Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2000, pages 7-8

Special Report

Israel Balks at Peace—Again

By Rachelle Marshall

Hope of an early peace between Israel and Syria went up in flames last February as Israeli warplanes pounded Lebanon, while talks between Israel and the Palestinians that were supposed to culminate in a final agreement on Feb. 13 went into deep freeze. Neither setback should have come as a surprise. For the first 30 years of Israel’s existence its leaders sabotaged or rejected outright almost every opportunity to make peace with the Arabs in favor of expanding Israel’s borders. More recently, Israel has entered peace negotiations while determined to retain the territories it captured in war—a goal that makes any agreement all but impossible.

The 1949 Lausanne Peace Conference ended in failure when Israel refused to discuss the Arab countries’ chief concern—the return of nearly half a million Palestinian refugees. In February 1955, shortly after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had indicated his willingness to discuss peace with the Israelis, the Israeli army attacked the Gaza Strip and killed 39 Egyptian soldiers and civilians, making such a meeting impossible.

In 1971 Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, offered peace with Israel in exchange for return of the Gaza Strip and Sinai, which Israel had captured in 1967. The Israelis, bolstered by an influx of American arms, refused to make any concessions, and thus helped to trigger the 1973 October War. Israel finally returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1979 after the United States agreedto station a peacekeeping force in the area. In 1982, after the PLO agreed to recognize Israel and accepted a two-state solution, Israel violated a year-long cease-fire with the Palestinians by invading Lebanon, laying siege to Beirut, and attempting to destroy the PLO as an organization.

As the year 2000 began, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat seemed prepared to reach a settlement. In early January, Israeli and Syrian negotiators met for eight days in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and agreed to meet again on Jan. 19 to work out details of a confidential “framework agreement” both sides were thought to have accepted before leaving Shepherdstown. But a week before that meeting was to have been held, a document was leaked to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz revealing that Syria had made major concessionson security issues and the normalization of relations, while Israel had made no commitment to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

According to later reports, the issue of Israel’s withdrawal had hardly been discussed. Publication of the document was highly embarrassing to Assad, who has made return of the Golan to the banks of Lake Tiberius (the Sea of Galilee, Lake Kinneret) the principal requirement for peace with Israel. The State Department, aware of Assad’s inevitable reaction, called the leaks “damaging.”

In releasing the details of the Shepherdstown meeting just after a huge rally in Tel Aviv protesting withdrawal from the Golan, Barak may have hoped to convince Israelis that any return of land to Syria would be offset by Syria’s acceptance of stringent security requirements and that Israel had the upper hand in the negotiations. But his effort to appease public opinion at home by portraying the Syrians as having knuckled under had its predictable effect. Assad immediately called off further negotiations until Israel made a written commitment in advance to withdraw fully from the Golan. In the flurry of diplomatic meetings on the Middle East that subsequently took place in Egypt, Switzerland, and finally Moscow, the two nations conspicuous by their absence were Syria and Lebanon.

“Just Punishment”

Hopes that negotiations between Israel and Syria would resume quickly were further eroded in late January after Hezbollah forces fighting to end Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon assassinated Col. Akl Hashem, second in command of Israel’s surrogate South Lebanon Army. Hashem was praised by Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh as one of “Israel’s strongest and staunchest allies,” although British journalist David Hirst described him as “an independent warlord,” whose “palatial villa” is said to have been financed by funds extorted from local businessmen. Barak, who had known Hashem for 20 years, promised “just punishment” of his killers.

The punishment was indiscriminate rather than just. Israel intensified its air and artillery strikes against villages in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah responded by killing three Israeli soldiers. Barak then called off further negotiations until the Syrians restrained Hezbollah from further attacks. Barak’s righteous anger was not shared by spokesman Timur Goksel of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, who pointed out that the Israeli soldiers who died in Lebanon “were in the wrong country.”

After three more Israeli soldiers were killed during the first week in February, Israel launched a concerted air attack across Lebanon, destroying three large power stations and plunging most of the country into darkness. At least 18 civilians, including two small children, were wounded as missiles hit homes and apartment buildings. Lebanese officials said the damage would take months to repair and cost as much as $40 million. The power plants were just coming back into full operation after being destroyed by Israeli attacks last June.

Israel’s strikes at civilian targets violated an agreement in which both sides promised to refrain from attacking noncombatants, a pledge that was signed four years ago after Israel’s “Operation Grapes of Wrath” killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians. Repudiating a solemn commitment did not seem to faze Barak and other Israeli officials, who said Israel would no longer honor the agreement.

On Feb. 9, after Lebanon had endured 11 days of Israeli air strikes while Hezbollah refrained from attacking Israeli border towns, Foreign Minister David Levy angered even moderate Arabs by warning that if Hezbollah rocketed Israel, “the soil of Lebanon will burn.” Saudi Arabia called Israel’s actions “the biggest damage to the peace process,” and Lebanese President Selim Hoss compared Levy’s threat to the genocide mentality of Nazism. Jordanian legislators issued a formal statement accusing Israel of “aggression.”

