THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF CLAIMS
By Boris Shusteff
The recent visit of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to
Washington and the US Secretary of State Colin Powell´s trip to
Middle East were as helpful to the solution of the Arab-Israeli
conflict as the latest earthquake in Turkey. The conflict cannot
be solved through forcing Israel to "return to the
negotiation table." However, while no Israelis will go
skiing in a desert, a very large majority of them still believe
that the Jewish state can achieve peace with the Arabs by
negotiating with Arafat the surrender of the lands that she
gained in the Six-Day War.
The reason for the common misconception is the complete
misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict itself. David
Brooks explained in an excellent article in the July 2nd edition
of the "Weekly Standard" that the core of the conflict
is embedded in the Jewish and Arab incompatible moral claims. He
wrote, "The whole dispute hangs on a simple question: Is
Israel a criminal state? The Arab population has swung behind the
idea that it is, and the Jewish population has swung behind the
idea that it isn´t."
For the Arabs, the existence of Israel itself is unacceptable. On
June 29 "The Jerusalem Post" quoted Dan Meridor,
Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Relations and Defense Committee,
who was a member of the Israeli negotiating team at Camp David.
Talking on June 28 to the Israel-Britain and the Commonwealth
Association he explained why the negotiations failed.
"The problem was not putting an end to occupation nor the
creation of a Palestinian state, it wasn´t even Jerusalem or the
right of the Palestinians to self-determination… The very
acceptance of the Jewish state was the issue. Israel has to be
courageous enough and truthful enough to see the reality and not
substitute it for wishful thinking."
For the Arabs, Israel is an illegitimate child of the western
imperialism implanted in their midst. The Arabs do not want to
recognize anything that will even hint at the legitimacy of
Israel´s existence. Brooks described an episode that happened
during the Camp David summit when the Israeli delegation proposed
to give the control of the top of the Temple Mount to the Arabs.
In exchange they asked the Arabs never to dig into the earth
below the mosque plaza, since there lay the remains of the Holy
Temple destroyed by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago. The Arabs
agreed to this arrangement. However, "when Shomo Ben-Ami
asked them to put words into the agreement making clear why the
Israelis didn´t want the Palestinians digging, the Palestinians
vehemently refused. They could not sign a document that
acknowledged even the possibility that the spot might be
legitimately holy to the Jews. This symbolic position could not
be compromised because it goes to the core of the moral
claims."
The Arabs are not shy to shove their position into everybody´s
face. Even at the peak of the Camp David´s summit Arafat stared
straight into Clinton´s eyes and "expressed doubts that the
ancient Jewish temple actually lay beneath the Islamic-run
compound in Jerusalem."
The more frequent the lie is repeated the more it is believable.
The Arabs categorically reject any Jewish connection with Eretz
Yisrael prior to 1917. To them the starting point of the Jewish
history in Palestine is the issuance of the Balfour Declaration.
Their position is simple: the Jews are the occupiers that came to
Palestine from all over the world to displace the local Arab
population; the Jews robbed them of the land and of their right
to self-determination.
The Israeli "peace camp" cannot understand that it is
not the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha) that
is rejected by the Arabs, but the Jewish presence in all of the
Land of Israel. On June 14-17, the Jerusalem Media &
Communication Center conducted a poll among the Palestinian Arabs
throughout Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, that unequivocally
proved this. When asked, "In your opinion what should be the
final goal for the current intifada?" 41.2 % of the
respondents answered - "the freedom of all Palestine."
Asked if they "agree to the cessation of the Palestinian
intifada in return for cessation of Israeli settlement in the
occupied territories," 67.1% disagreed. This hatred towards
the Jewish state did not develop as a byproduct of the
"intifada." The poll performed among 2000 Arabs of
Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Palestinian Autonomy by the
Israeli daily "Maariv" in November 1999, showed that
67% of the respondents "believe that Israel must be
destroyed."
While the Arabs consistently reject the legitimacy of the Jewish
rights to Eretz Yisrael, the Israeli leaders are tirelessly
working in support of the desires of the Palestinian Arabs.
