Living with a sloping status quo for 50 years
IT seemed like the original Arab-Jewish conflict came with two bookends. The first fell into place in 1948. The crushing defeat of the Arabs in 1967 should have been the second, but it was not. The Khartoum Resolution of the Arab Summit of September 1967 issued the famous three Arab “No’s”: No peace, no recognition and no negotiations with Israel until its forces withdraw from Arab lands occupied on June 5.
Palestinians did not sign on to the resolution, and the requested withdrawal applied only to Arab lands occupied in 1967. The past 50 years of war-making and peace-making have witnessed a steady evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict into a Palestinian-Israeli political process, with Palestinians and Israelis the principal antagonists.
The situation was further complicated by the emergence of jihadism, which mushroomed across the region as a potent resistance force by Islam’s two competing identities, Sunni and Shiite. Islamists precipitated a Palestinian geographic and political split before and after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
The second bookend that should have ended the conflict yielded to the reality of an ever-lowering ceiling of a two-state solution. The lesson we all can agree on is that neither war nor negotiations have resolved the conflict. Familiarity with the talent of those who have tried to resolve this issue over five decades teaches all aspirants that humility and patience are in order. There are no quick fixes.
There is no Palestine on the map. Geographically fractured and politically fractious, Palestine is free of elementary requisites of a state, including freedom and state monopoly of the use of force. Practical burdens of the occupation fall disproportionately on the people rather than their elite. Peace cannot be achieved until the Palestinians have a leadership than can deliver.
Those who earnestly seek a solution should take a break from negotiating final-status issues and focus on negotiating a finite transition period that will improve the quality of Palestinian lives and institutions. This is what it will take to keep the viability of a solution. Occupation, dictatorship, poverty, humiliation, injustice and hopelessness breed terrorists and victims, not citizens. Palestinian citizens of Israel are not rebelling.
The Palestinian polity, headed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, is fractured beyond hope. Its upper limit of competence is to keep security and safety under an Israeli security umbrella and to sustain the miserable, down-sloping status quo for the Palestinians. Good governance demands accountability, which will not be volunteered. The donor community needs to demand it. It has not.
With the passage of time, the disparity between Israelis and Palestinians increases. Time is the enemy of this deal. Final-status issues dominated the substance of negotiations for decades. Meanwhile, the degradation of Palestinians’ daily lives continued, and the bulk of their economy remains dependent on funding from international donors and trade with Israel. The peace process has not just predictably and repetitively failed, it has consistently stunted the budding infrastructure-building project as it crushed economic development.
Palestinian presidential elections have not taken place since 2005, and parliamentary elections not since 2006. Opening up political space, freedom of speech, formation of political parties and good governance should be a demand by the international community, which funds the PA. Only a prolonged and vigorous campaign can shake the monopoly of Fatah and Hamas, and make an accountable and stable government possible.
No counterterrorism measure is more effective than good governance. It is about time for serious international or bilateral deals that demand and provide oversight to deliver good governance, establish competent and accountable institutions, and build up the economy and education as a national project worthy of consideration in and of itself, outside the final-status track.