To sitater fra Ehud Baraks intervju i New York Review of Books:
They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates
no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling
lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as
an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your
purpose and that which doesn't.
Merk at her snakker han ikke bare om Arafat eller om palestinere, men
om alle arabere. Hvor har vi hørt slikt før? Sions Vises
Protokoller, kanskje? Om dette ikke er antisemittisme, vet jeg ikke
hva som er.
They will exploit the tolerance and democracy of Israel first
to turn it into "a state for all its citizens," as demanded by
the extreme nationalist wing of Israel's Arabs and extremist
left-wing Jewish Israelis.
Det som burde være selvsagt i ethvert oppegående demokrati, prinsippet
som «verdenssamfunnet» utkjempet kriger i Bosnia og Kosovo og
intervenerte i Makedonia for etter sigende å forsvare, som en ila
sanksjoner mot Sør-Afrika for å forsvare -- prinsippet om at en stat
ikke kan være basert på etnisk diskriminering og etnisk renhet, men må
tilhøre alle sine borgere -- dette prinsippet avfeier han som
«ekstremistisk».
Legg også merke til at i sin iver etter å tilbakevise den
«revisjonistiske» historien om Camp David som løgn, oppnår han så godt
som å bekrefte den:
I ask myself why is he [Arafat] lying. To put it simply, any
proposal that offers 92 percent of the West Bank cannot, almost
by definition, break up the territory into noncontiguous
cantons. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are separate, but
that cannot be helped [in a peace agreement, they would be
joined by a bridge].
But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a
continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin
Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the
Jordan River. Here, Palestinian territorial continuity would have been
assured by a tunnel or bridge:
Altså innrømmer han at Vestbredden ville blitt delt i to og at Israel
ville ha annektert 8% av Vestbredden rundt Stor-Jerusalem. Og
«sikkerhetssonene» langs alle grensene, som formelt ville vært
palestinsk territorium, men ville forbli under israelsk kontroll,
nevnes overhodet ikke.
Baraks uetteretteligheter tilbakevises av Hussein Agha og Robert
Malley i et tilsvar som jeg sender separat.
The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Exchange
Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)
By Benny Morris
1. An Interview with Ehud Barak
The following interview with Ehud Barak took place in Tel Aviv during
late March and early April. I have supplied explanatory references in
brackets with Mr. Barak's approval.
The call from Bill Clinton came hours after the publication in The New
York Times of Deborah Sontag's "revisionist" article ("Quest for
Middle East Peace: How and Why It Failed," July 26, 2001) on the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Ehud Barak, Israel's former prime
minister, on vacation, was swimming in a cove in Sardinia. Clinton
said (according to Barak):
What the hell is this? Why is she turning the mistakes we
[i.e., the US and Israel] made into the essence? The true story
of Camp David was that for the first time in the history of the
conflict the American president put on the table a proposal,
based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, very
close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafat refused even to
accept it as a basis for negotiations, walked out of the room,
and deliberately turned to terrorism. That's the real story-all
the rest is gossip.
Clinton was speaking of the two-week-long July 2000 Camp David
conference that he had organized and mediated and its failure, and the
eruption at the end of September of the Palestinian intifada, or
campaign of anti-Israeli violence, which has continued ever since and
which currently plagues the Middle East, with no end in sight. Midway
in the conference, apparently on July 18, Clinton had "slowly"-to
avoid misunderstanding-read out to Arafat a document, endorsed in
advance by Barak, outlining the main points of a future
settlement. The proposals included the establishment of a
demilitarized Palestinian state on some 92 percent of the West Bank
and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with some territorial compensation
for the Palestinians from pre-1967 Israeli territory; the dismantling
of most of the settlements and the concentration of the bulk of the
settlers inside the 8 percent of the West Bank to be annexed by
Israel; the establishment of the Palestinian capital in East
Jerusalem, in which some Arab neighborhoods would become sovereign
Palestinian territory and others would enjoy "functional autonomy";
Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem (the
Muslim and Christian quarters) and "custodianship," though not
sovereignty, over the Temple Mount; a return of refugees to the
prospective Palestinian state though with no "right of return" to
Israel proper; and the organization by the international community of
a massive aid program to facilitate the refugees' rehabilitation.
Arafat said "No." Clinton, enraged, banged on the table and said: "You
are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe." A formal
Palestinian rejection of the proposals reached the Americans the next
day. The summit sputtered on for a few days more but to all intents
and purposes it was over.
