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3.0 out of 5 stars
Intresting, but...., February 26, 2007
This review is from: Facing a Cruel Mirror: Israel's Moment of Truth (Hardcover)
Former Knesset member Michael Bar-Zohar wrote this 1990 look at Israel's defensive acquisition of Gaza, the ancient Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank of the Jordan) and the ancient Old City in Jerusalem, before recent studies. He concludes that Israel cannot realistically hold any of these areas, despite their legal acquisition under international law, thanks to demographic "realities."
That was before the 1993 Oslo Accords, before the Palestinian Authority, and before recent scholarly assessments of Palestinian and Jewish populations rendered much of this work, and indeed, Bar-Zohar's assessment outdated at best.
His conclusions were based neither on international law, nor on realistic assessments of current-day demographics. Indeed, the above noted demographic studies have exposed several myths enshrined in common perceptions of the growth and sustainability of Jewish and Arab populations--both within the 1949 Green line and within the disputed territories.
There are certainly interesting details concerning internal Israeli politics, private discussions between Israeli leaders and even private meetings (many of them) between King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli leaders beginning with Golda Meir in 1948, which achieved many understandings, albeit limited, but ultimately failed to temper overall Arab rejectionism or resolve the conflict.
Bar Zohar also captures a good sense of Arab hatred of Jews following the Six-Day War. In Chapter 3, for example, he quotes a poem of Fadwa Tukkan, beginning, "The hunger of my hatred/ opens his mouth./ Nothing but their livers would satisfy the hunger that dwells in my flesh./ Oh my intense, stormy rage!/ They murdered the love inside me./ They turned the blood in my veins into gall and melted tar."
There are also fair assessments of the birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its post-1967 reach for power, Israeli political turmoil within Israel following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the beginnings of an Israeli movement for peace at any cost.
He also portrays the intense Israeli dilemma concerning child Arab warriors, first openly discussed during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to halt two decades of shelling of Israel's northern towns. In one poignant moment, a soldier described catching the terrorist murderer of his fellow soldier. The terrorist had shot his comrade at point-blank range, but when the soldier caught him, he could not respond: the killer was "a boy of thirteen; I have a 13-year old child at home, and I could no more harm him than my own boy," he said. This was a new, immoral, but effective tool in the Arab arsenal, which grew only more powerful in the subsequent decades.
Then came the 1987 "uprising," during which Arab Palestinians targeted and killed dozens of Israeli civilians within the space of a few years, yet won a media war by claiming the "murder" of hundreds of Palestinians, most of them actually combatants.
Despite all this, Bar-Zohar ended up supporting negotiations with Arafat, because there was "no other game in town." But recent developments rendered moot discussions herein concerning Gaza; Israel opted in 2005 to withdraw the entire Jewish population from that area, granting unilateral control there to the Palestinian Islamist forces of Arafat's Fatah faction and the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas. Indeed, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that no Palestinian Authority faction--either Fatah or Hamas--intends ever to live "side by side in peace with Israel.
Ever since August 2005, the PA has continued to bombard Israel with Kassam rockets, and to smuggle in from Egypt, and by sea, both the terrorists and arms materiel with which to intensify this war against the Jewish people.
Therefore, discussions herein concerning all other areas that Israel legally acquired in 1967--between the 1949 Green Line and Jordan River, as well as the Golan Heights--remain very much open. Israel should no longer, as Bar-Zohar suggests, consider unilateral withdrawals. Nor should it pursue the failed discussions with Arafat's Fatah faction, much less the "unity government" of Hamas and Fatah.
International law is very clear: territory acquired by any state in self-defensive action against foreign state or other aggressors can be held legally until such time as the defenders can peacefully negotiate with the aggressors to conclude the dispute. To no avail, Israel has attempted innumerable times--most recently in 2000 at the Camp David II, and in 2005, with the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza--to end the ongoing dispute with Arab nations, and specifically, with the pseudo-government of the Palestinian Authority. Thus, no UN resolution calling for peaceful and binding bilateral negotiations has ever been sincerely attempted by the Arab leaders of any state, government or authority, much less successfully concluded. Which means that Israel has no obligation under international law, to again offer disputed territory to her would-be conquerors.
In 1990, Bar-Zohar's opinions were certainly worth considering. They aren't any longer. History and continuing Palestinian and other Arab public declarations of determination to destroy Israel render the entire subject inappropriate, and unrealistic.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
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