intransigence.

To sum up, the old historians claim that the new historians charge Israel with original sin. It may be said, however, is that it is they themselves, the old historians, who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continue to cling to the doctrine of Israel’s Immaculate Conception.

The last issue in the debate is particularly sensitive because it entails the allocating of responsibility for the persistence of the conflict. At the core of the old version is the image of the Arab world as a monolithic and implacably hostile enemy. According to this version, Israel’s leaders strove indefatigably towards a peaceful settlement of the dispute but all their efforts foundered on the rocks of Arab intransigence. The revisionist version holds that Israel was more inflexible than the Arab states and that she consequently bears a larger share of the responsibility for the diplomatic stalemate that remained in place long after the ending of military hostilities.

Evidence for the revisionist version comes mainly from the files of the Israeli foreign ministry. These files burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 onwards. The two main issues on the agenda were borders and the rights of the Palestinian refugees. Each of the neighbouring Arab rulers was prepared to negotiate directly with Israel in the hope of gaining something on these issues in return for making peace.

King Farouk of Egypt demanded the Gaza Strip and a substantial strip of desert as his price for a de facto recognition of Israel. King Abdullah of Transjordan proposed an overall settlement with Israel in return for a land corridor to link his kingdom with the Mediterranean. Even more subversive of the conventional wisdom is the case of Colonel Husni Zaim, the chief of staff who captured power in Syria in a bloodless coup in March 1949 and was overthrown five months later. On seizing power, Zaim offered Israel full peace with an immediate exchange of ambassadors, normal economic relations, and the resettlement of 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria in return for moving the border to the middle of the Sea of Galilee. All three Arab rulers displayed remarkable pragmatism in their approach to negotiations with the Jewish state. They were even anxious to pre-empt one another because they assumed that whoever settled with Israel first would get the best terms. Zaim openly declared his ambition to be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel.

In each case, though for slightly different reasons, David Ben-Gurion considered the price being asked for peace as too high. He was ready to conclude peace on the basis of the status quo; he was unwilling to proceed to a peace that involved more than minuscule Israeli concessions on refugees or on borders. Ben-Gurion, as his diary reveals, considered that the armistice agreements with the neighbouring Arab states met Israel's essential needs for recognition, security and stability. He knew that for formal peace agreements Israel would have to pay by yielding tracts of territory and by permitting the return of a substantial number of Palestinian refugees and he did not consider this a price worth paying. Whether Ben-Gurion made the right choice is a matter of opinion. That he had a choice is now undeniable.

The Israeli public paid close attention to this historical debate. The debate was not conducted exclusively within the precincts of academe but periodically spilled over into the public arena. Extensive coverage of the debate was provided by the media. Consequently, it is not just a handful of scholars but a significant section of the public that started confronting its past. Such a high degree of public involvement in a war in which the principal protagonists are university professors is uncommon in most countries but not surprising in the case of Israel. The reason for this is that the debate about 1948 cuts to the very core of Israel’s image of itself.

For a number of years after the publication of the first batch of revisionist books, the war of the historians continued to concentrate on the birth of Israel and the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Gradually, however, the debate extended to other fronts. In 1993 Benny Morris published a book entitled Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. This formed a natural sequel to his 1988 book on The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and to his 1990 volume of essays 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. Taken together, the last two volumes effectively undermined Zionist orthodoxy on the causes of the Palestinian exodus. Israel’s Border Wars dealt with the formative period which ended with the Suez war. Here too Morris made extensive use of recently declassified Israeli and Western sources in an attempt to describe what actually happened. And here too he drove a coach and horses through the orthodox version that placed the entire responsibility for the escalation of the conflict on the Arab side.

Towards the end of 1999 another round began in the war of the Israeli historians with the publication of two books: Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 and my own The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. Both books are wide in scope: the first traces the turbulent history of the conflict from its origins in the late 19th century to the end of the 20th century while the second examines Israel’s policy towards the Arab world during the first fifty years of statehood.

The title of Benny Morris’s book was intended to suggest that both sides had right on their side and that both parties were victims. The title of my book also requires a word of explanation. It refers to a strategy that was first formulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. In 1923 Jabotinsky published an article entitled ‘On the Iron Wall.’ He argued that it was naïve to expect Arab nationalists to welcome a Jewish state in Palestine. Negotiations with the Arabs in the early stages would be futile. The only way to realize the Zionist project was behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength. In other words, the Zionist project could only be realized unilaterally and by military force.

The crux of Jabotinsky’s strategy was thus to deal with the Arabs from a position of unassailable strength. But his article also incorporated a sophisticated theory of change – a change in Arab attitudes to a Jewish state. He envisaged two stages. The first stage was to build the iron wall. This was expected to compel the Arabs to abandon any hope of destroying the Jewish state. The shift towards moderation or realism on the Arab side was to be followed by stage II, negotiations – negotiations with the local Arabs about their status and national rights in Palestine.

Jabotinsky’s article sparked a lively debate within the Zionist movement. Spokesmen for the mainstream accused him of militarism and of betraying the values of the Zionist movement. Jabotinksy poured scorn on his left-wing critics, on the ‘vegetarians’. He called them hypocrites and he considered it a mitzvah – a sacred duty – to expose their hypocrisy. He rounded on his critics in a second article entitled ‘The Morality of the Iron Wall.’ From the point of view of morality, he argued, there were two possibilities: Zionism was either a bad thing or a good thing. If it was a bad thing it should be abandoned; if it was a good thing, if it had justice on its side, then it must triumph, regardless of the wishes of anyone else.

Jabotinsky’s analysis was surely correct: this was a conflict between two national movements that could not be resolved by negotiation and compromise as long as the Arabs thought they had a chance of winning. A voluntary agreement was unattainable. I argue in the book that Jabotinsky’s strategy was adopted in all but name by his Labour Party opponents, led by David Ben-Gurion. It became the cornerstone of Zionist strategy in the conflict. And, most importantly, I argue that the strategy worked. 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 – recognised Israel’s invincibility and were compelled to negotiate with her from a position of palpable weakness. They learnt the hard way that Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield. The real danger for Israel is to fall in love with the iron wall and refuse to move to stage II: negotiations and compromise which means the partition of Palestine with the Palestinians. Paradoxically, the politicians of the Right, the heirs to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, are more prone to adopt stage I of the iron wall strategy as a permanent way of life than the politicians of the Left.

Itzhak Shamir, who succeeded Menachem Begin as Likud leader and prime minister in 1983, conceived of the iron wall as a bulwark against change and as an instrument for keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience to Israel. He had no interest in negotiations. His aim was to preserve the integrity of the historic homeland, to keep the whole Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) in Jewish hands. As Avishai Margalit once wrote in the New York Review of Books: Itzhak Shamir is a two-dimensional man: one dimension is the length of the Land of Israel; the other is its breadth. Since his historic vision is measured in inches, it was predictable that he would not yield an inch. It was the Labour Party’s Itzhak Rabin who took the plunge, who made the transition to stage II by negotiating the Oslo accord with the PLO in 1993.

With the election of Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996, Israel was back to phase I of the iron wall. Netanyahu did not accept the Oslo accords. He spent his three years in power in a largely successful attempt to arrest, delay, and derail the Oslo peace process. The election held in May 1999 was a major landmark in the history of Israel’s relations with her neighbours. The Israeli public passed a severe judgement on Netanyahu and gave Ehud Barak a clear mandate to continue the Oslo process and to proceed towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East.

