WHY WAR? UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL & PALESTINE

Remember September 28, 2000? If not, you can’t understand why there is a war today — and why we are to blame.

What “pro-Palestinians” think a peacemaker looks like.

The terror of October 7 has been justified by vast numbers of Western observers as an inevitable, unavoidable consequence of Palestinian oppression, as if violence is the only option oppressed Palestinians have to resolve their situation.

This attitude reflects a vast historical ignorance of the Palestinian condition — and a moral black hole for overseas activists who, in every other situation, put our faith in peaceful negotiation before violence.

Peace and Palestinian self-determination had never been closer than when Palestinians showed a glimmer of inclination toward peaceful negotiation. They have never been further away than when Palestinians reverted to violence.

Palestinian terror is not only morally wrong (this should not need to be said, but it apparently does) — it is also strategically wrong. Violence will never “free Palestine.” Only negotiation, compromise and coexistence will do that.

But the Palestinians’ bad decision to choose violence is their problem. The worldwide movement to endorse and reward that violence — that’s on us.

Western activists, especially we who call ourselves progressives, made a grievous, cataclysmic choice to side with Palestinians when they reverted to violence. Instead, we should have demanded that they continue negotiating like members of civilized society.

What have we (and Palestinians) got in return for 25 years of violence? More death, as we see in the tragic current war. And the vision of a two-state solution in hopeless tatters.

How did we get here?

*

For most of us, September 28, 2000, was not a momentous Thursday. Most Canadians, Americans and Europeans did not even register events that day, half way around the world. It would take a couple of weeks or months before most people would get a handle on what started then.

Now, almost a quarter-century later, as we lament the growing number of dead in a cataclysmic war, we can pinpoint that day as one of the most significant turning points in the history not only of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in the moral collapse of Western approaches to this issue specifically and nonviolence more broadly.

*

Throughout the 1990s, the peace process that began at Oslo in 1993 was progressing, and we had reason to believe that that troubled region was moving slowly but inevitably toward a two-state solution, however imperfect.

In 1994, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in recognition of the beginnings of what were to be several significant steps toward a lasting peace. In agreements at Washington, in 1993, and at Taba, Egypt, in 1995, the process was laid out intending to lead to an independent Palestine living in peace beside Israel.

There were a lot of topics still being negotiated five years later: The exact situation of borders, the fate of Jewish settlements within the land designated for a Palestinian state, the precise nature of Jerusalem as a city claimed by two nations as their capital, and the Palestinians’ claim for a right of refugees to return to the places they (or their ancestors) had left since 1947-’48.

But, while negotiations may have been slow, they were ongoing. Until September 28, 2000.

On that date, Palestinians began rioting in what would become a five-year orgy of violence known as the Second Intifada (“uprising” or “shaking off”). In the chaotic days immediately after, all variety of explanations were tossed around for this reversion to violence.

It was presented as a spontaneous upheaval by ordinary Palestinians, but it soon became clear that it was stage-managed with full intention by Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement — precisely the “moderate” forces we were led to believe were Israel’s partner for peace.

The world did not know, on September 28, 2000, that this was the beginning of a five-year-long clash of terrorism and counter-terrorism. But even hindsight does not excuse the world’s reaction.

As one, we should have condemned the violence and insisted that the Palestinians return to the negotiating table.

Negotiations were tough and the issues they were addressing were — and are — extremely difficult. But political violence should never be an option where peaceful negotiation remains a viable alternative. So the Palestinians made a terrible choice that day, but it was in keeping with their history of using violence as a first resort.

For people around the world — and especially for people who self-identify as progressives, or leftists, or humanitarians — an equally immoral consensus was taking shape. In a way that social scientists still need to assess, world opinion quickly galvanized as the realization dawned that the Palestinians were rejecting the options presented through peaceful negotiation and were instead returning to violence and terror as a political strategy.

A sizeable European and North American consensus seemed to support the Palestinians and condemn the Israelis, a response that should have confounded anyone who believes in nonviolence and peace.

More stunning was the realization that it was progressives who were the vanguard in siding with Palestinian terror.

What should we have done? What power would we have, as Canadian, American or European activists, to influence peace there?

On that day, when the Palestinian street, incited by the Palestinian leadership, began its Second Intifada, our only moral and consistent course was to absolutely and unequivocally bring to bear every scrap of influence we had through our activist movements, our locals, our churches, our universities, our governments to pressure the Palestinian people and leadership, demanding that they cling to any slim chance for a lasting, negotiated peace.