Before the creation of the PLO in 1964, nobody talked about the
"Palestinian nationalism." It simply did not exist. The
PLO itself was established by the Egyptian President Nasser as a
weapon to obtain Egypt´s hegemony over the Arab world. Jillian
Becker wrote in the book "The PLO" that, the first PLO
Covenant specifically "denied that the PLO had sovereignty
over the West Bank of Jordan (annexed by the Hashemite monarchy),
Gaza (taken under Egyptian administration) or the al-Hamma region
(annexed by Syria)."
Since the proclaimed intention of the PLO was to "forge a
Palestinian consciousness in the present generation," it is
apparent that this "consciousness" was not supposed to
be forged among the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and al-Hamma.
That means that they were not considered to be a "separate
people" and did not need to exercise the right of
self-determination.
After Israel´s 1967 victory, in addition to the lands of Yesha
the Jewish state acquired a big group of Arabs that technically
were the citizens of the Arab states - Egypt and Jordan. Instead
of annexing the land, thus making the Arabs that lived there the
foreign nationals of the neighboring countries, Israeli leaders
demonstrated indecisiveness and utter non-preparedness to deal
with the situation. Many of them say today that they "do not
want to rule over another people." The truth is that they
never ruled over the "other people." The option that
they chose was the worst possible. They were "teasing"
the Arabs of Yesha, developing among them envy, forcing them to
compare the standards of living in Israel with those in Egypt and
Jordan.
Never in all other wars in the history of mankind has such a
problem existed. The victors either expelled without hesitation
the population of the enemy countries from the conquered
territories or incorporated them. Israel neither had the guts for
the former nor the desire for the latter. This uncertainty gave
the chance to the PLO to gain a foothold among the Arabs of
Yesha, and it began to "forge a Palestinian
consciousness" among them.
By exploiting the 20th century mantra of
"self-determination," Arafat and the PLO established a
smokescreen of legitimacy for their actions. The Arabs proved to
be capable students of the Western democracy. They realized that
they could not sell the plan of the outright Israel´s
destruction and found a brilliant way to substitute it with the
"legitimate" struggle of the "Palestinian
people." The terror was presented as a legitimate action of
the "occupied people" against the "Israeli
occupiers." The Arab propaganda lured the western world to
buy a story of an "indigenous Palestinian people"
devoid of "homeland and rights to self-determination."
What is even worse, the Israeli intellectual elite played the
first violin in helping to sell this story.
It took the Arab propaganda only a few years to convince the
world and many Israelis themselves of the "moral
equivalence" between the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael and
the claim of the "Palestinian people" to Palestine.
More than 4,000 years of the Jewish history became equivalent to
the 30 years of the history of the "pseudo-people." The
Arabs convinced others and themselves that the Jews are the
"criminals that stole their land," and that the Jews
are so greedy that they do not want to "return" even a
small piece of "Palestinian land."
The Palestinian Arab propagandists skillfully piled together the
UN Resolutions 242 and 338, the formula "land for
peace," and the declaration of their "right" to
establish an "independent Palestinian state with holy
Jerusalem as its capital." However, the fact is that in
Resolutions 242 and 338 there is not a single word about
establishment of any states, and, moreover, the word
"Palestinian" is not even mentioned there.
It is absolutely clear that the moral claims of the Jews and the
Palestinian Arabs are incompatible. While the Arabs are demanding
from Israel to recognize the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to
Palestine, they are categorically rejecting the rights of the
Jews to Eretz Yisrael. All these are the elements of the plan to
substitute the Jewish state in Palestine with the Arab one. As
Faysal al-Husseiny said in his last interview published on June
24 in the Egyptian daily "Al-Arabi," "if we agree
to declare our state… [in] West Bank and Gaza - our ultimate
goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from
the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea, even if this means
that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for
many generations" (1).
Meridor was right when he said that, Israel has to be courageous
enough and truthful enough to see the reality and not substitute
it for wishful thinking. The only question is how long will it
take?
1. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI): Faysal
Al-Husseiny in his Last Interview: "The Oslo Accords Were a
Trojan Horse; The Strategic Goal is the Liberation of Palestine
from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea." 7/2/01.
http://www.memri.org
02 July 2001
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Boris Shusteff is an engineer. He is also a research associate
with the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies.