The Great War for Civilisation (89 page)

Amnesty was especially concerned about extrajudicial killings. They included the murder of Hani Abed, a Hamas member suspected of murdering two Israeli soldiers, who was killed in a Gaza car bomb; Fatih Shikaki, the Islamic Jihad leader shot dead in Malta, and Yahya Ayash, a Hamas bomb-maker killed by a booby-trapped mobile telephone. His death, during a self-proclaimed Hamas ceasefire, provoked another round of suicide bombings. Among the many innocents killed by the Israelis was eight-year-old Ali Jawarish. The organisation quoted Joel Greenberg of
The New York Times
, who later told the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem that he saw Israeli troops fire at the boy during a demonstration.

I saw one of the soldiers kneeling and aiming his gun at the children . . . In my opinion it was a rubber [coated] bullet . . . but I am not certain . . . When the soldiers retreated I noticed a boy aged about nine or ten lying motionless on the ground . . . I saw . . . a wound on the right side of the forehead and a lot of blood flowing. Later the doctors at Muqassed Hospital and at Beit Jala told me that the child's brain had spilled out.

There was now a weird symbiosis about this bloody conflict. The greater the violence in Israel–Palestine, the darker the political future, the more optimistic the West would become about the “peace process” which was once more, of course, to be put “back on track.” This was, I suppose, an unconscious dress rehearsal for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the results of that illegal military operation became steadily more disastrous, so the Americans and the British would repeat their absolute confidence that the invasion was worthwhile, the aftermath predictable and the final result a mixture of “freedom” and “democracy.” So, too, “Palestine” and Israel in 1998.

In May of that year, I travelled to London to watch the continued myth-making of Middle East peace played out around Downing Street. A police helicopter purred lazily over us when Benjamin Netanyahu came out of Number 10 to tell us how grateful he was to Tony Blair. The chopper drifted back in the English spring sunshine when Yassir Arafat in turn emerged from Downing Street to thank Blair for his commitment to the “peace process.” How they loved Tony. How they hated each other. And all the while, behind us, loomed the fateful building in which Lord Balfour had composed Britain's 1917 declaration of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Bibi, immaculate as ever in dark suit and thick white hair, told us there could be progress if both sides showed “flexibility.” Israel, he claimed, “had already gone the extra mile.” The Palestinians took the view that Netanyahu's extra mile was the distance that Israel's latest Jewish colony had extended into occupied Arab land. Arafat—ashen-faced, lower lip quivering, his kuffiah for once untidy— warned only that “Netanyahu must take the responsibility of . . . the chaos that might take place in the region if the result of these talks is not positive.”

A mile away, through the empty London bank holiday streets, the Israeli prime minister talked to U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright in the sumptuous suites of the Grosvenor Park Hotel. The foyer, with its fake log fire and oil painting of ice skaters, looked ominously like the smoking room of the
Titanic
; and within minutes, there was Israel's spokesman, David Bar Ilan, with his ice-cold public school accent, strolling through the lobby to tell journalists—in response to Arafat's statement—that “if the formula is ‘land-for-terrorism,' we can't go on with this.” It was the language of children that both sides spoke, the language of threat and false compromise. How Netanyahu and Arafat loved peace, strove for peace. But they could not even bring themselves to talk to each other. Arafat was so weakened that all he could do, pathetically, was accept Washington's demand for a further 13.1 per cent Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, in itself a grotesque diminution of what the Oslo accords demanded. In Grosvenor House, Madeleine Albright—the supposedly tough-talking secretary of state who used all the anger of a sheep to persuade the Israelis to try to stop building settlements on occupied Arab land and adhere to the Oslo timetable—tried to persuade Netanyahu to cede more than 9 per cent of Palestinian land to Arafat in the next handover of territory. In vain.

So much for the Palestinian state. But outside Number 10, the networks were telling their viewers—in the words of the man from the BBC—that Netanyahu had “little room for compromise” because of his divided cabinet. There was no hint in his broadcast that Israel was not abiding by the terms of the signed Oslo agreement. Bar Ilan spelled out the situation all too well. Israel wanted more security from Arafat and demanded that he reduce the number of his Palestinian policemen. Better security, fewer policemen. Who dreamed up these crazy formulas?

