Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2004, pages 14-15

Two Views

 

The Geneva Accord

 

The Real Road to Peace

 

By John V. Whitbeck

The Geneva Accord, signed Dec. 1 at an impressive ceremony in which President Jimmy Carter and other Nobel Peace Prize laureates participated, deserves the active and whole-hearted support of everyone who genuinely cares about Israelis, Palestinians or peace.

This "virtual" permanent-status peace agreement, a prodigious, detailed document, contains all the fundamental substantive compromises and trade-offs which have long been recognized to be necessary in any negotiated peace agreement conceivably acceptable both to most Israelis and to most Palestinians, as well as carefully considered procedures and timelines for implementation. If both peoples simultaneously had governments sincerely determined to achieve peace, this is precisely the sort of document one would expect to emerge from their negotiations.

Naturally, neither side would realize all of its dreams under the Geneva Accord. It would not implement all of the Palestinians' rights under international law, notably with respect to the right of return for refugees. However, Palestinians should recognize that, if they were to reject peace on this basis, it would be vastly more likely that the Zionist project would be carried through to its logical conclusion--the total ethnic cleansing of the entire indigenous population of Palestine--than that they would ever achieve all of their rights under international law.

Israelis would have to settle for 78 percent of historic Palestine, relinquish the dream of carrying the Zionist project through to its logical conclusion and accept Palestinians as human beings entitled to basic human rights and their permanent neighbors, but they would not have to relinquish any of their rights under international law. Israelis should recognize that, if they were to reject peace on this basis, they would be opting for an open-ended fight to the finish between a few million Israeli Jews and over a billion Muslims. Any true friends of Israel, Israelis and the Jewish people should shout out loudly and clearly that, in any long-term perspective, this would be a catastrophically bad choice.

Efforts to achieve peace through bilateral negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian governments have failed, and there is scant reason to hope that they will ever succeed. Appeals to the United States or the United Nations to impose a solution on the parties will, for reasons of American domestic politics, remain unanswered.

The Geneva Accord offers another, more promising way forward. First, prominent peace-oriented Israeli and Palestinian politicians, while out of government, negotiate and sign a comprehensive and implementable peace agreement. They then appeal to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to bring to power governments that will implement the peace agreement already reached.

The hope, verging on a likelihood, is that, if a potential coalition of Israeli political parties were, in an election campaign, to offer the Israeli electorate a completed, pre-agreed-upon peace agreementwith terms close to the best that Israelis could rationally hope for, and a clear choice between a prompt and permanent peace on those termsor more of the same (or worse), a majority of Israelis would choose peace.

Israel is not legally obligated to hold new elections for several years. However, early elections have been the rule rather than the exception in Israel. Ariel Sharon is currently being investigated for financial crimes. The next Israeli elections may not, in fact, be years away, and the Geneva Accord, if widely supported, might bring them closer.

The actual achievement of a decent and honorable Israeli-Palestinian peace would do more than any other imaginable international development to reverse the current trends toward increased violence and terrorism and spiraling anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment throughout the world.

Even those who believe that the "road map" was conceived with good intentions should by now recognize that it was misconceived, leads nowhere and should be set aside. The Geneva Accord must become "the only game in town." Delay in implementing it will not improve the choices but only add to the toll of death and destruction--and not only in Israel and Palestine.

At the signature ceremony, Yossi Beilin, the chief Israeli architect of the Geneva Accord, warned, "The opportunity to have pragmatic partners belonging to the mainstream of our two societies is not open-ended. If the right steps are not taken, the pictures of the gathering in Geneva might become one of the last glimpses of sanity in our region."

President Carter told the audience, "It is unlikely that we shall ever see a more promising foundation for peace. The only alternative to this initiative is sustained and permanent violence."

They are right. The world cannot afford to miss this opportunity.

John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who has served as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace negotiations with Israel.

 

Giving Peace Talks a Chance

By Ali Abunimah

The medium-term future for Israelis and Palestinians remains bleak, but in the long run peace will be created.

It has been almost two months since the last deadly attack on Israeli civilians by a Palestinian suicide bomber and there are currently intense diplomatic efforts, principally by Egypt, to turn this hiatus into a new global cease-fire by Palestinian factions.

Such efforts are in jeopardy, however, because while Israelis have seen a dramatic drop in attacks, Palestinians continue to suffer daily.

Since the last suicide attack, the Israeli army has killed more than 70 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians, among them 17 children.

This carnage prompted Israeli journalist Gideon Levy to observe in a Nov. 30 column in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that, "Quietly, far from the public eye, Israeli soldiers continue killing Palestinians. Hardly a day goes by without casualties, some innocent civilians, and the stories of their violent deaths never reach the Israeli consciousness or awareness."

Along with this violence, Israel continues to do everything possible to undermine the basis for peace, and the Bush administration, which could use its enormous influence with Israel, chooses instead to do almost nothing. With much fanfare, the U.S. announced recently that it would withhold nearly $300 million of loan guarantees from Israel as a penalty for its continued construction of a massive barrier that annexes huge tracts of Palestinian land. But while this action is designed to look tough, the Financial Times reported that the true cost to Israel is a negligible $6 million in higher interest payments on new loans.

Emboldened by this slap on the wrist, Israel has begun work on a new Jewish-only settlement with 500 homes in the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabal Mukaber near Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli public radio reported on Monday. The new colony, "Nof Zahav," Hebrew for "Golden Landscape," follows hot on the heels of the announcement that Israel is giving legal status and providing utilities to dozens of other settlement outposts that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had personally promised President Bush would be dismantled.