Barak looked like the right man at the right place at the right time. If he had a heart, his heart would be at the right place. This is why I ended the Epilogue to my book on an optimistic note, describing Barak’s election as ‘the sunrise after the three dark and terrible years during which Israel had been led by the unreconstructed proponents of the iron wall.’

Political change in Israel helped to create a climate in which the new history could make further headway. The shift towards more moderate attitudes in the political arena was accompanied by growing awareness of the complex historical roots of the conflict and greater sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people. The two processes proceeded in parallel and reinforced one another. They were the product of greater maturity and greater self-confidence on the part of the Israeli public and its leaders. Self-righteousness and the habitual blaming of the Palestinians for their own misfortunes began to give way to a better understanding of the part played by Israel in causing the conflict and a more constructive attempt to heal the wounds of this conflict.

Two official pronouncements marked the beginning of the change in early October 1999. Prime Minister Ehud Barak, from the podium of the Knesset, expressed on behalf of the State of Israel his regret and sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people. Barak did not apologise, nor did he accept responsibility for Palestinian suffering. Nevertheless, his speech was significant as a first step towards a public recognition that without confronting the past, there could be no real reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. Yossi Sarid, the education minister, went a step further. He apologised to Israel’s Arabs for the massacre carried out by IDF soldiers in the village of Kafr Qasim in October 1956, on the eve of the Sinai Campaign. Sarid accepted full responsibility for the cold-blooded killing of Arab citizens of the State of Israel that had occurred 43 years previously. He also called upon Israel’s teachers to confront this dark chapter in their nation’s past.

In relation to the Palestinians, too, there were further indications of soul-searching at the official level. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Moroccan-born and Oxford-educated foreign minister, conveyed to his cabinet ministers some home-truths about the impact of the past on the present. The prime minister’s office prepared a long list of Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. As reported by Akiva Eldar in Ha’aretz on 28 November 2000, Ben-Ami opposed the distribution of the document on the ground that ‘Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence.’ This was a remarkably honest acknowledgement by a senior official that Israel, as the occupying power, could not set the ground rules for a people struggling for their legitimate rights.

The books by Benny Morris and me appeared during this relatively hopeful phase on the road to peace. Both books were first published in the United States where they received much attention from the media and many reviews, often together. On the merits of the books, opinion was divided but the great majority of reviewers were sympathetic and supportive, possibly reflecting a general shift in America towards a more critical attitude to Israel that had taken place during the Netanyahu era. What ten years previously had been regarded as dangerous revisionism, had become almost mainstream thinking.

My friends in Israel started teasing me that I had had become an establishment figure and that I now represented the new orthodoxy. In other words, I had changed from a Young Turk into an old jerk! But this incorporation into the establishment was an illusion. In any case, it was very short-lived.

Illustrative of the climate opinion in America was a review published by Ethan Bronner on 14 November 1999 under the title ‘Israel: The Revised Edition’ in The New York Times Book Review. Bronner was the education editor of the traditionally pro-Israeli New York Times. Yet his article was judicious and fair-minded and it helped to place the two new books in their proper intellectual context. ‘There is no question’, wrote Bronner, ‘that Shlaim presents compelling evidence for a re-evaluation of traditional Israeli history … His story is a bracing corrective to the somewhat mythic one told until now.’ Benny Morris was praised by Bronner for writing with ‘clinical dispassion’ which makes his narrative more responsible and credible: ‘This is a first-class work of history, bringing together the latest scholarship. It is likely to stand for some time as the most sophisticated and nuanced account of the Zionist-Arab conflict from its beginnings in the 1880s … In short, this is new history as one would like it – not as part of a political or scholarly campaign but in the genuine pursuit of complex truth.’

At the same time, the new books were also subjected to some fierce criticism, notably in the conservative, pro-Zionist, American-Jewish monthlies, Commentary and New Republic. Hillel Halkin, a translator and writer, published in the November 1999 issue of Commentary a long review article under the title ‘Was Zionism Unjust?’ Predictably, Halkin took the view that Zionism was not unjust and that it is the new historians who are unjustly harsh in their treatment of this noble, enlightened, and peace-loving movement. Yet Halkin begins his article by suggesting that the case of ‘The New Historians vs. The State of Israel’ can be considered closed because the plaintiffs have simply dropped the main charges.

Halkin was evidently relieved to discover that in our new books, Benny Morris and I were not as savage about Zionism as he had expected us to be. This expectation, however, betrays a mistaken view of the purpose and nature of the new history. Halkin clings to an idée fixe (that all our critics seem to share although they can find no evidence for it) namely, that the new history is driven by a not-so-hidden agenda of delegitimizing Zionism and the State of Israel.

Halkin’s real concern is that by challenging the conventional Zionist narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the new historians deprive young Israelis of pride in the achievements of their country and confidence in the justice of their cause. In this respect, too, Halkin is typical of the establishment view. Aharon Meged, the Israeli novelist, went much further in an article in Ha’aretz (16 September 1999), claiming that the new historians are leading their country towards collective suicide. Meged himself can claim poetic license, but this is the kind of loose and irresponsible talk that gives paranoia a bad name. The real question is whether the facts we present are true or false. Halkin and Meged, however, do not want the facts to get in the way of the myths that have come to surround the birth of Israel. They would like school history books to continue to tell only the heroic version of Israel’s creation. In effect, they are saying that in education one has to lie for the good of the country. Patriotism, it would seem, remains the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The review published in New Republic, on 29 November 1999, was written by Anita Shapira, a Professor of History at Tel Aviv University who is also known as ‘the princess of Zionist history.’ The cover announces ‘The Israeli Revisionism Racket’ but no explanation is given as to what the racket is. The article itself has a less offensive but an equally ambiguous title: ‘The Past is not a Foreign Country.’ A keeper of the Labour-Zionist flame, Professor Shapira presents old history with a vengeance. Her article is a breathless and relentless ten-page diatribe against the new historians. Her tone is hysterical, her arguments are shabby, frequently imputing guilt by association, and she misrepresents my position and the position of my ‘confederates’, as she calls them, on almost every single issue. Professor Shapira does not engage with the findings of the new history but simply regurgitates the conventional wisdom which portrays Israel as the wronged party, and as the innocent victim of Arab predators.

Professor Shapira’s tone is unctuous and sanctimonious and her article is full of humbug. In this respect, she epitomizes the attitudes of the Mapai old guard who would never admit any wrong-doing by the Zionist movement or the State of Israel. She is wedded to a certain image of Zionism, rather like General de Gaulle and France. Elle a épousé le mari et la cause. Perhaps this is why she is called the princess of Zionist history. Her book Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 was published by Oxford University Press in 1992. In Hebrew her book was called Herev Ha-yona – The Sword of the Dove. This says it all: the Zionist movement was a white dove which meant no harm to anyone but was forced by the primitive and pugnacious Arabs to live by the sword. A more apposite title for the book would have been: Anita in Wonderland.

The one mildly interesting question raised by Professor Shapira’s article is why the new history makes her and her confederates so hot under the collar. Their answer to this question would no doubt be that the new history is driven by a political agenda. This is a serious charge but no evidence is brought forth to support it. The more likely explanation for the anger and aggressiveness of the old historians is the fear that they were losing the battle for the hearts and minds of their compatriots. Professor Shapira’s own article was redolent of defeat on the intellectual battlefield. At the time, it seemed like the last gasp of the old history.

