SEPTEMBER 2005

ISRAEL

Everything is a synthetic realism. Everything belongs to safety orange.

It is a gaseous color: fluid, invisible, capable of moving out of those legislated topographies that have been traditionally fenced off from nature to provide significant nuances for daily living. Perhaps it is a perfume: an optical Chanel No. 5 for the turn of the millennium, imbuing our bodies with its diffuse form. (Chanel was the first abstract perfume, as it was completely chemical and not based on any flower; appropriately, it arrived on the scene at roughly the same time as Cubism.) The blind aura of safety orange has entered everyday living space. One pure distillation appears in the logo for Home Depot, which posits one's most intimate sphere, the household, as a site that is under perpetual construction, re-organization, and improvement. The home becomes unnatural, industrial, singed with toxic energy. Microsoft also uses the color for its lettering, conjuring its associative power to suggest that a scientific future is always here around us, but may be fruitfully harnessed (Your home computer is a nuclear reactor).FROM cOLOURS/sAFETY oRANGE, tIM gRIFFIN, Cabinet Magazine, www.cabinetmagazine.org

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THE OSLO ACCORD

The following conversation recorded by Barry Chamish persuades us to look at the Oslo Accord with new eyes, and ignore the trail, a financial one from the subliminal gutter that has opened up. Thus we may take an interest instead in a survivor, Yossi Beilin, who has and remains seeking a path to
" peace with the Palestinians, which is the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict.":

Barry Chamish:....And as usual, I will attempt to balance the Israeli terror - mafia state with the truth. Which usually means, I will impart vital information in utter futility.

     Three days ago I received a phone call from Oslo. The caller was Henry Gluksman, the advance man for the Oslo negotiations. He read my website and was impressed by my Rabin murder research. The first thing he said was, "You missed the real motive for Rabin's murder. It was financial."

      A little background about the man. He lives in what he calls a "fool's paradise" as a political refugee in Norway. The government there provides him with an apartment and pension as protection against mortal retaliation from Israel. Strange that he would be used to pave the way for the Oslo "peace" talks.

      He claims the Shabak made attempts on his life and he was forced to flee Israel in the early 1980s. Argentinian-born Gluksman publicly accused Israel of being behind the Falklands War. "I discovered that it was Israel Aviation Industries that provided the Argentinian planes and missiles and it was they who sunk the Lancaster," he explained. "They convinced the Argentinian government that they could win the war for them."

      Mr. Gluksman's motives for talking freely to me appear not to be ideological. He is an avowed Marxist. Simply, he believes his Oslo talks became corrupted and that Rabin was murdered by the corrupters of his negotiations. His insider revelations are startling and verify the crux of my own research.

HG - When I began laying the groundwork for the Oslo talks in '88, money wasn't even considered as a political issue. It's when it became the core issue that things turned ugly.

BC - What do you mean '88? The talks began in '92.

HG - The plans for them were initiated in '88. We had to wait until Rabin was elected to put them into action. He sent the two negotiators, Pundak and Hirshfeld, to Oslo and the initial talks were aimed at establishing an honest groundwork for peace.

BC - I interviewed Ron Pundak in 1996 and he told me something remarkable. He said that his boss, Yossi Beilin, doesn't believe in borders. Borders cause wars. He told me the end result of the accord would be the removal of Israel's borders. This would be done by dismembering the country piece by piece. After, Israel would blend into a Middle East bloc of united Arab countries.

HG - Yes, that was our objective. The Gush Katif disengagement was agreed to in 1993 as part of the broader plan. To understand how this would lead to peace, look at Hong Kong. It was a colony of six million in a sea of over a billion Chinese. Israel consists of six million Jews in a sea of over a billion Moslems. When Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1999, nothing changed for the people of Hong Kong. They went on with their lives as before but without the threat of attack hanging over them. That was our objective. Israel would become Arab and nothing would change, but the threat would end. The Jews of Tel Aviv would go on with their lives, run their businesses, build their homes but the mayor would be an Arab, the police would be Arabs, the courts would be Arab. It was the ideal solution.

BC - So if the plans are on course beginning with Gush Katif, what is your problem with the accords?

