231 Westmount Drive South

Orillia ON L3V 6E5

26 July 2002

The Hon. William Graham, Minister,

Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade

Lester B. Pearson Bldg.

Ottawa, Ontario

Dear Sir:

Re: Peace in West Asia

Palestine has been at the crossroads of invading armies and migrations, voluntary and forced, involving three continents for more than 7,000 years. The people we now call Palestinians have not known self-government, or basic freedoms, for many centuries.

An attempt was made by the United Nations in 1947 to begin a new era. It collapsed amidst the endemic warfare, but the principle of partitioning disputed land has since come into its own and is accepted, however grudgingly, by the Arab League. The world has moved further away from resolving the conflict in West Asia with each year of drift since 1967, yet there is still hope of ending that 7,000-year record of human suffering.

My only purpose in writing to you is to humbly suggest some ways to move towards a just peace.

Although condescending bureaucrats often say that a Minister cannot be expected to read more than two pages on any one subject, I have confidence that you, with an academic background, will read the attached essay. It is long because there is a need to provide some historical and factual balance to what has become a modern mythology, spawned in Jerusalem and grown in Washington. Until we dispense with the myths we will never get down to the real agendas.

I have no partisan axe to grind. I am not connected to, nor do I support, any faction. Like you, I hope to see a just and durable peace in Israel/Palestine in our lifetime.

Yours very truly,

Allan Millard

Essay on Peace in West Asia

About the Author

Allan Millard graduated from the University of Toronto in Political Science and Economics in 1956. He was very active, on and off campus, in political debate and action on national and international issues. He completed post-graduate studies in Politics at Queen's University, Kingston.

After extensive travel, Millard joined the Department of External Affairs as a Foreign Service Officer in November 1957. He spent his probationary year in the Far Eastern Division (Indochina then China desks) and was posted to Tel Aviv, Israel, arriving there in December 1958.

Millard visited every part of Israel from the Lebanese border to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba. He reported to Ottawa on economic matters, including Israel's developing aid and trade ties to East Africa and East Asia. He had close contact with Histadrut (labour federation) officials and with civil engineers engaged in water resource development. He toured the 108-inch water pipeline project to divert most of the Jordan River to central Israel. He also had a unique opportunity to see Israel from the air, at low altitude, when the Israeli Defence Forces gave members of Canada's National Defence College a tour in a DC-3 paratroop plane (with its wide door missing).

Millard travelled to East Jerusalem many times, and to other parts of Jordan (Amman and the West Bank). He travelled by automobile to Lebanon several times and took his family by car through Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece. He also visited Egypt with American officials from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.

On his return to Canada in August 1961 Millard served in the Far Eastern Division, at the Southeast Asia desk. In February 1964, after en-route visits to Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, he arrived in New Delhi for what was to become an extended posting, until the summer of 1968. His principal reporting area was India's economy (the Five-Year Plans) and advising on Canada's aid policy towards India. While posted to India, Millard travelled on official business to most Indian States and Nepal (twice), and on his own time, by car, twice each to Kashmir and Afghanistan, and three times to (West) Pakistan, including once to Pakistani Kashmir.

Millard left External Affairs in 1970 to take up senior positions with public service unions from 1970 to 1977. He obtained an LL. B. from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1980 and was a sole practitioner in Toronto from 1982 until retirement. He now lives in Orillia, Ontario.

Peace in West Asia

an essay by AlIan Millard

The purpose is to urge upon the Government of Canada an ethical, principled way towards peace based on an objective interpretation of history and current events. The plan is to move back and forth between the past and the present to dispel enduring myths and thereby to illuminate the way forward. Two central themes are that there is broad but not unanimous international agreement on the eventual shape of a just and durable peace in West Asia, and that there is little political will in some key quarters to move towards that peace.

It is well known that any criticism, however mild, of one side or the other will evoke a strong, visceral attack on the critic. The purpose of this tactic is obvious, and one can only deplore the simplistic way in which the current Administration in the United States has reinforced the notion that anyone who is not unquestioningly with us must be against us (and the corollary that the friend or sympathizer of my "enemy" is equally my enemy.) Those who would reduce the issues in West Asia to a matter of being for or against one side or the other are setting a trap for the unwary. Intimidation and extremism must not be permitted to push either individual peace-seekers or governments off the path of realism, honesty, and moral integrity in the cause of a just peace. "Taking sides" is choosing between violence and non-violence, between might and right, and between expediency and integrity in the search for a lasting resolution of the conflict.

The Government of Canada must not to be caught up in short-term responses to the current violence. It may be tempting to say: A plague on both your houses! while side-stepping the underlying cause of the violence. Reducing the violence is important, but no one should be deluded into thinking that it is either the first step towards peace or the pre-requisite to taking a first step. One will not lead to the other without, to use the current jargon, a political context. The loss of life will continue unless the underlying cause is addressed and seen to be addressed.

Middle East or West Asia

How you describe a region and its people is not inconsequential. The terms "Near East", "Middle East", and "Far East" betray, at the least, a Eurocentric mind-set and, at worst, acceptance of colonialist and imperialistic views of the world. Those terms also play into the hands of those who wish to polarize the world into East and West. We have no hesitation in using descriptions like Central Asia, or South and Southeast Asia. Asian nations, like China, and even American and European dictionaries have been using "West Asia" for decades. I strongly recommend that we jettison the baggage of "Middle East" and use the neutral and more accurate "West Asia".

Governments are obviously constrained by considerations of electoral politics, and nowhere in foreign affairs is this more obvious in Canada than in questions touching on West Asia. Nevertheless, and even though we like to think that we are not seen as a threat to other nations, we are now so much of an adjunct to the United States that we should, for our own security, adopt language, terminology, and policies tending to show that, when it comes to West Asia, we can be differentiated. In the name of a just peace, temporary unpopularity in Canada among one small but vocal group is surely not too high a price for the sake of both national security and international integrity.

