It would be interesting to wake up Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the middle of the night and ask him: Is Arafat a terrorist or a partner? Is he doing something against the terror or is he conning the whole world?
On Sunday, Sharon told Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that he was finally convinced that without Arafat, the situation would be much worse than with Arafat, and promised to stop calling the Palestinian leader names.
On Monday, after the Binyamina bombing and the shelling of Jenin, the prime minister's spokesmen said that Arafat is making fools of everyone. Israeli intelligence provided Arafat with a detailed list of terrorists who right this minute are planning to blow them selves up together with the Maccabiah. Arafat didn't invite a single one in, not even to a hotel room.
Sharon's ready to do a lot to prevent the next big attack, especially a new Maccabiah disaster. Try explaining to the American administration that Israel doesn't belong on the list of countries dangerous for tourists, or to Jewish mothers that they shouldn't call their athletic children to get on the next plane out of this country. The current assumption in both the military and diplomatic circles is that it won't matter which organization sends the next suicide bomber, where it explodes or how quickly Arafat condemns it. Nothing, not the U.S. president, not the G-8 and not Shimon Peres, can stop the tanks from storming into Area A.
But senior officials in the government and army have the impression that Sharon is ready to avoid a war at almost any price. The chief of staff may promise him that the invasion will be quick, fast and elegant, but the last thing Sharon wants is pictures of women and children lying dead in the streets of the West Bank and dozens of funerals of Israeli soldiers.
The assassination of the Hamas activists, which also took the lives of innocents including peace activist Isaac Sa'ada from Bethlehem, was supposed to prevent the big attack and stop the next big one that was going to follow it.
Sharon's problem is that the president of the United States - the only person who can control Sharon better than Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman - sends an assistant of an assistant secretary of state. Try explaining to Israelis that Israel has to stick to the restraint policy because David Satterfield banged on the table.
Netanyahu's foreign workers
Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu's public opinion polls show that if he wants to return to the Prime Minister's Office, it won't be enough for him to give Ariel Sharon advice about how to "eradicate terrorism." Sharon's polls, by the way, show that most Israelis still support the policy of restraint. As peace with the Palestinians fades, along with the Jewish majority in the Land of Israel, Netanyahu is offering Israelis the ultimate solution. He has a theory that once and for all will free the Jews, including the leftists, of the occupier's complex and fear of apartheid.
Netanyahu investigated and found that most of the Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean are the offspring of foreign workers attracted to the country at the beginning of the 20th century by the Jewish pioneers who made the desert bloom - moths attracted by the light, so to speak. The logical conclusion is that there's no reason to get hot and bothered about a demographic threat. No country gives national rights to its foreign workers, even if they are the absolute majority in a particular district. It doesn't matter when the natives, the Jews, invited the Arabs to plow their fields; they were day workers who exploited the generosity of the Jews and got stuck like a bone in their throat and don't deserve self-determination.
A report by Yossi Verter in Ha'aretz from July 17, about a meeting of Netanyahu supporters in Eilat, describes how the former prime minister won applause by telling his listeners that he gave a knock-out blow to a CNN interviewer who told him the Palestinians claim Israel stole their land. "I told her it wasn't their land," he revealed to his supporters, and that until the start of the return of the Jews "there wasn't a living soul here." In a letter published yesterday in Ha'aretz, Netanyahu reiterates the claim that at least half the growth of the Arab population in the country, in the first half of the 20th century, was because of Arab immigration. And he adds: "Not only did the Jewish pioneering bring with it technological and medical progress and raise the life expectancy of all the population, it also brought masses of Arab immigrants."
Netanyahu didn't invent this theory. It can be found in the writings of the leaders of the Revisionist movement. He probably found it in Joan Peters' book, which, like Netanyahu, buttresses the claim with quotes from Winston Churchill. In the 601 pages of "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict," published in 1984, the freelance journalist tries to prove that the Arabs of Israel are not anything more than the offspring of foreign workers who exploited the generosity of their employers. Peters, who underwent a transformation from Arab-lover to Zionist, uses quotation marks around the term Palestinians.
If Netanyahu had telephoned the Middle East historian Yehoshua Porat, from the Hebrew University, he would have saved himself the severe criticism we heard from the Jerusalem professor yesterday. Porat would be happy to send Netanyahu a copy of a 1986 article that appeared in the New York Review of Books about the old-new theory Netanyahu is now promoting. Porat, like others who reacted to Peters' book, tore its thesis into shreds.
It's important to note that Porat is not suspected of being a leftist or a Netanyahu-hater. He was one of the more prominent academics who backed Netanyahu in the election campaign of 1996 against Shimon Peres.
Porat says that the foreign Arab workers who settled mostly in the Ashdod and Ashkelon area, as well as Circassians and Muslims who came from Bosnia, were a tiny minority. Arabs from Syria did indeed come to work for Jews "but when the work was done they went home," says Porat.
You don't have to be a big expert, says Porat, to understand that most of the growth of the Palestinian population was a result of natural birthrates. "It's enough to look at the Arab population of Israel, which has grown five-fold since the establishment of the state, from 150,000 to 800,000 (not counting East Jerusalem). And that was in a society that wasn't eager to absorb them."
The veteran Orientalist also ridicules Netanyahu's theory that it was the work of the Jewish pioneers who made the desert bloom and that this drew the Arab workers. "The Jewish settlement needed donations from Rothschild and then, under the Mandate, there was an orderly administration that controled immigration. And with the numbers, Porat demolishes the Peters-Netanyahu theory. "The census of 1922 showed there were 600,000 Palestinian residents in the country. The high birthrate, together with modern medicine and improved nutrition, were what contributed to the growth of the population.
To put things in perspective, Porat mentions that Napoleon's expedition to Egypt at the beginning of the 19th century estimated there were two million people in the country. "Look how many there are now in Egypt," he asks and answers himself, "and that's all without any foreign workers." Porat concludes that Zionism doesn't need prevarication to justify its existence
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
