Will Israel Slam the Door?

By David K. Shipler

                In the 52 years since Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan during the Six-Day War, the prospect of attaining peace by granting some form of self-government to the area’s Palestinian Arabs has hovered over the conflict like an apparition of hope or dread, depending on your political view. Now, that approach to solving the conflict might be closed off by Israel’s tight election results, since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is positioned to form a right-wing coalition.

In the first two decades after the 1967 war, the notion of an independent Palestinian state was so anathema to most Israeli Jews that it was supported only on the far left, mainly by Communists in the tiny Hadash party. Even liberal Peace Now leaders, who opposed Jewish settlements that were being built in the West Bank, avoided advocating Palestinian statehood for fear that their movement would lose credibility in Israel’s mainstream.

Indeed, Israel’s 1978 Camp David accord with Egypt, which led to a peace treaty in 1979, stopped short of calling for a Palestinian state, providing instead for “autonomy,” which was ill-defined and never implemented. Once statehood gained traction in Israeli politics following the 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, support among Israelis usually oscillated just above and below 50 percent, with occasional spikes during peaceful stretches.

That support itself carried so many caveats that it would have been impossible to convert into statehood without broad changes of attitude among both Israelis and Palestinians. Spates of terrorism by Palestinians knocked off some percentage points, as would be expected, but even in relatively calm periods, Israeli Jews expressed serious doubts about statehood defined as Palestinians might accept, and Palestinians had their own reservations about the compromises they would have to make.

A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll in December 2013, for example, found an abstract two-state solution supported by 63 percent of Israelis and 53 percent of Palestinians. But the numbers declined as details were specified. Israeli withdrawal from all but 3 percent of the West Bank—all Jewish settlements except those in several large blocks—was favored by only 44 percent of Israelis. A Palestine with no army and only a strong police and multinational force appealed to 60 percent of Israelis but just 28 percent of Palestinians. Dividing Jerusalem was accepted by merely 37 and 32 percent of Israelis and Palestinians respectively—each side wanted the city all for itself. And in December 2012, a refugee solution providing for compensation to Palestinian refugees, their right of return to the new Palestinian state, and an undefined number admitted to Israel, won only minority support on both sides—39 percent of Israelis and 49 percent of Palestinians.

Middle East Fantasies

By David K. Shipler

            At the end of an interview I did several years ago with Palestinian high school students in Ramallah, the West Bank, the teenagers asked for my opinion about the conflict. I said, in part, that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I thought the Palestinians were right; on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I thought the Israelis were right, and on Sunday I thought they both deserved each other. (Their Palestinian teacher was outraged that I’d consider the Israelis right on any day.)

Now I’d add the United States to that mix, because it’s become a party that’s both right and wrong and deserves all the praise and criticism it’s getting for moving its embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem.

            Logically, yes, a country gets to pick its capital, and Israel chose Jerusalem both in ancient and modern times. As President Trump declared in a videotaped message, “For many years, we have failed to acknowledge the obvious, plain reality that the [Israeli] capital is Jerusalem.” But logic does not rule there. If it did, the clash of Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, and their overlapping territorial claims, would have been resolved long ago. No, what Trump and his smiling acolytes at the embassy’s opening ceremony do not get is the power of symbols to trigger zealotry in that weary land, where Israel, the Palestinians, and now the United States indulge in fantasies.

            It’s easy to see this by simply asking which image from that event represents reality: the jubilant Israeli and American officials, well-coifed in a clean, safe pageant of platitudes about peace, or the billowing black smoke, teargas, and bloody bodies of Palestinians who were raging toward Israel’s border with Gaza. Their demand? To return to villages that they had never seen, that mostly no longer exist, that had been emptied of their ancestors during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, which Palestinians call “Nakba,” Arabic for catastrophe.

            Neither the embassy ceremony nor the Gaza protest is remotely realistic. Palestinian kids have been indoctrinated to dream angrily of a return after 70 years to their grandparents’ lands inside Israel proper, where the orange groves and vineyards were rarely as lush and idyllic as in their imagination. For both security and political reasons, Israel is not about to permit a largescale return, and that demand by Hamas, which rules Gaza, simply reinforces Israeli fears that Palestinians want the obliteration of the Jewish state.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

By David K. Shipler

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

Psalm 137:5

            The city of Jerusalem, whose sandstone facades glow ethereally in the slanting light of dawns and dusks, stands on a spine of hills along the lands of milk and of honey. To the east, the land plunging down into the Judean Desert has been traditionally hospitable to milk-producing goat herds. To the west, the fertile coastal plain along the Mediterranean has been sweet with orchards.

            That is the basic biblical geography. At this intersection of semi-nomadic peoples and settled farmers, Jerusalem has been enriched and burdened by ancient affinities and faiths. Its map today is enhanced and scarred by the overlays of history, religion, and nationalism, a treacherous landscape into which President Trump has now stumbled clumsily.

What forces he has unwittingly set loose we do not yet know; predictions in that part of the world are for prophets or fools. But his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State alone, without also recognizing the Palestinians’ yearning for Jerusalem as the capital of their aspirational state, surely diminishes America’s maneuverability.

It’s hard to see what the United States gains from Trump’s move. For the limited profit of catering to his big donors and his narrow base, Trump has tossed away the American coin of neutrality—as tarnished as it was by years of tilting toward Israel’s interests. Not many Palestinians thought of Washington as truly unbiased, since no previous administration did more than use strong words against Israel’s confiscation of territories for Jewish settlement in the mostly Palestinian West Bank and the eastern districts of Jerusalem. No penalty was exacted: no withholding of aid, no reduction of military support. And now Trump has asked nothing from Israel in exchange for his endorsement.

The Unpredictable Wages of War

By David K. Shipler

            On the seventh day, after its dizzying six-day victory 50 years ago this week, Israel turned a corner from a sense of extreme vulnerability to a period of triumphalism. The armies and air forces of the surrounding Arab countries lay in shambles, the Goliath slain by the tiny Jewish state. Moreover, with Israel’s territory greatly expanded into ancient biblical lands, a hybrid of religion and nationalism found fertile ground. The movement then grew, even more than its adherents had expected, until it gained lasting power to shape the map for the next half century or more. 

            And that has saddled Israel with a moral and political burden. The euphoric victory in the Six-Day War brought a heady sense of Jewish self-reliance after a long history of persecution. But by holding onto the West Bank of the Jordan River, where Palestinian Arab residents have minimal say in how they are governed, Israel has undermined its democratic values and exposed itself to international condemnation.

To withdraw, however, would incur security risks and meet resistance from the religio-nationalist movement, which has gradually moved from the political margins into the cabinet. The movement calls the West Bank by its biblical names Judaea and Samaria, and regards it as the Jewish birthright, which Genesis says God gave to Abraham and his seed. The territory has been widely settled by religious Jews (along with secular Jews drawn there by housing subsidies). Many would have to be uprooted if a Palestinian state were to be created there under a peace agreement.

The outcome of a war, which seems obvious at the moment, can look simplistic in hindsight. Nothing of this conundrum was foreseen in June of 1967. Nor in 1973, when Israel nearly lost the Yom Kippur War, was it apparent that Anwar Sadat of Egypt may have felt that his near victory had burnished his warmaking credentials enough to then offer peace; he made a dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and followed with an Egyptian-Israeli treaty. Similarly, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which succeeded in driving the Palestine Liberation Organization out of the country, exposed Israeli soldiers to close-in attacks that eroded Israel’s image in the Arab world as a formidable juggernaut.