Rami G. Khouri: Perpetual and collective failures
[Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and US citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth.
He is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut as well as editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and author.]
Two opposing trends were affirmed in Israel and Palestine this week, and one of them must disappear.
The Fateh congress in Bethlehem reaffirmed the strategic decision among a majority of Palestinians to seek a negotiated peace with Israel, while a string of senior Israeli officials said that they would continue expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and would not repeat the “mistake” of withdrawing from Gaza.
These trajectories of Palestinians seeking peace and Israelis perpetuating colonial occupation are so starkly contradictory that they clearly cannot persist as they are. Yet they both also represent failed policies that must be changed if the interests of Israelis and Palestinians are ever to be reconciled in a peace agreement that respects both their national rights.
The Fateh congress in Bethlehem reaffirmed what has been clear since 1988, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) recognised Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism. This decision only formalised the PLO decision of a decade earlier to establish a Palestinian state on any part of the 1967 occupied territories that was liberated from Israeli control.
For the past 40 years, during which it has dominated Palestinian national politics, Fateh has shown itself to be unable to wage either war or peace. Consequently, Palestinians everywhere, but especially in the West Bank and Gaza, suffer the worst possible combination of political stagnation, economic stress, and widespread personal vulnerability and insecurity.
After 1993, Fateh wasted the historic opportunity of the Oslo agreement to rally all Palestinians behind a state-building project, and after 2002, it again wasted the opportunity to rally the Arab world behind the Arab Peace Initiative, issued at the 2002 Beirut summit.
Rarely in modern history has a political movement that enjoyed credibility, legitimacy and respect in its early years morphed so badly into sustained incompetence in its later years.
So for the Fateh congress now to declare, again, that the Palestinians choose peace with Israel while reserving the right to engage in armed resistance to occupation seems rather unconvincing, for the movement that once resonated widely around the Arab world has had 40 years to show that, in fact, it is unable to activate either option.
In Israel, meanwhile, on the same day, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that Israel must go ahead with plans to expand a settlement enclave near Jerusalem despite American objections. Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, on the same tour of Israeli settlements with Yishai, agreed, adding: “If we don’t build here, the Palestinians will.”...
Read entire article at The Jordan Times
The Fateh congress in Bethlehem reaffirmed the strategic decision among a majority of Palestinians to seek a negotiated peace with Israel, while a string of senior Israeli officials said that they would continue expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and would not repeat the “mistake” of withdrawing from Gaza.
These trajectories of Palestinians seeking peace and Israelis perpetuating colonial occupation are so starkly contradictory that they clearly cannot persist as they are. Yet they both also represent failed policies that must be changed if the interests of Israelis and Palestinians are ever to be reconciled in a peace agreement that respects both their national rights.
The Fateh congress in Bethlehem reaffirmed what has been clear since 1988, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) recognised Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism. This decision only formalised the PLO decision of a decade earlier to establish a Palestinian state on any part of the 1967 occupied territories that was liberated from Israeli control.
For the past 40 years, during which it has dominated Palestinian national politics, Fateh has shown itself to be unable to wage either war or peace. Consequently, Palestinians everywhere, but especially in the West Bank and Gaza, suffer the worst possible combination of political stagnation, economic stress, and widespread personal vulnerability and insecurity.
After 1993, Fateh wasted the historic opportunity of the Oslo agreement to rally all Palestinians behind a state-building project, and after 2002, it again wasted the opportunity to rally the Arab world behind the Arab Peace Initiative, issued at the 2002 Beirut summit.
Rarely in modern history has a political movement that enjoyed credibility, legitimacy and respect in its early years morphed so badly into sustained incompetence in its later years.
So for the Fateh congress now to declare, again, that the Palestinians choose peace with Israel while reserving the right to engage in armed resistance to occupation seems rather unconvincing, for the movement that once resonated widely around the Arab world has had 40 years to show that, in fact, it is unable to activate either option.
In Israel, meanwhile, on the same day, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that Israel must go ahead with plans to expand a settlement enclave near Jerusalem despite American objections. Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, on the same tour of Israeli settlements with Yishai, agreed, adding: “If we don’t build here, the Palestinians will.”...