Antony Blinken, the new US Secretary of State, has already indicated President Biden’s intent to restart the forever Israeli/Palestinian ‘peace process’ known affectionately to all as the ‘two state solution’. This paradigm for solving the intractable hundred-year conflict has clearly failed by all measurable parameters and appears to have bamboozled the entire world leadership for the past 100 years and in particular the last forty years. The world leadership just don’t seem to grasp why it never comes together for them.
Einstein’s theory of insanity, “…doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”, succinctly explains why Biden’s intent to go back to Go, not collect $200 and start again with this same process and the same players is either diplomatic incompetence or worse. The move at best will likely go nowhere and could just ruffle the feathers of the two disparate parties and even spark a new round of heightened violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, something it did after President Clinton’s failed Camp David talks in the year 2000.
President Trump through Ambassador Friedman and special envoy Kushner, in 2019-20 after contemplating the failed two state solution on permanent agenda, offered up an alternate process – ‘The Abraham Accords’ – a new vision to break the never-ending failure of the dogmatic ‘land for peace’ approach.
This was a new process based on acknowledging realities on the ground, wealth creation for the Arab Palestinian entity (seed fund of 50 billion US dollars), the sharing of much needed Israeli cooperation, technologies and good old mutual friendship and respect. It was picked up by a number of significant players in the region such as Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan, some of whom have already started direct flights and have exchanged ambassadors. This process has been predictably rejected out of hand by the Palestinian Arab leadership in Ramallah without consideration of the process or its contents.
The land for peace approach has been the go to solution since the Balfour declaration in 1917 more than a hundred years ago. It is based on the principle that the Jewish (Israeli) ‘Palestinians’ in Palestine give up lands to the Muslim Arab ‘Palestinians’ for them to create an Arab Muslim State they want to call Palestine in return for full recognition of Israel as a Jewish State and Jewish Homeland in the Holy Land, a cessation of Palestinian Arab claims against Israel and a declaration by both sides to an end of the conflict.
Seems simple and fair except the Palestinian Arabs have refused this simple formula time and time again and instead refuse to acknowledge any Jewish claims and history in the Holy Land. Further, their maximalist approach means that no compromise can ever be reached. From the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947 which divided the Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, until today, the Arab Palestinian leadership has rejected any and all land for peace proposals put on the table.
The Palestinian Arab approach is best summed up by the Khartoum Declaration of the Arab League. After the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel offered to negotiate a lasting Peace it was met with the resounding famous Arab declaration of the three NO’s. “No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.”
Since then the Palestinians and until recently the Arab world have stuck to their guns both literally and figuratively. The Palestinians while going through the machinations of a peace process time and time again have tabled multiple demands that are set in concrete from both the PLO (Fatah) and Hamas founding charters, demands they know that Israel can never meet and survive as a secure, independent and Jewish majority state. This Palestinian Arab rejectionism was well summed up by Abba Eban the well known Israeli diplomat and politician when he declared from the UN General Assembly podium in 1973 that “…the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
The big question here is why does the western world expend so much time, wealth and political capital on a process that cannot and will not ever succeed in bringing peace nor an end to the conflict?
One should also ponder as to why there is no ‘Peace process’ for all the other intractable and visible conflicts out there forever. Tibet, Kashmir, Crimea, Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, Nagorno Karabakh… Catalonia, Kurds? The list goes on and on ad nauseam. Is the focus on the Palestinian Peace to be forever at the expense of all the victims and peoples in the other world conflicts and disputes?
Further, the number of failed states that seriously need the immediate and urgent attention of world bodies, world leaders and NGOs, is growing exponentially from year to year. Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Lebanon…. What must the down trodden, malnourished, miserable and ignored millions think about another futile round of the Israeli/Palestinian ‘peace process’?
The oft heard excuse from Western governments, progressive and intersectional activists for their total lack of interest and progress on all the other calamities of the world is very sad to say the least: “Well, you have to start somewhere…”
Then the question has to be posed, why decade after decade are the UN and the world always starting with and only with the same conflict, using the same failed paradigm targeting the only Jewish state in the world? You can draw your own conclusions.
The bottom line is that Israel has tried the Land for Peace paradigm when it gave up areas ‘A’ and ‘B’ to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (West Bank). This was done under the auspices of the Oslo Accords signed in 1995, that resulted in the second Intifada against Israel and the loss of over a thousand Israeli lives to Palestinian Arab terror.
Israel tried the Land for Peace plan a second time in its 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip under an agreement between President Bush and then Prime Minister Sharon. The land evacuated was then used by Hamas to launch terror attacks and rockets toward Israel and is being used for that purpose to this very day.
The Trump plan recognised the reality that Israel will never cede so-called “East Jerusalem” (current Jewish population 200,000), one of the Palestinian concrete demands. Second, the demand for the Palestinian borders to be set along the ‘Green Line’ (named as such because it was drawn with a green pencil on the map) or armistice line of 1948 is also a non-starter. For security reasons, Israel sees the Jordan valley as its eastern line of defence. Further, there are now some 500,000 Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, mostly in cities and towns very close to the Green Line, so Israel will clearly not evacuate these.
The Bush letter of 2005 as part of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza acknowledges that these areas will remain part of Israel under any future settlement. Trump’s plan acknowledges reality on the ground and offers the Palestinian Arab side a future with statehood and prosperity if it is willing to give up its desire to destroy its neighbour Israel.
In summary, the Palestinians will come to this next round of ‘Two State Solution’ talks with the exact same demands that scuttled all previous attempts at agreement. Even if Israel were willing to give up (Camp David agreement, Olmert plan) Eastern Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria and uproot 700,000 Israelis from their homes, the Palestinians would still be unwilling to give up their demand for the return of all (‘the right of return’) who claim Palestinian descent and their self-perceived right to return and live within the borders of modern-day Israel, a right that just doesn’t exist. If agreed to or forced on Israel this would result in the end of the Jewish State of Israel as we know it through death by numbers.
Without a change in Palestinian maximalist demands this process will undoubtably go on forever with no solution in sight.
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