Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Arabs need to become Zionists if there is to be peace

My Peace Agenda. A Response To Jonathan Freedland
Posted by Lyn Julius
For most of last week, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland was
cast as the erstwhile Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat in a role-
play exercise, while Palestinians played Israelis .
Apparently, every time such exercises take place, it is the
‘Palestinians’ who seethe with righteous indignation as the underdog.
The  ‘Israelis’ suffered too, the negotiators recognise, but that was
‘in the past’.
How has the peace agenda come to be so seriously skewed? The victims
of a genocidal project to destroy the Jews in the Middle East have
been turned into aggressors, and Jewish suffering downplayed. Who
around the negotiating table remembers that it was the Arabs were
rejected the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, and launched a war of
annihilation against Israel in 1948? Who remembers the Arab League
secretary-general Azzam Pasha’s spine-chilling promise in 1947: ‘This
will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be
spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’?
 It was a good week, writes Freedland. He negotiated Israel back to
the 1967 borders.That was the easy bit, Jonathan. Did the ‘Israeli
‘negotiators’ get the ‘Palestinians’ renounce  their ‘right of return’
to Israel proper?
The ‘right of return’
This issue cannot not be brushed aside lightly as ‘rhetoric’. Not
content with getting a Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and
Gaza, even the ‘moderates’ of the Fatah camp have refused to recognise
Israel as a Jewish state. Most recently they again affirmed that
their ‘right of return’ was non-negotiable. Thus Palestinians reserve
the right to turn the Jewish state into a second state of Palestine,
by overwhelming it with millions of returning refugees. The first act
of such a Muslim majority-state would be to repeal Israel’s ‘Law of
Return’ which entitles Jews ,wherever they may be, to automatic
Israeli citizenship.
That’s why, in the real negotiating world, Benjamin Netanyahu is right
to make Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state the
quintessential issue. (The real Erekat has said flippantly that Israel
can call itself what it likes - but does the Arab side accept Israel’s
right to call itself what it likes?)   If successive Israeli
governments did not insist on this point in the past, it is because
the Netanyahu has realised that the much vaunted ‘two-state solution’
leaves room for ambiguity.
To put it bluntly, Arabs need to become Zionists if there is to be
peace. They need to accept that the Jews are an indigenous Middle
Eastern people with a right to self-determination in their ancestral
homeland.
Refugees
The Palestinian negotiatiors at Freedland’s role-play hold ‘the moral
high ground’: the Palestinian refugees are seen as the main victims of
an Israeli injustice.  But this is another serious distortion.
The Arab refugees are the unintended consequence of a  war the Arabs
failed to win against the nascent state of Israel in 1948.  But it is
forgotten that the Arab waged a second war, on their own defenceless
Jewish citizens, a war they won easily. This war was not a mere
backlash to Israel – it was inspired by totalitarian Arab nationalism
and by the rise of Nazism.  The Jewish refugees – now comprising half
the Israeli population with their descendants – were successfully
‘ethnically cleansed’. Now it is the turn of other minorities.
The peace agenda espoused by Freedland and others misses the fact that
the single largest group of refugees created by the Arab-Israeli
conflict refugees was not Palestinian. Almost a million Jews were
expelled, not just from Jerusalem and the West Bank, but Arab lands,
and their pre-Islamic communities were destroyed. In terms of lost
property, the Jews forfeited land four times greater than Israel
itself.   As a matter of law, the Jewish refugees too deserve justice.
Recognition of their plight and compensation for seized assets many
times greater than Palestinian losses must also be included on the
peace agenda. Two sets of refugees exchanged places in the Middle
East. The parties to peace must recognise that the exchange is
irrevocable.
The peace agenda needs to include a humanitarian solution for
Palestinian refugees in Arab countries and their four million
descendants. They need to be granted  full rights in their Arab host
countries - including the right to become full citizens in their
countries of birth, just as Jewish refugees were granted full rights
in Israel and the West. The Palestinian refugee camps, terrorist
breeding grounds, need to be drained. The agency perpetuating
Palestinians refugee status from generation to generation, UNWRA, must
be dismantled and Palestinians allowed to be absorbed in wider Arab
society.
Jihad-driven antisemitism
The peace process needs to address the very cause of the Jewish exodus
– the same bigotry which drives the Arab and Muslim struggle against a
Jewish sovereign state in the Middle East and marginalises minorites.
The conflict is not just between Israel and Palestine;  it is rooted
in the Arab world’s cultural and religious prejudice against non-
Muslims ; and with the rise of Islamism, it is between western values
and Iranian-backed Jihad.
Freedland’s peacemaking simply does not address Jihad. Assume that
Arab governments are willing to renounce anti-Jewish media- and mosque-
driven  incitement and violence. Assume they are willing to accept
Israel as the state of the Jewish people: how do you deal with the
spoilers intent on wrecking the peace? If Israel makes an agreement
with the ‘moderates’ of the Palestinian Authority, what about Hamas?
If peace with Hamas, what about Hezbollah? The history of the Middle
East is littered with the corpses of moderates murdered by extremists.
Make peace with one armed fanatic group, and another pops up
elsewhere.
Only if democracy takes root in the Arab world can violent extremists
be marginalised. Islamists have only become a powerful force because
they control the mosques, the only conduit for popular political
expression in failing or non-democratic states. To bring about a
lasting peace, we need to adopt the Sharansky solution – incremental
financial incentives to encourage liberal democracy,  the
establishment of civil society with real respect for civil and human
rights, independent institutions and the rule of law.
If there is lesson for Israel from the Arab Spring, it is that peace
deals with illegitimate dictators are at best tactical truces.
Democracies do not need to distract their masses with an external
bogeyman. Democracies do not go to war with one another.
Peace negotiators, real or make-believe, need to move on from the
tired old cliches of the Oslo years. The issues are broader than
conventional wisdom suggests. Would someone please tell Jonathan
Freedland?
http://propagandistmag.com/2011/04/26/my-peace-agenda-response-jonathan-freedland

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