Jewish state’; hence the conclusion that the Arabs should be made,
one way or another, to depart. The second, relatively pragmatic
trend, while believing that settlement and annexationist policies
should continue and even be intensified, believed that strategic
cooperation or at least a working relationship with the US
government – which would oppose maximum territorial expansion
– must be maintained as a vital Israeli interest. According to one
conservative estimate, US economic aid to Israel is $4 billion
annually; between 1948 and 1992 American aid to Israel totalled $77
billion.
2
A much higher figure was even suggested by US Ambassador
to Israel Martyn Indyk who stated in 1997 that the total of ‘US loans,
grants and loan guarantees’ to Israel came to $13 billion per annum.
3
Israel’s dependence on the United States for economic and military
assistance, particularly while still seeking to accommodate the
Russian Jewish immigrants, the pragmatists argued, made the
scenario of maximum expansion impracticable.
Yet for the caretakers of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist philosophy
(Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu), the secular radical right and the fun-
damentalist settlers of Gush Emunim, the Jewish state has always
meant ‘unpartitioned Eretz-Yisrael’, ‘the whole Land of Israel’, ‘the
old biblical lands of Judea and Samaria’, in which there is no room
for real Palestinian autonomy, let alone an independent Palestinian
state. For instance, on 14 January 1998, the government of Binyamin
Netanyahu voted to hold on to large segments of the West Bank
under any peace deal with the Palestinians. The Israeli Cabinet did
not publish a map of the area Israel planned to retain its hold on, but
said that it would include areas surrounding all the 148 Jewish
settlements set up in the West Bank since 1967, a buffer zone ringing
the territory, in addition to roads crisscrossing the area. Also
included were a wide zone around Jerusalem, military bases of
‘strategic importance’ or necessary for ‘deterrence’, water resources,
electricity networks and ‘historic sites sacred to the Jewish people’,
an eastern ‘security zone’ along the Jordan Valley, a western ‘security
zone’ along the divide line, north–south and east–west roads, and
vital installations. If these components were translated into
percentages, what would remain is an area of 12 per cent of the West
Bank, which would be handed over to the Palestinians.
4
Despite his personal victory in the election for prime minister,
Ehud Barak’s Labour Party came nowhere near to achieving an
overall Knesset majority. Barak’s sweeping twelve-point lead in the
race for prime minister did not carry over to his Knesset slate, which,
222 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians