The Complete Guide to Middle East Peacemaking
Peace is the heart’s desire of all the Israelis since they have regained their sovereignty in their country. With every child born in Israel, his parents express a wish that he will no longer have to be recruited to defend his country. Most of them are eagerly willing to undertake difficult concessions to achieve peace.
Israelis heart’s desire - Peace
It seems obvious to them that if they will flex their position and bring it closer to those of their enemies, it will promote the possibility to achieve peace. So why is it not working? Every time Israel presents a more far-reaching compromise in an attempt to narrow the gap between the positions of the negotiating parties they discover at the end of the day that the other side has only hardened its positions, and the gap remained.
The general public opinion in Israel always insists before the start of every negotiation to make sure Israel’s representatives would propose enough compromises to allow the success of the negotiations, while the other side always comes up with more extreme positions than those who had ended previous negotiations in failure. In fact, the leaders of the Fatah never made any compromise proposal; they always focused only on justifying their radical position which included delegitimizing Israel’s mere existence.
Is this just a tactic of negotiations? Let’s assume for the time being that this is so. If so, why Israelis shouldn’t use this same effective tactic of negotiations? Maybe if they had been wiser to do the same, the gaps could be reduced or even reach closure. Imagine that Israel would demand the Arabs to recognize its sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria. Maybe the Arabs would then come with an idea to leave only the existing settlements as is. Then the Americans could force Israel to agree to some kind of a territorial compromise in this area, and so we would come to an impartial agreement forced on Israel in spite of itself. What a sense of achievement for Abu Mazen? He would become a hero among his people. Instead, Israel presents a far-reaching compromise that is even beyond what Israel is really able to give up, and then wonders that Abbas requires more, and is not accepting the “Israeli position” as it is which would make him a traitor in the eyes of his people.
Peacemakers
One branch of practice developed in Israel is the peace-making industry. Some say its not quite small sector of functionaries who make a living and even considerable profit from dealing with it, and they even earn foreign currency for the country while doing so (q.v. the New Israel Fund). Over the years, the peace-makers were able to really transform the way the Israeli public is thinking, and increased their readiness to make concessions. From refusal to acknowledge the existence of a “Palestinian” people, and argument about whether Israel should or should not return territories, conducted in late 1967, Israelis came to engage in public debate on how to promote the establishment of a “Palestinian” state, and how much land should be given to it.
Apparently the peacemakers in Israel are more determined to establish the “Palestinian” state than the Arabs themselves. Nevertheless, ironically, it is precisely this success in the Israeli public that is behind their failure in the end result. If instead of incessantly convincing only the Israeli public opinion to increase its readiness for painful concessions, they were focused a little on softening the other side’s positions, it might have been possible to reach a compromise by now. Then, in retrospect, if further convincing of Israel’s public would have been required, it could have been accomplished after the agreement was signed, as it was following the peace treaty with Egypt.
But maybe the peace-makers were looking for the penny under the lantern, and not where it was lost (in the dark)? Maybe they focused on flexing Israel’s side, because only Israelis will ever be willing to be flexible?
Since 1977 there was not one Israeli prime minister who didn’t spend most of his time on the “peace process.” If they invested the same amount of time promoting the education system, for example, Nobel Prize committees in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics would permanently move their domicile to Israel, simply because there was no point to trouble all the winners each year from Israel to Sweden of all places. If they spent the same amount of time dealing with delinquency prevention, criminal lawyers were forced to undergo retraining in professional computer programming. Imagine what would have been if they spent so much time on the elimination of poverty, war against road accidents, improving healthcare or promoting civil service. But instead, every prime minister of Israel was engaged over his head for more than 30 years in “peace processes”, the result is – nothing, nada, rien.
Could be that nobody wants to make peace with Israel? No! Not possible.
Nature of peace
Let’s go one step back and ask ourselves what we really want in peace. This topic reminds me of the joke about a billionaire on vacation, fishing in a poor fisherman’s boat. Asked the fisherman – why do you bother to accumulate all your billions? Obviously, the billionaire said. So I can afford to go fishing on vacation as I please. Strange, the fisherman said, that’s exactly what I do, without all the billions.
The context of the joke in our case is quite simple. We want peace so we can live in neighborly relations and friendship, without fear of one another, and develop the economy and welfare for all. So what is preventing the Israelis and the Arabs from doing it right away? I mean, if everyone really wants peace, all they have to do is focus on promoting the co-existence, instead of wasting time on fruitless diplomatic processes.
But, then you might ask, what will happen to the settlements, what about Jerusalem, what about the “refugees”?
Wait, didn’t you say you want peace? But to answer the question seriously, I will review each of the obstacles to peace – the imaginary and the real ones.
