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80 Theses for a New Peace Camp 1. The peace process has collapsed - and taken down with it
a large part of the Israeli peace camp. 2. Transient
circumstances, such as personal or party-political matters, failures of leadership,
political self-interest, domestic and global political developments - all these
are like foam over the waves.
Important as they may be, they cannot adequately explain the total
collapse. 3. The true explanation can only be found beneath the
surface, at the roots of the historical conflict between the two nations. 4. The Madrid-Oslo process failed because the two sides
were seeking to realize conflicting goals. 5. The goals of each of the two sides emanated from their
basic national interests. They were shaped by their historical narratives, by
their disparate views of the conflict over the last 120 years. The Israeli
national historical version and the Palestinian national historical version are
entirely contradictory, on the whole and in every single detail. 6. The negotiators and the decision-makers on the Israeli
side acted in complete oblivion of the Palestinian national narrative. Even
when they had sincere good-will to come to a solution, their efforts were
doomed to fail as they could not understand the national desires, traumas,
fears and hopes of the Palestinian people. While there is no symmetry between
the two sides, the Palestinian attitude was similar. 7. Resolution
of such a long historical conflict is possible only if each side is capable of
understanding the other's spiritual-national world and willing to approach him
as an equal. An insensitive, condescending and overbearing attitude precludes
any possibility of an agreed solution. 8. The Barak Government, which had inspired so much hope,
was afflicted with all these attitudes, hence, the enormous gap between its
initial promise and the disastrous results. 9. A significant part of the old peace camp (also called
the "Zionist Left" or the "Sane Constituency") is similarly
afflicted and therefore collapsed along with the government it supported. 10. Therefore,
the primary role of a new Israeli peace camp is to get rid of the false myths
and the one-sided view of the conflict.
This does not mean that the Israeli narrative should automatically be
rejected and the Palestinian narrative unquestionably accepted. But it does require open-minded
listening and understanding of the other position in the historical conflict,
in order to bridge the two national narratives. 11. Any other way will lead to an unending continuation of the conflict, with
periods of ostensible tranquility and conciliation frequently interrupted by
eruptions of violent hostile actions between the two nations and between Israel
and the Arab world. Considering
the pace of development of weapons of mass destruction, further rounds of
hostility could lead to the destruction of all sides to the conflict. The Root of the
Conflict 12. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the continuation of the
historical clash between the Zionist Movement and the Palestinian Arab people,
a clash that began at the end of the 19th century and has yet to
end. 13. The Zionist Movement was, essentially, a Jewish reaction to the
emergence of the national movements in Europe, all of which were hostile to
Jews. Having been rejected by the European nations, some of the Jews decided to
establish themselves as a separate nation and, following the new European
model, to set up their own national State where they could be masters of their
own fate. The principle of separation, which formed the basis of the Zionist
idea, had far-reaching consequences later on. The basic Zionist tenet, that a
minority cannot exist in a national-homogenous state according to the European
model, let later to the practical exclusion of the national minority in the
Zionist state that came into being after 50 years. 14. Traditional
and religious motives drew the Zionist Movement to Palestine (Eretz Israel in
Hebrew) and the decision was made
to establish the Jewish State in this land. The maxim was "a land without
a people for a people without a land". This maxim was not only created out of ignorance, but also
out of the general arrogance towards non-European peoples that prevailed in
Europe at that time. 15. Palestine
was not empty - not at the end of the 19th century nor at any other
period. At that time, there were half a million people living in Palestine, 90%
of them Arabs. This population objected, of course, to the incursion of another
nation into their land. 16. The Arab National Movement emerged almost simultaneously with the
Zionist Movement, initially to fight the Ottoman Empire and later to fight the
colonial regimes created upon its destruction at the end of World War I. A separate Arab-Palestinian national movement developed in the country
after the British created a separate State called "Palestine", and in
course of the struggle against the Zionist infiltration. 17. Since the end of World War I, there has been an ongoing struggle
between two nationalist movements, the Jewish-Zionist and the Palestinian-Arab,
both of which aspired to accomplish their goals - which entirely negate each
other - within the same territory. This situation remains unchanged to this
day. 18. As Jewish persecution in Europe intensified, and as the countries of
the world closed their gates to the Jews attempting to flee the inferno, so the
Zionist Movement gained strength.
