Palestinian red line
Prof. Efraim Inbar
The media reported that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the peace proposals submitted by U.S. Secretary John Kerry. The Palestinians leaked that Abbas sent a letter to Kerry reiterating his complete opposition to the demand to recognize "Israel as a Jewish state." This was declared a "red line" the Palestinians would not cross.
This "red line" is not just about semantics, but the essence of the conflict. The Palestinian position amounts to denying the Jews the right to establish their state in their homeland. It also indicates, without any doubt, that the Palestinians, despite the conventional wisdom, are not ripe for reaching a historic compromise with Zionism, the Jewish national revival movement. A stable peace based on mutual recognition and ending all demands is not in the cards.
The weak PA seems to accept partition of Mandatory Palestine into two
states (perhaps in accordance with the stages approach championed by the
Palestine Liberation Organization), but it still refrains from
accepting the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.
This is in stark
contrast to Israel, which recognized the "legitimate rights of the
Palestinians" back at the September 1978 Camp David Accords, and which is ready for generous territorial concessions in order to implement a partition of the Land of Israel/Palestine. The bitter truth is that the asymmetry in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not changed for over a century.
In essence, this ethno-religious conflict is not about territory,
although it obviously has a territorial dimension, but about securing
the recognition of the other side to national rights in a given
territory.
Despite the image of
untrustworthiness, Palestinians give great importance to the language
used in the documents they are asked to sign. Yasser
Arafat, generally viewed by most Israelis as an accomplished liar,
refused to sign an agreement in 2000 that included a clause about an end
to all demands. For him the conflict could end only by the eventual demise of Israel. Similarly, Abbas cannot bring himself to put his signature to a document which says that the Jews have returned to their homeland. We know that the perception of Jews being foreign invaders of Palestine is a fundamental widespread Palestinian attitude, which is instilled in the younger generations in the PA-run schools.
The entrenchment of such attitudes is clear also by the lack of a debate among the Palestinians whether to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Discussing Jewish rights to the Land of Israel is not conceivable in the current intra-Palestinian deliberations. Not even
the so-called Palestinian moderates are calling for a debate among the
Palestinians on whether to recognize the right of self-determination of
the Jews in their historic homeland. Polls of Palestinians do
not ask whether Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state. Normative
language mentioning rights and international norms in Palestinian
discourse is reserved for Palestinian demands only and is never applied
in an attempt to understand what Israelis want.
The efforts of the
Palestinian media to negate the Jewish past and historic links to the
Temple Mount and even the Western Wall all indicate the ideological
commitment to rewrite history. Palestinian archaeology is
similarly used to erase all traces of Jewish presence from the land.
Even Koranic sources mentioning the links of the Jews to the Land of
Israel are ignored. Such Palestinian behavior serves only to prolong the
conflict because it does not teach the Palestinians that Jews are part
of the history of this land. All these acts are intolerable and must
stop before Israel considers signing a comprehensive peace agreement.
It was a mistake not to
insist on recognition of Israel being a Jewish state in the
negotiations with the Palestinians in the 1990s. Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu understands well the need for such recognition on
the part of the Palestinians to ensure a historic peace deal and his
insistence on getting it in the framework of a comprehensive settlement
is right on the mark.
Moreover, Palestinians are
different than Egyptians or Jordanians that were not required to accept
Israel as a Jewish state. They have no claims to Palestine, while it is the Palestinians and the Israelis who fight for the same piece of land.
Since the Israelis recognized Palestinian legitimate rights 35 years
ago, it is high time for the Palestinians to learn about the "other"
with whom they are in conflict, and reciprocate if they are serious
about peacemaking.
Professor Efraim Inbar is a professor of
political studies at Bar-Ilan University, director of the Begin-Sadat
Center for Strategic Studies and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
No comments:
Post a Comment