MYTH:  Israel’s minimum-security needs are such that it cannot afford to give up any part of the West Bank territory.   This has been the conclusion of three separate reports by three American generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 1967, 1974 and 1991. 

FACT:  The American Jewish Right is fond of citing such reports by several American generals about the supposed indispensability of the West Bank to Israel’s security because there are so many Israeli generals and leading military, intelligence and security officials who have strongly disagreed with this view for many years.  

·        The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot surveyed the senior military officers of the IDF General Staff in 1988, more than a year after the outbreak of the first intifada, and found “that among the current general staff a clear majority of seventy-five to eighty percent believe that the security risks associated with Israel’s continuing to rule the territories are greater than the security risks which Israel will assume if it relinquishes the territories.”  (Ron Ben-Yishai, “What Do the Generals Think About Territorial Compromise?” Yediot Aharonot, June 10, 1988, Supplement, pp. 6-7.  See also “Generals Dismiss the Security Value of the West Bank,” Ha’aretz, May 31, 1988.)  

·        Reflecting the strength of such sentiments in Israeli military circles, a group of three hundred Israeli generals and senior reserve officers formed the Council for Peace and Security in the spring of 1988.  The Council has since grown to 1,200 senior military and security officials.  They have maintained, and still do today, that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza would be advantageous to Israeli security, and far preferable to the status quo.   One of the planks in their platform is that “the development of military technology...gives the IDF a relative edge over the Arab armies and will lessen the need for continual and full occupation of the territories.” 

·        Some senior Israeli military officers have not only argued that Israel is fully capable of compensating for the loss of the West Bank and Gaza, but have gone so far as to declare the military value of these territories is quite limited.  For example, former air force commander Amos Lapidot stated, “From the standpoint of Israel’s defense, the territories have no value.”  Brigadier General (res.) Ephraim Sneh, former head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, asserted that three AWACS radar aircraft would provide Israel with better early warning than the country’s current stations on the mountain ridges of the West Bank.  (Ron Ben-Yishai, “Israeli Officers Argue the West Bank Is a Liability,” Newsweek, May 30, 1988.)

·        “Some analysts [have] even called the territories a security liability, arguing, among other things, that the intifada had transformed the IDF into a police force charged with keeping order in the occupied territories, and that this in turn was undermining Israel’s military preparedness. ...[M]ilitary operations in the West Bank and Gaza had lowered morale, disrupted training, and undermined the IDF’s organizational coherence, thereby making Israel weaker vis-a-vis Syria and other external challenges, the only real threats to its security of a properly military nature.”  (Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 711)

·        General (res.) Shlomo Gazit, one of Israel’s most respected strategic analysts, concluded in the fall of 1988, “Although the territories have some strategic value, in the end they are a burden.”  (The Jerusalem Post, October 25, 1988)  He continues to hold this view today, as do many other senior military figures in Israel.

MYTH: The settlements are not a problem; they don't contribute to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

FACT: 210,000 Jewish settlers live among 3.5 million Palestinians who want to rule themselves in an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza. The settler population (not including East Jerusalem) right after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 was about 100,000. At the end of the year 2000 it was more than 190,000. (Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics).  Just 7,100 Jewish settlers live among 1.2 million Palestinians now in Gaza; 200,000 now live among over 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank. 

MYTH: A peace treaty would force Israel to remove the 210,000 Jewish settlers, preventing all Jews from living in the West Bank.

FACT: The Clinton Plan and Israel's Taba proposal enabled Israel to incorporate 65% of the settlers in the larger settlements, which are grouped in blocs closest to the 1967 border, comprising just 5% of the West Bank.  Most settlements, built in the midst of heavily populated Palestinian areas, would be removed. This would require relocating only 35% of the settlers back to Israel proper or to larger annexed settlements.  Most Israeli settlers moved to the West Bank for economic reasons and have said they would move back to Israel for the sake of peace if the government helped them do so.

MYTH: Jews should be able to live anywhere freely, including in Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank.

FACT: Every sovereign country has the right to decide who may immigrate into its borders. Israel gives preference to Jewish immigrants under the Law of Return, and limits the number of non-Jews who may enter. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would give preference to Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, and have the same right as Israel and all countries to limit immigration for others.  The right-wing Jewish settlement movement wants not only for Jews to be able to live in the West Bank and Gaza among the Palestinian majority; they want Israel to rule over the territory, something that neither most Israelis nor most Palestinians want.  As a first step towards peace, Israelis and Palestinians need to partition the land west of the Jordan River into two states for two peoples.

