… then my judgment is that it will lie somewhere between the cluster of ‘plans’ that emerged between December 2000 and mid-2003– the ‘Clinton parameters’, ‘Geneva Accord‘, and ‘Nuseibeh-Ayalon Plan‘, which collectively we can call CGNA– and the Arab Peace Plan proposed by Saudi Arabia and adopted by the Arab League meeting in Beirut in 2002.
Probably, closer to the Arab Peace Plan.
The Arab Peace Plan is the only one of these that has the explicit support of (in this case, a large number of) the regional governments concerned, including the Palestinian Authority. The Clinton Parameters were then-Prez Clinton’s restatement of what he understood to be the points of convergence between negotiators from the then-outgoing Ehud Barak government in Israel and negotiators from Yasser Arafat’s PA. The Geneva Initiative was a well-meaning and well-funded Swiss project, undertaken after Ehud Barak fell from power, to get some of Israel’s out-of-government pro-peace actors to reach an agreement on details of a possible peace agreement with people very close to (still in office) Yasser Arafat. Nuseibeh-Ayalon was a similar attempt, focused on one pro-Arafat Palestinian and an Israeli figure who had previously been head of the Shin Beth.
One problem with all the CGNA projects is that they did not involve in any way either Hamas or that vast portion of the Palestinian nation (five million or more people– a number greater than that of Palestinians now living in the land of Mandate Palestine) who now live outside Mandate Palestine. These diaspora Palestinians include around 2.5 million UNRWA-registered refugees and an equally large or larger number of Palestinian exiles who still have demonstrable claims on property and national rights inside Palestine but who are not, for various reasons, registered refugees.
Another problem with the CGNA projects is that they completely ignored the requirements of international law, which underline the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, the complete illegality of a country planting its own settlers in land it holds only through belligerent military occupation, and the right of refugees to return to the land of their origin.
The problem with the Arab Peace Plan is that deliberations on it did not involve Israel’s seven million people, a good proportion of whom– though by no means all– could be expected to object to its international-law-based insistence on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the return of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homes and farms.
Back in 2000, and perhaps as late as 2003, it looked plausible– sometimes even advisable– to many people in the US and elsewhere in the west to proceed with Israeli-Palestinian “peacemaking” according to a model that relied on US monopolization of the whole process. Given the immense power of the pro-Israel and indeed also the pro-settler lobbies within the US political system, this tipped the balance systematically against any fair and equal consideration of Palestinian rights, claims, and needs.
In April 2004, President Bush went further than any previous US president in bowing to the demands of the pro-settler lobby when he gave Israeli PM Sharon a letter saying,
- In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers [i.e. West bank settlement blocs], it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 [i.e. the pre-1967 lines], and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Though this letter has often been seen as an important new “fact” in the Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, it actually has no force of law whatever and is merely an exchange of views between two government leaders. Neither George W. Bush nor any other US president is, after all, the “boss of the whole world” or of the Middle East; and pronouncements by the US president have no particular force in international law, though they– as in the case of this letter– considerably complicate the efforts of diplomacy.
The entire US diplomacy from, or before, the time of the ill-fated Oslo Agreement of 1993 until now has also been very centrally based on “letting the two parties to this dispute work it out between themselves.” This approach built on a generally attractive opposition to the idea of imposed peace settlements. On the other hand, it built on and further propagated a myth that the two parties in question were in some way “equal” in stature and power. They never have been. Israel is a long-established state with its own power in the international system and its own army. The Palestinians are not a state but a dispersed and dispossessed people, some 3.8 million of whom now live directly under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
How can representatives of the prisoners “negotiate” on an equal basis with jailers who currently hold them captive, controlling their economy and their every movement, and who have repeatedly shown their readiness to use blunt force to control, punish, and impose their will on the imprisoned people?
Those were the structural problems behind all the attempts (some well-meaning, some perhaps not) to reach simply a “bilateral” agreement between the two sides, with the US government playing merely a role to “facilitate” that negotiation. A more accurate description of that version of the US role would be that it was to protect that extremely inequitable encounter between the imprisoned and his jailer from any demands for equity or international legal standards that might come from outside the closed room of their “negotiation”.
Hamas and other Palestinian groups always rejected that model of negotiation. Many other actors in the Arab world, including many Arab governments, also always had strong reservations about it. The Arab Peace Initiative poses a distinct contrast to the CGNA approach, primarily because it is based on international law and makes no assumption about the special or authoritative value of highly inequitable “direct, bilateral negotiations.”
