Author: one of the people

For the past weeks and months, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has been organizing for what was billed as a large national protest in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, June 10th. Many of us who want to end the occupation through a two-state, end-of-conflict peace settlement between Israel and Palestine kept our distance, however, because of the campaign’s “Palestine, yes; Israel, maybe” politics.

In terms of its own goals, the campaign appears to have been a failure. Even though the rally was scheduled to coincide with the National Convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,the Detroit News estimated the turn-out at only “Hundreds.”  And one of the campaign co-sponsers claimed only “more than 5,000.” Progressive media appeared to have ignored the event.
In light of the considerable, and amply justified, unhappiness with the Israeli occupation, what lessons should be drawn from the failure to the campaign’s national rally?

One major cause, I suggest, was the campaign’s failure to take a principled stand in favor of two states — Israel and Palestine — for two peoples. On this litmus test of fairness and realism, the campaign equivocated. It expressly affirmed “the Palestinian right to self-determination,” without equally affirming the Israeli-Jewish right to self-determination:

Q. By advocating for the end of occupation does the US Campaign advocate a two-state solution? Or does it endorse a one-state solution?

The US Campaign does not endorse either a one-state or a two-state solution, but rather upholds the Palestinian right to self-determination. We believe the Palestinians must be empowered to exercise this right, and that the international community has a responsibility towards the right of the Palestinian to self-determination. . . .

But by supporting an unlimited Palestinian right of return to Israel, the campaign, in effect, takes a position against Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. As Noam Chomsky observes in Justice for Palestine?, however, such a right “will not be exercised, in more than a limited way, within Israel. Again, there is no detectable international support for it[.]” At the rally, however, there was no equivocation. Here’s a photograph of a placard at the rally from Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, one of whose members sits on the 11-person campaign steering committee. The placard reads: “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!”

In sharp and encouraging contrast, recent polls of Arab and Jewish Americans show broad agreement in favor of two states for two peoples:

• 98% of Jewish Americans and 88% of Arab Americans agree that “Israelis have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own.”

• 90% of Jewish Americans and 96% of Arab Americans agree that “Palestinians have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own.”

(See Arab and Jewish Americans Agree. So Can We.)

In Advocacy and Realism, Noam Chomsky says that “Attention to feasible programs of action is sometimes dismissed as ‘realism’ or ‘pragmatism,’ and is placed in opposition to ‘acting on principle.’ That is a serious delusion. There is nothing ‘principled’ about refusal to pay attention to the real world and the options that exist within it . . . . Those who ignore or deride such ‘realism’ and ‘pragmatism,’ however well-intentioned they may be, are simply choosing to ignore the consequences of their actions.”

If we are to marshal broad-based support to end the occupation and achieve peace, friends of Palestinians and friends of Israel must not be enemies. We must seek to broaden coalitions, not narrow them. The only effective way forward, I suggest, is a principled stand for two states for two peoples. “Palestine, yes; Israel, maybe” should be as unwelcome as “Israel, yes; Palestine, maybe.” In particular, as members of a community dedicated to electing Democrats, we should be aware that support for two states for two peoples expresses a broad consensus within the Democratic Party.

• The 2004 Democratic Party Platform affirms that our Party “is fundamentally committed to the security of our ally Israel and the creation of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors,” including the creation of a democratic Palestinian state dedicated to living in peace and security side by side with the Jewish State of Israel.”

• President Jimmy Carter endorsed, indeed, he gave the keynote address at the public announcement of, the Geneva Initiative, a model peace treaty drafted by senior Israeli and Palestinian political figures. “This Geneva initiative,” President Carter said, “offers the crucial and unavoidable elements of a permanent peace in the Holy Land. . . . This agreement would resolve the conflict’s most critical issues, including border delineations, Israeli settlements, the excessive occupation of Palestinian lands, the future of Jerusalem and its holy places, and the extremely troubling question of Palestinian refugees. It is unlikely that we shall ever see a more promising foundation for peace.”

• The Geneva Initiative also has been endorsed by President Bill Clinton: “For both sides to have confidence that their core concerns will be met, they must achieve a common understanding of what peace will look like. That, in turn, can bolster peace constituencies, isolate extremists and empower Palestinian moderates to crack down on violence, all of which will energize a political process leading toward peace. That’s why the agreement in Geneva is so important . . .”

In late May, Zogby polled representative samples of Arab and Jewish Americans for Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute. The poll, Seeing Eye to Eye (pdf), uncovered considerable agreement between the two communities. For example,

• 98% of Jewish Americans and 88% of Arab Americans agree that “Israelis have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own.” (Table 9)

• 90% of Jewish Americans and 96% of Arab Americans agree that “Palestinians have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own.” (Table 10)

If Arab and Jewish Americans can agree on a two-state peace settlement the essential basis for ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, then so can we. More important, we should work to make that agreement, already embodied in the 2004 Democratic Party Platform, the common position of Democratic candidates nationally in 2008.
As a veteran supporter a two-state peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians I obviously am encouraged. You’ll find more extended discussions of the merits of a two-state peace settlement in a number of my diaries, including

• Two States / Two Peoples / One Peace

• Where I’m coming from

• Chomsky and the two-state I-P peace settlement.

• An important message for Israel-Palestine peace

• Uri Avnery: Against the idea of a “one-state solution”

• Points of DKos agreement for I-P Peace

Here, I present some additional data from the polls. If, like me, you believe that the significant agreement between the Arab and Jewish American communities helps validate efforts to make active support for a two-state peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians a priority for US foreign policy, then I hope you will

• indicate your support in the poll;

• recommend this diary to give more people an opportunity to show their support and our ability to reach substantial, essential agreement on this contentious issue; and

• work in your individual communities to impress on friends, acquaintances, and would-be candidates for national office the importance of making a two-state peace settlement an active part of American policy.

Selected additional survey data.

• 68% of Jewish Americans and 64% of Arab Americans would be more likely likely to support a presidential candidate who promised to take an active role in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. (Table 7).

• 87% of Jewish Americans and 94% of Arab Americans support a negotiated peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that included the establishment of an independent, secure Palestinian state alongside an independent, secure Israeli state, and resolved final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders. (Table 14).

• 89% of Jewish Americans and 92% of Arab Americans think it important for Arab Americans and Jewish Americans to work together to achieve a Middle East peace where Palestinians and Israelis each have the right to live in an independent state of their own. (Table 13).

• 65% of Jewish Americans and 89% of Arab Americans agree that it is to the interests of both Israelis and Palestinians to end the occupation. (Table 15).

• 63% of Jewish Americans and 77% of Arab Americans agree that Israel should freeze settlement construction because settlements undermine the prospects for achieving peace. (Table 16).

• The two communities need to learn more about what the other actually believes. Although overwhelming majorities of both Jewish Americans and Arab Americans support the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in secure and independent states, only 34% of Jewish Americans believe that a majority of Arab Americans hold that view about Israel (88% actually do), and 60% of Arab Americans believe that Jewish Americans hold that view about Palestine (90% actually do). (Tables 9, 10, & 12).

A bit of demography.

Party Affiliation

• Democrat:        66% of Jewish Americans; 40% of Arab Americans

• Republican:      16% of Jewish Americans; 26% of Arab Americans

• Independent:   15% of Jewish Americans; 28% of Arab Americans

Political Outlook

• Progressive:           19% of Jewish Americans; 9% of Arab Americans

• Liberal:                   34% of Jewish Americans; 21% of Arab Americans

• Moderate:               27% of Jewish Americans; 41% of Arab Americans

• Conservative:          16% of Jewish Americans; 21% of Arab Americans

• Very Conservative:    2% of Jewish Americans; 5% of Arab Americans

• Libertarian:                3% of Jewish Americans; 3% of Arab Americans

I take it as uncontroversial that, following the Six-Day War of June 1967, Palestinians have suffered greatly from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Palestinians live under Israel’s often brutal military-colonial rule. And, they face an even bleaker future unless the occupation is brought to an end. I am not aware of any DKos members who disagree. But if you do, this diary is not for you.

