[News] Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/cantarow04092009.html

April 9, 2009


The Problem Isn't Avigdor Lieberman


Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

By ELLEN CANTAROW

No one doubts that Avigdor Lieberman is a thug. 
His ultimata (“Those who think that through 
concessions they will gain respect and peace are 
wrong,” etc, New York Times Thursday, April 2, 
2009) were designed to shock. On this site Neve 
Gordon’s revelations of Lieberman’s many 
corruptions, his beating of a 12-year-old child, 
his exhortation to bomb Gaza as the US bombed 
Hiroshima, supply further ugly evidence against 
the man, and fuel the flash-fires burning through 
the Internet in the wake of his appointment as Israel’s foreign minister.

So he should be denounced by all means, but it is 
certain that the problems attaching to his name 
are not going away. On the contrary -- 
particularly given President Obama’s repudiation 
of Lieberman during the President’s speech in 
Ankara, Turkey, and his avowed loyalty to a 
‘two-state solution’ – these problems will appear 
in a different form, specifically in regard to 
the nature of the “two states” under the guidance of Obama, Netanyahu & Co.

If the Lieberman appointment wasn’t specifically 
designed to have him play bad cop to everyone 
else’s good cop, it’s certainly turning out that 
way. A recent J Street petition urges me and 
thousands of on-line others to denounce Lieberman 
as a threat to “our community’s values,” and also 
to endorse J Street’s offer of “our best wishes 
and congratulations . . . pledging to help 
Benjamin Netanyahu's government where possible, 
and push when necessary, to achieve the goal of 
real peace and security for Israel, the 
Palestinians, and the whole Middle East.”

This is truly a dangerous path. Three years ago, 
Lieberman proposed annexing to the northern West 
Bank parts of the Galilee with large Arab 
populations. At the heart of this region is Wadi 
Ara, described in a US media account a few years 
ago as “a seasonal riverbed adjacent to the West 
Bank.” With a majority Arab population, Wadi Ara 
has been Israel’s ever since Ben-Gurion wrenched 
an agreement from Jordan’s King Abdullah that he 
cede the land as part of the post-war armistice agreement.

The area’s story goes back farther. During a 2005 
US trip, Shimon Peres suggested to American 
listeners that US “disengagement funds” (your tax 
dollars at work after the famed Gaza “pull-out”) 
should be employed to “develop” Wadi Ara – that 
is, to resettle the “dispossessed” Gaza settlers 
there. This echoed Irving Howe’s suggestion in 
The New York Times Book Review  (May, 16,1982), 
that more Jews be sent to the “under-populated 
Galilee” – “under-populated,” that is, in the 
sense that New York was “under-populated” by 
whites until the gentrification projects of the housing “boom years.”

Lieberman set the Peres idea on its head with his 
“land-swap” notion but both proposals have in 
common their preoccupation with the “the 
demographic issue.” On this, just about all of 
Israel – and much of so called “liberal Jewish” 
America - is united, extreme-right through left, 
the devil being only in the details how to resolve it for good.

Lieberman’s suggestion was deemed “illegal” by 
Israeli scholars, but it has found sympathetic 
supporters ever since. As it stands now, it could 
easily trot forward as a “two-state solution” 
under US-Israeli aegis. 1 This is what is ignored 
in the hysteria about Lieberman’s actual 
appointment: “transfer,” long an Israeli option, 
may actually take place in the near future. 
(Lieberman’s has been called “soft transfer”)

In the Washington Post February, 2006, Henry 
Kissinger enthusiastically endorsed the idea 
without mentioning Lieberman by name: “The most 
logical outcome would be to trade Israeli 
settlement blocs around Jerusalem . . . for some 
equivalent territories in present-day Israel with 
significant Arab populations. The rejection of 
such an approach . . . which would contribute 
greatly to stability and to demographic balance 
reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open.”

Incendiary issues” no doubt include Wadi Ara 
Arabs’ bitter resistance to the “land swap” 
notion. “Stability” and “demographic balance” are 
code for the purity of the Jewish state, once 
it’s been relieved of its “demographic problem,” 
and once potentially fractious Arabs have come 
under the boot of the Palestinian Authority, the US-Israel regional puppet.

Around the same time Kissinger wrote his 
commentary, Israel National News reported that 
Knesset member Otniel Schneller of Kadima, 
“considered to be one of the people closest and 
most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,” had 
proposed something similar to Lieberman’s “swap” 
idea. Schneller’s plan was “more gradual.” The 
annexed, former Israeli Arab citizens would still 
be of the Jewish state. Their land, however, 
would belong to the Palestinian Authority and 
they wouldn’t be allowed to resettle anywhere else in Israel. 2

A more recent recruit to this bandwagon is 
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has said a 
“Palestinian state” could “be the national answer 
to the Palestinians” in the territories and those 
“who live in different refugee camps or in Israel.”