Window of Opportunity - the 2002 Saudi Proposal

Earlier in 2002 the Arab League met in Beirut to discuss the so-called Saudi peace proposal, which was duly approved. The predictable Israeli rejection was unusual, even for Israel, in its sophistry, but the proposal is clearly a major concession in Arab policy. The cynical view would be that the Arab world made the offer knowing that Israeli rejection would relieve the Arab League of its commitment to accept the existence of the State of Israel. The better view, I submit, is that, just as the rest of the world (through U. N. resolutions) has implicitly accepted Israel's seizure of territory in the 1947-49 war, so reality also prevails in Arab capitals. We in the West may criticize the Palestinians for allegedly missing opportunities, but it would be a grievous error for us to miss the opportunity the Arab League has handed the world. The test of sincerity set by the Arab League was not for Israel, for we know its position, but for the U.S. A. and any of its friends, like Canada, who are seen to share the American moral blindness in West Asia. So far, we are failing the test, and the consequences will be disastrous.

Although peace is not a game, the expression "calling one's bluff" comes immediately to mind. The Arabs called Israel's and the response has been most instructive. Israel, and its apologists here, like Mr. Norman Spector (former Canadian ambassador), were quick to parse the Saudi proposal and Arab League resolution to find minor differences in language which, they said, showed Arab trickery, or worse, and which justified Israeli suspicion and rejection. This response makes sense only to the Zionist faithful, on an emotional and racist level, but it makes quite different sense to anyone who understands that the modern history of the Jews in Palestine has been, and continues to be, predicated upon occupation and control of the whole of ancient Palestine. Fault will be found with any Arab plan or proposal, or U.N. resolution for that matter, which wrests control of the West Bank from Israel.

The word games played by Israel and people like Spector are designed to conceal, not reveal. It

might be useful, in a gentle but pointed way, for the Government to state that it takes the Arab League proposal at face value and as having been genuinely made in the interests of peace.

Rhetoric and Reason

While Prime Minister Sharon, his ministers, and spokespeople are very cleverly and effectively using the Bush Administration's vocabulary on terror, destroying the "networks", and self-defence to justify their killing and arresting of Palestinians and the destruction of any viable Palestinian "Authority" even in small bits of the West Bank, the Palestinians are in fact still talking about the root causes, the real issues, and the real Israeli goals. Even if others are deaf or simply taken in by Israeli rhetoric/propaganda, Canada should be listening to the voice of reason and justice. Israel will not win peace with violence - it will breed more resistance - because it is a message of fear, injustice, and arrogance. Reason and justice are the way towards peace, and the only people pleading for justice are the Palestinians and a minority of Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel.

I do not underestimate the complexity of finding peace. Aside from the obvious issues of secure borders and international recognition of two viable, sovereign states, there are such thorny matters as the status of East Jerusalem, settlement of refugees (from 1947-49), and water management. Several commentators have noted that there is probably no conflict in recent history whose solution is so obvious as is that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The problem is not finding the solution but finding the will and moral integrity to bring it about.

What Not to Discuss

We must begin by setting some workable limits to the scope of the discussion.

First, we must rule out faith-based history and claims. When you hear Israelis both in Israel and in their West Bank colonies saying that those colonies are justified because it is "our land", and when you hear Sharon's spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin, say (6 May 2002, CBC radio) that the West Bank is not "occupied territory" but "disputed territory" because there never was a Palestinian State, the point needs no elaboration.

Second, we should give no weight to the "aboriginal" title. Quite apart from the almost total absence of Jews from Palestine for well over a thousand years (and regardless of the historical reasons for that absence), even the Palestinians have a shaky aboriginal claim given that the area was a "crossroads" of armies and migrants of three continents for thousands of years. It is insane to try to prove any aboriginal title, and yet such a straight-faced claim went unchallenged recently (on the CBC's "CounterSpin"). It all depends on where you choose to start, or stop, and all one needs to do is visit the old archeological digs at Jericho or follow modern archeological searches to understand the futility of attempting to prove any aboriginal title for anyone.

It is ironic to hear Jews stand upon such a claim when their own chronicles tell us that when Moses reached the unilaterally promised land he found someone else was already living there. Tribes and "peoples" have come and gone, stayed away, returned, been enslaved, dispersed, taken captive, subjugated, decimated, etc. for thousands of years. Surely there is a distinction between "aboriginal" and "survivor". Please see the article "False Testament" by Daniel Lazare in Harper's Magazine, March 2002. The sub-title is "Archaeology refutes the Bible's claim to history" and, while archaeology shatters the myths of the promised land, the Abrahamic migration from Mesopotamia, the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus, the conquest of Canaan, and much more, it also shows that "the Hebrews were a native people who had never left in the first place." (p.45) They were not, of course, the only native (and Semitic) people around 1200 B.C. in what we now know as Palestine, and they were all changed and moved about by conquests by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, and even Napoleon Bonaparte, to name only a few.

A third limit on any discussion of peace in West Asia is the claim of efficiency or productivity.

Some Jews and Israelis seriously attempt to make the argument that, before Jews began to settle in Palestine in the modern era (from about 1880), the land was denuded and worn out. It took the Jews to drain the swamps, plant forests and orange groves, irrigate, bring modern machinery, and make the desert bloom. The Arabs did not know what to do with their land and thus did not deserve it. (Reference is often made to buying Arab land from absentee landlords, as if to prove that the Arabs did not care and did not deserve.) Given the Canadian history of dealing with aboriginal people and land claims, we might be tempted to buy the productivity-possession line, but I think we must, on ethical grounds, not allow even a hint of this in a region where two peoples are claiming rights to the same limited land area. It would become a very slippery ethical and geo-political slope.

