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David Horovitz: Park Your Caravans Elsewhere, the Envoy Says
If Ariel Sharon thinks there will be world support for the idea of fobbing off Palestinian claims to independent statehood throughout the territories by ultimately relinquishing less than half of the West Bank, then, Simon McDonald makes plain, he should think again. And even Ehud Olmert�s more generous vision of an imposed comprehensive solution is a non-starter.
There are many unilateral Israeli steps that would be "universally welcomed," the ambassador says -- demolishing some of the 300 roadblocks and 70-plus checkpoints, for instance. "Withdrawal from Gaza" would be widely supported, too, as would dismantling "all the outposts, and one or two, or more, of the settlements." But annexing territory, even in the context of a unilateral withdrawal? That would be unacceptable. Opposition to annexation, he says, explains the international "hesitation" over Sharon�s plans.
As recently as early 2000, Shimon Peres, and other Israeli leaders who claimed to know the Palestinians well, insisted Israel could cut a permanent peace deal under which it would annex at least 10 percent of the West Bank, retaining heavily Jewish settled areas. Yasser Arafat made a mockery of those assessments at Camp David. And one of the most significant Palestinian achievements in the subsequent years of conflict, it must now be recognized, is that the world share Arafat�s insistence on a 100-percent Israeli withdrawal. McDonald�s stance is a case in point.
A Foreign Office high-flyer, he came here five months ago after a stint as principal aide to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, centrally placed to gauge international diplomatic sentiment. He is a quintessential diplomat in the gracious, polished, but also the "hugely careful about what he says" sense of the word. Yet he is unconcernedly unequivocal in referring to the West Bank as "Palestinian land," territory over which -- all security, religious and historical arguments notwithstanding -- today�s Jewish residents, and the Jewish state that sent them, simply have no legitimate claims. The Palestinians, "the people who own this land," he says flatly, "don�t think they [the settlers] should be on this land." And neither does he, or his government. After all, he reasons, "there�s no place in the world where, just because I want to go and live there, I can take my caravan and park it on a hilltop."
Talking at the embassy in Tel Aviv, McDonald is adamant that the world "is not going to give up on the Jewish state." But he is equally adamant that Israel is going to have to give up on the territories. "Many agree," he says, slowing his sentence construction to locate the appropriate wording, "that the moment there is an Arab majority west of the Jordan, without a [peace] settlement, it will be very difficult for Israel� We urge Israel to act before that moment."
Does that mean that Britain, whose 1917 Balfour Declaration viewed with such favor "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," would then reorient its support, and instead come to view favorably a single, binational state between river and sea?
"I personally don�t think that the moment there is a non-Jewish majority, this will erase the Green Line and the internationally recognized legitimacy of Israel," he says. Still, "the fact that the demography has moved in the Arabs� favor," will "clearly complicate" matters.
Within the limitations shaped by his understandable concern not to drop a diplomatic clanger, McDonald is a genial interviewee, unhurried and sometimes surprising. He is singularly resolute, for instance, that Israel need not respond to Bashar al-Asad�s peace overtures, asserting that Syria must take "action against the Palestinian rejectionists" it hosts in Damascus and against Hizballah before it can be judged a worthy negotiating partner.
He also allows that this represents a double standard: Here he is legitimizing non-negotiation with the terrorist-sponsoring Syria, while encouraging Israel to talk to a Palestinian Authority that contentedly harbors murder groups. The difference, McDonald says, is that with respect to the Palestinian conflict, "Israel is suffering." And so he and his employers, proclaiming themselves steadfast friends, urge Israel to try to return to the only widely endorsed framework for progress, the road map -- and rapidly shed any illusions about self-serving unilateral solutions.
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Protecting Ourselves (1): I share the Israeli ambassador to Sweden�s boiling indignation over "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," the installation he vandalized in Stockholm.
While its creator, the former Israeli paratrooper Dror Feiler, may assert that it was intended to help "put an end to terrorism," that is hard to reconcile with his placing of a photo of the Maxim restaurant suicide bomber in a small boat to sail serenely across a blood-red pool, with an accompanying text that, among other comments, details the female bomber�s personal grief. But while an instinctive response to the apparent moral bankrupcy of the installation may be a desire to destroy it, that instinct should be overcome; we would have been better served had the ambassador, Zvi Mazel, lived up to his profession. Diplomatic protests, if the installation were deemed to be celebrating or legitimizing terrorism -- at an exhibit, moreover, linked to a conference on genocide -- may have been called for. Vandalism, disturbingly endorsed by our government, demeans Mazel, and those of us in whose name he serves.
Protecting Ourselves (2): It is to our immense credit, amid the violence and barbarism that enclose us, that the Israeli courts, except in the case of Adolf Eichmann, have not imposed the death penalty on murderers. Even Yigal Amir, the assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was not put to death for his crime. But when he cold-heartedly pulled the trigger on November 4, 1995, Amir knowingly forewent many of the natural rights the rest of us enjoy. While we now grapple with the wretched question of whether he should nevertheless be allowed to marry and by extension father children -- as he now wishes and as other murderers may -- perhaps we should be most troubled that a highly educated, veteran immigrant sees in Amir a worthy partner. What does that say about the values she has absorbed here?
February 9, 2004
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