Israel is not ready for a historical compromise
By Islah Jad
The overall political situation in the Middle East is grim. The war on Iraq is escalating with no end in sight and the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is not at all improving. The U.S. debate about a war on Iran shows that such an event is not out of the question. Amid all this one can perceive of the Annapolis conference as a public relations exercise similar to 1991 Madrid Conference, organised by the United States. A few years after this conference Israeli Prime Minister Itzhaq Shamir bluntly stated that his aim was to keep up “negotiations” interminably, thus to gain more time to build settlements.
Israel’s latest call for Palestinians to recognise Israel as a "Jewish State" – and not a state for all of its citizens – might be a pretext for aborting the conference before its start, or a manoeuvre to prolong the “peace process” endlessly while building more Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Israel knows that it is impossible for any Palestinian leader to recognise Israel as a Jewish state because there are more than one and a quarter million Palestinians living in Israel. Against this background, to admit that Israel is for Jewish citizens only, might lead to the expulsion of Israel’s Arab-Palestinian citizens – as happened in 1948 when about one million Palestinian were expelled from their homes and made refugees.
For the Annapolis conference to achieve anything, Israel has first to come to terms with its future role in the region. Israel is not yet ready to reach an historical compromise similar to the one in South Africa, i.e. one that will end its colonial project in the area. Since the Camp David Agreement of 1978, Israel has attacked and destroyed Iraqi nuclear installation in 1981, launched a war on Lebanon in 1982, violated Tunisian sovereignty to assassinate Palestinian leader Khalil Al Wazir (Abu Jihad), and started another war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel does not perceive of itself as part of the region but acts as its master. Israel insists on being part of Europe and a defender of Western interests in the region. Israel is not yet ready to strike an historical compromise with its Palestinian and Arab neighbours in order to end the conflict in a way as suggested by the Arab initiative at the Beirut Summit in 2002, i.e. to trade land for peace with all Arab countries involved. Yet, nothing short of such an historical compromise will be necessary to reach an agreement on how to divide the land and on how to deal with the Palestinian refugees. Israel refuses to admit its responsibility for uprooting the Palestinians from their historic homelands and refuses to share territory. Quite on the contrary, Israel has raised the stakes by asking its victims to confer legitimacy on Israel by signing up to its self-definition as a Jewish state. By doing this Israel is asking the Palestinians to admit that their expulsion was legitimate and that they have no political rights whatsoever.
In order to solve the conflict, Western governments and the United Nations need to take a determined and honest lead. They wielded their power to implement the Security Council Resolution that in 2003 prepared the war on Iraq; they helped end the war on Lebanon in 2006. Such a scenario could also be envisioned for the Arab-Israel conflict. Israel refuses to implement any of the UN resolutions pertaining to land, borders, refugees, the status of Jerusalem, or natural resources. Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular have lost trust in the West’s claim that it is the defender of human rights, democracy, and the welfare of the peoples in the region. What they have seen time and again is that such claims by Western powers will be discarded as soon as Israel is concerned.
People in the Middle East believe that Israel acts as a state above the law, one beyond and above Western or international human rights and values. Israel’s latest call for the U.S. and other Western countries to attack Iran as it poses a 'nuclear threat' while, at the same time, Israel has a stockpile of all sorts of nuclear weapons, is further proof that the West’s fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East is based on double standards. Once again it demonstrates that Israel acts as the promoter and solicitor of all aggression, of all wars in the region.
Palestinians are sceptical about the Annapolis conference; they have little hope that the conflict will end soon – never mind in a way fair to them. A failure of the conference would be a big boost to those who want to continue the struggle and resistance against Israeli oppression at all cost, i.e. Hamas and the Islamic resistance would become ever more powerful and, most likely, the PLO and its offspring, the Palestinian Authority, would be sidelined.
Islah Jad is Assistant Professor for Political Sciences and Gender Studies at the Institute of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies Department, Bir Zeit University, Palestinian Territories.