MYTH: 95% of Palestinians have been living under their own rule since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

FACT: When the intifada broke out in September 2000, Israel still retained military control over fully 82% of the West Bank and Gaza.  All Palestinians have been subject to pervasive Israeli military control in their day-to-day lives during the entire Oslo process, when traveling to work or school to and from most places in the West Bank and Gaza, and many continued to live in areas under which Israel retained full security control.  (Areas B & C under the Oslo Accords.) Since the second intifada erupted, Israel has reoccupied at least eight major Palestinian cities in Area A, comprising most if not all of the 18% over which Palestinians had security and civil control. Palestinians are subjected to curfews, blockades, and Israeli tanks and troops in their cities. Denying that this is a military occupation defies common sense—in fact, it’s Orwellian doublespeak. The question is not whether there has been an Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza for the past 35 years since the Six Day War; of course there has been, and is such an occupation today. The question rather is this: is the occupation justified, is it militarily necessary, or would it be preferable for Israel’s security to find a way to end it under some political arrangement, and if so, under what conditions, with what kinds of mechanisms of monitoring and enforcement? If there’s no occupation, as some believe, then of course there’s only one explanation for why the peace process collapsed and the intifada erupted: the violence must be because the Palestinians want to destroy Israel. But all the evidence suggests that this too is a new myth, a false generalization from the existence of rejectionist attitudes among part of the Palestinian population to the whole, as discussed in the next Myth and Fact.

MYTH:  Most Palestinians reject peace with Israel. They want to throw the Jews into the sea.

FACT: 70% of Palestinians favor reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis after reaching a peace agreement based on the establishment of a Palestinian state recognized by Israel.  66% of Palestinians support the Saudi peace plan calling for the establishment of two states, Palestine and Israel, an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and the establishment of full normal relations and full peace between Israel and the Arab states.  (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) survey conducted May 15-18, 2002.)

QUESTION:  You say polls show that most Palestinians want peace and reconciliation with Israel after the violence ends and a two-state solution is put in place.  But aren’t there other polls that show that most Palestinians now see the goal of the intifada as the liberation of all of Palestine, and not merely the ending of the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. 

ANSWER:   Yes there are.  Another poll, by the JMCC (Jerusalem Media and Communications Center) found that 51% of those surveyed believed the goal of the conflict was to “liberate all of historic Palestine,” which is tantamount to the destruction of Israel.  This represents an increase from the 44% who held that view in December 2001.  43% of Palestinians surveyed said the aim of the intifada is only to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a decline from the 48% who supported that objective in December.  However, the researchers from the group that conducted this survey explained that Palestinian opinion has been radicalized by the ongoing violence, and the current attitudes are a result of the grim situation.  The pollsters do not view these findings as reflecting settled attitudes, given the more favorable results found in previous polls over not only the past year, but the past decade.  When the Oslo Accords were first signed in 1993, most polls showed that 80% of Palestinians supported a peace agreement with Israel and a two-state solution, while only 20% supported violence.  Support for a peace agreement and two-state solution is much less now, and support for violence much greater.  When peace talks are resumed, and a basis for hope is restored, notes Major-General (res.) Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Palestinian attitudes will moderate once again, as they have in the past.  (Associated Press, 6/12/02)  

Much the same is true of Israeli attitudes, by the way.  Before the Oslo agreement, most Israelis rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.  When a two-state solution appeared to promise an end to the conflict both with the Palestinians and with much of the Arab world, most Israelis came to endorse the idea, as they still do.   But the Palestinians are not the only side that has undergone an increasing short-term radicalization in public opinion under the impact of the continued bloodshed.  Significant portions of Israeli public opinion have also recently embraced such extremes as the “transfer” of the Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, and a war crime. Support for extreme measures—whether for the “liberation” of all of Palestine for Palestinians, or the “liberation” of all of the biblical Land of Israel for Israelis—would return to their prior lower levels if peace talks were renewed and used to build the framework for a real cease-fire.

Now the latest polls are showing a reverse trend: the most recent JMCC poll of Palestinian opinion, taken on a second anniversary of the intifada (9/21-25, Poll Number 46) shows that 48 percent of Palestinians believe the goal of the intifada is to “end the Israeli military occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state based on UN Security Council Resolution 242.” 43% believe the goal of the intifada is to “liberate all of Palestine”—this is a drop from 51% who believed this in June. When the question was asked differently, asking the respondents what they themselves favor, the responses were: 44% of Palestinians say they support a 2-state solution, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza living in peace next to Israel; while only 28.9% support a binational state—a single state in all of historic mandatory Palestine, encompassing what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in which Palestinian Arabs would be the majority, and Israeli Jews would be the minority.

