By Hasan Abu Nimah
Friday, August 7th, 2009, 2:43 pm Amman Time
Courtesy Of The Jordan Times
Current efforts by the Obama administration to revive the so-called peace process hardly make any reference to the Arab Peace Initiative (API). Astonishingly the same applies to both the Arab states and the Palestinian side who persistently invoke the roadmap and the two-state- solution instead.
I often argued against those who blamed the failure of the API on the inadequacy of Arab efforts to market the initiative outside the Arab world, although such efforts weresometimes tried. I always believed that for those concerned, mainly the Israelis, the API was fully understood and it did not need further elaboration. Probably it was their perfect understanding of every word in it that led to its rejection rather than any assumed vagueness about its text or intention.
In our media dominated world it is barely sufficient, however, to rely on what those who are directly concerned understand. One needs to create a much larger crowd of believers in a certain project so that the members of such a crowd would be immunised against misconceptionsand distortions.
So it may be that the Israelis fully understand what the API implies, but when they ignore it and saturate the airwaves with propaganda about Arab extremism, Arab terror and the alleged Arab/Islamic threat to their existence, fewer people remember the API. The question is why the Arabs have not mounted a campaign to hold Israel accountable for rejecting the API.
No serious person can argue that the API is not extremely generous - offering Israel full normal relations, security guarantees and peace in exchange for full withdrawal from the lands it occupied in 1967. This would leave Israel in control of 78 per cent of historical Palestine.
If anything, this plan is much harsher on the Palestinians who would end up with at best 22 per cent of their historical homeland. The API was also written in such a way as to suggest that Palestinian refugees would not be granted their right to return to the homes and lands from which Israel expelled them, and that some of Israel’s illegal colonies would remain on the stolen West Bank land on which they are implanted.
All this as well as other concessions were meant not to frighten Israel, and despite all this Israel rejected the plan and continues to resist it. Why?
One of the supposedly strong paragraphs in the API calls for “Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines, as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.”
Neither this text, nor the API’s introductory paragraph, which refers to the speech of then Saudi crown prince, now King Abdullah ben Abdul Aziz, make specific mention of East Jerusalem when defining the areas from which Israel is supposed to withdraw. East Jerusalem is indeed mentioned later in paragraph 2 as the capital of the envisaged Palestinian state. But calling for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital has become such a cliché that few take it literally. The operative paragraph on withdrawal also left out an important part mentioned earlier in the introductory paragraph. The speech by Saudi King Abdullah called for “full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967, in implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” That important reference to the resolutions was unduly omitted.
Despite all such discrepancies the significance of the API cannot, and should not, be undermined. The Arabs have every reason to hold on to the initiative as a moderate, pragmatic and (overly) generous offer that constitutes maximum flexibility. Instead of placing so much emphasis on the roadmap and the “two state solution,” the Arab discourse should counter demands for further concessions by stressing that the API is what the Arabs offered and the ball is entirely in Israel’s court.
The surprising phenomenon is that instead of showing more determination in pursuit of their own initiative, the Arabs tended to ignore it when the Israelis showed little or no interest. That is unusual.
There are no indications that the current American peace efforts are likely to produce any results. The Americans have, despite much persistence, lost the first and only round. Israel did not budge on the issue of stopping building settlements regardless of how trivial this issue is in comparison to others. Yet the Arabs have to shoulder the blame once more. To save face the American side had to deal with the issue of the settlement freeze not as a bilateral American-Israeli matter, but as part of a larger package. They conditioned Israeli compliance on Arab readiness for instant normalisation. This formula made it easy to press the claim that the Arab reluctance to start normalising must be blamed for Israeli rejection of the American demand of settlement freeze.
The Arabs should not allow this new American-Israeli myth to take hold, just like the last big myth that Palestinians were offered the moon at the 2000 Camp David summit and unreasonably chose to reject it.
The danger of the collapse of attempts such as the American one to force an Israeli settlement freeze is often compounded. Israel always interprets such failures as a green light to accelerate its colonisation programme.
What is happening as a result is that Israel has moved from the stage of expanding on empty land into evacuating Arab families from their homesand replacing them with Jewish settlers. This is exactly what happened last Sunday in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. Israeli policeevicted nine Palestinian families of 53 members from their homes, which were immediately made available to settlers who moved in.
If the Israeli claim that the houses were originally owned by Jews then the same rule should apply to Arab-owned property in West Jerusalem. Arab families should accordingly be allowed to evict Jewish families from their homes anywhere in Jerusalem and Palestine and reoccupy their property rightfully as well. There is nothing more simple or more straightforward.
5 August 2009
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