Good editorial from the Jerusalem Post:
Peace farce
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
– Karl Marx
A decade ago, the world was treated to a festivity of peace. There, in the bright sun of a beautiful September day on the White House lawn, stood Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, with a proud Bill Clinton coaxing them toward a historic handshake.
The celebration was clearly premature, but at least that was a real agreement.
Now we have another celebration, complete with the blessing of 58 former foreign ministers and world leaders, over – what can we call it?
Agreement is hardly the word.
On the Israeli side, we have ousted politicians who do not even fully represent the main opposition party. These Israelis, on the one hand, are at pains to argue that they were not usurping the government's prerogative to negotiate agreements, while on the other claiming they have proven that the Palestinian leadership is party to their endeavor.
Spoiling the party, we have the fact that even the Fatah officials who negotiated the agreement, we were told with Arafat's blessing, almost did not attend because they did not receive Arafat's written support, nor the endorsement of the Fatah central committee. Indeed, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade – Fatah's terrorist wing – circulated a leaflet branding the Palestinian participants "collaborators," a label that has often been a death sentence. Masked gunmen have reportedly shot at the home of Yasser Abed Rabbo, the key Palestinian negotiator of the initiative.
That neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian participants represent their respective leaderships is only the beginning of the story. It is, of course, blatantly undemocratic for Israelis to negotiate with people they claim represent foreign leaders who, even at the celebration itself, justify terrorism against Israel as a "fight for peace."
But the desperate attempts of their Palestinian counterparts to receive official endorsement demonstrates that there is no Palestinian opposition, and that the celebrants are pinning their hopes on the same thugocracy they did a decade ago.
Even if there were really an agreement, and the other party could be trusted to abide by it, it is still necessary to sort out what was really "agreed" upon. Proponents claim that the Palestinians gave up their demand of "return" and recognized the right of the Jewish people to a state in their own land.
They did neither.
First, because the official Fatah position, not to mention that of Hamas, is that the "right of return" remains sacred.
Second, as Shlomo Avineri and others have pointed out, the Geneva document does not mention a "right of return," but does cite UN Resolution 194 and the Saudi initiative, both of which are understood by the Arab world to mean the same thing.
Third, even if the "right of return" was not even obliquely part of the agreement, the refusal to explicitly renounce it means exactly that – it has not been renounced.
Regarding the other key and related point, Avineri notes that the document (aside from the preamble) refers only to Israelis and not to Jews, so that Palestinians can continue to claim that Jews are not a people with national rights, and that Israel should become a binational, rather than a Jewish, state.
We wish that this exercise proved that the Palestinians are ready to accept the existence of a Jewish people and its right to sovereignty, freedom, and peace in the land of Israel. We wish that the only thing stopping such a vision from becoming reality is, as Jimmy Carter helpfully reminded us, the settlements. We wish that the only thing between Israel and peace is the obtuseness of our own leaders, whom we, unlike the Palestinians, have the power to replace.
Yet when senior Palestinian leaders cannot even indirectly hint at a lessening of their commitment to the fantasy of flooding Israel with "refugees" (most of whom never lived in Israel) without taking their lives into their hands, it only accentuates how far the Palestinians are from a real readiness to live beside Israel.
By trying to prove once again that Israel is to blame for the lack of peace, the Israeli and international peace camps are distracting from the real root of the conflict: the jihad against Israel's existence. Border drawing cannot end jihad; the jihad must end for borders to be drawn. Anything short of that is not peace, but farce.
jpost.com |
