The Zionist false narratives are beginning to unravel

During my years at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I published little on Palestine and Israel, not least because this would not have been accepted under the prevailing rules. Although publication was formally permitted, one had to reckon with possible negative consequences, especially when texts diverged from official policy. Some officials saw their careers damaged after publishing articles deemed too critical. Others, including myself, escaped such repercussions.

In my early days at the Ministry, I still had to get used to the fact that expressing sympathy for the Palestinian cause was not so self-evident, even if it was entirely justified.

During a meeting within the framework of the Euro-Arab Dialogue in The Hague, a representative of the Arab League delivered a passionate speech in support of the Palestinians. The audience broke into applause, and I joined in enthusiastically. However, when I glanced a few seats to my left, where my superior was seated, he looked at me reproachfully. My applause did not reflect the policy of the Dutch government, and therefore should not have occurred.

At the time, I believed that what was scientifically or academically sound could not reasonably be challenged on political grounds. That assumption proved naïve. Reporting as a supposedly objective observer on developments in the Middle East was not always appreciated when it failed to align with the political line of the Minister or the government.

I have always had difficulty with situations in which the government showed no willingness to seriously listen to experts' views. In such cases, ignorance tended to prevail. Or perhaps it was simply feigned ignorance driven by political motives or political opportunism.

Sometimes, government officials were perhaps unaware of their own ignorance, their thinking being driven more by sympathies than by rational analysis. I later addressed this tension in a lecture at Leiden University titled ‘The (Ir)relevance of Academic Research for Foreign Policy-Making’.

I recall a Dutch ambassador in Beirut who, during the 1970s, reported objectively on the Israeli bombardments of Lebanon. The response among some key figures at the Ministry was dismissive: “That man has completely lost it.”

Of another diplomat who had visited Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, it was said: “It is as if he has become completely Palestinian!”

During my early years in The Hague, when I was working in the Political Department for the Middle East, the Minister of Foreign Affairs once received an unusual request. A Dutch engineer sought financial support for a project concerning Gaza, which he presented as a “practical contribution” to resolving the Palestinian question. As renowned dredgers, he argued, the Dutch could play a special role.

His proposal was as simple as it was striking: why not create a stretch of reclaimed land of several square kilometres in the sea off the coast of Gaza? The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip could be relocated to this newly constructed island, thereby relieving population pressure, while Jewish settlers in Gaza would gain more space.

Our department was asked to draft a reply. As a rule, every letter addressed to the Minister—however unusual—deserved an answer, if only a polite acknowledgement of receipt. Yet, in my administrative inexperience, I felt that this proposal, which struck me as wholly unrealistic, if not shameful, did not merit a reply at all and might best be consigned quietly to a file. Technically, it may have been an interesting idea; politically, however, it was entirely unacceptable.

One only had to reverse the perspective. Imagine a proposal to relocate all Israeli Jews to an artificial island off the coast of Israel so that the Palestinians might be rid of them. Its author would certainly have been accused of antisemitism, regardless of any well-meaning intentions or lack of political awareness.

My more seasoned superior took a different view. He considered it an original idea that deserved a courteous response, suggesting we thank the engineer for his inventiveness while explaining that the ministry lacked the necessary financial resources to pursue such a project. And so, in due course, a polite letter to that effect was sent—on behalf of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In 1978, there was a large-scale Israeli military incursion into Lebanon, and in a memo, I used the term “Israeli invasion.” This was changed by my superior to “action,” to make it appear as if something less serious was going on. Incidentally, this “action”—with some interruptions—is still ongoing some half a century later, involving large-scale Israeli killing and destruction.

Hezbollah did not exist at the time; it only emerged later as a result of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, just as Hamas was founded in December 1987, shortly after the outbreak of the first Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation).

Terminology matters, of course. The Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 were initially referred to by Israel as the “occupied territories,” then as the “administered” or “held territories,” and finally simply as “the territories,” as if there were no occupation, while at the same time the occupied West Bank came to be designated by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

Prime Minister Begin, during our meeting with Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Chris van der Klaauw in 1981 even argued that this was not an “occupation” at all: “How can you talk about occupying something that already belongs to you?”

The English version of the famous United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 speaks of “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It does not refer to “the” occupied territories, but rather vaguely to “territories occupied,” thereby creating the initial impression that Israel might not be required to withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967.

Nevertheless, since the same resolution emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” it was clear that full Israeli withdrawal was intended. As a compromise, however, deliberate ambiguity—so-called constructive ambiguity—was introduced, as otherwise the resolution might not have been adopted at that time.

By maintaining vagueness for years about whether Israel should fully withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, Israel was gradually given the opportunity to appropriate territories unlawfully and establish settlements without provoking clear protests from the Western international community.

How sensitive this issue was in the Netherlands became evident when, in early 1974, the spokesperson of the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Christian Thurkow, was suspended. He had publicly misrepresented Dutch policy by suggesting that Israel should withdraw from all the occupied territories, which led to criticism from the House of Representatives of the Netherlands.