The fourth off-limits topic is who or what started the war in 1948. It really started in December, 1947, but Israel has always pretended that it started in May 1948. When one studies the history and talks to people in all walks of life in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt one soon realizes that there can never be a rational or productive discussion of the 1947-49 war with the people of the region. However, there are many things an objective outsider can learn for purposes of dispelling still-current myths and advancing the cause of peace today.

1947-49 "War" and Refugees

There are conflicting views of that war and they will never be reconciled because each principal can find some evidence for its version. For example, there is evidence of Jewish terrorism both before and after May, 1948 (Israel's UDI or unilateral declaration of independence) which had a persuasive migratory effect on Arab villagers, and of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish [Israeli] Army. There is also evidence that the Arab High Command called on Palestinian Arabs to get out of harm's way, and that a few fled for that reason. For peace purposes now it is important for us to separate the "spins" from reality because those spins/myths have been constructed precisely for the purpose of thwarting any compromise, any settlement. The refugees from that war are still being held hostage to certain myths even unto the third and fourth generations.

It is well to remember that the 1947-49 refugees, who originally numbered some 700,000, came mainly from areas within what came to be known as Israel after 1949 and not from what would have been the Jewish State under the 1947 U.N. partition plan. There will never be agreement between Jews and Arabs on how the Palestinian Arabs came to be in refugee camps/towns, but if one thinks logically about the main theories (see preceding para.) it does seem highly unlikely that, in the middle of a complex and rapidly-changing turf war, the Arabs, if they were really fleeing their towns and villages at the suggestion of the Arab High Command, would know which way to flee and all end up outside the newly formed borders of Israel. It is impossible to resist the inference that they were pushed, not pulled.

The notion that the Palestinian Arabs brought their fate upon themselves has become such an imbedded part of Jewish lore that as recently as 21 June 2002 I was speaking to a Canadian Jew who is active in peace movements in Canada and Israel and she stated as an historical fact that the Jews had pleaded with the Arabs to stay. She is not alone in accepting this myth as fact.

Seth Ackerman (Harper’s Magazine, op. cit. at pp.5-6) deals with the deniers of mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs by quoting Israeli government archives:

"At least 55 percent of the total of the exodus was caused by our operations," estimated an Israeli army intelligence document dated June 30, 1948, and headed "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948." It judged an additional 15 percent to have been the work of the other Jewish para-militaries and 22 percent to have been caused by a general Palestinian "crisis of confidence." According to the document, only about 5 percent of the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to."

Ackerman goes on to quote (General) Yitzhak Rabin, in a censored passage from his 1979 memoirs, about how some men refused to take part in the expulsion action and how "Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these [soldiers] and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action."

It was necessary because the Jews, fewer than 600,000 in 1947, were less than a third of the population in the territories they coveted and they obviously could not have a democratic Jewish State unless they became the majority. Since they had only a few months or weeks before their planned UDI, the land had to be emptied of most (Muslim) Arabs, i.e. the Palestinians. (Most Christian Arabs in and around Nazareth were allowed to stay.) The immediate result of the mass expulsions was that the new State of Israel had military control of far more territory than it had people to fill it.

If the vocabulary had existed in 1947-48 it would have been called "ethnic cleansing". According to Israelis, and Spector again, the refugees have no moral claim against Israel, or any right of return, because they chose not to accept partition and statehood in 1947 - not true, by the way -and because they lost the war. An objective reading of history, however, raises a strong moral claim.

Germany paid huge war reparations to Israel for what Germany did to Jews - confiscation of property, deportation, and murder - even though there was no State of Israel at the time of the atrocities. Jews/Israelis see no obligation to pay reparations or make any amends to the Palestinians who were dispossessed, expelled, and murdered by the Jews not only in 1947-49 but also in the West Bank in 1967-2002. I understand neither the Israeli double standard on atrocities nor the complicit silence of most of the non-Arab and non-Muslim world.

There is not much doubt as to why the refugees were kept in camps in Lebanon, Jordan (the West Bank), and the Gaza Strip. Just as Israel used the external threat (the Arab states) for purposes of internal unity in a young nation-state be-devilled with religious, racial, and political strife, so also did the disparate interests among the Arab states need to have something to keep them from each other's throats. The existence of Israel, seen as a Western interloper/invader, was that thing, but the everyday reminder of that abomination was the refugees. They served to keep the Arab states focused and superficially united in a common cause. There has never been a realistic hope, based on Jewish and Israeli history before 1948 and after, that Israel would ever voluntarilv agree to the return of any Palestinian refugees. But 54 years later the matter is still on the table at least as far as the Arab world is concerned. For moral and humanitarian reasons Canada must agree that the refugee question is indeed "on the peace table" and that Israel cannot walk away from its misdeeds.

Some Arab States and Emirates allowed a few Palestinian refugees to work in them, but for the most part they maintained a common front - no permanent acceptance, no citizenship, no resettlement. On the contrary, one reason for maintaining a state of war with Israel was to hold out to Palestinians the hope that one day Israel would be defeated and the refugees would return to their "paradise lost" (the words spoken, wistfully, to me by a Palestinian employed at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem). The official position of most Arab states (specifically excluding Jordan) was calculated, cruel, and callous. They had the collective resources to resettle the refugees and there certainly was no shortage of land, although it might have been even drier and less fertile than the denuded and worn out soil of pre-1948 Palestine. The Arab states have realized for 40 years that Israel, with its American shield and American arms, will not disappear and that most refugees will never go back. There is, therefore, great significance in the Saudi proposal if recognition of Israel carries with it acceptance of some responsibility to start resettling the refugees, now said to number around three million.

