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Title: The Israel-Arafat Agreement
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: October 1993
Language: en
Topics: Israel/Palestine
Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199310__/
Notes: Published in Z Magazine.

Noam Chomsky

The Israel-Arafat Agreement

On August 30, the Israeli Cabinet approved a draft agreement on

“Palestinian self-rule” that had been reached by the government of

Israel and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s personal representatives. Parts

of the agreement have not been revealed or are not yet settled at the

time of writing (September 2), but it is likely that something much like

the published text (NYT, Sept. 1) will be instituted, and that it will

be followed by separate agreements between Israel and Arab states.

To understand what has been achieved, it is necessary to recall the

relevant background, much of it familiar to readers of this journal, at

least.

The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to

confrontation, driving home the importance of a diplomatic settlement.

In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which

expressed a broad international consensus on the general terms for a

settlement. The current agreement is based entirely on UN 242 (and 338,

which endorses it). Article I of the 1993 draft agreement, outlining the

“Aim of the Negotiations,” specifies that “the negotiations on the

permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council

Resolutions 242 and 338”; no other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus

resolving a central issue in the controversy in accord with US-Israeli

demands.

UN 242 “emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by

war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every

state in the area can live in security.” It calls for “Withdrawal of

Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”

and “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for

and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and

political independence of every state in the area and their right to

live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats

or acts of force.” It calls for an agreement among states; Palestinian

rights are mentioned only in the call for “a just settlement of the

refugee problem,” left unspecified. UN 242 is therefore thoroughly

rejectionist, if we understand the concept of rejectionism in nonracist

terms: as denial of the right to national self-determination of one or

the other of the two contending parties in the former Palestine.

With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the contending

states of the region over the next few years, though their

interpretations differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel

rejected full withdrawal.

The phrase “withdrawal from territories” has been a particular bone of

contention. In most of the world (including Europe), it has been

understood to imply Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories

occupied during the war, with at most minor — and mutual — adjustments.

At first, that was also Washington’s interpretation. UN Ambassador

Arthur Goldberg informed King Hussein of Jordan that the US insisted

that “there must be a mutuality in adjustments,” a classified State

Department history observes: to both Israel and the Arab states, “U.S.

officials emphasized that any territorial adjustments would be limited

in nature and would not, of necessity, be detrimental to the Arab

states”; there would be at most “minor reciprocal border rectifications”

with no “substantial withdrawing of the [pre-war] map.” It was on this

understanding, explicitly conveyed by US government mediators, that the

Arab states accepted the resolution, and the US itself unequivocally

held to this interpretation until 1971. In those years, Israel was alone

among major actors in rejecting this interpretation of the document.

The disagreements over interpretation came to a head in February 1971,

when UN mediator Gunnar Jarring presented a proposal to Egypt and Israel

that called for full peace between them in return for full Israeli

withdrawal from Egyptian territory. Egyptian President Sadat accepted

the proposal. Sadat’s acceptance of Jarring’s “famous” peace proposal

was a “bombshell,” Prime Minister Rabin recalls in his memoirs, a

“milestone.” While officially welcoming Egypt’s expression “of its

readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel,” the government

of Israel rejected the agreement, stating that “Israel will not withdraw

to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines. The reasoning was explained by Haim

Bar-Lev of the governing Labor Party: “I think that we could obtain a

peace settlement on the basis of the earlier [pre-June 1967] borders. If

I were persuaded that this is the maximum that we might obtain, I would

say: agreed. But I think that it is not the maximum. I think that if we

continue to hold out, we will obtain more.”

The crucial question was how Washington would react. The Jarring-Sadat

agreement was consistent with official US policy. There was, however, a

conflict between the State Department and National Security Adviser

Henry Kissinger, who was then engaged in a campaign to undermine and

displace Secretary of State Rogers, as he was soon to do. Kissinger

insisted that the US must insist upon “stalemate”: no diplomacy, no

negotiations. His position prevailed, and Sadat’s peace offer was

rejected.

Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in rejecting the

standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN 242. The basic

cause for the misery and suffering that followed is their conviction,

which has proven to be correct, that “if we continue to hold out, we

will obtain more.” The isolation of the US and Israel became still more

marked by the mid-1970s, when the terms of the international consensus

shifted to include a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,

thus departing from earlier rejectionism. In January 1976, the US vetoed

a Security Council resolution calling for a settlement in terms of UN

242, with this amendment. The US veto, repeated later, excluded the

Security Council from the diplomacy. The General Assembly continued to

pass near-unanimous resolutions in similar terms (the US and Israel

opposed); a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The US also blocked

initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The last

of the regular UN resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf conflict, in

December 1990 (144–2).

Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the

rejectionist camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the

Islamic world, justly termed “extremist.” The conclusions being

unacceptable, the facts have been “vetoed” along with numerous peace

initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole together with Sadat’s

“famous milestone” and much else that is inconvenient.

Israel’s policy spectrum with regard to the occupied territories is

illuminated in a study by Peace Now, which compares four different plans

for the territories from 1968 to 1992, asking how many Palestinians

would be within areas annexed by Israel if these plans were enacted

today: (I) the 1968 Allon Plan (Labor); (II) the 1976 Labor Party

Settlement Plan (never officially adopted though “it has informed

practical decision-making and action”); (III) the Ariel Sharon Plan of

1992 (Likud), which created eleven isolated and discontinuous “cantons”

for Palestinian autonomy; (IV) the Defense Establishment Plan of 1992

(Labor), which deals only with the West Bank. The number of Palestinians

in settlements to be annexed are as follows:

• Allon Plan: 385,000, 91,000 in the West Bank and the rest in Gaza

• Labor Party Settlement Plan: 603,000, 310,000 in the West Bank

• Sharon Plan: 393,000, 378,000 in the West Bank

• Defense Establishment Plan: 204,000 in the West Bank, Gaza unspecified

To these figures must be added the 150,000 Palestinians of East

Jerusalem, to be annexed in all plans, the Peace Now study notes. “The

Labor Party plan of 1976 would annex the greatest number of Palestinians

from the West Bank and Gaza,” while the Sharon Plan “is the maximalist

plan with regard to the West Bank,” though ceding self-rule to more Gaza

Palestinians than the Labor plans.

As the analysis indicates, the policy spectrum has been narrow, and

invariably rejectionist. The political blocs have differed on West Bank

Arab population concentrations, Labor being more concerned than Likud to

exclude them from areas scheduled for Israeli takeover. Washington has

favored Labor Party rejectionism, more rational than the Likud variety,

which has no real provision for the population of the occupied

territories except eventual “transfer” (expulsion).

After the Gulf war, Europe accepted the US position that the Monroe

Doctrine effectively extends over the Middle East; Europeans would

henceforth refrain from independent initiatives, limiting themselves to

helping implement US rejectionist doctrine, as Norway indeed did in

1993. The Soviet Union was gone from the scene, its remnants now loyal

clients of Washington. The UN had become virtually a US agency. Whatever

space the superpower conflict had left for nonalignment was gone, and

the catastrophe of capitalism that swept the traditional colonial

domains of the West in the 1980s left the Third World mired in general

despair, disciplined by forces of the managed market. With Arab

nationalism dealt yet another crushing blow by Saddam’s aggression and

terror and PLO tactics of more than the usual ineptitude, the Arab

rulers had less need than before to respond to popular pressures with

pro-Palestinian gestures. The US was therefore in a good position to

advance its rejectionist program without interference, moving towards

the solution outlined by Secretary of State James Baker well before the

Gulf crisis: any settlement must be based on the 1989 plan of the

government of Israel, which flatly bars Palestinian national rights

(Baker Plan, December 1989).

