The erasure from historical memory of Israeli statehood offers and Palestinian rejections is badly distorting today’s debate about Middle East peace
The erasure from our historical memory of Israeli attempts to achieve peace by agreeing to Palestinian statehood, and of the serial Palestinian rejections, is now standard practice. This erasure sustains the libel that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ seeking ‘permanent occupation’ and underpins a ludicrously uncritical attitude to the Palestinian national movement, its leadership, and aspects of its political culture. From Human Rights Watch to Nathan Thrall, Peter Beinart to the Carnegie Endowment, the debate now proceeds as if those offers were never made and never rejected. Bringing those offers back in, and those rejections, we get a more realistic picture of the obstacles standing in the way of achieving two states for two peoples.Israel Isn’t Going Anywhere
‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ is the slogan of the fictional English Socialist Party led by Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Orwell understood that the erasure of history is a useful tool to control the present narrative and to influence the future. While perhaps an exaggerated analogy, there are Orwellian parallels in how anti-Israel organisations and thought leaders now treat some of the key historical elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is clearly evident in relation to the multiple offers of statehood made by Israel to the Palestinians in the 2000 to 2008 period (the ‘Statehood Offers’). These events do not fit the fictional narrative of those who portray Israel as a colonial-settler enterprise that seeks to dominate the Palestinians in an endless occupation that has been characterised by some as ‘apartheid’.
A central element of this viewpoint asserts that Israel’s control of the West Bank has always been designed to be permanent. (It also considers Gaza to be occupied, despite not a single Israeli being present in the area, but this topic is beyond the scope of this article.) Thus, the notion that the West Bank and Gaza are semi-autonomous entities that may eventually become a sovereign Palestinian state is a fallacy and the whole region between ‘the river and the sea’ must be considered one entity under two systems that by design discriminates against Palestinians.
The concept of ‘permanent occupation’ as Israeli policy is demolished once we undertake a full and honest accounting of the Statehood Offers. Over this period Israel, with the assistance of the Americans who facilitated negotiations in 2000 and 2001, offered the Palestinians a full independent state that according to most Western observers contained all the elements of what a final-status deal should look like. The Clinton Parameters were a set of core positions provided to the Israelis and Palestinians in December 2000 as a vast improvement over the statehood offer in Camp David during the Summer of 2000. The key elements of the parameters were:
- Creation of an independent Palestinian state with contiguity on nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps, 100 per cent of Gaza and a dedicated link between the two areas.
- Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine divided under the principle that existing Arab areas would be Palestinian and Jewish ones Israeli. This would also apply to the Old City, which would also be divided.
- Palestinian control of the Temple Mount/Haram and Israeli control of the Western Wall.
- The ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinians would be allowed into the new Palestinian state.
- End of conflict agreement that would end all claims and satisfy all relevant U.N. resolutions.
For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the majority of the world’s Jews live in Zion.The Sand Curtain Has Fallen
Whether forced from Arab lands, fleeing persecution in Russia and eastern Europe before World War Two, or survivors of the Holocaust, these people and their children and grandchildren aren’t going anywhere. They are home. They have nowhere to go. Christian Europe and Muslim lands made it abundantly clear that they would suffer the presence of the Jews from time to time, but they would not hesitate to remind them, through expulsions, forced conversions, and pogroms, that they were guests in other people’s lands, and only sometimes welcome ones.
So they went to Israel, where there has been a continuous Jewish presence for 2,000 years, since the conquest by the Romans in 70 CE.
The Israeli novelist Amos Oz wrote that the graffiti in Europe before World War Two said “Jews get out. Go to Palestine.” The graffiti in Palestine said “Jews go back to Europe.” Oz concluded that if you can’t be here and you can’t be there, the clear message is, “Don’t Be.”
Well, the Jews are a stubborn lot and they refused to disappear, much to the consternation of many. Their mere existence is an affront. But this time, they aren’t going anywhere because they have nowhere to go.