Canada could make a contribution by letting it be known that we would be willing to assist in a global effort of resettlement. In other words, we could accept some refugees now that the Arab and host states are showing some interest in resolving the problem. If the refugees are finally to cease being held as pawns - and they really have been political prisoners - we can help in their liberation. There is no implied criticism of Canadian refugee policy up to now because it is clear that certain Arab interests were more interested in keeping their pawns than in finding humane solutions. Now, however, offers of humanitarian help may be accepted.

Although resettlement of refugees might be seen by hard-line Arabs as letting Israel off the moral hook, our motives must be, and be seen to be, purely humanitarian. It is clearly a step towards peace.

Israel adopted, as a "populating" principle in 1950, a law that any Jew anywhere in the world had the right of "return", even if he or she and ancestors had never been within ten thousand kilometres of West Asia for a thousand years. But, on the other hand, 700,000 people could not return to the homes they left "yesterday". Them's the breaks. Spoils of war, and all that. Officially, the Arabs still demand the right of return. The comparison is drawn not to bemoan the fact or to pillory Israel but to demonstrate the limits of logic and compassion in the face of brute strength. It is called realpolitik. Only strong international pressure might alter both Israeli and Arab mind-sets.

Framework for Peace: Where to Start?

If there are at least four subjects which should not be on the table, what are we left with? A lot, but we have to sort out fact from fantasy and look behind propaganda and modern myth-making. For peace-making purposes the "modern" history of West Asia begins some 125 years ago. We know about the Zionist Movement. We know about the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and how European powers "divvied up" that Empire after World War I. League of Nations mandates were set up in Palestine and in what became modern Lebanon and Syria. Vast quantities of oil were discovered to the east. The imperial powers, Britain and U.S.A., became quite interested in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Nationalism reared its head, but our American friends, with British help, made certain that no popular or elected government would get in the way of British and American oil companies. Remember the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1950?

Over the centuries most of the Israelites had become Christians, or Muslims, or had left, but there had always been a very small continuous Jewish presence in Palestine. European Jews began to trickle in during the 1880s. Under the British Mandate the Jews made progress on the land, even if the Balfour Declaration proved to be worth little politically. They increased their holdings, often by peaceful means, i.e. by purchases, but their Palestinian neighbours were understandably nervous because the goal of a Jewish homeland - it was not yet spoken of as a Jewish State - was certainly out there for all to see. Israeli history records "First Disturbances between Arabs and Jews" in 1921, more disturbances in 1929, and still more disturbances from 1936 to 1939. These were only the peaks of continuous tension and daily friction.

The Jews developed various forms of collective settlements as much for security and military advantage as for social and political idealism. The Jewish settlers scoured the world for arms and trained well for the fight they knew would come. World War II put the Zionist agenda on "pause" but was also an opportunity to gain experience in modem warfare by fighting for the Allied cause. (A Jewish Brigade had also fought for the British in World War I.) After 1945 the British were once again "the enemy" (of the Zionist dream). The Jews wanted the British out so that they could use their military superiority over the Palestinians to expand their homeland. For their part, the British came to want out, prodded by Jewish terrorist attacks like the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 and because the Mandate headache was not balanced by advancement of any vital British interest. There were bigger fish to fry in the oil a little further east, and in the Suez.

When one mentions the King David Hotel bombing, one is reminded of the dichotomy between Israeli views of their own "liberation" struggle and of the Palestinians' struggle. Israel has a strong history of terrorism and the terrorists are heroes. One, Menachem Begin, became Prime Minister. The following is taken from the book, "Israel Guide" by Zev Vilnay, published in Jerusalem in 1955: "Herut [forerunner of Likud, Sharon's and Netanyahu's Party] - Many of their members belonged to the Etsel: Irgun Tsevai Leumi - National Military Organization, a terrorist underground movement which fought British rule." ("Herut" means "Liberty".) Begin became the leader of Herut. Thus the Israelis openly identified their freedom fighters as terrorists when the "enemy" was the collapsing British Mandate (not colonial) rule, but they cannot see Palestinians as freedom fighters against a rule which is much more oppressive, brutal, and permanent than anything the British did or could have dreamed of doing.

(The Mandate lasted 28 years in Palestine, 26 in Transjordan. From the beginning it was destined to end with the creation of sovereign states. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank has already lasted 35 years and there is every indication (see below) that it was never intended to end.)

One is also reminded of the assassination in Jerusalem in 1948 of Count Folke Bernadotte, a respected Swedish humanitarian, whose only crime was to try to mediate between the Jews and Arabs. For his troubles he was killed by so-called Jewish extremists, but "extremist" is a relative term. In a State where the end (a Greater Israel) justifies any means, it is very difficult to imagine who could properly be called an "extremist". Terrorist, freedom fighter, assassin, patriot, extremist - which is which?

And what do we make of the murder of Prime Minister Rabin? Was Yigal Amir an extremist Israeli or was he the fall guy for a wing of Shabak (General Security Services) which feared Rabin might actually make peace? There have been books on the subject and one does not have to accept the conspiracy theory in full to accept that there is a fanatical element in Israel, and within Shabak, which will do literally anything to maintain Israel's military occupation and civilian colonization of the West Bank.

The starting point for peace, therefore, is to realize that the modern State of Israel is a Zionist expression which was born by war and lives by the sword.

1947-49 and Irredentism

In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine and produced a map of Jewish and non-Jewish areas which was a patchwork quilt. It looks eerily like the patchwork quilt Israel would make of Arab territory in the West Bank. Now there is a real irony. The Jews did not like the 1947 map (any more than the Palestinian Arabs did) and for the same reason that the Palestinians cannot accept the Israeli West Bank vision of 2002. Neither is a design for sovereignty.