Imaginary barriers
What’s wrong with the settlements? Suppose that the two-state solution is implemented. Why is it okay for the Jewish state to have Muslim communities, while the Muslim state can’t have any Jewish community in it? I think the answer is pretty clear. Jewish settlements in a Muslim state will become permanent targets for riots and massacres. Everyone knows it, but no one drew the conclusion derived from this insight. The conclusion being that the two-state solution is not truly a peace plan, but rather a Survivor TV series plan. Hostility towards Israelis will continue everywhere, and they will have to live in fear and make more concessions.
Jerusalem, the holy city of at least three religions, is open to all, and it enjoys freedom of religion as it did never have, and as it will never will if the political situation of Jerusalem will change. Attempt to divide the city between two peoples, and it will become a city strewn with barricades, where life and worship would be intolerable. The current situation remains objectively the most preferable situation to any other option.
And last but not least the problem of “refugees.” A pseudo-problem invented to avert the existence of Israel. The people who have become hostages of the “problem” will be released from their nightmare as soon as it will be clear that there will never be a way to pillage lands in Israel. So long as it is possible to delude them that they can conquer some lands in Israel they will live in deprivation. Deprivation for which the responsibility is lying on Arab states that although they themselves persecuted and expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews from their territory have remained unwilling to acknowledge that an irrevocable process of population exchange took place.
Once we have removed from the agenda the imaginary barriers to peace, let’s look at the real obstacles to peace.
Real barriers
The point of no return after which peace-making became impossible was precisely during the “success” of the Oslo Accords. This is when the infrastructure of incitement and extremism that raises the young generation for relentless anti-Semitic armed struggle was created in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The fact that at the time leaders of the Oslo process did not work against this incitement, and did not insist on stopping the indoctrination of hatred, extremism and agreed silently to its empowerment both in talking and in practical preparations, is what made it impossible even for the moderate Arab leaders to compromise with Israel’s existence.
Anti-Semitic propaganda from Iranian TV
Even in these very days, Abbas leads a two-faced policy. One face is supposed to show moderation, and negotiate peace. But the other face allows the incitement and armed struggle education to go on, and like his predecessor overlooks the continued existence of anarchy that allows radical terrorism to flourish.
Radicalization reached such a state that it led to the victory of the Hamas over the Fatah in the elections, even though the Fatah itself has radicalized its objection to the Jewish state. The fact that despite the elections of Hamas, Abu Mazen continues to control Judea and Samaria and doesn’t turn into a bullets perforated corpse as did his supporters in the Gaza Strip, can be attributed only to the IDF presence in the area and the use of such political exercises as the indefinitely postponement of the new elections.
No Arab leader intends to fight the radicals in his own jurisdiction. Even after what they have learned about them in Gaza, they will prefer the status-quo of anarchy over cleaning the area and enforcing law and order. Incidentally, the chain of extremism has no limit. Not only is the Fatah not enforcing law and order in Judea and Samaria over its extremists. Hamas is also not enforcing law and order over extremists that are even more extreme than itself inside the Gaza Strip. Extremist organizations will always remain Israel’s problem, and it will be able to cope with it only as long as it stays in control.
One can only make peace with a country whose peoples’ hearts are open and ready to accept it. Without preparing the hearts of the country’s people, one might sign peace with its dictatorial ruler alone and that may last only as long as he can impose his will reasonably, and when there is enough physical distance between the parties of that imposed peace. This is the type of peace Israel has with Egypt and Jordan.
But when one people’s major population centers are within a slingshot range from the other, whose rulers have no enforceable authority, one can never establish even a fake peace, so long as the public’s cognition regarding the desire to live in peace is not changed radically. Such a process could take generations, given current situation and its trend of intensifying radicalization.
Achieving peace requires both sides to be able to give up their dreams. Israelis to give up the dream of “Greater Israel” (a dream almost all Israelis are ready to give up in exchange for a true peace), and the Arabs to give up their dream of Israel’s destruction and spoilage of lands for the so-called “refugees.” Paradoxically, only the keeping of current situation may allow both sides to keep up the hope of realizing their dreams.
The only obstacle and the most significant one to achieving peace is the lack of ruthless fighting against anti-Semitic incitement in most Islamic countries and in particular in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. As long as the teaching of blood libels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the denial of the Holocaust, while using Nazi literature and the dissemination of Islam based anti-Semitic myths will be widely prevalent in the nations of Islam, peace will not stand a chance. How can one make peace with someone he regards as subhuman? As long as their leaders do not adapt the language of peace in their statements to their own people, so long as they do not say things like “we are destined to live together”, or “you make peace with enemies”, or “be prepared for painful concessions” (quotations from statements often made by Israeli leaders), and continue their impassioned rhetoric, there will be no peace.
TimesPost 