Long backgrounder on Israel, with much less Israeli bias than most of the US media:
nybooks.com
The government informed the United States that Israel was ready to withdraw from occupied Egyptian and Syrian territory in return for peace; but it explicitly excluded withdrawal from the West Bank or Gaza Strip. No evidence has turned up so far that American diplomats actually sounded out Cairo and Damascus about a deal based on Israeli withdrawal. An attempt, a few years ago, by The New York Review of Books to induce the US National Archives to release diplomatic documents pertinent to these exchanges under the Freedom of Information Act produced no results. Not a single US cable, report, or verbal communication turned up to indicate that in the summer of 1967 an attempt was made by the US to begin a peace process. We can only speculate on the reasons for US failure to do so.
The author proceeds to speculate on the reasons, but for some reason Jewish and pro-Israeli political influence in the American government doesn't even rate a mention.
The Palestinians were still remarkably docile; they had allowed the West Bank to be conquered [in the 1967 war] in a few hours without firing a single shot.
Bear in mind that Zionists like to claim they have legal right to the West Bank because they were attacked from it.
But was this really the conflict facing Israel? We now know that it wasn't. Peace was a distinct possibility - with the Palestinians as early as the summer of 1967, with Jordan and Egypt in 1971 and 1972. Soon after the 1967 war, two senior Israeli intelligence officers - one was David Kimche, who later served as deputy director of Mossad and director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry - interviewed prominent Palestinian civic and political leaders throughout the West Bank, including intellectuals, notables, mayors, and religious leaders. He reported that most of them said they were ready to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank that would sign a separate peace with Israel. The PLO at the time was still a fairly marginal group. Kimche's report, as far as we know, was shelved by Dayan. It was never submitted to the cabinet.
This is stunning --- not the details listed by the author, but the fact that he actually is allowed to state them in the media! And he continues:
The truth was that despite the "Three No's" of Khartoum, direct negotiations with Jordan began soon after the Six-Day War, by 1970 with King Hussein himself. Even while Golda Meir was publicly lamenting, "If the Arabs would only sit down with us at a table like decent human beings and talk!," her representatives were secretly meeting the King. Hussein flew his own helicopter to Tel Aviv and was taken by Dayan on a tour of the city by night. The King was ready to make peace with Israel if Israel withdrew from much of the West Bank as well as from East Jerusalem and if the Muslim and Christian holy places in the Old City were restored to Jordan. The King was ready to make concessions to Israel along the narrow coastal plain and at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel would not hear of it.
Two interesting facts:
1. Though 70 percent of Israeli voters say in the polls that they support abandoning some of the settlements, 400,000 settlers and their right-wing and Orthodox supporters within Israel proper now control at least half the national vote.
2. The occupation was, by and large, a paying proposition. Until the first intifada twenty years later its costs were more than covered by taxes on the Palestinian population as well as by turning the West Bank and Gaza into a captive market for Israeli-produced goods and services.
Tom |
