Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have embarked on lengthy talks aimed at reaching a Middle East settlement. Two commentators representing the sides outline what each should aim to achieve. Seán Gannontakes a pro-Israel perspective while James Bowenpresents the Palestinian view.
Israelis must wait for responsible Arab rule
Seán Gannon
The joint understanding signed recently by Israelis and Palestinians in Annapolis has been widely criticised as an unimpressive text, heavy on platitudinous peace-speak and light on content. It contains nothing to indicate how the gaps on the conflict's core issues might eventually be bridged, gaps which have considerably widened in the seven years since the collapse of the Camp David-Taba process and the Palestinians' return to war.
But Annapolis was never about achieving consensus on Jerusalem, borders or the "right of return" but about reaching agreement on process. Talks about talks remain a crucial aspect of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.
However, the principal importance of Annapolis was that it publicly committed the parties to the Middle East conflict to the search for a settlement. It was, said former US state department Middle East adviser, Aaron Miller, "designed to send one unmistakable message: that Arab-Israeli peace is open for business".
In a remarkable speech to the conference, Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, clearly demonstrated Israel's readiness to step up to the challenge. "There is no path other than the path of peace," he declared, "no just solution other than the solution of two national states for two peoples."
He acknowledged the "suffering" of the Palestinian people, of those "living in camps . . . wallowing in poverty, neglect, alienation, bitterness and a deep, unrelenting sense of deprivation," and assured them that Israel is not indifferent to "the tragedies [ they] have experienced." "Painful compromise" is necessary for both sides. The post-1967 status quo will have to "significantly change".
The Arab response was, however, predictably dispiriting. Although the Arab states' attendance at Annapolis was supposed to demonstrate their support for the peace process, most declined to deal with the Israeli delegation and its attempts to set up bilateral meetings were firmly rebuffed.
The Saudis refused even to be seen or shake hands with Ehud Olmert while Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was, according to one EU official present, "shunned like she was Count Dracula's younger sister."
The Palestinians also disappointed, engaging in Arafat-style eleventh-hour backtracking on the joint understanding and delivering an address markedly less generous than Israel's. While Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, acknowledged that Olmert personally "showed a desire for peace," he felt unable to reciprocate his empathetic tone and largely confined himself to criticisms of Israel and the reiteration of Palestinian demands.
Given the opposition to Annapolis at home (many tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of the West Bank and Gaza), this was perhaps understandable. The last thing Abbas needed was to be portrayed by Hamas as a traitor or to be compared unfavourably to Yasser Arafat, who returned "uncompromised" from Camp David in July 2000.
And this is the heart of the matter. While Abbas himself may be genuinely committed to the peace process, he does not have the power to carry it through.
His government has no political or popular base and, despite Israel's current efforts to bolster its position through prisoner releases, concessions on settlements and the transfer of $250 million in tax revenues to its coffers, it is being steadily eclipsed by Hamas. It was ruthlessly ousted from Gaza in June and its West Bank rule is facilitated solely by Israel's security presence there.
But until Palestinian society demonstrates that it can govern itself responsibly and effectively, a two-state solution will remain out of reach. An Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would result in a Hamas takeover, turning it into a second Gaza Strip from where 500 mortars and 350 Qassams have been launched against Israel in the last five months alone.
Olmert stated that the absence of Palestinian governmental institutes, ineffective law-enforcement and a weak legal system fosters terrorism and stops Israel "from moving forward too hastily" towards agreement.
Given the absence of such structures, the joint understanding very correctly conditions the implementation of a future peace treaty on the implementation of the road map which sets down markers that must be achieved with regard to Israeli security and Palestinian institution-building. Its framers appear to envisage the possibility of reaching and ratifying an accord while delaying its actual enforcement until the security situation improves. Such a strategy would allow Abbas to work around the problem of Hamas-controlled Gaza, which opposes not Israel's size, but its existence, has nothing to contribute to peace.
For although too weak to re-impose his rule directly Abbas could, with broad Arab backing, use a signed Israeli-Palestinian accord to undercut popular support for the Islamists by offering Gazans the prospect of a better life, the opportunity of a "new era of peace, based on freedom, security, justice, dignity, respect and mutual recognition" held out to both sides at Annapolis. And although famed for "missing opportunities," this is one the Palestinians simply cannot afford to let pass.
