Micha
08-01-2006, 12:24 AM
It's tempting to forget in this idyllic place the unrelenting bad news from the Middle East, but if you wanted to escape all of this, you'd be in Las Vegas or somewhere else. But like many Americans, you share a deep concern about the Middle East, and the tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land.
Just a few hundred yards down the hill here, there is a place called Palestine Park and a relief map of Palestine with ancient biblical names. It evokes the powerful religious, cultural and historic resonance of the Holy Land for Americans. And it reminds us of the heart-breaking conflict there today.
But our interest is not just sentimental. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, no less than a resolution of the conflict of Iraq, is of great strategic importance to the United States. We urgently need to return to active diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to protect our own national security.
There is a deep-seated notion that this is a primordial struggle and a religious war in which neither side will ever compromise. Maybe you've heard the story that there are only two solutions to the conflict, the realistic and the miraculous.
One solution would have Jesus, Mohammed and Moses meet in Jerusalem and command all the children of Abraham to make peace. That's the realistic solution! The other is that they would agree to do it all by themselves. That's the miraculous solution!
In fact it's not yet an insoluble conflict, and it need not be, although die-hard extremists on both sides view it has a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, these zealots today stand in the way of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who, as polls have repeatedly shown, now realize after decades of struggle that the only way to bring peace is to divide the land into two states. But this goal is still being thwarted by terrible leadership on both sides, dysfunctional politics, deep fear stirred by terrible violence, and I'm sorry to say, cautious American policy.
If we are to grasp this problem and solve it, we must understand at the outset that we're dealing with two historic tragedies. For centuries the Jewish people struggled to overcome the curse of anti-Semitism in Europe, a deviant product of Christian theology. But they were never fully accepted. So in the late 19th century they said, "We need a state of our own, where we can live freely as normal people." That was the birth of the Zionist national movement.
Zionism would have been a footnote in history had it not been for British sponsorship. The British thought a Jewish colony in Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland that the Zionists had chosen as their new home, would be an anchor for British imperial control in the region. So in 1917 they adopted the Balfour Declaration supporting a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, without "prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
The project flourished after World War I when the British took over Palestine as a League of Nation's mandate, and a Zionist proto-state grew under British protection. The British had naively expected that the Jewish immigrants and the indigenous Palestinians would coexist happily, but there was conflict from the very beginning.
Although the Zionist enterprise grew during the 1920's and 1930's, most Jews did not immigrate to Palestine. The State of Israel probably would not have emerged, ultimately, had it not been for the Nazi era and the Holocaust, which killed 90 percent of European Jewry. It was the Holocaust that, for the Jews, made a state of their own an absolute imperative. You'll remember that neither the United States nor the Europeans opened their doors to Jewish refugees either before or after the Holocaust. So for many Jews, the creation of the Jewish state became a matter of survival.
The British had tried everything to resolve Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine. But nothing worked, and in 1948 they abandoned Palestine. There was a great war. Israel decalred statehood, Arab armies invaded, and Jewish forces prevailed. It was a moment of triumph and redemption for the Jewish people after their tragic history. But it was a catastrophe for the indigenous Palestinians, 750,000 of whom lost their homes and their land to people whom they saw as colonists and invaders.
So there are two terrible tragedies at the heart of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the Jewish and Palestinian tragedies, and two victims, one created as a result of the victimization of the other, both of whom have powerful claims to justice. It is a stunning moral paradox.
I believe deeply that in order to deal with this, we must have deep respect and empathy for both peoples. Let's not take sides as too often we have. Let's embrace both peoples and be peacemakers. Let's turn what has often been seen as a zero-sum conflict into a peace in which both are winners. This is not simply a moral imperative; it is a practical one, since unless both sides win, they will both lose. Peace and security for Israel require the creation of a free, viable Palestinian State. And a free and viable Palestinian State will happen only if there is security for Israel.
Alas, after 56 years, five wars, and two Palestinian uprisings, there has been too little recognition in either society that both peoples have powerful equities and claims to justice and that their mutual salvation demands compromise.
This polarization and sense of exclusive victimization have been made worse by propaganda, the creation of national myths, which ascribe all evil to the other, and terrible mutual violence. Both societies are divided between moderate pragmatists and winner-take-all extremists. Unfortunately the latter have too often led by default, and they are leading again today.
The 1967 War was a great watershed because it brought about the conquest, not only of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Jordan had occupied since 1948, but the Gaza strip, the Sinai Desert, and the Syrian Golan Heights. This offered Israel and the Arabs a great new opportunity to make peace by trading land for peace.
There was a debate within Israel about whether to grasp that opportunity. But the hawks won, with a lot of help from stubborn Arab governments, who also rejected this opportunity to finally make peace.
Israel's decision to stay in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza was fateful. It brought with it the rise of the right wing in Israeli politics, both secular and religious, whose followers believe deeply that it is Israel's destiny to regain all of the ancient Jewish homeland that they call they call Judea and Samaria. These Israelis, with government support, began an aggressive campaign to settle the occupied territories with Jews. Their goal was to create irreversible "facts on the ground" that would make the eventual creation of a Palestinian State impossible. Religious settlers, moreover, believed fervently that by reclaiming their ancient holy lands they would hasten the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Over time, many secular Jews also became settlers, lured by lavish subsidies and amenities not available in Israel. The Israeli army has generally supported settlements in the mistaken belief that control of the occupied territories would bring security.
The settler movement has prospered and today there are now some 400,000 heavily subsidized Jewish settlers in well-established Jewish towns strategically located throughout the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Today, settlements are the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The stark reality is that unless most of the settlements are evacuated, there cannot be two states and there cannot be peace.
As the cost of the conflict continued to rise after 1967, peace movements began to emerge among both Israelis and Palestinians. In 1988, the Palestinian National Congress voted to abandon armed struggle in favor of a two state peace, and Israel's peace camp was also growing stronger. Thoughtful people in both societies began to recognize that their mutual survival required compromise.
Finally, the impasse gave way to hope for peace in the late 1980's and early 1990's, for several reasons. The first Palestinian intifada, which erupted in 1997 and was largely non-violent, put a human face on Palestinian suffering and Israel's occupation that Israelis had never seen, and it gave Palestinians a new sense of confidence and realism. Also, the United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the American victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war, for the first time in years recognized an opportunity to seize the nettle and deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President George Bush senior and Secretary of State James Baker engaged the Israelis, and for the first time in history, the Palestinians, with carrots and sticks. They cajoled and twisted arms, and they persuaded the two adversaries to sit down together for the first time at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991.
