It seems that these two religious groups will hate each other until the destruction of the other.
Goldberg: Palestine Won’t Be a State
The Palestinian national
liberation movement has arguably been the least successful
such movement of the past 100 years. The Arabs have tried
on many occasions to defeat Israel militarily, and to break
it through terrorism and boycotts, and have failed each
time.
Even so, independence was within reach of the
Palestinians at many different points in their history. The
Jews in Palestine, early in the arc of political Zionism,
sought simply to live as an autonomous minority within an
Arab entity. The Arabs rejected the idea -- some violently
-- and the Jews abandoned the notion.
The United Nations offered statehood to the Arabs in
Palestine in 1947. The Arabs chose the path of war, and
threatened the Jews with annihilation. Then they lost the
war. Arab states controlled the West Bank and Gaza until
1967, but did nothing at all to advance the cause of
Palestinian rights. After the Six Day War in June of that
year, many Israelis hoped that Arab leaders would offer
peace in exchange for occupied territory. That idea was
rejected.
At Camp David, in 2000, Bill Clinton came closer than
anyone to engineering the creation of a Palestinian state.
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, turned his back on
Clinton without even making a counteroffer. More recently,
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Arafat’s
successor, Mahmoud Abbas, a similar deal. Abbas rejected
it.
UN Recognition
Now Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority,
plans to ask the UN to recognize an independent state of
Palestine. The request, whether granted or not (the General
Assembly will support the notion; success at the Security
Council is unlikely), will only defer the goal of an
independent Palestine.
The support of Togo and Bolivia and Yemen would surely
give Abbas a warm and happy feeling, but it will be
irrelevant to the Palestinian cause. Abbas says he seeks a
state for his people on the West Bank and in Gaza, with a
capital in East Jerusalem. If that’s true, then there are
only two member states of the UN that can bring it about:
Israel and the U.S. Neither supports this resolution. Most
Israelis view it as an attempt to limit their options in
future negotiations, or to deny to them the holiest sites
of the Jewish people and delegitimize the idea of a Jewish
state.
Symbolic and Counterproductive
The U.S. opposes Abbas’s resolution -- and will veto
it if it reaches the Security Council -- but not because
the U.S. rejects the idea of a Palestinian state. President
Barack Obama has been sincere in his support of Palestinian
independence. The U.S. opposes the resolution because it
would represent yet another entirely symbolic and
counterproductive gesture in the long history of
Palestinian gesture-making.
“This is about shortcutting a process for which there
are no shortcuts,” Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, told me. “At the end of the day, there’s
only one way to create two states for two peoples, and that
is negotiations.”
Rice went on, “To have a drama that changes very
little in the world vis-a-vis the actual conflict, and then
to expect that while one party is taking this great victory
lap the other party is going to run to the negotiating
table, is not necessarily realistic.”
A Tragic Moment
The particular tragedy of this moment is that there
is, for the first time, a pragmatic alternative to the
fantasy-based approach to independence of Arafat and Abbas.
During the past few years, the Palestinian prime minister,
Salam Fayyad (ostensibly Abbas’s No. 2, though the men are
said to detest each other), has quietly built a security
force that has restored law and order on the West Bank and
stopped terrorists from attacking Israelis. He has built
the framework for transparent governance, and created an
increasingly viable economy. He has expressed repeatedly
his distaste for Abbas’s UN recognition campaign,
understanding -- as Obama and Rice understand -- that it
will hurt the cause it claims to help.
Fayyad has the potential to be the David Ben Gurion of
the Palestinians -- a pragmatist, like Israel’s founding
prime minister, who builds the structures of a state in
advance of statehood, as a means of showing the world that
Palestine will be a viable and constructive addition to the
community of nations. But Abbas’s UN campaign threatens the
entire project.
Another threat to Fayyad’s aspirations, to be sure, is
the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his
exceedingly right-wing coalition. Netanyahu has not done
much to suggest to Palestinians that negotiations would
bear fruit. But Abbas has been Netanyahu’s partner in
paralysis. Two points have been obscured by the drama at
the UN: Abbas, not Netanyahu, is the leader who has refused
to enter negotiations without conditions. And Abbas is
seeking something at the UN that was already offered to the
Palestinians -- and rejected by them.
Robert Danin of the Council on Foreign Relations has
noted that Abbas is ostensibly seeking UN recognition
because he prefers to negotiate as the leader of an
independent state. But the Palestinians were offered
independence with “provisional borders” in the now-
forgotten 2003 peace talks known as the Roadmap. “The
Palestinian leadership,” Danin wrote, “long rejected this
option, fearing that establishing a state prior to
resolving all outstanding final status issues with Israel
would leave them unresolved in perpetuity.” Now Abbas is
seeking an even more symbolic form of independence.
The True Goal
What, then, is Abbas’s true goal? It may be nothing
more than an attempt to ensure his legacy, or to
marginalize rivals like Fayyad. But he recently said
something revealing: “We are going to complain that as
Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.”
The occupation, as it is generally understood, did not
begin 63 years ago. Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza
44 years ago. Sixty-three years ago is when Israel itself
was founded. If Abbas’s goal at the UN is the
enfranchisement of his people, then he will not succeed. If
his goal to demonize and delegitimize his enemy, then he
very well might.
(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for The Atlantic. The opinions
expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this article:
Jeffrey Goldberg at goldberg.atlantic@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article:
Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net.
No comments:
Post a Comment