The price of peace between Israel and the Palestinians

[Darius11 12]

Quote

It is exactly seven years since that momentous event when, on 13 September 1993, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, and the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, shook hands at the White House lawn before the world's media. But, although we are no closer to a just and lasting peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians than we were when such a handshake would have been inconceivable, we are now virtually face to face with the unavoidable truth about this conflict and can perhaps begin to understand what it will take to resolve it. For what the seven years of torturous, stop-start peace talks have achieved was to debunk the myth that the Israelis - not just the political elite, but the overwhelming majority of the people - want a just and lasting accommodation with the Palestinians.

Ever since the establishment of the state of Israel, a central stratagem of Zionist propaganda has been the proclamation, repeated ad nauseum, of Israel's readiness to hold bilateral talks with Arab leaders on a peaceful settlement, while at the same time refusing to talk to the PLO or to anyone else who purports to represent the entire Palestinian people and not just those in the occupied territories. The stratagem paid off handsomely when used on Egypt which, in return for getting the Sinai Desert back, had to sign a peace agreement with Israel and establish normal relations with it. With Egypt out of the picture, the military option ceased to exist for the Arabs. Without any bargaining power, they were thereby condemned to rely solely on Israel's willingness to dish out bits of illegally occupied territory in return for even more concessions. Hence Syria - the only remaining potentially significant military power, but its army inadequately equipped, ineptly led and poorly trained, and its government mired in corruption and more concerned with maintaining the predominance of the Alawite sect in domestic politics - ceased to be a matter of urgency: the Syrians could be simply made to wait while new facts in the form of illegal Jewish settlements are created in the occupied Golan Heights. The only other remaining potential foe, Jordan, had never been a significant military power and, in any case, followed Egypt's example several years later and was thus taken out of the military equation as well.

This left the Palestinians. By the the time of the famous handshake, five years of intifadah, or uprising, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had convinced the Israelis - government, army and people - that the status quo in these occupied territories was not tenable politically or economically. Nor was the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan or some other neighbour a politically viable option for the time being. So what could be better than to hand over political and economic responsibility for the restless and impoverished masses to a Palestinian authority, but without conceding an inch on the core issues of Jerusalem, the illegal Jewish settlements and the 3.6 million registered Palestinian refugees. Indeed, once the Palestinians concede their rights on these core issues, they could even have their own state, in a proportion of the West Bank dotted with illegal Jewish settlements and linked to the Gaza Strip by an Israeli-controlled corridor - a state in all but reality.

This brings us to the stalemate at the Camp David talks in July 2000. The talks foundered principally on the issue of the illegally occupied East Jerusalem, with Arafat insisting on Palestinian control over at least those parts of the city containing Muslim holy sites, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister, unwilling to grant one iota more than joint control over some of the sites themselves. That is not to say that Barak had agreed to dismantle the illegal settlements and to compensate or allow the return of at least a substantial minority of the refugees. Not so. It has been reported, but never officially confirmed, that the most he would agree to was the return of a few thousand Palestinians with relatives living in Israel, to be spread over some 20 years, and the moving of some 40,000 of the 200,000 illegal settlers out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the remaining 160,000 armed to the teeth and enjoying Israeli sovereignty within the Palestinian territories.

However, to the Israeli people, even these miserly "concessions" seem too much to stomach. Thus, an opinion poll conducted for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot in the last week of July revealed that 70 per cent of those polled opposed the return of any part of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The fact that the Palestinians were now willing to settle for less than 22 per cent of Mandated Palestine, that they were abandoning the central principle of return or compensation for all the refugees, that they were prepared to accept less than half of the city of Jerusalem and that they were ready to live with the settlers - misfits, thieves and squatters from the United States, Europe and the former Soviet Union - was too high a price for peace and security in the eyes of the Israeli public at large. Hence, another opinion poll in July showed that nearly a third of Israelis hoped the peace talks with the Palestinians would fail. And who can blame them? For why pay a price at all when you can have "peace" - defined as the absence of large-scale and sustained violence - and security for free?

Indeed, the exploding of the myth of the Israeli people's desire to live in peace with their neighbours as equals is the biggest achievement of the process that began with the Arafat-Rabin handshake. We now know that what the Israelis mean by "peace" is the pacification of their opponents, the natives of Palestine, a "peace" imposed by the conqueror over the vanquished. And we also know that this shall continue to be the case as long as the cost to the Israeli people of the unjust status quo is as low at it is at present

This is intresting

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[SpeedRacer 1]

they're BOTH morons.

Speed Racer
--------------------------------------------------

[sundevil777 102]

I don't think it is quite as described (Israelis not willing to negotiate - what a load of bull).

Try this again:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

from my post in the Munich thread:

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2032854#2032854

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[Michele 1]

Quote

they're BOTH morons.

And they're both dead.

Ciels-
Michele

~Do Angels keep the dreams we seek
While our hearts lie bleeding?~