The
False Hope Of The Geneva Accord
By Ali Abunimah
The Chicago Tribune
04 December 2003
The
medium-term future for Israelis and Palestinians remains bleak, but
in the long run peace will be created.
It has been almost
two months since the last deadly attack on Israeli civilians by a Palestinian
suicide bomber and there are currently intense diplomatic efforts, principally
by Egypt, to turn this hiatus into a new global cease-fire by Palestinian
factions.
Such efforts are
in jeopardy, however, because while Israelis have seen a dramatic drop
in attacks, Palestinians continue to suffer daily.
Since the last suicide
attack, the Israeli army has killed more than 70 Palestinians, the vast
majority civilians, among them 17 children.
This carnage prompted
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy to observe in a Nov. 30 column in the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that, "Quietly, far from the public
eye, Israeli soldiers continue killing Palestinians. Hardly a day goes
by without casualties, some innocent civilians, and the stories of their
violent deaths never reach the Israeli consciousness or awareness."
Along with this
violence, Israel continues to do everything possible to undermine the
basis for peace, and the Bush administration, which could use its enormous
influence with Israel, chooses instead to do almost nothing. With much
fanfare, the U.S. announced recently that it would withhold nearly $300
million of loan guarantees from Israel as a penalty for its continued
construction of a massive barrier that annexes huge tracts of Palestinian
land. But while this action is designed to look tough, the Financial
Times reported that the true cost to Israel is a negligible $6 million
in higher interest payments on new loans.
Emboldened by this
slap on the wrist, Israel has begun work on a new Jewish-only settlement
with 500 homes in the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabal Mukaber near
Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli public radio reported
on Monday. The new colony, "Nof Zahav," Hebrew for "Golden
Landscape," follows hot on the heels of the announcement that Israel
is giving legal status and providing utilities to dozens of other settlement
outposts that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had personally promised
President Bush would be dismantled.
Bush, with a tough
re-election campaign ahead, is unlikely to challenge powerful U.S pro-Israel
groups that unquestioningly support Israel's policies. But nor is there
much to be optimistic about in the Democrat field. In September, Democratic
presidential front-runner Howard Dean stated that the United States
ought to be "even-handed" and should not "take sides"
if it wanted to be an honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians.
The strongest protestations
of outrage at Dean's remarks came from his own Democratic rivals, and
from the party's top leadership. This lack of courage and genuine debate
in the U.S. about how to break the Israel-Palestine impasse means that
peace is pushed further away, and U.S. standing around the world continues
to plummet.
Faced with official
Israeli intransigence, ineffective Palestinian leadership and U.S. inaction,
some Israelis and Palestinians have put their hope in the so-called
Geneva Accord, a virtual peace agreement negotiated by former Israeli
and Palestinian officials. Yet this accord offers only false hope.
Many Palestinians
oppose it because they see it as being fundamentally unfair and unworkable,
a rehash of the failed Oslo agreements. The initiative proposes that
Israel annex the vast majority of its settlements on Palestinian land,
and almost all of Jerusalem. At the same time, Palestinian refugees,
forced from their homes since 1947, are expected to give up their right
to return. Israel's government and its hard-line supporters reject the
deal because they see it as being too generous to Palestinians. In short,
this accord looks superficially promising, but close-up it fails to
resolve any of the key issues that have torpedoed every earlier peace
plan.
Given these fundamentals,
the prospects of a negotiated settlement to the conflict remain close
to nil. Yet the terrible situation cannot continue forever. Senior Israeli
security officials increasingly acknowledge that Israel's policies intensify
the conflict. But by the time enough Israelis wake up to this and demand
change, the basis for the two-state solution that Palestinians and the
international community embraced will have been irretrievably lost.
Israeli settlements will cover too much land, while Palestinians will
in a few years be the majority population.
Some Israelis and
Palestinians acknowledge a need to seek a radically different solution:
If dividing the land between two peoples is impossible, then why not
give 100 percent of the land to both peoples? In practice this means
a single democratic state with a constitution that guarantees the political,
cultural and religious rights of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians
and Muslims. A common homeland where Jews and Palestinians can flourish
instead of fight.
As I have traveled
around the U.S. discussing this idea with college students, among them
many Palestinian-Americans, Israelis and American Jews, I have found
a great deal of openness and support. Above all, there is a strong desire
to talk about solutions beyond the tired formulas that have failed for
decades. This debate should continue.
Israeli youth this
week demonstrated the kind of integration and normality that such a
future promises when they voted a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of
Israel, Firas Khoury, the winner of the Israeli version of the TV show
"American Idol." A tiny sign of hope, perhaps.
But hope, nevertheless.
Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of the Electronic Intifada. This
article was published in The Chicago Tribune on 2 December 2003 under
the title "Geneva Accord offering only false hope".