Is Peace (in Israel-Palestine) Possible?
To give you some insight into why today I believe that the idea of a genuine two-state solution is already dead if not yet buried, I’m now going to tell you the short version of a true story from Volume Two of my book.
At t
he end of 1979, after Arafat had committed himself and his people to unthinkable compromise with Israel, I found myself sucked into the secret diplomacy of conflict resolution at leadership level.
President Carter had always known that there could not be a peace process worthy of the name without the involvement of the PLO. At the end of 1979 he was in receipt of a secret letter Arafat had sent to the Security Council. In it Arafat pledged that he was ready to do business on the basis of Resolution 242, which meant that the PLO was prepared to recognise and legitimise Israel inside its pre-1967 borders. Everybody who saw that letter was of the opinion that it represented “the biggest potential breakthrough since the Zionist fait accompliof 1948/49″.
It was enough for Carter to try to bring the PLO into the peace process, but he was stopped from doing so by Prime Minister Begin and the Zionist lobby. The view thereafter in the Carter White House, and on the top floor of UN Headquarters in New York, was that institutional diplomacy could not solve the Palestine problem because of the inability of any American president to overcome Zionism’s veto.
Because it was widely known that, on the human level, I enjoyed excellent personal relationships with leaders on both sides of the conflict – with, for example, Golda Meir, Mother Israel, and Yasser Arafat, Father Palestine, it was put to me that I should try my hand at some unofficial secret diplomacy.
Israel at the time was 18 months or so away from its next election. Almost the whole world, and President Carter especially, was hoping that Begin would not win a second term as prime minister. My mission was to open and maintain a secret channel of communication between Shimon Peres and Arafat. (Peres wasthen the leader of Israel’s main opposition Labour Party and widely expected to be Israel’s next prime minister). The idea was that if I could get the two of them into an exploratory dialogue, initially with me as the linkman, we could prepare the ground for a public breakthrough when Peres became prime minister.
As it happened, my initiative was funded by Marcus Sieff, the Chairman of Marks and Spencer, with the approval of Lord Victor Rothschild.
When Peres gave me his green light, he said that if word of the initiative leaked, he would be destroyed politically. So he was, he said, putting his political future into my hands. Arafat said that he was putting his life in my hands. His exacts words were: “If what we are doing leaks before I have something concrete to show for my good faith, I will be assassinated.” …. Despite that I took the risk of keeping King Hussein and President Sadat informed. I knew I could trust Hussein, I had to gamble on trusting Sadat.
Now to the point of the story. In our very first private conversation before I went off to Beirut to engage Arafat, Peres said he feared it was already “too late”. He meant too late for peace on any terms Arafat could accept. When I asked Peres why, he said the following:
“Every day that passes sees new bricks on new settlements. Begin knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s creating the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews.” In order, Peres meant and did not have to say, to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. After a long pause, Peres added, “I’m not.”
Ladies and gentlemen (and one dear Lord), if it was “too late” in 1980 when there were only about 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank, how much more too late is it today when there are about half a million; and with that number growing on a daily basis, thanks in part to the assistance now being provided for illegal new settlement by American Christian fundamentalists…?
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