In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column "According to Reports," Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, looks at recent analysis pointing to the true obstacle to peace: Palestinian rejectionism.
The disclosure, via WikiLeaks, that several Arab leaders have urged U.S. action against Iran has provided additional ammunition to Mideast analysts who have long argued against linking a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (or indeed the larger Arab-Israeli conflict) to a resolution of the region's broader problems.
They have correctly pointed out, contrary to much conventional wisdom, that achieving a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement (as important a goal as this is in itself), is not the key to unlocking the problems and threats elsewhere in the Mideast, such as Iran's nuclear program.
David Frum has been one of the most articulate voices in this debunking exercise, as demonstrated in his Dec. 4 National Post column on the "unintended lesson" of WikiLeaks.
Nevertheless, on the subject he mentioned in passing – why the peace process involving the Palestinians and Israelis has broken down – Frum might consider an important modification to his view that it's because the Palestinians "hope that if only they hold out a little longer, they will be offered even more [by Israel]."
As with the linkage argument, this belief also requires debunking. It's not a matter of the Palestinians waiting for more than, say, what then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during the Annapolis talks in late 2008 (which was even more than what then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered former PA president Yasser Arafat at Camp David eight years before).
In both cases, the Palestinians spurned offers for a contiguous, viable state with control of Arab areas of eastern Jerusalem. Compromises were offered even on the Holy Basin. These unprecedented Israeli concessions took many by surprise – including Israel's Peace Now.
The harsh reality is that short of committing national suicide, there's nothing more Israel can offer the Palestinians that would lead to a deal. It's not about politics – that is, additional political and territorial concessions. Rather, it's a conceptual blockage: the Palestinian (and Arab) ideological refusal to accept the very legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty (as we have seen, once again, in the PA's denial of the Jewish historical attachment to the Western Wall).
In "Bleak House" (Tablet Magazine, Dec. 2) Israeli historian Benny Morris argued that "insurmountable" obstacles exist in the peace process: "Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called 'secular' and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews. They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs…”
"This basic Palestinian rejectionism, amounting to a Weltanschauung, is routinely ignored or denied by most Western commentators and officials. To grant it means admitting that the Israeli-Arab conflict has no resolution apart from the complete victory of one side or the other (with the corollary of expulsion, or annihilation, by one side of the other) – which leaves leaders like [U.S.] President Barack Obama with nowhere realistic to go with regard to the conflict.”
Morris is equally blunt about the Palestinian insistence on the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to Israel: "Contrary to what many Western commentators and analysts have chosen to believe, the Palestinian stress on the importance of the refugees is not a tactical matter – a way to gain further leverage in negotiations…The idea that the refugees must return to their homes [in Israel] has been the ethos, the be-all and end-all of Palestinian politics and policy, since 1948. No Palestinian leader can or will ever abandon this principle, on pain of assassination, and none has."
This being the case, in order to preserve Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state, could Israel unilaterally withdraw from much of the West Bank as it did from Gaza in 2005? Not unless it's willing to incur rockets launched from the West Bank onto Israel's major cities, including Tel Aviv. This of course is out of the question, Morris says. The security imperative must trump any other consideration.
The bleak conclusion is that Israel remains trapped on the proverbial horns of a dilemma.
/cijainfo
@CIJAinfo