Meanwhile, in the five years since George Bush’s extremely arrogant letter of 2004, the US’s relative position within world politics has been tumbling. There still seems to be a working assumption in much of Washington that the US can continue to monopolize Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, and apply ground-rules very similar to those it has used since 1993; but I believe that Pres. Obama and his advisers will rapidly discover that this is no longer the case.
A more truly international, UN-based and international law-based approach is the only sure way forward. (This could also, incidentally, provide Obama a sort of “Well, the UN made me do it” argument with which to counter the storm of internal criticism he’ll doubtless get from the pro-settler constituencies in both the Jewish and evangelical-Christian communities in this country, when and as he moves towards a more even-handed and law-based approach. After all, the US citizenry very evidently does need the active support of a range of other world powers at this point, if it is to avoid complete cataclysmic disasters happening to our badly over-stretched armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or further, even worse additional disasters striking our already badly battered national economy.)
So what would an international-law-based outcome look like on the ground? Probably, something very much closer to the Arab Peace Initiative than to the CGNA plans. The 470,000 illegal settlers whom successive Israeli governments have planted into the occupied West Bank (including occupied East Jersualem) and the 17,000 it has planted into Golan will just have to deal with this. Perhaps some of them would be willing to stay where they are under Palestinian (or in Golan, Syrian) governance; and perhaps those new governments could help to arrange some sort-out for the complex property issues involved if some settlers did choose to stay. But extra-territorial civil status of any kind for these (former) settlers would be a quite unworkable can of worms. They have lived as completely privileged “Lords of the Land”, lording it arrogantly over their dispossessed Palestinian neighbors for far too long to allow any “special civil status” arrangement to be viable.
The vast majority of the settlers will simply have to go back and live in Israel proper; and the Palestinian (and Syrian) governments can then decide in a fair and inclusive way how the very lovely housing stock thereby released can be allocated among the many claimants from among their respective citizenries.
Special arrangements could be made to protect the access of religious pilgrims from the Jewish and other faiths to holy sites in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank; and perhaps some special religious institutions could be built near those sites to service those pilgrims– but still under the national sovereignty of the rightful Palestinian government. The Muslim and Christian authorities in sovereign Palestine might also want to gain reciprocal access and facilities for pilgrims from Palestine who want to visit holy sites and graveyards inside Israel.
But one central point here is that, while claims for “pilgrimage access” and the facilities attendant thereto should always be considered with favor by national authorities, the idea that pilgrimage or any other kind of religious claims can provide any kind of property or sovereignty “right” in international law is plainly untenable… What would Rome look like now if every Catholic from anywhere who now is able to go and pray there thereby acquired a “right” to settle in Rome, instantly become an Italian citizen, and then take over Italy and make it into their own new kind of religio-national state?
Another central point: We need to be able to identify who the “primary stakeholders” to this conflict are. They are, surely, members of the following groups:
- a) All Israeli citizens, whether ethnically/religiously Jewish, or ethnically Palestinian/Arab;
b) All Palestinians, including both those who currently residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza and those forced into exile from mandate Palestine over the past 61 years, and the descendants of those “original” exiles.
Each person who is a member of one of these groups should count as one, and none as more than one, to use the old Benthamite definition of human equality. And though many of the rest of us– American Christians, French Jews, Buddhists from China, or agnostics from Sweden– may have special feelings of affection (or even religious longing) for various aspects of life or objects of devotion in that area of Israel/Palestine, we are not actually, direct stakeholders at all. We are outsiders, and have no special claims.
There are around seven million Israeli citizens. And though the counting of Palestinians– especially those in the diaspora– is less precise, the total of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders” (but excluding those 1.2 ethnic Paestinians who are citizens of Israel) doubtless comes to more than 7.5 million, perhaps a lot more.
A person does not lose his claim to be a Palestinian if he leaves his home under situations of duress and is thereafter denied the right to return to it; and nor do his children lose the rights they would otherwise have had to and in their homeland, simply because their parents were refugees. This principle of the continuation of the property and political rights of refugees is well founded in international law. In the political settlements of recent years in South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, those exiled from their homeland were included in voting and referendum processes on an equal basis with those who were never thus exiled. Palestinians are no different.
(Hence, incidentally, I find the arguments of many of those who discuss the “demographic threat” that Israel now faces as the number of Palestinians in mandate Palestine starts to overtake the number of Jews residing there quite ill-directed. Everyone who uses those arguments has already assumed the longterm disfranchisement and marginalization of that majority of the Palestinian people forced to live in complete exile from their homeland for, in many cases, the past 60 years… Some of those exiles have found citizenship and a modicum of a decent life elsewhere. A troubling number have not. But whether they have or not, nothing has happened that annuls the full citizenship rights they have as part of the Palestinian citizenry.)