Another (I hope) uncontroversial point is that we take seriously being a ‘reality-based’ community. Noam Chomsky makes the point in Advocacy and Realism that “Attention to feasible programs of action is sometimes dismissed as ‘realism’ or ‘pragmatism,’ and is placed in opposition to ‘acting on principle.’ That is a serious delusion. There is nothing ‘principled’ about refusal to pay attention to the real world and the options that exist within it . . . . Those who ignore or deride such ‘realism’ and ‘pragmatism,’ however well-intentioned they may be, are simply choosing to ignore the consequences of their actions.”
What can we say about “the real world and the options that exist within it” in relation to the Palestinians and Israel? We can start by noting the existence of an international consensus in favor of a two-state settlement, blocked for many years by the US and Israel.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted after the Six-Day War, expressed an international consensus including

• “respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”; and

• “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

UNSCR 242 does not mention the Palestinians. Nor does it or  UNSCR 338, adopted to end the 1973 war, call for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Following the 1973 war, however, the international consensus changed to include support for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Chomsky dates this new consensus to January 23, 1976, when the US vetoed proposed Security Council resolution S/11940, which affirmed, among other things,

“That the Palestinian people should be enabled to exercise its inalienable national right of self-determination, including the right to establish an independent state in Palestine in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

“In contrast,” as Chomsky also notes, “there has been no support for a one-state solution from any significant actor throughout this period.” At one time, the Palestine Liberation Organization called for a ‘democratic secular state’ in all of Palestine. But the substance of that call involved, in Chomsky’s words, the “liquidation of all Jewish political, social, and cultural institutions within an ‘Arab nation.'” In Chomsky’s view, it is “virtually unimaginable” that “some meaningful international support would develop for such a plan,” and were it to occur, “Israel would oppose it by any possible means: that includes the ultimate weapons, which Israel has available and can use.”

What stand can a person concerned for the Palestinians take that makes use of the potential, and respects the limits, of the real world? One stand is for a genuine two-state peace settlement in accordance with the international consensus.

In a 2004 interview published in ZNet as Justice for Palestine?, Chomsky argues that, in deciding what compromises should or should not be accepted, “The closest we can come to a formula — and it is pretty meaningless — is that compromises should be accepted if they are the best possible and can lead the way to something better.” In Chomsky’s view, “The Geneva Accord approximates the criterion, and therefore should be accepted[.]” The Geneva Accord, or Initiative,

“gives a detailed program for a 1-1 land swap and other aspects of a settlement, and is about as good as is likely to be achieved — and could be achieved if the US government would back it, which is of course the one issue that we can hope to influence, hence the most important for us.” (map of proposed final borders reproduced below)

In Advocacy and Realism, Chomsky adds that, “For the first time, they open the doors to a 1-1 land swap that could be meaningful, and they break from the cantonization programs of earlier proposals.” (In Justice for Palestine?, Chomsky also mentions approvingly the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Plan. He does not discuss the Clinton Peace Parameters, which I discuss here.)

Even the Geneva Initiative, Chomsky believes, still has “objectionable features, but the operative question is whether they can be taken as a serious basis for negotiations [Chomsky affirms that they can], and whether there is an alternative that is likely to offer more for the Palestinians than proceeding on this basis.” Chomsky says not.

Is a Geneva Initiative-based, two-state peace settlement attainable? For several reasons, with which I agree, Chomsky believes that it is attainable, at least if US policy supports it.

• In Justice for Palestine?, Chomsky notes that, in late 2003, the former heads of the Israeli General Security Services (Shin Bet), agreed that Israel could and should leave the Gaza Strip altogether and that 85%-90% of the West Bank settlers would leave if presented “with a simple economic plan.” Israel, they and Chomsky believe, can deal successfully with the 10% who might resist.

• Chomsky believes, and I agree, that the former heads of the Shin Bet are  realistic in their assessment of Israeli society. “Even without any US pressure, considerable majorities favor something of this sort — again, depending on exactly how questions are asked in polls.”

• But US influence must not be discounted: Chomsky believes that what Israel will accept is to some degree a function of what the United States wants, which makes it our responsibility. “To the extent that US policy can be shifted towards the international consensus . . ., support will increase in Israel[.]”

Chomsky denies the existence of a feasible alternative to a two-state peace settlement. “If there is such alternative, let’s by all means hear it. Those who do not want to undertake that responsibility are choosing, in effect, to take part in an academic seminar among disengaged intellectuals on Mars.”

A one-state solution is not feasible because, as Chomsky puts in Justice for Palestine?,

“there is virtually no possibility of organizing public opinion in the US, or anywhere else, in favor of a settlement that entails elimination of Israel in favor of a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority — quite a small and scattered minority if refugees return. This is entirely fanciful. And as I mentioned, it would of course be opposed by virtually all Israelis. In this case they would be very likely to resort to their ‘ultimate weapon’ — which they possess — to prevent what they would plausibly regard as their destruction.”

Let’s pause nevertheless to consider the implications of supporting a one-state solution. Here, I touch on a point that Chomsky does not discuss.

Presumably, what people of good will who support a one-state solution have in mind is something along the lines of the former PLO slogan of a democratic secular state throughout all of Palestine, that is, both Israel within the Green Line and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. I take it that people hope and expect that Palestinians and Israeli Jews will live together peacefully as equal citizens of that one state.

Following Chomsky, we must ask the feasibility question, how is such a goal to be realized? How can we so radically change the course of history? I see only two possibilities: voluntary and involuntary.

Israeli Jewish voluntary agreement to dissolve their state and society is unimaginable as an immediate proposition. One can entertain a longer-term vision, but it passes through the two-state solution. That is, as Chomsky argues in Advocacy and Realism, successful implementation of “a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus, and reversing the escalating cycle of hostility, hatred, violence, repression, and dispossession,” may open up possibilities for further federal, bi-national, or one-state developments. According to Chomsky, “two states in cis-Jordan [that is, west of the Jordan River,] make little sense, and both communities have good reasons to seek further integration.” But this is not an option Israeli Jews are going to choose voluntarily in the foreseeable future.

So, a supporter of a one-state solution either must begin by making common cause with supporters of a two-state peace settlement, or, must seek somehow to impose a single state on Israeli Jews. Chomsky raises the specter of Israeli resistance, extending to the use of nuclear weapons, but let’s put that objection aside for the moment. Who might be able to impose a one-state solution? The only imaginable candidates are the Arab states, possibly with the assistance of Iran.

So, starting with the pacific desire of Arabs and Jews living together as equal citizens in a single state, one is led to rely on Syria, Egypt, possibly Iraq, possibly Iran, and other Arab states, to, first, defeat Israel and, then, magnanimously create a secular, democratic state in Palestine. In the name of peace, one arrives at a policy that requires war and depends on the victors creating the kind of peaceful, democratic society none of them has succeeded in creating for itself. (See also, Sean Matgamna, Letter to an advocate of the ‘secular democratic state’).

But what about the Palestinian refugees and their claims for justice, the application of (a certain conception of) international law, and the like? According to Chomsky in Advocacy and Realism, “Much the same [as applies to the one-state proposal] holds with regard to the ‘right of return.'” Implementation of a Palestinian ‘right of return,’ at least within the state of Israel, is unimaginable: “Israel would resort to its ultimate weapons to prevent it,” and “Those who have any concern for the fate of the refugees will not dangle before their eyes hopes that will not be realized. And they can hardly claim that to do so is a moral stance.”