The Holocaust, which took the lives of six million Jews, gave moral and
political power to the Zionist claim that led to the establishment of the State
of Israel. 19. The Palestinian People, witnessing the growth of the Jewish
population in their land, could not comprehend why they were required to pay
the price for crimes committed against the Jews by Europeans. They violently
objected to further Jewish immigration and to the acquisition of lands by the
Jews. 20. The complete oblivion of each of the two peoples to the national
existence of the other inevitably led to false and distorted perceptions that
took root deep in the collective consciousness of both. These perceptions affect their attitude
towards each other to this day. 21. The Arabs believed that the Jews had been implanted in the country
by Western Imperialism, in order to subjugate the Arab world and take control
of its treasures. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that the Zionist
movement, from the outset, strove for an alliance with at least one Western
power (Germany, Great Britain, France, the U.S.A.) to overcome the Arab
resistance. The results were a practical cooperation and a community of
interests between the Zionist enterprise and imperialist and colonialist
forces, directed against the Arab national movement. 22. The Jews, on the other hand, were convinced that the Arab resistance
to the Zionist enterprise - intended to save the Jews from the flames of Europe
- was the consequence of the murderous nature of the Arabs and of Islam. In their eyes, Arab fighters were
"gangs", and the uprisings of the time were called "riots". (Actually, in the 1920's, the most extreme Zionist leader, Ze'ev
Jabotinsky, was almost alone to recognize that the Arab resistance to the
Zionist settlement was an inevitable, natural and from this point of view just
reaction of a "native" people defending their country against foreign
invaders. Jabotinsky also recognized the fact that the Arabs in the country
were a separate national entity and derided attempts made to bribe the leaders
of other Arab countries to put an end to the Palestinian Arab resistance.
However, Jabotinsky's conclusion was to erect a "wall of steel"
against the Arabs and to crush their resistance by force.) 23. This total contradiction in the perception of the facts affects
every aspect of the conflict. For
example, the Jews interpreted their struggle for "Jewish Labor" as a progressive social effort to
transform a nation of merchants and speculators into one of workers and
farmers. The Arabs, on the other hand, saw it as a criminal attempt by the
Zionists to dispossess them, to evict them from the labor market and to create,
on their land, an Arab-free, separatist Jewish economy. 24. The Zionists were proud of their "Redemption of the
Land". They had purchased it
for full value with money collected from Jews around the world.
"Olim" (new immigrants, literally pilgrims) who had been
intellectuals and merchants in their former life, now earned their living with
the sweat of their brow. They
believed that they had achieved all this by peaceful means and without
dispossessing a single Arab. For the
Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: The Jews acquired lands from rich
absentee Arab landowners and then forcibly evicted the fellahin who had, for
generations, been living on and earning their living from these lands. To help
them in this effort, the Zionists engaged the Turkish and, later, the British
police. The Arabs looked on,
despairingly, as their land was taken from them. 25. Against
the Zionist claim of having successfully "turned the desert into a
garden", the Arabs cited the testimonies of European travelers who spoke
of a Palestine that, for several centuries, had described Palestine as a
populated and flourishing land, the equal of any of its regional neighbors. Independence and Disaster 26. The contrast between
the two national versions peaked in the war of 1948, a war called "the War
of Independence" or even "the War of Liberation" by the Jews,
and "El Naqba", the disaster, by the Arabs. 27. As the conflict intensified in the region, and with the resounding impact
of the Holocaust, the United Nations decided to divide the country into two
States, Jewish and Arab. Jerusalem and its environs were supposed to remain a
separate unit, under international jurisdiction. The Jews were allotted 55% of the land including the
unpopulated Negev. 28. The Zionist Movement accepted the partition plan, convinced that the
crucial issue was to establish a firm foundation for Jewish sovereignty. In
closed meetings, David Ben-Gurion never concealed his intention to expand, at the
first opportunity, the territory given to the Jews. That is why Israel's Declaration of Independence did not
define the country's borders and the country has remained without definite
borders to this day. 29. The Arab world did not accept the partition plan and regarded it a
vile attempt of the United Nations, which essentially was at the time a club of
Western and Communist nations, to divide a country that did not belong to it.
