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Decolonizing The Key Issue For Mideast Peace
Regular negotiations won't work in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute because the two have unequal status. Israel should leave West Bank and Gaza to end the state of war.
By Charles Glass
Special To The Sun
Originally published April 14, 2002
PARIS -- The return of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to Israel has
revived language that, until now, the Bush administration has avoided:
peace process, peace partner and the other words that implied America
would intervene in negotiations.
The United States has been forced to act, because tolerance of Israeli
military assaults in the occupied territories encourages demonstrators to
destabilize allied Arab regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan. This time,
the Bush people should learn from the failure of the Clinton administration
to bring "peace" through the "peace process."
The Israel-Palestine dispute does not pit state against state. There can be
no equality of power and status between an occupying power and its
occupied subjects.
State-to-state negotiations may have been appropriate for Egypt and
Israel. They led to Israel's phased withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and
the removal of Egypt's army as a factor in the Arab-Israeli military
equation. Negotiations produced a peace treaty between Jordan and
Israel, demarcating and pacifying borders between two neighbors whose
governments wanted cordial relations.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decried the lack of a Palestinian
"peace partner." He has called Palestinian Authority President Yasser
Arafat "irrelevant" one day, an "enemy" the next. Last week in Madrid,
Spain, Powell warned Sharon that Arafat remained "the partner that Israel
will have to negotiate with at some point." But Arafat is not a partner.
Partnership implies a degree of equality.
Israel is a state. Its army is the best equipped and deployed in the Middle
East, and its institutions remain strong even during times of internal division
and military conflict.
Palestine of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a vulnerable, conquered
land which Israeli forces traverse at will. Its territory is daily confiscated to
provide living room for more Israeli settlements and settlers. Its roads are
not under Palestinian control. Provision of electricity, water and other vital
services depends on Israeli good will.
Israeli armored bulldozers rolled into Jenin, demolishing houses to clear
the way for tanks, protected by helicopter gunships that fired rocket after
rocket on a civilian population whose sons were defending their homes.
While the siege of Jenin was under way, Israeli troops had Palestinian
police and fighters pinned down in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity,
while the city's civilians were trapped in their homes. Palestinians have no
tanks, no air force, no heavy weapons.
Israel is a member state of the United Nations, whose resolutions -- even
those critical of Israeli behavior in the occupied territories -- reaffirm the
right of Israel to exist within secure and recognized borders. Who calls for
Palestinians to live within secure and recognized borders?
Powell's mission, like the previous interventions by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni
and Vice President Dick Cheney, is doomed.
Sharon has emphasized his determination to ignore calls from Powell to
"do it now," that is, to withdraw from Palestinian cities and refugee camps.
Sharon had turned a deaf ear to Powell's commander in chief's wish for "a
withdrawal without further delay."
Not only has Sharon delayed, but Israeli forces have placed more than
4,000 Palestinians in detention without trial, bulldozed more homes,
placed more Palestinians under curfew and, as the suicide bombings
Friday in Jerusalem and Wednesday in the suburbs of the mixed
Jewish-Arab town of Haifa demonstrated, failed to provide Israelis with
the security he promised when they elected him prime minister a year ago.
The peace process is dead, as any Israeli or Palestinian will tell you. It is
time for a new process, not of peace, but of decolonization.
The Western world knows what decolonizing means. It means you leave.
Your settlers go home, and you do not regulate borders that are not
yours. You can hold on to, as the Americans knew in the Philippines and
the British discovered in Kenya, long leases on a military base or two. For
Israel, that might mean bases or early warning stations in the Jordan
Valley. It does not mean forcing the Palestinians to accept 400,000
settlers in areas Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt in 1967.
Decolonization ends the state of war between the occupier and the
occupied. Two states recognize each other's rights and each accepts its
obligations. What can follow is the real process of peace: mutual
recognition, diplomatic relations, trade and meaningful discussion of
differences -- differences that can be solved peacefully.
Independence can, as with Britain and India, leave the two sides on better
terms than before. Negotiations -- Oslo, Wye, Sharm el Sheikh, Camp
David and Taba -- do not mean peace, so long as they function only to
alter the terms of occupation. To declare peace without leaving your
colonies is to obfuscate.
Ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would end
the spectacle of Israeli soldiers forcing Swiss Red Cross delegates to strip
when they are delivering food and blankets to homeless Palestinians in
Nablus.
An end to occupation would restore Israel's reputation in the world,
ending the charges that Israelis torture Palestinians in custody and loot
their houses.
Decolonizing could quiet the voices within its government and the Knesset
for the "transfer" of Arabs from the occupied territories, that is, the ethnic
cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza to provide more space for
settlements.
Only by working toward a decolonization formula can Israel avoid the
accusation that it practices forms of racial discrimination that elsewhere
were called apartheid and were condemned by the world.
No one in Israel or the territories it occupies believes the lies of Oslo,
whose failure has claimed 1,800 Palestinian and Israeli lives since this
uprising against occupation began at the end of September 2000. It would
be useless for Powell to revive Oslo and its so-called peace process. If he
wants to end the fighting, he must compel Israel to end the occupation.
Charles Glass is an American journalist living in Paris. He was ABC
News' chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. He returned
recently from six months in Israel, where he is writing a sequel for Harper
Collins to his 1990 book, "Tribes with Flags." |
