TRUTH IS THE FIRST AND ETERNAL CASUALTY OF THIS WAR

A Plea for Honesty in 2024 When Talking About Israel Palestine Conflict

“WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS,” von Clausewitz

“WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF LIES BY OTHER MEANS,” von Goldfarb

As a journalist I really do try to write the First Rough Draft of History. I scrupulously collect the facts as they are known on the day an event takes place in the hope that if a historian were to write about it in ten or a hundred years time the report would be a reliable source of information.

As a historian I use many techniques but with the aim of achieving the same kind of reliablity as in my journalism. If a reader finds their way to my work a century from now I want it to hold up. Among the techniques I use is the Michael Corleone interpretative method.

Do you remember this moment in the Godfather, part 2? Michael is in Havana en route to a birthday party for Hyman Roth where the older man will announce his business deal with the government of Cuba.

Corleone is held up in traffic created by a police checkpoint. He watches as a revolutionary follower of Fidel Castro pulls the pin on a hand grenade, grabs a cop and crushes the grenade between the two of them. It explodes killing the pair.

From this Michael intuits correctly that the government of Cuba is about to be overthrown and the deal is not going to hold.

The Corleone Method of anecdotal evidence analysis can be very useful if you have enough lived experience and spend your spare time looking for patterns in the events you have lived through.

In early spring 2001, I had several Michael Corleone moments while in Israel and Palestine to make a radio documentary about Jerusalem and its final status in what was still, just, a viable Oslo process.

It was less than nine months since talks at Camp David between Palestinian president Yasser Arafat and Israel’s then Prime Minister Ehud Barak chaired by President Bill Clinton had broken up. Jerusalem’s status had been under discussion. Could it be divided, as Clinton urged, so as to be capital of both Israel and Palestine?

Since then, the Second Intifada had started to crank up. Barak had resigned and been defeated in an election a few weeks before I arrived. Ariel Sharon was now Prime Minister but it was still possible to think that at some point the discussion on Jerusalem would have to be resumed.

At least that was the view in Boston, where my employer, the NPR radio station WBUR was based. It was also the view on the other side of the Charles River at Harvard where my producer’s husband and several of my friends taught.

The view from the intellectual epicenter of American liberalism was: the Oslo Peace process had hit a roadblock but so had the Northern Irish peace process in its time, and the Good Friday Agreement had been concluded successfully. Sharon’s government and the increasing violence was just a hiccup.

But in the two weeks I was in Jerusalem and the West Bank I heard so many obfuscations, self-delusions and outright lies being told by both sides, that the overwhelming feeling I came away with was nobody is telling the truth and because of this the conflict will continue.

In the wake of the collapse of the Camp David talks there had been public opinion research which discovered a significant majority on both sides wanted peace. My memory tells me that the figure who wanted peace was around 70 percent.

Now, I’m sceptical about polls related to peace. Who doesn’t want it? And since the word is rarely defined for polling purposes it is almost meaningless.

If your idea of peace is that your side wins completely, unconditionally, it really isn’t peace you want, it is victory and victory is something else entirely.

That was the case in Northern Ireland, which had been my beat for NPR in the final five years of the Troubles. There a political process—not really a “peace” process—had led to the Good Friday Agreement. The process had been painstaking and punctuated with occasional spasms of deadly violence. But throughout this period opinion polls would consistently show around 70 percent in both communities in the North in favor of peace.

Seeing that figure in the Israel/Palestine context was interesting because while in Israel I observed how fluid that percentage for peace was.

There was a terrorist incident and several Israelis were killed. I can assure you if a poll had been conducted on that day nowhere near 70 percent of Israelis would have been in favor of peace.

Israel’s retaliation for the incident against Palestinian targets was pretty brutal. If a poll had been conducted in the Occupied Territories that day nowhere near 70 percent of Palestinians would have been in favor of peace.

In Northern Ireland while negotiations were going on, when there was a terrorist outrage there was a dogged persistence to carry on, a sense of finally having found the way to the right track and a fear of leaving it. I did not feel that in Israel.