The Arab League categorically rejected the U.N. partition plan for the obvious reason that it was seen as the planting of a foreign and Western body in an Arab land. The Arabs did not object to how the lines were to be drawn but to the very idea of a Jewish state, i.e. to the drawing of any lines. The post-1948 Israeli and Zionist spin put on the partition plan has always been that the Jews accepted it but were immediately attacked by the Arabs and had no alternative but to defend themselves, ending up with much more territory than the U.N. had envisaged. Two observations are in order.

First, aggression under the pretext of self-defence has been the standard Israeli expansionist tactic since 1947 and was used again in 1956 (to take Sinai), in 1967 (to take the West Bank), to take South Lebanon, and most recently in March 2002 (to weaken Palestinian authority in the ghettoes). Second, the best that can be said of alleged Jewish acceptance of the 1947 partition plan is that they might have accepted it in principle, as it was a stepping stone to a Jewish state, but there is absolutely no doubt that the Jews did not accept the patchwork quilt - it was not nearly enough. Then and now the Jews/lsraelis were/are able to get away with this myth of acceptance because of the Arab rejection. Acceptance was never going to be put to the test, and only a naive Zionist can believe, as they do, that the Jews in Palestine in 1947 would have been satisfied with what the U.N. proposed.

While Jewish "acceptance" of the U.N. Partition Plan was good public relations, internationally, it was nothing more than a pose for, in fact, November 1947 marked the start of a new phase of a continuing war and unabashed mass expulsions (see above) of Palestinian Arabs. The guerrilla (terrorist) war to get the British out of the way was stepped up as the end was in sight, and what might be called the civil war against Arab neighbours was in the open and beyond constraint by the British. There is no evidence, even from Israeli sources, that Palestinian Arabs were ever given a chance to say to the Jews pushing them out of their homes, "We accept partition. This is our part. Now go away and mind your own part."

I am careful to make the distinction between Jewish aggression against Palestinian Arabs, which pre-dated Israel's declaration of independence, and Israel's war with the invading non-Palestinian Arab armies after the UDI in May 1948. Those armies were from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. This distinction is critical to a proper understanding of the weakness of Israel's position even today on refugees and the alleged failure of the Palestinians to have accepted a (mythical) half a loaf when it was offered in 1947.

The partition plan might have worked for the Jews as a collection of semi-autonomous pieces of a "homeland", but it was not the basis for a democratic, self-governing, viable, independent, geo- political entity. It was understandably unacceptable to the Jews since their goal was an independent state and not a homeland within a Palestinian state. This is an exceptionally important point in assessing Israel's professed desire for peace over the last ten years. The Israelis are the very first people in the world who must know that their agenda for the West Bankis completely disingenuous. The surface offering - the real offer is even less - to the Palestinians, existing in their own occupied homeland, is far less in every respect than they (Jews) rejected as inadequate for statehood for themselves in 1947.

Under the U.N. partition plan Israel would have been a state with a territory liberally commensurate with the Jewish population. The 1947 Palestine, including the 100 sq. mi. of the Gaza Strip, measured approx. 10,200 sq. mi., about 2% more than the surface of Lake Erie or 76% of Vancouver Island. After the 1947-49 war Israel was 7,992 sq. mi. (including water-covered land) or 78% of Palestine. The West Bank is less than 2,100 sq. mi. Prince Edward Island is 2,184 sq. mi. The 70% - 75% majority population of 1947 was left in 1949 with 22% of the land.

In assessing any Israeli statement we must keep in mind the divergence, often sharp, between what they say and what they do, and between what they say about their history and what that history really was.

There is a forgotten moral dimension in Canadian policy. It must have been buried when Spector was Canadian ambassador to Israel as he has been heard many times in recent months as an apologist for Israel and Zionism. He demonstrates the absence of moral considerations when he speaks of the U.N. partition plan and the war of 1948-49. He claims that Israel owes no obligation to the refugees; all the Palestinians had to do was accept the partition plan and there would have been a Jewish State and Palestinian State existing side-by-side from the start. He states that the Palestinians made a mistake and thus have no one to blame but themselves for their plight today.

What Spector glosses over is that the Palestinians did not make the mistake - it was made for them by outside forces. The Zionist/Spector view is that "might is right". The moral question is whether, if the Jews really did accept the partition, they would have retreated to the U.N.-designed areas once they had defeated the Arab invading forces, and welcomed back the Arabs they had expelled. If they had, there would have been few, if any, refugees and there might have been a basis for peaceful co-existence of two states. But we know that the guiding principle in Israel is that might is right, which is certainly amoral if not immoral. Therefore, Israel's use of arms to expand its territory and expel people who were given no choices, who made no mistake, who were unarmed or very poorly armed, and who, with some violent exceptions, had been trying to live peacefully alongside the Jews, does carry a moral debt. Palestinians see that and are stunned when the world will not see it.

Because the invasion of the fledgling State in May 1948 figures so prominently in Israeli mythology and moral evasions, one should try to understand, objectively, what happened. To hear Israelis/Zionists tell it, the new State was attacked suddenly and without provocation. It was the innocent victim. That is a gross distortion. There certainly was an attack, but it had antecedents. On the face of it, the Israeli version makes no sense. The Arab High Command could not have been ready with a coordinated invasion from several directions without considerable preparation. From November 1947 the Arabs could only watch from across the borders as the Jews accelerated the terror against both Palestinians and the British authority. It is unthinkable that the Arab armies - Jordan's was British trained and led - could have tried to put a stop to the Jewish expansion (beyond the partition plan) while the British Army was still in Palestine. It is obvious that the Jews gave abundant provocation to the Arabs but profited from the presence of the British even as they used terror to persuade the British to leave. The Jews had the tactical advantage of being able almost to choose when the inevitable Arab attack could occur. Further, it was not as though the Jewish armed forces had to re-deploy after battle with the British. A few terrorists kept the British unnerved while the Jewish armed forces consolidated positions in the last days of the Mandate and formulated tactics for the two-pronged war of defence and expansion. The final provocation was the UDI in May; it was also the first opportunity for the Arab attack, and no one, least of all the Israelis, expected the Arabs not to seize it. Israel and the non-Palestinian Arabs had all deliberately chosen the path of violence.

