News Abroad

Israel's Self-Defeating Policy of Oppression

by Avi Shlaim

Mr. Shlaim is a Fellow of St Antony's College and Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He is author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arabs (Penguin, 2000), and co-editor, with Eugene Rogan, of The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

In 1923 Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, published an article entitled "On the Iron Wall." He argued that Arab nationalists were bound to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Consequently, a voluntary agreement between the two sides was unattainable. The only way to realize the Zionist project was behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength. In other words, the Zionist project could only be implemented unilaterally and by military force.

The crux of Jabotinsky's strategy was to enable the Zionist movement to deal with its local opponents from a position of unassailable strength. The iron wall was not an end in itself but a means to an end. It was intended to compel the Arabs to abandon any hope of destroying the Jewish state. This was to be followed by a second stage: negotiations with the Arabs about their status and national rights in Palestine. In other words, Jewish military strength was to pave the way to a political settlement with the Palestinian national movement which laid a claim to the whole of Palestine.

The history of the State of Israel is a vindication of the strategy of the iron wall. The Arabs -- first the Egyptians, then the Palestinians, then the Jordanians -- learned the hard way that Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield and were compelled to negotiate with her from a position of palpable weakness. The 1993 Oslo accord between Israel and the PLO was a major turning-point in the 100-year old history of the conflict over Palestine. It marked the transition from the first to the second stage of iron wall strategy, the transition from deterrence to negotiations and compromise. By signing the Oslo accord, Israel and the PLO agreed to two things: they agreed to the territorial partition of Palestine, and to settle their outstanding differences by peaceful means. The Palestinians believed that by giving up their claim to 78 percent of pre-1948 Palestine, they would gradually gain an independent state stretching over most of the West Bank and stood to gain the Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem. Seven years on, the Palestinians are bitterly disappointed with the results of the historic compromise which they struck on the lawn of the White House with the leaders of the Jewish state.

The Oslo peace process has broken down essentially because Israel reneged on its side of the bargain. The most blatant transgression against the spirit, if not the letter, of the Oslo accord has been the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the construction of more and more roads to connect them with Israel. These settlements are a symbol of the hated occupation, a constant source of friction, and a threat to the territorial contiguity of a future Palestinian state. They demonstrate that Israel has not been negotiating in good faith and that its real intention is to repackage rather than to end the occupation.

With the election of Ariel Sharon Israel regressed to the first stage of the iron wall strategy with a vengeance. Sharon has nothing to offer the Palestinians on the political front. The two main pillars of his long career were mendacity and the most savage brutality toward Arab civilians. He consistently opposed all the earlier attempts at reconciliation with the Palestinians, including the Oslo accords. His sole response to the al-Aqsa Intifada consists of employing military force on an ever growing scale, culminating in the use of F-16 warplanes against the Palestinian people. Sharon is adamant that he would not resume the negotiations on the final status of the territories until the Palestinians end the violence. But he has also stated that if and when negotiations are resumed, he would not yield to the Palestinian Authority more than the 42 percent of the West Bank that it already controls. This leaves the Palestinian Authority no incentive to try to suppress the popular uprising against Israeli rule which Sharon himself had helped to provoke by his visit to Haram al-Sharif on 28 September 2000. For all its faults, and they are many, the Palestinian Authority is the leader of a national liberation movement, not a subcontractor engaged to take care of Israel's security.

During the election campaign Ariel Sharon promised to restore security and to bring peace. But his present policies can only deepen Palestinian disillusion and despair and fuel the cycle of violence and bloodshed. Security and peace are simply unattainable without an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and Gaza.

Ariel Sharon is the last in a long line of Israeli leaders to invoke spurious arguments of security in order to defend policies that are indefensible. The Palestinians do not pose a threat to Israel's basic security but the other way round. The contest is an unequal one between a vulnerable Palestinian David on the one hand and a heavily armed and heavy-handed Israeli Goliath on the other. Israel is not fighting for its security or survival but to retain some of the territories it conquered in the course of the June 1967 war. The war that Israel is currently waging against the Palestinian people is a colonial war. Like all other colonial wars, it is savage, senseless, directed mainly against civilians, and doomed to failure in the long run.

An independent Palestinian state is bound to emerge sooner or later over most of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It would be weak, crowded, burdened with refugees, economically dependent, and insignificant as a military force. The choice facing Israel is between accepting the inevitable with as much grace as it can muster or continuing to resist, restrict, and frustrate the emergent Palestinian state. Considerations of self-interest as well as of morality point to the first option because the longer Israel persists in denying the Palestinians the right to self-determination, the more its own legitimacy would be called into question.

A long editorial in the Guardian published a few years ago, "Between Heaven and Hell," is symptomatic of a rapidly intensifying impatience and anger with Israel felt by ordinary people all around the world. Having garnered so much international support by taking the plunge and signing the Oslo accord, Israel is now well on the way to becoming an international pariah. Enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, should prompt Israel to seek a peaceful solution to the present crisis. Israel should withdraw from the occupied territories not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a huge favor to itself. For, as Karl Marx observed, a nation that oppresses another cannot itself remain free.

This article was first published two years ago and is reprinted with permission of the author.