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Light at The End of the Mideast Tunnel?
By Eric Margolis, May 22, 1999
NEW YORK - The landslide victory by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak in
last week's elections showed just how fed up Israelis were with slippery
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the little ayatollahs of the religious
far right who supported him.s welcome victory also dramatically underlined public desire for
revival of the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, which Netanyahu had
blocked or sabotaged over the past three years. Predictions that normally
fractious Israelis would deliver a muddle electoral message were wrong.
Israelis voters thundered they'd had enough of Netanyahu's politics of fear,
which played to the basest instincts and most extreme elements of Israeli
society.
Netanyahu, a Bill Clinton clone, is gone. In place of the plastic politician, a
real man, Israel's most decorated soldier, Gen. Ehud Barak, something of an
old-style Labor Party leader: a deeply untelegenic, piano-playing, highly
cultured kibbutznik, as comfortable in a Vienna cafe' as in the turret of a
Merkava tank.
Barak's election, and rout of Netanyahu's Likud Party, ignited hope across
the Mideast that the moribund peace process would be revived. The new
Israeli leader vowed as much, though he cautioned there would be no
compromise on sole Israeli rule over Jerusalem, no return to 1967 borders, no
major reduction of settlements, and no substantial Arab military force on the
West Bank.
Shimon Peres, former Labor Party leader, and architect of the Oslo Peace
accords, dramatically summed up the situation facing by Israel: `There are 5
million Jews and 4 million Arabs between the Mediterranean and the Jordan
River. Our choice is either Oslo…or Kosovo.' Peres meant was that if Israel
didn't manage to conclude a fair deal with the Palestinians, there would be
more violence and a resumption of the `intifada,' leading to calls within Israel
for the mass expulsion of Palestinians into the deserts of neighboring Jordan.
This is unlikely to happen, but one wonders how much events in Kosovo
subconsciously or consciously affected the thinking of Israeli voters. The
expulsion of 800,000 or more Albanian from their ancestral homes by Serbs,
who claimed Kosovo was given to them by God and was their holy ground,
bears some similarities to events in Palestine during 1947-1949.
About 750,000 Palestinians, mostly framers and villagers, were expelled from
their homes by Jewish regular and irregular forces, and driven to flight.
Israeli extremist groups staged a few, selective massacres to incite fear and
accelerate the exodus. Claims that Palestinians fled on orders of Arab
governments were simply propaganda designed to mask Israeli ethnic
cleansing, as the late Israeli historian, Simcha Flapan, demonstrated in his
authoritative book, `The Birth of Israel.'
Five Arab states sent modest forces to stop expulsion of the Palestinians and,
if possible, defeat the new Israeli state, or at least force it back to the
original borders mandated by the UN. But the Arab `armies´ proved even more
inept and ineffective than the NATO coalition has in Kosovo, devoting more
effort to bickering and intriguing among themselves than fighting Israelis.
Israel emerged triumphant; the uprooted Palestinians became permanent
refugees who roil the Mideast to this day.
Jews were fleeing Nazi oppression in the 1940's. Their struggle for a
homeland cannot in any way be compared to the current sadistic atrocities
being committed in Kosovo by Serb ethnic fascists. But the result was similar:
an entire people displaced and left to rot in camps. Watching Kosovo, many
Israelis must have uncomfortably recalled the dark secret that still haunts
their nation's creation, and may have gained better understanding of the
simmering rage and anguish felt by the ever-homeless Palestinians.
Tellingly, Israel's govenrment and individual Israelis rushed to aid the
pitiful Kosovar refugees. It was not just the terrifying deja vu of Jews being
herded off to Nazi death camps. One senses some Israelis were also trying to
make up for the wrongs of their own past by aiding the Palestinians of the
Balkans. However, some Israeli rightists applauded Serb ethnic cleansing as a
model for action on the West Bank.
While many Israelis opened their heart to the Kosovars, and Jewish groups across
the United States demanded the weak-kneed Clinton take effective military action
to stop Serb crimes, the Muslim world, ever ready to denounce Israel for
persecuting fellow Muslims, sat back and did absolutely nothing to help the
persecuted, mostly-Muslim Kosovars. Iran, self-proclaimed defender of Islam,
even protested to NATO over slight damage to its Belgrade Embassy. The rest of
the Muslim World carried on business as usual with Serbia.
TThe horror of Kosovo, and Shimon Peres's warning, should encourage
Barak's new government and PLO to resume serious movement towards a
final peace. Syria has openly signaled it is ready to talk to Barak, and let
Israel out of the bloody quagmire in southern Lebanon. The Israeli public is
ready, so are most of the Arabs - and even Iran's new, moderate, ayatollah-
lite government. The alternative: escalation of Mideast nuclear, chemical,
biowarfare arms race.
Politicians start most wars; soldiers end them. Gen. Barak now has a golden
moment to seize the diplomatic initiative and become an Israeli DeGaulle by
having the courage to press his people into the worrisome, distasteful, but
absolutely essential, acceptance of a viable Palestinian state. Pray this
window of opportunity is not slammed shut by the Arab or Jewish extremists
who want to create another Kosovo.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999