Washington’s general goals have been stable for a long period. The basic

concern is the enormous oil wealth of the region. Planning has long been

guided by a strategic conception that assigns local management to an

“Arab Facade” of weak and dependent dictators, who will ensure that

profits from Gulf oil flow primarily to the US (and its British client),

not to the people of the region. A network of regional gendarmes is to

keep order; local “cops on the beat” as Nixon’s Defense Secretary,

Melvin Laird, described them in the context of the Nixon Doctrine. The

responsibility of the Middle East cops was outlined in 1973 by the

Senate’s leading expert on the topic, Henry Jackson: to “inhibit and

contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab

States…who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to

our principal sources of petroleum in the Persian Gulf” — more

accurately, to the vast wealth they yield. Senator Jackson was referring

specifically to the tacit alliance between Israel, Iran (under the

Shah), and Saudi Arabia.

As for Kurds, Palestinians, slum-dwellers in Cairo, and others who

contribute nothing to the basic structure of power — they have no

rights, by the most elementary principles of statecraft. Perhaps they

can occasionally be used in one or another power play, but that is where

their rights end, as the history of the Kurds has demonstrated, today

once again. The status of the Palestinians has been even lower than that

of other worthless people; their value is not zero, but negative, in

that their plight has had a disruptive effect in the Arab world, thus

interfering with US goals. They must therefore be marginalized somehow,

perhaps under a form of “autonomy” that leaves them to manage their own

affairs under Israeli supervision. That plan, proposed at Camp David,

was taken up when the “peace process” was renewed at Madrid in the Fall

of 1991. As the conference opened, one of Israel’s most knowledgeable

and acute observers of the territories, journalist Danny Rubinstein,

wrote that the US and Israel were proposing “autonomy as in a POW camp,

where the prisoners are ‘autonomous’ to cook their meals without

interference and to organize cultural events.” Palestinians are to be

granted little more control over local services, he wrote, adding that

even advocates of Greater Israel never call for literal annexation of

the territories, which would require Israel to provide the “restricted

services” available to Israel’s second-class Arab citizens, at enormous

cost.

As discussed here at the time, the best outcome, from Washington’s point

of view, would be a settlement that entrenches the traditional strategic

conception and gives it a public form, raising tacit understandings to a

formal treaty. If some arrangement for local “autonomy” can suppress the

Palestinian issue, well and good. Meanwhile security arrangements among

Israel, Turkey, Egypt and the United States can be extended, perhaps

bringing others in if they accept the client role. There need be no

further concern over possible Soviet support for attempts within the

region to interfere with such designs.

While the negotiations were proceeding without issue, Israel stepped up

the harsh repression in the territories, following the thinking outlined

by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (now Prime Minister). In February

1989, he explained to Peace Now leaders that the US had granted Israel

time to suppress the Intifada by force, diverting attention by

meaningless diplomatic maneuvers: “The inhabitants of the territories

are subject to harsh military and economic pressure,” Rabin said: “in

the end, they will be broken” and will accept Israel’s terms. These

policies achieved much success, extended with Rabin’s recent “closure”

of the territories, a crushing blow to the staggering Palestinian

economy.

From the early days of the Intifada, if not before, it was becoming

clear that the PLO leadership was losing its popular support in the

occupied territories. Local activists from secular nationalist sectors,

while still recognizing the PLO as the sole agent for negotiations,

spoke with open contempt of its corruption, personal power plays,

opportunism, and disregard for the interests and opinions of the people

it claimed to represent.

By all indications, the disaffection increased in the years that

followed, while the fundamentalist opposition that Israel had initially

nurtured gained popular support, feeding on this growing discontent and

on the demoralization as Rabin’s program was implemented, with constant

US support at all levels: economic, diplomatic, and ideological.

These matters, reviewed with particular detail and depth in Israel

Shahak’s regular reports, have received only sporadic and inadequate

coverage here.

With its popular support in decline and its status deteriorating in the

Arab world, the PLO became more tolerable to US-Israeli policymakers,

particularly as the growing fundamentalist movement evoked memories of

the resistance that had driven Israel out of much of Lebanon. Informal

Israel-PLO contacts were increasingly reported. These reached their

culmination with the August 1993 agreement, which bypassed the

delegations engaged in the official “peace process,” and indeed also

excluded the PLO, apart from Arafat and a few close associates.