HG - The problem began when the Labor Party leaders saw Oslo as a way to make a quick buck. Everyone was rushing to join in, Peres, Ramon, Micha Harish. And they all came with their Palestinian businessmen in tow. I mean, who were Micha Harish and Chaim Ramon? How did they become peace negotiators? Oslo was drawing the greediest crooks to the money pot. They didn't want peace, they wanted a piece of the action. People who were absolute nobodies suddenly were showing up for discussions. The most absurd was this Rabbi Melchior who Peres brought along. Who ever heard of him before? He had no legitimacy or constituency, never wrote learned tracts and overnight he jumps from Oslo to the cabinet of Shimon Peres. Everyone the Israelis sent to iron out details were there for what they could get out of Oslo and the PLO more than cooperated in the thefts and corruption. From a Marxist beginning, the discussions turned capitalistic.

BC - Where did Rabin fit in?

HG - He saw how corrupt everything had turned and decided to abandon the whole enterprise. He was going to put the talks on hold or shut them down for good if the corruption didn't stop. That's why they murdered him. He threatened to bring down the house of crime and that would have been very costly to the crooks. I read your work. Your conclusion is similar to mine but you left out some people who stood to lose big if Rabin stayed alive. It's a broader plot than you've found out.

This record mentions Yossi Beilin who turns up again today in matters concerning the Gaza Strip:
14m$ for Israelis fruit farms
in Gaza
The Irish Times
Peter Hirschberg

Greenhouses owned by settlers in Gaza will be purchased by a private foundation - for a sum of $14 million - and handed over to the |Palestinians once Israel has withdrawn from the Strip, according to an agreement reached yesterday (August 12th)

The deal became possible after the entire sum was raised via private donations, including one of $500,000 by James Wolfensohn, the Quartet envoy in the region trying to co-ordinate Israelis and Palestinians to ensure the economic development of Gaza after the pull-out.

The greenhouses included in the deal cover some 800 acres (1 dunum + 1/4acre) and are owned by about 400 farmers. they were bought by the Economic Co-operation Foundation (ECF), headed by Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the Oslo Peace Accords. He said the other donors included personal friends of Mr, Wolfensohn, the former World Bank President.

Farmers will receive half the money for their greenhouses after the settlements have been evacuated and the remainder once the Israeli Army has left. they will then be handed over to Palestinian farmers. the deal covers about 75 % of the settler greenhouses, with the other 25% already dismantled and moved inside Israel. Settler farmers have grown tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and flowers in these greenhouses, much for export. By ensuring the greenhouses are not destroyed jobs for about 4,000 Palestinians would be assured Mr Beilin said.

h kREISLER iNTERVIEWS yOSSI bEILIN : eXCERPTS

The peace process really took off at the beginning of the last decade with the Oslo Accords. Why did they fail?

They failed mainly because it was such a challenge for the extremists on both sides. They had the upper hand. They took it very seriously. They fought against the process as much as they could, while the moderate people were just happy. They did not fight. They did not demonstrate. They were happy that their governments took such bold decisions, and didn't feel that they had the need to fight for their own governments, which already had taken the decisions. This was a grave mistake of the coalition of sanity in the Middle East, which gave into the coalition of insanity. We are all now paying the price for this victory, which I hope is a very provisional one.

The people on both sides who didn't want a solution undertook actions that increased the probability that there would not be a solution....

Actually, the idea of Ehud Barak as the Labour prime minister was to have on board the rightist parties, including the Religious National Party, until the crossroads, which would be conducive to a permanent solution. The idea was a very interesting one: to have a broad coalition, to get together to the point of a decision, and then to have a referendum when you don't need your political coalition [anymore], but your constituency. And if you win that referendum, then you can implement the permanent agreement.......

You're a political scientist. Some critics say that all of this won't be fixed until Israel changes its political system, so that the governing coalitions are not as dependent on minority parties, some of whom are a very supportive of the settlements.

