Elliot Abrams is a
senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on
Abrams' blog "Pressure Points" here.
Several well-known
members of America's foreign policy establishment have just published an
open letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, titled "Stand Firm, John Kerry." And firm they are, in blaming Israel for every problem in the peace negotiations.
Criticism of Israel and
of the policies of the Netanyahu government is certainly fair, whether
from the Left or the Right. But the criticisms adduced here are not. Why
not?
The authors' (Zbigniew
Brzezinki, Carla Hills, Lee Hamilton, Thomas Pickering, Frank Carlucci,
and Henry Siegman) first point is that the "enlargement" of Israeli
settlements is the central problem in getting to peace. They propose
stopping all negotiations until settlement "enlargement" ends. One
problem with this approach is that it is the Palestinians, after all,
who want to change the current situation, end the occupation, and get a
sovereign state, so halting all diplomatic activity would seem to punish
the party the authors' wish to help. But there's a deeper problem:
There is no "enlargement" of Israeli settlements. There is population
growth, especially in the major blocs that Israel will obviously keep in
any final agreement. But enlargement, which logically means physical
expansion, is not the problem and is rare in the West Bank settlements.
The authors don't seem to know this.
Their second point
deals with "Palestinian incitement," a term long used by American
officials to describe anti-Semitic statements and actions that glorify
terror and terrorists -- naming schools and parks after them for
example. But the authors' say nothing about this; they do not mention
Palestinian anti-Semitism or the glorification of terror. They say
instead that Israel sees "various Palestinian claims to all of historic
Palestine constitute incitement." This is plain wrong. Here's what
Palestinian "incitement" means, as described by David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
"In a particularly
striking case, at the end of 2012, the Fatah Facebook page posted an
image of Dalal Mughrabi, a female terrorist who participated in the
deadliest attack in Israel's history -- the killing of 37 civilians in
the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre. The image was posted with the
declaration: 'On this day in 1959 Martyr (Shahida) Dalal Mughrabi was
born, hero of the 'Martyr Kamal Adwan' mission, bride of Jaffa and the
gentle energizing force of Fatah.'
"Another theme of
recent official Palestinian incitement is the demonisation of Israelis
and Jews, often as animals. For example, on 9 January 2012 PA television
broadcast a speech by a Palestinian imam, in the presence of the PA
minister of religious affairs, referring to the Jews as 'apes and pigs'
and repeating the gharqad hadith, a traditional Muslim text about
Muslims killing Jews hiding behind trees and rocks, because 'Judgment
Day will not come before you fight the Jews.'"
The authors should know this kind of incitement happens constantly, and should demand that it end.
Then comes a paragraph
about Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, as to which
the authors are a bit ambiguous. They conclude that "Palestinian
recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, provided it grants full and
equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens, would not negate the
Palestinian national narrative." They should have acknowledged that
Israel does grant full and equal rights to non-Jewish citizens. There is
no other country in the region with a substantial Christian population
from which those Christian citizens are not fleeing, and that might have
been noted. And Muslims in Israel vote in fully free elections; where
else in the region does that truly happen?
Then comes a paragraph
on "Israeli security," which is devoted to condemning "illegal West Bank
land grabs" -- as if Israel had no security problems at all. With
respect to the Jordan Valley, they bemoan the impression that the United
States takes Israeli security concerns there seriously. They do not
acknowledge something every serious expert knows: that the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan also has grave concerns about security in the Jordan
Valley and does not (repeat, not) want to see a quick withdrawal of
Israeli forces from that long border. Security in the West Bank is a
serious issue, but the open letter does not discuss the problem in a
serious way.
The authors conclude
that "the terms for a peace accord advanced by Netanyahu's government,
whether regarding territory, borders, security, resources, refugees or
the location of the Palestinian state's capital, require compromises of
Palestinian territory and sovereignty on the Palestinian side of the
June 6, 1967, line. They do not reflect any Israeli compromises. ..."
This is remarkable. It's obvious that tens of thousands, perhaps 100,000
or more, Israeli settlers would have to be uprooted in any peace deal
remotely like the ones proposed by Israel at Camp David in 2000 and
after Annapolis in 2008. The authors do not mention those proposals --
nor the fact that the PLO rejected them. Nor the massive uprooting of
citizens that Israel would have to undertake.
After his dozen trips
to Israel as secretary of state, John Kerry can be presumed to know
better than the authors of this open letter what's going on in the
"peace process." Let's hope he does "stand firm" against an analysis
that blames one side exclusively for the failure to make peace, and
ignores the history and complexities of the negotiations.
From "Pressure Points" by Elliot Abrams. Reprinted with permission from the Council on Foreign Relations.
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