MYTH: Israelis want to keep most settlements and territory in the West Bank and Gaza and annex them to Israel.

FACT: Six out of ten Israelis remain consistently willing to remove most settlements and withdraw from 95% of the West Bank and Gaza under a peace treaty.   (E.g., Dahaf Institute poll, May 9, 2002)

MYTH: Judaism teaches that Israel should keep Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the entire biblical Land of Israel.  Didn’t the borders of the Jewish biblical kingdom encompass Judea and Samaria, or what is now called the West Bank? 

FACT: The idea that a Jewish religious text like the Hebrew Bible should determine Israel’s contemporary political borders, whether in the West Bank or Jerusalem, is a case of idolatry, of false messianism.  It is one of the ways in which fundamentalist approaches to the Torah have helped insure that Jews will remain not only in a national conflict with Arabs, but in an even greater religiously-fired political conflict with the entire Muslim world.   A further problem with such justifications for exclusive control by one people of a given piece of land is that they establish the “right” to all the land only in the eyes of those who accept the authority of the text, and the particular interpretation of the text being advanced.  There are contested interpretations of the same text within Judaism.  Judaism affirms many values, not only the attachment to sacred land.  Among these pursuing justice and seeking peace are clearly higher values in Judaism than land.    Respect for the other, the Ger, the stranger, is a paramount value in Judaism. A more authentic understanding of Judaism holds that righteousness – tsedek, not land or sacred space, is the primary value in our tradition. It behooves religious zealots to recall another, more fundamental, biblical requirement than control over all of the land of Israel:  “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue, that thou may live and inherit the land . . .”   (Deut. 16:20).  Justice, in human relations—Jew or non-Jew, individual or nation—is viewed in traditional Judaism as the condition of the Jewish people’s living in the land of Israel.  “Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them:  that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spew you not out.”  (Lev. 20:22)   Under the Halacha, or Orthodox Jewish law, the saving of lives takes precedence over other commandments (pikuach nefesh).   If relinquishing the territories would ameliorate the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, or otherwise strengthen Israel’s security, thereby saving lives, Jewish law not only permits it—it requires it! 

QUESTION:  Wouldn’t offering to create a Palestinian state now in most or all of the West Bank and Gaza be a reward for terrorism and violence?  Wouldn’t it encourage more terror? 

ANSWER:  Much more carrot and much more stick are needed to end the violence.  More stick:  The US, along with the EU, the Saudis, Egypt and Jordan, should significantly increase the economic and diplomatic pressure on Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to crack down on terror, and closely supervise the reconstitution of the Palestinian security services for this purpose.  Arafat and the Palestinian leadership should be held accountable and publicly condemned for failing to take action, and given credit when they do. Egyptian President Mubarak stated on “60 Minutes” while in Washington during June 2002 that if Arafat doesn’t act against terror, the Egyptians will help overthrow him!   Such statements suggest that Arafat’s support has seriously eroded among key Arab leaders.  Much more carrot:  At the same time that pressures are applied, the payoff for compliance must be clear and strong enough to motivate full and consistent Palestinian anti-terror efforts.   An international peace conference should be convened in which the US, the EU moderate Arab states and the UN Secretary General will endorse a peace plan based on the Taba proposal and Crown Prince Abdullah’s offer of normal relations between Israel and the Arab states in exchange for withdrawal from 95% of the occupied territories, with allowance made for border modifications.   The US and other countries should press both Palestinians and Israelis to accept a peace treaty based on these parameters, with implementation contingent on Palestinian fulfillment of its commitment to work assiduously with Israel to prevent terror and all forms of armed violence, with the US serving as arbiter of both sides’ performance.   That would begin to realize the idea of land for peace.   The US and the UN Security Council would need to act to insure that this condition could not be used by a right-wing Israeli prime minister to undermine the agreement and prevent its realization.  The US would act as an arbiter to determine if the Palestinian side was honoring its commitment to peace and security cooperation.  The Palestinians would have strong incentives to do so, given the relatively near-term payoff of an end to most settlements, Israeli military control of areas where Palestinians live, and the creation of a Palestinian state.

MYTH:  Returning land for peace with the Palestinians can’t work.  The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 and the building of Israeli settlements are not the cause of Palestinian terrorism against Israel.  Wasn’t there a great deal of Palestinian terrorism against Israel in the decades before Israel took control of these areas in 1967? 