Barak today portrays Arafat's behavior at Camp David as a
"performance" geared to exacting from the Israelis as many concessions
as possible without ever seriously intending to reach a peace
settlement or sign an "end to the conflict." "He did not negotiate in
good faith, indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying
'no' to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own," he
says. Barak continuously shifts between charging Arafat with "lacking
the character or will" to make a historic compromise (as did the late
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977-1979, when he made peace with
Israel) and accusing him of secretly planning Israel's demise while he
strings along a succession of Israeli and Western leaders and, on the
way, hoodwinks "naive journalists"-in Barak's phrase-like Sontag and
officials such as former US National Security Council expert Robert
Malley (who, with Hussein Agha, published another "revisionist"
article on Camp David, "Camp David: The Tragedy of
Errors"[*]). According to Barak:
What they [Arafat and his colleagues] want is a Palestinian
state in all of Palestine. What we see as self-evident, [the
need for] two states for two peoples, they reject. Israel is
too strong at the moment to defeat, so they formally recognize
it. But their game plan is to establish a Palestinian state
while always leaving an opening for further "legitimate"
demands down the road. For now, they are willing to agree to a
temporary truce à la Hudnat Hudaybiyah [a temporary truce that
the Prophet Muhammad concluded with the leaders of Mecca during
628-629, which he subsequently unilaterally violated]. They
will exploit the tolerance and democracy of Israel first to
turn it into "a state for all its citizens," as demanded by the
extreme nationalist wing of Israel's Arabs and extremist
left-wing Jewish Israelis. Then they will push for a binational
state and then, demography and attrition will lead to a state
with a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority. This would not
necessarily involve kicking out all the Jews. But it would mean
the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This, I believe,
is their vision. They may not talk about it often, openly, but
this is their vision. Arafat sees himself as a reborn
Saladin-the Kurdish Muslim general who defeated the Crusaders
in the twelfth century -and Israel as just another, ephemeral
Crusader state.
Barak believes that Arafat sees the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and
their descendants, numbering close to four million, as the main
demographic-political tool for subverting the Jewish state.
Arafat, says Barak, believes that Israel "has no right to exist, and
he seeks its demise." Barak buttresses this by arguing that Arafat
"does not recognize the existence of a Jewish people or nation, only a
Jewish religion, because it is mentioned in the Koran and because he
remembers seeing, as a kid, Jews praying at the Wailing Wall." This,
Barak believes, underlay Arafat's insistence at Camp David (and since)
that the Palestinians have sole sovereignty over the Temple Mount
compound (Haram al-Sharif-the noble sanctuary) in the southeastern
corner of Jerusalem's Old City. Arafat denies that any Jewish temple
has ever stood there-and this is a microcosm of his denial of the
Jews' historical connection and claim to the Land of
Israel/Palestine. Hence, in December 2000, Arafat refused to accept
even the vague formulation proposed by Clinton positing Israeli
sovereignty over the earth beneath the Temple Mount's surface area.
Barak recalls Clinton telling him that during the Camp David talks he
had attended Sunday services and the minister had preached a sermon
mentioning Solomon, the king who built the First Temple. Later that
evening, he had met Arafat and spoke of the sermon. Arafat had said:
"There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on the Temple
Mount]." Clinton responded that "not only the Jews but I, too, believe
that under the surface there are remains of Solomon's temple." (At
this point one of Clinton's [Jewish] aides whispered to the President
that he should tell Arafat that this is his personal opinion, not an
official American position.)
Repeatedly during our prolonged interview, conducted in his office in
a Tel Aviv skyscraper, Barak shook his head-in bewilderment and
sadness- at what he regards as Palestinian, and especially Arafat's,
mendacity:
They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates
no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling
lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as
an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your
purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as
emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is
permissible. There is no such thing as "the truth."
Speaking of Arab society, Barak recalls: "The deputy director of the
US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are
societies in which lie detector tests don't work, societies in which
lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the tests are
based]." Barak gives an example: back in October 2000, shortly after
the start of the current Intifada, he met with then Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and Arafat in the residence of the US ambassador in
Paris. Albright was trying to broker a cease-fire. Arafat had agreed
to call a number of his police commanders in the West Bank and Gaza,
including Tawfik Tirawi, to implement a truce. Barak said:
I interjected: "But these are not the people organizing the
violence. If you are serious [in seeking a cease-fire], then
call Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh" [the West Bank
heads of the Fatah, Arafat's own political party, who were
orchestrating the violence. Bargouti has since been arrested
by Israeli troops and is currently awaiting trial for launching
dozens of terrorist attacks].