I went to Orient House, at that point the headquarters of the PLO in the heart of East Jerusalem, less than a mile from the Damascus Gate. The person I hoped to speak with about the breakdown of talks was now “unavailable” so I found myself talking to a spokesman.

The fellow was young and an excellent communicator. He had grown up in the Palestinian Diaspora. My memory isn’t perfect on this but I believe he had been educated in Switzerland. His English was excellent and unaccented. He gave me a recently published pamphlet putting the Palestinian side’s view of what needed to be done to resume talks.

I skimmed it and came across several references to UN Resolution 194. The pamphlet demanded its terms be implemented in any peace agreement.

Now, I knew all about UN Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza to its 1967 boundaries. UN 242 had been the basis for all discussion about ending the Occupation and establishing two states in the disputed area of what had been mandate Palestine. But I had never heard of UN 194.

I asked the young man what 194 was and he explained that it was the Resolution passed by the UN General Assembly at the end of the 1948 War of Independence. It calls for Palestinians to have the right to return to the homes they had fled during that conflict.

I’m not sure I maintained journalistic objectivity at that moment. I may have said, You’re joking, or you can’t be serious. Basically, Resolution 194 meant going back to the 1948 Partition borders not the 1967 borders. Isn’t 242 what these tortured decades of war and intifada and negotiations have been about? That’s what I thought and this undergirded my personal position against Israeli settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. In my community that is not always a popular position.

And now this kid was telling me that the whole time the world has been insisting that Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders as the foundation for peace, the PLO really wanted Palestinians to be able to return to the 1948 borders?

It was an impossible demand given how many physical and demographic changes had taken place since 1948. There were new cities and factories all over what had been sparsely populated agricultural land. How did the young man think it was possible?

He explained the PLO’s position was that financial compensation would be acceptable in place of physical return. Ok, How much? $70 billion dollars, was the answer, which, at that point was about half Israel’s GDP. Again I said, You cannot be serious.

I came away questioning what the Palestinian side meant by “peace” when asked by pollsters and whether the Palestinian leadership was really serious in political negotiations.

Perhaps a few days before that interview, or perhaps a few days after, I spoke with Israel Kimche, who had been part of the Israeli delegation at the Camp David talks. Kimche was a geographer and city planner, and had spent decades working on plans for a united Jerusalem and the city’s future growth.

His job in the talks was to oversee the maps being used to discuss not just land swaps that took into account changes in population and land use since 1967, but also infrastructure. Which side would be responsible for what if there was shared responsibility for Jerusalem? This was a very serious issue. Sewers ran across boundaries, so did electronic and telephone cables. Talking about ways to resolve these mundane dilemmas was fascinating and geeky at the same time.

Kimche volunteered the government had begun planning for the growth of Jerusalem as early as 1963. The working—more accurately, existential—assumption in the years preceding 1967’s Six Day War was conflict was inevitable. Arab leaders had promised to remove the Zionist entity from the face of the earth and their actions in building up their armies seemed to back up the intention.

That Israel would win the war when it finally happened was another working/existential assumption. Kimche and the government understood it was essential to plan for the day after victory.

From the end of the British Mandate and Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948, Jerusalem had been divided with Jordan in control of the Old City. Jews were not permitted to worship at the Western Wall. This new, united Jerusalem was expected to have a huge population boom.

Kimche pulled a massive folio volume down from a shelf. It was a book of Ottoman-era maps of the Jerusalem vilayet, an administrative area, from around the beginning of the 20th century. As he turned pages he explained how the maps had been the framework for planning the expansion of the city after the Six-Day war.

Under the Ottomans, the Jerusalem vilayet encompassed much more than the city. It included much agricultural land going up and down the steep hillsides over which the city is strewn. It was no surprise that there was an absence of a place identified as the West Bank but in annotations I could see where what are considered West Bank settlements post 1967, like Ma’ale Adumim, a bedroom suburb, for the rapidly growing city were planned. There was also a not about Har Homa, where ground had just been broken for another bedroom community. This action had led to international condemnation of Israel expanding settlements in the West Bank.