On the other hand, according to Chomsky, “Palestinian refugees should certainly not be willing to renounce the right of return.”

How are these two points to be reconciled? While I’m not entirely sure how Chomsky would do so, in my view, the late Israeli strategist Yehoshafat Harkabi, a professor of international relations at Hebrew University and formerly Chief of Military Intelligence, pointed the way in his 1988 book Israel’s Fateful Hour:

“The settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict can only be settled on this principle: One cannot persuade Palestinians that Jaffa, Haifa, and Nazareth are not part of ‘Palestine.’ One cannot persuade Diaspora Jews and Israelis that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are not part of Eretz Yisrael. The solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict requires that both Israelis and Palestinians resign themselves to the arrangement that their respective states in which they will be citizens will occupy only part of their homeland, to which they will both bear sentimental allegiance.” (p. xviii).

In this vein, regarding Palestinian refugees and the ‘right of return,’ the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Plan provides:

“4. Right of return: Recognizing the suffering and the plight of the Palestinian refugees, the international community, Israel, and the Palestinian State will initiate and contribute to an international fund to compensate them.

• Palestinian refugees will return only to the State of Palestine; Jews will return only to the State of Israel.

• The international community will offer to compensate toward bettering the lot of those refugees willing to remain in their present country of residence, or who wish to immigrate to third-party countries.”

The Geneva Initiative, which is more detailed (being a model peace treaty), devotes an entire Article to the subject. Article 7 has two parts that are of present significance: one declarative, the other substantive.

• Declaratively, the Geneva Initiative affirms that “an agreed resolution of the refugee problem is necessary for achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace between them,” and that “UNGAR 194, UNSC Resolution 242, and the Arab Peace Initiative (Article 2.ii.) concerning the rights of the Palestinian refugees represent the basis for resolving the refugee issue, and agree that these rights are fulfilled according to Article 7 of this Agreement.”

• Substantively, the Geneva Initiative provides that refugees shall be entitled to compensation and to a variety of choices of a permanent place of residence, including, among others, (a) the state of Palestine “in accordance with the laws of the State of Palestine,” and (b) the state of Israel “at the sovereign discretion of Israel.” And, of prime significance, the peace treaty permanently and completely resolves the Palestinian refugee problem: “No claims may be raised except for those related to the implementation of this agreement.”

From Chomsky’s approving references to the Geneva Initiative and the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Plan, I surmise that Chomsky accepts the necessity of such a compromise as part of a two-state peace settlement. As he writes in Advocacy and Realism, “Those who have any concern for the fate of the refugees will not dangle before their eyes hopes that will not be realized.”

Reality-based friends of the Palestinians also should be concerned by Chomsky’s contention that calling for a one-state solution serves the interests of Israel and US rejectionists. In Justice for Palestine? Chomsky writes:

“The call for a ‘democratic secular state,’ which is not taken seriously by the Israeli public or internationally, is an explicit demand for the destruction of Israel, offering nothing to Israelis beyond the hope of a degree of freedom in an eventual Palestinian state. The propaganda systems in Israel and the US will joyously welcome the proposal if it gains more than even marginal attention, and will labor to give it great publicity, interpreting it as just another demonstration that there is ‘no partner for peace,’ so that the US-Israel have no choice but to establish ‘security’ by caging barbaric Palestinians into a West Bank dungeon while taking over the valuable lands and resources. The most extreme and violent elements in Israel and the US could hope for no greater gift than this proposal.”

In general terms, I suppose, I am advocating applying to the Israel-Palestine conflict what Max Weber, in Politics as a Vocation called an “ethic of responsibility.” Weber explains:

“[A]ll ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility.’ . . . [T]here is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends–that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’–and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action.”

From this perspective, I sincerely assert, that the only way to be a true friend of the Palestinians is to stand for a true two-state peace settlement. To stand effectively for a two-statement requires, I believe, seeking to broaden coalitions, not narrow them.

As one who believes in the importance of changing our Nation’s course in many political areas, and who sees the Democratic Party as the only available vehicle, I take comfort from the fact that support for two states for two peoples expresses a broad consensus within the Democratic Party.

• The 2004 Democratic Party Platform affirms that our Party “is fundamentally committed to the security of our ally Israel and the creation of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors,” including the creation of a democratic Palestinian state dedicated to living in peace and security side by side with the Jewish State of Israel.”

• President Jimmy Carter endorsed, indeed, he gave the keynote address at the public announcement of, the Geneva Initiative. “This Geneva initiative offers the crucial and unavoidable elements of a permanent peace in the Holy Land. . . . This agreement would resolve the conflict’s most critical issues, including border delineations, Israeli settlements, the excessive occupation of Palestinian lands, the future of Jerusalem and its holy places, and the extremely troubling question of Palestinian refugees. It is unlikely that we shall ever see a more promising foundation for peace.”

• The Geneva Initiative also has been endorsed by President Bill Clinton: “For both sides to have confidence that their core concerns will be met, they must achieve a common understanding of what peace will look like. That, in turn, can bolster peace constituencies, isolate extremists and empower Palestinian moderates to crack down on violence, all of which will energize a political process leading toward peace. That’s why the agreement in Geneva is so important . . .”

As people concerned for the terrible condition of the Palestinians and — speaking for myself and I trust many others — also for the longterm well-being of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state, our tasks include

• giving real content — along the lines of the Geneva Initiative or the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Plan — to the Democratic consensus;

• obtaining commitments from Democratic candidates for president to a real two-state peace settlement; and

• making active, consistent US support for a genuine two-state peace settlement a priority for the next administration.

An op-ed article in today’s Boston Globe by the executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine and the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now demonstrates that Arab and Jewish Americans can work together for an historic compromise, “a grand deal that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians have repeatedly said they support,” namely, “an end to Israeli territorial claims in the West Bank and an end to Palestinian claims inside Israel.”

“The question is not whether a two-state solution is attainable. The question is whether Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans will exercise the political will to make it happen.” If Arab and Jewish American organizations can work together to achieve an end-of-conflict, two-state peace between Israel and Palestine, surely we here at Booman Tribune ought to be involved with them.
The only alternative is perpetual conflict, with one or both sides engaged in the futile, and morally abhorrent, effort to defeat the other.

Israeli and Palestinian hard-liners say there will be peace only when the other side is defeated. Surrender is not an option for either side, as we have seen in 20 years of on-again-off-again violence. But repeated Israeli attempts to defeat the Palestinians militarily have not brought Israel security. And Palestinian violent resistance has hurt the Palestinian economy, people, and cause rather than force Israel to end the occupation. Neither side can defeat the other, make the other disappear, or drive the other away.

The other alternative is propounded by those, mainly on the Palestinian (and Israeli) far left, who support a “one-state solution,” the revival of the old chimera of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. This two-headed monster is as unrealistic and undesirable today as it ever was. A binational state means, for all practical purposes, dismantling the state of Israel. Would Israeli Jews ever accept that? Would Palestinians — or anyone else, for that matter — ever be able to impose it? Why should Israelis give up on their dream and why should Palestinians give up on their yearning for a national homeland? And how would the two communities share in government and administration?

The map on the left, from the American Task Force on Palestine illustrates the international consensus on a future Palestinian State. Not surprisingly, it is consistent with maps illustrating the Clinton Peace Parameters by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ehud Barak’s dovish Foreign Minister and author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, and President Clinton’s chief peace negotiator, Dennis Ross; as well as the joint Israeli-Palestinian Geneva Initiative.

As The Economist writes in its current lead editorial, Israel’s wasted victory: “For peace to come, Israel must give up the West Bank and share Jerusalem; the Palestinians must give up the dream of return and make Israel feel secure as a Jewish state. All the rest is detail.”

The American Task Force on Palestine “advocates the following six principles towards a fair and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

1. Two sovereign states–Israel and Palestine–living side by side in peace and security based on the borders of June 4, 1967 with mutually agreed upon territorial adjustments.

2. An end to the Israeli occupation and the evacuation of all Israeli settlements, save for equitable arrangements mutually agreed upon by the negotiating parties.

3. A just solution for the Palestinian refugee problem, in accordance with international legality and the relevant UN resolutions.

4. A shared Jerusalem open to all faiths, serving as the capital of two states, providing for the fulfillment of the political aspirations of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.

5. Full acceptance of Israel by all Arab states, and normalized diplomatic and economic relations throughout the region.

6. A ‘Marshall Plan’ style package of aid and investment for Palestine and the new Middle East.”

Regarding the Palestinian refugee issue, ATFP has issued the following Statement of Principles:

The objective of ATFP is the establishment of a Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, and an end of the Israeli occupation that began in 1967. ATFP is opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, but is not opposed to the state of Israel in its internationally recognized borders.

1. A resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue can only come about through direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials as an expression of their national policies. No other parties are entitled to negotiate on this issue. However, individuals and organizations are free to express their opinions on this issue in the spirit of free, open and respectful debate.

2. There are many parties responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. Responsible parties include first Israel for displacing the Palestinian refugees, refusing their return and confiscating their property without compensation. Some Arab states also bear varying degrees of responsibility; some for allowing generations of refugees to languish in camps under miserable conditions, or by placing various restrictions in terms of their legal status, employment and travel rights, and others for not having done enough to ease the suffering of refugees. Finally, the Palestinian leadership has been at fault for not communicating honestly and openly with the refugees on what they can expect for their future.

3. The right of return is an integral part of international humanitarian law, and cannot be renounced by any parties. There is no Palestinian constituency of consequence that would agree to the renunciation of this right. There is also no Jewish constituency of consequence in Israel that would accept the return of millions of Palestinian refugees.

4. Although the right of return cannot be renounced, it should not stand in the way of the only identifiable peaceful prospect for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a resolution based on a state of Israel living side-by-side with a Palestinian state in the occupied territories with its capital in East Jerusalem. Implementation of the right of return cannot obviate the logic of a resolution based on two states. The challenge for the Israeli and Palestinian national leaderships is to arrive at a formula that recognizes refugee rights but which does not contradict the basis of a two-state solution and an end to the conflict.

5. As part of any comprehensive settlement ending the conflict, Israel should accept its moral responsibility to apologize to the Palestinian people for the creation of the refugee problem. Palestinians should accept that this acknowledgment of responsibility does not undermine the legitimacy of the present-day Israeli state.

Or, as the dovish Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on May 27th: “without acknowledging the Jewish character of the State of Israel, there is not even a basis for dialogue.” And, we might add, the same is true if we fail to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinian refugees and their entitlement to redress.

With my old friend Hanna Siniora, Gershon Baskin co-directs IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.

IPCRI, founded in Jerusalem in 1988, is the only joint Palestinian-Israeli public policy think-tank in the world. It is devoted to developing practical solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
IPCRI deals with the cardinal issues in the Israeli-Arab conflict – issues where the two sides find themselves at loggerheads, and where cooperation is necessary.

In recent articles in Yediot Ahronot and the Jerusalem Post, Baskin makes some important points regarding peace between Israel and Palestine. In his Jerusalem Post article, Baskin affirms his Zionist vocation and dedication to “the existence of State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” In other words, Baskin is within the mainstream of the Israeli peace camp.

Baskin writes:

I have been called everything from a self-hating Jew to a post-Zionist. I am neither. I am and have always been very Jewish and very Zionist. The main motivations behind all of what I believe are in fact both my Jewish identity and my Zionist one. For me the existence of State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people is the ultimate expression of the national strategic interests of the Jewish people. It is an expression of our liberation and our determination to be a free people in our land. But Israel cannot fulfill the national strategic interests of the Jewish people if it is a state built on oppression, persecution and denial of the national rights of another people.

Baskin’s restatement of these beliefs, with which I have identified myself for my entire adult political life, I hope make clear that coming to terms with Israel, and Israelis, cannot realistically be based on insisting on demands, such as “one state” or a “right of return,” that negate Israel’s character, or at least aspiration, to be a democratic and Jewish state.

Baskin answers his Israeli critics by asking them for a practical alternative:

FROM ALL of my critics I have yet to understand in practical terms what they propose as an alternative to serve the interests of Israel and the Jewish people. I don’t believe that there are real Jews who could even think of the possibility of removing the Palestinians from here by force. There is the notion of “transfer by choice” – a ridiculous idea based on the suggestion that if we make their lives so intolerable, they will chose to pick up and leave on their own.

Baskin’s critics, IMHO, have no good answer.

In his article for Yediot, Who’s at fault? Israel bemoans absence of Palestinian partner, but we are partly to blame, Baskin directly engages the issue of the occupation and presses The June 5th Initiative. As I do not have permission to reproduce Baskin’s article, my direct quotations from it are necessarily limited.

Baskin begins with the near-universal opposition to the occupation:

The anti-Zionist movement is picking up speed. The entire world is against the occupation. The good news is that the State of Israel is also against the occupation – its people and government seek peace with the Palestinian people on the basis of “two states for two peoples.” Speaking at the United Nations in September 2005, Prime Minister Sharon said that the Palestinian people are “entitled to freedom and to national sovereign existence in a state of their own.”

Even though, as Baskin argues, “there is no point in signing a peace agreement when the Palestinian government has no ability to fulfill its obligations,” and the Palestinian government is divided between a president — Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) — who wants to make peace but cannot and a government “mostly made up of a radical Islamic movement that seeks Israel’s destruction,” it is no answer for Israel to deny the existence of a peace partner on the Palestinian side, especially because Israel’s own actions have weakened, and continue to weaken, Abbas’s position.

Proof of this is the situation in the Gaza Strip: Israel argues that Abbas controls tens of thousands of uniformed police officers, who fail to curb the Qassam rocket attacks. Is that indeed the case? His loyalists have not been paid regularly for more than a year now. The Palestinian Authority’s government system has collapsed a long time ago. Gaza Strip residents live without any personal or social security. They can see neither political nor economic horizon. . . . Perhaps Israel does not bear direct responsibility for this situation, yet it is certainly a direct result of its policy. The complete lack of Palestinian Authority control in Gaza threatens its hold over the West Bank as well. Similarly, the weakening of the moderate and non-religious parts of Palestinian society boosts the radical Islamic sectors not only in Palestine, but rather, across the region.

As an immediate proposal, and noting that both senior Israeli officials and the international community trust the new Palestinian Finance Minister, Salam Fayyad, Baskin urges the release of the $600 million in Palestinian tax revenue that Israel currently holds. “Injecting USD 600 million into the Palestinian economy would have had an immediate positive effect on the grim situation and would have greatly assisted in boosting the president and his moderate forces.”

Baskin also calls on Israel to recognize the Palestinian national unity government and to reopen the Rafah crossing point into Egypt, so that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are no longer completely dependent on Israel.

And Israel should engage itself constructively in the diplomatic peace-making process:

We must also declare that the State of Israel accepts the Arab peace initiative as a basis for restarting negotiations. We must declare that the negotiations will start with the ratification of the Clinton parameters, which moderates the Arab Initiative through the notion of territorial tradeoffs instead of clinging to the 1967 borders. We must declare that any improvement in the conduct of Palestinian Authority security arms will be rewarded with an Israeli redeployment outside towns and villages, including the removal of roadblocks.

