October 11, 2004

Peace in the Middle East

There was an article in the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review (subscription required) that has some bearing on the issue of peace in the Middle East. The article is by Peter Rogers, a former Australian Ambassador to Israel, and author of Herzl's Nightmare: One Land Two People.

In Australia we are constantly pressured to declare our allegiance to one side or the other in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. To criticize Israel runs the gauntlet of the charge of anti-Semitism. To criticize the Palestinians risks the accusation of pro-Israeli bias. Those of us who speak about the conflict can only hope we draw fire from both sides.

Rogers opens up this partisan debate. He points out that there are good reasons for taking aim at both Israeli and Palestinian, since each has acted towards the other with extraordinary blindness and inhumanity on the land both call home. At their heart lies a contradiction between freedom fighter and terrorist. On the Palestinians he says that:


"There is little doubt that Arafat is both [freedom fighter and terrorist]. In his quest for Palestinian statehood, he has employed, directly, and indirectly, indiscriminate violence---often against Israeli citizens. And he has, again, without a doubt, been a better terrorist than freedom fighter. Arafat may have delivered rebellion; freedom he has not. Arafat renounced terrorism but never discredited it. The conflict has defined Arafat. Tragically he cannot move on. "

The Palestinian leadership has become dysfunctional and lives in its own fantasy world.

Rogers says that the other side to Palestinian terrorism is Israeli colonialization of the Palestinian territorities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.


"There is no better example of Israeli myopia than its settlement of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This movement was launched soon after Israel's stunning victory over the Arab world in the 1967 Six-Day War. It was given enormous fillip by then agricultural minister Sharon, who in 1977 unveiled his 'vision of Israel at century's end', calling for 2 million settlers in the occupied territories by 2000. Fortunately, it did not come to that. But the extraordinary thing is that during the 1990s, when a peace deal seemed in prospect, Israeli's could not resist the urge to occupy land that logically should have been earmarked for the Palestinian state. In the past decade, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank have actually doubled, to about 230,000."

This account shifts beyond Arafat and Sharon to argue that Israeli's and Palestinians have grown so used to conflict they have appear to have lost the will and the courage to end it.

So where to now?

Rogers says that both sides know what needs to be done:


'Both have to renounce their dreams---the Jewish one of a homeland in all of Biblical Israeli; the Palestinian dream of their state supplanting the Jewish one. Arafat and the Palestinian leadership have to to say to the Israelis clearly, unequivocally: "We accept that you have a deep attachment to this land. We accept the Jewish state as a natural legitimate part of the region. We will deal harshly with those if us who attack you."

And the Israelis have to say to the Palestinians:"You paid a great price for you self-determination.We dispossesed you from a land that you also hold dear. We cannot undo that wrong. But we can, and will, help you to to achieve your own statehood."'


Such a scenario does appear unreal. Neither side can move forward as both are locked up inside their own myths, sense of victimhood and absolutist conception of good and evil.

The decades of violence have rendered Israeli's and Palestinians incapable of peace. Both sides are incapable of looking one another in the eye and acknowledging that history has dealt both a raw deal. Both claim the high moral ground and neither deserve it.

Rogers concludes by saying that:


"For peace to have a chance Israeli's and Palestinians must acknowledge the horror if what they are doing to the other and to themselves. They are not ready for that mental shift. And no outsider can impose it."

How long before the constantly refreshed layers of hurt, anger, bitterness and hostility overwhelm any prospect of a rational solution?

Can a viable Palestinian mini-state really be concocted from the bits of the West Bank that Israel might relinquish, connected to Gaza by a tenuous land bridge across Israel? So the question we face is whether it’s too late for Palestine.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 11, 2004 01:46 PM | TrackBack
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