Arafat and Abbas on Violence

Reflections from Tomorrow Is Yesterday

I've been reading a series of recent books on Israel, mostly hoping to get a sense of how the political system works, and what (if any) hope it might offer for a retreat and correction from Netanyahu's far-right governments, especially his current coalition with Deri, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir. Israel has long followed the path that goes: racism to repression to exclusion to war to genocide. Of course, the stages don't separate out cleanly: repression and exclusion (better known as apartheid, the South African translation of America's segregation) overlap, and both not only reflect but reinforce racism. And the violence that defines war first appeared piecemeal as repression. And once you've dehumanized the other with racism, and enforced it with increasing violence, the temptation of wholesale slaughter is hard to resist.

I don't mean to write a piece on whether "genocide" is the right term for what Israel did after 2023, in my notebooks for October and November I cited many pieces on the subject, and made my own statements. For instance, on October 9:

Anyone who condemns Hamas for the violence without also condemning Israel for its violence, and indeed for the violence and injustice it has inflicted on Palestinians for many decades now, is not only an enemy of peace and social justice, but under the circumstances is promoting genocide.

By October 16 I had decided that genocide had moved from threat to fact:

The only way to stop this genocide is to make Israel ashamed for even thinking such thoughts. Railing against Hamas won't help. If anything, it only emboldens Israel.

On November 26, I wrote this:

Similarly, I can hardly condemn Israelis for defending themselves once the revolt broke out of Gaza. I would only point out that the defense was complete, and should have ended, once the attackers were rebuffed, and the border secured — which happened within 24 hours of the initial attacks. The war since then, including some 40,000 tons of bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza, cannot be considered self-defense. This bombardment is no less than an act of systematic destruction and slaughter, an act that can only be summed up in the word "genocide."

I'm not interested here in relitigating that or any other charge against Israel. The question that interested me was what can stop and undo the five-step progression from racism to genocide. It is clear that no external force can or will stop Israel, as the US and USSR forced the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945. Germany had committed the textbook definition of genocide, and Japan had behaved little better in its imperial wars across Asia and the Pacific. But while defeat helped break the spell of the ideologies driving German and Japanese conquest, the reform that occurred in those countries had less to do with the occupation than the people's own recalibration of their own humanity.

So what I've been looking for is whatever may lead Israelis to reconsider the beliefs that led them into this moral morass, and how they might possibly emerge from it. Thus far, I've found very little that gives me any hope on that count. I could try to explain why, but that would turn into a very long post, and all I intended to do here was note a couple of interesting quotes. But I will offer a paragraph each on these books:

• Dahlia Scheindlin: The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023, De Gruyter): This is a fairly broad history of the idea and practice of democracy, from independence in 1948 to the book's publication shortly before the revolt and war in Gaza, with a focus on legal structures — Ben-Gurion's decision not to write a constitution; the delayed and always tenuous development of "basic laws"; the role of the Supreme Court; the influence of the religious parties; and to some extent the effects of treating Palestinians differently. There is not a lot on partisan dynamics, although it is interesting to find out that the right-wing Begin was considerably more liberal (at least when he was in opposition) than the left-wing Ben-Gurion. But one suspects there is a lot more to uncover here.

• Omer Bartov: Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026, Farrar Straus and Giroux): A distinguished historian of the Nazi Holocaust, he wrote an early article skeptical of the genocide charge, then later reversed himself. He's mostly lived outside of Israel, but retains close ties there. In the end, he endorses a binationalism scheme advanced by Scheindlin (although not in her book above).

• Saul Friedländer: Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil (2024, Verso): Another Holocaust scholar, who like Bartov has lived much abroad, but presents this as a day-by-day diary of Israel in 2023. Most of the book precedes the Gaza revolt. He focuses on the changes Netanyahu was pushing to overhaul the Supreme Court, to make it much more subservient to the ruling coalition (which among other things would allow him to dismiss his corruption indictments). Friedländer is very agitated over this, and is strongly opposed to the far-right coalition. Then the revolt interrupted, and like most Israelis always, he redirected his ire against Hamas. That bothered me less than his tendency to accept at face value the notion that Iran was behind it all, and the ease with which he would view any foreign criticism of Israel as anti-semitism. This gives you an idea of how completely such ideas have been embraced even by principled opponents of the Israeli right.

