Is a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict REALLY possible?
My answer is yes perhaps, but only if Obama has the courage to take on the Zionist lobby and its agents in Congress in order to secure the freedom to use the leverage he has to try to end Israel’s defiance of international law and cause it to be serious about peace on terms that would provide an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all.
In my recent post Another Daydream – How President Obama could earn his Nobel peace prize I indicated how he could put Israel on notice that he was prepared to use the leverage he has. He could do it by taking the lead in securing a binding UN Security Council Resolution that would demand, in accordance with Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, an end to Israel’s occupation in exchange for a comprehensive peace with the entire Arab and Muslim world including Iran. The resolution would say that if within a specified time Israel did not make the necessary withdrawals for peace based on two states with Jerusalem an undivided, open city and the capital of both states, it would be isolated and sanctioned, with America taking the lead in the sanctioning process.
Because what most Israeli Jews care most about is the relationship with America, there has to be a 60-40 chance, perhaps even a 70-30 chance, that such an Obama strategy would cause a significant majority of them to insist that their government changed course and complied with the new Security Council resolution.
There are, in fact, some very senior Israeli military and other security personnel who are already calling on Netanyahu to change course. According to a report in The Jewish Daily, a group of 106 retired generals, Mossad directors and national police commissioners signed a letter to Netanyahu urging him to “initiate a diplomatic process” based on a regional framework for peace with the Palestinians.
Several of those who signed what was called the “protest letter” told Israel’s Mako-Channel 2 News in interviews that Israel had the strength and the means to reach a two-state solution that “doesn’t entail a security risk,” but hadn’t managed to reach an agreement because of “weak leadership.” Reserve Major General Eyal Ben-Reuven said this:
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We’re on a steep slope toward an increasingly polarized society and moral decline, due to the need to keep millions of people under occupation on claims that are presented as security-related. I have no doubt that the prime minister seeks Israel’s welfare, but I think he suffers from some sort of political blindness that drives him to scare himself and us
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The letter was initiated by a former Armoured Corps commander, reserve Major General Amnon Reshef. He told Yediot Ahronot in an interview that he was “tired of a reality of rounds of fighting every few years instead of a genuine effort to adopt the Saudi initiative.”
What was said by those who signed the letter reminded me of something else former DMI Gazit said to me in 1980 and which I didn’t quote in my book. “If we had a government consisting of only former Directors of Military intelligence we would have had peace with the Palestinians long ago.”
The reason why I put my conclusion that Palestine is a lost cause on hold was that I thought, on reflection after reading Goldberg’s article, that it would wrong to make a 100 percent assumption that Obama won’t do what is in the best interests of America, the Jews of the world as well as those in Israel and, of course, the Palestinians.
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