I'm not sure that by technical decision you will change the ideology. Even if the political system imposes a reshuffle, you may have bigger parties, but they themselves would be coalitions. Then the leadership will have to be attentive to the internal coalition, as it is now attentive to the external coalition. So I am not one of those who believe that the systems are changing everything. Of course, they have ramifications, they have an impact on ideology. But the ideology is there, and what we have to tackle is the substance of the matter, not only the style.

Is there a contradiction at the core of Zionism? On the one hand, secular, committed to Western values, to democracy; but on the other hand, a component that is faced toward the religion and emphasizes the Jewish people's connection to the land as it is written in the Bible.

I don't think that Zionism as a movement, which was created in the nineteenth century, is connected to religion. But under the Zionist umbrella there are different movements, and one of them is a religious one. The other one is secular, and there are liberals, and there are socialists, and all of them under one umbrella. The umbrella is saying something which is very simple: that the Jewish people, like many other peoples, like all the other peoples, deserve the right to self-determination and a state, as long as it doesn't take the rights of the others. This is the original idea. The idea is that there will be one state in the world whereby there will be a Jewish majority. A Jewish majority will enable the state to absorb any Jew who is asking for a rescue. This is the original idea.

Now, of course, there are religious Zionists. There are non-religious Zionists. And there is, also, a distortion of Zionism. In my view, Zionism is the most liberal national movement in the world. From the beginning [of Zionism], if you read the writings of Herzl and others who established the movement, how they viewed, more than a hundred years ago (it was actually a hundred years ago that Herzl died) the Arabs who lived in Palestine -- the cooperation which they envisioned there between Jews and Arabs -- you see that they did not intend to hurt them or to harm them. Maybe in their own naïve way, they believed that if Jews came to this land, they would be the best neighbors of the Arabs, and that together there will be an economic cooperation, and both of them would flourish and develop. Regretfully, this is not exactly the picture that we see today.

.............Now, in this downward spiral, it must be the case that the decision about the settlements was one problem. But the implementation of that decision on the Israeli side must have aggravated the problems in the sense that you build roads to the settlements, the security requirements and so on. What it looks like you're getting, then, is an action and a reaction on both sides. The Israelis see the suicide bombers and can't make head or tail out of its meaning from a partner that wants to have a peace process. On the Palestinian side, there is an incapacity to understand the process of implementing the settlements.

It is very, very difficult to compare, because one may criticize the settlements as one wishes, and you will not find somebody who would criticize the settlements more than myself -- I think that even building one brick on the West Bank in Gaza since '67 was a huge mistake -- but to compare this project with suicide bombing, with killing of innocent people, is very problematic. It is true that on both sides, we cannot understand the two phenomena, which doesn't mean that they are the same.

Talk now a little about the informal processes that start the peace process again. I know that in the making of Oslo, you were a key figure. You were one of the first people talking to Palestinians on the other side. And, again, we see that phenomenon, that we were at a standstill in the peace process, and in the last couple of months, Israelis on one side and Palestinians on the other began talking informally. Tell us a little about the dynamic of that process. What leads you to each other, so to speak?

We never stopped talking to each other. It is not a couple of months, it is three years. Immediately after the end of the Taba negotiations, that was January, 2001, Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was then the Minister of Culture and Information, and myself, the Minister of Justice, talked about the situation. Our belief was that had we had more time and better circumstances, we could have concluded the job and had an agreement.

We decided, after the defeat of Prime Minister Barak to the new Prime Minister Sharon, that we would dedicate our efforts in order to try, on a private basis, to conclude the job, first and foremost to prove to ourselves that a solution is possible. Since then, we have worked at the beginning in a very modest way with a few people. Then we enlarged the coalitions on each side. We hired experts; we prepared maps. It was a kind of a simulation. We decided to do two things: first of all, to get to the details. Our belief is that God is in the details; not the devil. Because people don't believe that it is possible to have a detailed agreement anymore, that there is a solution for the refugee problem, that there is a solution for the Jerusalem problem. If you prove that there is such a solution, they might change their minds. I'm speaking about the peace camps, about the skeptical people, not necessarily about the extreme doves and the hawks, and the extreme right on both sides.