Handing over most of the country to the Jewish minority, which represented a
mere third of the population, made it all the more unforgivable in their eyes. 30. The war initiated by the Arabs after the partition plan was,
inescapably, an "ethnic" war; a kind of war in which each side seeks
to conquer as much land as possible and evict the population of the other
side. Such a campaign (which later
came to be called "ethnic cleansing") always involves expulsion and
atrocities. 31. The war of 1948 was a direct extension of the Zionist-Arab conflict
in which each side sought to fulfill its aims. The Jews wanted to establish a homogenous, national State
that would be as large as possible.
The Arabs wanted to eradicate the Zionist Jewish entity that had been
established in Palestine. 32. Both sides practiced ethnic cleansing as an integral part of the
fighting. There were not many Arabs remaining in territories captured by the
Jews and no Jews remained in territories captured by the Arabs. However, as the
territories captured by the Jews were by far larger than those captured by the
Arabs, the result was unbalanced. (The ideas of "population exchange"
and "transfer" were raised in Zionist organizations as early as in
the 1930's. Effectively this meant the expulsion of the Arab population from
the country. On the other side,
many among the Arabs believed that the Zionists should go back to wherever they
came from.) 33. The myth of "the few against the many" was cultivated by
the Jews to describe the stand of the Jewish community of 650,000 against the
entire Arab world of over a hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of
its people in the war. The Arabs
painted a completely different picture:
A fragmented Arab population with no national leadership to speak of,
with no unified command over its meager forces, with poor, few and mostly
obsolete weapons, confronting an extremely well organized Jewish community that
was highly trained in the use of its weapons. The neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians
and, when they finally did send their armies, they primarily operated in
competition with each other, with no coordination and no common plan. From the
social and military point of view, the fighting capabilities of the Israeli
side were far superior to those of the Arab states, which had hardly emerged
from the colonial era. 34. According
to the United Nations plan, the Jewish
State was supposed to include an Arab population amounting to about 40%. During the war the Jewish
State expanded its borders and ended up with 78% of the area of the land. This area was nearly devoid of Arabs.
The Arab populations of Nazareth and a few villages in the Galilee remained
almost incidentally; the villages in the Triangle had been given to Israel as
part of a deal by King Abdullah and, therefore, could not be evacuated. 35. In the war a total of 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted. Some of them fled out of fear of the
battle, as civilian populations do in every war. Some were driven away by acts of terror such as the
Dir-Yassin Massacre. Others were systematically evicted in the course of the
ethnic cleansing. 36. No less important than the expulsion is the fact that the refugees
were not allowed to return to their homes when the battles were over, as is the
practice after a conventional war. Quite to the contrary, the new Israel saw the
removal of the Arabs very much as a blessing and proceeded to totally demolish
450 Arab villages. New Jewish villages were built on the ruins, and new Hebrew
names were given to them. The abandoned houses in the cities were repopulated
with new immigrants. "A Jewish State" 37. The signing of the
cease-fire agreements at the end of the war of 1948 did not bring an end to the
historical conflict. That was, in
fact, raised to new and more intensive levels. 38. The new State of Israel dedicated its early years to the
consolidation of its homogenous national character as a "Jewish
State". Large sections of land were expropriated from the
"absentees" (the refugees), from those officially designed as
"present absentees" (Arabs who physically remained in Israel but were
not allowed to become citizens) and even from the Arab citizens of Israel, most
of whose lands were taken over. On
these lands a dense network of Jewish communities was created. Jewish
"Immigrants" were invited and even coaxed to come in masses. This
great effort fortified the State's power several times over in but a few years.