… So, to return to the main topic of this post, if there is a two-state solution in Palestinian/Israel that is viable at the all-important political level, then it will be one that lies somewhere between the CGNA guidelines and those of the Arab Peace Plan-cum-international law approach, but most likely closer to the latter than to the former.
I know a lot of people who put a lot of effort into the Geneva Initiative. And I know a lot of people for whom the name “Clinton” is itself (fairly inexplicably to me) quite golden. But I think the advocates of these two approaches, and of Nuseibeh-Ayalon, need to understand that their approaches were centrally flawed because they so deeply excluded and marginalized the claims of the Palestinian exiles and of international law. I urge everyone who worked hard on behalf of any of the CGNA plans now to work just as hard promoting the Arab Plan.
My gut sense is that it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, for all, or indeed, for many at all, the claims of the Palestinian refugees to their lands and homes in Israel to be met. (And the provision of UN GA resolution 194 which detailed that right of return also prescribed that the returnees should live peaceably in their homes under the prevailing government, which might not be easy for them to accept, anyway.) But the needs of most of the refugees could surely be sufficiently met through some combination of compensation for properties lost and an expression of remorse from government authorities in Israel for the harm caused in the fighting of 1947-49.
Meantime, it is the needs and claims for political and other forms of inclusion of that vast body of the Palestinian refugees who are also exiles from historic Palestine that now need urgently to be brought back into the peacemaking agenda. If their needs and claims can be sufficiently met within the contours of a politically robust Palestinian state, then a two-state solution can still– not without difficulty– be salvaged.
But this needs to start happening very soon indeed. In this JWN post yesterday I outlined the seven important steps that President Obama should take, to get us on speedily on the path to this.
If a two-state solution cannot be salvaged, then the only alternative– down the road– will be an inclusive, South-Africa-style, one-state solution within Mandate Palestine. But that outcome will be far harder, and more damaging, for the region to get to than the presently offered road to a workable two-state outcome. It would involve, most likely, regionwide turmoil and upheaval on a scale we have not seen yet, that would directly threaten supply lines vital to the US and other world powers, and also the peace and security of the entire world system.
It would be the height of folly and recklessness for President Obama to even risk going anywhere near that road. Using the opportunity that’s presently offered to work with the world community to win a viable two-state outcome may look difficult. But it is by far the wiser course. And with a substantial portion of both the world and the US citizenry urging him on, he can start to spell out visions of an Arab-Israeli theater at peace that have been literally unimagineable for most of the past 60 years.
Helena, why do you think a one-state solution would create “upheaval” in the region?
In Israel yes as many would leave but why in the region?
There is an interesting aspect of this problem that Helena hints at but that deserves much deeper consideration according to a leading anthropologist, Scott Atran That is the crucial fact of the symbolic importance of core values and willingness to make compromises on them rather than merely material concessions, He says that he has scientific data to support this thesis – if one accepts the soft sciences as science. He says:
“ Making these sorts of wholly intangible “symbolic” concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.”
The whole article is found at the edge.org website at ;
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/atran_ginges09/atran_ginges09_index.html
Israel and Hamas have implicitly recognized this importance by their demand and refusal respectively to recognize Israel’s right to exist. This is the very issue that Arafat gave away virtually for free, or at least only for his personal aggrandizement. While Israel regularly ignores or pettyfogs international law with which it disagrees, international recognition is very important to it, and it clings to every scrap of such support, Similar attention has not been paid to the issue of Israel acknowledging its part (guilt?) in creating the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948.
Perhaps more attention should be paid to these issues rather the usual “confidence-building measures” which have never worked and seem to be merely created excuses to not move forward. All this presupposes that there is a genuine interest among the Israeli power structure – as opposed to the Israeli people – in actually pursuing a real two state solution rather than just humoring their patron, US.
B, because the death of the two-state project would almost certainly be accompanied by wars and major political upheavals in all the Arab states that have given it strong support… stoked on by the Samson-like ‘we’ll bring this whole regional house of cards down’ machinations of last-ditch ultra-Zionists… I hate war and the immense harms it inflicts. Hence my support for a workable negotiated settlement if it can be found.
