Palestinian obstinance hurts them
Critics of Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, have appropriately characterized it as gratuitous and unhelpful to the peace process. That said, the question must be asked: “What peace process?” While it is a dream (perhaps fantasy is a more fitting term) of those concerned with stability in the world’s most fractious region, a dose of reality should be introduced into the discussion.
There have been no serious negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis for over a decade. Even when former president Barack Obama bribed the parties to communicate during his administration, there was never a time when their representatives met in the same room. The Palestinians have insisted that a precondition to negotiations is a prior agreement as to what the final boundaries for the two states would be.
Ironically, the reality is that the proposal to move the U.S. embassy 60 km from Tel Aviv to western Jerusalem, an area that has been under Israeli jurisdiction since 1948, is largely symbolic. It needn’t have precluded Palestinian sovereignty in eastern Jerusalem should there be a future agreement, except that Palestinians chose to condemn it as an unacceptable outrage.
This decision continues a long-term pattern of overplaying their diplomatic hand, even as their bargaining leverage has continued to recede. One should remember that this dispute has existed for more than 70 years. The original UN partition plan (Resolution 181) passed in November, 1947 would have created a Palestinian state larger than the Fatah faction of President Mahmoud Abbas is claiming today.
That proposal was rejected by Arabs at the time who preferred to launch an attack upon Israel, which resulted in the first of many military losses by them. For the next 19 years, Arabs were in total control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza but refused to declare a state, presumably because that might have implied an acceptance of Israel in the balance of the adjacent land.
After losing that entire territory in the next war in just six days, the Arab position was continued intransigence, summarized in the Khartoum Declaration of 1967, “no peace, no negotiations and no recognition” of Israel. This occurred over fifty years ago, and it wasn’t until three years later that Israelis started settling across the previous “green line”. Over the following twenty-five years, the Fatah faction of Yasser Arafat with its clout declining, came to pay lip service to the idea of recognizing some Israeli state, but its rival Hamas which currently controls Gaza, to this day rejects the concept of any Israeli state under any boundaries.
As recently as 2000, at the close of former president Bill Clinton’s presidency, there was a viable proposal to create two states including a Palestine with 97 per cent of their requested territory and embodying East Jerusalem. Unfortunately that too was ultimately rejected by Arafat, who responded with an intifadah killing some 1,000 Israelis and almost five times as many Palestinians. In three subsequent wars, the casualty ratio has risen to approximately 30 to one. As a result of all this, Israelis have come to feel that the real Palestinian goal is to destroy their state, rather than to create one of their own.
The Israeli left, which for many years held out the hope of compromise, has been shattered by this, and erstwhile moderate Israeli leaders such as Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have been replaced by a much harder line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By contrast, Palestinian tactics have resembled those of a compulsive gambler who, in the quest for a total victory, have frittered away most of what they already possessed.
The deal Arafat rejected in 2000, is probably unavailable today, certainly not from the Netanyahu government. Palestinian frustration has increased as the current Likud administration has been busy creating new facts on the ground with increased settlement of the West Bank, and is on the verge of blocking territorial contiguity between Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinian unwillingness to accept compromise has played into the hands of Israeli hardliners, who seem to be delighted by the Palestinian boycott of negotiations.
While it is true that the Palestinians are recognized by over 100 countries, and they have been winning UN votes for over 50 years, it isn’t evident that this adds up to much in substantive terms. With each passing decade Israel has become stronger militarily, politically and economically, while Palestinians become weaker and more divided. Despite facing boycotts throughout their existence, Israel’s economy has flourished and its per capita GNP is now comparable to Britain, France and Japan.
Those who are concerned about achieving a Palestinian state independent of Jordan, which itself is a majority Palestinian state, should be focusing more about moderating their demands than the symbolic location of a U.S. embassy whose establishment is years away, if ever. Among their demands that are deal-breakers from an Israeli perspective, are the “right of return”, beyond a token symbolic resettlement, and the goal of a binational state. Israel isn’t about to commit demographic suicide in order to gain an international pat on the back.