This American effort was designed to prompt continuing negotiations, but it languished as a presidential election approached. But by then it had caught the imagination of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Without our knowledge, the new Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had replaced the hard line Yitzhak Shamir, began secret negotiations through emissaries with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and Israel's traditional enemy.
The upshot was the Oslo Declaration of Peace in 1993. Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn after Bill Clinton embraced the Declaration and offered U.S. good offices. It looked like an historic breakthrough. The Palestinian and the Jewish national movements had recognized each other and agreed to negotiate solutions to all of their problems and then sign a peace treaty after a seven-year transition. There was euphoria, and everyone thought that the Oslo Declaration marked the end of the struggle and that peace was just around the corner.
We know now that that Oslo process has collapsed. How could we have been so mistaken? Why have the Palestinians and Israelis descended again into the worst violence, hatred and despair since 1948?
In retrospect, we can draw some conclusions. Unfortunately, Oslo was only a process that did not define the destination, and both sides had very different expectations of the endgame. The Palestinians, having agreed to forego 78% of their former homeland, expected a state in the occupied territories in the West Bank-Gaza with their capital in East Jerusalem. The Israelis, being vastly more powerful and the occupying power, thought they could persuade the Palestinians to accept even less. So there were competing expectations and a lack of understanding about the other's bottom line.
To underscore their expectations, the Israelis continued to expand settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Between 1993 and 2000 when the Oslo process collapsed, the settler population of the West Bank expanded from 100,000 to 200,000. Palestinians had thought that Oslo would bring peace and liberation, but when they saw new Israeli settlements spreading over the hilltops in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem and Gaza, they felt betrayed.
Similarly, radical Palestinian elements, mostly extreme Islamists, that had never accepted compromise, began terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens in the streets of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. The Israelis, who thought Oslo would bring security, also began to lose faith. Right wing politicians argued that the whole Oslo process was a fraud, claiming "The Palestinians still want to kill us, and renewed violence proves it."
There was Jewish terrorism as well. A Jewish settler terrorist killed Palestinians worshipping in a mosque in Hebron, and another pro-settler Jewish fanatic assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
So radical elements on both sides helped to undermine the Oslo process. That would have been harder to do if there had been an agreed destination. We should remember this lesson as we ponder an eventual solution.
At the end of the 1990's after the Oslo deadline for peace had passed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, struggling for his political life, talked a reluctant Bill Clinton into holding a summit meeting. But little progress had been made in negotiating the big issues - borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, and security. For this reason, Arafat opposed the summit as premature. He warned Clinton that it would fail, and expressed fear that he would be blamed, but in the end he agreed to attend.
Sure enough, the Camp David Summit in July 2000 collapsed. It was a chaotic and ill prepared, without maps or agreed papers, and Arafat was blamed. To be sure, Barak offered far more than any other Israeli leader - some 90% of the West Bank. He even conceded some kind of Palestinian official presence in East Jerusalem, which was unprecedented. Israelis believed they had made an extraordinarily generous offer.
But the Palestinians disagreed, and viewed Barak's offer as more like an invitation to surrender. The deal Barak offered would have left them with three almost disconnected enclaves in the West Bank, separated by Israeli settlements, most of which would have been preserved. Palestinians believed that such a truncated entity could not be a viable Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Palestinian violence was growing, provoked in part by the visit of Ariel Sharon, who was challenging Barak in the coming election, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with a large force of Israeli police. Harsh and often lethal Israeli military retaliation against Palestinian protesters tended to stir further violence.
It is little known that the collapse at Camp David was not the end of the negotiations. There were dozens of additional talks, and in January 2001 Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, in a final session in Taba, made major progress in closing the gaps with compromises on the big issues. But it was too late. The Israeli peace camp had retreated, shocked by the violence. Palestinian opinion was inflamed by heavy-handed Israeli military reprisals, and the death toll was rising.
So the peace process fell apart, and Ariel Sharon, who promised to stop the violence, was elected Israel's new Prime Minister. Sharon had always been an advocate of force, and had opposed all peace initiatives, including the Oslo Accords. Sharon was also a supporter of "Greater Israel," although for security, not religious reasons, and he was the main architect of the Israeli settlement movement. Sharon told the Israelis that the peace process was an illusion and that it was foolish to expect compromise from Arafat and the Palestinians. Many Israelis believed him.
Yasser Arafat must also share blame for the collapse of the peace process. Instead of just dismissing Barak's offer at Camp David, however unsatisfactory it was for the Palestinians, he should have acknowledged that some progress had been made. Indeed, he authorized his negotiators to keep talking, but his public relations were dreadful. Worse yet, he did not try to stop the growing Palestinian violence. While he did not start it, he foolishly thought it would improve his negotiating leverage with the Israelis. Instead, it had the opposite effect, by alienating the Palestinians' more important allies, the Israeli peace camp and the U.S. government. And it helped bring about the election of Ariel Sharon, who had no interest in peace through compromise.
In spite of Sharon's promises to restore security, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli reprisals grew. In the last three years, over 900 Israelis, mostly civilians, have been killed. And over 3,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians also, have died. If we were to extrapolate the impact of these deaths in terms of our own population, it would mean in the case of Palestinian deaths, some 220,000 dead Americans, and in terms of Israeli deaths, some 44,000 Americans dead. So you can imagine the traumatic effect the intifada has had on both societies, replacing hope for peace with fear and despair.
As the situation deteriorated, Israeli forces reoccupied most of the West Bank, destroying many institutions of the Palestinian Authority and imposing a draconian system of controls and checkpoints.
The intifada has also had a high economic cost. The Palestinian economy is shattered, and there is even malnutrition today in some areas of the West Bank and Gaza. In Israel, tourism and investment have declined sharply. Most damaging of all, both sides have lost hope, and see no way out of the conflict.
George W. Bush's new administration thought Bill Clinton's diplomacy had been too ambitious and that the conflict was not "ripe" for a settlement. In fact, during most of the Oslo years, Washington's role was to offer good offices, but little in the way of American ideas on the big issues. The lesson should have been, not that the Clinton administration had been too active, but that it did too little. Given the huge disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians, American diplomacy, to succeed, must mediate energetically and introduce its own views. It must also weigh at times on the side of the Palestinians, the weaker party. The Clinton administration failed to do this until the very end, but by then it was too late.
