March 02, 2014
With
perhaps just weeks to go before the United States unveils its framework accord
that it hopes will prod Palestinians and Israelis towards a comprehensive
negotiated resolution of their conflict, it seems that every dimension of this
conflict is generating new ideas, trial balloons, or fresh pressures on both
sides, as the moment of truth for both sides approaches.
Consider
just these recent developments: Hamas and Fatah are trying again to create a
single, unified Palestinian national leadership. Spain is working on a law that
would give citizenship to Sephardic Jews in Israel or elsewhere whose ancestors
once lived in Spain. German banks and European companies and investment funds
are almost daily listing Israeli firms or enterprises they will not do business
with because the latter profit from the colonization of the West Bank, Gaza
Strip and Arab East Jerusalem. An American-backed effort proposes to
financially compensate the 700,000 or so Jews who fled or were driven out of
Arab countries since 1948. Israelis and Western Jews are increasingly debating
what exactly the Israeli government means when it wants the Palestinians to
formally accept and recognize Israel as “the homeland of the Jewish people.”
And earlier this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told a visiting
Israeli youth delegation that in any permanent peace agreement he did not
intend “to drown Israel with millions of refugees.”
These and
other developments touch on some of the most delicate but important issues that
have long stoked this conflict, and that must be resolved without ambiguity for
a permanent peace agreement to see the light of day. As Israelis and Palestinians
near the point where they must come clean on core issues that they have allowed
to float in a sea of ambiguity for 70 years, they will both find it important
to engage in tough debates on the two huge issues that define and dominate
everything else in this conflict:
First,
what is the precise required relationship between one’s Zionist or Palestinian
identity and the same land that each side sees as its rightful patrimony? Since
its inception in the late 19th Century, this has always been a conflict about
two interrelated things: identity and land. The two are equally important in
different ways, but also inseparable. The current negotiations, and the
American mediation that seeks to nudge them forward with the framework accord,
have focused on a series of issues like security, borders, water, Jerusalem,
settlements and refugees, by disaggregating them into smaller items that can be
addressed in a technical manner. Such solutions often rely on money
(compensation) or guns (security) as the final arbiters, but this approach is
unlikely to work if it does not recognize the centrality of, and wrestle with,
the much deeper emotional, psychological and nationalist issue that are
anchored in that fundamental twinning of land and identity—and also of their
denial.
Second,
how far is each side willing to go to acknowledge the other side’s need to be
recognized in the manner that it defines itself, i.e., to what extent can
Palestinians acknowledge Israel in a peace accord as “a Jewish state,” or “the
homeland of the Jewish people,” a land where Jews have always lived as
indigenous natives, and not only as colonial settlers? Conversely, to what
extent can Israelis acknowledge the deliberate and documented role of Zionist
political and military organizations in the forced refugeehood of the
Palestinians in 1947-48, and their subsequent lifetimes of exile? What actions
would supplement such an Israeli acknowledgment that remains absolutely central
to the Palestinian national and individual psyche? What combination of options
would be offered the Palestinians to finally resolve and permanently leave
behind their refugeehood, and the pain they have suffered from it since
1947—and would those same options be mirrored by choices offered to Jews who
left or were driven from Arab lands?
In other
words, are both sides prepared to admit to the other that they both have a
natural and historical link with the same land? If so, are they able then to
share the land in an equitable manner that removes the pains of the past and
provides them both with secure, viable and meaningful statehood for the future?
Can this happen with honor and dignity for both sides, and in accordance with
international law and UN resolutions?
I believe
that the answer to all these questions is an emphatic ‘yes,’ if we assume both
people have equal rights in the eyes of God, the law, and more importantly,
each other. For it is in each other’s eyes that Palestinians and Israelis
encounter the critical and reciprocal nexus of identity, land and historical
trauma that demands first acknowledgment, then equitable resolution, because it
is what has always shaped their conflict with each other. We will know soon if
the American framework accord understands this, and if the parties to the
conflict are prepared to address this.
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. You can follow him @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2014 Rami G.
Khouri—distributed by Agence Global