Can
It Ever Really End?
By Sam Bahour
23 December, 2003
Countercurrents.org
The
world has finally come to its collective senses by explicitly acknowledging
that Israel's 37-year military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip
and East Jerusalem must come to an abrupt end in order for peace in
the Middle East to have even a remote chance of success. With this belated
awakening, a fair and frank question has come to the forefront.
Will the Palestinians
accept the end of the Israeli occupation as their cue to cease, once
and for all, their five-decade struggle to correct the historic injustices
done to them? The easy answer is no.
Fifty-five years
of historical injustice does not subside with the signing of a peace
treaty, official or unofficial, whatever the extent of public relations
invested in the effort. Prospects for peace must start to be measured
by how well justice is served, and not by how much fanfare is generated.
The fact of the
matter is that many Israelis, some say the silent majority, are now
finally convinced that their country's illegal occupation of Palestinians
must end, but they are holding themselves back, some say holding the
Palestinians hostage, by wanting clear guarantees that what will follow
Israel's return to the 1967 armistice border is absolute security for
every Israeli citizen.
Absolute security
is a myth. It is a political myth so perfected by the Israeli propaganda
machine that when Palestinians attempt to call attention to its mythical
nature they are accused of propagating the cycle of violence. No one
can meet this security threshold. Israel, especially Israel's Prime
Minister Sharon, has used the myth of absolute security as a strategy
to avoid assuming historic responsibility. Not the US, not Yasir Arafat,
not a well-groomed Palestinian Prime Minister - nobody, not even a demilitarized
future State of Palestine - can guarantee Israelis, or any people on
the planet for that matter, absolute security. The sooner that Israel
concludes that its security cannot co-exist with an illegal occupation
of another people, the closer the Palestinians and the Israelis will
be to embracing each other's fears and working jointly toward alleviating
them.
On the other hand,
there are no easy answers in the Middle East.
The reality of the
region, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is the
region's cornerstone conflict, is that Israel's illegal occupation is
only one of a multitude of wrongs that Israel must address. In today's
global, short-term memory approach to conflict resolution the UN, US,
EU and Russia are aiming to resolve only the most recent Israeli historic
wrong - the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
However, the initial wrong that culminated in the 1948 expulsion of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from today's Israel is purposely
being neglected in the hope that the embattled Palestinian society will
somehow forget that their inalienable rights were violated.
Palestinians call
this right the Right of Return. It is a right embedded in international
law, a right afforded to individuals; a right that no government, not
even a recognized Palestinian government, can invalidate. Although the
most recent peace initiatives, namely the Geneva Accord and the Nusseibeh-Ayalon
Statement, prefer to dismiss this right, one must be politically and
morally naïve to believe that doing so would bring the two embattled
peoples any closer to a real final-status solution - one that will have
a fair chance to bring real security to both peoples. Only honest and
serious historic accountability - with all the necessary international
verifications - would be grounds for celebration of the start of true
reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis.
Untangling 37 years
of Israeli occupation means rehabilitating injured Palestinians; restoring
the lives of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners so they may
become productive elements in society; clearing the way for a full and
unfettered assumption of power of a central Palestinian government;
building thousands of housing units and hundreds of schoolhouses; installing
massive amounts of basic infrastructure; absorbing hundreds of thousands
of Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living in the Diaspora; and
re-establishing property rights for those Palestinians who lost their
lands to Israeli settlements, military installations and the separation
wall over the last three decades, among other tasks.
All this is going
to require not months, not years, but generations. It will require hundreds
of billions, maybe trillions of dollars. Palestinians are going to be
kept extremely busy catching up with the rest of the world while simultaneously
moving ahead to compete effectively in today's globalized world. Nevertheless,
this daunting developmental task should not lull the players in the
conflict into believing that those Palestinian historic rights violated
by Israel prior to 1967 will ever be forgiven, forgotten or dispensed
with, especially not while the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (West
Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem) remain illegally occupied by Israel.
Historic reconciliation
is possible. Just look at the mutually constructive relations today
between Israel and Germany. Israel and Palestine are not destined to
be enemies forever, but ignoring the core inalienable rights of Palestinians
will not bring the two any closer together. Rather than seeing yet another
generation of Palestinians and Israelis living a false hope that yet
another incomplete "interim" or "final" status agreement
will bring normalcy to their lives, we would all be better off if Israel
would face up to the necessity, sooner rather than later, of assuming
its ultimately unavoidable historic responsibility vis-a-vis the indigenous
Palestinian people.
Going back to the
original question at hand, Will the Palestinians accept the end of the
Israeli occupation as their cue to cease, once and for all, their five-decade
struggle to correct the historic injustices done to them?
The most realistic
answer lies somewhere in the shades of gray between no and yes. To put
the Palestinians and Israelis on the track toward historic reconciliation,
Israel must stop holding the region hostage. It must begin by unilaterally
ending the illegal occupation of Palestinians and working to establish
a Palestinian state based on internationally accepted borders and international
legitimacy.
The emerging State
of Palestine, having learned from the hard mistakes of the Oslo era,
may be able to create the moral and political authority to bring the
Palestinians back from the abyss. For Israel or the US to deny Palestinians
the right to full sovereignty based on internationally recognized borders
- in the hope that some outdated, semi-elected Palestinian leadership
might have the ability to write off 20 years of history - betokens ignorance
of the lessons of world history.
If the future State
of Palestine succeeds, the conflict may end without a press release
or final handshake. If it fails, then Israel, the military superpower
of the Middle East, has all of the brute force necessary to defend its
borders from any future hostile attack. If reconciliation wins through,
then both peoples, jointly, can tear down the walls between them and
truly be, separately and jointly, a light among nations.
* Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American
living in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West
Bank; he can be reached at [email protected].
He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians
(1994). To be added to his mailing list on Palestine, send him an email
with the word 'subscribe' in the subject.