Jack, Scott Atran’s work on the contribution that ‘symbolic’ actions can make to peacemaking is very important. Of course, the whole discourse of ‘confidence-building measures’ as purveyed by the Dennis Ross’s etc of this world focused on what the Palestinians had to do to ‘build’ Israelis’ confidence and paid far too little attention to what the Israelis needed to do (and stop doing, e.g. building settlements) to ensure not just that the Palestinians’ confidence could be built but also that there was any territorial base left to negotiate over.
The whole article is in the last two paragraphs, and they are all backwards. For sixty years the separation of an “Israeli” racial state has caused turmoil, threatened supply lines, menaced world peace, et cetera, et cetera. Now, Helena says, the disease is the cure, and the cure would be the disease. No reasons given, of course.
From a South African point of view I get very fed up with this line of argument, or more precisely non-argument, especially when it mentions South Africa right there. Because that struggle is the same struggle as ours, and an acceptance of a racial state and segregation there, is a denial and a reversal of our liberation here in South Africa. It threatens us. Never mind the sacred supply lines of the USA, what about us? And then waht about all the other places where lousy “2-state solutions” will suddenly become fashionable, more than likely also on some holy “supply-line” of the USA.
This is terrible old tosh. “Height of folly and recklessness” indeed! Who does Helena think she is nowadays: Lady Bracknell?
Shimon Peres told the UK parliament in November that “Israel will find it difficult to evacuate the settlements without a civil war.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1038961.html
A destabilization of their country and an internal civil war is what the Israeli leadership is really afraid of. They understand any reasonable and viable two-state solution requires evacuation of most of the settlement from the West Bank. You can expect that they will push back with all the means at their disposal against any process leading to this outcome.
Helena, in your response to b, you said “the death of the two-state solution would almost certainly be accompanied by wars and major political upheavals in all of the Arab states that have given it strong support”. Do you have any basis for saying that, other than the natural feeling that populations might feel a little more empowered vis-a-vis entrenched regimes like that of Mubarak and the Saudis? Would that be a bad thing and “the height of folly”, in your view?
Your second point about possible ultra-Zionist sabotage is surely not something you are going to use as a basis for your position, is it. Or do you think it would also be the “height of folly” to face up to that kind of thing?
What exactly do you mean, because what you have said so far sounds like scare tactics in defense of the existing regimes.
Ah, “Lady Bracknell” hands round the cucumber sandwiches and purple Kool-Aid in the interests of “the existing regimes” . . . .
No, one would definitely never have thought of THAT unassisted!
Planet Justworld may be far too remote from Terra for either to exercise gravitational pull on the other, but fortunately for entertainment lovers, it is well within telescope range. Semper sint in flore!
Allow me to suggest that the fun snowball in question might be augmented by the valuable contribution of Herr Prof. Dr. Fu’ád von ‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins University in today’s Wall Street Jingo. A true friend of the Street Arabs (and also a Republican Party neocomrade in his spare time, believe it or not!), F.‘A. points out how terrified of George XLIII Bush those existing régi …
… but no, one must let everybody see the real thing, one does not want to be accused of making stuff up to ridicule an opponent:
Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. (…) True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture. [*] (…) The brief reference to Iraq in the inaugural could not have been icier or more clipped. “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people,” Mr. Obama said. Granted, Iraq was not his cause, but a project that has taken so much American toil and sacrifice, that has laid the foundations of a binational (Arab and Kurdish) state in the very heart of an Arab world otherwise given to a despotic political tradition, surely could have elicited a word or two of praise. In his desire to be the “un-Bush,” the new president fell back on an austere view of freedom’s possibilities. The foreign world would be kept at an emotional and cultural distance. Even Afghanistan — the good war that the new administration has accepted as its burden — evoked no soaring poetry, just the promise of forging “a hard-earned peace.” The nation had cast a vote for a new way, and had gotten the foreign policy of Brent Scowcroft.
I have ventured to mark [*] the honourable and gallant’s best passage. It outshines white phosphorus and cucumber sandwiches, in my judgment, to propose to judge one’s political buddies by what they talked ineffectually about doin’ for six years while damnin’ poor Mr. O. on the basis of one interview. Best of all, though, is to propose to skip two lean years after the six fat years and then claim credit in advance for anythin’ positive that may happen to turn up tomorrow or next week despite the Obama Administration’s best efforts to abort.
Some have described BHO as a cool customer, but compared to F. ‘Ajamí, he scarcely registers on my thermometer.
Happy days.
