Arab capitals are discussing with Washington the idea of President Barack Obama inviting the leaderships of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Israel to a conference similar to the Camp David talks. Held in July, the conference would include parallel negotiations between Israel and each of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, with the goal of reaching an all-inclusive peace.
The idea includes Barack Obama participating in some rounds of negotiations, as had former president Jimmy Carter when he invited Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David to hold intensive negotiations that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreements. The idea revolves around pushing the three tracks of negotiations forward by seriously committing to solving the pending problems known to all, yet without making one track yield to the other, setting off a race between the tracks or manipulating one at the expense of another. The aim is to reach an all-encompassing peace, to stop attempts at paralyzing Palestinian negotiations and taking them out of the scope of interest and immediate efforts of the new administration under one pretext or another, and to work towards an Arab-Israeli normalization package that would gather with it the willingness of 57 Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel.
Such a proposition calls for Jewish leaderships in the United States, Europe and Russia to think carefully of the roles they must play towards Benjamin Netanyahu-led Israel. Indeed, Netanyahu’s political discourse so far indicates that he is not at all willing to accept any initiatives for peace between the Arabs and Israel. His ideology, based on the principle of cleansing Israel of its Arab citizens so that it may become purely “Jewish,” in fact threatens to turn Israel itself into a pariah state and launch a wave of hatred, vengeance and schism against Jews around the world. Thus the new Israeli political discourse necessarily requires new and young American Jewish leaderships that would put an end to the logic of decrepit leaderships, based on the blind support of any Israeli Prime Minister, no matter what he does. As for the new Arab political discourse, it requires of American Jewish leaderships not to repeat the mistakes of the past by binding the US President and preventing him from embracing sound stances and pressuring Israel into agreeing to them – this in order to protect Israel from peace and its requirements.
It is clear today that the Arabs do not want war, and that Israel does not want peace. This is what world public opinion has begun to realize after decades of being spoon-fed the opposite. The last two wars did not take place between countries, but rather between the State of Israel and the organizations Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. All of Israel’s neighbors do not want war: Egypt and Jordan both have peace agreements with Israel, the Palestinian Authority has been negotiating with Israel for a long time, and Lebanon has no desire to go to war with Israel. In fact, the only thing distancing Lebanon from peace with Israel is the latter’s continued refusal to completely withdraw from its territories, as well as its deceit, as in the case of Ghajar for instance. As for Syria, it has repeatedly declared and once again asserts that its strategic choice is not war with Israel but rather negotiations towards peace.
Israel has repeatedly eluded making peace with the Palestinians, gone back on peace with Syria after it was almost achieved, and purposely avoided peace with Lebanon by refusing to resolve the issues of the Shebaa Farms and the Ghajar village.
Pretexts and excuses abounded behind evading peace, as did explanations and interpretations. Some argued that the logic of establishing the State of Israel as well as its existence require it to remain in a state of war, even if it seems like the constant victim. Today, on the other hand, the ideology of Netanyahu, and the likes of his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, exposes a racist mentality in Israeli social and political society, one aimed at segregation and ethnic cleansing.
When the world spoke of establishing a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, it meant ending Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of 1967 and establishing a Palestinian state in place of the occupation. And when those who held the vision of the two states spoke of modifying these borders to deal with the reality of illegal settlements and the separation wall, they believed that this would be the maximum that Israel could ask for or that it could be offered, knowing that the state of Palestine will be established on what amounts to 20 percent of Palestine under the British Mandate.
It seems today that many Israelis were thinking of something completely different than the rest of the world. Indeed, when talk of the “Jewish State” began, it never occurred to the world that what was meant was the “purity” of Israel from non-Jews, including its Palestinian citizens, known as “Israel’s Arabs.”
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu boasts before Israeli journalists, after meeting with Barack Obama, of not having uttered the expression “two states for two peoples,” but rather “I said that Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side if the Palestinians agree to recognize Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people.” He said that the current government is committed to the peace process with the Palestinians “not on the basis of two states for two peoples, but rather on the basis of Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Netanyahu expressing before Obama his willingness to negotiate, under the condition that he will not sign a peace agreement until the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, is a novelty aimed at eluding the peaceful solution through negotiations as long as the Palestinians do not agree not only to relinquish the right of return for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from Israel, but also to consecrate Israel’s “right” to either consider Israeli Arabs as a burden and expel them one way or another, or to classify them as citizens without the privileges of a Jewish citizen. All of this while Israel keeps what it has expanded into through settlement or what it has contributed to imposing as a de facto situation, in terms of the separation and split between Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s problem is that it wants to get rid of the occupation without recognizing having lifted the occupation through peace. It wants to live in peace while setting itself to a siege mentality, its borders contiguous to those whom it has forcefully separated by procedures of distrust. It wants to deny the failure of a reality it has created, as a result of its unsound belief that triggering strife between the Palestinians will turn the anger of the Palestinians away from itself, and lead them to fierce fighting amongst themselves and into bitter fear.