Arafat looked at me, with an expression of blank innocence, as
if I had mentioned the names of two polar bears, and said:
"Who? Who?" So I repeated the names, this time with a
pronounced, clear Arabic inflection-"Mar-wan Bar-gou-ti" and
"Hsein a Sheikh"- and Arafat again said, "Who? Who?" At this,
some of his aides couldn't stop themselves and burst out
laughing. And Arafat, forced to drop the pretense, agreed to
call them later. [Of course, nothing happened and the shooting
continued.]
But Barak is far from dismissive of Arafat, who appears to many
Israelis to be a sick, slightly doddering buffoon and, at the same
time, sly and murderous. Barak sees him as "a great actor, very sharp,
very elusive, slippery." He cautions that Arafat "uses his broken
English" to excellent effect.
Barak was elected prime minister, following three years of Benjamin
Netanyahu's premiership, in May 1999 and took office in July. He
immediately embarked on his multipronged peace effort-vis-à-vis Syria,
Lebanon, and the Palestinians-feeling that Israel and the Middle East
were headed for "an iceberg and a certain crash and that it was the
leaders' moral and political responsibility to try to avoid a
catastrophe." He understood that the year and a half left of Clinton's
presidency afforded a small window of opportunity inside a larger, but
also limited, regional window of opportunity. That window was opened
by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had since the 1950s
supported the Arabs against Israel, and the defeat of Iraq in Kuwait
in 1991, and would close when and if Iran and/or Iraq obtained nuclear
weapons and when and if Islamic fundamentalist movements took over
states bordering Israel.
Barak said he wanted to complete what Rabin had begun with the Oslo
agreement, which inaugurated mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition
and partial Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza Strip back
in 1993. A formal peace agreement, he felt, would not necessarily "end
the conflict, that will take education over generations, but there is
a tremendous value to an [official] framework of peace that places
pacific handcuffs on these societies." Formal peace treaties, backed
by the international community, will have "a dynamic of their own,
reducing the possibility of an existential conflict. But without such
movement toward formal peace, we are headed for the iceberg." He seems
to mean something far worse than the current low-level
Israeli-Palestinian conflagration.
Barak says that, before July 2000, IDF intelligence gave the Camp
David talks less than a 50 percent chance of success. The intelligence
chiefs were doubtful that Arafat "would take the decisions necessary
to reach a peace agreement." His own feeling at the time was that he
"hoped Arafat would rise to the occasion and display something of
greatness, like Sadat and Hussein, at the moment of truth. They did
not wait for a consensus [among their people], they decided to lead. I
told Clinton on the first day [of the summit] that I didn't know
whether Arafat had come to make a deal or just to extract as many
political concessions as possible before he, Clinton, left office."
Barak dismisses the charges leveled by the Camp David "revisionists"
as Palestinian propaganda. The visit to the Temple Mount by then Likud
leader Ariel Sharon in September 2000 was not what caused the
intifada, he says.
Sharon's visit, which was coordinated with [Palestinian
Authority West Bank security chief] Jibril Rajoub, was directed
against me, not the Palestinians, to show that the Likud cared
more about Jerusalem than I did. We know, from hard
intelligence, that Arafat [after Camp David] intended to
unleash a violent confrontation, terrorism. [Sharon's visit and
the riots that followed] fell into his hands like an excellent
excuse, a pretext.
As agreed, Sharon had made no statement and had refrained from
entering the Islamic shrines in the compound in the course of the
visit. But rioting broke out nonetheless. The intifada, says Barak,
"was preplanned, pre-prepared. I don't mean that Arafat knew that on a
certain day in September [it would be unleashed].... It wasn't
accurate, like computer engineering. But it was definitely on the
level of planning, of a grand plan."
