Abbas: Arabs in Israel; No Jews in Palestine. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 30, 2013.
“Palestine” without Jews. By Herb Keinon. NJBR, July 31, 2013.
Why Israel Has No Negotiating Partner. By Benjamin Weinthal. National Review Online, July 30, 2013.
Abbas and the “Peace Process.” By Ahmed Feteha. Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2013.
The Real Palestinian Vision. By Emanuele Ottolenghi. Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2011.
Tobin:
While
in Cairo yesterday to meet with Egypt’s new leaders, Palestinian Authority
leader Mahmoud Abbas let drop a few remarks about the peace negotiations with
Israel that began in Washington last night. As the Times of Israel reports, Abbas left no doubt about what his vision
of peace entails:
“In a
final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian
or soldier — on our lands,” Abbas said following a meeting with interim
Egyptian President Adly Mansour in Cairo.
The
statement provoked little comment in the Western press, and no wonder. Most of
the mainstream media has long accepted the Palestinian formulation that sees
the presence of Israelis in the West Bank and Jerusalem as the primary obstacle
to peace with the Palestinians. From this frame of reference, the peace
equation is simple. No Israelis in Palestine means the conflict disappears.
Therefore the sole object of peace negotiations is to leverage Israelis out of
the areas that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.
But the
problem here is not just that this is an absurd distortion of reality that
ignores Jewish rights and security needs. The Abbas statement provides some
important context for the key Israeli demand that the Palestinians refuse to
accept: PA acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. If
Palestinians think there is something racist about Israel being accepted as the
sole Jewish state in the world, why is it OK for them to envision an
independent state of their own where Jewish communities would have to be
destroyed and their inhabitants be evicted?
Peace
processers and Israel’s critics claim this reasoning is nit-picking, but this
actually goes to the heart of the problem that Secretary of State John Kerry
and his aide Martin Indyk are trying to unravel in the negotiations they have
worked so hard to bring about.
The
Palestinian position remains that specific acceptance on their part of Israel
as a Jewish state would undermine the rights of the Arab minority inside the
pre-1967 lines and force them to make a judgment about the country’s internal
arrangements. But the whole point of the conflict since its beginnings a century
ago has always been the Arab rejection of the return of the Jews to their
ancient homeland. If Palestinians are determined to create an independent state
where there are no Jews, why then are they so afraid of agreeing that their
neighbors will be a Jewish state?
The
reason for this is no mystery.
More
than any compromise on borders, accepting Israel as a Jewish state would be an
open acknowledgement that the conflict is finished. It would mean the
descendants of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 would have to be resettled
elsewhere and all terrorism and efforts to erase Israel inside its contracted
borders would cease.
The
demand for recognition of a Jewish state is often represented as something new
created by Prime Minister Netanyahu in order to make peace more difficult to
achieve. But it should be remembered that the original United Nations partition
resolution of 1947 spoke of the country being specifically divided between a
Jewish state and an Arab one, not Israel and “Palestine.” The effort to deny
the right of the Jewish people to a sovereign state in their own land is an act
of prejudice since no other group in the world is treated in this manner.
It is
true that in the unlikely event that the Palestinians ever agree to peace on
any terms, Israel will be anxious to evacuate any Jews currently living in
territory from which they will withdraw. The reason for this is also no puzzle.
Any Jews left behind in Arab lands would last as long as the greenhouses left
behind in Gaza when Israel left that region in 2005. No one, not even the
United States, could guarantee the safety of any Jew—whether a peace-loving
leftist or a hard-core right-wing settler—living in a Palestinian state.
But
that’s the conundrum of the whole peace process. Even though it is the national
state of the Jewish people, religious and ethnic minorities have full rights in
Israel. What Abbas is asking for is for Israel to be a bi-national state of
Jews and Arabs while Palestine would be a solely Arab nation.
If
Palestinian society were ever to evolve to the point where Jews could live in
peace under Arab rule, then peace would be possible without any major effort
from the secretary of state. So long as Abbas is promising to evict the Jews
from Palestine, he has no right to reject Israel’s demand that he recognize
that Israel is a Jewish state and that this cannot be reversed by future
negotiations, the influx of refugees, or new wars. His refusal to do so will
ensure that the talks Kerry has convened will be nine months of wasted effort.
Ottolenghi:
The
Obama administration is busy renewing its push for Middle East peace talks and
the Europeans aren’t far behind. But how can these talks succeed when the
Palestinians clearly don't support democratic ideals?
Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas told the Arab League late last month that the future
Palestinian state should be free of all Israelis, noting that their eviction
could take place “in stages.” Although he didn’t explicitly single out Jews,
there are few Christian, Druze and Muslim Israeli citizens living in the West
Bank and Gaza. His message couldn’t be clearer: a Palestinian state will be Judenrein, or free of Jews.
This is
a disturbing vision, to say the least. No one who knows Mr. Abbas’s history,
however, should be surprised: He is a Palestinian nationalist who once wrote a
thesis denying the Holocaust, and has shown little interest in a negotiated
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr.
Abbas’s statement should have incurred a harsh response from Western supporters
of Palestinian independence, starting with the European Union, whose official
Middle East policy calls for an “independent, democratic, viable Palestinian
state living side-by-side with Israel and its other neighbors.” Instead, Brussels
was silent. And now, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to coerce both
sides to the negotiating table.
But
this, too, is historically consistent. The EU has a terrible human-rights
record in the Middle East, though its policy makers like to proclaim otherwise.
Until recently, Brussels has been a strong financial and rhetorical supporter
of Bashir Assad’s Syrian regime. Despite Mr. Assad’s bloody crackdown on
pro-democracy supporters, EU members retain their ambassadors in Damascus. The
same goes for Bahrain. There is no EU democracy promotion in Saudi Arabia.
Given such a record, Europe’s commitment to a democratic Palestine amounts to
little more than empty rhetoric.
The
same can be said for the U.S. and President Obama, who has only tepidly
supported Israel as a democratic partner. The president gave a speech on the
Middle East last month proposing that the “borders of Israel and Palestine
should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promptly rejected that idea, noting those borders
aren’t defensible. For their part, the Palestinians long ago rejected the idea
of a land swap. So much for U.S. policy leadership.
Israelis
harbor no illusions about Palestine’s democratic credentials. The Israeli
government has always been adamant that no Israeli citizens would be left
behind a future border. Israelis remember well the fate of Jews under Muslim
rule in the past: Even when protected by benevolent rulers, Jews often
encountered persecution, expulsion and the occasional wholesale massacre. Under
Muslim rule, access to holy places was restricted, and many were desecrated and
destroyed.
Why
would it be different this time? More often than not, minorities’ fate in the
Middle East has been bloody and cruel. Shia suffer under Sunni rule and vice
versa; Berbers and Kurds have never enjoyed the rights claimed for
Palestinians; Christians are under attack everywhere in the region except
Israel; Iran persecutes its Bahai, Christian and Jewish minorities; Turkey
refuses to recognize its own Kurdish minority; and even in Lebanon, democratic
tolerance is in decline.
The
U.S. and EU, as Western democracies, profess to hold those values dear. But a
state that aspires to be free of Jews cannot be a democracy. Any talks that
pretend otherwise are simply foolish.