For all the solidarity missions, peace convoys and fact-finding trips undertaken by Western trade unionists, socialists, progressives, church groups and others over the decades, did we really have no influence when the time came and our great cause and ally, the Palestinians, launched a new war?

If we did have any influence, why didn’t we use it?

If we didn’t have any influence, what have our solidarity groups been doing over there?

In retrospect, it may have seemed to some progressives that a little bit of stone-throwing might improve the bargaining position of the Palestinians.

Presumably we thought the violence would soon dissipate. We didn’t know it would carry with it so many lives and hopes. We justified a little violence, maybe with a frisson of the vicarious ecstasy we see among suburban thrill-seeking activists who chant about “resistance” amid the current conflagration.

Whatever our thoughts, or lack thereof, when we bent our principles in this one instance to support Palestinian violence, it might not have seemed like such a big deal at the time.

But things progressed. As it became clear that Arafat was personally behind the “spontaneous” uprising, the Palestinians’ tactics of choice moved quickly from rock-throwing to suicide bombings, eviscerations, beheadings and other grisly affronts to humanity. And Western activists responded with variations of More. More, More!

A vast range of post facto justifications were trotted out to explain (and excuse) Palestinian terror. 

They must have known the entire peace process was bogus, Western activists declared. They were never going to get a fair deal, we concluded. Violence, we figured, was their only means of getting justice.

If these rationalizations did not fit geopolitical realities, it didn’t seem to bother us. What should have bothered us more was the abandonment of the very idea of peaceful negotiation and the endorsement of violence. By supporting this depraved turn of events, we made a choice as activists that flushed any moral validity we have as nonviolent peace advocates down the drain.

By concluding that Palestinian violence was justified, we not only obliterated our own integrity. History has shown what we should have known then: that we ensured peace and Palestinian self-determination were indefinitely shoved off the table.

By killing the peace process, Palestinians condemned another generation to violence and condemned thousands of Palestinians (and still counting) to death.

By siding uncritically with that decision, Western activists not only rewarded that strategy. We drove our movements off a cliff of cataclysmic moral disaster.

*

Under the Oslo Process, the sole substantive obligation of the Palestinians was to permit Israelis to live with a reasonable expectation of peace. In exchange, Israel would institute a vast number of steps leading to an independent Palestinian state, at no small cost and with great compromise to its own security. Israel carried its load down the long path to peace, though it blanched at negotiating final-status issues until it had a reasonable expectation that the Palestinians would fulfill their one obligation and demonstrate a willingness to coexist.

Anyone who saw what was happening on the ground in Palestine knew Palestinians were not remotely prepared to coexist.

While Arafat was supposed to be creating a viable state prepared to take its place among the nations, he was instead pocketing billions of dollars that were flowing in from Europe, the United States, Canada and other countries meant to build the infrastructure of an independent Palestine.

The Palestinians’ sole promised concession — the one commitment upon which the entire peace process hung — was to stop inculcating in yet another generation of young Palestinians the view of Jews as mortal enemies who must be killed.

In educational curriculum (paid for in part by Western governments and the UN), in Sesame Street-type television programs, in the veneration of mass-murdering “martyrs,” in the naming of schools, parks and soccer fields after terrorists, Palestine in the 1990s was perpetuating its decades of anti-Israel (and incontestably antisemitic) propaganda. It was doubling down. At the very time when Arafat’s government was supposed to be preparing his people to live in peace, he was turning what had already been a society steeped in genocidal Jew-hatred into a suicidal death cult.

On the Israeli side, from 1993 onward, political leaders were preparing their electorate — and the Israelis were the only partners in the peace process who had to concern themselves about the views of a democratic electorate — to accept massive compromises, including security risks, in hopes of a lasting peace.

The Palestinian reversion to violence itself was so counterintuitive, so illogical and irrational, that the justifications for it were necessarily outlandish in their credulity.

A host of complaints about Oslo and its subsequent offers was paraded out: Israel offered nothing more than a collection of Bantustans. (So why did Arafat agree in the first place?). The Palestinians couldn’t get a fair deal out of the Israelis. (Even with the support of the whole diplomatic world?) The Israelis’ “generous” offer was, in fact, bubkes. (Which should have raised questions — but didn’t and still hasn’t — about just how much the Palestinians would consider “enough.”)

