Unmaking Palestine: On Israel, the Palestinians, and the wall

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 25-43

  Usher, Graham ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN SETTLEMENT; INTERNATIONAL LAW; LAND USE;

ASIA; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST; PALESTINE;

EID: 33646769281     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2005.35.1.25     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. I take as a given that Israel was and, in the 1967 occupied territories, remains a colonial-settler state. For what is still the definitive exposition of this, see Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973).
2. See David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, revised edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
3. Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians (London: Verso Books, 2003).
4. The phrase is from a 29 September 1967 article in Davar by Joseph Weitz, former head of the Jewish Agency's colonization department: "when the UN passed a resolution to partition Palestine into two states, the War of Independence broke out to our good fortune and in this war a twofold miracle took place: A territorial victory and the flight of the Arabs. In the Six Day War one great miracle happened: A tremendous territorial victory but most of the inhabitants of the liberated territories remained 'stuck' to their places - which may destroy the foundation of our state."
5. On the lack of consensus, see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin Books, 2000), particularly chapters 6 and 7.
6. See also my interview with another "new" Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé: "An Israeli Peace," in Graham Usher, Dispatches from Palestine: The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process (London: Pluto Press, 1999).
7. Quoted from Herzl's Diaries in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 9.
8. "It is not as though there were a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist," pace former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, quoted in Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 311.
9. This was the shibboleth of every Israeli government until the 1993 Oslo accords. It was revamped after Israel's 2003 reconquest of the West Bank and Sharon's successful demonization of the PA.
10. For example, West Bank Fatah general secretary and leading activist in the second intifada Marwan Barghouti was exiled from his country between 1987 and 1994. Arrested by Israel in April 2002, he is now serving five life sentences.
11. One period when mass expulsion was at least considered was the 1991 Gulf War. Under international and domestic pressure, Israel dropped that option from consideration.
12. The exception was the emergence of the Islamist Hamas movement in the occupied territories in the late 1980s - a mass Palestinian movement outside the PLO's influence or patronage.
13. See Amira Hass, "Israel's Closure Policy: An Ineffective Strategy for Containment and Repression," JPS 31, no. 3 (Spring 2002), pp. 5-20.
14. See my "Closures, Cantons, and the Palestinian Charter" in Dispatches from Palestine.
15. Quoted in Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 14.
16. Long excerpts of Weisglass's October 2004 interview in Ha'Aretz were published as Document C in JPS 34, no. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 203-7.
17. See Kimmerling, Politicide, especially chapter 5.
18. Interview with author, March 2005.
19. Salonweb, 16 May 2005. Though there is evidence that Ben-Gurion's acceptance of the partition plan was "cynical" - a tactical move that gambled on Arab rejection and war to extend Israel's borders beyond those drawn by the UN - by the end of his life he was opposed to Israel's retention of the territories conquered in the 1967 war, and for the same reasons that persuaded Sharon, in August 2005, to withdraw from Gaza.
20. Since his election as prime minister in February 2001, Sharon has never held a meeting with the Palestinian leadership as part of a peace process. All meetings have been about restarting a peace process.
21. In Azmi Bishara's shrewd phrase, it would be "a 'victim' state, prone to Israeli manipulation and/or military threat." See my interview with him, "Bantustanisation or Binationalism" in Dispatches from Palestine. Nor would it be contiguous. Israel's latest route for the wall still assumes the de facto annexation of the Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim, and Gush Etzion settlement blocs, leaving the Palestinians the bulk of the West Bank but severed into three disconnected cantons.
22. For an account of the "revised" Jordan option, see Gary Sussman, "Ariel Sharon and the Jordan Option," Middle East Report Online, March 2005, online at www.merip.org.
23. Sharon's main motives for going to war in Lebanon were to destroy the PLO and install a Maronite quisling regime under Israeli protection. See Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1994).
24. For example: Mustafa Barghouthi from the National Democratic Coalition and Jamal Juma' from the grassroots "Stop the Wall" campaign.
25. Interview with author, April 2004.
26. Vaughn Lowe, public international law expert and member of the Palestinian Delegation to the ICJ proceedings at The Hague.
27. Kimmerling, Politicide, p. 19.
28. Eqbal Ahmad, "Pioneering in the Nuclear Age: An Essay on Israel and the Palestinians," Race & Class 25, no. 4 (Spring 1984), pp. 1-15.
29. Hass, "Israel's Closure Policy."
30. Ahmad, "Pioneering in the Nuclear Age," p. 14.