Had Israel been lucid and wise, it would have realized that coexistence, peace and true tranquility are the key to its stability, not communal expulsion, nor classifying its citizens religiously or ethnically. Indeed, constitutions are the means to resolve demographic fears, not procedures of “purity” and “cleansing.” Peaceful coexistence is the key to the new phase, one which would move the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis away from occupation, resistance and confrontation – which of course would require trust. Building trust is only a means to reach a goal – and permanent trust is its crowning achievement.
Politicians in Israel may think that their achievements are in neutralizing Egypt in the Arab-Israeli strategic balance through a peace agreement, and neutralizing Iraq through the US war there, knowing that it was the strategic depth for the Arabs. Peace with Jordan came partial, because of the secret Oslo process between Israel and the Palestinians, knowing that Israel viewed these negotiations as a mere “process” for the purpose of distraction, whereas former President Yasser Arafat took it seriously and implemented his engagements to the surprise of the Israeli negotiators.
The peace treaty between Jordan and Israel is today the clear, practical response to those who still dream in Israel of Jordan as an “alternative homeland” for the Palestinians. Indeed the world – especially under Barack Obama – will not allow any Israeli government to implement this decrepit strategy in any shape or form. The practical deterrent against ambitions such as these, which inhabit the hearts and minds of extremist Israelis, is the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty and building the de facto peace at the borders and across them. Indeed, normalization is sometimes a double-edged sword. It is a protective shield and not just an open door to tourism, meetings and conferences.
The Jordanian monarch King Abdullah II is behaving with the utmost political wisdom, not just by saying that the so-called “Jordanian option” does not exist in Jordan’s lexicon, but also by persevering to draw the Palestinian issue to the forefront. He went to Washington entrusted by the Arabs with reviving the Arab Peace Initiative, and expressing the willingness of the Arabs to enter into partnership with the United States and Israel in making peace.
He also went to Damascus, and was followed there by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as it was agreed with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad not to squander the Arab Peace Initiative as a main reference to what President Obama will bring in his initiative during his visit to Egypt on June 5th, and as Syria has agreed in principle to the idea of a Camp David-like conference with parallel negotiations.
During the World Economic Forum which was held at the Dead Sea last weekend, King Abdullah sought to convey a message of hope and trust in President Barack Obama, on the eve of the latter’s meeting with Netanyahu, after he had made sure to receive Netanyahu a few days before his visit to Washington. This is new both in terms of quality and of strategy: the Arab parties have put forth an initiative, followed by ideas for implementing it and message to the US President signifying that partnership between him and the Arabs will not be at the individual, but rather at the communal level, and that willingness to make peace with Israel is not broken down into parts but rather all-encompassing, as long as Israel accepts the requirements of peaceful negotiation and implements its engagements and commitments with good will.
Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu has resulted in the US President’s determination and rigor, not only in his commitment to the “two-state solution” as it is understood at the international level – rather than as per the conditions put forth by Netanyahu – and his insistence of stopping Israeli settlement, but also in his response to the novelty of “Iran first” made up by the Israeli Prime Minister.
Obama clearly said that action must be taken on both the issues of Iran and Palestine in parallel. Netanyahu chose to consider Obama’s pledge to assess dialogue with Iran by the end of this year a personal “achievement.” His other achievement is represented by the US pledge not to hold Israel answerable for its nuclear arsenal. However, Obama has frankly refused Netanyahu’s proposition, which is based on the “linkage and precedence” between looking into Iran’s nuclear issue and looking into the Palestinian issue. In fact, he said that his view is opposite to that of Netanyahu in terms of “precedence” – in other words, that if there should be precedence, it should be given to Palestine.
Iran almost gave Netanyahu the present of the US President becoming convinced with the propositions put forth by the Israeli Prime Minister by timing a missile launch that can be considered to be linked to nuclear capabilities and the possibility of using them through advanced missiles. The similarity in the methods of provocation and imposing de facto situations, eluding important steps and procrastinating in negotiations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel is a noteworthy one.
Barack Obama will be subjected to numerous pressures and will face the surprises of Iranian and Israeli skill in the coming weeks and months. What he does not need is for American Jewish leaderships to adopt the methods of “bullet-points” to wage a media campaign that would restrain his movements and present him with a ladder that he must climb downwards, as they did when George Bush gave his first speech about making peace in the Middle East and recorded the first commitment by a US President to a Palestinian state that would replace the occupation on the 1967 territories within the framework of the two-state solution.
Indeed, the opportunity truly gets eaten away because of Israeli stances, and the Arabs, if Israel were to thwart their initiative to make peace with it, would only be able to completely withdraw from peace-making, leaving Israel alone and without cover to face the wars of the siege mentality at its mercurial borders, in the depth of its soul and with the world.
Front Page Features