I rather liked Uri Avnery’s piece, to which I no longer have the reference, but it is somewhere on his site, where he says that the one-state solution, so widely promoted recently by pro-Palestinian commentators as the only remaining solution, is very dangerous for the Palestinians. Because, once the Israelis have legal access to the land, they will simply seize it, and no-one can protest. At least at the moment what they do is illegal.
Stick to the two-state solution is much better for the Palestinians. If Israeli settlers can leave Sinai, and then Gaza, then they can also leave the West Bank. The settlers wail and complain a lot, but they are still lacking legal right.
Obama’s interview on al-‘Arabiyya: “Obama praised the 2002 peace plan offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which proposed a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab League states based on an Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders.” (Juan Cole)
The transcription said “Obama praised Saudi King Abdullah for his Middle East peace plan”
Well, that may not mean very much, but it is better to keep settler activity in illegality, than to give them rights. The political situation may change one day.
I rather liked Uri Avnery’s piece, to which I no longer have the reference, but it is somewhere on his site, where he says that the one-state solution, so widely promoted recently by pro-Palestinian commentators as the only remaining solution, is very dangerous for the Palestinians. Because, once the Israelis have legal access to the land, they will simply seize it, and no-one can protest. At least at the moment what they do is illegal.
Stick to the two-state solution is much better for the Palestinians. If Israeli settlers can leave Sinai, and then Gaza, then they can also leave the West Bank. The settlers wail and complain a lot, but they are still lacking legal right.
Obama’s interview on al-‘Arabiyya: “Obama praised the 2002 peace plan offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which proposed a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab League states based on an Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders.” (Juan Cole)
The transcription said “Obama praised Saudi King Abdullah for his Middle East peace plan”
Well, that may not mean very much, but it is better to keep settler activity in illegality, than to give them rights. The political situation may change one day.
Sorry for the double posting. I should know by now how to post on this site.
By the way, I’ve just been listening to yet another puff-piece on the BBC in Israeli interests, about the Entebbe rescue. I never cease to be amazed by the degree of penetration. But I also think that it doesn’t have much effect; the public reaction (outside the US) is more or less cold.
I agree that a one-state solution is out of the question. It would immediately degenerate into a full-fledged Apartheid state with prisons on the scale of the US’ to hold Palestinian “criminals” and the rest of the Palestinians set to work as helots for the Spartan Israelis. Absurd.
But in the long run a two state solution may well evolve into a de facto symbiosis that is at least as good as a nation state.
But I cannot believe the author of today’s wonderful piece can be the author of “point number 1” below :
Fateh or its allies can be the public face that do the formal negotiations with Israel and provide international political cover for Hamas. It remains possible that the Hamas leaders don’t see having such a “cover” as providing them any real benefit.
This is crazy Helena. Hamas is the Palestinians; the Palestinians are Hamas. That second sentence above must have had you biting your own tongue. The Palestinians voted Hamas in as their government and would give them a greater mandate today, from all I read. It is time we respected the Palestinians and their government. How can you even consider negotiations that substitute Elliot Abrams’ “Contras” for the Palestinians?
I mean… I know how you can. You are trying to see a way that Israel and their stooge in the White House can proceed with something called “negotiations”, but since neither of them are willing to do so, since neither of them plans to do so, and since no one can think of a means to force them to do so… we need a way to pretend they are going to do so anyway. Or else we can’t have “negotiations”, can we? Is this not the history of US sponsored Israeli/Palestinian negotiations?
The US must straightforwardly state that there will be no more arms or money for Israel until a two-state solution has been agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians. And it’s up and working. Then perhaps pick up the phone to the Brazilians and the South Africans and ask them to see if they can be of any use to the negotiations.
But wait, “the US”, at least as regard to foreign policy, is controlled by the US/Israeli Neocon mob. So, we Americans, the people of the United States of America, must stand up on our hind legs and straightforwardly state that there will be no more money forthcoming for Israel until a two-state solution has been agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians. And it’s up and working. This accomplished, we might then suggest those involved pick up the phone to the Brazilians and the South Africans and ask them to see if they can be of any use to the negotiations.
At the very least repeats of the three week Christmas holocaust will be foreclosed. The Israelis will never spend their own money just for the fleeting “sport” of killing Palestinians while eating cucumber sandwiches.
It seems impossible, or extremely unlikely for this to happen: For we the people to bestir ourselves and bring about what we all instead “hope” and “pray” might happen.
Yet it is more likely for peace in Palestine to come about by the direct action of the people of the United States of America than by “negotiations” that exclude the Palestinians at the very outset.
