Two Views: The Annapolis Conference—What Next?
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2008 January-February |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 10-11
Two Views
The Annapolis Conference—What Next?
Don’t Expect Peace
By Charley Reese
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DON’T BET ON PEACE coming out of President Bush’s much-belated efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
For one thing, the people whom the Palestinians elected to represent them are excluded. President Bush, hypocrite that he is, blathered about democracy, then changed his tune when Hamas won the last election. He cut off all aid to the Palestinians and sponsored a coup by the Fatah faction.
Secondly, the Israeli government is not about to dismantle the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The Israelis will not allow the Palestinians to have a viable state even on 18 percent of Palestine. Nor will the Israelis agree to allow the Palestinian refugees to return or even be compensated for their lost property.
The Annapolis meeting was just another charade like the one Bill Clinton staged. Eventually the Israelis will make an offer no Palestinian could possibly accept, and then the Israelis and the Americans will say, “We offered them a good deal and they rejected it.” Note, too, that the only thing to come out of the Annapolis meeting was an agreement to reach an agreement by the end of 2008. This is the 40th year of Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They don’t need a year if they are serious, which they are not.
Some sap on TV said the big difference this time was that the president himself would be the judge of progress. What a joke. George Bush has shown for seven years that he would sooner kiss Bill Clinton on the lips than utter a word of criticism of the Israeli government.
In 1988, Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote an excellent book, Israel’s Fateful Hour. In it, Harkabi, former head of Israel’s military intelligence and a hard-liner, said that unless Israel grants the Palestinians a state, Israel will be committing national suicide.
What he predicted is coming true. Israel will eventually bankrupt itself trying to remain a regional military superpower, even with U.S. assistance. The occupation has already corrupted the Israel Defense Forces, which no longer enjoys the enormous prestige it once had. Israel was driven out of Lebanon by Hezbollah fighters, and despite its high-tech weapons and brutal tactics, it was unable to stop Hezbollah from raining rockets down on Israel in the summer of 2006.
Furthermore, Israel’s real strategic asset is its powerful lobby in the United States, and this lobby is already facing what it dreads most—becoming a public political issue. Sooner or later, the American public will rebel. What I fear is that when it happens, it will come in the form of a rebirth of anti-Semitism. That will be a terrible price to pay for Israeli intransigence and ideological and religious fanaticism.
A common fallacy of human beings is to imagine that what is will always be. The opposite is true. Change is a constant. Nothing ever remains the same. Every single day, the world shifts. After World War I, nobody could imagine the British Empire fading away, but the change was already taking place. Today, Britannia, which once ruled the waves, would be hard-pressed to win a war unassisted with even Libya.
America is also changing. The Chinese have shot down a satellite, launched a successful moon probe, penetrated our naval defenses with a submarine that surfaced within torpedo range of an American carrier and refused us the use of its port in Hong Kong. Vladimir Putin is telling us in plain words to butt out of Russian affairs. The president of Iran is publicly scoffing at our threats to attack his country. And after five years, we are still fighting in two poor countries.
I expect our own empire is on the wane, and when we wane, Israel will wane.
Charley Reese is a nationally syndicated columnist. Copyright © King Features Syndicate.
Two States or One—Time to Choose
By John V. Whitbeck
Almost immediately after the hollow show in Annapolis, a ray of hope has appeared from an unexpected source—Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
In an interview published on Nov. 29 in the Israeli daily Haaretz, he declared, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”
This Haaretz article helpfully referred readers to a prior Haaretz article, published on March 13, 2003, in which Olmert had expressed the same concern in the following terms: “More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”
Briefly, the Palestinian leadership appeared to have noticed Mr. Olmert’s nightmare. On Jan. 8, 2004 Ahmed Qurei (then the Palestinian prime minister and, more recently, the chief Palestinian negotiator in the run-up to Annapolis) declared that the wall being built through the West Bank represented an “apartheid solution” which would “put Palestinians like chickens in cages” and “kill the two-state solution” and concluded: “We will go for a one-state solution. There is no other solution.” Three days later, he reaffirmed this position as he stood before the wall.
For Israel, “failure” has always constituted “success.”
Unfortunately for the Palestinians and for the causes of justice and peace, there was no Palestinian follow-up. Now, almost four years later, Mr. Olmert has flung open the window of opportunity so wide and so publicly that it is barely conceivable that any Palestinian leadership could fail to notice and jump through it.
Throughout the long years of the perpetual “peace process,” deadlines have been consistently and predictably missed. Such failures have been facilitated by the practical reality that, for Israel, “failure” has had no consequences other than a continuation of the status quo, which, for all Israeli governments, has been not only tolerable but preferable to any realistically realizable alternative. For Israel, “failure” has always constituted “success,” permitting it to continue confiscating Palestinian land, expanding its West Bank colonies, building Jews-only bypass roads and generally making the occupation even more permanent and irreversible.
In everyone’s interests, this must change. For there to be any chance of success in the new round of negotiations, failure must have clear and compelling consequences which Israelis would find unappealing—indeed, at least initially, nightmarish.
If Israeli public opinion could be brought around to sharing the perception of their position and options reflected in Mr. Olmert’s public pronouncements, the Palestinians would be entering the “continuous negotiations” due to commence on Dec. 12 in a position of overwhelming strength—intellectually and psychologically difficult though it would be for them to imagine such a role reversal.
All that the Palestinian leadership now needs to do is to agree, very publicly, with Mr. Olmert. It should state promptly that, if a definitive peace agreement on a “two-state basis” has not been reached and signed by the agreed deadline of the end of 2008, the Palestinian people will have no choice but to seek justice and freedom through democracy—through full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race or religion and with equal rights for all who live there, as in any true democracy.
The Arab League should then publicly state that the very generous Arab Peace Initiative, which, since March 2002, has offered Israel permanent peace and normal diplomatic and economic relations in return for Israel’s compliance with international law, will expire and be “off the table” if a definitive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has not been signed by the end of 2008.
At this point—but not before—serious and meaningful negotiations will begin. It may already be too late to achieve a decent two-state solution (as opposed to an indecent, less-than-a-Bantustan one), but a decent two-state solution would never have a better chance of being achieved. If it is, indeed, too late, then Israelis, Palestinians and the world will know and can thereafter focus their minds and efforts constructively on the only other decent alternative.
It is even possible that, if forced to focus during the coming year on the prospect of living in a democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens—which, after all, is what the United States and the European Union hold up, in all other instances, as the ideal form of political life—many Israelis might come to view this “threat” as less nightmarish than they traditionally have.
In this context, Israelis might wish to talk with some white South Africans. The transformation of South Africa’s racial-supremicist ideology and political system into a fully democratic one has transformed them, personally, from pariahs into people welcomed throughout their region and the world. It has also ensured the permanence of a strong and vital white presence in southern Africa in a way that prolonging the flagrant injustice of a racial-supremicist ideology and political system and imposing fragmented and dependent “independent states” on the natives could never have achieved.
This is not a precedent to dismiss. It could and should inspire.
John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of The World According to Whitbeck, available from the AET Book Club.
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