Blood and Religion

The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State

Pluto Press

Contents

Israel's Fifth Column

What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties. If we know the family, [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.

David Ben Gurion (1948)

Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism.

Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of Israeli Military Intelligence (1973)

Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.

Moshe Dayan (undated)

Mahmoud Yazbak looked as crumpled as a discarded packet of the cigarettes he smokes obsessively. The Haifa University history lecturer was not only much paler and thinner than I remembered from our last meeting nine months earlier but lacked his previous sharpness of thought and easy charm. Sitting in his home in a suburb of Nazareth, he was a shadow of his former self.

Between our two meetings events in the Middle East had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. On 28 September 2000 the then leader of the opposition Likud party, Ariel Sharon, made a visit to the Old City of Jerusalem and a site sacred to both Jews and Arabs. The visit was designed to be provocative in the extreme: Sharon, a man renowned throughout the Arab world as the general who engineered the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and whose soldiers oversaw the massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christian militias in Beirut's refugee camps, marched on to a plaza of mosques known as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, backed by more than 1,000 armed Israeli security staff and policemen. The backdrop to his photo-call was the impressive golden-topped Dome of the Rock, reputedly the place where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on a ladder of light and received God's prayers for his followers to perform.

Although during the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel occupied and later annexed East Jerusalem, including the Old City, it promised to leave control of the mosques under the exclusive authority of Muslim clerics, through a religious endowment known as the waqf that had overseen the region's Islamic holy places for hundreds of years. Over the next three decades, however, Israeli leaders asserted with increasing fervour their country's rightful ownership of the site, basing their claim to sovereignty on the presumption that the Noble Sanctuary is built on a small mount that was once home to the First and Second Temples, built respectively by Solomon and Herod. The Second Temple was destroyed 2,000 years ago, and only an original retaining wall known as the Western Wall survives, but the Temple Mount – as it is known to Jews – has become the main symbolic focus of attention of Israeli politicians fighting the Palestinians for control of Jerusalem. They have been demanding that Jews be given access to the Noble Sanctuary's plaza of mosques in violation of centuries of rulings by rabbis that Jews are forbidden by halacha (religious law) to step anywhere on the Mount.

The Israeli leadership's motive is mainly political: by playing up the significance of Jewish ownership of the Temple Mount, Israel strengthens its hand in preparation for the day when it may have to negotiate with the Palestinians over the future division of spoils in Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories. Israeli politicians have found vociferous support among Israel's growing number of fundamentalist Jews, especially the Messianic movements among the settlers, who want the complex of mosques destroyed to make way for a Third Temple to herald the arrival of the Messiah. Over the years several plots to bomb the Mount have been uncovered by Israeli security organisations. Israel has won further backing for its ambitions in the Old City among the large and powerful community of Christian Zionists in the United States, evangelical fundamentalists who have the ear of President Bush and other senior figures in the Washington Administration.

The Palestinians, mostly confined by Israeli walls, fences, checkpoints and curfews to the towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza, cannot reach the Old City of Jerusalem, but they desire it, as well as the Muslim and Christian holy places, and the income and prestige they would bring, for the future capital of their state. The 35-acre site has therefore become the most disputed piece of territory in a conflict that is essentially about real estate claims. Both Israelis and Palestinians have turned Jerusalem's Old City into a powerful national symbol, each demanding it as a capital: in Israel's case, of a state of expanded borders that the world so far refuses to recognise; and in the Palestinians' case, of a shrunken state whose birth Israel has consistently blocked.

THE CAMP DAVID STALEMATE OVER JERUSALEM

A chance to end the deadlock was offered in July 2000, when American President Bill Clinton hosted "make-or-break" talks between Israel and the Palestinians at his Camp David retreat. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had called for the negotiations as a way to bypass the deadening pace of the Oslo process. He wanted to broker a final-status agreement with the Palestinians on all the major outstanding issues of the conflict, including security, borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. The result, the Palestinians hoped, would be the creation of a Palestinian state. According to many of the participants, however, Israel made control over East Jerusalem, including the Old City, the biggest stumbling block. Barak had hoped that Yasser Arafat would be persuaded to accept Abu Dis, a Palestinian village lying close by Jerusalem, as his capital and rename it al-Quds (the Holy), Jerusalem's title in Arabic. When it became clear he would not, nor would he settle for "functional autonomy" in the Old City – responsibilities for policing and garbage collection – without actual sovereignty, Barak's position hardened. As Martyn Indyk, the US Ambassador to Israel, recalled, the talks soon "got swamped in on the Jerusalem issue".

