Promoting the rightwing Israeli line in the Canadian press, David Frum makes what a dangerous-to-his-own side argument against the peace process. The problem is contained, let’s have peace without the process, let’s give them economic development on the West Bank and keep building settlements around Jerusalem. Oh and please don’t start any violence, you Palestinians.
It’s not a great deal for the Palestinians, obviously. Certainly not as good a deal as they would have had if they had accepted the deals on offer in 1937 or 1947 or 1968 or 2000. But they didn’t accept those offers, and they have lapsed.
As the unspoken peace takes hold, the world can hope that Palestinian prosperity and Israeli security will soothe old quarrels… the alternative to a signed peace does not have to be fighting.
Frum is saying that the iron wall policy favored by Jabotinsky—they don’t want us here, we must build defeat into them till they sue for peace– has now worked. There is no sense of international law here, and without some idea of fairness there won’t be peace. Frum has said before that the Jewish state is based in international law (League of Nations mandate, Balfour, Partition). But all those rulings also promised that Jerusalem is an international city and the land would be divided in half more or less. After the Arab states lost the ’48 war, they demanded of the UN that Israel move back to the ’47 Partition line (half and half, more or less) but Israel refused, it wanted its expanded, ethnically-cleansed state to include the Galilee and the Negev. The UN rep Folke Bernadotte, who wanted portions of the Galilee to remain Palestinian, was assassinated in ’48 by the Stern gang, led by a future Israeli prime minister; and Bernadotte’s successor, Ralph Bunche, duly awarded the territories to the Israelis, establishing the Green Line east of all but a quarter of the land. Bernadotte feared that there would be endless strife over the borders, and he was right. And the Palestinians and Arab states accepted that unfair division in ’88 and 2002, two dates Frum doesn’t cite.
Because they want the West Bank and East Jerusalem now too. Netanyahu says that Jerusalem has belonged to the Jews for 3000 years, but Bernadotte, Herzl and others sought the internationalization of the city. The Peel commission, which Frum cites above, would have established a huge international zone from Bethlehem and Jerusalem to the great Arab city of Jaffa on the coast. Frum’s assertion that the offer has lapsed is in essence the statement, We have the hammer, you don’t, and now we have as much of the West Bank as we need, and the Palestinians are reduced to fragments. The only principle here is essentially imperialist: the U.S. is on our side.
If Frum were lecturing me like that I’d dig in my heels and imagine ways to foil him. I would think just what Palestinians are always accused of thinking: let’s wait them out, let Israel swallow all the land and find it ungovernable, and then demand democracy, a state of all its citizens. The struggle against apartheid that Olmert and Barak have both predicted is upon us. I never understood why these guys didn’t push for two states to save Israel. I imagine in Frum’s case it is feelings of Jewish supremacy and Holocaust apprehension that drive his madness. And his ideas have had power, here and in Israel, which is why the two-state solution is widely thought to be dead.