The Bush administration has also been divided over the basic issues of the conflict. Some, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, understand that the solution lies in negotiations, not unilateral decisions and the use of force. They also understand that terrorism is not just the product of fanatic ideology. It is also a symptom of a deeper problem of occupation and settlement and the absence of an effective political process.
But others in the Bush administration sympathize with Sharon, and see him as a partner in a common American-Israeli struggle against terrorism. These officials have prevailed for the most part. And as a result, the Bush administration's diplomacy has failed to stem the violence and restore peace talks.
President Bush, moreover, has always been far more interested in Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken a back seat. However, Bush was pressed hard by the Arab States, by Tony Blair, and by our European allies to do something. And so he came up with something called the Road Map.
The Road Map was a kind of modified Oslo approach. Although it called for a Palestinian state, in principle, as the destination, it was still a process, since it did not clearly define this in terms of borders, settlements and other aspects of the endgame. The Bush administration waited until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein before announcing the Road Map, and it has never invested heavily in it.
Meanwhile the conflict intensified. But, paradoxically, public opinion polls showed that even though Israelis and Palestinians had lost hope that peace was possible, they understood even more clearly than they had in the past, that the only way out was to divide the land and create two states. This convergence of mainstream opinion about a solution had become clearer, notwithstanding the total lack of hope that it could happen, is a positive sign in an otherwise bleak picture.
Sharon, under pressure from Washington, from the Europeans and from his own public, realized that his policies were not succeeding, and his poll numbers were sinking. So he advanced what he called his "Disengagement Plan" to withdraw from all 17 Israeli settlements in Gaza, containing 7,000 people, in 2005, and four small settlements in the northern West Bank.
Sharon claimed this would bring peace. But at the same time he said he intended to retain virtually all of the other settlements in the West Bank containing some 220,000 Israelis. Sharon is also building what he calls a "separation barrier" and the Palestinians call a "wall." This massive structure of concrete and steel is already partially built, and most of it is inside the West Bank on Palestinian territory.
Sharon's barrier is designed to prevent infiltration of Palestinian terrorists. But its other goals are to preserve the large Israeli settlements on the Israeli side of the barrier, to seal off Arab East Jerusalem from the Palestinian hinterland, and to define Sharon's vision of the boundaries of a Palestinian State.
If you look at a map you will see that the barrier, if it is finished, will leave a series of misshapen, truncated, and scarcely connected enclaves that couldn't possibly form the basis of a viable state. So its purpose is not just to gain security, but to control and dominate the Palestinians and to preserve most Israeli settlements. Far from a formula for peace, Sharon's plan guarantees continued conflict.
President Bush, having lost interest in his own Road Map, applauded Sharon's disengagement plan as "historic and courageous." Worse yet, the President said the United States opposes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, and realized that some Israeli settlements in the West Bank should remain.
Now, of course the U.S. does not support the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel. And everyone knows that in the final agreement some of the Israeli settlements will have to be preserved. But for the U.S. to announce this outside of the context of negotiation is wrong. Moreover, in contrast to the Road Map, which calls for negotiations, Sharon's plan is unilateral. Sharon has said, "I have no partner. Arafat is a terrorist," and there can be no peace through negotiations, so I'm going to do it my way." But Sharon's way will not bring peace. By endorsing it, President Bush has effectively jettisoned his own Road Map, although both he and Sharon continue to pay lip service to it, and weakened prospects for renewed negotiations.
Some optimists think Sharon is playing a sophisticated game and that he believes that by removing a few settlements he will break the back of the settlement movement and bring about a gradual withdrawal of all settlements. My own view is that Sharon remains deeply committed to the settlement enterprise, and the fact that he is expanding settlements in the West Bank confirms this.
Sharon continues to blame the entire conflict on Arafat and refuses to deal with him. Taking its cue from Sharon, the U.S. also shuns and demonizes Arafat. To be sure, Arafat, who is now a virtual prisoner in his ruined compound in Ramallah, is an inadequate leader, a poor communicator, and has little vision, and he has not even tried to stop splinter elements in his own Fatah party from supporting terrorism. He also faces growing criticism from his own public for his poor governance. But demonizing and humiliating Arafat won't work.
If Arafat were allowed to move freely, he would have to become more accountable to his own people. That's not to say that they would reject him, since he is still viewed as the father of the Palestinian movement. In any case, our policy of "regime change" in Palestine is a failure. Arafat can't be ignored, and, for all his weaknesses, some way must be found to reengage him, work around him, or encourage an honorable "emeritus" role.
Why has American policy over the years in this conflict been so diffident? It's a long story. We have developed a kind of quasi-alliance with Israel primarily for cultural, historic, and religious reasons. Many Americans view our culture as Judeo-Christian, although today we are a far more diverse society, and the Holy Land has tremendous resonance for us.
Also, since War II and Holocaust, Americans have felt, quite rightly, a sense of moral debt to the Jewish people, and that has helped to cement our alliance with Israel. We have had no similar cultural, historic bonds with the Arab world or with the Palestinians. Indeed, until recently we tended to regard the Palestinians simply as refugees, or worse as terrorists. For years, we thought the occupied territories should be returned to Jordan, and we were very late in recognizing that there could be no way out of this conflict without the creation of a Palestinian State
There is also a very dedicated professional Jewish establishment in this country that works hard, within the American system, to protect the interests and support the views of whatever Israeli Government is governing. They claim to speak for the American Jewish community and have a very influential voice in the Executive Branch and the Congress. There is a lot of money involved in political campaigns, and there is a perception among politicians that if they were to take an independent view of this conflict they might be penalized. In contrast, the unorganized majority of the Jewish community lacks a strong voice.
There is also a powerful conservative evangelical Christian movement in this country that makes common cause with the theory of "Greater Israel." They interpret the Bible to mean that Israel's conquest of the ancient homeland of Judea and Samaria will bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. They also believe, although they do not advertise this, that when Jesus returns all the Jews must become Christians, or they will get a one-way ticket to hell. These evangelical Christians are another element of the political calculus in Washington.
Another strand in the U.S.-Israel alliance was the view during the Cold War that Israel was a strategic ally for the U.S. and that their powerful armed forces would protect U.S. interests, were the Soviet Union to invade the Middle East.
For all of these reasons, our policy toward mediating peace between Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians, has been reluctant, sporadic and often ineffective. It's been very hard for us to play the role we aspire to as honest broker. No doubt, bringing to bear more effective U.S. leadership will not be easy, but it can be done.