One assumes that this plan will keep popping up 
and that (the incendiary Lieberman kept tidily in 
the wings while his shoot-from-the-mouth behavior 
distracts the attention of “the left”) that it 
could well come to fruition. The New York Times’ 
Ethan Bronner reported February 12 that “the 
left” likes Lieberman’s “willingness to create 
two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, which 
would involve yielding areas that are now part of 
Israel.” Note Bronner’s use of “willingness” and 
“yielding,” suggesting his own tacit endorsement 
of Israel’s magnanimity. (Bronner, of course, 
quoted no Arab voices from Wadi Ara, nor did he 
mention that what Israel would yield is land 
inhabited by untermenschen. At best the vast 
majority of Israelis consider the Arabs to be 
people who need “help” -- as in the suggestion 32 
years ago by Irving Howe’s disciple, Michael 
Walzer, that the indigenous people are “marginal 
to the nation.” His solution was “helping people 
to leave who have to leave.” 3

Again, there’s no need to ask the people of Wadi 
Ara and such “Arab” areas how they feel because, 
after all, the land isn’t theirs to begin with. 
The Jewish National Fund controls more than 90 
percent of Israel’s land and the JNF must use 
charitable funds in ways that “directly or 
indirectly [benefit] . . . persons of Jewish 
religion, race or origin.” The JNF is “recognized 
by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist 
Organization as the exclusive instrument for the 
development of Israel’s lands.” Such development 
is open, forever, only to Jews. 4

And so, amidst much celebration (hand-shakes on 
the White House lawn, etc.) the new “two-state” 
solution could well be realized in the 
not-so-distant future. A Palestinian ghetto would 
exist alongside a Jewish state, which would of 
course include the settlements. “The demographic 
problem” bedeviling Zionists ever since two 
rabbis returned in the 19th century with the 
report that the bride was “beautiful but married 
to another man,” would vanish. Now and then, on a 
distant hilltop, a lone goatherd might appear, 
nostalgically suggesting “simpler” and more 
“traditional” times. Palestinian embroidery would 
be sold at appointed places, to adorn the persons 
and furniture of pure Jews commuting back and 
forth to a now purely Jewish Jerusalem and Tel 
Aviv from, say, purely Jewish Maale Adumim. 
American readers wearing exquisite Navajo 
turquoise jewelry – this writer among them – will recognize these images.

* * *

How could it have come to this? Surely not for 
want of countless early warning signals. Here, 
for example, is Moshe Dayan in an interview with 
BBC reporter, Alan Hart, May 14, 1973:

Alan Hart – Why are you seeking to establish more 
and more settlements? The Arabs think that your 
goal is to stay in Transjordan for eternity.

Dayan – That’s right. In fact I think that 
Israelis should stay in Transjordan for eternity and till the end of time.

Hart­Arabs listening to you now, including 
President Sadat, will say: “There you are! Dayan 
has confirmed that he’s only after territorial expansion


Dayan­OK, if you think the desire to feel at home 
throughout all of Transjordan is an expansionist 
ambition. If that’s what you call being 
“expansionist,” then I’m an expansionist.”

--from Amnon Kapeliouk’s Israel: la fin des 
mythes (Israel: an end to all myths), Editions 
Albin Michel, 1975 (translation mine.)

Nor should one forget Dayan’s 1967 comment to 
colleagues about what they should tell the 
Palestinians: “[Y]ou shall continue to live like 
dogs, and whoever prefers­may leave
” 5 Or, 
farther back in time, Chaim Weizmann’s remarks 
about the 1917 Balfour declaration, on record 
with the Jewish Agency Executive: “[W]ith regard 
to the Arab question – the British told me that 
there are several hundred thousand negroes there 
but that this matter has no significance.” In 
Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky quotes US 
journalist Vincent Sheean, who “arrived in 
Palestine as an avid Zionist in 1929, [and who] 
left a few months later a harsh critic of the 
Zionist enterprise largely because of the 
attitudes among the Jewish settlers towards what 
they called the ‘uncivilized race’ of ‘savages’ 
and ‘Red Indians,’ ‘squatters for thirteen centuries’
” 6

In Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis 
of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy, 
(University of Michigan Press, 2006), Israeli 
security and foreign policy analyst Zeev Maoz 
shows that Israel was conceived through 
deliberate policy choices as a “Sparta state.” 
All of its governments from Ben Gurion forward 
have relied on Zeev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” 
doctrine. This doctrine translates as military 
blows "to convince the Arabs of the futility and 
illogic of their dreams. Over time, the Arabs 
will come to accept the Jewish state and to make 
peace with it."7   (See this writer’s review at 
<http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20927>http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20927.) 
The destruction of Gaza this past winter is the 
latest of such actions designed to persuade the 
natives that their dreams are futile and illogical.

