by Avraham M. Goldstein

Thank G-d for Yasir Arafat. Half a year ago, the Palestinian Authority leader was offered a dream deal. Under the terms of Ehud Barak’s proposal during the Camp David negotiations, a Palestinian state would have emerged in most of Judea and Samaria and in the entire Gaza Strip.

Israel would have retained only the Jewish ring around Jerusalem (including Gilo, Ramot and Maalei Adumim), the Gush Etzion bloc (Efrat, Neve Daniel, Betar), and a few cities immediately over the Green Line, such as Kiryat Sefer. And Israel would have kept sovereignty over the Kotel and over the Jewish and Armenian Quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City. To “compensate” the Palestinians for the retention of these areas, parts of Israel adjacent to the Gaza Strip would have been ceded.

Whereas Israel holds all the cards (it controls the territories and has by far the strongest military in the region), Barak’s offer was mind-boggling. What led him to endorse a giveaway in toto in return for no more than a promise of peace? Evidently Barak had accepted the Arab view that Israel has no claim on the territories, that these are indisputably Arab lands. Barak insisted on keeping only areas that are so heavily populated by Jews or so politically charged as to make giving them up impossible.

Yet Arafat said no (for which, again, we can only thank G-d). Arafat declared that he had already compromised to his limit, that any further erosion would be political (and perhaps physical) suicide for him. What was he talking about? Isn’t the compromise here fully on Israel’s side? The answer lies in bogus mathematics. The Palestinians insist that the State of Israel rests upon seventy-eight percent of Palestine, and that the West Bank and Gaza constitute only twenty-two percent. Translation: by agreeing to any deal that recognizes Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the Palestinians would be ceding their rights to most of “their” land. How, then, can they be expected to give up even one inch of the disputed territories?

Governments and news outlets have embraced this view: that most of Palestine is today part of Israel in its pre-June 5, 1967, borders, and that the Arabs cannot be expected to give any more. As we will demonstrate, this is simply not true.

The world’s understanding of the Middle East conflict has shifted dramatically since 1967. At the time of the Six-Day War, Israel was perceived as the underdog, and after the war, the United States recognized that Israel would have to keep at least some of the captured territories even in the wake of a final peace agreement. This is no longer the case.

In 1974, President Gerald Ford announced a “reassessment” of American policy toward the Middle East. Since then, U.S. support for Israel has eroded progressively, to the point that the Americans now see themselves as an “honest broker” rather than as Israel’s unalloyed ally.

Simultaneously the Arabs have waged a relentless political and media attack upon Israel. The campaign has succeeded by sticking to specific positions while patiently waiting out Israel until it has started to yield. And yield it has, on so many issues. At one time, Israel refused to entertain any withdrawal from the Golan Heights. It refused to consider giving up the Jordan Valley, or any part of East Jerusalem, and certainly not the Temple Mount. The Arabs have patiently waited while Israel has worn down. Today none of Israel’s red lines are classifiable as such. Everything is up for negotiation.

The overall Arab position is today the stance of the major television, radio, and print media. Among these, CNN, Time, Reuters, and The New York Times have been especially hostile to Israel. Objective reporting has given way to biased, inaccurate coverage. Seizing on isolated Israeli miscues, the media portrays Israel as an oppressive occupier. Israeli settlers are routinely termed “militant,” even those not engaged in violence. And the term “settlements” itself, used even for large cities such as Kiryat Arba, is loaded, carrying overtones of someone who does not belong there.

Israel has been a colossal failure at countering this disinformation campaign. Ever since the Yom Kippur War, Israel has proved remarkably inept at public relations (hasbarah, in Hebrew). So poor has Israel’s performance been that many well-meaning Jews now believe the Palestinians are in the right and Israel is in the wrong.

The Arabs have distorted the facts that surround the conflict. Recent interviews by Time for its magazine and website reveal just how distanced from the truth is the Palestinian perspective. In a highly biased report, writer Scott MacLeod spoke with a number of men connected with the Palestinian Authority. Among them was Yasser Abd Rabbo. Describing the atmosphere at Camp David, he told MacLeod that “the Americans came with a draft agreement and it was a real shock to us. It was clear in the draft that it represents mainly the Israeli positions concerning various issues like Jerusalem and the refugees.”

Wait a second. Almost everyone I know believes that Israel offered all the compromises at Camp David. How can it be that the Palestinians perceive the same circumstance in a manner totally opposite? A history of the conflict unveils the development of these bipolar mindsets — the distorted Arab view, and the accurate Israeli view.

Whose Land Is It Anyway?