The Sand Curtain, like the Iron Curtain 30 years ago, has fallen. Israel and its “Abrahamic” partners are enjoying a lightning-fast peace bonanza. But some Westerners have difficulty rejoicing in the breakthrough. The Left assiduously seeks to poke holes in the Abraham Accords, and makes sourpuss faces whenever advances in Gulf-Israel ties are mentioned. The good news is that the accords easily survived the recent Hamas-Israel conflict. How a renewed JCPOA accord will affect ties remains an open and troubling question.David Singer: Abdullah-Biden meeting will not help resolve Jewish-Arab conflict
Falling in Love
The speed with which Israeli relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have taken off (and with Morocco and Sudan to a degree as well), and the genuine warmth experienced by every Israeli business delegation and tourist group to have visited these countries, is astounding. It is a speed of light peace bonanza, a whirlwind of almost Biblical proportions.
Venture capitalists from Tel Aviv and Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Manama are scouting out joint investment opportunities in cybersecurity, fintech, aggrotech, food security, educational technology, and healthcare. Bilateral business chambers have been established, including a Jewish-Muslim women’s business council and a youth council. One Emirati investment house executive enthused to The New York Times, “It’s like falling in love!”
Trade between Israel and the UAE already has exceeded $354 million. According to the Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Trade, Thani bin Ahmed Al-Zayoudi, the two countries have signed approximately 25 agreements in more than 15 sectors. Academics from the Emirates and Israel are participating in each other’s conferences. Israel’s two main strategic think tanks, INSS and JISS, each have signed research partnerships with leading Emirati institutes.
Tourist packages for Israelis and for Jews everywhere to the Gulf are sprouting like mushrooms, and Gulf tourists to Israel are coming soon too. Three Emirati and three Israeli airlines are operating or planning daily flights to Dubai and Abu Dhabi (slowed only by lingering effects of the COVID-19 crisis), as is Bahrain’s Gulf Air. Emirati Airlines times its flights from Ben-Gurion Airport to connect with Emirates flights from the Gulf to the Far East, giving Israelis new routes to China, Japan, Thailand and more.
Hundreds of Israelis in kippas and Emiratis in long white robes and kanduras gathered in early June at a Global Investment Forum in Dubai, co-sponsored by The Jerusalem Post and The Khaleej Times. This, despite the fierce mini war that Israel had just fought with Hamas in Gaza and with Palestinian radicals in Jerusalem.
The meeting between Jordan’s King Abdullah and President Biden at the White House on 19 July seems set to achieve absolutely nothing towards resolving the 100 years-old conflict between Jews and Arabs.
Biden’s Press Secretary - Jen Psaki – has claimed:
“It will be an opportunity to discuss the many challenges facing the Middle East and showcase Jordan’s leadership role in promoting peace and stability in the region.”
The King has shown no leadership in resolving the conflict between Jews and Arabs over sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (aka "West Bank") [“Disputed Territory”] and Gaza – comprising the remaining 5% of the territory of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine where sovereignty still remains unallocated (“Unallocated Territories”).
Sovereignty in the remaining 95% of the Mandate territory was divided between:
Jordan - 78% – upon the establishment of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan in 1946
Israel - 17% – upon its establishment in 1948.
Concerted attempts over the last 25 years to create an additional Arab State in the Unallocated Territories for the first time in recorded history (“two-state solution”) have all failed. Abdullah has been a principal protagonist for this solution.
Jordan’s failure to take a leadership role in agreeing to an alternative solution - division of the Unallocated Territories between Jordan and Israel within the framework of their existing 1994 Peace Treaty – has gone begging during Abdullah’s 22 year reign.
The following historic, geographic and demographic realities bind Jordan with the Disputed Territory:
Transjordan in 1948 conquered and occupied the Disputed Territory until 1967 – renaming the newly-merged territorial entity “Jordan” in 1950.
The Arab residents of the Disputed Territory were Jordanian citizens between 1950 and 1988 and elected their own representatives to the Jordanian Parliament in Amman.
Statements made by Arab leaders over decades have attested to the territorial and population ties between Jordan and the Disputed Territory:
"Jordan and Palestine until 1945 were one state, actually. After the Second World War Churchill himself said ‘This is Transjordan and this is Palestine’. Before that, Jordan was an emirate, completely part of Palestine." – Yasser Arafat New York Review of Books 25 June 1987