Shortly after the Six-Day War, the view in Syria was quite the opposite. In 1970, I spoke in Aleppo with someone from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and referred to “the occupied territories.” Since he had inferred from my words that I recognised Israel, he replied somewhat irritably: “Which occupied territories do you actually mean—those of 1948 or those of 1967?”

At that time, the Syrian media spoke only of “occupied Palestine” and the “Zionist entity.” Later, “Israel” appeared in quotation marks; eventually, even those quotation marks disappeared in the Syrian press. This reflected the gradual process of acceptance of Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries.

When I accompanied our Foreign Minister Van der Klaauw to Syria in 1978, Syrian Foreign Minister Abd al-Halim Khaddam asked him whether he supported the idea of a Palestinian state if the Palestinians themselves wanted it. The Netherlands recognised the right of peoples to self-determination, didn’t it? Van der Klaauw responded positively, namely that he supported the idea of a Palestinian state in that case, and he meant it.

I truthfully recorded this in the report, but my superior of the Ministry deleted it “because you had to protect the Minister from himself”. After all—according to my chief, at least—the Minister was supposed to take full account of the strongly pro-Israel public opinion in the Netherlands, even though he himself had the political authority to pursue a different line. But my chief was right in the sense that openly recognising the idea of a Palestinian state might, at that time, have seriously damaged the Minister’s domestic political position in the Netherlands.

During my time at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I published on Syria and Iraq, even though the issues I addressed—sectarianism, tribalism, and regionalism, the subjects of my PhD thesis—were highly sensitive and often taboo in those countries. Yet within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, these publications seemed to pass largely unnoticed.

When it came to Israel, however, matters were different: criticism was not easily accepted, particularly in public. Internally, I addressed the issue more directly. At an ambassadors’ conference in 1984, I gave a lecture on Israeli policies aimed at reshaping the Middle East along sectarian and ethnic lines—destructive policies that, in retrospect, have become increasingly evident over the past four decades but were, at the time, largely taken for granted.

In 1981, when posted in Beirut, I was appointed Secretary of the Middle East mission of the Dutch European Presidency and was given the unique opportunity to accompany our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Van der Klaauw, for almost five months during visits to Israel and fourteen Arab countries. This was a unique and exciting experience and, to my knowledge, the most extensive European-Middle East mission ever.

We had interesting conversations with kings, princes, presidents, sheikhs, sultans, and emirs, as well as their prime ministers, foreign ministers, and other government officials. The question is what has become of these and later European efforts to help bring about a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, some forty-five years later? I am afraid the answer is: nothing positive.

Israeli ideas about the concept of “justice” have remained diametrically opposed to what most Arabs think about it, and that made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach a compromise.

In retrospect, one can wonder what the point of this mission and many other European efforts was. It has been almost sixty years since the June War in 1967. What has changed since then? Or rather, what has improved since then? Actually, little to nothing in the positive sense.

From a Palestinian and Arab point of view, the situation has rather seriously deteriorated, and the main reason for this is that almost everything from Israel has been tolerated and even encouraged by some.

I have often wondered whether we could not have seen all this coming decades ago. We took the Israelis seriously at our mission in 1981 and hoped (in retrospect, rather naïvely) that the Israelis would become more “susceptible to reason” in the interests of peace. In fact, you could also say that we did not take the Israelis seriously at all, because we hoped that they would do something other than what they kept proclaiming.

We thought that the concept of “justice” would prevail in Israel, and some still think so. But in fact, wishful thinking was rampant, and still is.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues unabated, with no satisfactory solution in sight; on the contrary, the situation worsens. Most Western countries bear a shared responsibility for this through their decades-long policy of tolerance and support for Israel and their unwillingness to implement the very principles and treaties they themselves have professed and signed. In this case, “doing nothing”, aside from issuing numerous empty statements, has proven clearly wrong. The problem is not a lack of condemnatory statements, but a lack of power — or rather, of the willingness to use it.

In 1998, while serving as ambassador to Turkey, I published De vrede die niet kwam (The Peace That Did Not Come), together with the Dutch journalist Jan Keulen. The book dealt with Palestine and Israel, as well as my experiences in Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt. In the run-up to publication, I gave several interviews, which appeared in newspapers and magazines on the official publication date. I chose not to submit the manuscript to the Ministry in advance, anticipating that substantial cuts might be requested—cuts that would have made it difficult to take full personal responsibility for the final text. Moreover, prior submission would have implied shared responsibility with the Ministry, which I preferred to avoid.

I did, however, ask a journalist friend to review the manuscript to eliminate any unnecessary sensitivities. He offered several useful suggestions. After the first media coverage appeared, I received an urgent call from the Ministry’s press department asking why I had not submitted the book earlier. I replied: “Be glad that I did not send it to you in advance—otherwise you would now have had to comment on it.”

No further issues arose. Shortly thereafter, I was nominated ambassador to Germany, one of the most important Dutch postings abroad.

 Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.