Land swap key to peace, Palestinian envoy says
As U.S. President Barack Obama made a flying visit to the Palestinian territories Thursday, he said the Palestinians “deserve an end to occupation” and an “independent state of their own.” But a senior Palestinian diplomat says the fate of the peace process depends on ending Israel’s settlement-building and returning to a “fair and balanced” peace process.
“It’s a question of political will,” said Afif Safieh, in an interview in Toronto earlier this month. “Israel could leave the settlements in six days, and then rest on the seventh.” Safieh, known as the most eloquent spokesman for the Palestinians, is a 63-year-old Jerusalemborn Christian who has served in London, Washington and Moscow. He is currently based in London as an ambassador-at-large. His visit to Canada was sponsored by the Canadian Friends of Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian peace group. If it is unrealistic to ask Israel to abandon its settlements, Safieh said, it is also fruitless to ask the Palestinians to drop their land claims. Land swaps that have been squabbled over for more than a decade could be settled in an equitable way, he said, so that Israel retained some of its settlement blocs in return for land now in Israel. “The Palestinians need a state, not a Gruyere cheese.” Israeli groups that monitor settlements warn that as more building erodes Palestinian land, a “tipping point” for a two-state solution is approaching. Safieh said he was “disappointed” that Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird had warned the Palestinians, through a speech to a proIsrael lobby group in Washington earlier this month, that they faced “consequences” if they took Israel to the International Criminal Court over illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Canada’s earlier opposition to a UN vote that made Palestine a nonmember observer state had put Ottawa on the wrong side of history, Safieh said.
Israel and its allies fear that the change in status could allow a case against the Jewish state to be launched in the ICC.
“We are always told to be reasonable, but we are unreasonably reasonable,” Safieh said. “Canada is a country that is known for upholding the rule of law, but how can it take the side of one party against the other, when international law is on our side?”
He said the Palestinians have no immediate plans to go to the ICC.
“I do not know why there should be opposition to the principle of Palestinian statehood, when it is agreed that there should be a twostate solution.”
Canada and the U.S. maintain that statehood can be negotiated only by Israel and the Palestinians. In a news conference Thursday in Ramallah, Obama urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to return to talks in spite of continued settlement construction.
Another obstacle to Palestinian statehood — the rift between Abbas’s Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules Gaza — can be resolved, Safieh said. The two sides were coming closer to unification in spite of their geographical as well as ideological divisions.
Although Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and is treated as a terrorist organization by the West, it is “not monolithic,” Safieh said. “There are different factions, and some want to modernize Hamas.” With files from Star wire services