"I Have ... A Cunning Plan"
Baldrick: "I have ... a cunning plan. It's as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University.
The thing is, we want all this land, but we don't want those Arab people what live on it.
These days, you can't simply bundle people onto wagons and cart them away, you have to have a more positive policy that will sort of ... encourage ... people to leave. [1]
So ... how about if we pretend we want to get along with them, and start having talks about how we're all going to share the land. We could call it ... a peace process. But ... and this is the really cunning part ... we make sure the talks never actually succeed in resolving how to share the land equitably [2], and we keep taking over more and more of their land even while we're "negotiating" with them over it! [3]
And all the time we're dragging out these endless negotiations about nothing in particular, we will be building great big walls and checkpoints around their towns to keep them locked in, and moving our own people onto all the bits of land the Arabs can't access anymore. By the time people catch on to what we're doing, we will have declared all the Arabs' productive land "abandoned" and taken it for ourselves, and all their water supplies will be in our hands. And they will be stuck in overcrowded, isolated, parched reservations. [4]
Of course they won't be very happy about this, in fact they might just be very angry indeed, and even the most placid of them might happily contemplate the possibility of sticking our collective head on a pike. But once they are stuck behind 25ft concrete walls, they won't be able to do anything about it. Their only choice will be to scurry around uselessly in their townships like bugs in a bottle [5], or to leave altogether, which would be even better.
It is the most cunning plan in the history of cunning plans.
Nothing ... could possibly go wrong!"
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Palestinians make their way to Egypt after Palestinian gunmen blew up a section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 23, 2008. (REUTERS/Suhaib Salem)
A Palestinian man celebrates as heavy equipment destroys a section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 23, 2008. (REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)
Palestinians make their way to Egypt after Palestinian gunmen blew up a section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, January 23, 2008. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
An Egyptian border guard, right, tries to control Palestinians crossing the border after militants exploded the separated wall between Gaza Strip and Egypt early Wednesday, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
A general view of the destroyed border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt in Rafah refugee camp. Thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt after militants set off at least 15 explosions along the border with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. (AFP/Mohammed Abed)
A Palestinian sits on top of a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 24, 2008. (REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)
Palestinians carry goods as they return to the Gaza Strip after crossing into Egypt following a series of explosions by militants along the wall between Gaza Strip and Egypt, in Rafah, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2008. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
Palestinians carry goods as they return to the Gaza Strip after crossing into Egypt following a series of explosions by militants along the wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, Jan. 23, 2008. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
Palestinians bring back sheep from Egypt after crossing the destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 24, 2008. (REUTERS/Mohammed Salem)
Palestinian children play on the collapsed concrete slabs that mark the border with Egypt, left, as others go in and out of the Gaza Strip, right, in Rafah Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Eyad Baba)
Palestinian children play on the bombed metal fence that used to separate the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the border town of Rafah. (AFP/Mahmud Hams)
Palestinian children play across a section of the destroyed border wall between Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip and Egypt, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
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Blackadder: "Baldrick, I would like to say how much I will miss your honest, friendly companionship".
Baldrick: "Thank you, Mr B".
Blackadder: "But, as we both know, it would be an utter lie. I will therefore confine myself to saying simply, 'Sod off and if I ever meet you again, it will be twenty billion years too soon'...".
(Adapted from Blackadder, Series Three, Episode 4: Sense and Senility. Hat tip to Jonathan for the idea.)
Footnotes:
[1] "You don't simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away ... I prefer to advocate a more positive policy ... to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave." Ariel Sharon, quoted by David Bernstein in Forcible Removal of Arabs gaining support in Israel", The (London) Times, August 24, 1988, page 7. Cited in Imperial Israel And The Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, by Nur Masalha; Chapter 2, footnote 117.[2] "We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism". General Yehoshafat Harkabi (former head of IDF Intelligence); Maariv, 2 November 1973. Cited by David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East; third edition (2003), p.181.
[3] "I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years and meanwhile we would have reached a half million people in Judea and Samaria." Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir in an interview with Joseph Harif, for Ma'ariv, 26 June 1992; cited by Avi Shlaim, "Prelude to the Accord: Likud, Labor, and the Palestinians," Journal of Palestine Studies, p 23 (1994). [link]
[4] During his visit two weeks ago to Israel, former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema hosted a small group of Israelis - public figures and former diplomats - to a dinner at a Jerusalem hotel. The conversation quickly turned to the conciliatory interviews Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave to the press for their Independence Day editions. One of the Israelis, of the type for whom it's second nature, no matter who is in government, to explain and defend Israeli policy, expressed full confidence in Sharon's peace rhetoric. He said the prime minister understands the solution to the conflict is the establishment of a Palestinian state beside Israel.
The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict. The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said." D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister."
Supplementary evidence backing D'Alema's story can be found in an expensively produced brochure prepared for Tourism Minister Benny Elon, who is promoting a two-state solution - Israel and Jordan. Under the title "The Road to War: a tiny protectorate, overpopulated, carved up and demilitarized," the Moledet Party leader presents "the map of the Palestinian state, according to Sharon's proposal." Sharon's map is surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same - 10 in the West Bank (and one more in Gaza). Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their 10 planned Bantustans.
The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa's territory. By 1986, unrest in the Bantustans turned into ongoing rioting and terror, which descended into coups in the so-called independent regimes, and South African intervention. The minuscule support the Bantustan governments did enjoy evaporated, so by January 1994, they were finally dismantled and became integrated into the united South Africa of black majority rule.
No country recognized the Bantustans nor did any drop embargoes against South Africa. But veteran leaders of the black struggle against apartheid remember that business people from Israel and Taiwan were the only foreigners who developed business relations with the Bantustan governments. The permission given to the largest of the Bantustans, Bophutatswana, to open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv infuriated American opponents of the apartheid regime, including Senator Ted Kennedy, and some of the Jewish congressmen of the time.
An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister. He said that whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length about the history of the protectorates and their structures.
-- "Sharon's Bantustans are far from Copenhagen's hope"; Ha'aretz, 13 May 2003.
[5] "Speaking to an Israeli Knesset committee in 1983, [Israeli Chief of Staff] Eitan boasted that after Israel had further multiplied its West Bank settlements, 'all the Arabs will be able to do is scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle'. See The Times, 15 April 1983." - From Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk; footnote to Chapter 11, "Terrorists".