The Israeli air force is currently seeking to augment the fleet of 42 Apaches that conduct daily bombing raids on southern Lebanon by buying 48 advanced Apache Longbow helicopters from Boeing. Since the Apaches are purchased with U.S. aid funds, American taxpayers are footing much of the bill for Israel’s devastating air war in Lebanon, including its attacks on civilians.

Barak’s attempt to conduct two sets of negotiations simultaneously collapsed entirely on Feb. 3, when Arafat angrily walked outof a meeting with the prime minister after a dispute over a delayed Israeli troop withdrawal. Israel was supposed to withdraw its troops from 6.1 percent more of the West Bank on Jan. 20, but Barak had first insisted on a delay and then indicated that the Israelis would turn over only sparsely populated land south of Hebron rather than areas adjacent to Palestinian-controlled territory. The Palestinians also objected to Barak’s proposal to link a final troop withdrawal to the framework agreement, a move that would give Israel an additional bargaining chip in negotiating the crucial issues that remain.

Last fall, under pressure from Mrs. Albright, Arafat had reluctantly accepted Israel’s withdrawal from an additional 5 percent of the West Bank that consisted largely of uninhabited desert. This time he stood firm, rejecting Israel’s plan and insisting instead that theIsraelis withdraw from the Arab-populated suburbs of Jerusalem, including Izariyeh, al-Ram, and Abu Dis, where the Palestinians are constructing a parliament building. Talks between the two sides ended in acrimony when the Israelis refused to yield and insisted on the unilateral right to determine the withdrawal map. While the dispute was going on Israeli authorities ordered the speedup of construction of housing for 1,000 Jewish settlers in Abu Dis.

Barak has postponed indefinitely a final withdrawal in which Israeli troops would leave all of the West Bank except Jerusalem, the major settlements, and a limited number of military areas. According to the Oslo agreement this withdrawal was supposed to take place before a final settlement was reached, but Barak is reported to want Israel to retain territory permanently in the Jordan Valley and the northern part of the West Bank, with the army allowed to move freely between these areas. Under Barak’s plan Israel would continue to control at least 50 percent of the West Bank, making a unified Palestinian state all but impossible.

After the Feb. 3 meeting, Palestinian Planning Commissioner Nabil Sha’ath reported that “an ocean, not a river” separated Barak’s proposals from the U.N. resolutions on which the Palestinians are basing their demands. The two sides are still far apart on every major issue, including borders, Jewish settlements, the status of Jerusalem, water, and the rights of the refugees. Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat recently pointed out that Israel has yet to release hundreds of prisoners, allow the opening of a seaport in Gaza, or provide a northern passage between Gaza and the West Bank, all of which were called for in previous agreements. Meanwhile, Israel is violating the Oslo accords by continuing to seize Palestinian land and expand West Bank settlements.

The Barak government has given repeated evidence that the Israelis assume the right not only to determine peace terms unilaterally, but also to ignore or delay implementing the agreements they do sign. An editorial in the Jerusalem Times on Jan. 21 suggested that Barak’s decision to seek voters’ approval of any withdrawal from the Golan is nothing more than a ploy to avoid returning all of the territory while passing on the blame if he fails to achieve peace. The editorial writer concludes that “The Israeli government believes it is strong enough to keep everything and have peace.”

Barak may indeed believe that as long as he can drag out negotiations and keep juggling peace proposals without giving up any territory, he will continue to be seen as a peacemaker and reap the resulting benefits in U.S. aid and international trade. But the resistance to his latest demands by both the Palestinians and Syria shows there is a limit to the price they are willing to pay for peace with Israel. As the Jerusalem Timeseditorial warns, “Today the government has a choice between peace and war. If it misses that opportunity it will be left with only one choice: war.”

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

SIDEBAR

Another Massacre Uncovered

Most of the world has long ignored the testimony of Palestinian survivors and scholars on the forced expulsions, indiscriminate destruction, and mass killings carried out by Zionist soldiers in 1947-48. But Israeli researchers recently have come up with increasing evidence that the Jewish army’s claim to have been fighting under the rubric of “purity of arms” is a myth. Teddy Katz, a history student at Haifa University, unearthed details last January of a massacre by Zionist soldiers in May 1948 of men, women, and children in the village of Tantura, near Haifa. According to Katz, “There were killings inside homes, in the cemetery, and on roads leading to the village…The soldiers made people stand in lines of six and forced them to dig their own graves. Then they shot them.”

Katz interviewed local villagers, including Abd al-Razzoq Yehya, whose family witnessed the massacre from beginning to end. They identified the commander as Shimshon Masbitsch and said the killing ended when armed Jewish people from a nearby town threatened to shoot Masbitsch if he did not order his men to stop shooting. According to an account in the Jan. 26 issue of Palestine Report, Katz believes 90 villagers were killed, although another researcher, Mordechai Sokelyair, estimated the number of dead in Tantura as close to 200.

When Katz was asked what the Israeli reaction has been to his findings, he said, “They are too busy with other issues. They don’t like to go back 50 years. I can’t make a noise about it on my own, but if the international media demanded and insisted that this was an important event, they would respond.” So far such a demand has not been apparent, and so the tragedy at Tantura may once more begin to fade.

—R.M.