One of the great hypothetical questions is whether the 1947-49 war could have been avoided. Given a little time and good will from Jews and Palestinian Arabs, would the U.N. and people like Folke Bernadotte have been able to work out a two-state solution based on some modifications of the U.N. partition plan? There is always an alternative to war, if one wishes to look for it, but in Palestine peace was never given a chance. Did any side want peace other than strictly on its own terms? We really do not know what the Palestinians might have done if they had been given a choice, but we do know that both the Israelis and the non-Palestinian Arabs were determined to use violence to achieve their respective goals of expansion and eradication.

Irredentism: Part II

We have all seen maps and film footage of the post-1967 Jewish colonies (settlements). They are built on limestone hillcrests, the most vulnerable places, historically, for soil loss. Palestinian farmers would use the hilltops the least of their lands, but the military view would be to hold the high ground. The colonies appear to be what we have come to call "gated" communities but which, in the West Bank, might better be called "forts" with high walls, sentries, and who knows-what armaments. There can be no pretense that the colonies are agricultural. The colonists are an occupying militia. They are all armed and they occupy tactical military vantage points in a strategic pattern which ensures their ability to control the countryside. Some of the roads in the West Bank are for the exclusive use of the colonists and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Can anyone doubt that the colonies are meant to be a permanent extension of Israel?

In this essay the terms "colony" and "squatter" are employed because the terms "settlement" and "settler" imply the existence of vacant, frontier, or unclaimed land which can be settled. Even if the hillcrests in the West Bank were used only to graze sheep, none of the land could be said to be unclaimed or frontier. The most accurate, objective description of the Jews who have taken over the high ground is "squatters", however strongly they believe in their right.

In recent months the CBC has shown, several times, a map of the West Bank on which the Jewish colonies are shown as white triangles. They have shown how they increased in numbers over the years and how, even when Israel said there would be a freeze, there wasn't. Not only did Israel allow for "natural" growth within a colony but it also added new colonies even while it was supposedly talking peace with the Americans and Palestinians. The biggest jump in numbers of new colonies approved by the Israeli government occurred during the brief tenure of Ehud Barak as Prime Minister. Barak, according to another modern myth, offered Arafat almost everything he could have wanted but Arafat inexplicably turned him down, with no counter-offer.

The world simply does not know exactly what Barak offered - we saw no maps or details - but, given what Barak was doing with the colonies, we must give the benefit of any doubt to Arafat. While figures like 91% or 95% (of the West Bank) were put out by Israel, an educated Palestinian commentator told us, thanks again to the CBC, that Barak's plan was for Israel to retain the relatively small "footprint" of the colonies and their access roads, which would account for appearing to retain a harmless 5% or 9%. The effect would have been to cut off Palestinian areas from each other and make a chaotic, disjointed Palestinian homeland which would be easy for Israel to control and impossible for Palestinians to govern. No Palestinian leader could ever have accepted, even with compensation in kind for the 5%. Arafat knew, as we should all recognize now, that Barak made a meaningless gesture which pleased the Americans but which was, clearly, nothing more than a PR ploy. As Shakespeare wrote, one can smile and smile and be a villain.

The Barak "offer" is regularly trotted out by Israel and its apologists as proof that Arafat does not want peace. They have gotten tremendous mileage out of it. However, it can be argued even more persuasively that the "offer" demonstrated either that Barak did not want peace (because he knew that Arafat could never agree to the de facto continuance of the Israeli occupation) or that he was naive and ignorant enough to think that his "offer" would satisfy Palestinian aspirations. Israel's leaders have shown themselves to be masters of international public relations; naive and ignorant they are not. (Some observers say that Arafat's failure to take up such a generous "offer" led directly to the replacement of "dove" Barak with the "hawk" Arid Sharon so that, once again, one can say that the Palestinians deserve what they are getting. This is preposterous. Barak was giving up neither the colonies nor the military occupation of the West Bank. General Barak is as much of a hawk as General Sharon; the difference lies in their methods, not their goals.)

We are further indebted to the CBC for showing us an interview with one of the Jewish squatters who saw nothing wrong with colonies because "It is our [Jewish] land". Palestinians have been hearing that and seeing squatters come and take their [Arab] land in the West Bank for 35 years. It begs the question: If Israel is ever dragged into peace negotiations, what is it prepared to put on the table?

Israel has given "irredentism" an expanded meaning, no pun intended. I believe it was invented to describe an Italian claim to certain "unredeemed" lands, i.e. lands once possessed but lost (in war). Israel's unredeemed land is the whole of Palestine even if the historical possession claim is full of holes. There is no evidence that the Jews' ancestors ever ruled all of what is now called Palestine except, possibly, by adding up claims from different eras. There is also no evidence of mass expulsions of Jews but, rather, exile of zealots (like the "activists" in the recent Bethlehem stand-off), some flight, and some seekers of better opportunity elsewhere. The Diaspora grew slowly over many centuries. Most Jews appear to have stayed near home and many (but never all) who stayed were swept along with the Islamic waves which rolled across Palestine from Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey at different times. All of the current claimants to the land of Palestine are members of the Semite family, dysfunctional for 13 centuries, and had common ancestors. Religion divides them and religion is used by one branch of the family to give itself a superior claim.

