Palestinian rejectionism means no deal by Richard Baehr
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=
There is a long history of Israeli-Palestinian peace processing. Some things have been largely the same in every cycle. Israel has at different times offered a little more or a little less land for a Palestinian state. There have been minor shifts in the Israeli offers made on Jerusalem, so as to accommodate a Palestinian desire for a capital there. Israel has shown some flexibility in addressing the refugee issue through family reunification in Israel in a limited number of cases, with the great number having a new state as their home if they want it. At times American and third party involvement in the negotiations was significant, and at other times, largely absent.
The Palestinians have for the most part made the same demands year after year. The borders are to reflect the 1949 armistice lines. The Palestinian capital will be in east Jerusalem. The refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and their descendants shall have a right of return to Israel or to a new Palestinian state. Jews now living within the new borders of a Palestinian state must leave or accept the law of the new state. All Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails are to be released. This is a formula guaranteed to produce a stalemate and a breakup in talks.
Israel has demanded recognition that it is a Jewish state, and the Palestinians have never accepted this formulation. After all, if a new Palestinian state were created, but Israel was required to absorb millions of refugees, it would become far less of a Jewish state. The Palestinians, much like Iran, do not accept the permanence of Israel. The creation of Israel has always been considered a nakba, a disaster. While Iran has threatened missiles and nuclear weapons to reach its desired outcome, the Palestinians seemed to rely on demographic shifts and terrorism to eventually break down Israel’s will to resist. The now much higher Israeli Jewish fertility rate (more than three children per woman of child bearing age, about the same as for Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs), along with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, have significantly extended the horizons for when this supposed demographic advantage for the Palestinians in places where both people reside would be realized.
A new round of peace processing is underway, this time the Donald Trump version, spearheaded by Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt and Senior Adviser to the President Jared Kushner. The early signs are that things have not changed among the two parties. Things may have changed, however, on the American side. The Trump administration has been fighting the lawfare, and propaganda efforts Palestinians and their allies routinely push at the United Nations and other international organizations. Nikki Haley, the new American ambassador to the United Nations, has been the most vocal challenging the obsession at the U.N. with condemning Israel and its behavior. The administration in its meetings with Palestinian officials in Washington and Ramallah have demanded an end to incitement against Israel and a cutoff of Palestinian Authority payments to families of terrorists, many of whom have or had American blood on their hands. These payments are a significant dollar amount when compared to total American aid to the Palestinian Authority but are very popular among Palestinians, who see the jailed Palestinians or those killed in terror attacks as noble resistance fighters and heroe. A threat of an aid cutoff would likely result in a sham multistep process to provide an appearance that the program has ended, when it will in fact continue to fund the families. Already there are hints about the PA contributing to a social welfare organization that, among other tasks, continues the payments to the same families on the same schedule.
The U.S. Congress may soon consider the Taylor Force Act, which would require an aid cutoff if the payments continued. There are reports that there has been significant tension in the meetings between U.S. officials and the Palestinians over this issue.
In essence, the Palestinians on their own are very unlikely to show any more flexibility in a new negotiating process than in previous efforts. What may be different is that several important Sunni Arab states in the region — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates — may lean on the PA to take advantage of the opportunity of talks. These nations, over time, have come to understand that on key strategic concerns in the region, primarily Iranian aggression, the instability created by the Syrian civil war, and the threat from ISIS and al-Qaida, they share some common interests with Israel. The degree to which these nations have been willing to work with Israel, almost always behind the scenes, but a bit more in public, suggests that the constant long-standing narrative of Palestinian rejectionism that these countries have largely accepted may now be viewed as a bad path forward.
This is not to argue that peace is at hand because the Arabs will deliver the Palestinians. They won’t. The Arab street suffers from the disease of Israel-hatred and anti-Semitism, much as is the case with the Palestinians, and the Arab leaders are hardly a courageous lot leading their people to new and better relations with Israel. The good news is that if the current effort fails, as it likely will, the obsession to get a deal done among Arabs and American peace processors may fade.
Comments are closed.