• Hussein Agha/Robert Malley: Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine (2025, Farrar Straus and Giroux): This is a different kind of book, one I picked up in the library just intended to give it a quick glance, but it's turned out to be the most insightful book I've read on the diplomacy of the so-called "peace process" and the unviability of the so-called "two-state solution." The authors were active participants: Agha representing Arafat and Abbas, and Malley a member of US teams from Clinton through Obama, so they were close witnesses to multiple failures (Malley was also in on JCPOA, which one can score either way), but sympathetic enough to each other to meld their viewpoints. (Unlike, say, Dennis Ross, whose memoir is nothing but a recounting of his master's talking points.) Not finished yet, so I'm expecting more speculation on ways to move forward. Don't know what they are yet, but falling back on the "two-state" cliché is unlikely

• Richard Ben Cramer: How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (2004, Simon & Schuster): I read this when it came out, and while it's been superseded by events, I've long regarded it as the smartest book ever written on Israel. It was one of the few books ever to delve into the psychology of the conflict, and especially the dimension of time, and why continuing the conflict often seems preferable to ending it and risking both your dreams and your solidarity collapsing.

That's all preamble, and not why I started writing this piece. What I wanted to do here is to share a quote from Agha & Malley (p. 110):

The other difference between Arafat and Abbas has to do with their views on armed struggle. this had not always been the case and was not truly a matter of principle. Earlier in his political life, in 1965, Abbas had provided the tie-breaking vote that led Fatah to turn to armed resistance. When its Central Committee was equally divided between those, led by Arafat, who advocated immediate resort to arms, and those who argued the movement was not yet ready and counseled patience, Abbas's vote favoring Arafat's approach won the day. By the early eighties at the latest, he reached a different conclusion: Violence had played its part; its utility for the struggle had expired. The more time went by, the more convinced he was that violence was futile, if not counterproductive. It was tantamount to the Palestinians deliberately wielding their weakest weapon against Israel's most potent tool. Israelis, spared the need to make a difficult choice, would close ranks; the United States, no longer under pressure to feign evenhandedness, would squarely take Israel's side; the rest of the world would cease to see the Palestinians as victims, Israel as the aggressor. Israel had its weaknesses, he believed, but they were not military; they lay in internal contradictions and in tensions with the United States. He bristled when accused of docility. Palestinian nonviolence endangered Israel far more than did violence. When faced with an outside danger, Israelis rallied and united; without that menace, they tore themselves apart. The greatest threat Israel faced was the absence of an external one.

I want to continue with the quote, but let's pause on that last sentence: "The greatest threat that Israel faced was the absence of an external one." That's basically the conclusion of Richard Ben Cramer, who sees Israel as a fractious amalgamation of tribes that would fracture and fight if they didn't have a common enemy to bind them together. Let me a few major historical examples:

1. After their war of independence, Israel signed armistices but never the peace treaties they had promised, keeping their enemies on edge.
2. After Begin signed the peace treaty with Egypt, he invaded Lebanon.
3. After Iraq was defeated in the Persian Gulf War, Israel started playing up the Iran threat. (Iran had been friendly with Israel, both under the Shah and after the revolution, when they had a common enemy in Iraq.)
4. After Trump pressed Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza, Netanyahu intensified his lobbying for a joint war on Iran.

There is much more obscure history that fits this pattern, but let's move on. The point is that the more Israel won, the more confident they became in their power, in their ability to dominate and manipulate their enemies. Ben-Gurion's motto was "it only matters what the Jews do" (by which he meant his Jews, the Israelis who were ready and able to fight for their nation, or his vision of their nation). In the beginning, that motto was merely aspirational, but his life's work was spent in realizing that ambition, and this sense of ever-increasing power has pervaded, and intoxicated, Israel ever since.

As Israel has gained power, Palestinians lost power, and with it the the ability to employ violence. Or perhaps I mean "get away with" violence: one could never quite convince most Palestinians that violence never works, because they saw it working for Israel all the time. As the authors note, Arafat's attitude toward violence was instrumental: he embraced it when he thought it would work, and eschewed it when he thought it wouldn't. He had a problem picking his moments, but his bigger problem wasn't that violence couldn't work, but that Palestinians never had enough power to use violence effectively (at least in the sense that the Israelis did).

