Dr James J. Zogby, President of Arab American Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan national leadership organisation/Middle East Monitor
Preventing Palestine is an insightful book that sheds lights on Israeli intransigence, and failure of successive US administrations and regional leaders
Seth Anziska’s ‘Preventing Palestine: A Political History From Camp David to Oslo’ is a deeply insightful and profoundly disturbing book that traces the tortuous path of Middle East peacemaking during the past four decades. It was quite painful to read.
Having been a close observer and sometimes participant in many o
f the developments that have unfolded since the end of the 1973 War, Anziska opened old wounds while shedding new light on the painful events and acts of betrayal that have shaped recent Palestinian history. Through all of the twists and turns of this period, the brutal wars and the diplomatic initiatives, the one constant that emerges is the determined Israeli refusal to recognise the Palestinian right to self-determination and statehood and the self-serving acquiesce to their intransigence by successive American administrations and key Arab leaders.
The culprits are many. In Anziska’s telling of this history, we can find faults with most of the parties to the conflict — all of the United States administrations that were involved during this period: Israeli prime ministers, whether from Labor or Likud; Egyptian presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak; Lebanon’s Phalange Party; and, in the end, even the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Yasser Arafat.
Digging deep into the official records of the Israelis, Egyptians, Americans, Palestinians and others who participated in the region’s wars and various diplomatic endeavours, Anziska mines government and research centre archives unearthing contemporaneous accounts, minutes of meetings, and official communiques — providing the story behind the story of events as they unfolded.
Especially fascinating were: The internal debates that took place in Israeli cabinet meetings and how, at times, they would don a diplomatic mask of accommodation, while clinging to their firm refusal to surrender sovereignty of Palestinian lands or recognise the existence of a Palestinian nation; the discussions that occurred between former US president Jimmy Carter and his aides; the frustrations expressed by former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s various foreign ministers over his betrayal of the Palestinian cause; the way Israel’s Ariel Sharon rudely manhandled US emissaries and their cowering in the face of his belligerence; the way Israel’s Menachem Begin initially sought to pose as the saviour of the Christians of Lebanon only to “turn on a dime” after they refused to sign a peace agreement on Israel’s terms.
What emerges as key to the denial of Palestinian rights is the self-imposed paralysis of American decision-makers in the face of Israeli intransigence — resulting from successive administration’s fears of the domestic political fallout that might follow any pressure the US might apply on Israel. Time and again, US principals grew impatient with Israeli ploys and their hardline refusal to recognise and grant national rights to Palestinians, only to back down after advisers cautioned them of the political consequences that might result. There were no American “profiles in courage” emerging from Anziska’s book.
Carter, for example, began his term with a pledge to realise a “homeland” for the Palestinians. In line with his administration’s commitment to human rights, Carter was moved to end their suffering in exile and under occupation. The vehicle he envisioned to initiate the path towards this goal was an international all-party conference to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carter’s efforts were ultimately upended by a combination of:
* Israel’s refusal to participate in any forum that would question their claim of sovereignty over the Palestinian territories;
* Sadat’s resolve to achieve a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace without the Palestinians, despite his public pronouncements to the contrary;
* and the pressure from the American Jewish community, which caused sufficient enough discomfort within the White House to cause Carter to back away from pressing Israel to cede land or political rights to the Palestinians.
In the end, Carter acceded to the pressure and shepherded the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.
Horrific invasion
Throughout the next four decades the region witnessed the horrific Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon (together with the aerial bombardments that devastated Beirut and the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps), two Palestinian uprisings, and repeated failed American efforts at peacemaking.
During this time, the US dithered, professing to want to solve the conflict, but refusing to apply the pressure needed to make it happen. As Anziska observes, throughout this entire period, the Israelis, while agreeing to negotiate, insisted on their exclusive sovereignty over the Occupied Territories and their “God-given right” to colonise them. These were not topics they would discuss. In communiques, they repeatedly chided their American interlocutors rejecting the designation “occupied territories” and insisting on the terms “Judea and Samaria”. They also rejected the term “Palestinian people”, referring to them, instead, as “Arab inhabitants”.