The second thing was to sign a commitment, because in the past, no signatures were taken and were given. The feeling that you are signing and you are giving something of yourself, you dedicate something, you are giving up on something but you get more, was very important for us. So we signed on a cover letter, not on the agreement itself, because the agreement will be between the government of Israel and the PLO, and we are not representing them today. But we signed on a cover letter, which was sent to the Swiss Foreign Minister, depositing the agreement itself and committing ourselves to the draft of the agreement. By that, I believe that we proved to many -- not to those who don't want to believe, but those who wanted to believe and couldn't anymore -- that there is a partner, that there is a plan, that if we are courageous enough and if we are ready to pay the price, here there is a moment. The governments, at the moment of truth, will have to decide whether they want to use it as a basis, whether they want to change it. But there is one thing that they cannot take from us, that it is feasible.

Re. Geneva Accords How did this process fit into the agreements, the negotiations that had gone before? As we talk now about these Geneva Accords, which I think is the label that's given, do they incorporate the Taba Accords, the Clinton parameters? Where do they differ in very important respects?

Our secret is that we never invented the wheel. We are continuing a path which began with the Rogers plan in '69. What did Rogers say, the secretary of state, then? That the solution will be between Israel and Palestine, with minor modifications of the '67 borders. This was the idea, this has been the idea all the years. This was the Reagan plan, and then it was the Clinton plan, and the Shultz plan, in a way. Eventually what we did was implemented the last phase of the Oslo process. The Oslo process spoke about five years of an interim solution with the Palestinian Authority conducive to a permanent solution at the end of the period. The end of the period was May 4, 1999. We never had an agreement then. The second date was extended to September 13, 2000; even then there was no agreement.

Now, there is no new date. What we are saying is, "Here is, actually, the permanent solution that we needed." It is the continuation of Taba. It is based on the ideas of Clinton, which were the most developed ideas and the most detailed ideas ever suggested to both parties. And this is also the third part of the road map. The road map is the legitimate son of the Bush vision from June 24, 2002. The road map was offered to the parties at the beginning of 2003. The road map speaks about three steps: the first is confidence-building measures, the second is a Palestinian state with provisional borders, and the third is a permanent solution, which will deal with refugees and security in Jerusalem and all these things. This should be implemented by 2005, which means almost yesterday. So we are coming with a third phase. We are not contradicting, of course, the first phases. But that should be a model for the third phase.

If one is serious about implementation of the road map, one has to be prepared with a permanent solution already, or at least talk about it. Now, nothing is taking place, nothing is going on about the permanent solution. This why I believe that what we are doing may revive the road map, which has weakened in the last months.

Re the Demographic situation..........................So those of us, like myself, who believe that a Jewish majority is very important, that it is important that there will be a Jewish state in this world, and that it is vital that this state will be democratic and will be a state of the Jewish people, but also a state for all its citizens, for us the issue of not being in control in a majority of Palestinians is vital. This question is not a theoretical one. It is a matter of a few years until there is a Palestinian majority to the west of Jordan River. And this is why there is a vital and urgent need for us to find a solution as Zionists.
..................................There are people who are really to the extreme right. They don't believe in human rights. Regretfully, they exist also in my country, but they're a small minority, and I don't refer to them. I will never be able to convince them. I'm speaking about the others, about Likud voters. Twenty percent of them supported our agreement. So I'm asking myself about the other eighty percent. What is their alternative? They understand that transferring all the Arabs from the land of Israel or Palestine is crazy. Are they waiting for a miracle? Do they believe a million Jews will now emigrate from the United States to Israel and change the demographic balance?

I believe that they don't have an answer. I believe that they don't have an alternative to what we suggest, because there are actually only two options, in my view. One is to have an agreed upon border as part of a general agreement, and another is to withdraw unilaterally, and to decide upon our own border. If you don't do either a unilateral or an agreement, you are left with an abyss.....................I believe that the public opinion in Israel is our biggest asset. This was the public opinion which convinced the government of Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. This was the public opinion which supported the Oslo agreement. And this was the public opinion which was ready to support an agreement after the King David summit in July 2000, had this summit concluded successfully.

