THE PRICE FOR A PALESTINIAN STATE

  Artículo de Jim Hoagland en “The Washington Post” del 05.06.2003
 

A Palestinian state is now recognized as a legitimate and desirable goal by the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel.

This is a historic shift. But it must be accompanied by a similar mental earthquake in the Arab world for a lasting peace to be reached.

Three decades ago Israeli leaders -- most notably, Golda Meir -- disputed the very existence of a "Palestinian" people. The residents of the West Bank and Gaza were "Arabs" who had never had and never would have a state, she told the Times of London. This was not long after Israel responded to direct threats to its survival by conquering its Arab neighbors in six days -- 36 years ago this week.

Contrast Meir's words to those of Ariel Sharon at the Aqaba summit yesterday:

"It is in Israel's interest . . . for the Palestinians to govern themselves in their own state," Sharon said in formally accepting the goal of a Palestinian state by 2005 as outlined in President Bush's "road map." This is a conceptual breakthrough, however limited Sharon may intend that acceptance -- and the Palestinian state -- to be.

Bush also attaches strong conditions to his championing of Palestinian national aspirations through a two-state solution. These include halting terrorism and demilitarization.

"I destroyed a terrorist state in Afghanistan, I destroyed a terrorist state in Iraq and I am not about to help create a terrorist state" on Israel's borders, the president is said to have told aides in discussions about security guarantees that Israel needs for peace.

But a paradox develops: At this highest crest of acceptance of a two-state solution since 1947 -- when Israel adopted the original U.N. partition but Arabs did not -- Arab leaders are increasingly edging away from openly recognizing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

That retreat is largely disguised and conducted in diplomatic code. It nonetheless feeds separate tides of anti-Israeli resentment and anti-Semitic hatred of Jews that are rising and fusing in Europe, potentially in the United States and elsewhere. Such behavior does not summon peace to the Middle East.

Arab leaders who met with Bush in Egypt on Tuesday did so on the condition that Israel was excluded. Earlier, Palestinian negotiators told journalists they had turned down a proposed joint communique with the Israelis because of proposed language that could be interpreted as endorsing Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

But such an endorsement is, in Sharon's view, essential. The Israeli prime minister had demanded that the Palestinians grant "a waiver of any right of return of Palestinian refugees to the state of Israel" to get talks started.

At Bush's urging Sharon dropped this as a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinians. But he still insists that a final agreement must include that waiver. Sharon is highlighting early in the process what I think is the biggest obstacle that Bush will confront in his post-Iraq search for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement.

Three years ago this month, as Bill Clinton prepared for his Camp David II summit with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, Israeli and Palestinian officials described to me a tentative compromise that they felt could be adopted at the talks.

The compromise would have allowed Arafat to claim that Israel had agreed to respect a formal "right of return" for the estimated 3 million members of the Palestinian diaspora, while in practice Israel would screen applications and determine who could actually resettle in Israel. The result would have been a relatively small number, perhaps as few as tens of thousands. But only such an arrangement could preserve Israel's viability as a Jewish state.

Arafat, a creature of exile politics, refused at the last minute to swallow the bitter pill, which would have offered compensation for those not admitted to Israel. Instead he walked away from peace and into insurrection. And he got no pressure or criticism from the Arab leaders who have refused to take the politically risky steps of integrating the Palestinian refugees into their own societies. These leaders continued to put their interests and safety before those of peace. (Another historical note worth remembering: No one opposed a Palestinian state more fiercely in the 1970s than the royal families of the Gulf, led by the Saudis.) No one can dispute that Palestinian refugees lead existences of daily suffering and humiliation. They deserve not only sympathy but also compensation for their dispossession, and a fresh start outside those awful camps.

For that to happen on the basis of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, Arab leaders will have to display courage and toughness that have been absent for half a century in dealing with their own publics about the Palestinian refugees and workers in their midst.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and in the first instance the Palestinian Authority will have to abandon the fiction that the Palestinians in diaspora have an absolute and unlimited "right of return" into Israel.

The Arab side must now also show concretely that it is committed to a genuine two-state solution.