In the last few years, however, various developments in the political arena made the Israeli public more suspicious of the new interpretations of the past and more receptive to the old ones. The breakdown of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, and the rise to power of Ariel Sharon at the head of a Likud-dominated government in February 2001 resulted in a swing in public opinion away from the new history towards the old history.

Six months before the election, Ariel Sharon was asked what changes he thought the education system needed. Sharon replied: ‘I would like them to study the history of the people of Israel and the land of Israel … the children must be taught Jewish-Zionist values, and the ‘new historians’ must not be taught.’ Underlying this reply was a sense, widely shared among the country’s conservatives, that the new historians have undermined patriotic values and young people’s confidence in the justice of their cause. Sharon’s aim was to nullify the effect of the new historians and to reassert traditional values in the educational system.

Likud’s return to power brought in its wake a regression to fundamentalist positions in relation to the Palestinians and the reassertion of a narrow, nationalist perspective on Israel’s history. Limor Livnat, the education minister, launched an all-out offensive against the new history, post-Zionism, and all other manifestations of what she views as the defeatism and appeasement that paved the way to the Oslo accord. In the Jerusalem Post, on 26 January 2001, she published an article, or rather an electoral manifesto, under the title ‘Back to the Iron Wall.’ Ms Livnat accused the Left of lying to the public about the Oslo process that was ‘secretly and illegally initiated by Yossi Beilin in 1992.’ She failed to explain, however, why a diplomatic process initiated by a deputy foreign minister in a democratically elected government is illegal. The central theme of the article is the contrast between the pacifism of the Left and the realism of the Right:

The ideology underlying Oslo was the direct opposite of the ‘Iron Wall’ strategy, which had guided the policy of Israel’s leaders since the establishment of the state. Jabotinsky only stated the obvious when he claimed that the Arabs will never willingly accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst, but that only an ‘Iron Wall’ of deterrence and military strength would lower their aspiration to destroy Israel. Ms Livnat went on to warn against ‘the false belief that preaching pacifism and abandoning some of Zionism’s national claims would be enough to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.’ The doctrine of the permanent conflict is stated even more forcefully in the conclusion: It is time for Israel to rebuild the ‘Iron Wall’ that will once again convince the Arabs that neither military threats nor terrorism will weaken Israel’s determination to protect the rights and freedom of the Jewish people. The ‘Iron Wall’, however, will not be rebuilt as long as Prime Minister Ehud Barak is in power.

Ms Livnat’s summary of the strategy of the iron wall is so crude and simplistic that one is bound to wonder whether she ever read the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Had she read Jabotinsky’s work, she might have realised that he was not a proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians but an advocate of negotiations from strength in order to end the conflict. Like other prominent members of her party, Ms Livnat treats the iron wall as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end – a satisfactory resolution of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. She combines ignorance and belligerence in roughly equal portions. I for one would not like to meet her in a dark alley!

The policies advocated by Ms Livnat can only lead to more violence and more bloodshed. As long as she, and people who think like her, remain in power, Jabotinsky’s strategy is unlikely to be carried to its logical conclusion. For Jabotinsky the iron wall was a metaphor. In the crude hands of Ariel Sharon and his colleagues, this metaphor is being metamorphosed into a monstrous physical reality in the shape of the wall that they are building on the West Bank.

One of the first things that Ms Livnat did on becoming minister of education was to order new history text books for secondary schools to be written, removing all traces of the influence of the new historians. In addition to these officially-instigated attacks, two recent developments have helped to weaken the cohesion and the credibility of the new history. One was the Teddy Katz affair; the other is the defection of Benny Morris. Teddy Katz submitted in 1998 a master’s thesis that made extensive use of oral history. The thesis dealt with a massacre perpetrated by the Alexandroni Brigade in late May 1948 in the Arab village of Tantura, 35 kilometres south of Haifa. Katz’s finding that more than 200 Tantura villagers were shot after the village surrendered was reported in the Israeli press in January 2000. This unleashed a storm, culminating in a libel suit brought by veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade against Katz. The court case prompted Haifa University to institute an internal inquiry that led to Katz being stripped of his master’s degree.

In the academic controversy, a number of scholars came to the defence of Teddy Katz, notably Ilan Pappe of the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa. In Pappe’s view, as he wrote in an article in the Journal of Palestine Studies in the Spring of 2001, the case shed light on the extent to which mainstream Zionists are prepared to go to in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as “ethnic cleansing”. The controversy surrounding the case was bitter and overtly political. The critics called into question the credibility not only of Katz and Pappe but, by extension, of the entire school of new history.

The embattled new historians suffered a more serious setback as a result of the defection of Benny Morris from their ranks. Over the last three years, since the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada, Morris’s thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict and its protagonists radically changed. He now lays all the blame for the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the return to violence at the door of the Palestinian Authority. In the Guardian, on 21 February 2002, he launched a vicious attack on the ‘inveterate liar’ Yasser Arafat and explained why, in his opinion, peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians is impossible. This article, uncharacteristically for Benny Morris, was long on opinions and short on evidence. The following day I replied to Benny Morris in a long and angry article entitled ‘A Betrayal of History’.

I do not wish to go over the same ground again but only to make one point: there is no longer a consensus among the original group of new historians that Israel is the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Benny Morris believes that the main obstacle to peace is the Palestinian national movement; Ilan Pappe and I believe that the main obstacle is Israel. The debate continues.

Consequently, it is premature to pass a final verdict on the new history. When a journalist asked Chou En-lai a question about the impact of the French Revolution, the wise Chinese leader replied: ‘It is too soon to tell.’ The same may be true of the new history. But a review of the last 15 yeas suggests that the new history has already had significant political consequences on at least four levels. First, it acted as a spur to a quiet revolution in the teaching of history in most Israeli high schools. Second, it enabled ordinary members of the Israeli public to understand how Arabs perceive Israel and how they view the past. Third, it presented to the Arabs an account of the conflict which they recognize as honest and genuine, and in line with their own experience, instead of the usual propaganda of the victors. Fourth, it encouraged Palestinian historians, like Rashid Khalidi, to examine more critically the conduct of their own community in this conflict in the light of the evidence that is now available. The result is the beginning of a new history on the Palestinian side.

In all these different ways, the new history helped to create a climate, on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide, which was conducive to the continuation of the peace process. As Bishop Tutu pointed out in the South African context, it is difficult to know what to forgive unless we know what happened. In the Middle East, as in South Africa, it is necessary to understand the past in order to go forward.

This survey also suggests an important link between the state of Arab-Israeli relations and popular attitudes towards the past. Just as disenchantment with the Likud government in the aftermath of the Lebanon War acted as a spur to the new history, disenchantment with the Palestinians following the return to violence has served to isolate, marginalise, and even delegitimise the new historians.

The more Israelis feel under threat, the more they retreat into simplistic and self-serving narratives of the past and the less tolerant they become of dissenting voices. But it is precisely in such times of crisis that dissenting voices are most vitally needed. Xenophobic and self-righteous national narratives only fuel and prolong this tragic conflict. A more complex and fair-minded understanding of the past is therefore essential for preserving at least the prospect of reconciliation in the future.

Text of Talk at Georgetown (7,335 words)

On Old and New History

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here although the subject of this session – the Palestinian catastrophe -- is a tragic one.

And I feel doubly guilty towards the Palestinians. As an Englishman, I am ashamed of my adopted country’s astonishing record of duplicity and betrayal going all the way back to the Balfour Declaration. As an Israeli, I am burdened by a heavy sense of guilt for the monumental injustice and never-ending suffering that my people have inflicted on the Palestinians since the beginning of this conflict over 100 years ago.

