Peace? No chance 

Benny Morris was the radical Israeli
historian who forced his country to
confront its role in the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Later he was jailed for refusing to do
military service in the West Bank. But now
he has changed his tune. As the cycle of
violence in the Middle East intensifies, he
launches a vicious attack on the
'inveterate liar' Yasser Arafat - and
explains why he believes a peaceful
coexistence is impossible 

Thursday February 21, 2002
The Guardian 

The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is
(as far as I can remember) unfounded - or at least
premature. But my thinking about the current Middle
East crisis and its protagonists has in fact radically
changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel
a bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely
awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing
through Budapest in 1956. 

Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous
Victims, a revisionist history of the Zionist-Arab
conflict from 1881 until the present, I was cautiously
optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace.
I was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study
during the mid-1990s of the pre-1948 history of
Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home to me the
depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms.
But at least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking
peace; had agreed to mutual recognition; and had
signed the Oslo agreement, a first step that promised
gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied
territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and
a peace treaty between the two peoples. The
Palestinians appeared to have given up their
decades-old dream and objective of destroying and
supplanting the Jewish state, and the Israelis had
given up their dream of a "Greater Israel", stretching
from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. And, given
the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the
Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace
settlement between Israel and all of its Arab
neighbours seemed within reach. 

But by the time I had completed the book, my
restrained optimism had given way to grave doubts -
and within a year had crumbled into a cosmic
pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of
the deal offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin
and Shimon Peres in 1993-96 and Ehud Barak in
1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from the Golan
Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace
treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of
President Hafez Assad and subsequently his son and
successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles about a
few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to
make peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in
the end, was the presence, on a wall in the Assads'
office, of a portrait of Saladin, the legendary
12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten
the crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the
Zionists. I can see the father, on his deathbed, telling
his son: "Whatever you do, don't make peace with the
Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish." 

But my main reason, around which my pessimism
gathered and crystallised, was the figure of Yasser
Arafat, who has led the Palestinian national movement
since the late 1960s and, by virtue of the Oslo
accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron,
Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and
Qalqilya) and their environs, and the bulk of the Gaza
Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the movement,
accurately reflecting his people's miseries and
collective aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven
himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al
Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the
Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive)
rebellion against the British mandate government and
during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to
prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948,
resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation
of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had
been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) -
but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him,
neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the
Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied
rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the
Zionist movement. He had rejected two international
proposals to partition the country into Jewish and
Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937
and by the UN general assembly in November 1947.
In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in
Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and
recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht. 

Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once
quipped that the Palestinians had never missed an
opportunity to miss an opportunity. But no one can
fault them for consistency. After Husseini came Arafat,
another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar,
trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though
there appear to be many Europeans who are taken
in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the Israeli-Egyptian
Camp David framework, which might have led to
Palestinian statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning
his back on the Oslo process, Arafat rejected yet
another historic compromise, that offered by Barak at
Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon
in President Bill Clinton's proposals (endorsed by
Barak) in December. Instead, the Palestinians, in
September, resorted to arms and launched the current
mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some
790 Arab and 270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of
hatred on both sides to the point that the idea of a
territorial-political compromise seems to be a pipe
dream. 

Palestinians and their sympathisers have blamed the
Israelis and Clinton for what happened: the daily
humiliations and restrictions of the continuing Israeli
semi-occupation; the wily but transparent Binyamin
Netanyahu's foot-dragging during 1996-99; Barak's
continued expansion of the settlements in the
occupied territories and his standoffish manner
toward Arafat; and Clinton's insistence on summoning
the Camp David meeting despite Palestinian
protestations that they were not quite ready. But all
this is really and truly beside the point: Barak, a
sincere and courageous leader, offered Arafat a
reasonable peace agreement that included Israeli
withdrawal from 85-91% of the West Bank and 100%
of the Gaza Strip; the uprooting of most of the
settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab
neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; and the
establishment of a Palestinian state. As to the Temple
Mount (Haram ash-Sharif) in Jerusalem's Old City,
Barak proposed Israeli-Palestinian condominium or
UN security council control or "divine sovereignty" with
actual Arab control. Regarding the Palestinian
refugees, Barak offered a token return to Israel and
massive financial compensation to facilitate their
rehabilitation in the Arab states and the Palestinian
state-to-be. 