Nor does Barak believe that the IDF's precipitate withdrawal from the
Security Zone in Southern Lebanon, in May 2000, set off the
intifada. "When I took office [in July 1999] I promised to pull out
within a year. And that is what I did." Without doubt, the
Palestinians drew inspiration and heart from the Hezbollah's
successful guerrilla campaign during 1985-2000, which in the end drove
out the IDF, as well as from the spectacle of the sometime slapdash,
chaotic pullout at the end of May; they said as much during the first
months of the intifada. "But had we not withdrawn when we did, the
situation would have been much worse," Barak argues:
We would have faced a simultaneous struggle on two fronts, in
Palestine and in southern Lebanon, and the Hezbollah would have
enjoyed international legitimacy in their struggle against a
foreign occupier.
The lack of international legitimacy, Barak stresses, following the
Israeli pullback to the international frontier, is what has curtailed
the Hezbollah's attacks against Israel during the past weeks. "Had we
still been in Leb-anon we would have had to mobilize 100,000, not
30,000, reserve soldiers [in April, during 'Operation Defensive
Wall']," he adds. But he is aware that the sporadic Hezbollah attacks
might yet escalate into a full-scale Israeli- Lebanese-Syrian
confrontation, something the pullback had been designed -and so
touted-to avoid.
As to the charge raised by the Palestinians, and, in their wake, by
Deborah Sontag, and Malley and Agha, that the Palestinians had been
dragooned into coming to Camp David "unprepared" and prematurely,
Barak is dismissive to the point of contempt. He observes that the
Palestinians had had eight years, since 1993, to prepare their
positions and fall-back positions, demands and red lines, and a full
year since he had been elected to office and made clear his intention
to go for a final settlement. By 2002, he said, they were eager to
establish a state,
which is what I and Clinton proposed and offered. And before
the summit, there were months of discussions and contacts, in
Stockholm, Israel, the Gaza Strip. Would they really have been
more "prepared" had the summit been deferred to August, as
Arafat later said he had wanted?
One senses that Barak feels on less firm ground when he responds to
the "revisionist" charge that it was the continued Israeli settlement
in the Occupied Territories, during the year before Camp David and
under his premiership, that had so stirred Palestinian passions as to
make the intifada inevitable:
Look, during my premiership we established no new settlements
and, in fact, dismantled many illegal, unauthorized
ones. Immediately after I took office I promised Arafat: No new
settlements-but I also told him that we would continue to honor
the previous government's commitments, and contracts in the
pipeline, concerning the expansion of existing settlements. The
courts would force us to honor existing contracts, I said. But
I also offered a substantive argument. I want to reach peace
during the next sixteen months. What was now being built would
either remain within territory that you, the Palestinians,
agree should remain ours-and therefore it shouldn't matter to
you-or would be in territory that would soon come under
Palestinian sovereignty, and therefore would add to the housing
available for returning refugees. So you can't lose.
But Barak concedes that while this sounded logical, there was a
psychological dimension here that could not be neutralized by
argument: the Palestinians simply saw, on a daily basis, that more and
more of "their" land was being plundered and becoming "Israeli." And
he agrees that he allowed the expansion of existing settlements in
part to mollify the Israeli right, which he needed quiescent as he
pushed forward toward peace and, ultimately, a withdrawal from the
territories.
Regarding the core of the Israeli-American proposals, the
"revisionists" have charged that Israel offered the Palestinians not a
continuous state but a collection of "bantustans" or "cantons." "This
is one of the most embarrassing lies to have emerged from Camp David,"
says Barak.
I ask myself why is he [Arafat] lying. To put it simply, any
proposal that offers 92 percent of the West Bank cannot, almost
by definition, break up the territory into noncontiguous
cantons. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are separate, but
that cannot be helped [in a peace agreement, they would be
joined by a bridge].
But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a
continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin
Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the
Jordan River. Here, Palestinian territorial continuity would have been
assured by a tunnel or bridge:
The Palestinians said that I [and Clinton] presented our
proposals as a diktat, take it or leave it. This is a
lie. Everything proposed was open to continued
negotiations. They could have raised counter-proposals. But
they never did.
Barak explains Arafat's "lie" about "bantustans" as stemming from his
fear that "when reasonable Palestinian citizens would come to know the
real content of Clinton's proposal and map, showing what 92 percent of
the West Bank means, they would have said: 'Mr. Chairman, why didn't
you take it?'"