First of all we must understand how high the stakes are for Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S.
I'll say this quite bluntly. If Israel continues to dominate and to pursue a policy of quasi-annexation and Jewish settlement of the Palestinians territories, this will lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state and the corruption of Zionism. The Palestinians have a much higher birth rate than the Israeli Jews. If Israel continues to dominate the Palestinians and deny them a genuine state of their own, it will soon face a demographic majority of hostile Arabs under Jewish governance who can be controlled only through increasing force and repression. It is foolish to expect, as Ariel Sharon does, that the Palestinians will accept defeat, or that they will abandon violence if there is no political path to liberation.
This is not a future that any of us wish for Israel. We talk a lot about our bedrock commitment to Israel's well being and security and our "shared values." If we are really so committed to Israel, should we indulge their leaders in self-destructive policies that violate Israeli, as well as American values? Some say we should abandon Israel, or sanction it. I disagree. Instead we should must embrace the Israelis and the Palestinians, but tell them the truth.
The stakes are also high for the Palestinians. Needless to say, the continuation of the status quo means more misery, more heartbreak, and the defeat of their legitimate aspirations for dignity, freedom and a state of their own, where they can exercise their human rights and live as normal people.
So both Israelis and Palestinians have a vital stakes in peace and two genuine states.
The United States has an equally high stake, not just to meet our moral obligations to our Israeli and Palestinian friends, but also to protect our national security. There is no issue that has greater resonance or creates greater hostility in the Muslim and Arab world than the perception that we don't care about Palestinian equities, that we are supporting the policies of the Sharon government, and that we don't mean what we say about freedom, democracy and human rights.
This perception has helped inflame a huge region of the world against the United States. I don't have to remind you that Arab and Muslim countries have become the breeding grounds for terrorists who want to kill us. Of course, the terrorists have manipulated and exploited our policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to intensify anti-American sentiment and divert attention from their murderous intentions, but our policy also needs fixing. The reality is that we have a strategic self-interest in resolving this conflict. We need friends and allies, not just in Israel, but in the Arab and Muslim worlds also, to overcome the growing threat of terrorism.
Well, how can the U.S. resolve this terrible conflict? The good news, as I said, is that the outlines of a two state solution are increasingly clear. These have been developed over years of dialogue, official and unofficial. In the latter category, last year a group of distinguished Israelis and Palestinians came up with a virtual peace treaty called the Geneva Accord. This 55 page plans spells out the solutions for borders, settlements, refugees, Jerusalem and security. It is a model of what peace ought to be, and what most experts think it must be. So solutions to the issues don't have to be invented. Basically, they are already there for the asking. And they have the virtue of being negotiated, not by Americans, but by Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately Ariel Sharon has rejected the Geneva Accord, calling it an act of "treason," and the United States has treated it with polite indifference.
The Geneva Accord shows that peace, which meets the fundamental needs of both people - in short security for the Jewish state of Israel and liberation for the Palestinians - is possible.
A solution along the lines of the Geneva Accord would modify the border to some extent by allowing some of the big block settlements to be annexed into Israel, but it would compensate the Palestinians with one-for-one land swaps.
It would create two capitals in Jerusalem, and Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty over their respective holy sites in Jerusalem.
It would create mechanisms to ensure security. The Palestinians would not have an army or an air force, and both sides would be obliged to cooperate against their respective fanatics and extremists.
And it would resolve the refugee issue, which is one of the most contentious, by a symbolic fulfillment of the right of return. The reality is that if there is to be peace, not many Palestinian refugees can return to Israel, since that would undermine the Jewish character of Israel. Instead, they would return to the new state of Palestine and receive compensation. There would also be some modest repatriation to Israel of refugees for family reunification purposes. And other states, including the U.S., would offer immigration quotas to take some of the refugees who now live in Lebanon and elsewhere who do not wish to return to the new state of Palestine. I am convinced that the right of return is not a deal breaker, and that it is soluble as long as the other issues are resolved.
It is obvious that neither Arafat nor Sharon is going to advance such a comprehensive plan. Sharon has very different goals, and Arafat is too weak and too unimaginative to take such an initiative. The reality is that only the United States can do this. Neither the European Union nor the United Nations can play this role.
With strong leadership and commitment, we have the capability to bring about a solution. We can do this by offering a bold new American plan - something along the lines of the Geneva Accord. The President would say to the Israelis and Palestinians:
"Here is plan that will rescue you both from a grim future. The United States is totally committed, and I am appointing a senior envoy who will stick with this task until there is peace. We have deep sympathy and understanding for your needs and your suffering. But this conflict is destroying your futures and your childrens'. It is also doing great harm to the United States and the rest of the world. I want both of you to cooperate in negotiating a peace of the kind I offer. Of course the choice yours, but don't ask me to take 'no' for an answer. It is time for peace."
If we spell out such a plan skillfully and with empathy and respect for both people, I think it would galvanize politics in both societies. Eventually, it would recreate a liberal peace-minded majority in Israel, and it would also rally the Palestinian people. Neither of these societies is vicious or crazy, although they both have such people in the fringes. The art of peace making is to engage both societies and to restore hope and confidence so that they will turn against and marginalize the extremists.
Of course, if the United States were to offer such a bold and comprehensive vision of peace, there would be stiff opposition from the politicians at the outset. But in the end no Israeli or Palestinians leadership could defy us. If we do it right and do not retreat when the going gets tough, as it inevitably will, I am convinced that majorities in both Israel and Palestine will see the wisdom of such an American initiative and support negotiations to bring it about. If Sharon, Arafat, or their successors, stand in the way of a bold and sweeping American peace initiative, their constituents would eventually choose new leaders.
But could any American president, given the cautious traditions of U.S. diplomacy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the strength of various interest groups here, ever show such leadership? Why not? Surely the American public, including the majority of Jews, Christians, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans would rally to such a plan. I have never believed that American Jewish community is committed to the policies of Ariel Sharon. Indeed, there is almost certainly a silent majority of American Jews who are deeply concerned about those policies and the grim future they foretell for of Israel if Sharon's vision is fulfilled.
So an American peace plan would not only be the wise and statesmanlike thing to do, it would also be good politics and would summon broad support from most Americans.
Let us hope that the next Administration, Republican or Democrat, will finally do the right thing. If we are going to restore American credibility in the Middle East, reduce the threat of terrorism, rescue our suffering Israeli and Palestinian friends, and help resolve a very difficult challenge in Iraq, we need an imaginative and bold new initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thank you.