FACT:  Yes, that’s true.  For a long time, Palestinians overwhelmingly refused to accept Israel’s right to exist and waged terror against it.  But the attitudes of many in the Palestinian public and its leadership—especially most of those who are likely candidates to succeed Arafat—have undergone change and moderation in the last fifteen years, as did the leadership of Egypt and Jordan, leading to firm peace agreements with Israel.  While there are still Islamists like Hamas and secular rejectionists, many Palestinians have come to accept Israel’s right to live in peace and security.   Palestinian society is now divided between those who favor peace with Israel and those who reject it on any terms whatsoever.  The moderates recognize that peace with Israel is the only realistic and practical path for improving the lives of their people and controlling their own destiny.  A wise Israeli policy will seek to strengthen the forces of moderation in Palestinian society over those of rejection and fundamentalist Islam.  To advantage the moderates and enlist them as allies against the force of Palestinian rejection, Israel and the US should exploit a renewal of peace talks to stimulate parallel Israeli and Palestinian confidence-building measures.  These would help restore an atmosphere of hope and trust on both sides.   

The Mitchell Report recommended that removing isolated Israeli settlements in the heart of heavily populated Palestinian areas, freezing construction on existing settlements, and withdrawing troops to their prior positions before the outbreak of the intifada should follow a Palestinian cease-fire.  However, few believe that a sequential approach of this kind can now work.  A parallel process, under US oversight, in which both sides jointly agree to take positive steps forward, is more likely to work than an approach which relies on all stick and no carrot (Sharon’s way), or, at best, a very small carrot.   Sharon refuses to remove any settlements whatsoever even after a lasting truce takes hold, and insists his government will not discuss any final status issues like settlements, borders, Jerusalem and refugees for a long time to come.  Sharon’s is a formula for continued war and terrorism.  There is a better way. 

QUESTION: What if the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states cannot reach even a partial peace treaty resolving the territorial dimension of the conflict after concerted efforts?  What if the Bush Administration is unwilling or unable to press both sides to take such parallel confidence building measures?

ANSWER:  If even mutual confidence building measures or a partial peace treaty cannot be reached, either because of American unwillingness to exert greater influence, or because concerted efforts by the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states fail, many Israeli military and strategic analysts believe that Israel would be better off executing a unilateral separation from most of the West Bank and Gaza, erecting a border fence, while keeping its forces in the Jordan Valley.  The Council for Peace and Security, whose current president is Major General Daniel Rothschild, is currently urging such a plan.  It would involve withdrawal to defensible borders "somewhat east of the 1967 borders," with evacuation of outlying settlements in the West Bank and all of Gaza, but with buffer forces remaining between Gaza and Egypt and with settlements remaining for the time being in the Jordan Valley.  This evacuation would comprise about 25,000 settlers (10% of the total), and cost $600 million including relocation at comparable living standards within Israel.  Soldiers currently defending them would be redeployed to strengthen defenses along the new lines, which would be military, not political.    With 80-85% of the West Bank and all of Gaza thus given back to the Palestinians, they could declare a state if they wished, and move ahead with economic support from the international community.  Permanent borders would be decided if and when they were willing to negotiate a final settlement.  Jerusalem would be left for the final talks, but would be much more heavily guarded by soldiers redeployed from the evacuated areas. The vote in the Council itself for unilateral separation was 80%.  A poll of Israelis about this option, gained 76% support, across ideological lines.  The Council is waging a campaign for one million Israeli signatures on a petition, to be used to pressure the government in favor of this option.

MYTH:  International law says that in a defensive war to the victor go the spoils.  Since the Six Day War of 1967 was a defensive war for Israel, when it took control of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, Israel is not required under international law to return these territories to the aggressor Arab states or to surrender the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. 

FACT:  While in the nineteenth century international law allowed states to acquire territory by conquest if the defeated state signed a peace treaty ceding the territory to the victor, since the mid-twentieth century,  “any threat or use of force,” whether in self-defense or not, “invalidates acquisition of territory” under international law.   “After the Arab-Israeli hostilities of June 1967, the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations did not condemn either side for committing aggression...But the General Assembly and the Security Council have repeatedly declared by overwhelming majorities that Israel is not entitled to [unilaterally] annex any of the territory which it overran in 1967—which provides further support for the view that the modern [20^th century] prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force applies to all states, and not merely to aggressor states.”  (Peter Malanczuk, Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law, 2000)

QUESTION:  But won’t creating a Palestinian state now in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza reward the suicide bombers who have terrorized Israelis?