The Arab position is that Palestine, comprised of the land upon which Israel stands plus the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is historically Arab, and that the Jews stole the land upon which Israel sits. Negotiator Ahmed Qurei told MacLeod that “in 1988 for the first time we recognized explicitly U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338. . . . we accepted just twenty-two percent of the size of historical Palestine. . . . And therefore, the Palestinians have already made the biggest concession. . . . When we talked about the implementation of Resolutions 242 and 338, we never thought that [Israel would] want the land.”

The truth is far different. While the Jewish people were nominally exiled from the Holy Land by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple, some Jews always remained, even through the worst of times. Enduring primitive conditions, these holy people refused to abandon the Jewish homeland, renamed “Palestine” by the Romans in order to eradicate the memory of the Jewish state. In the meantime, successive armies invaded and occupied the Holy Land. But there never was an independent Arab state with a defined citizenry in Palestine.

By the middle of the 19th century, Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem. (At that time, the New City did not exist; all the Jews and Arabs lived in the Old City. The notion that the Old City is Arab is unfounded. It was only an Arab city from 1948 to 1967, because the Jordanian army expelled the resident Jews.) With the First Aliyah in 1882, Jews returned en masse. They came upon a land that was largely devoid of settlement, and certainly of development. Arab Bedouins lived there, but they were scattered throughout the land. (The book From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, is a revelatory exploration of the belated Arab immigration into Palestine. Predictably, this remarkable book was lambasted by Arabists, because it exposed the truth about the lack of Arab permanence in Palestine.) Many Arabs welcomed the Jewish arrivals, who brought with them a determination to revive the land.

By the time the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, favoring the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, Jews were a substantial presence there. Mandatory Palestine included not only what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, but also Transjordan (later renamed Jordan).

As the years went by and Arab opposition surfaced, the land to be used for a Jewish state was whittled down to twenty-two percent — the entire land west of the Jordan River. Israel’s recognized 1948 boundaries, as established by the United Nations, included much less of Mandatory Palestine. The Jews had entertained dreams of a state in a much larger part of the Holy Land, yet desperate for a country of their own in the wake of the Holocaust, accepted the proposed partition into a Jewish and an Arab state. But five Arab states, interfering in a matter that did not involve their borders, waged war against the fledgling country.

Therefore, the claim that Israel exists on seventy-eight percent of Palestine is false. It is Israel that makes up a small percentage of Palestine. Thus, today the Arabs already rule the vast majority of “Palestine,” in Jordan!

From the time that a cease-fire was implemented until 1967, a period of eighteen years, Israel repeatedly expressed its desire for peace. The Arab response, with one exception, was no. The exception, King Abdullah of Jordan, paid with his life for his peaceful intentions, assassinated by a gunman at the Al-Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount in 1951.

In 1967, Egypt committed an act of war by blockading the strategic Gulf of Aqaba. In the ensuing war, which Israel fruitlessly begged Jordan not to enter, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were legally taken from Jordan and Egypt respectively, while the Golan Heights were captured from Syria. Israel’s area had tripled within the space of a week. The Jewish state’s leaders used the new situation to again seek a permanent peace. To this end, they offered to return most of the captured land, with the exception of Jerusalem. The overture was rebuffed.

Some Land, Full Peace

The cornerstone of the negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors has long been United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (and the subsequent 338, which reiterated 242), adopted on November 22, 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War. As the aforementioned Ahmed Qurei sees it, the resolution calls upon Israel to give up the entire Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to the Palestinians so that they can create a state there. In return, the Palestinians will make peace with Israel. The media has accepted this interpretation of 242. So did Bill Clinton, in his final speech on the subject as President, made, predictably, to the leftist Israel Peace Forum. There is only one problem: 242 says no such thing, neither about Israel, nor about the Palestinians.

(We are not making a judgment here as to whether Israel is at all compelled to heed a United Nations resolution. One can make the convincing argument that the U.N. has been so hopelessly biased against Israel that its resolutions carry no weight. However, Israel has long accepted 242 as the basis for negotiations.)

First, the Palestinians are entirely irrelevant to 242, for the simple reason that there was no Palestinian Arab people when 242 was adopted. This is a nation that was manufactured only during the past three decades. Until recently, the very concept of a Palestinian Arab nation was unknown; in the early part of the century, the term “Palestinian” was taken as referring to Jews! The resolution addressed Israel’s standing with its legal neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Therefore, for Palestinian negotiators to bring up 242 is meaningless; the resolution did not award them any rights.

More important, however, is the misperception that the resolution called for all captured lands to be returned to the Arabs. In truth, 242 implicitly recognized that Israel would not give up all of the territories in exchange for peace. The resolution was meticulously worded, stating that Israel should withdraw from “territories occupied.”

Arthur Goldberg was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during that turbulent time. Goldberg stated: “The notable omissions in regard to withdrawal . . . are the words ‘all,’ ‘the,’ and ‘the June 5, 1967, lines.’ . . . There is lacking a declaration calling for Israel to withdraw from all of the territories occupied by it on and after June 5, 1967.”

