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Was
Barak telling the truth?
The ex-PM's
disparagement of the Palestinians began long ago
Yoav Peled
May 24, 2002
The Guardian
(UK)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4420334,00.html
The ex-PM's
disparagement of the Palestinians began long ago
Yoav Peled
Guardian
Friday May
24, 2002
Astute observers
of Israeli politics have been wondering, ever since Ehud Barak
was elected prime minister in 1999, whether his "peace offensive"
was a real effort to achieve peace with Israel's neighbours or
only an attempt to "expose" the Arabs' intention of destroying
Israel.
The debate
intensified when the failure of the Camp David II summit in the
summer of 2000 was almost universally interpreted as a rejection
by Yasser Arafat of Barak's "generous" offer to end Israel's occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza and enable the Palestinians to establish
an independent state.
An interview
Barak recently gave to Benny Morris - a convert to the cause of
the Israeli rightwing - which was published in the New York Review
of Books (and reprinted in this newspaper yesterday) allows a
glimpse into some of his underlying assumptions.
The controversy
over what actually transpired at Camp David is well known by now,
and Barak's version of events is disputed (yet again) in the same
issue of the New York Review by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha.
What is more revealing is Barak's view of the people with whom
he was purportedly trying to reach a peace agreement.
"Repeatedly
during [the] interview," Morris reports, Barak spoke of the Palestinians
as products of a culture "in which to tell a lie ... creates no
dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies
that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant
category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that
which doesn't." Curiously, Morris, who did more than anybody to
dispel official Israeli lies about the war of 1948, does not record
his own reaction to these racist stereotypes.
Polite western
society no longer tolerates such characterisations of entire cultures,
although I suspect things may have changed, at least in the US,
since September 11. But in Israel the public denigration of Arab
culture was historically acceptable, since, like all colonial
movements, Zionism had to dehumanise the indigenous inhabitants
of its country of settlement in order to legitimise their displacement.
Thus, as many studies have shown, depictions of the Arabs as conniving,
dishonest, lazy, treacherous and murderous were commonplace in
Israeli school textbooks, as in much of Israeli literature in
general.
For the past
two decades, however, Israeli society has been going through a
profound and wide-ranging process of liberalisation. A great deal
of effort was invested, by the upper-middle strata of Jewish Israeli
society (the people who voted for Barak in 1999), in the struggle
against the mutual stereotyping of Jews and Palestinians.
A whole industry
of "dialogue and coexistence" groups sprouted up. As a result,
generalisations such as the ones used by Barak were delegitimised
to the point where it became difficult, in classroom situations
for example, to make any general statement about a particular
group in society. Tragically, all of this was halted by the breakdown
of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada.
The question,
then, is whether Barak's statements reflect a genuine frustration
over the Palestinians' response to his peace efforts; are an effort
to cater to changing public opinion; or whether he held this view
of the Palestinians all along.
As chief
of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, he opposed the Oslo accords,
and as minister of the interior in Yitzhak Rabin's cabinet he
abstained in the crucial vote on the Oslo II agreement. When he
took office as prime minister he reneged on the commitments undertaken
by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the Wye Plantation
agreement, to further withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory.
And throughout his tenure as prime minister he refused to abide
by any clause of the Oslo agreements that mandated further Israeli
"concessions" to the Palestinians. This behaviour is perfectly
understandable if the Palestinians are all pathological liars
and agreements signed by them are not to be trusted.
During Barak's
year and a half in office as prime minister, he kept warning that
Israel was like a ship heading towards certain collision with
an iceberg, and that his peace efforts were crucial for avoiding
a catastrophe. Unfortunately, what is revealed in the Morris interview
is that the captain of the ship may have been blinded by prejudice,
so that instead of avoiding the iceberg he sailed full steam ahead
right into it.
Yoav Peled
teaches political science at Tel Aviv University. He is co-author,
with Gershon Shafir, of Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple
Citizenship (CUP).
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