A Disastrous
Dead End:
The Geneva Accord
By Ali Abunimah
The
Electronic Intifada
29 October 2003
Because
of the Oslo process, the basis for a viable and minimally fair two-state
solution has been completely destroyed. The Israeli "peace camp"
and the Palestinian leadership ought to have learned from the calamities
they helped bring about and changed their ways. The so-called "Geneva
Accord," an informal agreement prepared by Israelis, led by former
Labor Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and other Oslo-era luminaries, and
Palestinians close to Yasser Arafat, demonstrates a determination to
repeat the tragic errors of the past.
Oslo allowed Israel
to double the number of colonists on occupied Palestinian land, while
the PLO transformed itself into a Palestinian Authority whose mandate
was to protect Israel from the victims of the ongoing colonization.
There is no better account of the bad faith with which Israel's leaders
approached the peace process than Tanya Reinhart's book Israel/Palestine:
How to End the War of 1948. It is essential reading for anyone who wants
to understand how Palestinians and Israelis reached the bloody impasse
they are in today.
While its creators
have tried to sell the Geneva Accord as some sort of breakthrough, it
is nothing of the sort. The document recycles the unworkable arrangements
that Israel and the United States tried to impose at Camp David in July
2000. A Palestinian "state" would be established in the West
Bank and Gaza, but without sovereignty or control of its own borders
or airspace. Israel would be permitted to keep military forces in it
forever, while the Palestinian "state" would not be allowed
to defend itself. The Palestinian state would be occupied by a "Multinational
Force" that could only be withdrawn with Israeli agreement, and
so on.
Israel would annex
most of its West Bank settlements, including vast swathes of territory
in and around Jerusalem and other major cities, a simple endorsement
of most of the illegal territorial conquests Israel made since 1967.
Crucially, the document completely cancels the basic rights of Palestinian
refugees by giving Israel an absolute veto on the return of even a single
person to his or her home.
That the Geneva
"negotiators," freed from any real accountability, could not
come up with anything better than they did, underscores the utter bankruptcy
of the glacial "step-by-step" approach toward a two-state
solution, while that two-state-solution has galloped away because of
Israeli colonization. The authors seem to believe that the Palestinian
people are like a donkey that will forever chase after a carrot dangling
from a stick attached to its own head. They fail to recognize that the
intifada was foremost a rejection of such manipulation.
Should anyone feel
that this presentation is overly negative, just look at how Amram Mitzna,
the "dovish" former general who led the Labor Party to massive
defeat at the last Israeli election, and one of the authors of the document,
presents it to Israelis. In an October 16 Ha'aretz commentary, Mitzna
claimed that: "For the first time in history, the Palestinians
explicitly and officially recognized the state of Israel as the state
of the Jewish people forever. They gave up the right of return to the
state of Israel and a solid, stable Jewish majority was guaranteed.
The Western Wall, the Jewish Quarter (of Jerusalem) and David's Tower
will all remain in our hands. The suffocating ring was lifted from over
Jerusalem and the entire ring of settlements around it -- Givat Zeev,
old and new Givon, Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Neve Yaacov, Pisgat Zeev,
French Hill, Ramot, Gilo and Armon Hanatziv will be part of the expanded
city, forever. None of the settlers in those areas will have to leave
their homes."
Since these settlements
account for the largest land expropriations in the most dense Palestinian
areas, and for a majority of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Mitzna
is simply following the Labor Party tradition of assuring Israelis that
they can enjoy peace, international legitimacy and the spoils of conquest
all at the same time. They cannot.
Perhaps the most
dishonest claim is Mitzna's assertion that the Palestinian side in the
Geneva project "was represented by an authentic, broad Palestinian
leadership that enjoys the support both from the official Palestinian
Authority leadership and from the activist leaders at street level."
Who is this "authentic" leadership? The Palestinians who went
to Geneva did so in secret, and had no mandate whatsoever, except from
themselves and the Israelis who anointed them. They certainly do not
speak for the refugees whose fundamental rights they so blithely offered
up, or for the Palestinians whose land was stolen for colonies that
will remain intact. The Palestinian Authority, which apparently backed
them, has itself lost all legitimacy as a representive body, because
it is unaccountable.
As for the Israeli
delegation, one would do well to remember that the Labor Party in opposition
speaks with a different voice than Labor in government. The former has
always appeared more dovish than the latter. As independent agents,
the Israeli negotiators can renege on any commitments they made. Yet,
judging from history, the concessions they extracted from the "authentic
Palestinian leadership" will become a new bottom line from which
any future negotiations would proceed. Any new Israeli government, even
one headed by Labor, would come to the table with ever more demands,
and new facts on the ground that would have to be accommodated.
If the Geneva authors
were serious about a two-state solution, they would recognize that if
it still has a remote chance, that can only be if Israel were at a minimum
willing to withdraw every soldier and settler, without exception, behind
the lines of June 4, 1967, including in Jerusalem, and allow the Palestinians
to establish a state no less independent and sovereign than Israel.
As the Geneva document demonstrates, not even Israel's most "dovish"
figures are willing to contemplate that. So instead, they push a hopeless
and unjust formula, claiming that this is the "only alternative"
to the bloodthirsty way of Sharon, and pretend that the Palestinian
people have agreed to it.
In fact, since Israel
can't or won't allow a real two-state solution, there is an alternative
-- the creation of a single, democratic state that will allow all Israelis
and Palestinians to peacefully cohabit the entirety of their common
homeland as equals. To dismiss this possibility, and to refuse even
to explore it as a serious way out of the deepening crisis is immoral.