Mark Silverberg
It is now clear why Mahmoud Abbas and his the Palestinian Authority have refused negotiations with Israel for more than a year even after Israel agreed to freeze Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. They have been busy working behind the scenes with South American leaders to obtain a declaration of statehood for "Palestine" and, according to the London-based Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat, they are preparing to ask the U.N. Security Council to do the same. After all, why negotiate the critical core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Israel when they can achieve statehood without being forced to concede anything? Mahmoud Abbas has reason to gloat. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina recently announced that she intends to recognize "Palestine as a free and independent state" noting that her decision follows that of Uruguay and Brazil, both of whom intend to recognize "the state of Palestine based on its pre-1967 borders". The fact that the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States requires a "state" to have a permanent population, a defined territory, a stable government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states (hopefully peaceful ones), and that "Palestine" does not qualify for statehood under any of these conditions is obviously irrelevant to these countries.
While most of the world ignored a similar declaration by Yasser Arafat in 1988 and will probably ignore these declarations as well, they are nevertheless disturbing because they not only contradict the letter and spirit of the Oslo Accords that require the core issues dividing the Israelis and the Palestinians to be resolved through negotiations, but they reinforce the myth that a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza will satisfy the Palestinians and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite everything we read in the Western media and hear from the U.S. Administration's foreign policy gurus, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Arab and Islamic worlds have been seething in anger and humiliation from the moment of Israel's rebirth. They have initiated and lost seven wars to annihilate her and have incited hatred against her for decades through their mosques, media and educational systems. So intense is their hatred; so humiliating is Israel's presence in their midst, that any compromise on the core issues of settlements, borders, Jerusalem, a Palestinian right of return, and especially Israel's recognition as a Jewish state would be seen by the Arab street as a betrayal of such magnitude that it would threaten their credibility, their power and their lives(1) and no one is more aware of that than PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Sixty-three years after Israel's establishment, the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants now numbering over five million, remain in the squalid camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan where they are used as political pawns by their Arab masters who preserve UNRWA as a permanent reminder to them of their "right" to "return" to "Palestine". Over the decades, these Palestinians have been nourished by a hatred of Israel and fed the illusion that their "return" is a "right". So successful have Arab leaders been in convincing them of this, that any compromise of that "right" would be seen as a betrayal of the Palestinians' ultimate hope - the destruction of Israel.
Given that no Israeli government would allow such a massive influx of Palestinians into its country (which would mean demographic suicide), Arab leaders have used Israel's refusal as a pretext for continuing the conflict. The more the Palestinians are victimized by their Arab host countries (who refuse to integrate them and deny them citizenship and their civil rights), the more Israel can be scapegoated, and the better it serves Arab interests by re-directing Palestinian rage against Israel. For that reason, at Taba (2001) and at Annapolis (2007), Palestinian leadership, supported by the Arab/Muslim world, rejected Palestinian statehood on more than 95% of the West Bank and Gaza rather than recognize Israel and forego its "right of return" to "Palestine". Even the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the ruling PLO Authority in the West Bank and President Abbas recently declared: "No to Israel as a Jewish state, no to interim borders, no to land swaps."
Consequently, from the Arab perspective, there is no basis for compromise and nothing to negotiate with Israel other than its demise since the core issues are defined in zero-sum political and ideological terms. If Israel "wins" recognition, the Palestinians "lose" on all fronts, and should any Arab/Muslim leader compromise their "right of return" by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, he will be humiliated, condemned, lose power and probably be assassinated.