Fourteen days later, the Camp David talks collapsed. As the two sides walked away empty-handed, the Israelis cast the blame on Arafat. The Palestinian leader, said Barak, had rejected his "generous" offers and had thus been unmasked as no partner for peace. The Americans supported the Israeli accusations. Tensions between the Palestinians, who felt they had been cheated of a state by the more powerful side, and the Israelis, who claimed they had no one to talk to, simmered all summer long.

Contacts between the two sides, however, continued through the autumn, although little progress was made. By December 2000, as Barak faced an imminent election he was expected to lose and Clinton was waiting out the dying days of his presidency, the American team brought the two parties together for one last stab at a peace deal. The US President read out the basis for an agreement, what came to be known as the "Clinton parameters". Again, Barak made Jerusalem a hurdle that could not be surmounted. According to Barak's main adviser on Jerusalem, Dr Moshe Amirav, the Israeli prime minister insisted on describing the whole plaza of the Noble Sanctuary, including the mosque areas, as the "Holy of Holies", a title traditionally reserved by Jews for the small inner sanctum of the temple, whose location is unknown and where only the High Priest was allowed to enter. Barak was the first Israeli leader to use the term in this way. Amirav later observed that, by maintaining his uncompromising position on sovereignty over Temple Mount, Barak had chosen to "blow up" the negotiations.

Sharon's brief and high-profile occupation of the plaza in the wake of the failed Camp David talks was designed to send a message to the Palestinians and the world about who ultimately was master of the sacred site. It also served to demonstrate to the Israeli public that Sharon, unlike Barak, was not prepared to compromise sovereignty of the Mount at any price. "The Temple Mount is the most sacred place, it is the basis of the existence of the Jewish people, and I am not afraid of riots by the Palestinians," Sharon declared.

The response to Sharon's visit from ordinary Palestinians was predictable; in fact, it was so predictable that the Palestinian leadership, including Yasser Arafat, the head of the Jerusalem police, Yair Yitzhaki, and US officials all warned Barak to prevent it. Their advice was ignored. Although there were only small-scale clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli security forces during Sharon's visit, the next day, on 29 September, the violence grew much worse. As Palestinians massed at the Noble Sanctuary for Friday prayers to make a show of strength, Barak and his public security minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, prepared for a showdown. They deployed a huge number of police officers and stationed a special anti-terror sniper unit at a location overlooking the site. When Palestinian youths began throwing stones at the massed ranks of the security forces, the police opened fire with rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition, killing at least four Palestinians and injuring 200 more. Israel's chief of police, Yehuda Wilk, later admitted that snipers had fired into the crowds of demonstrators, a fact confirmed by doctors who reported that three of the dead had been hit by live rounds. The violent clashes were the trigger for an outpouring of Palestinian anger and the eruption of the intifada, a grassroots uprising that was soon sweeping out from Jerusalem towards the West Bank and Gaza – and finally towards Israel itself.

Mahmoud Yazbak's grief sprang from the same source as that of the thousands of other Palestinian families who lost loved ones to Israeli bullets and shells in the days, months and years that followed Sharon's visit. In Yazbak's case, he was mourning his own shaheed, his 25-year-old nephew, Wissam, who was killed on the night of 8 October 2000 inside Israel, in the city of Nazareth. Wissam, a builder studying business administration in his spare time, was due to be married a month later.

In the first days of the intifada world attention concentrated on the barbaric events unfolding in the occupied territories, where scores of mostly unarmed Palestinians were dying at the end of Israeli soldiers' gunsights. As figures provided by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem showed, about three-quarters of the 230 Palestinians killed in the occupied territories by the army in the first two months of the intifada died in clashes that did not involve any Palestinian gunfire. A third of those shot dead were minors. Most of the rest were youths armed only with stones or slingshots facing down snipers, tanks and Apache helicopters operating inside the occupied territories. Just 24 members of the Palestinian security forces were killed during this period. But later, as the death toll continued to mount in Palestinian towns and villages, the confrontations with the Israeli army increasingly sucked in the Palestinian security forces and the armed factions. A wave of Palestinian suicide bomb attacks was launched against Israeli civilian targets from January 2001. All of this created the impression in Israel and abroad that the intifada was a war between two opposed, if very unevenly matched, armies.