39. At the same time the State vigorously conducted a policy to
obliterate the Palestinian entity as a national entity. With Israeli help, the
Trans-Jordan monarch, Abdullah, took control over the West Bank and since then
there is, in effect, an Israeli military guarantee for the existence of the
Kingdom of Jordan. 40. The main rationale of the treaty between Israel and the Hashemite
Kingdom, which has been in effect for three generations, was to prevent the
establishment of an independent
Arab-Palestinian State,
which was considered - then and now - as an obstacle to the realization
of the Zionist objective. 41. A historical change occurred at the end of the 1950's on the
Palestinian side when Yasser Arafat and his associates founded the Fatah
Movement designed to free the Palestinian liberation movement from the custody
of the Arab governments. It was no accident that this movement emerged after
the failure of the great Pan-Arab concept whose most renowned representative
was Gamal Abd-el-Nasser. Up to this point many Palestinians had hoped to be
absorbed into a united All-Arab Nation.
When this hope faded, the separate National Palestinian identity
re-emerged. 42. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created by Gamal
Abd-el-Nasser to prevent autonomous Palestinian action that might involve him
in an undesired war with Israel. The organization was intended to impose
Egyptian authority over the Palestinians. However, after the Arab defeat in the
June 1967 war, Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, took control over the PLO and has
been the sole representative of
the Palestinian people ever since. "The Six Day War" 43. The June 1967 war is seen in a very different light by the two
sides, as has every incident in the last 120 years. According to the Israeli myth, this was a desperate war of
defense, which miraculously placed a lot of land in Israel's hands. According to
the Palestinian myth, the leaders of Egypt, Syria and Jordan fell into a trap
set by Israel in order to capture whatever was left of Palestine. 44. Many Israelis believe that "the Six Day War" was the root
of all evil and it was only then that the peace-loving and progressive Israel
turned into a conqueror and an occupier. This conviction allows them to
maintain the absolute purity of Zionism and the State of Israel up to that
point in history and preserve their old myths. There is no truth to this legend. 45. The war of 1967 was yet another phase of the old struggle between
the two national movements. It did
not change the essence; it only changed the circumstances. The essential
objectives of the Zionist Movement - a Jewish State, expansion, and settlement
- were making great strides. The
particular circumstances made extensive ethnic cleansing impossible in this
war, but several hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were nevertheless
expelled. 46. Israel was allotted 55% of the land (Palestine) by the 1947
partition plan, an additional 23% were captured in the 1948 war and now the
remaining 22%, across the "Green Line" (the pre-1967 armistice line),
were also captured. In 1967 Israel
inadvertently united the Palestinian people (including some of the refugees)
under its rule. 47. As soon as the war ended, the Settlement Movement began. Almost every political faction in the
country participated in this movement - from the messianic-nationalistic
"Gush Emunim" to the "leftist" United Kibbutz
Movement. The first settlers
received broad support from most politicians, left and right, from Yigal Alon
(the Jewish settlement in Hebron) to Shimon Peres (the Kdumim settlement). 48. The fact that all governments of Israel cultivated and advanced the
settlements, albeit to differing extents, proves that the settlement aspiration
was restricted to no specific ideological camp and extended to the entire
Zionist Movement. The impression
that has been created of a small minority driving the Settlement Movement is
illusionary. Only a consolidated
effort on the part of all Government Agencies since 1967 and till today could
have produced the legislative, the strategic and the budgetary infrastructure
required for such a long-lasting and expensive endeavor. 49. The legislative infrastructure incorporates the misleading
assumption that the Occupation Authority is the owner of "government-owned
lands", although these are the essential land reserves of the Palestinian
population. It is self-evident that the Settlement Movement contravenes
International Law. 50. The dispute between the proponents of the "Greater
Israel" and those of "Territorial Compromise" is essentially a