This zero-sum mindset pervaded the Oslo “Peace Process” (whatever that means) when Arafat could not bring himself to make peace with Israel despite eight years of direct negotiations with the Israelis. “Arafat”, Professor Richard Landes writes in Augean Stables, “acted with enormous reluctance, taking what he could, offering no concessions in return, and promising his honor-shame constituency that the concessions were not real - merely a Trojan horse." In response to virtually universal condemnation from the Arab/Muslim world, he justified his actions in making the agreement by stating: "I am hammering the first nail into the Zionist coffin." He equated the Oslo Accords with Mohammed’s Treaty of Hudabya with the Koreish tribe, which he maintained for two years – until his forces grew strong enough to crush the Koreish. Speaking in Johannesburg in 1993, after signing the Accords, Arafat assured his audience that Jerusalem, in the end, will be exclusively Muslim, that the only permanent state in present-day Israel would be the Arab state of Palestine, and that the "peace process" would end in the Palestinian conquest of Israel - no surprise given that Fatah's constitution maintains to this day that "the struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine."
Intertwined with this overriding sense of humiliation, anger and fear of loss of power should any compromise be made on Israel's right to exist are the religious aspects that flow through this conflict - principles that are downplayed by Western leaders as mere rhetoric. Recently, the Palestinian Authority's religious affairs official praised Palestinians who carry out ribat (religious war) against Israel, and the coordinator of the National Committee on Summer Camps told his local media that Palestinian summer camps instill in children the Palestinian culture, "which unites the culture of resistance, the culture of stones and guns ... and the culture of shahada (martyrdom)." In fact, Professor Robert Wistrich in his book: A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad leaves no doubt that the Arab/Muslim rejection of Israel is based in large measure on Islamic principles that permeate their societies. It is reflected, he writes, in an irrational hatred of Jews who are portrayed as evil incarnate. Martin Gilbert's many works on the subject of the treatment of Jews in Muslim lands throughout the centuries confirm that this attitude towards Jews cannot be separated from the Arab/Muslim enmity towards Israel as a Jewish state and the genocidal rhetoric and suicide bombers (shahids) that flow from it.
Whatever points of ideology and tactics may divide the nominally secular Palestinian Authority from the religiously orthodox Hamas, both have the same foundation and agree that Zionism is a “criminal conspiracy” against the Palestinian people, that Israel’s creation is a satanic, imperialist plot that must be reversed, and that Palestine is, was and always will be indivisible Islamic land. Their sermons urge believers to “Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them. Whenever you meet them, kill them,” and are broadcast live on the PA’s official TV channel. When Jews are discussed in PA textbooks, it is only to recite the same litany of their unchangeable, negative traits from the days of the Prophet to the present. On its maps, Israel is portrayed as Palestine, Israeli cities are portrayed as Palestinian, and Zionism continues to be portrayed as a modern-day expression of the Jews’ essential evil - all of which raises the question - "Can generations of Palestinians weaned on such beliefs ever set them aside to make a stable, long-lasting peace with Israel as a Jewish state within any borders?"
These religious imperatives are also woven into the PLO Covenant (Charter) that sees Judaism as a religion, not a nationality. The Charter states that Jews are not a nation, and repudiates any claim they have to national self-determination or national sovereignty. Instead, it confers upon them the inferior religious status of dhimmis under Islamic law. Thus, from a theological perspective (separate and apart from the political aspirations relating to their uncompromising position on a "right of return" to "Palestine"), the Arab street will not accept the right of Jews to sovereignty on any of the land which, according to Islamic law, forms part of the Islamic "waqf" or holy endowment.
What is clear is that the Arab/Muslim narrative is focused on Jews not just Israelis as we in the West have been led to believe. Jonathan Kay writing in the National Post observes that: "When Israeli planes smashed Egyptian airfields in the opening hours of the Six-Day War, announcers on Radio Cairo took to the airwaves, calling on Arabs in neighboring countries to attack any Jews they could find. In the Libyan capital of Tripoli, then home to about 5,000 Jews, rioters responded with an orgy of murder, arson and looting that lasted three days. Even after the survivors had fled to Israel and the West, leaving Libya effectively judenrein, the anti-Semitic bloodlust remained unquenched. It was "the unavoidable duty of the city councils," opined one Libyan newspaper, "to remove [Jewish] cemeteries immediately, and throw the bodies of the dead, which even in their eternal rest soil our country, into the depths of the sea ... Only then can the hatred of the Libyan people toward the Jews be satiated.” Carrying this pathology forward, the idea of any compromise that would lead to a sovereign, independent Jewish state in the Islamic Middle East is pure fiction.