For somebody viewing this from afar, it seems that there is a gridlock in the Israeli system, so that what appears to be one thing becomes something else. What I have in mind here, in the first instance, is the fence, which started as a reasonable statement of trying to separate the two peoples so that the suicide bombers could not come across the border, but seems to have become a juggernaut for bringing more territory under Israel's control, and more settlements. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes. I agree with you one hundred percent. The original idea of a fence came from the left, many people from the left who said, "If you don't have an agreement, if you don't trust the partner, okay, let us withdraw unilaterally." Eventually, the fence now is dividing between Israelis, the settlers who live on the West Bank and the Israelis who went to the west side of it. What are we going to do? Are we going to the fence only part of our citizens against the others? The wall became something which is very bizarre. It is neither hawkish nor dovish. It is very, very expensive. And I don't believe that it is going to give us a safe haven.

I'm not a pacifist. I understand that even if we have a peace agreement, it doesn't mean that we will have a quiet situation by a hundred percent. But I do believe that if we have peace, which will be perceived by both sides as a first solution, then the level of violence will drop drastically. Such a wall may just endanger us more, and irritate the other side, and create for them a vision of people who want to take their land and things like this. It is contrary to the original idea of building the wall and saying, "This is our state, this is our border; we are waiting for a better partner to appear, and until then, we will live as good neighbors or bad neighbors with the fence between us." [Today] this is not the case.

You [recently] used the term, "Two peoples, two narratives." It seems that behind your thinking is the idea that somehow there has to be a settlement that takes account of the two narratives, reconciles the people to each other to accepting both sides of the stories, in some way. Is that a fair statement of your view and what this peace process might ultimately result in?

I would say the following: the Geneva Accord doesn't refer to the narratives at all. We don't have the two narratives. We don't have a united narrative. We have just a solution. From that point of view, it is very logical and rational. It doesn't mean that we don't take into account the importance of the narratives, and it doesn't mean that we believe that it is easy to make from these two different narratives, one. But there is one thing which is, I believe, important: that people will know exactly what is the narrative of the other side. I'm sure that it might make them angry, irritate them, and assure them that the other side is lying, is telling the wrong story, or whatever, but it is important to understand. Some things which seem to you obvious and logical, seem to me almost crazy; but if I know it, at least I can take it into account. And if I don't want to irritate you, I will behave. I will say to myself, "Well, there's something wrong with you, but at least it is not my target to make you angry and to fight with you. I know that you have this story and this is what you believe. I know that my story is very different. Let's coexist."

It must take a lot of hope in your line of work, as somebody who's been so instrumental, so important in trying to make the peace process possible, and to revive it when it fails. Talk a little about that. How have you maintained that hope in an ultimate solution?

It won't surprise you that I have a positive view about myself. But I don't think that I should be the one to talk about it. For me, to be optimistic is actually my raison d'etre. I don't think that any political leader can lead if he or she is pessimistic. Just to have a gloomy vision about the future will not lead us anywhere. So I believe that it comes with the job. If you are a political leader, you must give hope to the people, and you must believe in it. You cannot deceive them.

I believe that we can have a better world. I believe that it is in our hands. We made many mistakes, but we should not give up on it. The fact that we failed once in the game doesn't mean that we don't have peace with Egypt, that we don't have peace with Jordan, that we cannot go to the Arab world, that I cannot go to Morocco next week. It is a different world than the one to which I was born. It is a better world in many aspects. It is a worse world in other aspects. The duty of people like myself is to emphasize the better part of it and to try and lead my people towards peace with the Palestinians, which is the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. If we solve this heart of the conflict, I think that we can change the status of Israel in the world, and in the Arab world. This is, in my view, the sense of Zionism.


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If you had to address a group of students and explain to them what you've learned as a person and as a political leader in this odyssey that you've been on to find a solution, what would you tell them?

I would tell them that when they think that something is a very solid floor, it might be a very thin layer of ice. That one should go on his or her toes. Because what we are doing is something which is very difficult. It is against nature. It is so easy to hate, and to punish each other, and to retaliate, and it is so difficult to understand the other and to have a reconciliation, that even if it seems as if it happened, it's still in the making. If this is the case, take it very seriously and understand that it is not necessarily a solid flow.
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