In one other important way the "revisionist" articles are misleading:
they focused on Camp David (July 2000) while almost completely
ignoring the follow-up (and more generous) Clinton proposals (endorsed
by Israel) of December 2000 and the Palestinian- Israeli talks at Taba
in January 2001. The "revisionists," Barak implies, completely ignored
the shift-under the prodding of the intifada-in the Israeli (and
American) positions between July and the end of 2000. By December and
January, Israel had agreed to Washington's proposal that it withdraw
from about 95 percent of the West Bank with substantial territorial
compensation for the Palestinians from Israel proper, and that the
Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would become sovereign Palestinian
territory. The Israelis also agreed to an international force at least
temporarily controlling the Jordan River line between the West Bank
and the Kingdom of Jordan instead of the IDF. (But on the refugee
issue, which Barak sees as "existential," Israel had continued to
stand firm: "We cannot allow even one refugee back on the basis of the
'right of return,'" says Barak. "And we cannot accept historical
responsibility for the creation of the problem.")
Had the Palestinians, even at that late date, agreed, there would have
been a peace settlement. But Arafat dragged his feet for a fortnight
and then responded to the Clinton proposals with a "Yes, but..." that,
with its hundreds of objections, reservations, and qualifications, was
tantamount to a resounding "No." Palestinian officials maintain to
this day that Arafat said "Yes" to the Clinton proposals of December
23. But Dennis Ross, Clinton's special envoy to the Middle East, in a
recent interview (on Fox News, April 21, 2002), who was present at the
Arafat-Clinton White House meeting on January 2, says that Arafat
rejected "every single one of the ideas" presented by Clinton, even
Israeli sovereignty over the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem's Old City. And
the "Palestinians would have [had] in the West Bank an area that was
contiguous. Those who say there were cantons, [that is] completely
untrue." At Taba, the Palestinians seemed to soften a little-for the
first time they even produced a map seemingly conceding 2 percent of
the West Bank. But on the refugees they, too, stuck to their guns,
insisting on Israeli acceptance of "the right of return" and on
Jerusalem, that they have sole sovereignty over the Temple Mount.
Several "revisionists" also took Barak to task for his "Syria first"
strategy: soon after assuming office, he tried to make peace with
Syria and only later, after Damascus turned him down, did he turn to
the Palestinians. This had severely taxed the Palestinians' goodwill
and patience; they felt they were being sidelined. Barak concedes the
point, but explains:
I always supported Syria first. Because they have a [large]
conventional army and nonconventional weaponry, chemical and
biological, and missiles to deliver them. This represents,
under certain conditions, an existential threat. And after
Syria comes Lebanon [meaning that peace with Syria would
immediately engender a peace treaty with Lebanon]. Moreover,
the Syrian problem, with all its difficulties, is simpler to
solve than the Palestinian problem. And reaching peace with
Syria would greatly limit the Palestinians' ability to widen
the conflict. On the other hand, solving the Palestinian
problem will not diminish Syria's ability to existentially
threaten Israel.
Barak says that this was also Rabin's thinking. But he points out that
when he took office, he immediately informed Arafat that he intended
to pursue an agreement with Syria and that this would in no way be at
the Palestinians' expense. "I arrived on the scene immediately after
[Netanyahu's emissary Ronald] Lauder's intensive [secret] talks, which
looked very interesting. It was a Syrian initiative that looked very
close to a breakthrough. It would have been very irresponsible not to
investigate this because of some traditional, ritual order."
The Netanyahu-Lauder initiative, which posited an Israeli withdrawal
from the Golan Heights to a line a few kilometers east of the Jordan
River and the Sea of Galilee, came to naught because two of
Netanyahu's senior ministers, Sharon and Defense Minister Yitzhak
Mordechai, objected to the proposed concessions. Barak offered then
President Hafiz Assad more, in effect a return to the de facto border
of "4 June 1967" along the Jordan River and almost to the shoreline at
the northeastern end of the Sea of Galilee. Assad, by then feeble and
close to death, rejected the terms, conveying his rejection to
President Clinton at the famous meeting in Geneva on March 26,
2000. Barak explains,
Assad wanted Israel to capitulate in advance to all his
demands. Only then would he agree to enter into substantive
negotiations. I couldn't agree to this. We must continue to
live [in the Middle East] afterward [and, had we made the
required concessions, would have been seen as weak, inviting
depredation].
But Barak believes that Assad's effort, involving a major policy
switch, to reach a peace settlement with Israel was genuine and
sincere.