The rising death toll on the Israeli side, even if it paled beside the Palestinian one, allowed government spin-doctors to present the intifada as a well-planned assault on the Jewish state, led by the Palestinian security forces under the direction of Yasser Arafat himself. In fact, Israeli officials went further: they argued that the Palestinian leader had been hoping at Camp David to use demographic weapons, most notably an insistence on the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees, to destroy Israel as a Jewish state and turn the whole area into "Greater Palestine". When he failed, they alleged, he fell back on Plan B, unleashing the armed intifada. Later Barak himself would claim as much. In an interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris in 2002, he argued that the intifada "was pre-planned, pre-prepared. I don't mean that Arafat knew that on a certain day in September [it would begin] ... It wasn't accurate, like computer engineering. But it was definitely on the level of planning, of a grand plan."

One of the senior American participants at the Camp David negotiations, Robert Malley, President Bill Clinton's special adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs, wrote lengthy articles debunking Israel's account of the talks and its explanation of the intifada. But only very belatedly, nearly four years after the outbreak of the uprising, was the Israeli story – almost universally accepted by the world's media – finally and irreversibly discredited.

GEN. MALKA EXPOSES ISRAEL'S INTIFADA MYTHS

In June 2004 a senior army officer, General Amos Malka, the former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, broke his silence to reveal that the assessments about Arafat's involvement in the intifada endlessly voiced by Israeli politicians and the army had not been based on any intelligence information. They were the personal hunches of Malka's immediate subordinate, Amos Gilad, who had been responsible for intelligence gathering during that period. According to Malka, Gilad had ignored the available intelligence and told the political and military echelons either what he personally believed or what he thought they wanted to hear: that Arafat was not a partner for peace but a terrorist who was planning the destruction of Israel, either through a demographic war or an armed struggle. Malka argued that, in reality, the available intelligence suggested the opposite. Arafat, he said, was ready to reach a compromise with Israel but not on the terms offered. He was forced to ride the unexpected outpouring of Palestinian public anger, the intifada, after the failure of the Camp David talks.

Malka's devastating criticisms of Gilad were supported by Colonel Ephraim Lavie, who had supplied Gilad with his intelligence information about the Palestinian leadership. Lavie noted that "while we warned of the possibility of a clash, we never said before the conflict broke out such unequivocal things as 'Arafat does not want a two-state arrangement but rather the eradication of Israel through demography'." He added: "The prevailing concept about Arafat having only one, absolute goal – establishing 'Greater Palestine' – and deliberately initiating general hostilities, is nowhere to be found in the papers prepared by the research division." Instead, Lavie observed, the intifada "began from below, as a result of rage that had accumulated toward Israel, Arafat and the [Palestinian Authority]. Arafat hitchhiked on it for the sake of his personal needs."

Once Malka and Lavie's revelations burst forth, Mati Steinberg, the chief adviser on Palestinian affairs in the Shin Bet, the country's domestic security service, admitted he had reached the same conclusions. He told Ha'aretz: "The intifada did not result from a decision reached up above; it stemmed from a mood that swept through the Palestinian public. The Palestinians felt as though they had reached a dead end due to the failure of the Camp David summit." Steinberg ridiculed Gilad's claims that Arafat had aspired to create a Palestinian state through a demographic war of attrition. "Factually, there is no support for this contention. Had [Arafat] concentrated on demographic factors, he would have had to refrain from the diplomatic process and he would have waited for natural population increase to do its part, and for Israel to self-destruct."

Instead, Steinberg said, Arafat shared the Palestinian public's view that, in agreeing to forgo their claims to most of their historic homeland, they were making a supreme compromise that should be reciprocated by Israel. "The Palestinian way of thinking is this: We are prepared to establish a state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, on just 22 percent of the Palestinian homeland. Our consent to the 1967 borders is, for us, an unbearable sacrifice." Arafat had no choice but to insist at Camp David that the proposed Palestinian state have sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary (Temple Mount), conceded Steinberg.

Realizing sovereignty rights on the Temple Mount is not just a religious or symbolic matter: it's a matter of survival. A Palestinian state which controls the Temple Mount will be a source of interest, and will attract millions of Palestinians; it will be a magnet for tourism and pilgrimages. There isn't a single Muslim – not even the most selfless altruist – who can accept Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

Given the enduring nature of Israel's political assessments of the conflict, said Steinberg, he was pessimistic about the future.