Does America Want a Real Peace Process?

Feb 17, 2006

By Eugene Bird
Eugene Bird served as US ambassador to various Middle East capitals.


The unreal testimony given by three members of the Israel Lobby before the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia the House Committee on Foreign Affairs indicates that we have a long way to go before Congress, under the new Democratic majority, is able to shed its anti-Palestinian robes.

The lengthy hearing called by the subcommittee chairman Gary Ackerman (D-NY) could properly be described as a Valentine Day massacre of peace in the Middle East.

The Administration and even many members of Congress seem aware that the problem that Israel poses to the reputation of the United States throughout the world demands some immediate attention. Will it get that attention? The subcommittee hearing indicates otherwise.

Many organizations and individuals had asked the chairman to balance the Lobby witnesses with reasonably objective academics or activists on the peace process. The Palestine Center’s Fellow Michael Brown, citing the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, suggested that there were a number of real experts on the Middle East including Naseer Aruri, Phyllis Bennis, Nadia Hijab, Rashid Khalidi, Saree Makdisi, and Joseph Massad.

He might also have included Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations who recently commented that the Saudi initiative to successfully negotiate a coalition government for the Palestinians was a very positive development and one that might persuade the European Union to undertake its own initiative.

However, at the subcommittee hearing on February 14th, David Makovsky from the AIPAC-backed Washington Institute for Near East Policy attacked the Saudis as having undermined Secretary Rice's idea of "political horizon" - the State Department's en vogue term that has become a major supplement to "the roadmap" - that she will promote on President's Day in Jerusalem. It is hard even to guess what she will say to President Mahmoud Abbas. Nor will she be able to offer him any additional aid, even for security purposes. The subcommittee hearing made clear that even the 87 million dollars already pledged was in jeopardy as a result of the new Palestinian coalition government.

The subcommittee has promised to have further hearings on the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine issue with the implicit promise that some actual, real Palestinians might be invited to testify for only the second time in 15 years. Everyone should be alerted and come down hard on the members of the subcommittee to see to it that this promise is fulfilled and that a fair hearing is held. Ackerman, the highly pro-Israel chairman, did ask a surprisingly frank question of the three witnesses, which also included former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and the somewhat ridiculous academic Daniel Pipes. Ackerman said that the testimony had been very depressing with little or no optimism about where negotiations could go. What, he asked, did they have in mind for getting out of this situation, inferring that both the U.S. and Israel were in deep trouble. There was no real response to this question, except to insist that Hamas recognize Israel and foreswear violence.

Secretary Rice announced that she would be visiting with some representatives from the Arab states in Amman before going to Berlin next Wednesday for a meeting of the Quartet to brief them on her trip. It is a fair guess that there will be a representative from Saudi Arabia at the meeting in Amman, and officials around Secretary Rice have indicated that she would be seeking support for Prime Minister Olmert. The inference was that Saudi Arabia , in particular, might be asked to continue her backchannel efforts with Israel . Any attempt by the United States to encourage Saudi recognition of Israel is almost certainly bound to backfire.

However, there is a halfway house for recognition.

In exchange for a somewhat vague de facto recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia, the United States could end financial sanctions on the new government of Palestine and perhaps Prime Minister Olmert could be asked to include the Arab League in negotiations. This may look unrealistic and perhaps even foolish to the foreign policy establishment in Washington, but stranger things have happened in Middle East negotiations. The Bush administration very much needs a success in dealing with the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine.


Eugene Bird is the founder of the Council for the National Interest (CNI) and served as the US ambassador to various Middle East capitals.

The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Editor's note: I may be moving to the other blog shortly.
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January 16th, 2007

by Nur Masalha
Pluto Press, 304 pp., October 2003, 978-0745321202

Review by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Mainstream discourse on the question of Palestine confines itself largely to the land occupied by Israel in ‘67 and the fate of the people living therein. In the various peace processes convened under American aegis, the refugees of ’48 and their right of return, enshrined in UNGAR 194, received scant attention. This trend, curiously, has been replicated on the left by even some of its luminaries. Some have arrogated themselves the right to decide whether the fate of more than four million Palestinians living in the squalor of refugee camps is a “realistic” consideration to burden Israel with in a prospective settlement. In The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Nur Masalha lays to rest the notion that sustainable peace in the region is possible without addressing the rights of the Palestinian refugees. Masalha also exposes concerns that inform Israel’s persistent denial of its responsibility in creating the refugee problem and its history of foiling attempts at repatriation and restitution.

Masalha’s scrupulously researched analysis of the Palestinian refugee question begins with the early twentieth century arrival of Jewish settlers who are accompanied by an ideology that aims to, and to a large degree succeeds in, ridding the land of its native population. Zionism seeks self determination for its people on a land inhabited by another; hence it must not only expel the native population, but also deny the reality of their dispossession. Thus are laid the foundations of the Palestinian tragedy.