Seán Gannon is chairman of Irish Friends of Israel
Apartheid-style fight for democracy looms
James Bowen
Samuel Johnson, who once said that "a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience", would have had something pithy to say about anybody expecting justice for the Palestinians from the Annapolis process. Too many past initiatives have been derailed by the intransigence of Israeli governments whose tactic has long been to delay justice in order to deny justice.
This started as long ago as May 1949 when, in order to join the United Nations, Israel promised to honour Resolution 194 which demanded that the Palestinian refugees be allowed to return home. They are still waiting.
Olmert's commitment to reach a final-status agreement in 2008 should be seen in the same light as Rabin's 1993 commitment to do the same within five years. By early 1995, the Israeli general turned peace activist, Matti Peled, had recognised that Rabin did not intend to allow an independent Palestinian state and said so in an article headlined "Rabin does not want peace". Unfortunately for Rabin, his assassin was not so perceptive.
The Palestinians were more trusting than Peled, finally venting their frustration in September 2000, after seven years of a "peace process" in which Israeli governments of every political stripe had destroyed any possibility of a viable Palestinian state, by stealing more land and vastly increasing the number of settlers. The process has continued ever since, despite the Gaza "withdrawal" - there is huge ongoing settlement expansion in the West Bank.
Annapolis overshadowed an important anniversary. Sixty years ago last week, President Truman forced the "international community" to ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people in Palestine. On November 22nd, 1947, the UN rejected the partition of Palestine. A second vote, four days later, rejected partition by an even bigger margin, so Truman asked that the final vote be delayed for three days, until after Thanksgiving. Truman entered the White House only on Roosevelt's death in 1945 and needed American Zionist support to win the 1948 election. Over the next few days, he bullied five of the weaker UN members into changing their vote. That is how partition was passed on November 29th, 1947.
The UN vote was only a "recommendation" and had no force in international law. However, the Zionists knew this distinction could be hidden when they implemented their plan to ethnically cleanse the Arabs who were the overwhelming majority of the population.
Indeed, on November 29th this year, the historian Tom Segev wrote in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, that 'The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the "road map". Annapolis, claiming to be based on the road map, is merely the latest fiction, in which a weak Palestinian leader is scripted to illegitimately sign away his people's rights under international law. We should remember three facts: Mahmoud Abbas leads a party which lost the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Authority; Israel prevents most Palestinians, the almost six million refugees in the diaspora, from voting in PA elections; international law specifies that the refugees should be allowed to return home. In the Annapolis charade, a delegation which has no mandate from the refugees is expected to sign away this right.
As Peled recognized in 1995, Israel does not want a Palestinian state.
The Zionists have always wanted all of Palestine, but without the Palestinians. Now they have the land, the long-term plan is to make life so miserable for the remaining Palestinians that they will emigrate. Until then, Israel wants the "surplus" incarcerated in open-air prisons, in Gaza and a few isolated parts of the West Bank. If it amuses the "international community", Israel will call these prisons a Palestinian state, but it will be under continuous siege, just as Gaza is today. That is the best Palestinians can expect from the Annapolis fiction.
Indeed, cannier Israelis are anxious to create this fictitious state.
They are worried about what, with unabashed racism, they call the "demographic timebomb". Ignoring the refugees in the diaspora, the number of Palestinians under Israeli rule is about to exceed the number of Jews. Indeed, US State Department figures suggest it has already happened.
This is what prompted Olmert to tell Ha'aretz last Wednesday, November 28th, that "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights [ also for the Palestinians in the territories], then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished". Israel needs to appear to offload as many of these potential Palestinian voters as it can, quickly.
Olmert is surely aware that a group of Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals issued a declaration last week in which they called for "a single state . . . that does not privilege the rights of one ethnic or religious group over another".
Despite seeing the one-state train coming down the track, it is unlikely that Olmert will accept a just two-state solution. He is more likely to try to impose a bantustan on Abbas. If he does, the South African-style struggle will not be long behind.
James Bowen is chairman of the Ireland- Palestine Solidarity Campaign, www.ipsc.ie