Barak appears uncomfortable with the "revisionist" charge that his
body language toward Arafat had been unfriendly and that he had,
almost consistently during Camp David, avoided meeting the Palestinian
leader, and that these had contributed to the summit's failure. Barak:
I am the Israeli leader who met most with Arafat. He visited
Rabin's home only after [the assassinated leader] was buried on
Mount Herzl [in Jerusalem]. He [Arafat] visited me in my home
in Kochav Yair where my wife made food for him. [Arafat's aide]
Abu Mazen and [my wife] Nava swapped memories about Safad, her
mother was from Safad, and both their parents were traders. I
also met Arafat in friends' homes, in Gaza, in Ramallah.
Barak says that they met "almost every day" in Camp David at mealtimes
and had one "two-hour meeting" in Arafat's cottage. He admits that the
time had been wasted on small talk-but, in the end, he argues, this is
all part of the "gossip," not the real reason for the failure. "Did
Nixon meet Ho Chi Minh or Giap [before reaching the Vietnam peace
deal]? Or did De Gaulle ever speak to [Algerian leader] Ben Bella? The
right time for a meeting between us was when things were ready for a
decision by the leaders...." Barak implies that the negotiations had
never matured or even come close to the point where the final
decision-making meeting by the leaders was apt and necessary.
Barak believes that since the start of the intifada Israel has had no
choice-"and it doesn't matter who is prime minister" (perhaps a jab at
his former rival and colleague in the Labor Party, the dovish-sounding
Shimon Peres, currently Israel's foreign minister)- but to combat
terrorism with military force. The policy of "targeted killings" of
terrorist organizers, bomb-makers, and potential attackers began
during his premiership and he still believes it is necessary and
effective, "though great care must be taken to limit collateral
damage. Say you live in Chevy Chase and you know of someone who is
preparing a bomb in Georgetown and intends to launch a suicide bomber
against a coffee shop outside your front door. Wouldn't you do
something? Wouldn't it be justified to arrest this man and, if you
can't, to kill him?" he asks.
Barak supported Sharon's massive incursion in April-"Operation
Defensive Wall"-into the Palestinian cities-Nablus, Jenin, Bethlehem,
Ramallah, Qalqilya, and Tulkarm-but suggests that he would have done
it differently:
More forcefully and with greater speed, and simultaneously
against all the cities, not, as was done, in staggered
fashion. And I would argue with the confinement of Arafat to
his Ramallah offices. The present situation, with Arafat
eyeball to eyeball with [Israeli] tank gun muzzles but with an
in-surance policy [i.e., Israel's promise to President Bush not
to harm him], is every guerrilla leader's wet dream. But, in
general, no responsible government, following the wave of
suicide bombings culminating in the Passover massacre [in which
twenty-eight Israelis were murdered and about 100 injured in a
Netanya hotel while sitting at the seder] could have acted
otherwise.
But he believes that the counter-terrorist military effort must be
accompanied by a constant reiteration of readiness to renew peace
negotiations on the basis of the Camp David formula. He seems to be
hinting here that Sharon, while also interested in political dialogue,
rejects the Camp David proposals as a basis. Indeed, Sharon said in
April that his government will not dismantle any settlements, and will
not discuss such a dismantling of settlements, before the scheduled
November 2003 general elections. Barak fears that in the absence of
political dialogue based on the Camp David-Clinton proposals, the
vacuum created will be filled by proposals, from Europe or Saudi
Arabia, that are less agreeable to Israel.
Barak seems to hold out no chance of success for Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations, should they somehow resume, so long as Arafat and
like-minded leaders are at the helm on the Arab side. He seems to
think in terms of generations and hesitantly predicts that only
"eighty years" after 1948 will the Palestinians be historically ready
for a compromise. By then, most of the generation that experienced the
catastrophe of 1948 at first hand will have died; there will be "very
few 'salmons' around who still want to return to their birthplaces to
die." (Barak speaks of a "salmon syndrome" among the Palestinians-and
says that Israel, to a degree, was willing to accommodate it, through
the family reunion scheme, allowing elderly refugees to return to be
with their families before they die.) He points to the model of the
Soviet Union, which collapsed roughly after eighty years, after the
generation that had lived through the revolution had died. He seems to
be saying that revolutionary movements' zealotry and dogmatism die
down after the passage of three generations and, in the case of the
Palestinians, the disappearance of the generation of the nakba, or
catastrophe, of 1948 will facilitate compromise.
I asked, "If this is true, then your peace effort vis-à-vis the
Palestinians was historically premature and foredoomed?"
Barak: "No, as a responsible leader I had to give it a try."