Beginning with Ahad Ha’am’s description of the abuse of Palestinian peasants by the early Zionist settlers, Masalha reconstructs the story of the colonization of Palestine, culminating in al Nakba, the Palestinian tragedy of 1948. In discussing the contributions of Israel’s “New Historians” towards the understanding of the events of ’48, Masalha exposes the egregious shortcomings in the work of the most famous among them: Benny Morris. Contrary to Morris’s claims, Masalha reveals that the expulsion of Palestinians was born not of war, but of designs going back all the way to Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Referred to euphemistically as “transfer” the idea of ethnic cleansing remained central to the Zionist project.

With painstaking attention to detail, and copious documentation Masalha deconstructs the myths surrounding the expulsion of Palestinians in ’48 and the subsequent expropriation of their lands. He describes the massacres, intimidation, armed eviction and destruction of villages that precipitated the Palestinian flight. There were fifty major and a hundred minor massacres committed by the Zionist forces. Operation Dalet, which preceded the creation of the state of Israel, was responsible for the widespread panic which was exploited by the Zionist military to drive out the Palestinians. Operation Hiram took care of those left behind.

The most important part of this study deals with the mechanisms employed by the Jewish state to expropriate Palestinian lands. The Jewish National Fund – an organization that still retains tax-deductible charitable status in Britain, Canada, US and Australia – worked in conjunction with the Transfer Committees to pave the way for the ultimate ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Operating as a quasi government, the JNF and Jewish Agency had already established the structure of a government before the formation of the State. On partition, the Zionists therefore had an advantage over the Palestinians whose organizations and institutions had been destroyed by the British colonial authorities during earlier uprisings.

Once Palestinians were driven out, Israel sold Palestinian lands to the JNF to stave off anticipated international pressure to repatriate the refugees. Israel could then claim that the land was now owned by a private organization over which it had no authority, except that JNF is a quasi governmental organization, and more importantly, its charter prevents the land it owns from ever being sold or leased to someone who is not a Jew. Although the JNF itself owns only 13% of Israeli land, it appoints half the board members on Israel Land Authority which controls most of the rest of Israel’s lands. Through this mechanism, the Jewish state conceals its Apartheid policies.

There were also 220,000 of those who were internally displaced, i.e. they were driven from their homes but they remained within the borders of Israel. Absurd legal designations like “Present-Absentees” were invented to keep them from their lands. Many were expelled in the following years.

The emergency regulations enacted have remained in place since and military expropriation of their lands continues to date. Restitution and repatriation was strictly prevented for the fear that it might set a precedent.

Having denied dispossessed Palestinians the right to return to their homes after the end of hostilities, Masalha documents the various proposals that were floated to resettle the refugees – in neighboring Arab countries, Libya, even South America. Attempts were also made to link the Palestinian refugee issue with the issue of the Jews who immigrated to Israel from other Arab countries. What is generally overlooked in these cases of course is the role of Mossad-B in precipitating their flight through acts of sabotage and intimidation to encourage them to immigrate to Israel.

Come ’67 another 250,000 Palestinians found themselves homeless as a result of Israel’s latest offensive which inter alia destroyed many ancient sites in Jerusalem. Destroyed Palestinian villages of Imwas, Yalu and Bayt Nuba were helpfully concealed under the Canada Park, developed through funds donated to the JNF by Canadian Jews to “make the desert bloom” (elsewhere, the British Park conceals evidence of a similar atrocity). Denial of the Palestinian reality was necessary to the Zionist project, and the ruins bore witness to the ugly crimes sustaining it.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, another 200,000 were expelled from the West Bank. By now the idea of “transfer” had entered the mainstream and even espoused by liberal Zionist authors, poets and intellectuals. Various plans were mooted to take care of Israel’s “demographic problem”, the alternatives being “transfer” (ethnic cleansing) or Apartheid (isolated Bantustans). The Oslo peace process conformed to the latter with Israel refusing to accept any responsibility for creating the refugee problem.

In Madrid, and subsequently in Oslo, the Palestinian negotiator’s failure to link the refugee question to UNGAR 194 made it easy for Israelis to relegate it to a secondary status. At Camp David, Masalha reveals there was “no progress on the issue, in fact no real negotiations on the subject”. For this, and its numerous other shortcomings, the process was doomed to failure. However the death of the “peace process” has once again revived the question of the Right of Return and Israeli responsibility in creating the refugee problem. As Masalha rightly concludes, there is no possibility o f a just and lasting peace, or for that matter negotiation towards that end, unless Israel acknowledges its responsibility in creating this the refugee problem.

Posted by m.idrees Filed in Human Rights, Middle-East, Book Review, Israel-Palestine