The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace (review)

For anyone trying to understand the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace provides critical background and context. As the title suggests, Professor Cheryl Rubenberg's topic is not the conflict as a whole, but the Palestinian side of this complex equation. Rubenberg explains issues from the perspective of the Palestinians. She opens with a brief history of the Palestinians, in their relation to Israel, a daunting task given the complexity of that history and the widely diverging factual accounts accepted, respectively, by most Palestinians and most Israelis.

Rubenberg focuses on the last decade of the twentieth century, viewing the Palestinians at that period as having made a serious compromise under pressure of circumstances. The PLO eschewed its original aim of liberating the territory of Mandate Palestine, instead recognizing Israel as legitimate and agreeing to settle for a two-part (Gaza and West Bank) mini-state alongside Israel.

By Rubenberg's account, PLO chair Yassir Arafat made these concessions as the price for Israel's willingness to talk to the PLO. Arafat hoped that the new line of communication would lead to the recognition of a Palestine state, with Israel's settlements withdrawn.

Proceeding from the Palestinian perspective, Rubenberg describes the situation of the Palestinians under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, arguing that Israel responded to the PLO concession with increasing harshness. Rubenberg examines the settlements Israel has promoted, whereby its civilians have taken substantial sectors of Gaza and the West Bank. She recounts how the settlements have been expanded significantly since the beginning of the Oslo process. Thus, instead of leading to a solution to the conflict, Oslo in this respect has rendered the conflict even more insoluble. The settlements are now so extensive, Rubenberg says, that Palestinians are unable to sustain their agriculture or industry. A major reason is that Israel gives the settlements preferential access to the scarce water supply. By siphoning West Bank water across the "green line," Israel has damaged Palestinian agriculture.

Demolishing Palestinian homes, both as a criminal punishment on families, and for lack of a building permit, increased after the onset of the Oslo process. These demolitions, in Rubenberg's analysis, are "part of Tel Aviv's overall effort to encourage the emigration of Palestinians" and to take over more territory. The main impact of the Oslo process, for most Palestinians, was "grinding poverty."

Rubenberg examines the closures and curfews that the Israel Defense Force has imposed on the Palestinians, making everyday life intolerable and a constant humiliation.

Making matters worse, in Rubenberg's view, the United States has taken Israel's security concerns as its overriding priority and has pressed the Palestinians to make inappropriate concessions, in particular on Israel's settlements and on the repatriation of the 1948-displaced Palestinians. In so doing, the United States jeopardized chances for a lasting peace: "The United States should have been able," Rubenberg writes, "to . . . understand that a peace not based on equity would not be durable or lasting." Rubenberg debunks the widely reported version of the July 2000 Camp David negotiations as having involved a "generous offer" by Israel rejected by an intransigent Arafat.

To force the Palestinians to accept his spurned offer, Prime Minister Ehud Barak dispatched 1200 troops a few months later to accompany Ariel Sharon on a provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. Barak "welcomed Palestinian demonstrations that he could suppress and thereby remind the Palestinians exactly who was in charge." Assuming the reins of government soon thereafter, Sharon set out to "break" the Palestinians, so that he might "realize the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel from the sea to the River Jordan." In early 2002, Sharon re-occupied much of the Palestinian territory, demanding the surrender of "every male between the ages of fourteen and forty-five." The IDF shelled residential areas and brought new devastation to Palestinian institutions and to their economy.

This invasion engendered an organized...