Arafat rejected the offer, insisting on 100% Israeli
withdrawal from the territories, sole Palestinian
sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and the refugees'
"right of return" to Israel proper. Instead of continuing
to negotiate, the Palestinians - with the agile Arafat
both riding the tiger and pulling the strings behind the
scenes - launched the intifada. Clinton (and Barak)
responded by upping the ante to 94-96% of the West
Bank (with some territorial compensation from Israel
proper) and sovereignty over the surface area of the
Temple Mount, with some sort of Israeli control
regarding the area below ground, where the
Palestinians have recently carried out excavation work
without proper archaeological supervision. Again, the
Palestinians rejected the proposals, insisting on sole
Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount (surely
an unjust demand: after all, the Temple Mount and the
temples' remains at its core are the most important
historical and religious symbol and site of the Jewish
people. It is worth mentioning that "Jerusalem" or its
Arab variants do not even appear once in the Koran). 

Since these rejections - which led directly to Barak's
defeat and hardliner Ariel Sharon's election as prime
minister - the Israelis and Palestinians have been at
each other's throats, and the semi-occupation has
continued. The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war,
with the underdog, who rejected peace,
simultaneously in the role of aggressor and, when the
western TV cameras are on, victim. The
semi-occupier, with his giant but largely useless army,
merely responds, usually with great restraint, given the
moral and international political shackles under which
he labours. And he loses on CNN because F-16s
bombing empty police buildings appear far more
savage than Palestinian suicide bombers who take
out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at a go. 

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a
virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official,
from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to
a succession of western journalists. The reporters
routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater
than what they hear from straight, or far less
mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges
that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses
uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians.
The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of
independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish
- and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again
garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers.

Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres"
and "bombings" of Palestinian civilians - when in fact
there have been no massacres and the bombings
have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings.
The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in
large numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli - by
Palestinian suicide bombers. In response, the army
and Shin Bet (the Israeli security service) have tried to
hit the guilty with "targeted killings" of bomb-makers,
terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently
moral form of reprisal, deterrence and prevention:
these are (barbaric) "soldiers" in a mini-war and, as
such, legitimate military targets. Would the critics
prefer Israel to respond in kind to a suicide bombing
in Tel Aviv? Palestinian leaders routinely laud the
suicide bombers as national heroes. In a recent spate
of articles, Palestinian journalists, politicians and
clerics praised Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber
who detonated her device in Jerusalem's main Jaffa
Street, killing an 81-year-old man and injuring about
100. A controversy ensued - not over the morality or
political efficacy of the deed but about whether Islam
allows women to play such a role. 

Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli
peace offers, the Palestinians have been subjected to
a nonstop barrage of anti-Israeli incitement and lies in
the PA-controlled media. Arafat has honed the
practice of saying one thing to western audiences and
quite another to his own Palestinian constituency to a
fine art. Lately, with Arab audiences, he has begun to
use the term "the Zionist army" (for the IDF), a
throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when Arab
leaders routinely spoke of "the Zionist entity" instead
of saying "Israel", which, they felt, implied some form
of recognition of the Jewish state and its legitimacy. 

At the end of the day, this question of legitimacy -
seemingly put to rest by the Israeli-Egyptian and
Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties - is at the root of
current Israeli despair and my own "conversion". For
decades, Israeli leaders - notably Golda Meir in 1969
- denied the existence of a "Palestinian people" and
the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for
sovereignty. But during the 1930s and 1940s, the
Zionist movement agreed to give up its dream of a
"Greater Israel" and to divide Palestine with the
Arabs. During the 1990s, the movement went further -
agreeing to partition and recognising the existence of
the Palestinian people as its partner in partition. 

Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from
its inception, has denied the Zionist movement any
legitimacy and stuck fast to the vision of a "Greater
Palestine", meaning a Muslim-Arab-populated and
Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with
some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious
minority. In 1988-93, in a brief flicker on the graph,
Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation
seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a
compromise. But since 2000 the dominant vision of a
"Greater Palestine" has surged back to the fore (and
one wonders whether the pacific asseverations of
1988-1993 were not merely diplomatic camouflage). 

The Palestinian leadership, and with them most
Palestinians, deny Israel's right to exist, deny that
Zionism was/is a just enterprise. (I have yet to see
even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari
Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: "Zionism
is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our
own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like
we do.") Israel may exist, and be too powerful, at
present, to destroy; one may recognise its reality. But
this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's
repeated denial in recent months of any connection
between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount,
and, by extension, between the Jewish people and the
land of Israel/Palestine. "What Temple?" he asks. The
Jews are simply robbers who came from Europe and
decided, for some unfathomable reason, to steal
Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses to
recognise the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old
Jewish connection to the land of Israel. 