Soviet Ambassador Vasily Kuznetsov insisted that the word “all” be added to the declaration, but he was rebuffed. Kuznetsov was clearly worried about the resolution’s implication. He stated that “there is certainly much leeway for different interpretations which retain for Israel the right to establish new boundaries and to withdraw its troops only as far as the lines which it judges convenient.”

Professor Eugene Rostow, who helped write the resolution, agrees that 242 did not anticipate a full withdrawal. Rostow, a renowned international lawyer, said that 242 “calls on Israel to withdraw only from territories occupied in the course of the Six-Day War — that is, not from ‘all’ the territories or even from ‘the’ territories.” Rostow goes on: “Speaker after speaker made it explicit that Israel was not to be forced back to the fragile and vulnerable Armistice Demarcation Lines [the 1949 cease-fire lines].”

George Brown, who was the British Foreign Secretary at the time, later told the Jerusalem Post (Jan. 23, 1970), “I formulated the Security Council Resolution. Before we submitted it to the Council, we showed it to Arab leaders. The proposal said, ‘Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,’ and not from ‘the’ territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson, on Sept. 10, 1968, said: “We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders. Some such lines must be agreed to by the neighbors involved.”

Israel accepted the premise of 242: that some land would be exchanged for full peace. The Arabs rejected 242 precisely because it did not call for the return of all the captured lands. What happened, then, that today the Palestinians cite 242 as the basis for a settlement? What happened is that the Arab states worked assiduously to alter the perceived meaning of the resolution. Over the course of the past thirty years, the Arab propaganda machine has successfully put out the word that 242 demands the return of all the lands. The ploy has worked.

Israel and the Palestinians went into negotiations with bipolar views of their purpose. To the Palestinians, the end result was a foregone conclusion: Israel would give up all the territories, upon which a Palestinian state would be founded. In exchange, the Palestinians would cease to have claims upon Israel. By contrast, Israel, especially under Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu, saw no preordained outcome. Everything was up for discussion: whether a Palestinian state would be created, what its boundaries would be.

However, Israel blundered critically in its approach to the talks. Inexplicably, it agreed to push off the toughest issues — the status of Jerusalem and the right of return for Arab refugees — to the end of the negotiations. With the Arab and Israeli views diametrically opposed on these issues, the negotiations were on a collision course. In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority was gaining more and more land, effectively removing more and more territory off the negotiating table. Once taken, these lands would not be given back.

The correct strategy for Israel would have been to negotiate the toughest issues first. If these negotiations failed, crossing Israel’s professed red lines, such as a united Jerusalem, no return of Arab refugees, and Israeli control of the Jordan Valley, more territory would have remained in Israel’s hands when the inevitable impasse happened.

The Palestinian refugee issue is among these issues. Here too the Arabs have warped reality. They claim that the Arabs who left Palestine during the War of Independence were forcibly removed by Israel. And they grossly exaggerate the number of those refugees. The media has gone along with the lies. Writing in Time, Scott MacLeod says that “Jewish forces . . . sent 800,000 Palestinians fleeing into Arab countries as refugees.” In truth, most of the Arabs left of their own accord; only a small number were actually expelled. This does not mitigate the fact that today millions of Arabs live there and must be accommodated. (Here again the precise number is not clear and is certainly exaggerated by the Palestinians.) But Israel is not responsible for the three to four million Arab refugees.

What should Israel do regarding the refugees? First, it should announce that any refugee settlement must simultaneously address the monetary claims of Jews expelled by Arab countries after 1948. Second, it should make clear once and for all that an Arab return to Israel en masse is out of the question.

Equivalence

In its reportage of the Palestinian riots, the media equates the behavior of Israel and the Palestinians. For example, The Times will report that an Israeli and a Palestinian were killed, discounting the fact that the Palestinian was killed because he was engaged in shooting or rock-throwing while the Israeli was murdered as he drove home for dinner. Arabs are being killed for being violent; Jews are being killed for being Jews.

Further, the media treats as axiomatic the notion that both sides are at fault for the Palestinian uprising. This drivel is beyond comprehension, yet the Western governments, including the United States, endorse it.

Saeb Erekat, the main Palestinian negotiator and Arafat’s right-hand man, pins the blame for the violence upon Ariel Sharon’s pre-Rosh Hashanah visit to the Temple Mount. Erekat told Time: “Electing Sharon is undermining the moderates everywhere, making people like me irrelevant.” First, to Erekat, a “moderate” is an Arab who believes that if Israel yields on every single issue, then there can be peace! There is no moderation among Arab “moderates.” Second, the idea that Ariel Sharon is somehow responsible for the uprising is preposterous. With the Temple Mount under Israel’s sovereignty, Sharon had every right to ascend it. (We refer here to a political right; we are not discussing whether a Jew can halachically walk upon the Temple Mount.) Moreover, the uprising actually began two days earlier; Sharon’s visit was just a pretext.