Eretz Israel

Eretz Israel is a name used to describe a "Greater" (Biblical or historical) Israel, i.e. Palestine. At one extreme in Israeli society is the sect that says it believes in Zion but does not recognize the secular or temporal entity known as Israel. At the other extreme are those - not a sect by any means - who believe that Jews have an inalienable God-given right to Eretz Israel. The precise boundaries of this ancient Palestine vary with the particular ancient map (or history) or time one chooses for stake-claiming, but I know many Israelis include all of what we know today as the West Bank, and possibly more, such as the Golan Heights and Gaza Strip. It is not a coincidence that some, perhaps all, of the squatters are believers in Eretz Israel. Whether there will be colonies, where they are built, and who lives in them are matters under the control of the Government of Israel. Again we see the differences between what is said and what is done.

It is very naive to think that a peace settlement in West Asia could offer the Jewish squatters the choice between returning to Israel or living peaceably and unarmed in a Palestinian state, without the protection of Israel's military might. Even if the colonies had been established with the grudging consent of the Palestinians (and they weren't), the fanaticism of the squatters would absolutely preclude any possibility of peaceful co-existence. Friends of peace must be firm: All of the squatters must leave and they must not destroy anything in the process. (When Israel gave up colonies in the Sinai it bulldozed the buildings.) They might want to scorch the earth and they will feel betrayed by their own government, but we must remind them that they and their government are the trespassers. (They will not hear us, but we must say it because it is true and because the Palestinians need to hear it.) The very least the Israeli squatters can do by way of reparations for the occupation is leave their buildings for the use of those they dispossessed in all of their wars and expulsions.

In 50 or 100 years the Jews and Arabs may be able to live in peace and freedom in a single bicultural state, but even those who dream of this goal accept that there must be an intermediate stage of two independent and sovereign states. I have noted in recent months that neither Israelis nor their apologists here are talking about a withdrawal of all squatters. They say that some would be pulled back but they can't see any reason why some of them could not continue to live in their "forts" (my word) in the West Bank. Do we need any more evidence to prove that Israel is not serious about peace in West Asia except on terms it dictates?

The establishment of a Jewish homeland/State in the whole of the Biblical Eretz Israel has been the goal for the past 105 years. Military force to reach that goal has been the coldly calculated instrument of choice. While words are meant to mislead us into thinking that the goal is something less, there is too much evidence from deeds over the past 60 years to permit any other conclusion. Moreover, the proponents of a final ethnic cleansing and formal assertion of Israeli sovereignty over Eretz Israel are increasingly heard in Israel today, emboldened as the so-called "right wing" is by the Bush Administration's blind obsession with its "war on terrorism".

Palestine under the Ottoman Turks was ruled as a province of Syria. It was neglected, decayed, unimportant, impoverished, and insular - foreign investment was forbidden. Theodor Herzl's timing for Zionism (1897) could not have been better. While the British Mandate brought some law and order and a military presence, the Christian and Muslim Arabs of Palestine had few arms, little organization, and no Arab states who were particularly concerned, with the exception of Transjordan, which was itself new, struggling, and founded on the loyalty of Bedouin tribes east of the Jordan River. There was a power vacuum to be exploited if only the British would leave, but clearly the push would have to wait until after World War II. Jews gained valuable war experience and came to Israel as seasoned veterans. Jews also gained new determination after the Holocaust as they vowed, "Never Again!"

The world must never forget the Holocaust. We must also recognize that the existence and survival of a strong Jewish homeland has a deeper and more emotional significance for many Jews than non-Jews can appreciate. While making every allowance for the personal and collective trauma of the Holocaust, we must not allow Israelis to use their and our memories of that evil horror for any of their own less-than-honourable purposes.

As noted above, terror was used to demoralize both the British and the Arabs in Palestine. Since the evidence cannot be buried, and since a Jewish terrorist eventually became an Israeli Prime Minister, the modem Israeli spin is that the Jewish terrorists, unlike Palestinian terrorists currently, provided warnings of their bombings and assassinations. I am not aware of any such historical record, but, even as Zionist contortionists attempt to put a humane face on bombings, we are entitled to ask if the Arab women, children, and men massacred in the village of Deir Yassin were given a chance to flee for their lives. The oxymoronic claim of humane terror is as preposterous as the claim in 2002 that Israeli tanks in Jenin or aircraft over Gaza were able to pick out "terrorist" civilians while sparing the innocent. If Israel is unapologetic about the "collateral damage" in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Gaza, and elsewhere, there is a simple explanation at work in Israel, viz. that all Palestinians are potential "terrorists" and that killing any or all of them is justified in the name of Israel's survival.

When the British left Palestine in 1948, did David Ben-Gurion and his cohorts welcome the attacks from the Arab neighbours as an excuse to expand the homeland/State? I am sure the Israelis would rather have accomplished their goal through fear and continued expulsion of Palestinians without having to fight off the Arab High Command, which had rather belatedly tried not so much to ride to the rescue of the Palestinians (who had been losing ground for years) but to try to smother the new State of Israel.

It is said that the Arab High Command wanted to "drive the Jews into the sea", and that was a fair reading of Arab intentions. It is a line which has been used repeatedly since 1948 to rally world Jewry and to justify any outrage committed by the military and the State against Israel's neighbours. Incredibly, despite the Arab League willingness now to live with the State of Israel, and despite the fact that for the last 25 years no Arab state or combination of them could defeat the Israeli forces, and risk atomic/nuclear retaliation if they could, Israelis are still spreading the myth that they are fighting for their very existence against a hostile Arab world which wants to drive them into the sea. I heard this only a few days ago from an Israeli cabinet minister, among others. Also, at a rally for Israel in Toronto in May, Ra'anan Gissin thanked the Canadian Jews for supporting Israel, "for being Jews", and told them that with their support "Israel will win". Win what? He did not say, and no one asks because it is understood that it is the battle for survival of the State.