There was a moment that captured the hopelessness of the Middle East “peace process.” On a sofa just outside the coffee salon of the Churchill Hotel in London on the second day of the talks, I came upon a familiar figure slumped on the sofa. There was no obvious security, no policemen, just the tall, dark-haired State Department spokesman and the woman sitting white-faced with exhaustion in the corner of the settee. Madeleine Albright looked on the point of collapse. Only hours before, she had telephoned Arafat to plead her excuses. She could not come to see him as agreed, she said. She was simply too tired to drive over to Claridge's for their meeting. Arafat burst into laughter when the call was over. Never mind that his own state of health—shocking to behold when only a few feet from him, his right hand clutching his shaking left hand, his lower lip moving helplessly when he wasn't speaking—was far worse than Mrs. Albright's. But when it came to Netanyahu a few hours later, Albright was off in her limousine to meet the Israeli prime minister at his own hotel.

What came over most strongly—even more shocking than the state of Arafat's health—was Albright's fear of Netanyahu, indeed perhaps of Israel. Arafat and the PLO had already accepted America's conditions for the 11 May 1998 invitation to meet President Clinton in Washington. Netanyahu had not responded. He was flying back to Israel to “consult” his cabinet. But when Albright talked to us all later—hesitant and sometimes confusing or forgetting questions—she was all praise for the Israeli leader who was forging ahead with Jewish settlements on the land Arafat wanted as part of his Palestinian state. Netanyahu was “encouraging.” He had produced “new ideas.” He was enthusiastic. He was “helpful.” She was very grateful to Netanyahu. “It is obviously up to Israel to decide what its security demands are”—goodbye, then, to those Palestinian policemen. But when we asked Albright what all those “new ideas” were, we were informed that “more details do not help us to move forward.”

This was meaningless. Yet still she talked of “progress”—I counted the word at least eighteen times in just a few minutes. And so did Tony Blair in his own appearance before the press. Here was another of those verbal punctuation marks, its increasing frequency making its use ever more suspect. Arafat said he had “heard” from Albright that there had been “progress.” It was when I asked him if he did not now regret signing the Oslo accords that the old man's eyes suddenly widened and his voice took on its old strength. “The peace agreement I signed was the peace of the brave,” he replied. “I signed with my partner Yitzhak Rabin, who paid for his life with this peace. It is our firm duty that we continue with the just endeavour we signed with Mr. Rabin and Peres.” There was no mention of Netanyahu. And in what Netanyahu and Albright said, there was no mention of the “peace of the brave”; with inappropriate flippancy, Albright remarked of America's peace-making efforts that “it's up to the parties [to decide] as to whether we are serving the vegetables well.” Perhaps that would be written on Oslo's tombstone.

At an autumn 1998 private dinner party in the White House with junior members of the Jordanian royal family, President Clinton unburdened himself of a few thoughts on Benjamin Netanyahu. There were fewer than a dozen guests and he was talking to men and women who would sympathise with his remarks. “I am the most pro-Israeli president since Truman,” he announced to his guests. “But the problem with Bibi is that he cannot recognise the humanity of the Palestinians.” Stripped of its false humility—Clinton was surely
more
pro-Israeli than Truman— the president had put his finger on Netanyahu's most damaging flaw: his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans, his conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book
A Place Among the Nations
, which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu's policies but of the whole Netanyahu government.

Yet within just a few days, he was presiding over yet another “peace” accord— at Wye—which effectively placed the Palestinians in the role of supplicants. The main section in the Wye agreement was not about withdrawals but about “security”—and this was liberally laced with references to “terrorists,” “terrorist cells” and “terrorist organisations,” involving, of course, only Palestinian violence. There was not a single reference to killers who had come from the Jewish settler community.