As the starting point for my remarks on the new history of 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba, I would like to take Edward Said, a friend and a guide, for whom there was a moving memorial meeting in the Friends House only two days ago.

Edward was an intellectual with an astonishingly broad range of interests but he was no historian. Yet he immediately grasped the significance of the new history that began to emerge in Israel in the late 1980. He made two points in this connection:

1. Palestinians can accept the new history as an honest, genuine version of events because it conforms to their own experiences in 1948. This is in contrast to the old history which Palestinians see as the propaganda of the victors.

2. The fact that Israeli scholars started subjecting the behaviour of their own community in 1948 to serious scrutiny in light of the evidence, would encourage Palestinian scholars to do the same. Rashid Khalidi and Nur Masalha are just two examples of this trend.

The War for Palestine

The traditional Zionist rendition of the events of 1948 is familiar to all of you. It lays all the blame for the war and its consequences on the Arab side. This is a nationalist version of history and, as such, it is simplistic, selective, and self-serving. It is, essentially, the propaganda of the victors. It presented the victors as victims, and it blamed the real victims - the Palestinians - for their own misfortunes

Yet, until the 1980s, this one-sided narrative went largely unchallenged outside the Arab world.

The 40th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel in 1988 was accompanied by the publication of four books:

Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949
Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951
Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan.

Between us we challenged many of the myths that have come to surround the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War.

We came to be known collectively as the new historians or the revisionist Israeli historians. The publication of our books triggered the war of the historians.

There are 4 main bones of contention in the debate about 1948:

1. Britain’s policy in the twilight of the Palestine mandate
2. The military balance in 1948.
3. Arab war aims
4. The causes of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Let us review these issues briefly one by one.

1. British policy towards the end of the Palestine mandate

Zionist leaders at the time, and Zionist writers subsequently, portrayed Britain’s policy as savagely hostile to the Yishuv.

The main charge was that Britain armed and encouraged her Arab allies to resist the birth of the Jewish state by force.

A special place was reserved in Zionist demonology for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary of the Labour government. Bevin was portrayed as a great ogre, as a monster in human form.

I was 3 years old at the time and we lived in Baghdad and my mother used to say to me: ‘If you don’t eat your porridge, Mr Bevin will come and take you away.’ The threat never failed to work.

Ilan Pappé drove a coach and horses through the traditional Zionist account of British policy.

His argument is that Britain was resigned to the emergence of a Jewish state but supported her client, King Abdullah of Jordan, in his efforts to pre-empt their common enemy, the Grand Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The key to British policy is Greater Transjordan at the expense of the Palestinians.

Hostility to the Mufti and to a Mufti-led state was an important and constant factor in British policy in 1947-49.

So there is a case to be made against Britain during this critical period in the struggle for Palestine. The case is not that Britain tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state but rather that it helped to abort the birth of a Palestinian state.

2. The Military Balance

The old historians saw the 1948 war as an unequal struggle between a Jewish David against an Arab Goliath, as a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful Jewish struggle against overwhelming odds.

The heroism of the Jewish fighters is not in question. Nor is there any question that the first round of fighting was indeed a struggle for survival.

Yet, throughout the war, the IDF outnumbered all the Arab forces, regular and irregular, operating in the Palestine theatre.

Estimates vary, but the best estimates suggest that on 15 May 1948 Israel fielded 35,000 troops whereas the Arabs fielded 20 - 25,000. The problem of the IDF was not manpower but firepower. Its firepower was negligible.

But during the first truce Israel violated the UN embargo and imported arms from the Eastern bloc: artillery, tanks, aircraft.

Illicit arms imports decisively tipped the military balance in favour of Israel. The Israelis now not only outnumbered but also outgunned their opponents.

The final outcome of the war was not a miracle but a reflection of the underlying Arab-Israeli military balance. In this war, as in most wars, the stronger side won.

3. Arab War Aims.

The third question is why did the neighbouring Arab states send their armies into Palestine upon expiry of the mandate?

The standard Zionist answer is that all the Arabs were united and that their aim was to destroy the Jewish state and to throw the Jews into the sea. The reality was more complex.

The Arab coalition facing Israel in 1948 was one of the most deeply divided, disorganised, and ramshackle coalitions in the history of warfare.

There was no agreed Arab strategic plan for the conduct of this war. The Arab armies were ill-prepared and ill-equipped for prolonged warfare. Most of the Arab military leaders were incompetent.

There were dynastic rivalries at play between King Farouk of Egypt and the Hashemite rulers of Jordan and Iraq. Syria and Lebanon also felt threatened by King Abdullah’s ambition to make himself master of Greater Syria.

All the Arab armies intervened ostensibly in order to help the Palestinians. But they treated the Palestinians with brutality and with contempt. The Arab League promised the Palestinians money and arms. It did not keep its promise, thereby helping to seal their fate.

ALA. Departure tax.

The Falcons of Basra.

In short, the Palestinians, in their hour of need, were let down by the Arabs and they have been let down ever since.

4. The causes of the Palestinian refugee problem

This is a very controversial question and one which lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli dispute. The question is: Did they go or were they pushed?

The origins of the refugee problem are intimately connected with the question of responsibility for solving this problem. Here we have two diametrically opposed versions.

The official Israeli version maintains that the Palestinians left the country on orders from their leaders and in the expectation of a triumphal return after the Arab armies had swept all before them. Israel was thus in no way responsible for turning the Palestinians into refugees.

The Arab version maintains that the Palestinians did not leave of their own accord: they were pushed out. Israel expelled them and Israel therefore has to give them a choice between and a return to their homes or compensation.

Benny Morris, in his 1988 book, studied the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem thoroughly, carefully, and objectively.

He found no evidence of Arab calls on the Palestinians to leave their homes, but nor did he find evidence of a Zionist master-plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians. He therefore rejected both the Arab order and the Jewish robber state explanations.

The refugee problem, he concluded, was a by-product of the war.

Countless reviewers pointed out that Benny Morris’s conclusion did not correspond to the evidence he had unearthed. The evidence suggests a far higher degree of Israeli responsibility for the mass flight of the Palestinians.

Sure, there were many different reasons for the Palestinian exodus but the single most important reason was Israeli political, military, and psychological pressure.

We now have a term to describe what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1948 which did not exist then – ethnic cleansing. So let us call a spade a spade.

Benny Morris himself has veered to the extreme right since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. He now thinks that BG made a mistake in allowing a Pa minority to stay inside the state of Israel in 1948. He should have expelled the whole lot.

In my humble opinion, Benny Morris’s current ideas are complete rubbish and they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. He used to be a Young Turk and he has become an old jerk! But his early scholarship is still valuable because it documents the extent of Israel’s responsibility for displacing and dispossessing the Palestinians.

Conclusion

The entire debate between the old and the new historians revolves round the question of moral responsibility for the consequences of the first Arab-Israeli war.

The old historians say that the new historians charge Israel with original sin. My reply is that it is the old historians who cling to the doctrine of Israel’s immaculate conception.

The evidence that we have at our disposal today, makes it patently clear, and indeed beyond dispute, that the creation of the state of Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians.

Unless and until Israel acknowledges its share of the moral responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, this dispute will not be solved.