This hatred is also reflected in pernicious Palestinian attempts to negate Jewish history by denying the Jewish people's ancient historical connection to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Jewish historical sites in Judea and Samaria (including, but not limited to Rachel's Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs at Machpelah and even the city of Hevron), the ludicrous claim that Abraham and Jesus were Palestinians, the claim that Islam represents the final and one true faith (Christianity and Judaism being flawed precursors), and the utilization of the PA educational system and media to deny Israeli legitimacy to the Land by otherwise falsifying, vandalizing and/or destroying that history. By doing so, they are furthering the myth re-stated time and again by the American and European Left that Jews are "foreign occupiers" and "imperialists" who have no legal or historical claim to "Palestine".
All this makes resolution of the conflict a political impossibility and explains why there can be no lasting peace until this zero-sum mindset changes. Thus, the paradigm floated by the U.S. and the Europeans of “two states for two peoples” is not only naive but dangerous because it is inconsistent with Middle East realities and fatally flawed. It not only fails to acknowledge that the Arabs will not make peace with a dhimmi Jewish state they can neither dominate nor destroy, but it refuses to see that any Palestinian state established on the West Bank and Gaza is merely a subterfuge for the phased destruction of Israel. A 2009 poll showed that 71% of Palestinians continue to support a zero-sum solution to the “problem” of Israel and deem it essential that their state comprise all of Israel and the territories. More recently, a poll of Palestinian public opinion in the West Bank and Gaza released by Arab World for Research and Development in Ramallah asked: “If Palestinian negotiators delivered a peace settlement that includes a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, but had to make compromises on key issues (right of return, Jerusalem, borders, settlements) to do so, would you support the result?” 12% responded “yes”, while 85% responded “no.” 65% said it was "essential" that any peace agreement include historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
That was what the Arab/Israeli conflict was about in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. That is what the conflict is about today. If it was a territorial dispute, it would have been resolved 63 years ago and many times since, but it has never been about borders. It is about the conquest of Israel, and the subjugation and/or annihilation of its people depending upon whether or not they choose to convert to Islam or submit to it as dhimmis or "protected Jews" in Arab Palestine. It's a centuries-long war against the very existence of Jews and especially an independent Jewish state in the Middle East. As such, Israel's return to the 1949 armistice lines (euphemistically referred to as “borders”) will not end this conflict. Rather, any Palestinian state established on the West Bank and Gaza will be the staging ground for "the final solution to the Jewish problem" in Israel.
The rhetoric and barbarism hurled at Israelis today is part of the long and pathetic history of anti-Semitism and dhimmitude that has permeated the Arab/Muslim world for centuries and explains why so many Muslims refuse to use the word "Israel," preferring instead terms such as "the Zionist entity." The pathologies of hate, rage, intolerance and jealousy, more than all the other issues combined, have doomed this region to many more years of conflict. An objective review of these facts (which are obviously irrelevant to those who support Palestinian statehood on the West and Gaza) shows that Arab leadership is uninterested in any remotely plausible agreement with Israel on any of the core issues for the reasons cited. Consequently, only when this zero-sum mindset changes will peace be possible and the conflict resolved.
ENDNOTE
1. This fear, however, has not prevented clandestine meetings between Israeli and Arab leaders who face a common existential threat in a nuclear-armed Iran that would destabilize the entire region and lead to a dangerous nuclear arms race in the Middle East. So, in matters affecting the security of the Sunni regimes and emirates of the Middle East, the Palestinian issue becomes secondary, and "the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend" - provided, of course, that this relationship is (or at least was until the WikiLeaks) hidden away from the prying eyes of the media and the Arab street.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Mark Silverberg is a foreign policy analyst for the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel), he contributes to Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) and the New Media Journal and is a member of Hadassah’s National Academic Advisory Board. His book “The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad” and his articles have been archived under www.marksilverberg.com and www.analyst-network.com.
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