I asked Kimche about the planning before the war to expand into these areas. He acknowledged that Israel’s expected demographic growth necessitated expansion. When the Arab nations showed themselves ready for war, Israel’s government decided not to waste the crisis and began planning for expansion into areas it expected to conquer.

I had no idea that this expansion had been planned for. What I had learned in my diaspora upbringing was the West Bank had been acquired almost by accident. I asked Kimche about this. His words and attitude were along the lines of: tough, we won.

Kimche was a liberal Israeli. He worked closely with Palestinians and Arab Israelis and taught them urban planning at Hebrew University. I am certain he accepted the need for a two-state solution, just as he understood that for practical reasons, if nothing else, Jerusalem would have to be in some way jointly administered by Israeli and Palestinian officials. But his, “we won, we get to do what we like” attitude was not something you heard from Israeli officialdom and indicated a different meaning for the word Peace than might have been the pollster’s intention.

The finished documentary was called “This Year in Jerusalem: Inside Out” and it was a failure. My reporting demanded a conclusion, but the only conclusion I could reach was the one I am telling you now: neither side was speaking the truth, and I didn’t have the courage to say that out loud.

Jerusalem, Old City roof tops from terrace of Austrian Hospice in 2001 © Michael Goldfarb

Instead I went up to the roof of the Austrian hospice in the Old City and recorded, in stereo, the true sound of Jerusalem echoing in the atmosphere: church bells and muezzin’s calls, I had already secretly recorded myself in a minyan of ecstatic shabbat worshippers at the Western Wall. Back in Boston, my sound engineer mixed those elements into a soundscape we wove in and out of my final script:

This year in Jerusalem there is another kind of dissonance. I came away from the place with a terrible din going on inside my head. It's the noise when you're having an argument with yourself and you can hear your own voice and you're imagining the voice of the person you're arguing with and your can't hear anything anyone else might be saying to you—even when the other side wants almost exactly what you do: a Jerusalem united and just, as it was when Solomon first built the Temple.

The last sound effect was a recording I made of a rocket being launched into the West Bank.

And the lies and self-delusions extended into the diasporas. For years after my documentary aired, whenever I appeared at fundraisers for my NPR station, there were frequently pickets organized by CAMERA, a Jewish-American media monitoring group. They were demonstrating against my and the radio station’s alleged bias against Israel, I knew some of the people in that organization and know they wanted peace, but only as they defined it. And their definition ignored UN Resolution 242, as well.

Six months later I was in Cairo, the World Trade Center was still smoldering and I was making a documentary on the origins of radical Islam. One evening, at an end of the workday dinner with colleagues, mostly Arab, we discussed everything related to the events that had led to 9/11. Inevitably Israel came up. One of my Palestinian colleagues said,

“Really, the Zionists should all go back to Poland.”

She, too, wanted peace but would only talk about her repatriation plan to achieve it in private.

And the reason is obvious. If people were to say out loud their truth: peace means the elimination of the other side—the enemy—the geopolitical dynamics would shift to their detriment. Which of the major funders of both sides would give money to perpetuate the conflict?

In the three decades since the Oslo Agreements were signed international donors have bankrolled the process: $40 billion in aid to the Palestinians since 1994, most of it from the EU and US. US military aid to Israel is also in the tens of billions during the period.

And yet peace is further away today than it has been at any time since 1967. Did none of the various international negotiators trying to solve or, more accurately, manage the conflict not recognize over the years how they were being lied to about what both sides would consider “peace”? And if they knew, why didn’t they call the lies out? Why did they provide billions to sustain a process built on obfuscations and outright falsehoods which doomed it to failure?

In the quarter century since I made the documentary the essential dynamics of the situation in Israel and Palestine have remained the same.

Until the lies and self-delusions of those who live in the area of combat and their supporters in the respective diasporas and overseers in the wider world come to an end, nothing will be resolved.

I hope—and you should too—that 2024 sees an outbreak of honesty in Israel and Palestine.

בעזרת השם

/إن شاء الله

Bezrat ha’Shem/Inshallah … G-d willing.