dispute about the way to achieve the basic Zionist aspiration: a homogenous
Jewish State in as large a territory as possible. The proponents of "compromise" emphasize the
demographic issue and want to prevent the inclusion of the Palestinian
population in the State. The
"Greater Israel" adherents place the emphasis on the geographic issue
and believe (privately or publicly) that it is possible to expel the non-Jewish
population from the country (code name: "Transfer"). 51. The General Staff of the Israeli army played an important role in
the planning and building of the Settlements. It created the map of the
settlements (identified with Ariel Sharon): blocs of settlements and bypass roads, lateral and longitudinal,
so that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are chopped up into pieces and the
Palestinians are imprisoned in isolated enclaves, each of which is surrounded
by settlements and the occupation forces. 52. The Palestinians employed several methods of resistance, mainly
raids across the Jordanian and Lebanese borders and attacks inside Israel and
everywhere in the world. These acts are called "terrorist" by the
Israelis while the Palestinians see them as the legitimate resistance of an
occupied nation. The PLO
leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat, had long been considered a terrorist
leadership by the Israelis but has gradually came to be internationally
recognized as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian
people. 53. When the Palestinians realized that these actions do not put an end
to the settlement momentum, which gradually pulled the land from under their
feet, at the end of 1987 they launched the Intifadah - a grassroots uprising of
all sectors of the population. In this Intifidah, 1500 Palestinians were
killed, among them hundreds of children, several times over the number of
Israeli losses. The Peace Process 54. The October 1973
war, which commenced with the surprise victory of the Egyptian and Syrian
forces and culminated with their defeat, convinced Yasser Arafat and his close
associates that there is no military way to achieve the national Palestinian
objectives. He decided to embark
upon a political path to reach agreement with Israel and to allow, at least, a
partial achievement of the national goals through negotiation. 55. To prepare the ground for this, Arafat created contact for the first
time with Israeli personalities who could make an impact on public opinion and
on government policy in Israel. His emissaries (Said Hamami and Issam Sartawi)
met with Israeli public figures, the peace pioneers who in 1975 established the
"Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace". 56. These contacts as well as the growing fatigue felt by the Israelis
of the Intifadah, the Jordanian withdrawal from the West Bank, changing
international conditions (the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Gulf War) led
to the Madrid Conference and, later, to the Oslo Agreement. The Oslo Agreement 57. The Oslo Agreement
had positive and negative qualities. 58. On the positive side, this agreement brought Israel to its first
official recognition of the Palestinian People and its national leadership and
brought the National Palestinian Movement to its recognition of the existence
of Israel. In this respect the agreement (and the exchange of letters that
preceded it) were of paramount historical significance. 59. In effect, the agreement gave the National Palestinian Movement a
territorial base on Palestinian land, the structure of a "state in the
making" and armed forces - facts that would play an important role in the
ongoing Palestinian struggle. For
the Israelis, the agreement opened the gates to the Arab world and put an end
to Palestinian attacks - as long
as the agreement was effective. 60. The most substantive flaw in the agreement was that both sides hoped
to achieve entirely different objectives. The Palestinians saw it as a
temporary agreement paving the way to the end of the occupation, the
establishment of a Palestinian State in all the occupied territories. On the other hand, the respective
Israeli governments regarded it as a way to maintain the occupation in large
sections of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian self-government
filling the role of an auxiliary security agency protecting Israel and the
settlements. 61. Therefore,
Oslo did not represent the beginning of the process to end the conflict but,
rather, another new phase of the conflict. 62. Because
the expectations of both sides were so divergent and each remained entirely
bound to its own national "narrative", every section of the agreement
was interpreted differently.