IMHO, Baskin is completely on target. I would hope that self-styled friends of both Israel and Palestine could unite in supporting his proposals. Indeed, this why, like Baskin in addressing his fellow Israelis, I have been asking “pro-Palestinian” critics of an end-of-conflict peace settlement modeled on the Clinton Peace Parameters or the Geneva Initiative to explain in practical terms how they propose to achieve their desired solution either peacefully or non-peacefully, considering the demonstrated willingness and ability of Israelis to defend their state, the structure that grounds their collective life.

Like Baskin, I have yet to see or hear an answer that I can understand. Some people look askance at my insisting on asking these uncomfortable questions, even though I am just as insistent in posing Baskin-like questions on the rare occasions when I run across a “pro-Israel” comment advocating a position inconsistent with Palestinian national self-determination.

All I can say is that, most members and supporters of the Israeli peace camp are, in the words of the late Yehoshafat Harkabi, doves with talons. We have been, and will be, strong, consistent allies in any peaceful struggle for a Palestinian state based on acceptance, at least on a going forward basis, of Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. We do not even require abandonment of dreams of a future Palestinian right of return to Israel and of a single state. But we do insist both on peaceful means and not counter-posing those dreams to practical efforts to immeasurably improve the lives of both peoples, particularly the Palestinians, by achieving two states for two peoples, living together in peace.

Hat-tip to Eileen Fleming  for drawing my attention to the two Baskin articles.

Many of us identified with the Israel “side” of I-P discussions often state our belief that most “pro-Israel” participants support a genuine two-state peace settlement. Many of those on the “Palestine” side often state their support for Israel’s continued existence alongside a (desired) state of Palestine. Under the motto Two States / Two Peoples / One Peace, The June 5th Initiative gives us, and all DKos members interested in an end-of-conflict peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, the opportunity to demonstrate where we stand, and to try to make a difference in the real world.

Below the fold, I reproduce the (brief) text of the Initiative. If you can support it, please say so in the comments and go here to add your real name to the public list of endorsers from around the world.

If you are a member of Daily Kos, please add your name and rec here

Thank you for your consideration.
The June 5th Initiative

Mission Statement

June 5, 2007 will mark 40 years since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Over the years, Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting each other endlessly, ferociously resulting in death, devastation, and destruction. In recent years polls repeatedly show that the silent majorities of both peoples understand that they have no other national home, and that neither side is going to leave their homes. Hence, most people believe that it is time to reach an historical peaceful compromise, ending the occupation and ending the conflict.

During the week of June 5, 2007 the June 5 Initiative for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a civil society initiative together with various NGOs and individuals, will send a loud and clear message to the peoples and leaders of the region and around that world that the silent majorities of Israelis and Palestinians accept a peaceful compromise based on the “two-states for two peoples” formula on the basis of the 1967 borders. For the first time in years,  events and demonstrations for peace will be conducted in both Palestine and Israel.

We leave the details of the peace agreement to our leaders, but we want to show our support for an historical compromise for peace. We call on our leaders to initiate non-stop negotiations for peace until full agreements are reached. We affirm that there are partners for peace on both sides. We assert our commitment to the principle that the Palestinian and the Jewish peoples have a right to a state of their own, and that they have a right and deserve to live in peace, security and prosperity.

An international list of endorsers may be found here.

Original Tags: Peace, Israel, Palestine

Rather than hijack shergald’s diary on this subject, I offer this account for your consideration. I welcome reasoned, fact-based comments.

Focusing particularly on the Clinton Peace Parameters of December 2000, I’ve contended that Yasser Arafat should have responded more constructively during the period from the Camp David summit of July 2000 through the Taba negotiations in January 2001. In opposition, some invoke “the myth of the generous offer,” a meme that generally refers to Camp David. My requests for attention to the Clinton proposals, and for explanations and evidence, largely go unanswered.

Here I set out my understanding and interpretation of the facts together with supporting references. I invite those who disagree to offer their own substantive interpretations and supporting evidence.
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I have opposed Israel’s colonization project in the West Bank from its outset as a folly that, in my understanding, violates of international law, even though the occupation itself is the legitimate result of Israel’s success in a defensive war, and is accepted by the United Nations for the time being. In United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, the Council called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories [not “the territories”] occupied in the recent conflict” in conjunction with the “[t]ermination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”. Unfortunately, we still lack the necessary agreement on the Palestinian front.

The United Nations confirmed its acceptance of the occupation, along with the necessity for “a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” based on a “two state solution,” by welcoming a Performance-Based Roadmap. The goal is

“the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.  The settlement will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and end the occupation that began in 1967, based on the foundations of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah – endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit – calling for acceptance of Israel as a neighbor living in peace and security, in the context of a comprehensive settlement.”

Introducing Shlomo Ben-Ami

In general, I accept the analysis of Shlomo Ben-Ami, a dove who was Israel’s Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. Ben-Ami, who also conducted secret talks with Abu-Ala (Ahmed Qurei) in Stockholm, received his D. Phil. from St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, and was the Chairman of the History Department at Tel-Aviv University. He is the author, among other works, of  Origins of the Second Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1978), Fascism from Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923-1930 (Oxford, 1983), and Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (Oxford, 2006).

Both sides have done wrong and made mistakes

In particular, I share Ben-Ami’s assessment that both Israelis and Palestinians have done wrong and made bad choices:

“No one in this conflict has a monopoly on suffering and martyrdom; nor is the responsibility for war atrocities exclusive to one party. In this tragic tribal dispute, both Jews and Arabs have committed acts of unpardonable violence, and both have succumbed at times to their most bestial instincts. What is no less grave is that they have both too frequently chosen the wrong course, refusing to see the changing realities and adapt their policies accordingly.” (Scars of War, p. 332.)

The Clinton Peace Parameters: the major lost opportunity.

I also agree with Ben-Ami that, while the Palestinians may not have been able to accept the Camp David offers, “the real lost opportunities came later” (whether they should have responded constructively at Camp David being another matter):

“Admittedly, however, Camp David might not have been the deal the Palestinians could have accepted. The real lost opportunities came later on. The negotiations continued after Camp David. More than fifty meetings between the parties and the American mediators, both in Israel and in the United States, took place throughout the summer and autumn of 2000. This was a sequence of round tables that culminated on 23 December in a meeting in the Cabinet room adjacent to the Oval Office, where President Clinton presented to an Israeli delegation presided over by this author and a Palestinian team headed by Yasser Abd-Rabbo his final parameters for a peace treaty between the parties. The parameters were not the arbitrary and sudden whim of a lame-duck president. They represented a brilliantly devised point of equilibrium between the positions of the parties as they stood at that particular moment in the negotiations.” (Scars of War, p. 270.)

As Ben-Ami summarizes them, in their territorial aspects, the Clinton Peace Parameters, included a “sovereign” Palestine state containing all of the Gaza Strip, 97% of the West Bank, and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, a safe passage, docks in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, “so as to wrap up a deal that for all practical purposes could be tantamount to 100 per cent [of the] territory,” i.e., of the West Bank plus the Gaza Strip. ((Scars of War, p. 270.) Fortuitously, after I had first nearly completed this diary, the New York Times published an op-ed article by President Clinton’s chief envoy to the Middle East, Dennis Ross, entitled Don’t Play With Maps. (Available at no charge here.) In this article, Ross summarizes the Clinton Peace Parameters, of which he was the principal author, as follows:

Put simply, the Clinton parameters would have produced an independent Palestinian state with 100 percent of Gaza, roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and an elevated train or highway to connect them. Jerusalem’s status would have been guided by the principle that what is currently Jewish will be Israeli and what is currently Arab will be Palestinian, meaning that Jewish Jerusalem — East and West — would be united, while Arab East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state.

The Palestinian state would have been “nonmilitarized,” with internal security forces but no army and an international military presence led by the United States to prevent terrorist infiltration and smuggling. Palestinian refugees would have had the right of return to their state, but not to Israel, and a fund of $30 billion would have been created to compensate those refugees who chose not to exercise their right of return to the Palestinian state.