In the absence of real negotiations, Barak believes that Israel should
begin to unilaterally prepare for a pullout from "some 75 percent" of
the West Bank and, he implies, all or almost all of the Gaza Strip,
back to defensible borders, while allowing a Palestinian state to
emerge there. Meanwhile Israel should begin constructing a solid,
impermeable fence around the evacuated parts of the West Bank and new
housing and settlements inside Israel proper and in the areas of the
West Bank that Israel intends to permanently annex (such as the Etzion
Block area, south of Bethlehem) to absorb the settlers who will be
moving out of the territories. He says that when the Palestinians will
be ready for peace, the fate of the remaining 25 percent of the West
Bank can be negotiated.
Barak is extremely troubled by the problem posed by Israel's Arab
minority, representing some 20 percent of Israel's total population of
some 6.5 million. Their leadership over the past few years has come
to identify with Arafat and the PA, and an increasing number of
Israeli Arabs, who now commonly refer to themselves as "Palestinian
Arabs," oppose Israel's existence and support the Palestinian armed
struggle. A growing though still very small number have engaged in
terrorism, including one of the past months' suicide bombers. Barak
agrees that, in the absence of a peace settlement with the
Palestinians, Israel's Arabs constitute an irredentist "time bomb,"
though he declines to use the phrase. At the start of the intifada
Israel's Arabs rioted around the country, blocking major highways with
stones and Molotov cocktails. In response, thirteen were killed by
Israeli policemen, deepening the chasm between the country's Jewish
majority and Arab minority.
The relations between the two have not recovered and the rhetoric of
the Israeli Arab leadership has grown steadily more militant. One
Israeli Arab Knesset member, Azmi Bishara, is currently on trial for
sedition. If the conflict with the Palestinians continues, says Barak,
"Israel's Arabs will serve as [the Palestinians'] spearpoint" in the
struggle:
This may necessitate changes in the rules of the democratic
game ...in order to assure Israel's Jewish character.
He raises the possibility that in a future deal, some areas with large
Arab concentrations, such as the "Little Triangle" and Umm al-Fahm,
bordering on the West Bank, could be transferred to the emergent
Palestinian Arab state, along with their inhabitants:
But this could only be done by agreement-and I don't recommend
that government spokesmen speak of it [openly]. But such an
exchange makes demographic sense and is not inconceivable.
Barak is employed as a senior adviser to an American company,
Electronic Data Systems, and is considering a partnership in a private
equity company, where he will be responsible for "security-related"
ventures. I asked him, "Do you see yourself returning to politics?"
Barak answered,
Look, the public [decisively] voted against me a year ago. I
feel like a reserve soldier who knows he might be called upon
to come back but expects that he won't be unless it is
absolutely necessary. But it's not inconceivable. After all,
Rabin returned to the premiership fifteen years after the end
of his first term in office.
At one point in the interview, Barak pointed to the settlement
campaign in heavily populated Palestinian areas, inaugurated by
Menachem Begin's Likud-led government in 1977, as the point at which
Israel took a major historical wrong turn. But at other times Barak
pointed to 1967 as the crucial mistake, when Israel occupied the West
Bank and Gaza (and Sinai and the Golan Heights) and, instead of
agreeing to immediate withdrawal from all the territories, save East
Jerusalem, in exchange for peace, began to settle them. Barak recalled
seeing David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder and first prime minister
(1948-1953 and 1955- 1963), on television in June 1967 arguing for the
immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the Six- Day
War in exchange for peace, save for East Jerusalem.
Many of us-me included- thought that he was suffering from
[mental] weakness or perhaps a subconscious jealousy of his
successor [Levi Eshkol, who had presided over the unprecedented
victory and conquests]. Today one understands that he simply
saw more clearly and farther than the leadership at that time.
How does Barak see the Middle East in a hundred years' time? Would it
contain a Jewish state? Unlike Arafat, Barak believes it will, "and it
will be strong and prosperous. I really think this. Our connection to
the Land of Israelis is not like the Crusaders'.... Israel fits into
the zeitgeist of our era. It is true that there are demographic
threats to its existence. That is why a separation from the
Palestinians is a compelling imperative. Without such a separation
[into two states] there is no future for the Zionist dream."
Notes
[*]The New York Review, August 9, 2001.
-- We are guilty of the grossest, and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the universe ... What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole Universe. - David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
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