For that is exactly what the Israelis and their stooges, Barack and The Retreads have in mind. And that is more likely to lead to the “final solution” of the Israelis “Palestinian problem” than to anything else.
At this time it is impossible to have even a one state solution for the Palestinian state, so we may need to think about a three state solution. That makes topological and demographic sense. The regional integration would naturally be with Gaza towards Egypt and the West Bank towards Jordan. That is what it was, that is what it can be. An empty Sinai ruled by an Arab country and you want to integrate Gazans towards Israel? Nonsense. Use logic, not poisoned historical fairy tales. Even Arafat was an Egyptian for God’s sake.
I listened to Sbigniew Brzezinski talk at Chatham House about the foriegn policy challenges facing Obama.
He finished his talk be saying that because of the way the US works that electoral considerations influence foreign policy. He went on to say that an intelligent foreign policy needs an intelligent electorate and that one of the requirements for the coming presidency is a process of educating the US electorate.
Your piece is a good introduction to the fundamental set of inconsistencies that make up an intractable problem to which there is no simple solution called One State Two State or, as Mr Friedman proposed in the NYT, Five State solution.
Seen from the simple point of view of designing infrastructure – telephony, telecommunications and electricity a two state solution doesn’t work. I looked at how to design a telecomunications solution for Palestine and it just doesn’t work. It is every bit as bad as Kosovo where the Serb villages host cellular masts for the Serbian cellular network, which makes network planning and commucation security a nightmare. So I incline towards Edward Said’s position of a one state solution of some kind.
Ury Averney’s point that Palestininans would have their land expropriated in a situation where a Judiciary and civil service was dominated by the people who run the courts in Israel today is probably accurate. Maintaining the lack of suitably trained Palestinians who can fill roles in the Judiciary and civil servcie is probably one of the objectives of the restrictions on Palestinian edcation.
Thus I conclude that the one state is not within the boundaries of mandate Palestine.
I am influenced by the recollection of how the 900 year old conflict in Ireland lost its underlying fire, when both Ireland and UK became EU members. From having an international conflict, it gravitated down to being a dispute between minorities in neighbouring provinces of the Eurostaat. The Regional Economic growth of both the regions provided alternative occupations.
I suspect that the first step in sorting out the mess actually lines up with a number of Obama’s policies. This is the process of removing nuclear weapons from the Middle East. It comes as a stunning revelation to realise that the emphasis on stopping the Iranian uranium enrichment program is in fact a smokescreen to delay tackling the problem of the Israeli nuclear blackmail referred to by Helena. It is intolerable that a group of people who, from their behaviour in Lebanon and Gaza do not reassure as rational actors should be able to threaten to start Armageddon. Not only can they threaten the Aswan dam, but by having submarines at sea with nuclear tipped Tomahawks, as reported by Stratfor, they can threaten Marseilles, or Rome, or Barcelona.
The second step is probably a definition of the shape of an enlarged EU that includes the Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. This expansion or integration will cause economic growth that brings the surrounding states closer the the GDP per head figure of Israel. I applaud Benita Ferrero Waldner’s recent moves to suspend awarding Israel special trading status with the EU. I am also deeply suspicious of the identity of the people who sabotaged the Irish referendum on adoption of the Lisbon treaty.
But I know that the problem is far bigger than any solution I can propose, so I, unlike Helena and Tom Friedman, am not going to propose a solution. That is Mr Mitchel’s job. Whatever he did in Ireland it worked.
I do applaud Helena’s initiative to educate the American Electorate so they can support the hard choices that need to be made to resolve sixty years of misguided support of an injustice that attempted to resolve another injustice.
I guess I’m glad you are so hepped on Obama. But I can’t think why. He gladhanded Livni and handed US Iran policy to her, after her perpetration of war crimes in Gaza. He sent an envoy to the Middle East, but with strict instructions not to talk to Hamas, which makes the trip as pointless as Bush sending Zinni. Obama has already declared, through Clinton that Iran can go to hell if it doesn’t agree to stop enriching uranium PRIOR to any negotiations, which is the exact same position W had.
Keep reading tea leaves and parsing body language. As long as you do that, you stand in the way of any real peace movement developing in the US. You need to consider this: Obama = W, but with no peace movement to hamper his warmongering.
I’m sorry, but what other president bombed another country his third day in office?
Obama = W but without any peace movement around to stop his warmongering. Expect war against Iran within months.
