Israeli intransigence is the only hope
While Palestinian negotiators are weak and prone to sign any peace deal, Israel’s current leaders look set to reject every solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
By Ghada Karmi
(source: Al-Ahram Weekly)
What an irony that the Palestinians’ archenemy, Israel, should also be their saviour. There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks due to start 2 September in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the requirements of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades if not forever. Fortunately, this will not happen as long as Israel’s obduracy can be relied on to save the Palestinians from such a dreadful outcome.
Time and again, when Israel was thrown a lifeline by its Arab neighbours that could have ensured its legitimacy and security, its folly and greed lost it those opportunities. But, since those same opportunities came at great cost to Palestinian rights, Israel’s obduracy had the perverse effect of safeguarding them. All peace proposals after 1967 were based on maintaining Israel as a regional power and forcing the Palestinians to settle for less than they were entitled to. They were repeatedly offered paltry settlements that in effect legitimised Israel’s hold on a majority of their land and undermined their right of return. Had Israel agreed, the Palestinian cause would have been lost long ago.
But it never happened. Israel foiled each proposal and, though robbing the Palestinians of ever more land and resources, the basics of the Palestinian case remained intact. When in the 1979 Camp David negotiations Egypt sought to give the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza a basis for a future independent state, Israel refused. As it also spurned a succession of Arab peace proposals, most recently the Saudi plan of 2002, offering Israel peace and recognition in return for a Palestinian state. And when, in the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organisation finally capitulated and accepted Israel’s occupation of Palestine’s remnants so long as it would end and enable the establishment of an independent state on this morsel, Israel responded by taking more land.