Riding an Old Path to Nowhere

BEIRUT -- A flurry of activity this week surrounding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s trip to Washington suggests to many people that we can expect breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli peace-making. Mubarak and US President Barack Obama both said that things were moving in the right direction. The Israeli government has instituted an unofficial and unannounced “freeze” on new settlements construction, as demanded by the United States. Arab reports speak of an “initiative of leaders” to offer the Palestinian refugees compensation in exchange for dropping their demand on the “right of return.” Other reports expect the Obama administration to announce soon the terms of a permanent peace settlement, as a means of forcing all sides to respond and negotiate its terms.

It is good to have hope. It is much better to be realistic, and I fear that much of the talk about “jump starting” the peace process remains handicapped by relying on the same old techniques and approaches that have been tried many times and always failed. The determination of the Obama administration to push for an Arab-Israeli peace will go nowhere if the various initiatives and gestures by all concerned continue to dance around the central issues of the conflict, rather than to attack them head-on.

The current approach to peace-making suffers from the same vulnerabilities that caused many other attempts to fail -- other than the Jordanian and Egyptian peace agreements that gave both sides equal and simultaneous rights. Today’s limp approach isolates elements of the conflict, and tries to address them one by one, hoping that “confidence-building measures” will take root and prod the parties to ultimate full reconciliation. So, the United States emphasizes its demand for a full Israeli settlements freeze. It asks the Arab countries to make unilateral gestures of accommodation with Israel, such as opening diplomatic interests sections or allowing commercial over flight rights. The Palestinians in turn are asked to focus on improving their security forces, so that Israelis feel more at ease that terror attacks will stop.

The fatal weakness of this approach is that addressing symptoms of the conflict will not resolve it, and instead one must acknowledge and go right to the core causes of the conflict. An Israeli interests section in the capital of Kuwait or Algeria, frankly, is diversionary nonsense, if the central issue of the historic dispossession, exile and refugeehood of the Palestinians in 1947-48 is not resolved. Similarly, a freeze on new Jewish settlements in isolated parts of the West Bank or the Golan Heights essentially means nothing if the Arab countries refuse to acknowledge and live with Israel as the historic heartland and secure homeland of the Jewish people.

Here is the hard but essential core of the conflict that must be grasped quickly and addressed courageously, if there is to be any realistic chance for peace-making to proceed convincingly, rather than romantically, as is the case now: The shattering and refugeehood of the Palestinian community in 1947-48 was a direct consequence of the Zionist movement’s massive inflow of Jews into Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel. Any realistic attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict must reconcile those two facts, in a manner that respects three essential principles:

1) It must affirm the rule of law as defined by UN resolutions and international conventions on refugee rights.

2) It must address directly, rather than evasively dance around, the simultaneous core demands of the Jewish people’s need to live in a secure state, and the Palestinian people’s need to have their exile and refugeehood acknowledged as a consequence of Zionism’s actions, and then redressed through a series of options that allow future generations of Palestinians to live a normal life.

3) it must be negotiated directly and peacefully by the parties that explicitly and openly acknowledge the equal national rights of the other, in a manner that is politically realistic to all concerned.

Hosni Mubarak has sat in the White House for almost three decades stating that progress is being made towards a negotiated peace, and every time we sit through this spectacle it becomes less convincing, even just a little bit more childish -- because the approach being used guarantees failure if it continues to evade the core issues for both sides that must be resolved.

If the good folks in the White House did not notice, Palestine is now split into a Hamas region and a Fateh region, Israel is polarizing into liberal secularists and gun-toting colonialist religious zealots, and a few days ago Hamas battled a small group of militant Salafists in Gaza who are inspired by Al-Qaeda. It is too costly to keep pussyfooting around the core issues of simultaneously acknowledging Israeli and Palestinian national rights in adjacent states, and resolving the refugeehood of the Palestinians and of any Arab Jews who have similar claims.


Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.