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| Author: | Henry Siegman, Former Senior Fellow and Director for the U.S./Middle East Project, Council on Foreign Relations |
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April 1, 2002
Council on Foreign Relations
1) There will be no end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before Israel agrees to withdraw fully to its pre’67 borders. Adjustments to these borders to accommodate Israeli security concerns will have to be the result of mutual agreement, not unilateral imposition.
2) Palestinians will not achieve a state of their own unless they forego the refugees’ “right of return.” The 1947 UN resolution dividing Palestine intended to establish two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. There was no intention of establishing two Arab states, which would be the result were Palestinian refugees granted the right of return.
3) Chairman Yasser Arafat cannot control terrorism by exhortation. Not only Hamas and Islamic Jihad but Palestinian militants supportive of Fatah, Arafat’s own party, will ignore ceasefire declarations by Arafat, whether made in English or in Arabic. Terrorism will end only when Arafat orders his security forces to dismantle Hamas and Jihad as well as the Fatah-affiliated Tanzim.
4) Arafat will not engage in such a fratricidal war without a firm assurance that it will lead imminently to a Palestinian state. If he were to trigger a Palestinian civil war without such an assurance, he would stand no chance whatever of winning that war, or of surviving personally. Even the most moderate Palestinians will not sanction Palestinian bloodletting that does not clearly lead to the end of Israel’s occupation.
5) Terrorist outrages that target innocents are an unqualified evil. They cannot be justified by the most dire Palestinian circumstances or by the most noble of goals. A military occupation that denies freedom and self-determination to three and a half million people and has stunted the lives of two successive generations of Palestinian children is also an unqualified evil. A people’s struggle to rid itself of foreign occupation and to assert its inalienable rights is instinctive and undeniable. Indeed, it is evidence of its humanity and of its individual and collective dignity. Deny them and their children their future, and they will resort to whatever means that cause their oppressors pain sufficient to end their subjugation. This is not to justify terrorism, or to suggest that it works, but to recognize that when a people’s plight becomes sufficiently hopeless and desperate its resort to terrorism becomes inevitable.
6) No government can tolerate the brutal terrorism that Palestinians have inflicted on Israel’s citizens. But a government that has no policy other than ever greater violence in punishment of terrorism, and refuses to offer to the people under its occupation a clear non-violent alternative for the achievement of their freedom, becomes itself complicit in the escalation of that terrorism. This is the considered judgment not of wild-eyed peacenicks, but the inevitable implication of the findings of Israel’s own intelligence agencies. Following Israel’s assault on the refugee camps, its military intelligence reported to the political echelon that these assaults made no dent on the so-called terrorist infrastructure, but inflamed Palestinian rage to the point that Israel will be subjected to unprecedented terrorist assaults in the days ahead (Yediot Achronot, March 25). Israeli intelligence and security officials also told their government for sometime now “that no cease fire would work without movement to a political settlement” (NYTimes March 31).
7) Under the terms of Oslo, Palestinians agreed to drop all prior territorial claims for what they believed was Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state in 22% of Palestine - in return for their recognition of the legitimacy of Israel’s claim to 78% of Palestine. Palestinians can be forgiven for not considering Barak’s proposal that they yield even more territory from the little that was left them as particularly “generous.” Even assuming there were no mitigating circumstances that justified Arafat’s failure to respond to Barak’s proposals, it does not follow that this failure wiped out Palestinian rights. Israel can demand that Palestinians end their violence and return to the negotiating table in order to deal seriously with Israel’s proposals tabled at Camp David. Israel cannot demand that Palestinians abandon their rights and dignify Sharon’s proposal that they settle for isolated Bantustans.
8) Sharon has made it clear that a return to Israel’s ’67 borders – even with mutually agreed to corrections - and the establishment of a Palestinian capital in the Arab sections of East Jerusalem are an unrealizable Palestinian dream. In these circumstances, efforts to achieve a ceasefire, whether by General Zinni, or by the good Lord Himself, will fail, no matter how often they are tried.
9) If Sharon and his government continue to believe it is worth feeding the lives of Israeli children to Palestinian rage for the sake of settlements and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, the carnage will continue. And if it continues long enough, it will finally fulfill the prophecy of Israeli right wingers that it is all of Israel, not just the occupation, that Palestinians and the Arab world want to end.
10) Only the US can put an end to the disaster that is now unfolding in full view of the world. But it can do so only if it is prepared to put its influence and weight behind a peace plan that clearly requires Israel’s return to the pre ‘67 borders and the establishment of the Arab part of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. What has prevented such a forceful US intervention until now - at least in part - is the fear of alienating certain sectors of the pro-Israel community. In the end, no friend of Israel will have any reason to thank this administration if its inaction allows the current hemorrhaging to run its full tragic course.
Henry Siegman is a Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations. These views are his own.
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