Think about it. What other president bombed another country on his third day? Think about this: Obama sent Mitchell to Israel, but with strict instructions not to talk to Hamas. That means it’s just a head fake. Period. You speak of the dangers of Ross and Clinton’s hard line tendencies, as if OBAMA DIDN’T HIMSELF PICK THEM!!!
Also, we saw Obama hand partnership in Iran policy to Israel’s War Crimes Minister Livni. I’m sorry, but how is that something a Man of Peace does?
You sneer at Carter. Wow. That amazes me. After all, Carter is the only President who actually has accomplished anything constructive.
But do carry on. Obama needs all the apologists he can get.
Gazan children denied treatment abroad
Amira is one of four children who have been offered potentially life-saving surgery by a team of doctors in France. But she and the other children appear to be victims of a bureaucratic wrangle involving the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Egypt.
Mohammed Salem, the head of a medical group based in France known as Pal Med, was among the doctors accompanying the children through the crossing last Friday. He said the doctors had been allowed through, but the ambulances carrying the children were blocked. When the doctors tried to return, they were denied entry into Gaza.
“We do not know why the children were refused,” he said. “We had organised all the relevant papers and documents. We were told once we passed through Rafah that the ambulance carrying the children would be allowed to follow.”
The reason appears to be a sudden change of policy by the Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah, which issued a statement the day before the four children tried to leave Gaza saying that it believed there was “no more reason to refer any more children for treatment abroad”.
Nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed and a further 5,300 injured during Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza.
In the days immediately after Israel’s declaration of a ceasefire on Jan 18, hundreds of seriously wounded Gazans were transferred through the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Many are being treated in Egyptian hospitals, and others have been sent abroad.
But in recent cases, Egyptian officials appear to have preferred to abide by the wishes of the Palestinian health ministry than create diplomatic friction.
Two of the four children, Hazem Abu Odeh, 12, and Iman Khadum, nine, need surgery to stop bleeding from their kidneys.
The fourth, Alla Abu Dagan, 16, suffered multiple fractures and abdominal wounds from a shell blast.
A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Amira and the other children had probably been caught in a political row resulting from the split between the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, and the Hamas government in Gaza.
“The PA wants to show it is exercising authority in Gaza, too. It is using its control over the international medical aid reaching Gaza as a way to show it is in charge and making things happen,” the source said.
You see this is the result of putting Elliot Abrams’ “contras” in charge of the “international” border crossings. Elliot’s boys are now Obama’s boys. Making sure that “innocent Palestinians” receive help from the “contras”, and that those who refuse to relinquish what little freedom they have left… the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers, right Barak?
Why are the patients having to leave Gaza to see the doctors? Why are not the doctors allowed to see the patients? Why has not the US Mediterranean fleet established field hospitals in Gaza?
The only answer is because Barak Obama, Commander in Chief, ready to send more to murder and be murdered in Aghanistan, has not ordered that to happen. One word : “GO!”. And it woud be accomplished. But we have no words. We have no comment. We have worse. We have complicity.
the key to the whole question, it seems to me, is in the first word of the header: “IF”.
as many people have been saying more and more persuasively for years now (from jeff halper of ICAHD to ali abunimah of electronic intifada and beyond), there ain’t no such thing as a viable 2-state solution.
at risk of repeating what i’ve said a few times in the past, i’ll highlight one key reason. a majority of palestinians are 1948 refugees. they have no stake in a 2-state solution, and have shown again and again that they don’t support palestinian parties and movements who define their goal in that way. this is the reason why Hamas beat Fatah in the last PA elections; a key part of why heavily-refugee-populated gaza has been a Hamas stronghold; a central element in the near-complete loss of the PA’s credibility. unless something very very strange or very selectively genocidal happens, the refugee majority among palestinians will continue to grow. which makes a 2-state solution even less viable, and even more unjust. the post’s discussion of “primary stakeholders” makes the problem clear: about 1/3 of the 15 million or so “primary stakeholders” are palestinian refugees. that’s a decisive fraction, barring the extremely unlikely case of support from the overwhelming majority of both jewish israelis and non-refugee palestinians.
the 2-state solution has been dead and rotting for years. it’s a mystery why folks keep exhuming it to let it run around eating their brains. can we live in the evidence-based community already?
once more: who’s the new lead poster on this site, and what have they done with Helena Cobban?
rozele, a well defined right to return can be the stake refugees will have in the two state solution. I think John Francis Lee has the right idea about how a solution would work. A two state solution as the immediate solution, with the possibility of a one-state solution evolving from years of normalcy and economic interaction.