In Scars of War, Ben-Ami includes a map illustrating his understanding of the proposed borders. You can see that, among other things,

• The Jordan Valley is part of Palestine

• There are no Israeli settlements outside the settlement blocs near the Green Line to be annexed to Israel

• Hence there is geographic contiguity — and no Bantustans — within the West Bank

• In compensation for annexing the settlement blocs, Israel gives Palestine territory from within the Green Line, i.e., the pre-June war border

• The two parts of Palestine — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — are connected by a “safe passage” across Israel:

If you have difficulty making out all the details, you may want to look at Dennis Ross’s illustration of the Clinton Peace Parameters. It is substantially similar to the Ben-Ami map, except that Ross does not show either the safe passage or areas to be transferred from Israel to Palestine. As Ross explains in his NYT op-ed article:

When I decided to write the story of what had happened in the negotiations, I commissioned maps to illustrate what the proposals would have meant for a prospective Palestinian state. If the Clinton proposals in December 2000 had been Israeli or Palestinian ideas and I was interpreting them, others could certainly question my interpretation. But they were American ideas, created at the request of the Palestinians and the Israelis, and I was the principal author of them. I know what they were and so do the parties.

Israel accepts the Clinton Peace Parameters; Arafat rejects them.

President Clinton, Ben-Ami tells us, “presented his parameters as a ‘take it or leave it deal’. . . . It was not supposed to be the basis for further negotiations but a set of principles to be translated by the parties into a peace treaty.” (Scars of War, p. 272.)

President Clinton said at the time that Israel had accepted his proposals:

“‘Israel has said that they would agree to try to close the remaining gaps within the parameters of the ideas I put forward if the Palestinians will agree,’ [Bill Clinton] said, throwing the ball into the Palestinians’ court. ‘And I think that this latest violence only reminds people of what the alternative to peace is.’

“Clinton is almost certain to invite Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat to Washington early next week for separate talks if the Palestinians answer affirmatively. Those talks could pave the way for a three-way summit.

“Clinton has been on the phone daily, speaking to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah and Saudi King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah to ask them to pressure Arafat into accepting the suggested compromises, primarily the idea that the Palestinians would largely have to give up the right of return to Israel.”

Ben-Ami writes: “Our decision, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada . . . was a daring decision of a government (then already a minority government) of peace that stretched itself to the outer limits of its legitimacy in order to endorse positions its [domestic] opponents labeled as suicidal and as being an affront to Jewish values and history.” (Scars of War, p. 272.)

Yossi Beilin, another dove, then Minister of Justice and now leader of Meretz-Yachad,  confirms that, “On December 28, [2000], at a meeting of the government [i.e., the cabinet,] the [Clinton] plan was endorsed in principle . . . From that moment, the Clinton Plan embodied Israel’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel, which had said no to the Rogers Plan in 1969 and no to the Reagan Plan in 1982, said yes to the Clinton Plan in 2000.” (Yossi Beilin, The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004 , Page 223.)

By the way, former president Jimmy Carter has said of Yossi Beilin: “I have had an opportunity to deal with a few individuals whose commitment to peace merit special recognition. Yossi Beilin is one of those people. He has dedicated a significant amount of his personal and professional life to the proposition that a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians requires principled and mutually beneficial compromise from both sides. I was honored to present the keynote speech . . . at the formal launching of the Geneva Initiative, an example of his leadership. His recollections of the years 1996-2004 should be required reading for anyone interested in the search for peace in the Middle East.” (From a blurb on the dust jacket of Beilin’s book.)

Robert Malley, a junior member of the U.S. team who, with Hussein Agha has written critically of American, Israeli, and Palestinian conduct in the peacemaking process (see below), observes: “Arafat had the best deal he could ever get. He could not get more and he had hit the proverbial wall. At the time, this was quite clear to American and to Israeli leaders. And in hindsight, it is now painfully clear to many more, including Palestinians.”

Although the Clinton Peace Parameters “gave Arafat almost everything he wanted,” as Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., “recognized” when Dennis Ross “showed Bandar the President’s talking papers” (Elisa Walsh, The New Yorker, March 24, 2003, p. 55), Yasser Arafat did not accept them. Ahmed Querei, (Abu Ala) who has served as both Speaker of the Palestinian parliament and Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), told the Guardian, as reported on January 8, 2001, in Palestinians Reject Peace Plan:”We can’t accept Clinton’s ideas as a basis for future negotiations or a future settlement.”

Walsh’s New Yorker article describes the efforts of Bandar and Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S. to persuade Arafat to accept the Clinton Peace Parameters. Arafat assured them that he would do so. When Bandar met with Arafat and learned that he had rejected the offer, “Bandar believed that . . . Arafat . . . was committing a crime against the Palestinians – in fact, against the entire region. If it weren’t so serious, Bandar thought, it would be a comedy.” (p. 57)

And yet, about eighteen months later (and after helping Ariel Sharon defeat Ehud Barak), Arafat told veteran Ha’aretz correspondent Akiva Eldar that he was ready to accept the Clinton Peace Parameters:

“Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat yesterday issued a call for “no more war,” declaring that he accepts the proposal first made by former U.S. president Bill Clinton as a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. . . . Yesterday’s interview was the first time Arafat has declared his acceptance of the Clinton proposal.” (Ha’aretz, June 21, 2002)

Arafat’s belated acceptance of the Clinton Peace Parameters should put paid to the myth, as Ross describes it in his op-ed article, “that seeks to defend Mr. Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren’t real or they were too vague or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised.”

The unhappy conclusion, in Ben-Ami’s words, is that “Three times in their history the Palestinians were offered statehood — in 1937 [when the Peel Commission recommended partition], in 1947 [when the UN General Assembly voted partition] and through the Clinton Parameters in 2000 — and three times they have rejected it.”

What about Camp David?

We thus see that it is not a myth to say that the Palestinians missed a real opportunity for statehood at the end of 2000 by rejecting the Clinton Peace Parameters. In this context, at least, the so-called myth of the generous offer is itself a myth. Accordingly, it might be thought unnecessary to consider what happened at Camp David the preceding July, and whether the Palestinians missed another real opportunity. On the other hand, it is at least strongly likely that, had the Camp David summit not ended in public failure, the second intifada would not have occurred, and both the Palestinians and Israelis would have been spared the last six plus years of bloodshed and hardship.

As I understand the “myth of the generous offer” meme, the proponents of the alleged myth are said to claim that:

• at Camp David, “Israel offered the Palestinians extraordinary concessions”

• but “Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer”.

The conclusion the supposed myth-makers are said to want us to draw is that “There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors.” In contrast, the would-be debunkers of the so-called myth maintain that Israel was “far from generous,” leaving Palestine in the West Bank with only disconnected “Bantustans” (in the word commonly used by a prominent DKos member of this school).

In fact, as I hope to persuade you, whether or not one chooses to call the ultimate Israeli position at Camp David “generous” — an irrelevant question, I think — the offer to the Palestinians was substantial enough to have warranted a constructive response in the form either of a counter-proposal or negotiations to modify and improve the offer. Having said that, I reiterate my belief that Arafat’s failure in this regard does not relieve Israel from the need to continue to seek peace with the Palestinians, nor does it justify Israel’s settlements policies or all the ways in which the occupation is maintained.

While Barak surely can be criticized for his handling of the peace process both before and at Camp David, efforts to exonerate Arafat of responsibility for the ultimate collapse of the peace process, leading to the election of Sharon, are without merit.

