For a year I've thought that the best analysis of the peace process is Henry Siegman's fabulous piece in LRB last year saying it has been a "scam" aimed at covering Israel's accession of more territory. Now here is a rival: a piece on Tom Friedman in the latest Tikkun, by Jerry Slater.
The heart of Slater's piece is the idea that Friedman is given to "glib" and derisive commentary about Arafat at Camp David and in the subsequent intifada when an actual and patient scrutiny of the best accounts of Camp David show decisively that Arafat was right not to accept Barak's vague deal. Slater wrote last year about how Times coverage of the situation has hurt American policymaking by depriving our leaders of any sense of what is really going on there. And the importance to Slater of Friedman is that he has done more than anyone else to bolster a mythology: that the Palestinians don't want peace, that they want to destroy the Jewish state, that they walked away from a good offer. This mythology is now absorbed by the educated and influential in the U.S., and it is hobbling statecraft. Friedman has to know better. And so he is guilty of a "moral" irresponsibility.
Some of Slater's excerpts. First, on Camp David:
outlines of what Barak verbally seemed to be offering at Camp David: a
demilitarized Palestinian state in some 85-90% of the occupied
territories, but with Israel retaining (1) most of Jerusalem, (2) most
of the largest Jewish settlements, typically located on the most
fertile lands in the West Bank and some of them extending far from the
Green Line into the Palestinian areas, (3) most of the West Bank water
aquifers, and (4) direct military control over the Jordan River valley
and adjacent mountains.
Thus, if Arafat had accepted Barak’s
concept of a “fair and generous” settlement, the Palestinians would
have gained only a tiny, impoverished, water-starved Palestinian
“state,” divided into at least three different enclaves—in effect,
Bantustans separated from each other by Israeli armed forces, roads,
and settlements.
On the Palestinian violence:
intifada: What would that prove? For centuries it has been an
established tradition in the West (and certainly in the United States)
that an oppressed people who have exhausted political methods of
redress have a right of armed revolution. In that case, it was hardly
unreasonable—let alone “idiotic,” “insane,” etc—for the Palestinians to
have concluded in 2000 that political methods of redress had failed.
To
be sure, armed revolution must be distinguished from terrorism; attacks
on an oppressive state and its military forces may sometimes be
legitimate, but attacks on innocent civilians can never be.It has been widely (and conveniently)
forgotten, and not only by Thomas Friedman, that in its early stages
the Palestinian uprising did not employ terrorism. Indeed, there was
very little Palestinian armed violence against anyone in the
first few weeks of the intifada, during which hardly any Israelis were
killed—although hundreds of Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli
police and military units.
Even after the Palestinians turned
to violence, Arafat and other Palestinian leaders repeatedly stated
that the intifada was not directed against the state or the people of
Israel proper (i.e. within its pre-1967 boundaries) but only against
the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
And on Friedman's errors:
conflict, especially in the first three or four years after Camp David,
Friedman utilized this complete freedom from criticism and
accountability (1) to make arguments, statements, and charges that had
been repeatedly demonstrated to be factually wrong; (2) to make a
number of assertions for which there was no evidence, as if they were
so self-evident that no evidence was required; (3) to oversimplify and
even, on occasion, vulgarize the issues; and (4) on several occasions
to indulge in emotional diatribes that managed to be simultaneously
unpersuasive and self-contradictory.