Speech by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President, FMEP, at the Chautauqua Institute
Just a few hundred yards down the hill here, there is a place called Palestine Park and a relief map of Palestine with ancient biblical names. It evokes the powerful religious, cultural and historic resonance of the Holy Land for Americans. And it reminds us of the heart-breaking conflict there today.
But our interest is not just sentimental. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, no less than a resolution of the conflict of Iraq, is of great strategic importance to the United States. We urgently need to return to active diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to protect our own national security.
There is a deep-seated notion that this is a primordial struggle and a religious war in which neither side will ever compromise. Maybe you've heard the story that there are only two solutions to the conflict, the realistic and the miraculous.
One solution would have Jesus, Mohammed and Moses meet in Jerusalem and command all the children of Abraham to make peace. That's the realistic solution! The other is that they would agree to do it all by themselves. That's the miraculous solution!
In fact it's not yet an insoluble conflict, and it need not be, although die-hard extremists on both sides view it has a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, these zealots today stand in the way of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who, as polls have repeatedly shown, now realize after decades of struggle that the only way to bring peace is to divide the land into two states. But this goal is still being thwarted by terrible leadership on both sides, dysfunctional politics, deep fear stirred by terrible violence, and I'm sorry to say, cautious American policy.
If we are to grasp this problem and solve it, we must understand at the outset that we're dealing with two historic tragedies. For centuries the Jewish people struggled to overcome the curse of anti-Semitism in Europe, a deviant product of Christian theology. But they were never fully accepted. So in the late 19th century they said, "We need a state of our own, where we can live freely as normal people." That was the birth of the Zionist national movement.
Zionism would have been a footnote in history had it not been for British sponsorship. The British thought a Jewish colony in Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland that the Zionists had chosen as their new home, would be an anchor for British imperial control in the region. So in 1917 they adopted the Balfour Declaration supporting a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, without "prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
The project flourished after World War I when the British took over Palestine as a League of Nation's mandate, and a Zionist proto-state grew under British protection. The British had naively expected that the Jewish immigrants and the indigenous Palestinians would coexist happily, but there was conflict from the very beginning.
Although the Zionist enterprise grew during the 1920's and 1930's, most Jews did not immigrate to Palestine. The State of Israel probably would not have emerged, ultimately, had it not been for the Nazi era and the Holocaust, which killed 90 percent of European Jewry. It was the Holocaust that, for the Jews, made a state of their own an absolute imperative. You'll remember that neither the United States nor the Europeans opened their doors to Jewish refugees either before or after the Holocaust. So for many Jews, the creation of the Jewish state became a matter of survival.
The British had tried everything to resolve Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine. But nothing worked, and in 1948 they abandoned Palestine. There was a great war. Israel decalred statehood, Arab armies invaded, and Jewish forces prevailed. It was a moment of triumph and redemption for the Jewish people after their tragic history. But it was a catastrophe for the indigenous Palestinians, 750,000 of whom lost their homes and their land to people whom they saw as colonists and invaders.
So there are two terrible tragedies at the heart of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the Jewish and Palestinian tragedies, and two victims, one created as a result of the victimization of the other, both of whom have powerful claims to justice. It is a stunning moral paradox.
I believe deeply that in order to deal with this, we must have deep respect and empathy for both peoples. Let's not take sides as too often we have. Let's embrace both peoples and be peacemakers. Let's turn what has often been seen as a zero-sum conflict into a peace in which both are winners. This is not simply a moral imperative; it is a practical one, since unless both sides win, they will both lose. Peace and security for Israel require the creation of a free, viable Palestinian State. And a free and viable Palestinian State will happen only if there is security for Israel.
Alas, after 56 years, five wars, and two Palestinian uprisings, there has been too little recognition in either society that both peoples have powerful equities and claims to justice and that their mutual salvation demands compromise.
This polarization and sense of exclusive victimization have been made worse by propaganda, the creation of national myths, which ascribe all evil to the other, and terrible mutual violence. Both societies are divided between moderate pragmatists and winner-take-all extremists. Unfortunately the latter have too often led by default, and they are leading again today.
The 1967 War was a great watershed because it brought about the conquest, not only of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Jordan had occupied since 1948, but the Gaza strip, the Sinai Desert, and the Syrian Golan Heights. This offered Israel and the Arabs a great new opportunity to make peace by trading land for peace.
There was a debate within Israel about whether to grasp that opportunity. But the hawks won, with a lot of help from stubborn Arab governments, who also rejected this opportunity to finally make peace.
Israel's decision to stay in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza was fateful. It brought with it the rise of the right wing in Israeli politics, both secular and religious, whose followers believe deeply that it is Israel's destiny to regain all of the ancient Jewish homeland that they call they call Judea and Samaria. These Israelis, with government support, began an aggressive campaign to settle the occupied territories with Jews. Their goal was to create irreversible "facts on the ground" that would make the eventual creation of a Palestinian State impossible. Religious settlers, moreover, believed fervently that by reclaiming their ancient holy lands they would hasten the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Over time, many secular Jews also became settlers, lured by lavish subsidies and amenities not available in Israel. The Israeli army has generally supported settlements in the mistaken belief that control of the occupied territories would bring security.
The settler movement has prospered and today there are now some 400,000 heavily subsidized Jewish settlers in well-established Jewish towns strategically located throughout the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Today, settlements are the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The stark reality is that unless most of the settlements are evacuated, there cannot be two states and there cannot be peace.
As the cost of the conflict continued to rise after 1967, peace movements began to emerge among both Israelis and Palestinians. In 1988, the Palestinian National Congress voted to abandon armed struggle in favor of a two state peace, and Israel's peace camp was also growing stronger. Thoughtful people in both societies began to recognize that their mutual survival required compromise.
Finally, the impasse gave way to hope for peace in the late 1980's and early 1990's, for several reasons. The first Palestinian intifada, which erupted in 1997 and was largely non-violent, put a human face on Palestinian suffering and Israel's occupation that Israelis had never seen, and it gave Palestinians a new sense of confidence and realism. Also, the United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the American victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war, for the first time in years recognized an opportunity to seize the nettle and deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President George Bush senior and Secretary of State James Baker engaged the Israelis, and for the first time in history, the Palestinians, with carrots and sticks. They cajoled and twisted arms, and they persuaded the two adversaries to sit down together for the first time at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991.