In a two state solution, the one with no control of their infrastucture, their borders, airspace, litoral is properly called a Reservation
there ain’t no such thing as a viable 2-state solution
Not if you want it all and think you can get away with it, as the US/Israeli Neocons do. This is a prophecy they’ve hoped will be self-fulfilling for some years now, hoping to eliminate the Palestinians completely before it comes to pass, but willing now to internalize the Palestinians, for awhile, if they must.
…a one-state solution is out of the question. It would immediately degenerate into a full-fledged Apartheid state with prisons on the scale of the US’ to hold Palestinian “criminals” and the rest of the Palestinians set to work as helots for the Spartan Israelis. Absurd.
there ain’t no such thing as a viable 2-state solution
Not if you want it all and think you can get away with it, as the US/Israeli Neocons do. This is a prophecy they’ve hoped will be self-fulfilling for some years now, hoping to eliminate the Palestinians completely before it comes to pass, but willing now to internalize the Palestinians, for awhile, if they must.
…a one-state solution is out of the question. It would immediately degenerate into a full-fledged Apartheid state with prisons on the scale of the US’ to hold Palestinian “criminals” and the rest of the Palestinians set to work as helots for the Spartan Israelis. Absurd.
I think the best contribution of this thread is the notion pointed by Frank that affiliation to a larger regional block diminished the severity of the Irish conflict. That idea is indeed interesting Frank. Say some more.
I am sure that initially the Arabs will require that it does not include lepers like Israel, but that is fine for starts. Eventually that may change as millions of Israeli Arabs would be excluded, and maybe the Arabs can overcome that mental block over time.
Thanks Titus
Three things happened in Ireland as a result of joining the EEC (now the EU) in 1973.
Firstly it provided money jobs and status not only in the Republic but also through regional grants in Northern Ireland. People who are in well paid jobs and whose chldren have the prospect of a career are less likely to spend all day in a hide overlooking the border in order to snipe at an army patrol.
http://www.heritage.org/research/worldwidefreedom/bg1945.cfm
Secondly it changed the environment for political debate. Membership of the EEC meant that the stasis in political ideology could move on from the sense of an incomplete war of independence to take a wider view of Ireland’s place in the world.
This shift moved the role models for young men from the people who built the state, or who died trying, by taking the hard option of rebellion as opposed to the soft option of parliamentary gradualism, to constuctive models based around social democratic ideals.
Thirdly the central EU functions exerted pressure on both British and Irish governments to resolve the political, and social problems in Northern Ireland. It became apparent that the local and regional governement structures devolved after the Treaty of 1922 were anachronistic in the contest of a modern state and that there was a lack of suitably qualified people to run the state.
We are cautioned to avoid trying to transplant the Irish situation to the Middle East.
However the following are signs of hope:
There is a nascent Economic Union known as the Economic Cooperation Organsiation (ECO) headquartered in Teheran which might expand to include Iraq and Syria. This bloc controls an enormous amount of the world’s hydrocarbons and given proper management can use Turkey as a bridge to the EU. There is the option of being a reliable gas and oils supplier to the EU in exchange for education, development and growth.
Management of the water and electricity generation across this area is the key to success, and one of the key acts that needs to take place is to remove the de facto veto held by Israel on constuction of nuclear desalination and power generation plants in the area.
Titus
You might find this by Claire Spencer of interest.
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/twt/archive/view/-/id/1863/
I am a great fan of Claire’s writing and her ability to use words like scalpels to cut to the heart of the issue.
Her exposition of the divergence between the American view of the situation and the Arab view is of great value.
“the complete illegality of a country planting its own settlers in land it holds only through belligerent military occupation,”
Strange thing to say. If this were true then every person in the world would be an illegal living in an illegal country. The fact is, that acquisition of land through military force is the standard way land is acquired by nations, and always has been, all throughout history in all parts of the world. It’s long been accepted by international law, for millennia actually, and, in fact, is one of the core precepts of international law. Why should the Israelis be expected to live under different standards than every other country? It’s convenient for others to insist on this, but it’s truly hypocritical and the Israelis would be insane to go along with it.
The Israelis should hold onto the land, and certainly shouldn’t surrender even one inch as part of any peace treaty. The Arabs will see that as a sign of weakness. In the long run the land is worth more than peace or recognition. The Jews can live without those. Eventually the world will recognize it as Israeli land. It may take a few hundred or thousand years, but there’s no rush.
Well, there you have it folks. Honest Mike P says: Bugger “Israel’s right to exist”. Might is right for a thousand-year Reich. Full circle.