Does the new historiography have any broader significance beyond the war of the historians? Does it have any relevance to the quest for peace today? Once again, Edward Said answered these questions in the affirmative. He pointed out that if Israelis and Palestinians are to learn to coexist peacefully side by side, it is essential that they understand their own history and each other’s history. It is not enough for each side to examine critically its own actions in 1948. We must have a common and comprehensive picture of what happened in the war in order to deal with its consequences, in order to find a solution to this tragic conflict.

Workshop in London, 8.11.2003

The shocking human cost that occupation has taken on Palestinian women is laid bare in research published today. Combining research, extensive surveys, and first-hand testimonies from over 40 Palestinian women, Palestinian Women: The Disproportionate Impact of The Israeli Occupation provides new insight into the gendered experience of occupation, looking into four issues in particular:

• women refugees
• the impact of residency revocation on Palestinian women in Jerusalem
• the experience of women prisoners
• Gazans’ access to health

Co-authored by four Palestinian NGOs – the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD), the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), and Women Media and Development (TAM), the report includes detailed findings that demonstrate how the oppression occupation has permeated women’s daily lives, and the particular impact is has had on women in Palestinian refugee camps, Palestinian women living in Jerusalem, women prisoners, and residents of Gaza who require health services.

The impact on refugee women

Researchers spoke to 500 Palestinian refugee women from 12 Palestinian camps (7 in the West Bank, 5 in Gaza). Their findings included the following:

• A third of women surveyed had been directly exposed to physical assault by Israeli Occupation Forces. 9% had been exposed to threats of being attacked by police dogs during Israeli night raids on their homes.
• Over a third (37%) of respondents had been exposed to detention or interrogation, while 38% said that they or members of their households had been exposed to verbal abuse during Israeli army raids, at checkpoints or while visiting religious places.
• Nearly a quarter (24%) were forced to live in shelters or with extended family. 22% were forced to live under unhealthy conditions. 13% stated that the female and male members of their families were separated as a result of having to live in shelters.
• More than one in five (21%) had been exposed to beatings or tear gas at Israeli checkpoints while they were pregnant. 4% reported that they aborted or gave birth at Israeli checkpoints.
• The majority (64%- 321 cases) had been unable to visit religious or recreational places because of Occupation restrictions.

Jerusalem: Residency Revocation and Family Reunification

According to official figures, 14,595 Palestinians from East Jerusalem had their residency status revoked between 1967 and the end of 2016.

Through residency revocations, Israel has separated husbands from wives, parents from children, and extended families from one another, causing traumatic complications for women attempting to remain with their families in both Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This leads to traumatic fears of separation from children for mothers and an entrenching of patriarchal practices across society. Palestinian women living in Jerusalem lose residency rights if they get divorced or their husbands remarry. Limiting their access to justice, female victims of domestic violence fear reporting abuse to authorities in case they are forcibly transferred away from their children.

Women prisoners

Since the beginning of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine in 1967, approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained by Israeli military forces. According to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs’ 2017 annual report, 1,467 children were arrested last year.

Our researchers spoke to prisoners who experienced physical and psychological torture at arrest and imprisonment, and traumatic, gendered treatment, including:

• Women denied access to menstrual products while detained
• A woman arrested while pregnant who gave birth while chained to a prison hospital bed
• Ex-prisoners who report being subjected to rape and death threats during interrogation, including a girl in of 15-years old threatened with rape
• Women who were subjected to frequent forced and violent strip searches
• A prisoner who reported toothache, only to have the wrong tooth removed

Access to Health in Gaza

Israel exercises strict control Gaza’s borders, a policy of ‘actual authority’, constituting continued occupation, despite the withdrawal of its permanent presence. This control in particular affects those who need medical treatment outside of Gaza’s struggling health system, who require permission to leave. The report shows that the rate of approval applications is falling year-by-year:

• 92.5% of applications were successful in 2012
• 88.7% in 2013
• 82.4% in 2014
• 77.5% in 2015
• 62.1% in 2016

Of the 26,282 permit applications submitted by patients aiming to exit through Erez in 2016, 8,242 (31.4%) were delayed. Many applicants received no response from border authorities, even after lawyers filed formal applications on their behalf. These delays regularly extend months and years beyond medical appointments, worsening already life-threatening diseases and in some cases resulting in death.

Read the full report here, or download it here:

Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

Women represent half of the Palestinian population

The qualitative base of the structure of the population in Palestine the sex ratio stood at 103.3, which means that there are 103 males for every 100 females

The percentage of female-headed households

The percentage of female-headed households in Palestine was 10.6% in 2017, 11.2% in the West Bank and 9.5% in Gaza Strip.

fifth of the persons in Palestine got married at an early age (less than 18 years) in 2016

Early marriage reached to 20.5% among females and 1.0% among males of the total married population in Palestine; the rate was 19.9% out of the total married population in West Bank and 21.6% out of the total married population in Gaza Strip end 2016.

The highest rate of female early marriage in the West Bank was in Hebron 36.8%, and the lowest was in Jericho and the Jordan Valley 1.2% out of the total number of women marriage below 18 years in the West Bank. In Gaza Strip, the highest rate of early female marriage was 42.1% in Gaza Governorate, while the lowest rate was in Dier Al-Balah 7.1% out of the total number of women marriage below 18 years in Gaza Strip.

A continued rise in literacy among women

Despite the rise in literacy rates among females over the last decade, the gap is still in favor of males by 3.0%, female literacy rates was 95.6% compared to 98.6% for male literacy in the year 2017.

Rise in enrollment rate of females in high schools compared to males

Data showed that male enrollment in high schools was 60.5%, compared to female enrollment which was 80.4% for the year 2016-2017.

A gap in the participation rate and average daily wages between men and women

The female participation rate in the labor force was 19.0% of the total female population at work age in 2017, compared to 10.3% in 2001, while the male participation rate was 71.2% in 2017. There was also a pay gap in the average daily wages between males and females; the average daily wage for females was NIS 84.6 compared to NIS 119.6 for males.

Around half of the women are unemployed

The unemployment rate among women participated in the labor force was 47.4% compared to 22.3% for participated males. 65.8% of youth females aged of (15-29 years) were unemployed. While the unemployment rate among women with 13 school years and above represents 53.8% of women in this group.

Palestinian Women in Public Life

In 2017; 21.2% of the members of the local councils are females in the West Bank while 78.8% were males.

In 2016, 82.7% of judges were male, compared to 17.3% female, while 66.6% of registered lawyers were male, compared to 33.4% female and 82.0% of members of the public prosecution staff were male, compared to 18.0% female. Furthermore, Palestinian female ambassadors represented 5.8% compared to 94.2% male. Females represented 32.3% of registered engineers with the Union of Engineers while male represented 67.7%. On the other hand, in 2016, 12.4% of members of student councils in West Bank universities were females, compared to 87.6% males.

In the public sector, females represented 42.7% of civil servants, compared to 57.3% male civil servant. In the public civil sector, female Director Generals represented 11.3% of the total director generals, compared to 88.7% males in the same post.

To View this Report as PDF

To View the Full Statestics as PDF

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

The conflict with the Arabs has cast a long shadow over Israel's history. In the Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, on 14 May 1948, the founding fathers extended their hand in peace to all the neighbouring states and their peoples. Today, Israel is still at war with Syria and Lebanon and locked into a bitter conflict with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. The explanation that Israelis usually give for the failure to achieve peace in the Middle East can be summed up in two words: Arab intransigence. Israel's image of itself is that of a decent, rational, peace-loving nation that resorts to military power in self-defence only. The image of the Arabs, on the other hand, is that of a fanatical, hostile enemy that understands only the language of force. The reality is more complex.