One of Barak’s failings was his failure to carry out an agreement to transfer to the Palestinian Authority three Arab villages near Jerusalem.  Barak reasoned that, from a domestic perspective, it would be easier for him politically to bundle all his concessions to the Palestinians in the comprehensive peace settlement he expected to achieve at Camp David.  While he may have reasoned well about Israeli politics, his conduct fed Palestinian mistrust of his intentions.

At Camp David, Barak went significantly beyond any prior Israeli government, including

• withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip

• withdrawal from 92% of the West Bank, including complete withdrawal (in stages) from the Jordan River

• retaining and annexing settlement blocs only near the Green Line, which did not cut up the West Bank into cantons

• a Palestinian state that, although demilitarized would have had full sovereignty over its natural resources

The two maps presented side-by-side below illustrate, on the left, the PLO version of the ultimate Camp David offer and, on the right, the actual offer. They are taken from Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. Although it is fashionable for some people to dismiss Ross out-of-hand, readers may want to bear in mind that President Clinton has called Ross’s book “definitive” and praised Ross, saying, “No one worked harder for peace than Dennis. He gave it everything he had and served our nation very well.” Reviewing Ross’s book for The Washington Post, Glenn Frankel noted that Ross had criticisms of both sides:

While Ross is withering in recounting the miscalculations and tantrums on both sides, he holds Arafat most responsible for the failure: “Only one leader was unable or unwilling to confront history and mythology: Yasser Arafat.”

Still, when Ross steps back and reviews the trail of tears that the peace process became, he argues that both sides failed to live up to their commitments. Palestinian leaders failed to stop, and even gave support to, the suicide bombers, while Israelis never really eased the grip of their military occupation or stopped building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

And Robert Malley, reviewing Ross’s “meticulous narrative” for the New York Review of Books, although he disagrees with some of Ross’s interpretations, also recognizes that “Ross attended every significant meeting; he has a prodigious memory and his note-taking was legendary. All of which makes his book important to read, his factual account difficult to dispute . . .”

Here are the maps. The actual last Camp David offer is on the right; the PLO’s misrepresentation is on the left:

At least three observations are readily apparent:

• the last Camp David offer does not separate the West Bank into Bantustans, but

• even though the Camp David offer marked a substantial advance beyond any prior Israeli position, it did not meet the Palestinians’ fundamental needs in Jerusalem and took too much land, without compensation, from the West Bank,

• thus Arafat had good reason not to accept the Israeli offer as it stood when the Camp David summit ended.

But the Camp David summit need not have ended when or how it did, and that is Arafat’s responsibility. He is the one who chose not to present a counter-offer and not to use the Israeli offer as a basis for negotiating something better. Arafat did not engage substantively with President Clinton and the American delegation. Toward the end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: ‘If the Israelis can make compromises and you can’t, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything.” (Quoted by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors [see below].)

To the extent Barak would have retained too much of the West Bank, did not give Palestinians control of all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and failed to settle the status of Har ha-Bayit/the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, his proposal was inadequate.  But inadequate is not the same as meaningless.

These facts also emerge from Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s New York Review of Books article Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors (August 9, 2001), which is critical of all three parties (the Americans, Barak, and the Palestinians), and their letter in Camp David: An Exchange, in  the New York Review of Books for September 20, 2001. In their second offering, Agha and Malley stated that their original article “describes how the Palestinians’ actions–and inaction–contributed to the breakdown in the negotiations.” In that original article, Agha and Malley wrote:

“Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own. In failing to do either, the Palestinians denied the US the leverage it felt it needed to test Barak’s stated willingness to go the extra mile and thereby provoked the President’s anger. When Abu Ala’a, a leading Palestinian negotiator, refused to work on a map to negotiate a possible solution, arguing that Israel first had to concede that any territorial agreement must be based on the line of June 4, 1967, the President burst out, ‘Don’t simply say to the Israelis that their map is no good. Give me something better!’ When Abu Ala’a again balked, the President stormed out: ‘This is a fraud. It is not a summit. I won’t have the United States covering for negotiations in bad faith. Let’s quit!’ Toward the end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: ‘If the Israelis can make compromises and you can’t, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of the peace process…. Let’s let hell break loose and live with the consequences.'”(Ellipses by Agha and Malley.)

Nor do Agha and Malley use the word “myth” to characterize the view that, at Camp David, Israel made Arafat a “generous offer.” Rather, they call it a “perception.” They ask, “Had there been, in hindsight, a generous Israeli offer?” But they never answer the question. Rather, they write:

“Ask a member of the American team, and an honest answer might be that there was a moving target of ideas, fluctuating impressions of the deal the US could sell to the two sides, a work in progress that reacted (and therefore was vulnerable) to the pressures and persuasion of both. Ask Barak, and he might volunteer that there was no Israeli offer and, besides, Arafat rejected it. Ask Arafat, and the response you might hear is that there was no offer; besides, it was unacceptable; that said, it had better remain on the table.

“Offer or no offer, the negotiations that took place between July 2000 and February 2001 make up an indelible chapter in the history of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. . . .”

By way of a conclusion

If you have stayed with me this far, thank you. I hope you now are persuaded that:

• the Palestinians, unfortunately, missed a real opportunity for statehood by rejecting the Clinton Peace Parameters, which, as Robert Malley acknowledges, offered Arafat “the best deal he could ever get.”

• the “myth of the generous offer” itself is a myth because, even though Arafat had reason not to accept the final Camp David offer, that offer was “final” only in the sense that the summit ended due to Arafat’s refusal either to agree to use it as general bases for negotiation or to make his own counter-proposal.

Having cleared away this historical underbrush, I hope we may now see more clearly the shape of the final two state, “end of conflict” peace settlement to which people of good will should aspire. In this regard, I recommend both the Geneva Initiative, a detailed, model treaty negotiated by unofficial, senior Israeli and Palestinian figures, and The People’s Voice, also a joint Palestinian-Israeli effort, setting forth a set of principles for an end-of-conflict peace settlement.  The People’s Voice statement, about which I diaried in March 2006, has the virtue, as I related in my Daily Kos diary The shergald-another American I-P Peace Plan, of having been independently offered last Sunday by a frequent, harsh critic of Israel.

Two states for two peoples.

When a leading public figure takes an unexpected position, it’s important to pay attention. Uri Avnery is the best known figure in Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc), a dovish group just outside the mainstream of Israel’s peace camp. Avnery’s criticisms of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians are well-known and widely relied upon by people who want an Israeli or Jewish imprimatur for their own comments.

Particular attention thus should be paid to Avnery;’s most recent column, published on the eve of Israel’s 59th Independence Day celebration.

Avnery exposes the so-called one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an idea that “will harm [the effort to change the policies of the Israeli government] very much” because “[i]t diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis [two states for two peoples], in favor of a solution that has no chance at all.”

“There is no doubt,” Avnery recognizes, “that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders. The belief that a world-wide boycott could change this is a complete illusion.” Avnery quotes his colleague, who recently asked Ilan Pappe (without receiving an answer):

The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?

“In any case,” Avnery observes, “such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared admirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the ‘Jewish State’, which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan ‘Kauft nicht bei Juden’ (‘Don’t buy from Jews’).”

The idea of a “one-state” solution also is dangerous to the Palestinians. At present, Jews constitute an absolute majority of the people living in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The average annual income of an Israeli Jew is about $20,000; that of a Palestinian is about $800. “The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians,” Avenery believes, “would be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees.”

And it’s not just the Israeli Jews who will refuse to give up having a state of their own. Palestinians “can applaud an Israeli professor [Ilan Pappe] who advocates the dismantling of the State of Israel, but they have no time to wait for utopian solutions that could be realized in a hundred years. They need an end to the occupation and to achieve a solution to the conflict here and now, in the near future.”