It is time to tell Israel that we are not buying that line and that we recognize it for what it is - an excuse to keep control of the West Bank. Israel and its apologists ask us how we would feel to have a hostile state nine miles from our largest city [Tel Aviv). Well, I lived in north Tel Aviv, some ten miles from what was then Jordanian-controlled territory. Neither I nor my neighbours felt threatened even though the IDF was not nearly the force it is today. The difference between then and now is that Israel, by its occupation, has turned unhappy refugees and indifferent non-refugees into a critical mass of hatred, hostility, and despair.

The 1949 truce lines, and particularly the Jerusalem salient, which fell only a few hundred metres short of the Wailing Wall, are graphic evidence of Israel's intentions. Jerusalem was not to be Jewish territory under the U.N. partition plan and even Israelis cannot pretend that they ever accepted that. Also, can there be any doubt that Israel did not want to be left with a narrow waist (of about 20 kilometres) between the Mediterranean and the hills of Transjordan? The fight to secure Jerusalem was fierce and undoubtedly took priority over expanding the waist to the Jordan River. The Israelis simply did not have enough forces, or time, to take all of Eretz Israel. They bided their time, but remained very much an irredentist State.

It is a serious mis-reading of history and of Zionism to conclude that the truce lines established in 1949 were the result of miscalculation by the Arab High Command in 1948 or to believe that Israel would have been forever content with what it held in May 1948, but for that Arab attack.

The Rest of the World is Biased

Canadian military officers took part in the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO) for several years. They were stationed along the truce lines - a state of war still existed between Israel and all of the contiguous and several of the non-contiguous states in West Asia and North Africa. It was the time of the Fedayeen (Arab guerrilla) raids from Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, and shelling of Israeli settlements below Syria's Golan Heights. (Some Fedayeen may have come from Saudi Arabia, which is only 7 km. from Israel via Aqaba.) To the best of my recollection, these raiders were never called "terrorists"; they were called guerrillas, even though they hit civilian targets in Israel. Some of the Fedayeen came in very small units and occasionally singly. Israel would not respond to every pin-prick but would hit hard every so often with aircraft and armour. Some of the UNTSO officers said that Israel had amended the biblical saying to: Two eyes for a tooth.

UNTSO was not very effective. It did not have the manpower to stop any side from attacking another; it investigated violations (when permitted) and reported to the U.N. Israel was not very co-operative and claimed regularly that UNTSO was biased against it. I could never find out in what way that bias was supposedly manifested and had to conclude that it was simply an easy way to justify ignoring the U.N. The Israeli position was, of course, self-fulfilling. UNTSO had to report the fact that its hands were often tied by Israel's lack of co-operation, and that observation was taken as criticism and turned into "bias". Israel's discomfort with any international presence on its borders was obvious from very early on. Israel wanted to deal with its "defence" problems in its own way, i.e. by aggression. This is an aspect of Israeli policy which continues to this day. In April, 2002, Israel opposed the three civilians appointed by the U.N. Secretary General to investigate what happened in Jenin. The reason? Israel said they were biased. When that failed to dissuade, the objection was that only a military person could understand the actions of the IDF.

(In my time, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, relying on reports from its embassy in Ottawa, no doubt, also regularly claimed that there was a pro-Arab bias in the Canadian Department of External Affairs. They even named a senior officer, Ross Campbell, in Ottawa. He was "fingered" by pro-Israel lobbyists like the Canadian Jewish Congress for no better reason than that he did not always show the requisite sympathy and support for everything Israel did. If you are not for us you must be against us, or at least be for our enemies. Does this sound familiar?)

The mis-named Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) may claim that their antipathy towards international "peacekeepers" or even observers stems from bitter experience with UNTSO. Israel even accused UNTSO of leaking Israeli military information to the Arabs, as though UNTSO officers had any inside knowledge of IDF plans and personnel. Israelis must be challenged on that in the same way that accusations of anti-Semitism must be. Show us the evidence. The truth for 40 years is that the IDF simply wants as few people as possible to see what they are up to. Just as the Americans learned from Vietnam to "manage" conflict news, so the Israelis learned even earlier, and reinforced at Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon, the importance of tight controls over what the world may know of Israeli military operations.

Wounded Innocence

Incredibly, in the decade before the Six-Day War the Fedayeen did not seem to understand that they were fuelling the fires of Israeli expansion in the name of defence and security. In 2002 is massive retaliation in the West Bank defence of the homeland? And unless one accepts that the Israeli colonies in the West Bank are de facto part of Israel, how can anyone see retaliation for attacks on those colonies as defence of the homeland? War in Afghanistan raises the same question. Perhaps Canada is not in a very good position to "call" Israel on its defence fictions when we have used an even worse piece of fiction to justify intervention in a civil war in Afghanistan which has no connection to security in North America. American (and Canadian) work on a just peace in West Asia will do far more for North American security than any phony "war on terrorism".

The parallels between Israel and the U.S.A. are many and striking. After 11 September, 2001, the infamous 11/09, some Americans were asking, "Why do they hate us?" Some Israelis react to suicide bombers in the same bewildered way. The answer is the same in both cases. Successive governments have pursued foreign policies seen in the rest of the world as repressive, anti-democratic, and unjust, but portrayed to the home audiences as policies of freedom, democracy, and national security. The answer to terrorist attacks and suicide bombers is to deal with the causes. While not condoning suicide bombers, one can understand them, and one cannot call them "terror" when Israel knows precisely what it has to do to eliminate the causes. The Americans are a harder case because there are many indications that Presidents, Congress, and the media are even more taken in by their own propaganda than the leaders of Israel are by theirs.

Before moving on to 1967 I wish to point out that strong retaliation against Jordanian towns and villages for the Fedayeen raids was not the only way to have dealt with them. Israel did not have long borders marked by difficult terrain. The Fedayeen, who usually infiltrated on foot, at night, could surely have been detected with a modicum of forces and surveillance/detection equipment along the borders. Israel was more interested in building its case for a 'just war" of expansion. Eretz Israel was always the goal.

What is "Defence"?