The general picture that emerges of Israeli statecraft in the first 60 years of statehood is one of routine, often unthinking reliance on military force and a reluctance to engage in meaningful diplomacy to resolve the conflict with its neighbours. Another trait, common to Labour and Likud leaders alike, is a blind spot when it comes to the Palestinian people and a desire to bypass them by concluding bilateral deals with the rulers of the neighbouring Arab states.

Of all Israel's bilateral relationships, the most far-reaching in its consequences and the most endlessly fascinating is the one with the Hashemite rulers of Jordan. Jordan and Israel have been aptly described as "the best of enemies". Twenty years ago I published a book that established my credentials as a "new" or revisionist Israeli historian: Collusion Across the Jordan. I challenged many of the myths that have come to surround the birth of the State of Israel and the First Arab- Israeli War, most notably that Arab intransigence was alone responsible for the political deadlock that persisted for three decades. In contrast to the conventional view of the Arab- Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair, I dwelt on the special relationship between King Abdullah I of Jordan (grandfather of King Hussein and great-grandfather of King Abdullah II) and the Zionist movement, and on the interest that the Hashemites and the Zionists shared in containing Palestinian nationalism. The central thesis is that, in November 1947, the Hashemite ruler of Transjordan and the Jewish Agency reached a tacit agreement to divide up mandatory Palestine between themselves and that this agreement laid the foundations not only for mutual restraint during the war but for continuing collaboration in its aftermath - until Abdullah I's assassination by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951.

Abdullah left behind a legacy of moderation and realism that continues to inform Jordanian foreign policy down to the present day. Hussein bin Talal, like his grandfather, was the king of realism. Israel, for its part, sought lines of communication to the "plucky little king", who was at odds with the radical Palestinians and with the Arab nationalists led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. In September 1963, the young king took the initiative in starting his own secret dialogue across the battle lines. He had a realistic assessment of the military balance, he knew that the Arabs had no chance of defeating Israel on the battlefield, and he wanted to meet the enemy face-to-face to find a path to peaceful coexistence. His secret contacts with the enemy continued right up until the conclusion of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in October 1994.

The June 1967 war marked the lowest ever point in Jordanian-Israeli relations. Hussein made the mistake of his life by jumping on Nasser's bandwagon and the price he paid was the loss of half of his kingdom, including the jewel in the crown - the Old City of Jerusalem. He spent the rest of his life in a tireless effort to recover the occupied Arab territories. Secret diplomacy was resumed and intensified after the war. The list of prominent Israeli politicians who met secretly with Hussein included Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.

Thick veil of secrecy

While researching my biography of Hussein, and with the help of official Israeli documents and interviews with some of the principal participants, including the king himself, I tried to reconstruct the parleys that were held behind a thick veil of secrecy. The list of the secret meetings, with dates, names of participants and venues, reveals that most took place in St John's Wood in London at the home of Dr Emanuel Herbert, the king's Jewish physician. But there were also meetings in Paris, Strasbourg, Eilat, Coral Island, the royal yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba, an air-conditioned caravan in Wadi Araba, and one meeting at the Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv. My list is probably incomplete but it conveys the scope and intensity of the covert relationship between the ostensible enemies.

Jordan accepted UN Resolution 242 of November 1967 and the principle of land for peace. This resolution became the cornerstone of Jordan's postwar diplomacy. At a deeper level, however, Hussein understood the importance of giving Israel the sense of security needed to make concessions for the sake of peace. Hussein's terms never changed. From the beginning he offered his Israeli interlocutors full, contractual peace in exchange for the occupied territories, with only minor border modifications. His aim was not a separate peace with Israel, but a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Nor was he alone in striving for peace on the Arab side. Nasser knew and approved of Hussein's secret talks provided they did not lead to a separate peace. Despite Nasser's tacit support, it took great courage on Hussein's part to pursue this solo diplomacy, as it violated the greatest Arab taboo.

The quest for a land-for-peace deal was frustrated more by Israeli than by Arab intransigence. By its actions, the victor showed that it preferred land to peace with its neighbours. Soon after the end of the war Israel began to build settlements in the occupied territories. Building civilian settlements on occupied territory was not just illegal under international law, but a major obstacle to peace. There were some early signs of flexibility on the part of the Israeli cabinet in relation to the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights but none towards the West Bank. All the major parties in the 1967-70 national unity government were united in their determination to keep at least a substantial part of the West Bank, permanently.

There were proponents of the "Jordanian option" and proponents of the "Palestinian option", but in practical terms the debate was between those who did not want to return the West Bank to Jordan and those who did not want to return it to the Palestinians who lived there. Despite Hussein's best efforts the diplomatic deadlock persisted for another decade, until Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Sadat did what Hussein had studiously avoided, namely, a bilateral deal with Israel that left the Palestinian problem unresolved. The two countries changed places: Egypt was drummed out of the Arab League while Jordan joined the Arab mainstream.

There was only one leader in Israel's history with the courage to grasp the nettle and negotiate directly with the Palestinians about their rights and status in Palestine, and that was Yitzhak Rabin. Secret negotiations in the Norwegian capital culminated in the signing of the Oslo Accords on 13 September 1993. For all their shortcomings, the Oslo Accords represented a historic breakthrough in the hundred-year-old conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The PLO recognised Israel; Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; and the two sides agreed to resolve all their outstanding differences by peaceful means. The historic compromise was clinched on the White House lawn. For his courage, Rabin paid with his life - two years later, he was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic. The assassination achieved its objective: it derailed the Oslo peace process.

Contrary to the widely held view in Israel, the Oslo Accords were not doomed to failure from the start. The Oslo peace process broke down because Rabin's hardline Likud successors reneged on their country's side of the original deal. They not only continued but intensified the building of settlements in the occupied territories. Settlement expansion continues even as these lines are being written. It is tantamount to stealing the land and the water resources that belong to another people. Occupation is the opposite of peace. It is oppression; it is the abuse of human rights; it is in-your-face violence. There can be no genuine or viable peace between Israel and the Palestinians without an end to the occupation. Peace-making and land-grabbing simply do not go together. Consequently, 40 years after its spectacular victory in the Six-Day War, Israel still faces the same fundamental choice: it can have land or it can have peace; it cannot have both.

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush's real agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Tony Blair's opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times. Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair's entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure. He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with America was the be all and end all of Blair's foreign policy. He presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America's really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair's special relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept a settlement on Israel's terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued, went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to America or Britain. The real issue was Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories and America's support for Israel in its savage colonial war against the Palestinian people.

When seeking the approval of the Commons for the war, Blair pledged that after Iraq was disarmed, he and his American friends would seek a solution to the Palestine problem. He has utterly failed to deliver on this promise.

True, Blair was the driving force behind the "road map" that envisaged the emergence of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But Sharon wrecked the road map. In return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon exacted a written American agreement to Israel's retention of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank. Blair publicly endorsed the nefarious Sharon-Bush pact. This was the most egregious British betrayal of the Palestinians since the Balfour declaration of 1917.

Blair and Bush have also betrayed the Iraqi people. To begin with, there was much brave rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq and turning it into a model for the rest of the Arab world. But the rhetoric was empty. The neoconservatives who drove American policy were interested in overthrowing Saddam Hussein and in nothing else.

The allied invasion of Iraq was not an isolated episode but part of the so-called global war on terror. But the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq only exacerbated the problem of terrorism. The invasion of Iraq has given a powerful boost to al-Qaida and its confederates by damaging Britain's reputation and radicalising its young Muslims. The London bombs may not have been a direct result of the Iraq war - but they are indisputably a part of the blowback.

