Two States Solution? Not Likely

Matania Ginosar

“The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” said the famous Israeli diplomat Abba Eban decades ago. I have a lot of respect for Abba Eban, but I question his grasp of the Arab mentality and culture; without which you can not understand the events among the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular.
Abba Eban looked at the Arabs, and the Palestinians, from a vantage point of a highly educated British intellectual. He assumed that his logical way of thinking about the world: peace, mutual advantage, cooperation, logic, is similar to the ways the Arabs/Palestinians also think. He could not have been more wrong. Unfortunately many Israelis, American Jews and Westerns think the same way— they view the Middle East from the vantage point of their own Western culture.

This is a crucial mistake that hinders for decades any solution to the Palestinians problem. Let me elaborate about it since no possible solution can exist when you do not grasp what your enemy is thinking and especially in the Middle East – your enemy feeling. And if you see their TV and newspapers and listen to their influential religious leaders, you would realize that most Palestinians and most Arabs are enemies of Israel, and theUS too. The desire for peace is so powerful among Jews in general and Israelis in particular, that they often ignore reality. It is too painful not to hope for peace around the corner.

One of the hardest things for most educated people is to grasp their adversary’s point of view. First they want to expound their own views, and second they want the other to agree with them. Sometimes the more diverse the background, the more is the inability to listen clearly to your opponent, or to grasp their worldview. You expect him/her to have essentially a similar educational and cultural background. You expect him/her to think and feel somewhat similarly to you. And certainly this is not applicable when we view the Arab world from a Western perspective.

Most Arabs are much more aware in this area; they are street smart, cunning and watch very carefully your response in order to get their way. Look how well they manipulated most Israelis and Western media and public.

This unrealistic view of the Arabs is so clearly illustrated in Israel. For decades a majority of secular Ashkenazy Jews (from Western background) were inclined to believed in the “brotherhood of men” and cooperation with the Palestinians and the Arabs. I was one of them. These liberal Jews believed that if Israel would give more and more to Palestinians demands then eventually understanding and peace would arrive. After Israeli independence many Ashkenazies looked in disdain at the newly arriving “Sephardic” Jewish refugees from Arab countries because they assumed that they were less educated and too emotional, and utterly wrong about their suspicion of Arab motives and honesty.

The Sephardic lived among the Arabs for centuries, and knew their culture from within. The Ashkenazies did not, therefore they missed the boat. They projected their own desire for peace on the Palestinians, and any one who did not agree with them was “too militant.” The liberal Left is still populated in Israel mostly by Ashkenazies; the national Right is generally populated by Sephardic. The desire for peace encompass nearly all sectors ofthe Israeli public, the difference is, I believe, their different grasp of the Palestinians’ motives and ultimate aim.

Too many Westerns think that the glory period of Arab culture of a thousand years ago still has some validity today. This is a gross mistake. For hundred of years the majority of Arab had to survive under deprivation, poverty, coercion, atrocities, tribal laws, and the power of absolute rulers. Despite their vast oil reserves, until seventy years ago the Arab Middle East was without any valuable resources, not even sufficient water, bound by a very oppressive, unyielding culture. For hundreds of years it was, and still is, a miserable place to live for the majority of the people.Unless you were a wealthy person, your life was miserable with no hope. The same little piece of land had to nourish a larger and larger number of very impoverished people, no education and no options. And the majority of the oil wealth of recent decades still does not trickle down to the majority of the Arabs. And obviously, under these conditions our Western culture does not make sense to them, it is foreign and the majority despise it, although they may wish the trappings of our wealth.

Let’s look at the current situation in the Palestinians territories in lightof the previous discussion. Let us see with open eyes what is hindering any possible peace agreement.

These facts are known: The first Intifada started in 1987, so any one born in the Palestinian areas from that time on was raised with the “glory” of terrorism, with the “honor” of murdering Israeli civilians whenever possible. Any one that was less than 25 years old in 1987 was also very muchinfluenced by the increasing glamour and appeal of murdering innocent Israelis. After Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres gave complete rule over the Palestinians to Arafat in 1994, Arafat used all means in his power to train his people to hate Israel and to aspire to a single state solution- a Palestinian state on the entire region west of the Jordan, including all of Israel. The propaganda he used was Nazi- like, demeaning Jews, comparing them often to vermin. They dehumanized Jews systematically and continuously.Western media never exposed us to this sad reality.

The result of this intensive indoctrination of the Palestinians made inerasable impression on over half of all living Palestinians, at least up to the age of fifty currently. Obviously there are some Palestinians that want peace, most of them left the region long ago, but the great majority could not but be influenced by the inescapable propaganda and repeated lies heard and seen on all the Palestinian media from at least 1994 Recent brain research indicates that the old adage “if you repeat a lie long enough most people will believe it”—is scientifically valid. If you repeat alie often enough it becomes part of your reality –you believe it is a fact. And these experiments were done with Western educated subjects! How more influential are the repeated, overwhelming lies that the majority of highly emotional Palestinians were, and are, exposed to for many years. They can not, even if they wanted to, to erase the hateful malicious propaganda aboutthe Israelis they have heard for so long.

Note also the recent atrocities that Arabs/Palestinians have been inflictingon one another, such as the bloody infighting between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza (throwing their opponents to death from roof tops) and the unrelenting mass murders in Iraq (also in weddings and funerals) demonstrated that Arab culture is drastically different from our own; we are in a completely different world.

We will have to live with these facts, and they influence the chance for peace and a two state solution.

As sad as it is, as bad as it is, I do not see any possibility that the majority of Palestinians would be willing to accept a peaceful solution withIsrael in the foreseeable future.

Most of the current generation of Palestinians is not capable of agreeing neither to peace nor to a two state solution- they are full of hate. Many Palestinian polls demonstrate the majority support continuous terrorism against Israeli civilians.

Any solution that even remotely resemble the Will Of the Palestinian People will lead to terrorist driven government, such as Hamas in Gaza. One possible eventual solution I see is that the Palestinians will have to live for some lengthy period under an Arabic/Palestinian dictatorial power that would impose peace on them. Hopefully a peace oriented benevolent dictator would emerge eventfully, similar to the case in Jordan, or Mubarak of Egypt,that would impose a controlled environment that would eventually lead to a more peaceful Palestinian public.

Without peace-oriented dictatorial power many Palestinians will continue to initiate and support terrorism against Israel. If the West Bank will have the freedom that Hamas has now in Gaza, the majority of the Israeli population would be subjected to repeated rocket attacks. This would not be tolerated and Israel would reoccupy all the Palestinian areas again and peace will be further in the future.

I hope I made it clear; these are not my wishes, but the reality I see.