Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he hopes the Jewish state can find a willing partner so as to “quickly reach a historic agreement between the two peoples”.
Netanyahu was obviously referring to the Middle East Peace process which has been frozen since the Israeli Army’s ham-fisted assault on Gaza in 2008.
Netanyahu, seen by the Palestinians as the antithesis of peace, believes that achieving an agreement with the Palestinian Authority is difficult but possible.
Of course, little progress can ever be expected in the Gaza Strip. The tiny stretch of coastal land is run by Hamas – designated a terrorist organisation. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel and Israel refuses to deal with terrorists.
But the West Bank should be a different story with its softer approach under the PLO. However, one fails to see how Netanyahu can ever hope to convince his Likud Party that the West Bank should ever become a state (or part of a state) when it has been a champion of the four-decade-old movement to settle Jews in the West Bank, which Israel captured along with east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war.
Netanyahu has also said that any future Palestinian state would not be allowed to have an army, would have to recognise Israel as a Jewish state and accept “other” Israeli security demands.
He did not, on the other hand, address what are considered the conflict’s thorniest issues: Borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of the Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians have long rejected Netanyahu’s demands.
The talks are due to start in Washington tomorrow, but PLO negotiators have already stated that Netanyahu’s proposals are not at all proposals, but dictation. The PLO wants a state in all of the West Bank, neighbouring east Jerusalem and the seaside Gaza Strip on the other side of Israel.
The issue of Gaza is likely the one which will lead to the breakdown of talks. As we have mentioned, Hamas holds sway there and has vowed to continue to attack Israel and to never recognise a Jewish state.
Meanwhile, there is also the issue of an Israeli slowdown on settlement construction in the West Bank which is set to expire next month, and some of Netanyahu’s coalition members have stated that the government’s stability will be threatened if Israeli construction in the West Bank does not resume in full.
Palestinian negotiators have said that if the slowdown ends, Israel “will have closed the door to negotiation.”
While it is positive that talks are to resume after a two-year halt, one does not see how they can possibly bear fruit, especially with nationalistic Netanyahu’s pre-conditions, coupled with the Palestinian’s internal differences and resultant refusal to budge on various issues.
It is indeed sad to see that while the rest of the region has come to some level of peace and acceptance, the Palestinian issue continues to drag on. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel and others have moved closer to peace – some formally, some informally, but the basis of tolerance and acceptance seems to have finally taken root.
But the worst of it all is that through all the conflict, it is the Palestinian people who are suffering. People who have been made refugees in their own country. People who do not have access to basic humanitarian rights. People who are suffering because of the actions of others – militants and the army. Israel might argue that these people fuel the flames of resistance, but Israel should also look to its own past, the atrocity of the Holocaust, and realise that if there is a possibility to offer resistance to oppression, people will take up that cause. As many Jews did in WWII, whether it was by silent resistance, fighting in other nation’s armies, or by subterfuge. The Jews suffered tremendously, and that should allow their psyche to recognise the plight of the men, women and children of Palestine.