But suppose calls for an international boycott of Israel were more successful than Avnery expects? “It would push all Israelis into the arms of the extreme Right, because it would reinforce the right-wing belief that ‘All the world is against us’ – a belief that took root in the years of the Holocaust, when ‘all the world looked on and kept silent’.” A general boycott of Israel would do more to isolate and weaken Israel’s peace activists than anyone else.

Avney concludes on an optimistic note:

All public opinion polls show that the great majority of Israelis not only want peace, but are ready to pay its price. But they are afraid. They lack trust. They are shackled by the beliefs they acquired in early childhood. They must be freed from them – and I believe that it can be done.

How does Avenery’s analysis affect the work of liberals and progressives in America? Just as in Israel, so, too, in America, campaigns that are perceived as demonizing Israel or aiming at the elimination of Israel as a democratic Jewish state will push friends of Israel, including critical friends of Israel, into the arms of the hard-liners. I am not calling for a moratorium on criticism of Israeli policies or conduct. But, I submit, it makes all the difference in the world whether the criticism and the critics are perceived, at bottom, as

* concerned for and supportive of Israel’s continued existence or

* fundamentally hostile to Israel.

I hope that friends of Israel will understand the imperative need to enable our country to play a constructive role in helping Israel secure peace with the Palestinians along the lines of the Clinton Peace Parameters and the Geneva Initiative. (See, generally, The shergald-another American Peace Plan and The Myth of the “Myth of the Generous Offer”.)

And to those who do not consider themselves friends of Israel, I say: You need to decide whether your desire to help Palestinians secure real improvements in their every-day lives exceeds your dislike of Israel. If it does, then we have common ground.

Happy Israeli Independence Day. May we merit the enjoyment of many more. Soon, in our days, alongside a free and independent Palestinian state.

cross-posted at Daily Kos

If Israelis and Palestinians are unable to agree on their tragic mutual history, maybe they can benefit from learning how the other side views it. That, in a nutshell, is the premise behind a new series of workbooks, whose third volume is to be published in the coming weeks, presenting the central historical narratives of Israelis and Palestinians side by side.

So reports Ha’aretz in a fascinating article by Or Kashti about the high school curriculum efforts of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East and its co-directors, Prof. Sami Adwan, Department of Education, Bethlehem University, and Dan Bar-On, of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

For more about the curriculum and the two co-directors, please read on.

PRIME’s own description of the “Shared History Booklet Project” appears here.

Just Vision presents interviews from 2005 about the project with both Adwan and Bar-On.

Through his work with PRIME, Sami Adwan is pioneering an educational model that enables both Palestinian and Israeli educators to create school history curricula that includes both historical narratives in a single textbook. Sami was born in a village north of Hebron and finished his PhD. in the United States. He has published widely on the role of education in peace building. His encounter with Israeli soldiers while in prison for being a member of Fatah during the first intifada made him realize that denial and avoidance would not help to improve the situation, but rather discovering the other.

Dan Bar-On began his involvement in dialogue and conflict resolution through working with children of Holocaust survivors and children of Nazi perpetrators. After the Oslo process Dan met and began working with a group of Palestinian and Israeli academics who formed PRIME, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East. PRIME’s group of teachers and historians has created a high school history text that presents the Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives side by side.

Each page of the three history workbooks, Kashti reports, “is divided into three sections of equal size: the Israeli narrative on the right, the Palestinian on the left, and in the middle, empty lines for students to write their own reactions to the historical descriptions.”

The teachers worked in national and cross-national groups. At the first stage each chapter was written by the Israelis and the Palestinians separately; afterward the teachers discussed the different versions. At the second stage, the draft underwent extensive discussion, in which all the teachers took part.

Throughout the project, participants adhered to the principle on which Bar-On and Adwan had decided at the beginning: No one had a veto over what is written. One could only explain one’s opposition, debate it and hope that the other side accepted the objections.

In the past year, 14 teachers from each side have used the workbooks. Prof. Adwan estimates that a few thousand Palestinians have been exposed to at least some of the content. “There have been students who refused to study the Israeli narrative, and who left the classroom,” he explains. “Some said Israeli history is propaganda and twists what really happened. Others wondered if the Israelis really teach the Palestinian narrative. But there have also been more understanding responses.”

According to Rachel Zamir, a history teacher at Tel Aviv’s Rogozin High School, students very quickly grasp the basic idea of the project. “Usually one lesson is enough for them to understand that every chapter in history has a number of points of view. For me, as a history teacher, the very fact that students understand that one place can have two names depending on national allegiance, is already a success,” she notes.

After studying the two narratives, the students in the younger classes are asked to write two articles, one for a Palestinian newspaper, the other for a Jewish one, before the establishment of the state; or to draw one poster for Independence Day and one in memory of the Nakba. At the end of each period of study, Niv Kedar, a history teacher at the Givat Brenner regional high school, elicits feedback from his students. He says almost all agree that the Palestinian narrative should be taught. In answer to a question as to whether they were surprised at the narrative of the other side, many responded that it had a lot of logic. “If I were on the other side, I would want the same thing,” one student wrote. Another wrote, “I’m sure that if I were in their situation, without a state, I would behave in the same way.”

Here are examples of the contrasting Israeli and Palestinian presentations of events:

Zionism

Israeli: “The national movement of the Jewish people. Developed in Eastern and Central Europe as a result of disappointment with emancipation, continued antisemitism, the impact of other national movements and the continuing bond between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel.”

Palestinian: “A colonialist political movement ascribing a national character and racial attributes to Judaism … Led to Jewish immigration to Palestine, claiming historical and religious rights.”

The Balfour Declaration

Israeli: “The first time any country supported Zionism… Expressed the support of the British government for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.”

Palestinian: “The unholy marriage between British imperialism and the colonialist Zionist movement, at the expense of the Palestinian people and the future of the entire Arab nation.”

The War of Independence/The Nakba of 1948

Israeli: “On November 29, 1947, the United Nations approved by a large majority the proposal for two independent states alongside each other (Resolution 181). The Jewish community celebrated that night with dancing in the streets. However, the next morning acts of terror began, carried out by the country’s Arabs and volunteers from Arab countries, who did not accept the Partition Plan.”

Palestinian: “Resolution 181 of the United Nations on the division of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish, symbolized on the one hand the beginning of the countdown to the establishment of Israel, on May 15, 1948, and on the other hand the beginning of the countdown to the Nakba of 1948, the uprooting and exile of the Palestinian people.”

The origin of the refugees/The events of the Nakba

Israeli: “During the war a number of massacres, robberies and rapes were carried out by Jewish fighters. The best known massacre was at Deir Yassin, where 250 Arabs were murdered by Irgun and Lehi fighters. The incident was roundly criticized in the country and harsh public debate broke out.”

Palestinian: “The actions of the Zionist gangs were intended to sow terror among the Palestinian inhabitants to cause them to abandon their villages, especially after the massacre at Deir Yassin.”

The Six-Day War/The June 1967 war

Israeli: “The war began on June 5, 1967, and ended six days later, on June 10, 1967. Israel fought three Arab countries: Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and attained a victory that became a landmark in Zionist history. The backdrop to the war’s outbreak was the relationship between Israel and the Arab countries in the 1960s.”

Palestinian: “The war that Israel started against the Arab countries is known as the ‘June 5 aggression’ because Israel was the initiator of the declaration of battle and opened an offensive.”

The first intifada

Israeli: “On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck hit a Palestinian car in the Gaza Strip, killing four occupants of the vehicle. The Palestinians claimed the act was intentional and deemed it malicious murder.”

Palestinian: “On December 8, 1987, the day the intifada broke out, an Israeli truck driver in Gaza intentionally ran into an Arab car, resulting in martyrs’ deaths of a number of Palestinians. After news spread of the incident, huge demonstrations broke out all over the West Bank and Gaza.”