What we have in Iraq today is chronic instability, an incipient civil war, endemic violence and anarchy, an upsurge of terrorist activity of every kind, and a national insurgency to which the allies have no answer. The neocons did not bother to plan for postwar reconstruction. Occupation was accompanied by devastation and destruction on a massive scale and a civilian death toll estimated by one source at 655,000.

The allies pride themselves on having brought democracy to the Iraqi people, but they have failed in the primary duty of any government: to provide security for the civilian population. The upshot is that America and its pillion passenger in the "war against terror" are now embroiled in a vicious, protracted and unwinnable conflict.

Blair has the audacity to say that God will be his judge over the Iraq war. This is a curious attitude for a democratic politician to adopt. History will surely pass a harsh judgment on Blair. He has the worst record on the Middle East of any British prime minister in the past century, infinitely worse than that of Anthony Eden, who at least had the decency to accept responsibility for the Suez debacle.

In a new initiative, ORG is publishing a series of occasional briefing papers from key international commentators and experts. The first of these, by Avi Shlaim, contains an important new contribution to thinking about the resolution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

The Crisis

The Palestine problem presents Europe with a crisis of supreme magnitude. The situation on the ground is dismal, dire, and getting worse by the day. The Oslo peace process broke down four years ago and the return to violence has already claimed the lives of 973 Israelis and 3,747 Palestinians. Israeli forces have injured 27,484 Palestinians, confiscated 224,415 dunums of Palestinian land, razed 72,951 dunums, and are estimated to have uprooted 1,167,913 trees. The road map to peace, launched by the Quartet with so much fanfare on 2 June 2003, is in tatters. A voluntary agreement between the parties is out of the question because of the acute asymmetry of power between them: Israel is too strong and the Palestinians are too weak.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the current situation is that the policies of Ariel Sharon’s government are creating realities on the ground that are going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible to change. The government continues to expand the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, to construct more housing units, and to build more roads and by-pass roads to link the settlements to Israel proper. Moreover, in the face of fierce international opposition, the government is pressing ahead with the construction of the “security barrier” or wall that involves the expropriation of Palestinian land and creates unbearable conditions for the civilian population. This wall entails the de facto annexation of large chunks of the West Bank to Israel. It is unlikely, to say the least, that this wall will ever be dismantled or that the land on which it is built will be returned to its owners. In the meantime, the long-suffering civilian population has to contend with no less than 736 Israeli army checkpoints on what remains of its rapidly shrinking patrimony.

The road map envisaged an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel by the end of 2005. But the Likud’s policies of creeping annexation are steadily undermining the basis for a two-state solution. Israel’s presence in the occupied territories is already so extensive and well entrenched as to cast doubt about the viability of a future Palestinian state. To be viable such a state requires territorial contiguity whereas the end-result of Israeli policies is to cut up the West Bank into a patchwork of isolated enclaves. Continuing Israeli expansion thus strikes at the very heart of a two- state solution.

The United States and Great Britain

The Bush administration has made matters worse by supporting the expansionist policies of the present Israeli government. It endorsed Ariel Sharon’s plan for a unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip although the plan entails the annexation of the major West Bank settlement blocks to Israel. Sharon’s plan was presented as a contribution to the road map but it is nothing of the sort. The road map calls for negotiations between the two sides on the border between them and on the other “permanent status” issues such as Jerusalem and the right of return of the 1948 refugees; Sharon wants to re-draw the border between Israel and Palestine by unilateral action. He is the unilateralist par excellence. His idea of a Palestinian state is a small, weak, emasculated entity, consisting of a series of heavily populated enclaves with Israel controlling all the border crossings, air space, and water resources. The guiding principle behind Sharon’s idea of a Palestinian state is the largest possible population on the minimum amount of land and the incorporation of the rest of the West Bank into Greater Israel.

George Bush famously described Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace.” To most people Sharon is better known as a man of war. His plan is a recipe for never-ending conflict, turmoil, terror, and counter-terror in the Middle East. By endorsing Sharon’s plan, President Bush abruptly reversed his country’s traditional policy towards the conflict which was grounded in UN resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 and the view that Jewish settlements on occupied territory are illegal and “an obstacle to peace”. The plan itself is seriously at odds with the Geneva conventions, the UN Charter, a whole raft of UN resolutions, and the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

For reasons best known to himself, Tony Blair chose to associate himself with the Bush- Sharon pact. Blair’s public statement in support of this infamous pact is all the more puzzling given the role he had played in persuading George Bush of the need for an international initiative to resolve the Palestine problem in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Bush was not genuinely committed to the road map; he went along with it partly as a reward to Tony Blair for his support over Iraq. Despite the defection of Bush and Blair, the road map continues to represent the broadest possible measure of international consensus on the way forward on the Israel-Palestine front. All the other members of the Quartet – Russia, the UN, and European Union - remain fully committed to it. By lining up behind Bush in his blind support for Sharon, Blair dealt a serious blow to the hopes of a negotiated settlement. He also abandoned the Palestinians to the tender mercies of General Sharon. This was the second greatest betrayal by Britain of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and there have been many others in between.

European Union

European Union cannot put Western policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back on track but it should do what it can to limit the damaging effects of Anglo-American folly. EU is the only international actor capable of balancing the sole surviving superpower in the Middle East. It has the right and the duty, in its capacity as a member of the Quartet and one of the authors of the road map, to distance itself from the latest twist in US foreign policy. US support for Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan amounts to an undeclared abandonment of the road map. This change of course took place without consultation with America’s allies, with the exception of Britain. The least that EU can do is to publicly reaffirm its support for the road map and the two-state solution that it embodies.

EU is an important actor in the Arab-Israeli conflict for historical, political, and economic reasons. It is Israel’s largest trading partner and the biggest provider of foreign aid to the Palestinians. America, by contrast, is not a major trading partner to Israel and its aid to the Palestinian Authority is negligible. For this reason alone, EU views on the appropriate mode of conflict resolution ought to carry some weight. EU can choose to remain, in Willy Brandt’s phrase, “an economic giant and a political dwarf” but it is not mandatory to do so!

As a military power Europe is simply not in the same league as the United States. One can therefore easily apply Stalin’s jibe about the Vatican to Europe – How many divisions does the Pope have? But military power has its limits as America’s experience in Iraq has painfully demonstrated. Europe, precisely because it does not rely to the same extent as America on military power to bring about political change, enjoys more credibility as an actor on the international stage. It also enjoys greater legitimacy because of its respect for international law and international institutions, its values of cooperation and conflict resolution, and its record in promoting democracy and human rights.

Domestic constraints and international standards

America’s whole approach to the Middle East is vitiated by its adherence to a double-standard – one towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. Europe has one common standard to Arabs and Israelis but it needs to apply it more assertively. Nor should it shy away from using its economic leverage against any party that falls short of this standard for international behaviour. Israel, for example, has recently pressed foreign donors to finance the construction of a web of roads through the occupied territories – made necessary by the construction of the wall and the roads that are for the exclusive use of the settlers. Europe needs to tell Israel loud and clear that it is not in the business of financing apartheid. A European role is not only possible but crucial for realising the vision of a two-state solution, for striking the right balance between security for Israel and justice for the Palestinians.