Bush, with a tough re-election campaign ahead, is unlikely to challenge powerful U.S. pro-Israel groups that unquestioningly support Israel's policies. But nor is there much to be optimistic about in the Democrat field. In September, Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean stated that the United States ought to be "even-handed" and should not "take sides" if it wanted to be an honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians.

The strongest protestations of outrage at Dean's remarks came from his own Democratic rivals, and from the party's top leadership. This lack of courage and genuine debate in the U.S. about how to break the Israel-Palestine impasse means that peace is pushed further away, and U.S. standing around the world continues to plummet.

Faced with official Israeli intransigence, ineffective Palestinian leadership and U.S. inaction, some Israelis and Palestinians have put their hope in the so-called Geneva Accord, a virtual peace agreement negotiated by former Israeli and Palestinian officials. Yet this accord offers only false hope.

Many Palestinians oppose it because they see it as being fundamentally unfair and unworkable, a rehash of the failed Oslo agreements. The initiative proposes that Israel annex the vast majority of its settlements on Palestinian land, and almost all of Jerusalem. At the same time, Palestinian refugees, forced from their homes since 1947, are expected to give up their right to return. Israel's government and its hard-line supporters reject the deal because they see it as being too generous to Palestinians. In short, this accord looks superficially promising, but close-up it fails to resolve any of the key issues that have torpedoed every earlier peace plan.

Given these fundamentals, the prospects of a negotiated settlement to the conflict remain close to nil. Yet the terrible situation cannot continue forever. Senior Israeli security officials increasingly acknowledge that Israel's policies intensify the conflict. But by the time enough Israelis wake up to this and demand change, the basis for the two-state solution that Palestinians and the international community embraced will have been irretrievably lost. Israeli settlements will cover too much land, while Palestinians will in a few years be the majority population.

Some Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge a need to seek a radically different solution: If dividing the land between two peoples is impossible, then why not give 100 percent of the land to both peoples? In practice this means a single democratic state with a constitution that guarantees the political, cultural and religious rights of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims. A common homeland where Jews and Palestinians can flourish instead of fight.

As I have traveled around the U.S. discussing this idea with college students, among them many Palestinian-Americans, Israelis and American Jews, I have found a great deal of openness and support. Above all, there is a strong desire to talk about solutions beyond the tired formulas that have failed for decades. This debate should continue.

Israeli youth this week demonstrated the kind of integration and normality that such a future promises when they voted a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel, Firas Khoury, the winner of the Israeli version of the TV show "American Idol." A tiny sign of hope, perhaps.

But hope, nevertheless.

Ali Abunimah is a political analyst based in Chicago and a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, <www.electronicintifada.net>. This op-ed first appeard in The Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

 

SIDEBAR

 

Arab Wins Israeli Reality TV Show

 

By David Chazan, BBC, Jerusalem

Firas Khoury (photo courtesy BBC).

HE'S COOL, confident and hip. Just what you'd expect from the 21-year-old winner of a reality TV show on Israeli satellite television.

The surprising thing is, Firas Khoury is an Arab. Despite the venom which too often poisons relations between Jews and Arabs here, more than 70,000 Israeli teenagers voted for Firas.

The prize is a one-year contract to host a show on a youth TV channel. So Firas is about to become Israel's first Arab TV presenter.

He was the only Arab among 15 contestants who were locked up in a luxurious villa for 80 days. He says he needed a lot of tact to break the ice with his housemates.

"It was very hard for them to understand that I'm an Arab and I understand them. I lived the life they live. Most of them don't have a single Arab friend," he says.

"I think, inside, I touched each and every one of them, and they took me as I am, they considered me as a talent, one who wants to act, who wants to sing, to improve himself, as Firas."

The contestants were asked to perform song and dance routines and viewers judged them on their showbiz potential.

All the others were voted out of the house--but Israeli teenagers were charmed by Firas Khoury's talent and his open, engaging personality.

"I really honestly showed myself from the inside," he said. "I came and I said, 'I'm here and I'm real and I don't give a damn about being an Arab or a Jew. All I can give you people is love and all I want to show you is my talent'."

Firas is something of a model of coexistence. When I met him at a café on the edge of the Tel Aviv University campus, he showed up with his Jewish Israeli girlfriend.

I asked him if his victory meant that there were fewer barriers between Arab and Jewish teenagers than between the political leaders.

"I deeply hope so," he said. "I really hope that I can have an influence on Arab and Jewish youth. I can see here in the newspaper, and I can see how people reacted when I won. They were very, very happy for me."

Firas says he hopes that by becoming a television personality, he can help to smash some of the stereotypes in the Middle East.

"Now they can consider me--an Arab who wants to show his talent, who wants to be involved in showbiz as what he is and what he has to offer, and not where did he come from or what language is he speaking."

These days many people in Israel are talking about trying to breathe new life into peace efforts. Firas says he isn't political, but he believes in reconciliation.

"I really think that love can solve it all. Really understanding each other and trying to understand each other. Even if you don't understand sometimes, you need to connect it to your emotions more than to your head," he says.

"Sometimes you just need to close your eyes, and try to understand that we are all human beings and we should love each other and there is nothing to fight for at the end."

Naïve perhaps, but after all Firas is aiming for a career in showbiz. And he says he wants to be a role model for Arabs and Jews alike.

This article first appeared on BBC News Online Nov. 28, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

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