Arafat's torture was exquisite. Each new accord with Israel involved a subtle rewriting of previous agreements. Madrid—with all its safeguards for the Palestinians—turned into Oslo—no safeguards at all, and a system of Israeli withdrawal that was so constructed that deadlines no longer had to be met. This turned into the 1997 Hebron agreement—which allowed Jewish colonists to stay in the town and made an Israeli withdrawal contingent upon an end to anti-Israeli violence. In 1998 the Wye agreement even dropped the “land for peace” logo. It was now billed as the “Land for Security” agreement, “peace” being at least temporarily unobtainable. Peace means respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence—but it also means prison, hatred and, as we already knew, torture. In return, the Palestinians could have 40 per cent of their territory under their control—as opposed to the 90 per cent they expected under Oslo. And the CIA, that most trustworthy and moral of institutions, would be in the West Bank to ensure that Arafat arrested the usual suspects.

The Palestinian Authority had not prevented Hamas from attacking Israelis— any more than Israel could prevent it from doing so before Oslo—but now, miraculously, they would succeed with the help of the CIA. Palestinians holding illegal weapons would be disarmed. The thousands of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land who had weapons—and who condemned even the watered-down version of Wye as “treachery”—would not be disarmed. Israelis should have been able to live without fear. So should Palestinians. But security comes from peace, not the other way round. And 3 per cent of the Palestinian land from which Israel would now withdraw was to become—perhaps the most farcical of Oslo's many manifestations—a “nature reserve” upon which Palestinians could not build homes. One wondered what kind of wild animals were supposed to roam inside this protected area. And what kind of wild animals would now roam outside its walls.

No word in Wye, then, of the Jewish “terror organisations,” no hope of controlling settler groups that would attack Palestinians in the future. In July 2001, for example, one such group—a “terror” group by Israel's own definition, although the international press called them “guerrillas” or “vigilantes”—fired dozens of bullets into a car carrying eight Palestinians home from a pre-wedding party in the small town of Idna on the West Bank. Mohamed Salameh Tmaizeh and his relative Mohamed Hilmi Tmaizeh died on the spot. Five others were wounded. The third fatality was Diya Tmaizeh, a baby just three months old. This is not an excuse for Palestinian violence or “terror”—a Palestinian sniper also killed a Jewish baby at a settlement in Hebron—but there was a vital difference. Palestinians were to be disarmed. Jewish colonists were not.

How did the United States allow this to happen? Ignorance, weakness in the face of Israel's powerful American lobby groups, intellectual idleness when confronted by issues of massive complexity: all these may provide a clue. But it was a general irresponsibility that pervaded U.S. policy. Clinton wanted to be the author of a “peace” that he stubbornly refused to guarantee. We heard the old refrain from Clinton, that while Washington could “bring the parties together,” it was for “the parties themselves” to take the “hard decisions.” Thus Israel, infinitely the more powerful of the two parties—Palestinian tanks, after all, were not occupying Tel Aviv—could act as it wished within or outside the framework of the Oslo accord. Off the record, we would be told—like the Jordanian dinner guests at the White House—of Clinton's exasperation with Netanyahu.
⁹⁴
Publicly, he would be silent. Yet when Palestinian violence was inflicted on Israelis, Clinton was in lionlike mode, calling the killers “yesterday's men” in Amman, and at Wye lecturing the world on the “hate” that would undoubtedly greet the latest success for “peace.”

Sloppy use of language was also one of the most dangerous aspects of successive American “peace” accords. Clinton was good on cliché and rhetoric but— ironically, in view of his pedantry in responding to the grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky—lazy when it came to points of detail. Despite all the handshakes and platitudes at Wye, for example, both Palestinians and Israelis went home with diametrically opposite ideas of what had been achieved. Netanyahu was able to assure Jewish colonists that there would be no Palestinian state, while Arafat's men could persuade their few remaining supporters that another Israeli withdrawal would be another step towards statehood. No sooner had Netanyahu returned to Israel than his foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, urged settlers to “seize every hilltop they can” in the West Bank.