American bias in favour of Israel is not a fleeting feature of the Bush administration but the result of the peculiarities of the American electoral system. Henry Kissinger used to say, with good reason, that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. The same may be said about America, at least in relation to the Middle East. Due to structural reasons, no American Congress is ever likely to support a policy deemed adverse to Israel’s interests. Settlements in the occupied territories are a case in point. America supports Israel to the tune of $3 billion dollars a year but this aid is rarely made conditional on desisting from policies that harm the prospects for peace such as the building of new settlements. America changed the regime in Baghdad in three weeks. But it failed to compel Israel to dismantle a single settlement in 37 years.

EU does not labour under the same debilitating constraints. Its approach to the Middle East is much more enlightened and even-handed. It is unreservedly committed to Israel’s security within its legal borders and it has a trade association agreement that carries very substantial benefits for the Jewish state. This commitment to Israel is balanced by support for the Palestinian right to self-determination in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. EU has a much more consistent record than America of upholding international law and abiding by UN resolutions relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The view that EU should follow America because only America can deliver Israel is simply wrong. America cannot and will not push Israel into a settlement. It follows that EU must pursue an independent policy if it is to contribute to a resolution of the conflict.

Leadership

If the enlarged EU is to play a more effective role in the diplomacy surrounding the Israel- Palestinian dispute, one of its key members will have to take the lead. Britain is no longer fit to take the lead because the part it played in the illegal invasion of Iraq has all but destroyed its reputation on the continent and in the Arab world. France would not command broad support as a leader because it is widely perceived to be too antagonistic towards Israel and too soft on the Arabs for commercial reasons. Germany would probably rule itself out for a leadership role on account of its continuing guilt feelings towards the Jewish people arising out of the Holocaust. But all the signs suggest that Germany would lend its weight to an independent European initiative if another major power took the lead.

Spain has the best credentials for taking the lead in a new European initiative to promote a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not the result of a process of elimination but of a long list of positive virtues. First, Spain has a long historic association with the Jewish people and close ties with the Muslim countries of North Africa, especially Morocco. Second, ever since the end of the dictatorship, Spain has displayed a commendable commitment to international law and international order. Third, Spain successfully hosted the Madrid peace conference in 1991 and the Barcelona conference of 1995. Fourth, the Socialist government that came to power in April 2004 is eminently well-qualified to serve as an honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians. It began life by breaking away from its predecessor’s unpopular legacy of support for the American war in Iraq and quickly set about resuming Spain’s traditional role as a loyal member of the European community of nations.

Senior members of the government have deep knowledge and extensive first-hand experience of the problems of the Middle East. Miguel Angel Moratinos, the foreign minister, was the EU special envoy to the Middle East peace process and he won the respect of both sides by his impartiality and fair-mindedness. His deputy, Bernardino Leon, is a career diplomat who specialised in Middle Eastern affairs and later served as director of the Foundation of the Three Cultures of the Mediterranean in Seville. In Seville he hosted the West-Eastern Divan, the unique and brilliantly successful orchestra for young Israeli and Arab musicians that Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said established in 1999. Leon convened several conferences and workshops on Israeli-Palestinian relations. He also translated into Spanish the present writer’s book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. In short, there is an important European leadership role waiting for an actor and Socialist Spain is able and willing to play this role.

It is a mistake to think, as nearly all Israelis do, that a European role in regulating the regional conflict would necessarily be at their country’s expense. Whether they like it or not, Israelis and Palestinians are destined to live side by side on the same small piece of land. Israel’s supreme interest lies in a negotiated settlement of the dispute with its immediate neighbours. The policies of the Sharon government over the last four years have produced neither peace nor security. They have also inflicted serious damage to the Israeli economy and to living standards in the Palestinian territories. There is nothing Israelis want more than peace and security and they are prepared to pay the territorial price for it. Surveys show that the majority of Israelis support a two-state solution with only minor border modifications. The politicians of the Right are much more opposed to the idea of an independent Palestinian state than the Israeli public.

On the Palestinian side, both the government and the public would warmly welcome a more forceful European intervention in the conflict. The PA accepted with alacrity the Quartet’s road map and started implementing it even before it was officially launched. But it was too weak to prevent the suicide bombings by Islamic militants that were used by Israel to justify its abandonment of the road map. Among the public at large there is much greater degree of support for internal reform and for an end to violence than is commonly recognised in the West. A survey carried out by Dr Khalil Shikaki in the autumn of 2004 revealed that 92 per cent of respondents support fundamental political reform in the PA; that 79 per cent support the mutual cessation of violence with Israel; and that 72 per cent support reconciliation between the two peoples.

Yasser Arafat was a controversial figure. Although he was the indisputable symbol of the Palestinian cause, he led his people to a dead end. In the West Arafat was widely perceived in as a problem because of his resistance to reform, because he was inept and incompetent, and because he was unwilling or unable to prevent violent attacks on Israeli civilians. But for all his faults, Arafat was a democratically-elected leader who continued to represent a broad national consensus in favour of a two-state solution. In any case, Arafat’s death, on 11 November 2004, marked the end of an era in Palestinian politics. The departure of the patriarch from the political scene opened up an opportunity for a new beginning with new people and new ideas.

The first order of business was to elect a new president to succeed Yasser Arafat. The presidential elections held on 9 January 2005 were a test for Palestinian democracy and the Palestinians passed the test with flying colours. A team of some 800 international observers reported very favourably on the conduct of the elections. There were six candidates, lively debates, and a genuine contest. The winner was Mahmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, the mainstream Fatah candidate, who received 62 per cent of the votes cast. The runner up, with 19 per cent of the votes, was Dr Mustafa Barghouthi, a well respected physician and the leader of a democratic political party called “Al Mubadara”.

The 69 year-old Abu Mazen has excellent credentials to lead the Palestinians in the post- Arafat era. He is a moderate who was deeply involved in the Oslo peace process and the coauthor with Yossi Beilin of what became known in 1995 as the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan. Following the collapse of the Oslo process and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, Abu Mazen repeatedly warned that the resort to force would hurt the Palestinians more than it would hurt the Israelis. Within a week of his inauguration, Abu Mazen went to Gaza and persuaded Hamas and Islamic Jihad to suspend their attacks on Israel in return for a tacit Israeli agreement to a cease-fire. His aim is not to crush but to co-opt the militant organisations, to initiate an internal peace process between the different Palestinian factions that would enable him to press for the renewal of the peace process with Israel. Abu Mazen’s agenda is the EU’s agenda: to bring about a cease-fire, to carry out political and financial reforms, to reorganise the security forces, to assert the rule of law, and to revive the negotiations with Israel on a two-state solution.

Conclusion

The case for an active EU role in promoting a genuine two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is thus overwhelmingly strong today from every conceivable angle. It would serve Israel’s best long-term interest by ending its occupation of another people and by enabling it to channel its energies towards more constructive ends. It would assist the Palestinians in realising their long-denied aspirations to independence and statehood. It would help the moderate Arab states, all of whom have been destabilised by the violence of the second intifada. Last but not least, it would remove one of the main sources of Muslim rage against the West and thus help the West in the conduct of the global campaign against terror. In all these different ways, a European initiative would not be a selfish act but a desperately needed contribution to the resolution of one of the most protracted and bitter conflicts of modern times, to regional stability, and to international order.

If ever there was a time for Europe to stand firm, it is now; and if ever there was a cause on which to stand firm, it is this one.

Avi Shlaim is a British Academy Research Professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin Books, 2000). This paper was first published by ORG in November 2004. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oxford Research Group.