Ultimately, many parts of the agreement were not carried out, mainly by
Israel (the third withdrawal, the four safe passages, and others). 63. Throughout
the period of the "Oslo Process" Israel continued its vigorous
expansion of the settlements, primarily by creating new ones under various
guises, expanding existing ones, building an elaborate network of
"bypass" roads, expropriating land, demolishing houses and uprooting
plantations etc. The Palestinians, on their part, used the time to build their
strength, both within the framework of the agreement and without it. In fact,
the historical confrontation continued unabated under the guise of negotiations
and the "Peace Process", which became a proxy for actual peace. 64. In contradistinction to his image, which became more pronounced
after his assassination, Yitzhak Rabin kept the conflict alive "in the
field", while simultaneously managing the political process to achieve
peace, on Israeli terms. As he was
a disciple of the Zionist "narrative" and accepted its mythology, he
suffered from cognitive dissonance when his hopes for peace clashed with his
conceptual world. It appears that
he began to internalize some parts
of the Palestinian historical narrative only at the very end of his
life. 65. The case of Shimon Peres is much more severe. He created for himself an international
image of a peacemaker and even designed his language to reflect this image
("the New Middle East") while remaining essentially a traditional
Zionist hawk. This became clear in
the short and violent period that he served as Prime Minister after the
assassination of Rabin and, again, in his current acceptance of the role of
spokesman and apologist for Sharon. 66. The clearest expression of the Israeli dilemma was provided by Ehud
Barak who came to power completely convinced of his ability to cut the Gordian
knot of the historical conflict in one dramatic stroke, in the fashion of
Alexander the Great. Barak approached the issue in total ignorance of the
Palestinian narrative and with disrespect to its importance. He presented his proposals as
ultimatums and was appalled and enraged by their rejection. 67. In the eyes of himself and the Israeli side at large, Barak
"turned every stone" and made the Palestinians "more generous
offers than any previous Prime Minister". In exchange, he wanted the Palestinians to sign off on
"an end to the conflict". The Palestinians considered this a
preposterous pretension since Barak was effectively asking them to relinquish
their basic national aspiration, such as the Right of Return and sovereignty in
East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
Moreover, while Barak presented the claims for the annexation of
territories as matter of negligible percentages ("Settlement Blocs"),
according to Palestinian calculations this amounted to an actual annexation of
20% of the land beyond the Green Line. 68. In the Palestinian view, they had already made the decisive
compromise by agreeing to establish their State within the Green Line, in
merely 22% of their historical homeland. Therefore, they could only accept
minor border changes in the context of territorial swaps. The traditional Israeli position is
that the achievements of the war of 1948 are established facts that cannot be
disputed and the compromise required must focus on the remaining 22%. 69. As with most terms and concepts, the word "concession" has
different meanings for both sides.
The Palestinians believe that they have already "conceded" 78%
of their land when they agreed to accept 22% of it. The Israelis believe that they are "conceding"
when they agree to "give" the Palestinians parts of those same 22%
(the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). 70. The Camp David Summit in the summer of 2000, which was imposed on
Arafat against his will, was premature and brought things to a climax. Barak's
demands, presented at the summit as Clinton's, were that the Palestinians agree
to end the conflict by conceding the Right of Return and the Return itself; to
accept complicated arrangements for East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount without
achieving sovereignty over them; to agree to large territorial annexations in
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and to an Israeli military presence in other
large areas and to Israeli control over the borders separating the Palestinian
State from the rest of the world.
No Palestinian leader would ever sign such an agreement and thus the
summit ended in deadlock and the termination of the careers of Clinton and
Barak. The El Aqsa Intifadah 71. The breakdown of
the summit, the elimination of any hope for an agreement between the two sides
and the unconditional pro-Israeli stance of the Americans, inevitably led to
another round of violent confrontations, which earned the title of the al-Aqsa
Intifadah. For the Palestinians, this is a justified national uprising against
the protracted occupation, which has no end in sight and allows continual and
daily pulling of their land from under their feet. For the Israelis, this is an outburst of murderous
terrorism. The performers of these
acts appear to the Palestinians as national
heroes and to the Israelis as merciless criminals who must be liquidated. 72. The official media in Israel no longer mention settlers but speak of
"residents" upon whom any attack is a crime against civilians. The
Palestinians consider the settlers the forefront of a dangerous enemy force
whose intention is to dispossess them of their land and who must be defeated. 73. A great part of the Israeli "Peace Camp" collapsed during
the al-Akza Intifadah and it turns out that many of its convictions had feet of
clay. Especially after Barak had "turned every stone" and made
"more generous offers than any previous Prime Minister, the Palestinian
behavior was incomprehensible to this part of the "Peace Camp", since
it had never performed a thorough revision of the Zionist "narrative"
and did not internalize the fact that there is a Palestinian
"narrative" too. The
only remaining explanation was that the Palestinians had deceived the Israeli
Peace Camp, that they had never intended to make peace and that their true
purpose is to throw the Jews into the sea, as the Zionist right has always
claimed. 74. As a result, the dividing line between the Zionist "right"
and "left" disappeared.