On some symbolic plane, the Temple Mount is a
crucial issue. But more practically, the real issue, the
real litmus test of Palestinian intentions, is the fate of
the refugees, some 3.5-4m strong, encompassing
those who fled or were driven out during the 1948 war
and were never allowed back to their homes in Is rael,
as well as their descendants. 

I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the
creation of the refugee problem, publishing The Birth
of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in
1988. My conclusion, which angered many Israelis
and undermined Zionist historiography, was that most
of the refugees were a product of Zionist military
action and, in smaller measure, of Israeli expulsion
orders and Arab local leaders' urgings or orders to
move out. Critics of Israel subsequently latched on to
those findings that highlighted Israeli responsibility
while ignoring the fact that the problem was a direct
consequence of the war that the Palestinians - and, in
their wake, the surrounding Arab states - had
launched. And few noted that, in my concluding
remarks, I had explained that the creation of the
problem was "almost inevitable", given the Zionist aim
of creating a Jewish state in a land largely populated
by Arabs and given Arab resistance to the Zionist
enterprise. The refugees were the inevitable
by-product of an attempt to fit an ungainly square peg
into an inhospitable round hole. 

But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on -
and Israel exists. Like every people, the Jews deserve
a state, and justice will not be served by throwing them
into the sea. And if the refugees are allowed back,
there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel.
Israel is currently populated by 5m Jews and more
than 1m Arabs (an increasingly vociferous,
pro-Palestinian irredentist time bomb). If the refugees
return, an unviable binational entity will emerge and,
given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will
quickly cease to be a Jewish state. Add to that the
Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have,
almost instantly, an Arab state between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish
minority. 

Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the
7th century - and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never
much enjoyed the experience. They were always
second-class citizens and always
discriminated-against infidels; they were often
persecuted and not infrequently murdered. Giant
pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as
the 1940s Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in
Baghdad, and hundreds more in Libya, Egypt and
Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled the
Arab world during the 1950s and 60s. There is no
reason to believe that Jews will want to live (again) as
a minority in a (Palestinian) Arab state, especially
given the tragic history of Jewish-Palestinian relations.
They will either be expelled or emigrate to the west. 

It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the
Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December
2000, the launching of the intifada, and the demand
ever since that Israel accept the "right of return" that
has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in
this generation, do not intend peace: they do not want,
merely, an end to the occupation - that is what was
offered back in July-December 2000, and they
rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as
few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the
wedge with which to prise open the Jewish state.
Demography - the far higher Arab birth rate - will, over
time, do the rest, if Iranian or Iraqi nuclear weapons
don't do the trick first. 

And don't get me wrong. I favour an Israeli withdrawal
from the territories - the semi-occupation is corrupting
and immoral, and alienates Israel's friends abroad -
as part of a bilateral peace agreement; or, if an
agreement is unobtainable, a unilateral withdrawal to
strategically defensible borders. In fact in 1988 I
served time in a military prison for refusing to serve in
the West Bank town of Nablus. But I don't believe that
the resultant status quo will survive for long. The
Palestinians - either the PA itself or various armed
factions, with the PA looking on - will continue to harry
Israel, with Katyusha rockets and suicide bombers,
across the new lines, be they agreed or self-imposed.
Ultimately, they will force Israel to reconquer the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, probably plunging the Middle
East into a new, wide conflagration. 

I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or
want peace - only a staggered chipping away at the
Jewish state - and I don't believe that a permanent
two-state solution will emerge. I don't believe that
Arafat is constitutionally capable of agreeing, really
agreeing, to a solution in which the Palestinians get
22-25% of the land (a West Bank-Gaza state) and
Israel the remaining 75-78%, or of signing away the
"right of return". He is incapable of looking his refugee
constituencies in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza in
the eye and telling them: "I have signed away your
birthright, your hope, your dream." 

And he probably doesn't want to. Ultimately, I believe,
the balance of military force or the demography of
Palestine, meaning the discrepant national birth rates,
will determine the country's future, and either Palestine
will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab
minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a
gradually diminishing Jewish minority. Or it will
become a nuclear wasteland, a home to neither
people. 

· Professor Benny Morris teaches Middle East history
at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. His next
book, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, the Jews
and Palestine, is published by IB Tauris.