The agreement was welcomed with great acclaim, marred only by skepticism

as to whether it could hold. “America’s own greatest interest,” the twin

goals of “enhanced security for Israel and regional peace,” both…seem

closer to achievement this morning than ever before,” the New York Times

editors observed as the agreement was announced. Apart from omission of

the tacit background understanding that the “regional peace” must ensure

US control, their identification of Washington’s highest priorities is

accurate, though automatic identification of US government policy with

“America’s greatest interest” takes a leap of faith; it is not obvious

that ignoring Palestinian national rights and the security of others is

in the interest of the people of the United States.

The editors may, however, be right in thinking that long-standing US

policy goals have been advanced. The intended eventual outcome of the

1993 agreement falls well within the bounds of traditional US-Israeli

rejectionism, adopting essential features of the Sharon Plan as well as

the Labor Party’s Allon Plan. That much was spelled out the same day on

the facing page of the Times by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi

Beilin, a close associate of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He informed

his US audience that

“the permanent solution will be based on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza

and from most of the West Bank. We agree to a confederated formula

between Jordan and the Palestinians in the West Bank, but we will not

return to pre-1967 borders. United Jerusalem will remain the capital of

the State of Israel.”

In return, “After years of rejection of Israel as part of the Middle

East, the Arabs will accept and recognize Israel’s right to exist as a

sovereign state within secure and defined borders in this region” — as

they did, for example, in the vetoed Security Council resolution of

January 1976, gone from history along with much else like it, so that

Beilin’s statement will ring true to American ears.

The reasons for preferring “confederation” to Palestinian independence

have nothing to do with security. As has been understood since 1948,

when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the point explicit, an

independent Palestinian state serves Israeli security interests better

than “a state linked to Transjordan [now Jordan], and maybe tomorrow to

Iraq.” The problem is that an independent state would be a barrier to

eventual integration of parts of the territories and control of their

resources, primarily water. As for “united Jerusalem,” that is a concept

of broad and as yet undetermined scope. “Withdrawal from Gaza” and other

territories is understood to exclude Jewish settlements and the

resources they control. And even this “permanent settlement” lies well

down the road.

It is understandable, then, that the Times editors, expressing the

prevailing view, should see the “historic deal” as a great opportunity.

It is “the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall,” chief

diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman proclaimed. The projected

arrangements represent the “triumph of realism over fanaticism and

political courage over political cowardice.” “Realists” understand that

in this world, you follow US orders. Those who are not convinced of the

justice of traditional US-Israeli rejectionism are not only wrong, but

are “fanatics” and “cowards,” thus excluded from respectable society.

The hysteria of the rhetoric suggests that more is understood than

appears on the surface.

While some Israeli advocates in the US felt that the victory was not

far-reaching enough, more perceptive ones recognized the scale of what

had been achieved. The PLO had been forced “to become more reasonable,”

acceding to Israel’s demands, as Times columnist William Safire, a

self-described “pro-Israeli hawk,” put the matter. “Arafat finally

appears to be ready to accept [Menahem] Begin’s approach [of 1978],

adding the Gaza-Jericho twist,” Safire comments, “having been softened

by 15 years of Israeli hard line” — to which we may add US

intransigence.

The draft agreement makes no mention of Palestinian national rights, the

primary issue on which the US and Israel broke with the international

consensus from the mid-1970s. Throughout these years, it was agreed that

a settlement should be based on UN 242.

There were two basic points of contention: (1) Do we interpret the

withdrawal clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus

(including the US, pre-1971), or in accord with the position of Israel

and US policy from 1971? (2) Is the settlement based solely on UN 242,

which offers nothing to the Palestinians, or 242 and other relevant UN

resolutions, as the PLO had proposed for many years in accord with the

nonrejectionist international consensus. Thus, does the settlement

incorporate the right of refugees to return or compensation, as the UN

has insisted since December 1948 (with US endorsement, long forgotten),

and the Palestinian right to national self-determination that has

repeatedly been endorsed by the UN (though blocked by Washington)? These

are the crucial issues that have stood in the way of a political

settlement.