The leaders of the Labor Party joined the Sharon Government and became
his most effective apologists (Shimon Peres) and even the formal leftist
opposition (Yossi Sarid) took part.
This again proves that the Zionist narrative is the decisive factor
unifying all facets of the political system in Israel, making the distinctions
between Rehavam Zeevi and Avraham Burg, Yitzhak Levi and Yossi Sarid
insignificant. 75. There is a notable decline in the Palestinian willingness to reopen
a dialogue with the Israeli peace forces, a consequence of the utter
disappointment from the "leftist government" which had inspired so
much hope after the Netanyahu years, as well as a consequence of the fact that
apart from the small radical peace groups no Israeli outrage at the brutal
reactions of the occupation forces has been heard. The tendency to tighten ranks, typical to any nation in a
war of liberation, makes it possible for the extreme nationalistic and
religious forces on the Palestinian side to veto any attempt at
Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. A New Peace Camp 76. The breakdown of the old peace camp necessitates the creation of a
new Israeli peace camp that will be real, up-to-date, effective and strong,
that can influence the Israeli public and bring about a complete re-evaluation
of the old axioms in order to effect a change in the Israeli political system. 77. To do so, the new peace camp must lead public opinion to a brave
reassessment of the national "narrative" and rid it of false
myths. It must strive to unite the
historical versions of both people into a single "narrative", free
from historical deceptions, which will be acceptable to both sides. 78. While doing this it must also educate the Israeli public that along
with all the beautiful and positive aspects of the Zionist enterprise, a
terrible injustice was done to the Palestinian people. This injustice, which peaked during the
"Naqba", obliges us to assume responsibility and correct as much of
it as is possible. 79. With a new understanding of the past and the present, the new peace
camp must formulate a peace plan based on the following principles: (a) An
independent and free Palestinian State will be established alongside Israel. (b) The Green Line will be the border between the two States. If agreed between the two sides,
limited territorial exchanges may be possible. (c) The
Israeli settlements will be evacuated from the territory of the Palestinian
State. (d) The
border between the two States will be open to the movement of people and goods, subject to arrangements made
by mutual agreement. (e) Jerusalem will be the capital of both States - West Jerusalem the
capital of Israel and East Jerusalem capital of Palestine. The State of Palestine will have
complete sovereignty in East Jerusalem, including the Haram al-Sharif (the
Temple Mount). The State of Israel
will have complete sovereignty in West Jerusalem, including the Western Wall
and the Jewish Quarter. Both States will reach agreement on the unity of the
city on the physical, municipal level. (f) Israel
will recognize, in principle, the Palestinian Right of Return as an inalienable
human right. The practical
solution to the problem will come about by agreement based on just, fair and
practical considerations and will include return to the territory of the State
of Palestine, return to the State of Israel and compensation. (g) The
water resources will be controlled jointly and allocated by agreement, equally
and fairly. (h) A
security agreement between the two States will ensure the security of both and
take into consideration the specific security needs of Israel as well as of
Palestine. (i) Israel
and Palestine will cooperate with other States in the region, to establish a
Middle Eastern community, modeled on the European Union. 80. The signing of a Peace agreement and its honest implementation in
good faith will lead to a historical reconciliation between the two nations, based
on equality, cooperation and mutual respect. Submitted
by Gush Shalom as a draft for public debate. If you generally agree with the
spirit of this document - please send comments and remarks. Gush Shalom - info@gush-shalom.org
P.O.Box 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033. Hebrew and English versions can be
downloaded from www.gush-shalom.org . Please help us to
finance this campaign by check to Gush shalom. |