ANSWER:  No.  Not if a Palestinian-Israeli agreement to implement it is the political breakthrough which gives the Palestinian leadership and security forces the cover they need to crack down on the terrorist groups in their society, so that the first step in the implementation process is a genuine cease-fire, or a very significant reduction in violence and a return to Palestinian-Israeli security cooperation.   Since the Israeli redeployment of forces, and relocation of settlers from most settlements, would take some time, continued progress could be conditioned on consistent Palestinian adherence to a truce.  Under the unilateral separation option, while Palestinians might regard their territorial gains as a result of their use of violence,  Israel would be positioned much more effectively from a military and strategic point of view to respond to any renewed attacks.   It would no longer have settlements on the Palestinian side of the border, but would still control the Jordan Valley.  It would have a well-patrolled and defended interim border with shorter lines of defense.  Israeli forces would be free now to defend Israel in a clearly defined geographic space, instead of having to divert large numbers of troops to protect isolated settlements. 

QUESTION:  Setting aside the unilateral separation proposal for the moment, why attempt any return to peace talks?   Didn’t we try an agreement like this before and fail?   Didn’t Barak offer something like what you’ve suggested at Camp David and get rebuffed by Arafat? 

ANSWER:  No, this has never been tried, or even proposed before.  At Camp David and Taba, Barak conditioned Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and Gaza on resolving all outstanding final status issues between Palestinians and Israelis, including Jerusalem and refugees, and obtaining a declaration that the conflict has ended.  By playing an all-or-nothing gambit, he risked ending up with nothing if all issues couldn’t be worked out adequately in a relatively short period of negotiations.   In the absence of an agreement after seven years of the Oslo process, and several months of final status talks, many Palestinians lost faith in negotiations with Israel, and supported groups who turned to violence and terror in the hope of coercing Israel to relinquish its military control over the West Bank and Gaza, and to remove the settlements, allowing Palestinians to achieve independence.   The Oslo process left the end point undefined, with no explicit agreement on where things were heading for far too long.   It raised hopes, and left them frustrated.   If reaching the end point must be phased, the destination should be fully agreed at the starting gate, and the implementation should be limited to a much shorter time (perhaps one to three years), so long as both sides meet their main obligations under the agreement, as determined by the US.  The question of territory, settlements and borders should be uncoupled from the other final status issues.   An agreement should be reached laying out the borders of a non-militarized Palestinian state and Israel, determining which settlements become parts of the Jewish state.  A patrolled and fortified border fence should be erected, separating Israelis and Palestinians, greatly enhancing Israeli security.  The Israeli Right and the settlement movement are the main opponents of an agreed border between three and half million Palestinians and six million Israelis.  But such a fenced border would stop most suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israel’s now murderously porous eastern flank, which faces the West Bank.   US-led international forces, perhaps under NATO, should oversee the transition, and remain in place for some time to insure compliance with such a treaty’s strict limits on Palestinian demilitarization.  The charge that proponents of a Palestinian state next to Israel—who include President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—would permit a terrorist state to emerge is a red herring. 

QUESTION:  But haven’t international troops consistently failed to protect Israel from aggression, whether in the Sinai in 1967 or from Lebanon today?   

ANSWER:  Yes and no.  The difference is that in all cases where international peacekeeping troops have failed, they have been inserted into situations, and between countries, which had no peace treaty, so none of the underlying political problems between them have been resolved.  No motivation existed on the Arab side to preserve the status quo, which the peacekeepers monitored.  This is certainly true today of southern Lebanon and Syria, which controls Lebanon; neither have peace treaties today with Israel.  And when Nasser ejected the UN’s toy soldiers from the Sinai in 1967, Egypt was still in a state of war with Israel.  International troops have, on the other hand, successfully monitored compliance with Arab-Israeli peace treaties, when both sides already had an incentive to keep the peace.  US-led international forces have supervised the demilitarization of the bulk of the Sinai Peninsula since the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty for more than twenty years.  

There is another common denominator to the situations in which peacekeeping forces have failed in the Middle East:  they have been UN troops, who had little or no ability to prevent or punish violations, not representatives of great powers like the US who have the wherewithal to act forcefully if necessary.  This suggests that US-led, NATO-staffed peacekeepers monitoring the implementation and transition to a full peace treaty between Israel and a Palestinian state—or even a stable truce leading to a peace treaty—are much more likely to succeed than UN peacekeepers interposed under current conditions in southern Lebanon or in the West Bank, when Hezbollah, Syria and the Palestinians have no desire or reason to cooperate. 

This analysis was written by

Gidon D. Remba

President

Chicago Peace Now