It cannot be over-emphasized that without the US, 
Israel could not have gotten to this point. 8 
President Obama is turning out to be more of the 
same. Announcing the appointment of George 
Mitchell as his Middle East envoy, Obama said:

Senator Mitchell will . . . help Israel reach a 
broader peace with the Arab world. Let me be 
clear: America is committed to Israel's security. 
And we will always support Israel's right to 
defend itself against legitimate threats. . . To 
be a genuine party to peace, the quartet has made 
it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: 
recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce 
violence; and abide by past agreements. . . I 
should add that the Arab peace initiative 
contains constructive elements that could help 
advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab 
states to act on the initiative's promise by 
supporting the Palestinian government under 
President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking 
steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, 
and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all.  (Emphasis mine.) 9

The emphases on Israel’s “right to defend 
itself,” the requirement that Hamas toe the 
quartet’s line, the underscoring of the US-Israel 
puppet regime – all this is obvious. What is not 
so obvious is Obama’s deliberate choice to 
eviscerate the Arab League’s 2002 proposal, the 
body of which requires Israel to withdraw to its 
1967 borders with some modifications.  Obama 
quotes a corollary to the proposal, a small 
paragraph requiring Arab states to “normalize” 
relations with Israel – the corollary has as its 
premise that first Israel must make real (not 
bogus) land concessions. This was the solution 
almost reached at the Israeli-Palestinian talks 
in Taba, Egypt in 2001: Ehud Barak withdrew. 10

Just so, Israel refused in 1971 what was then a 
dazzling prospect, President Anwar Sadat’s offer 
of full peace. Egypt was the regional Arab 
super-power, and peace with it would have ensured 
future treaties with other Arab countries. (The 
Palestinians were not considered by Sadat, who 
was interested only in Israel’s withdrawal from 
the Sinai, which it had taken in 1967.) The 
consequence of Israel’s rejection, a choice of 
expansionism over security -- one that Henry 
Kissinger, backing Golda Meir, enabled --  was 
the Yom Kippur War. This cost Israel the lives of 
three thousand Israeli soldiers; a "staggering" 
loss of equipment (Zeev Maoz’s term); $10 billion 
in overall damages. On at least two occasions 
Israel armed its nuclear warheads, bringing the 
region to the brink of nuclear war. 11

Israel rejected security for expansionism at Oslo 
as well, no matter what the “generous offer” 
myths may say. It continues to do so as I write. 
More bad news floods our e-mail boxes about the 
rotting concentration camp in Gaza. US-Israel 
apparently intends to make it an international 
charity case, an occasional shooting gallery for 
WMD testing in dense urban areas, or both. At the 
same time, bad news comes from the West Bank, 
where arrests and kidnapping of Palestinians, the 
shooting of international solidarity workers, 
home demolitions, settler pogroms, further 
annexations in East Jerusalem, and all the rest 
of it, continue at a brisk and unimpeded pace.
Such is US-Israel’s history. Such is the present. 
In all of this Avigdor Lieberman is merely an 
exclamation mark. Those who want change should focus on the larger picture.

Ellen Cantarow can be reached at 
<mailto:ecantarow at comcast.net>ecantarow at comcast.net

Notes.

1. I am indebted to Noam Chomsky’s essay, “Good 
News, Iraq and Beyond,” for ideas about the Lieberman “land
swap” and some of the politicians who embraced 
it. 
See 
<http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/17048>http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/17048

2. Ibid.

3. “Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Jews: 
the chimera of a binational state,” in Irving 
Howe & Carl Gershman, Israel, the Arabs and the Middle East (Bantam, 1972).

4. “Good News, Iraq and Beyond.” Chomsky 
discusses a recent (only partly successful) 
challenge to the JNF’s blatantly racist practices.

5. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (South End 
Press, 1983, 1989), p. 481. Dayan made this 
statement in a September, 1967 meeting, 
suggesting what his colleagues should tell 
Palestinians. The original sources is Yossi 
Beilin. Shimon Peres protested that that Israel 
should preserve its moral stand, and Dayan 
replied, “Ben Gurion said that anyone who 
approaches the Zionist problem in a moral aspect is not a Zionist.”

6. Ibid.

7. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical 
Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy 
(University of Michigan, 2006) p. 9

8. A crucial article recently posted at Znet, by 
Irene Gendzier, proves through her analysis of a 
rich assortment of quotes by US officials, that 
in 1948 everyone in US power knew precisely what 
was happening to Palestine’s Arab population. 
They looked on – some with horror, some with 
skepticism. Those who saw in Israel the prospect 
of a future Spartan guarantor of US “interests” 
(post-British-French hegemony in the region and 
access to its oil) looked on with cold curiosity. 
After 1967 the deal was, so to speak, signed, sealed and delivered.

9. “President Barack Obama Delivers Remarks to 
State Department Employees,” The Washington 
Post,  January 22, 
2009 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012202550.html>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012202550.html 


10. See Ran HaCohen’s portrait of Barak, whose 
record is equally as appalling as Lieberman’s, at 
<http://anti-war.com/hacohen/?articleid=12110>http://anti-war.com/hacohen/?articleid=12110 
) Also see Idith Zerta and Akiva Eldar’s 
essential Lords of the Land: The War Over 
Israel’s Settlements In The Occupied Territories, 
1967 – 2007, for rich descriptions of Barak’s 
affection for the most extreme of Israel’s 
right-wing religious nationalist settlers.

11. Maoz, p. 417.




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