How Israel Lost

Read this really interesting book called “How Israel Lost” by Richard Ben Cramer. I don’t know why I sold it off but I guess it was a little lightweight, even though it was one of the most interesting books I’ve read about the Israel – Palestinian conflict I have read. This book is very different from the previous one I’ve read, “Gun and the Olive Branch”, which took a very anti-Israel slant towards the whole affair, detailing incident after incident where the Israel military crushes the helpless Palestinians under their own wheels.

This account is altogether more nuanced, and looks at it from the ground level. There are fewer facts and figures here but a few very well chosen anecdotes which reveal the nuances more clearly than the mere numbers.

The reality is a little more complicated. Yes the Israeli occupation is cruel but a lot of it comes from the very understandable insecurity that their nation is constantly in peril. On the other hand, Israel is a democracy where even the leaders are beholden to the bloodlust of its population. Democracies are not exactly peace loving countries, because when the people feel that they have to “take a hard line”, then there is this irrational attitude that military action is a great thing.

More specifically, the main obstacle to peace are the settlers on West Bank. No politician in Israel will ever risk his career to order them to leave. Many of them are fundamentalist nuts who believe that they are on a God ordained promised land. Many others are rabble rousers who have nothing better to do than to stir up shit with the Palestinians. (I’m paraphrasing).

At the same time, the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat was hopelessly corrupt. He runs it like a Godfather. Like most corrupt leaders, he is partially at fault, and partially he understands that granting cash and favours is one of the most convenient and easiest ways to maintain his hold on power. (I suddenly had this great respect for LKY and understood that his method of “breaking heads” did have a real purpose in a particular setting and time, albeit not now.)

One of the most startling charges is that there was a pact that Yitzhak Rabin made with Yasser Arafat. Just before the White House handshake, Yasser Arafat was a marginal figure living in exile in Tunisia. Rabin brought back Arafat because he had had enough of the uprising by the Palestinians and was actually using him to help control his own Palestinians! He hoped to buy time in order to fulfil his own side of the bargain, which was to uproot settlers. Unfortunately even that was too much for his own people. So he was shot, just like Anwar Sadat got shot for signing the Egypt – Israel peace pact.

So there were 2 nearly symmetrical stories which illustrate why peace is almost impossible. One concerned an Israeli who had a dream to build a house on the settlements. His relationship with his neighbours had a tentative start, because he found out that he wasn’t an Orthodox Jew fundamentalist that his neighbours but he ignored the warning signs. Eventually he grew friendly with the Palestinians in the neighbouring village and sometimes went there to hang out. One day their disapproval over this was so great that they burnt his house down. It was a house that he had spent much of his life savings and a few years trying to build. He tried to appeal to the Israeli authorities about this but nobody would lift a finger to help him because nobody wants to be seen helping a traitor.

Another concerned a lively and enterprising Palestinian. He set up a business shipping stuff in and out of Iraq. Unfortunately he was seen as favouring Israeli businessmen who were less corrupt than the Palestinians. He remained friendly to a few Israeli partners in spite of receiving warnings not to do so. In the end, he was captured and tortured by the Palestinian authorities, had the crap beaten out of him, and disowned by his family.

One way of understanding Palestinians is that Arabs have a very deep rooted concept of honour, and it’s as important to them as face is to us Chinese. Life in Palestine is oppressive in not small part because of all the checkpoints that the Israelis set up. Because most of the good jobs are in Israel, there are people who have to cross the checkpoints every day (think about the motorbikes on our causeway). And every day they are subjected to humiliating searches and threats of violence.

It is definitely an insult to your honour if you have to be subjugated to another country and still have to be forced to go there to work in order to earn a living.

Suicide bombing is a way of getting back your lost honour. You get proclaimed to be a hero in your village. It is unfortunate that Arab culture is like that but many people all over the world (but definitely not all) do see that it is understandable. Wrong but understandable.

The other thing is that there are vested interests in getting the system to work the way that it is working now. A handful of Israeli and Palestinian businessmen import petrol and other goods from Israel to Palestine, and makes a windfall by charging exorbitant prices. These businessmen are working hand in hand with the Palestinian authorities – the PA ensures the safety of these trucks. Think – no suicide bomber will attack them even though they belong to the Israelis. That’s because the suicide bombers are in for the honour, and they also know that their entire clan will be murdered if they try anything funny on these trucks.

One other big debate on the peace issue was this. It is known that when, in a last ditch to save the peace process, Clinton, Barak and Arafat met at Camp David in 2000 to negotiate a peace treaty. Apparently they were terms favourable to Arafat, and people were all saying that this is the best deal that Arafat will ever get, and were puzzled when he refused to sign it. They jumped on this as proof that he is completely intransigent.

Well not quite. The deal says that he will get 99% of West Bank. But that 99% of West Bank is 3 walled ghettoes surrounded by criss crossing highways that cut through the land. It’s as though Malaysia were to conquer Singapore, then cut a deal with us saying, “we’ll give you back everything, 99% of the land except for CTE, ECP and PIE, and you’ll have to build a wall around those expressways.” I think we would reject, too.