Murderous Overtime
Michael Young | March 31, 2006, 4:34pm
Writing in London's The Guardian, the new Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, essentially spells out Hamas' vision of relations with Israel. What he says, combined with the Israeli decision to move toward unilateral withdrawals in the West Bank if peace talks don't progress within a decent timeframe, only confirms that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is beyond a negotiated resolution, a delay perhaps lasting for decades.
For Hamas, the conditions are these, as Haniyeh writes: "No plan will ever work without a guarantee, in exchange for an end to hostilities by both sides, of a total Israeli withdrawal from all the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all our prisoners; the removal of all settlers from all settlements; and recognition of the right of all refugees to return."
Most of this is not much different from what Bill Clinton offered Yasser Arafat in late 2000 (and which Israel accepted), except for that bit about the return of refugees. Return to where, is the question? If it's a return to the cities, towns and villages from which they left or were expelled after 1948, then no resolution is likely, since the Israelis would regard such resettlement as a Palestinian demographic Trojan horse.
Israel, in turn, wants to create a mosaic of separated Palestinian areas in the West Bank, even as it seeks to break off Gaza from the Palestinian areas in the West Bank and effectively push its development westwards so it can link its fate to the Egyptian Sinai. In the West Bank Israel will finish its wall, behind which it hopes to hide.
On both sides, these objectives aren't the substance of peace plans at all, just guarantees that Israelis and Palestinians will fight on until another generation loses interest. Palestinians will soon change tack, because the two-state option is no longer viable, with their state one only in name. They will, instead, begin demanding a single bi-national state in all of geographical Palestine, much like the PLO once did. The Israelis, in turn, will have to find out how to manage a failed Palestinian state on their borders, which will gravitate toward more anti-Israeli violence as factions use this to vie for internal supremacy.
Ariel Sharon and now Prime Minister-elect Ehud Olmert have been hailed as geniuses, but the fact is that the unilateral disengagement they advocate makes long-term conflict only more inevitable. Oslo was the only chance both sides ever really had to avoid their deadly embrace, and they blew it: the Israelis never used it creatively to help push for a truly democratic state in the West Bank and Gaza, which could have helped guarantee Israel's security down the road; the Palestinians never understood that the right of return was a red line for the Israelis, and that what Clinton offered them in 2000 was the most they could expect at the time.
James | March 31, 2006, 5:45pm | #
Michael Young, as is his custom, is being disingenuous in his description of the offer Arafat rejected. The Palestinians were not offered anything remotely resembling the 1967 borders. The starting point was the Israeli-fixed "Green Line," which the Palestinians accepted.
From there, the Israelis demanded an additional 9-10 percent of the West Bank, which the Palestinians didn't like very much. Beyond that, they insisted on indefinite control of ANOTHER 9-10 percent of the West Bank, which was obviously an open door to more annexations. Just looking for a pretext, really. In exchange for giving away twenty percent of the land allocated to them by the UN, the Palestinians were to be "compensated" with a land area approximately one-seventh the size, conveniently located in the Negev Desert. Israel was to be given fifteen percent of the Jordan River frontage under the deal. When people say Arafat was "offered the moon," that is quite literally true. The Israelis took the riverfront; the Palestinians would get a tiny bit of lifeless desert.
Not content with guaranteeing permanent isolation and starvation of the Palestinians, the Israelis gratuitously threw in an insult to go along with the injury. They insisted on controlling the highway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, effectively cutting Palestine permanently in half.
None of this was in the Oslo Accords that Arafat agreed to. None of it would have been accepted by the Israelis or anyone else. If Barak and Clinton had genuinely offered the Palestinians the 1967 border, as Young claims, this conflict would have simmered down to a low-scale border dispute in 2001. The Arab world would have been mollified by the Palestinians' acceptance of nationhood. The US probably would have gotten a lot of credit for it.
But it was not to be. No nation would have accepted such a deal. Even the issue of return could have been finessed by allowing Palestinian refugees to return to the West Bank in exchange for the Palestinians formally recognizing Jews' right to migrate to Israel. The private Geneva negotiations established this principle, as a matter of fact. The majority of Palestinians surveyed supported the Geneva solution. The refugee camps could have been closed. The Middle East might have moved on.
But no. Instead we have to listen to tired rhetoric of "Israel's right to exist," the formulation that requires every Palestinian politician to alienate his constituency as a precondition for "legitimacy." Every Palestinian leader must therefore break his own legs before the Israelis will deign to speak to him. Some do, some don't. The Israelis can thus boast that they are experts on the divide-and-conquer strategy. How's that working out for them?
The "failed state" Michael Young describes is a creation of Israel itself, which has worked hammer-and-tong for years to undermine the very notion that the Palestinians are or might be a people, nation, or state. Now they have to live with the consequences. Unfortunately, so do the rest of us.