This American effort was designed to prompt continuing negotiations, but it languished as a presidential election approached. But by then it had caught the imagination of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Without our knowledge, the new Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had replaced the hard line Yitzhak Shamir, began secret negotiations through emissaries with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and Israel's traditional enemy.
The upshot was the Oslo Declaration of Peace in 1993. Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn after Bill Clinton embraced the Declaration and offered U.S. good offices. It looked like an historic breakthrough. The Palestinian and the Jewish national movements had recognized each other and agreed to negotiate solutions to all of their problems and then sign a peace treaty after a seven-year transition. There was euphoria, and everyone thought that the Oslo Declaration marked the end of the struggle and that peace was just around the corner.
We know now that that Oslo process has collapsed. How could we have been so mistaken? Why have the Palestinians and Israelis descended again into the worst violence, hatred and despair since 1948?
In retrospect, we can draw some conclusions. Unfortunately, Oslo was only a process that did not define the destination, and both sides had very different expectations of the endgame. The Palestinians, having agreed to forego 78% of their former homeland, expected a state in the occupied territories in the West Bank-Gaza with their capital in East Jerusalem. The Israelis, being vastly more powerful and the occupying power, thought they could persuade the Palestinians to accept even less. So there were competing expectations and a lack of understanding about the other's bottom line.
To underscore their expectations, the Israelis continued to expand settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Between 1993 and 2000 when the Oslo process collapsed, the settler population of the West Bank expanded from 100,000 to 200,000. Palestinians had thought that Oslo would bring peace and liberation, but when they saw new Israeli settlements spreading over the hilltops in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem and Gaza, they felt betrayed.
Similarly, radical Palestinian elements, mostly extreme Islamists, that had never accepted compromise, began terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens in the streets of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. The Israelis, who thought Oslo would bring security, also began to lose faith. Right wing politicians argued that the whole Oslo process was a fraud, claiming "The Palestinians still want to kill us, and renewed violence proves it."
There was Jewish terrorism as well. A Jewish settler terrorist killed Palestinians worshipping in a mosque in Hebron, and another pro-settler Jewish fanatic assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
So radical elements on both sides helped to undermine the Oslo process. That would have been harder to do if there had been an agreed destination. We should remember this lesson as we ponder an eventual solution.
At the end of the 1990's after the Oslo deadline for peace had passed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, struggling for his political life, talked a reluctant Bill Clinton into holding a summit meeting. But little progress had been made in negotiating the big issues - borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, and security. For this reason, Arafat opposed the summit as premature. He warned Clinton that it would fail, and expressed fear that he would be blamed, but in the end he agreed to attend.
Sure enough, the Camp David Summit in July 2000 collapsed. It was a chaotic and ill prepared, without maps or agreed papers, and Arafat was blamed. To be sure, Barak offered far more than any other Israeli leader - some 90% of the West Bank. He even conceded some kind of Palestinian official presence in East Jerusalem, which was unprecedented. Israelis believed they had made an extraordinarily generous offer.
But the Palestinians disagreed, and viewed Barak's offer as more like an invitation to surrender. The deal Barak offered would have left them with three almost disconnected enclaves in the West Bank, separated by Israeli settlements, most of which would have been preserved. Palestinians believed that such a truncated entity could not be a viable Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Palestinian violence was growing, provoked in part by the visit of Ariel Sharon, who was challenging Barak in the coming election, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with a large force of Israeli police. Harsh and often lethal Israeli military retaliation against Palestinian protesters tended to stir further violence.
It is little known that the collapse at Camp David was not the end of the negotiations. There were dozens of additional talks, and in January 2001 Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, in a final session in Taba, made major progress in closing the gaps with compromises on the big issues. But it was too late. The Israeli peace camp had retreated, shocked by the violence. Palestinian opinion was inflamed by heavy-handed Israeli military reprisals, and the death toll was rising.
So the peace process fell apart, and Ariel Sharon, who promised to stop the violence, was elected Israel's new Prime Minister. Sharon had always been an advocate of force, and had opposed all peace initiatives, including the Oslo Accords. Sharon was also a supporter of "Greater Israel," although for security, not religious reasons, and he was the main architect of the Israeli settlement movement. Sharon told the Israelis that the peace process was an illusion and that it was foolish to expect compromise from Arafat and the Palestinians. Many Israelis believed him.
Yasser Arafat must also share blame for the collapse of the peace process. Instead of just dismissing Barak's offer at Camp David, however unsatisfactory it was for the Palestinians, he should have acknowledged that some progress had been made. Indeed, he authorized his negotiators to keep talking, but his public relations were dreadful. Worse yet, he did not try to stop the growing Palestinian violence. While he did not start it, he foolishly thought it would improve his negotiating leverage with the Israelis. Instead, it had the opposite effect, by alienating the Palestinians' more important allies, the Israeli peace camp and the U.S. government. And it helped bring about the election of Ariel Sharon, who had no interest in peace through compromise.
In spite of Sharon's promises to restore security, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli reprisals grew. In the last three years, over 900 Israelis, mostly civilians, have been killed. And over 3,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians also, have died. If we were to extrapolate the impact of these deaths in terms of our own population, it would mean in the case of Palestinian deaths, some 220,000 dead Americans, and in terms of Israeli deaths, some 44,000 Americans dead. So you can imagine the traumatic effect the intifada has had on both societies, replacing hope for peace with fear and despair.
As the situation deteriorated, Israeli forces reoccupied most of the West Bank, destroying many institutions of the Palestinian Authority and imposing a draconian system of controls and checkpoints.
The intifada has also had a high economic cost. The Palestinian economy is shattered, and there is even malnutrition today in some areas of the West Bank and Gaza. In Israel, tourism and investment have declined sharply. Most damaging of all, both sides have lost hope, and see no way out of the conflict.
George W. Bush's new administration thought Bill Clinton's diplomacy had been too ambitious and that the conflict was not "ripe" for a settlement. In fact, during most of the Oslo years, Washington's role was to offer good offices, but little in the way of American ideas on the big issues. The lesson should have been, not that the Clinton administration had been too active, but that it did too little. Given the huge disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians, American diplomacy, to succeed, must mediate energetically and introduce its own views. It must also weigh at times on the side of the Palestinians, the weaker party. The Clinton administration failed to do this until the very end, but by then it was too late.
The Bush administration has also been divided over the basic issues of the conflict. Some, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, understand that the solution lies in negotiations, not unilateral decisions and the use of force. They also understand that terrorism is not just the product of fanatic ideology. It is also a symptom of a deeper problem of occupation and settlement and the absence of an effective political process.
