Sep 2010
In this issue:
Features
No peace soon
Top 10 reasons why there will be no peace in the Middle East soon - along with Angry Arab As'ad abu-Khalil
Issue: Sep, 2009
The end of next month marks the 18th anniversary of the Madrid peace conference. The post-Gulf War Soviet-American sponsored three-day affair was supposed to lay the foundations for a peace process that will end the Arab-Israeli conflict. For Palestinian refugees living in the neighbouring Arab countries, the dream of ending their diaspora seemed closer than ever, and the potential of spending the weekend in Nablus or even Nassreh was a real possibility, even for those who had never set foot in their homeland.
It is also exactly 16 years since Yasser Arafat shook the hand of Yitzhak Rabin in the White House’s garden on September 13th, 1993, the start of the framework for a final solution of an issue that has occupied – no pun intended – the region since the beginning of the 20th century. But sadly all we have seen since is broken promises, increased colonisation of Palestinian land, another popular uprising and at least two major assaults on Arab civilians, it’s no exaggeration to declare that we’re actually back to square one.
9- The Embattled Obama administration is not serious enough about a plan
The Obama initiative has so far proven to be nothing but empty promises.
As we highlighted at considerable length in NOX Issue 29, Obama’s election victory might just usher in a new wave of progressive politics in America, but for us in the Middle East, the changes will be negligible. When it comes to Palestine, a Democratic president can’t alienate the main suppliers of his re-election war chest, America’s Jewish community. We have seen his limits already; he began to push, the lobby went into overdrive, and a “total freeze on settlements” quickly became “don’t build any new ones unless you really, really have to. Please.”
7- The Arabs have really nothing left to offer
After Israel gave repeated cold shoulders to the Arabs’ supposed best offer, the only thing left to ensure peace is our humiliating capitulation
The King Abdullah initiative – or as Dr Abu Khalil refers to it, the Thomas Freidman initiative – of 2002 was presented as the Arab’s trump card that will spark the peace process: the offer that cannot be refused. Full-page ads were taken in Arab newspapers promoting the visionary initiative that would liberate Jerusalem in no time. In reality, it turned out that the initiative was as shallow as Friedman’s analogies. With nothing to compel Israel to accept the proposal, they can ramp up the “threatened on all sides” rhetoric without fear of challenge, while accelerating the colonisation of someone else’s land.
5- the refugee issue will never be resolved
Legality has always taken a back seat to Israel’s racist demographic fears when it comes to the rights of 700,000 refugees and their descendents
This is one of the genuine sticking points for any Arab leader at the negotiating table. No one, not even the ever-complaint Yasser Arafat, was willing to sign away the birth-right of millions of Palestinians and make their exclusion from their homeland – and in the vast majority of cases, their families’ actual, title-held land – permanent. In umpteen pleas for peace in 40 years of trying, King Hussein refused to discuss the issue, claiming he could not speak on their behalf.
3- The Arab world simply doesn’t care about it anymore
With 300+ TV channels featuring Haifa Wahbe, the quest for Jerusalem naturally takes a back seat
Long gone are the days when the Palestinian issue used to occupy the hearts and souls of the Arab masses. Long gone, too, are the days when people would flood the streets celebrating Egypt signing an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, or demonstrating against the Rogers Initiative. These days, the Arab masses flood the streets celebrating France’s World Cup win or to watch the season finale of competing fifth-grade “singers”. With localised rally cries a la “Jordan First” and “Lebanon First” dominating Arab minds, and with intellectual and material poverty reducing the consciousness of the people, individual states can quietly pursue
their own narrow agendas.
1- Because the two-state solution is no longer a solution
Assuming that it ever was a solution to begin with, of course.
The two-state solution has been dying for so long that it’s entirely conceivable to think it was never a viable option to begin with. The ongoing expansion of settlements in the West Bank since 2001, the Apartheid Wall that isolates towns and villages from each other and appropriates the land of the potential Palestinian state, and Hamas’ independent Islamic Emirate in Gaza are among the reasons that prompted British journalist Patrick Seale to argue last year that: “It is now clear beyond reasonable dispute that a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has passed into the realm of fiction. The project – if it ever was a real project – is stone dead.” It seems that the best Zionist offer so far is for two states; one in Israel and the other in Jordan. Or even more comically farfetched: a three-state solution with fragmented cantons across the West Bank and Gaza.