On these issues, the agreement explicitly and without equivocation

adopts the US-Israeli stand. As noted, Article I states that the

“permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council

Resolutions 242 and 338,” nothing more. Furthermore, as Beilin made

explicit, the withdrawal clause of UN 242 is to be understood in the

terms unilaterally imposed by the US (from 1971). In fact, the agreement

does not even preclude further Israeli settlement in the large areas of

the West Bank it has taken over, or even new land takeovers. On such

central matters as control of water, it speaks only of “cooperation” and

“equitable utilization” in a manner to be determined by “experts from

both sides.” The outcome of cooperation between an elephant and a fly is

not hard to predict.

The victory of the rejectionists is complete, even in the ideological

sphere; given US global power, the version of history designed by its

doctrinal institutions becomes the general framework for discussion in

most of the world, including Europe.

For Palestinians in refugee camps and elsewhere outside the territories,

the agreement offers little hope, and they have expressed understandable

bitterness. Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon also “criticized the PLO for

making concessions with Israel that could jeopardize Palestinian

national rights and undermine the joint Arab negotiating strategy,”

Lamis Andoni reported from Amman, giving “Israel the upper hand in

imposing its conditions on each Arab country separately.”

A separate matter entirely is whether the two sides would be

well-advised to accept the agreement devised by Israel and Arafat. For

the US and Israel, the question hardly arises: the agreement falls

within the framework on which they have insisted.

For the Palestinians, the question is more complex. The agreement

entails abandonment of most of their hopes, at least for the foreseeable

future. Nevertheless, realistic alternatives may be much worse.

Given US power, refusal to accept US-Israeli terms is at once translated

into a demonstration of the worthlessness of such “fanatics” and

“cowards,” who thereby cede any rights they might have been thought to

have. Palestinians were once “the darling of many Western liberals,”

Thomas Friedman writes (meaning, presumably, that some Western liberals

regarded them as at least semi-human); but they are beloved no more, and

unless they toe the line their former admirers may abandon them to their

fate. Furthermore, the agreement should offer Palestinians some relief

from the barriers to development imposed by the military administration,

no small matter. And it moves beyond Rubinstein’s “autonomy of a POW

camp” in that Palestinians are assigned control over “direct taxation.”

An Israeli-supervised “strong police force” of Palestinians might, at

worst, be the local counterpart of Israel’s South Lebanon Army, subduing

the population by terror and threat while the masters observe closely,

ready to move if the iron fist is needed. But it might turn out that

Palestinian police will treat the population less harshly than the

Israeli army and border police, and settler depredations should reduce.

Though the agreements say nothing about the matter, there may be a

decline in Israeli settlement and in the development programs designed

to integrate the extensive areas designated for Jewish settlement into

the Israeli economy, leaving Palestinians on the side. Many issues can

be debated, but not — at least not seriously — within a doctrinal

framework that identifies “realism” as what the US and Israel demand,

and dismisses critical analysis in advance as “fanaticism” and

“cowardice.”

The respected head of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul Shafi,

had some observations on these matters in a talk in Bethlehem on July

22, 1993, just as Arafat was secretly moving to take matters into his

own hands, bypassing local Palestinians. Abdul Shafi held out little

hope for the “peace process,” which excludes entirely the possibility

“that Palestinians must be the main authority in the interim period for

the people and for the land,” leading to true national

self-determination. He stressed, however, that

“the negotiations are not worth fighting about. The critical issue is

transforming our society. All else is inconsequential… We must decide

amongst ourselves to use all our strength and resources to develop our

collective leadership and the democratic institutions which will achieve

our goals and guide us in the future… The important thing is for us to

take care of our internal situation and to organize our society and

correct those negative aspects from which it has been suffering for

generations and which is the main reason for our losses against our

foes.”

His remarks seem to me apt, and of much broader import, ourselves

included.