Daniel Levy has of late become one of the most sought-after leftist commentators on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one of the most frequently quoted and interviewed pundits on the subject in the mainstream press. His name regularly appears in news stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, among other papers. Cultivating an image of expertise and sobriety, he is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, which advertises itself as a center-left source of serious analysis. The day after Annapolis, he debated David Frum for 40 minutes on bloggingheads.tv, the video of which was posted at the end of last week and which has now been posted on the New York Times’s website.

Levy’s performance was astonishing. His preferred tactic was to repeatedly digress from the debate in order to lecture Frum on what he claimed to be the “historic context” of the conflict; his appearance on Bloggingheads is one of the most misleading performances I’ve ever seen on the conflict from a putatively serious person. This is a long fact-check, but I think it’s a necessary one.

 

Yasser Arafat’s Involvement in the Intifada

Frum: I think there are very few people who would take the view that what happened on the Temple Mount was a spontaneous upsurge of Palestinian public opinion.

Levy: Well, the Mitchell Commission actually took that view. there was a commission, an international commission, that was brought in to say what happened and how do we stop it, and the Mitchell Commission did NOT come out on the side of the argument that said, ‘the Palestinians were just waiting to for a moment to start a violent intifada.’ So the one internationally-sanctioned but non-partisan group that was asked to look into this drew a very particular conclusion.

Several minutes later:

Frum: So there are people who say that Yasser Arafat did not start that war?

Levy: Well I’m saying that the Mitchell Commission did not come out with the finding — and this was the only internationally authorized, non-partisan assessment of this — the Mitchell Commission did not come out with that finding, and I think it’s very important to put that out there.

Well, indeed, let’s put the Mitchell Commission report out there. The MC was charged, in a December 2000 letter from President Clinton, with proposing ways “to end the violence, to prevent its recurrence, and to find a path back to the peace process.” The MC report stipulates:

We are not a tribunal. We complied with the request that we not determine the guilt or innocence of individuals or of the parties. We did not have the power to compel the testimony of witnesses or the production of documents. Most of the information we received came from the parties and, understandably, it largely tended to support their arguments. [emphasis added]

The purpose of the MC was thus not to add fuel to the nascent intifada by delving into issues of culpability; it was to cool the violence by showing the parties a path toward peace. In the report, which is quite long, the findings on culpability for starting the intifada were essentially a restatement of the views of both sides:

…we were provided with no persuasive evidence that the Sharon visit was anything other than an internal political act; neither were we provided with persuasive evidence that the PA planned the uprising.

Accordingly, we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the GOI [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.

On this basis, it is disingenuous to declare that the Mitchell Commission absolved Yasser Arafat of involvement in starting the intifada. By the commission’s own admission, it was neither within its purview nor its competence to render such a judgment. It is also important to note that the MC was convened at the very beginning of the intifada, before the voluminous and incontrovertible evidence of Arafat’s complicity in the terror war had been exposed, making Levy’s portrayal of the Mitchell Commission as the definitive exculpation of Arafat all the more implausible. Anyone wishing to look into this material can start with the massive and unrefuted report of the Israeli government on exactly this subject from May, 2002; a lengthy, two-part investigation in 2002 by the German paper Die Zeit (see here and here ); a 2003 study by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; David Samuels’s exhaustive 2005 Atlantic magazine cover story, in which Palestinians who worked intimately with Arafat during both the first and second intifadas are quoted explaining, in detail, Arafat’s involvement in choreographing Palestinian rioting and terrorism; and another in-depth reported analysis, this one by the Jerusalem Post’s highly-respected Palestinian affairs reporter, Khaled Abu Toameh.