But others in the Bush administration sympathize with Sharon, and see him as a partner in a common American-Israeli struggle against terrorism. These officials have prevailed for the most part. And as a result, the Bush administration's diplomacy has failed to stem the violence and restore peace talks.
President Bush, moreover, has always been far more interested in Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken a back seat. However, Bush was pressed hard by the Arab States, by Tony Blair, and by our European allies to do something. And so he came up with something called the Road Map.
The Road Map was a kind of modified Oslo approach. Although it called for a Palestinian state, in principle, as the destination, it was still a process, since it did not clearly define this in terms of borders, settlements and other aspects of the endgame. The Bush administration waited until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein before announcing the Road Map, and it has never invested heavily in it.
Meanwhile the conflict intensified. But, paradoxically, public opinion polls showed that even though Israelis and Palestinians had lost hope that peace was possible, they understood even more clearly than they had in the past, that the only way out was to divide the land and create two states. This convergence of mainstream opinion about a solution had become clearer, notwithstanding the total lack of hope that it could happen, is a positive sign in an otherwise bleak picture.
Sharon, under pressure from Washington, from the Europeans and from his own public, realized that his policies were not succeeding, and his poll numbers were sinking. So he advanced what he called his "Disengagement Plan" to withdraw from all 17 Israeli settlements in Gaza, containing 7,000 people, in 2005, and four small settlements in the northern West Bank.
Sharon claimed this would bring peace. But at the same time he said he intended to retain virtually all of the other settlements in the West Bank containing some 220,000 Israelis. Sharon is also building what he calls a "separation barrier" and the Palestinians call a "wall." This massive structure of concrete and steel is already partially built, and most of it is inside the West Bank on Palestinian territory.
Sharon's barrier is designed to prevent infiltration of Palestinian terrorists. But its other goals are to preserve the large Israeli settlements on the Israeli side of the barrier, to seal off Arab East Jerusalem from the Palestinian hinterland, and to define Sharon's vision of the boundaries of a Palestinian State.
If you look at a map you will see that the barrier, if it is finished, will leave a series of misshapen, truncated, and scarcely connected enclaves that couldn't possibly form the basis of a viable state. So its purpose is not just to gain security, but to control and dominate the Palestinians and to preserve most Israeli settlements. Far from a formula for peace, Sharon's plan guarantees continued conflict.
President Bush, having lost interest in his own Road Map, applauded Sharon's disengagement plan as "historic and courageous." Worse yet, the President said the United States opposes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, and realized that some Israeli settlements in the West Bank should remain.
Now, of course the U.S. does not support the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel. And everyone knows that in the final agreement some of the Israeli settlements will have to be preserved. But for the U.S. to announce this outside of the context of negotiation is wrong. Moreover, in contrast to the Road Map, which calls for negotiations, Sharon's plan is unilateral. Sharon has said, "I have no partner. Arafat is a terrorist," and there can be no peace through negotiations, so I'm going to do it my way." But Sharon's way will not bring peace. By endorsing it, President Bush has effectively jettisoned his own Road Map, although both he and Sharon continue to pay lip service to it, and weakened prospects for renewed negotiations.
Some optimists think Sharon is playing a sophisticated game and that he believes that by removing a few settlements he will break the back of the settlement movement and bring about a gradual withdrawal of all settlements. My own view is that Sharon remains deeply committed to the settlement enterprise, and the fact that he is expanding settlements in the West Bank confirms this.
Sharon continues to blame the entire conflict on Arafat and refuses to deal with him. Taking its cue from Sharon, the U.S. also shuns and demonizes Arafat. To be sure, Arafat, who is now a virtual prisoner in his ruined compound in Ramallah, is an inadequate leader, a poor communicator, and has little vision, and he has not even tried to stop splinter elements in his own Fatah party from supporting terrorism. He also faces growing criticism from his own public for his poor governance. But demonizing and humiliating Arafat won't work.
If Arafat were allowed to move freely, he would have to become more accountable to his own people. That's not to say that they would reject him, since he is still viewed as the father of the Palestinian movement. In any case, our policy of "regime change" in Palestine is a failure. Arafat can't be ignored, and, for all his weaknesses, some way must be found to reengage him, work around him, or encourage an honorable "emeritus" role.
Why has American policy over the years in this conflict been so diffident? It's a long story. We have developed a kind of quasi-alliance with Israel primarily for cultural, historic, and religious reasons. Many Americans view our culture as Judeo-Christian, although today we are a far more diverse society, and the Holy Land has tremendous resonance for us.
Also, since War II and Holocaust, Americans have felt, quite rightly, a sense of moral debt to the Jewish people, and that has helped to cement our alliance with Israel. We have had no similar cultural, historic bonds with the Arab world or with the Palestinians. Indeed, until recently we tended to regard the Palestinians simply as refugees, or worse as terrorists. For years, we thought the occupied territories should be returned to Jordan, and we were very late in recognizing that there could be no way out of this conflict without the creation of a Palestinian State
There is also a very dedicated professional Jewish establishment in this country that works hard, within the American system, to protect the interests and support the views of whatever Israeli Government is governing. They claim to speak for the American Jewish community and have a very influential voice in the Executive Branch and the Congress. There is a lot of money involved in political campaigns, and there is a perception among politicians that if they were to take an independent view of this conflict they might be penalized. In contrast, the unorganized majority of the Jewish community lacks a strong voice.
There is also a powerful conservative evangelical Christian movement in this country that makes common cause with the theory of "Greater Israel." They interpret the Bible to mean that Israel's conquest of the ancient homeland of Judea and Samaria will bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. They also believe, although they do not advertise this, that when Jesus returns all the Jews must become Christians, or they will get a one-way ticket to hell. These evangelical Christians are another element of the political calculus in Washington.
Another strand in the U.S.-Israel alliance was the view during the Cold War that Israel was a strategic ally for the U.S. and that their powerful armed forces would protect U.S. interests, were the Soviet Union to invade the Middle East.
For all of these reasons, our policy toward mediating peace between Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians, has been reluctant, sporadic and often ineffective. It's been very hard for us to play the role we aspire to as honest broker. No doubt, bringing to bear more effective U.S. leadership will not be easy, but it can be done.
First of all we must understand how high the stakes are for Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S.
I'll say this quite bluntly. If Israel continues to dominate and to pursue a policy of quasi-annexation and Jewish settlement of the Palestinians territories, this will lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state and the corruption of Zionism. The Palestinians have a much higher birth rate than the Israeli Jews. If Israel continues to dominate the Palestinians and deny them a genuine state of their own, it will soon face a demographic majority of hostile Arabs under Jewish governance who can be controlled only through increasing force and repression. It is foolish to expect, as Ariel Sharon does, that the Palestinians will accept defeat, or that they will abandon violence if there is no political path to liberation.
This is not a future that any of us wish for Israel. We talk a lot about our bedrock commitment to Israel's well being and security and our "shared values." If we are really so committed to Israel, should we indulge their leaders in self-destructive policies that violate Israeli, as well as American values? Some say we should abandon Israel, or sanction it. I disagree. Instead we should must embrace the Israelis and the Palestinians, but tell them the truth.
The stakes are also high for the Palestinians. Needless to say, the continuation of the status quo means more misery, more heartbreak, and the defeat of their legitimate aspirations for dignity, freedom and a state of their own, where they can exercise their human rights and live as normal people.
So both Israelis and Palestinians have a vital stakes in peace and two genuine states.
The United States has an equally high stake, not just to meet our moral obligations to our Israeli and Palestinian friends, but also to protect our national security. There is no issue that has greater resonance or creates greater hostility in the Muslim and Arab world than the perception that we don't care about Palestinian equities, that we are supporting the policies of the Sharon government, and that we don't mean what we say about freedom, democracy and human rights.
This perception has helped inflame a huge region of the world against the United States. I don't have to remind you that Arab and Muslim countries have become the breeding grounds for terrorists who want to kill us. Of course, the terrorists have manipulated and exploited our policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to intensify anti-American sentiment and divert attention from their murderous intentions, but our policy also needs fixing. The reality is that we have a strategic self-interest in resolving this conflict. We need friends and allies, not just in Israel, but in the Arab and Muslim worlds also, to overcome the growing threat of terrorism.
Well, how can the U.S. resolve this terrible conflict? The good news, as I said, is that the outlines of a two state solution are increasingly clear. These have been developed over years of dialogue, official and unofficial. In the latter category, last year a group of distinguished Israelis and Palestinians came up with a virtual peace treaty called the Geneva Accord. This 55 page plans spells out the solutions for borders, settlements, refugees, Jerusalem and security. It is a model of what peace ought to be, and what most experts think it must be. So solutions to the issues don't have to be invented. Basically, they are already there for the asking. And they have the virtue of being negotiated, not by Americans, but by Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately Ariel Sharon has rejected the Geneva Accord, calling it an act of "treason," and the United States has treated it with polite indifference.
The Geneva Accord shows that peace, which meets the fundamental needs of both people - in short security for the Jewish state of Israel and liberation for the Palestinians - is possible.
A solution along the lines of the Geneva Accord would modify the border to some extent by allowing some of the big block settlements to be annexed into Israel, but it would compensate the Palestinians with one-for-one land swaps.
It would create two capitals in Jerusalem, and Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty over their respective holy sites in Jerusalem.
It would create mechanisms to ensure security. The Palestinians would not have an army or an air force, and both sides would be obliged to cooperate against their respective fanatics and extremists.
And it would resolve the refugee issue, which is one of the most contentious, by a symbolic fulfillment of the right of return. The reality is that if there is to be peace, not many Palestinian refugees can return to Israel, since that would undermine the Jewish character of Israel. Instead, they would return to the new state of Palestine and receive compensation. There would also be some modest repatriation to Israel of refugees for family reunification purposes. And other states, including the U.S., would offer immigration quotas to take some of the refugees who now live in Lebanon and elsewhere who do not wish to return to the new state of Palestine. I am convinced that the right of return is not a deal breaker, and that it is soluble as long as the other issues are resolved.
It is obvious that neither Arafat nor Sharon is going to advance such a comprehensive plan. Sharon has very different goals, and Arafat is too weak and too unimaginative to take such an initiative. The reality is that only the United States can do this. Neither the European Union nor the United Nations can play this role.
With strong leadership and commitment, we have the capability to bring about a solution. We can do this by offering a bold new American plan - something along the lines of the Geneva Accord. The President would say to the Israelis and Palestinians:
"Here is plan that will rescue you both from a grim future. The United States is totally committed, and I am appointing a senior envoy who will stick with this task until there is peace. We have deep sympathy and understanding for your needs and your suffering. But this conflict is destroying your futures and your childrens'. It is also doing great harm to the United States and the rest of the world. I want both of you to cooperate in negotiating a peace of the kind I offer. Of course the choice yours, but don't ask me to take 'no' for an answer. It is time for peace."
If we spell out such a plan skillfully and with empathy and respect for both people, I think it would galvanize politics in both societies. Eventually, it would recreate a liberal peace-minded majority in Israel, and it would also rally the Palestinian people. Neither of these societies is vicious or crazy, although they both have such people in the fringes. The art of peace making is to engage both societies and to restore hope and confidence so that they will turn against and marginalize the extremists.
Of course, if the United States were to offer such a bold and comprehensive vision of peace, there would be stiff opposition from the politicians at the outset. But in the end no Israeli or Palestinians leadership could defy us. If we do it right and do not retreat when the going gets tough, as it inevitably will, I am convinced that majorities in both Israel and Palestine will see the wisdom of such an American initiative and support negotiations to bring it about. If Sharon, Arafat, or their successors, stand in the way of a bold and sweeping American peace initiative, their constituents would eventually choose new leaders.
But could any American president, given the cautious traditions of U.S. diplomacy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the strength of various interest groups here, ever show such leadership? Why not? Surely the American public, including the majority of Jews, Christians, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans would rally to such a plan. I have never believed that American Jewish community is committed to the policies of Ariel Sharon. Indeed, there is almost certainly a silent majority of American Jews who are deeply concerned about those policies and the grim future they foretell for of Israel if Sharon's vision is fulfilled.
So an American peace plan would not only be the wise and statesmanlike thing to do, it would also be good politics and would summon broad support from most Americans.
Let us hope that the next Administration, Republican or Democrat, will finally do the right thing. If we are going to restore American credibility in the Middle East, reduce the threat of terrorism, rescue our suffering Israeli and Palestinian friends, and help resolve a very difficult challenge in Iraq, we need an imaginative and bold new initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thank you.
Speech by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President, FMEP, at the Chautauqua Institute