Thursday, March 18, 2010

The peace process

Ralph Zwier
Wednesday March 17, 2010

The quartet of interested parties - consisting of US, UK, EU, and UN - have set up a mediation process to make progress in the Israel Palestinian conflict. Whilst the nature of the quartet, and the processes it has set in place might not have been exactly what Israel sought, there can be no doubt that from the end of the Six Day War in 1967 Israel believed that a negotiation would take place culminating in a lasting peace with multilaterally agreed borders for Israel.

To re-iterate - Israel was always, somewhere down the track, going to give back land - via a negotiation process - and agree on mutually accepted borders with its neighbors.

It’s 2010 and the mediation process is supposed to be in place. But there’s just one small hitch: one of the parties in the negotiation refuses to attend the mediation process, unless the other party “shows a bit of good faith” by restraining its activities within the disputed areas. But isn’t that what the mediation process was set up to achieve?

This is a bit like a dispute between a divorcing couple where the court is forcing a mediation, and wife says to husband (through lawyers of course):

I'm not attending the mediation until you stop using the family car.

The husband - the stock standard bad-guy in today's metaphor - would reply to the wife (through lawyers, of course):

If you want to resolve anything at all between us, it's only going to happen via mediation. Mediation is my only leverage on you to resolve the differences between us.

I maintain the car is mine anyway, but it's not up to you or me to resolve this matter. Only the mediation can resolve it.

Therefore the longer you delay coming to the mediation, the further do you delay resolution to this issue - and all other issues.

Thus should Israel send a message to the Quartet, to the world, and to the Palestinians:

Israel stands ready at any instant to halt all development in all settlements, wherever they may be, including East Jerusalem, but ONLY in the context of the mediation process which has been set up by the Quartet.

Israelis have waited for 43 years for a mediation process to actually take place, and whatever claims the Palestinians have against them can only be resolved by the method set up by the Quartet.

Once upon a time Israel granted a concession unilaterally: They vacated / evacuated Gaza "as a show of good faith" without any mediation process. For that "give peace a chance", Israeli civilians received ongoing military attacks against them. Never again will they give anything outside the context of a full negotiation process.

The mediator who fails to force both parties to negotiate now and without pre-conditions is no mediator!

Today's Middle East mediators are not bringing the parties together and are instead calling only upon Israel to accede to a Palestinian request (pre-conditional to the mediation itself). They have lost their independence and forfeited their right to be mediators; they should acknowledge their ineptitude and appoint truly independent mediators to continue with the process.

This latest little twist in the 43+ year saga for a just solution for all parties in the dispute is typical of all the previous twists: Somehow the world believes that peace can be achieved by imposing Palestinian demands upon Israel. It never worked in any dispute in history, and it'll never work in the middle East. Somehow each new generation of world leaders starts again from the beginning. They ignore what went before. Groundhog Day.
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=8043&ICJS=6152&article=2345
Thanks Ronit Fraid

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