Sharon is also routinely termed a “terrorist,” which he never was, while Arafat’s terrorist past is forgotten. (At one time, Arafat would have been arrested for setting foot in the U.S. and charged with ordering the murder of two American diplomats in Khartoum, the Sudan, in 1974.) In fact, Sharon is a true moderate, perhaps the only moderate on either side, who has promoted a compromise that would lead to a Palestinian state in part of the territories.

Who truly deserves the blame for the riots? The words of the notorious Marwan Barghouti, an Arafat confidant who has led the uprising, are striking: “[Arafat] didn’t tell us to stop [the uprising]. He would never say that. . . . I always receive encouragement from [Arafat].”

Further, Barghouti told Time, “This intifadeh is strategic. Not for one month, two months. I think it will continue for one year, two years, more than people expect.” And what does Arafat think of this? “Barghouti and Arafat regularly communicate,” declares Time.

And so the Palestinian Authority, from the top, is responsible for the violence. Yet Israel has been condemned for its response. The nature of the response apparently is irrelevant. When soldiers defend themselves by shooting at rock throwers (and yes, rocks do kill), Israel is condemned if bystanders are hurt. But if Israel pinpoints a Palestinian agitator and kills him, thereby sparing bystanders, it is also condemned!

Israel is scolded for not reacting “proportionately” to the Arab violence. A nation under attack has no obligation to respond in a proportionate manner. Rather, it is obliged to make the attack cease. When the U.S. led the invasion of Iraq, it did not bother with proportionality. The goal (admirable) was to get Iraq out of Kuwait, as quickly and effectively as possible. In war, bad stuff happens. Everyone should mourn when innocent civilians are killed. But that is the horror of war. If the Palestinians stop shooting bullets and throwing rocks and firing mortars, Israel will stop reacting, because there will be nothing to which it must react. (A suggestion: some Muslims believe that contact with swine delays their ascent into paradise. Perhaps Israel should begin burying all suicide bombers in the skin of a pig.)

The news media has repeatedly noted the number of Arabs killed in comparison with the lower Jewish tally. Time, for example, wrote that “329 Palestinians have died . . . (compared with fifty-seven Israelis).” The intimation that not enough Jews have been killed should nauseate all good people!

Is Israel perfect? Far from it; all nations make errors in judgment, including the United States. A recent State Department human rights report criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinian inmates. What of the way Jonathan Pollard has been treated while in prison (included prolonged isolation and deprivation)? The U.S. should first put its own house in order.

The Arab propaganda machine insists that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is at the core of the 100-year-old Middle East conflict. The news media treats this as a given. Yet the reality is quite different. The central issue continues to be the refusal by many Arabs to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Each time that Arafat has been asked whether he recognizes this right, he responds circuitously. He never has publicly said, “I recognize Israel.” In Palestinian classrooms and camps, kids are taught that Israel is the enemy. Finally, the impression is given that by cracking down on violence, the Palestinians have “compromised” and merit an Israeli concession in return. This is like saying, “If you do as I demand, I won’t shoot.”

Here, then, is the conflict in a nutshell. While Israel has recognized that the Palestinian issue must be fairly addressed, it awaits true reciprocity. Most Israelis are amenable to compromise in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, even though they believe Israel has a full right to keep those lands. The reasons for this right are religious, historical, and military. Most Arabs mistakenly see the lands as Arab, the return of all of which is the sine qua non of a final agreement.

Are the Palestinians truly prepared for peace? If so, they will take concrete steps to prove their readiness. They will end the violence. They will stop demonizing Israel in their textbooks. And they will sit at the negotiating table in the spirit of give and take, prepared for true peace rather than deception.

And it is time for Israel to mount an effective public relations campaign, spearheaded by the Prime Minister. Ariel Sharon should explain to the world that Israel has an integral right to all the areas taken in 1967, and that any compromise of those rights will be done not because Israel does not have rights, but in spite of the fact that it does. Thus, any Israeli concession is truly a concession and must be matched by Arab compromise. Heretofore we have seen compromise only by the Israelis; until the Palestinians share this spirit, hope for peace will remain a distant dream.

But the worst propaganda involves the Har Habayit, the Temple Mount. Yasir Arafat has dared to claim that King Solomon did not build a Temple there, that the religious Jewish connection is of recent vintage. The Palestinians also began to promote an Arab term for the Har Habayit, and have now done the same for the Kotel.

How has the news media responded to these lies? By giving them the imprimatur of legitimacy. The New York Times routinely refers to the “Haram al-Sharif, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.”