Continuing with the quote (pp. 102-103):

For Abbas, who viewed violence purely in terms of cost and benefit, the costs were high, the benefits few, and the Second Intifada nothing short of catastrophic. He looked around and saw Palestinian land thoroughly reoccupied by Israel, the Palestinian Authority destroyed, widespread economic distress, and political mayhem. Practically anyone could acquire a gun and claim to make policy by showing it off. This was not resistance. It was anarchy of the worst sort, readily exploited by foes. All of this happened without the world lifting a finger, with Israel's shrinking peace camp silent, with Arabs indifferent. In the court of international official opinion, the Palestinians lost the moral high ground so patiently acquired over the years.

So we can read this passage and agree with Abbas, but in the end, Abbas's nonviolence was no more effective than Arafat's (or Hamas's) violence. With their absolute faith in their own power, Israel offered only two choices: die or surrender. In many ways they preferred the "die" option, as they never quite figured out how to keep surrendered people docile and invisible. And killing turned out to be much easier work (and dare I say it, more fun?) than administering occupied territories. So they never accounted for the risks of messing up and further alienating their wards. (That may strike you as a strange word to use here, but when you occupy territory, you assume responsibility for the people living there.) When the price of failure was resuming war, Israelis easily became callously careless.

I want to close with one more quote (pp. 141-143), on the 2006 elections, which represented a popular rejection of Abbas:

Palestinians saw Americans not as friend but as foe, the most potent enabler of their most loathsome enemy. Through the years, the United States compounded neglect of Palestinian suffering with degrading lectures about how they should behave and whom they should elect and with threats to cut off aid if they did not oblige. Each time Washington expressed backing for the PA or for Fatah, it sunk their chances; US denunciations of Hamas boosted its fortunes. Abbas's ties with the United States were strengthened, yet he had precious little to show for it. . . . Throughout, the Palestinian Authority was becoming an irrelevance, acting as powerless supplicant, rejoicing in friendly visits to Washington and patronizing platitudes ("Abbas is a man of peace") which, with no concrete supporting policy, further eroded the Palestinian Authority's credibility at home. The more the United States offered Fatah and the PA, the more Hamas obtained. . . .

The vote for Hamas was more than a rejection of corruption, an expression of frustration with the peace process, and an act of defiance against America. It was an expression of deeply felt, if unarticulated, anger at years of lost dignity and self-respect, coupled with a yearning to recover a semblance of both. The list of indignities was long. . . . The destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, the killing of thousands, and the imprisonment of their historic and democratically elected leader, Yasser Arafat, who for decades had personified the Palestinian cause, prompted scarcely a yawn from Western leaders. His death was greeted in Washington with at times barely concealed glee.

In a normal democracy, Abbas would have been forced out, and new leaders would have taken over. And the world would have had to learn to deal with them, because in democracies you don't get to choose other nations' leaders. And they would have had to learn to deal with the world, because no nation can really stand alone. But in the sham democracy Israel and the US set up for Palestinians, Abbas carries on even 20 years later, less effective than ever.

I'll save Agha and Malley's chapter on 2023 ("Apocalypse") for another post, but the first couple pages are as sharply reasoned as anything I've read on the subject. One thing that occurs to me is that I may need to make a fundamental shift in my understanding of the conflict. I've always refused to identify with the Palestinians, partly because I've found it easy to find fault with leaders like Arafat and Abbas (and one could go back, especially to Husseini, and forward as well), and partly because I so dislike nationalism in all of its manifestations (Israel being a particularly egregious example). So when I hear expressions of solidarity with Palestine (or "pro-Palestinian") I naturally recoil. But there is another sense of the sentiment that makes more sense to me: if you think of the Israeli state as a cult of maximal power — which always reminds me of the maxim that "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" — then what do Palestinians represent? Not quite powerlessness, because it is really hard to completely wipe out agency, but humanity, at least what's left after you strip all the arrogance and hubris away.