At the core of the emerging progressive/Palestinian narrative was the premise that the Palestinians were somehow unequal partners at the negotiating table.

Well, so they should have been. 

The very fact of their statelessness was a result of the Arab world’s successive efforts to eradicate Israel. After Israeli victories in the Arab-initiated wars of 1947-’48 and 1967, Israel had control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and should have rightfully held the upper hand. The defeated rarely get to set the terms of the peace.

And yet, Israel had demonstrated they were willing to wipe the historical slate clean. Israeli leaders — and, according to opinion polls, Israeli people — were willing to make almost every compromise imaginable in the faint hope of peace.

Abroad, the Palestinians had almost universal international diplomatic goodwill on their side. In vote after excruciating vote, the United Nations for decades has indicated near unanimity in uncritically supporting the Palestinian cause. The European Union pumped billions of dollars into building an independent Palestine. Under Bill Clinton, the United States, long an ally of Israel, was acting as a moderate broker to ensure a fair settlement for both sides.

The world, without a diplomatic exception including Israel’s fiercest ally, the United States, was unanimous in seeking a resolution satisfactory to the Palestinians. Little more than a wink and a nod would have brought world opinion in line with a revision of the agreement if the Palestinians had expressed any legitimate concerns about its fairness or contents. Any doubts about this can be dispelled by the fact that world opinion almost immediately came to support, or at the very least uncritically justify, the Palestinian intifada which, by any measure, should have been much more jagged a pill to swallow than a glitch in negotiations.

But the Palestinians didn’t appeal to their massive network of global allies. They didn’t explain their position to the UN or to the European powers. They didn’t even express to the American facilitators of the process what alternatives could keep them from reverting to violence.

They simply refused to negotiate. They didn’t make a counter-offer. They kicked over the negotiating table and began an orgy of violence that continues to this day and has brought Palestinian self-determination not closer, but further away.

And what did Western activists do in response? We rewarded violence. We concluded, despite mountains of evidence, that peace was never going to work out for Palestinians. (How is war working out for you?) We determined that violence, in this case, was legit.

We abandoned our most sacred values of nonviolence to justify the unjustifiable because, we somehow concluded, if Palestinians thought Israelis needed to die in bombings on buses, in cafes and at discotheques, well, they must know better than we do how to free Palestine.

On October 7, that decision came to full fruition.

The Palestinian decision to choose violence as a strategy of first resort killed whatever hope there was left for peaceful coexistence — just as it has killed thousands of Israelis and, now, tens of thousands of Palestinians. And, true to form, a vast swath of overseas “allies” lined up right alongside the beheading, raping, immolating, kidnapping, mass murdering terrorists.

Overseas “pro-Palestinian” (why scoff quotes? See my post “Pro-Palestinians Aren’t”) have stood shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian terrorists every time they have fallen to more heinous depths of violent depravity.

This might — might! — have been justifiable if peaceful negotiation had never been a viable option.

But Israel has always been prepared to negotiate, to return to the table Arafat overthrew on September 28, 2000. It has always been Palestinian leaders who chose violence.

What is truly atrocious is that Western activists — as well as the United Nations, European and North American foreign ministries, church groups, trade unions, activists and others — have stood unflinchingly on the side of that violence.

On September 28, 2000, the world should have demanded that Palestinians renounce violence and rejoin the Israelis at the negotiating table.

On October 7, 2023, we saw the consequences of our failure to do so.

Since then, as tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, the consequences of our catastrophically failed moral compass have become clear.

Palestinians and their overseas “allies” seeded the wind on September 28, 2000.

Since October 7, tens of thousands of Palestinian dead and many more wounded and displaced have reaped the whirlwind.

Western activists crowd onto the streets, condemning Israel in the most venomous (and, very often, conventionally antisemitic) manner.

A little history would go a long way here. If these same activists had not rewarded Palestinian violence beginning on September 28, 2000, they would probably not have needed to mourn Palestinian deaths since October 7, 2023.

One catastrophic decision led to another. But “pro-Palestinian” activists don’t care. They blame everyone but those who deserve the blame — themselves and the Palestinian leaders whose violence they have endorsed for a quarter-century.

Nice job freeing Palestine.