Open letter to President Obama: Your legacy
4. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Despite some stupid rhetoric to the contrary, the Arab regimes never, ever, had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine. (When Israel closed the Palestine file with its victory on the battlefield in 1948 and the Armistice Agreements that followed, the Arab regimes shared behind closed doors the same hope as Zionism and the major powers – that the Palestine file would remain closed. The Palestinians were supposed to accept their lot as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency. Their “crime” was and is their refusal to do so).
5. By the end of 1979, nearly 35 years ago, the pragmatic Arafat, on the advice of President Nasser more than a decade earlier, had prepared the ground on his side for peace on terms any rational government in Israel would have accepted with relief. He did it by persuading the Palestine National Council, more or less a Palestinian parliament-in-exile and then the highest decision making body on the Palestinian side, to endorse by 296 votes to 4 his policy of politics and compromise with Israel – compromise which until then had been unthinkable to all Palestinians because it required them to make peace with Israel in return for only 22 per cent of the land they rightfully claimed as their own. (Arafat also informed Israel’s leaders through secret channels that he and his leadership colleagues understood and reluctantly accepted that in order for a Palestinian mini state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be acceptable to most Israeli Jews, the Palestinian right of return would have to be restricted to the territory of the Palestinian state. That meant, as Arafat told me, only about 100,000 Palestinians would be able to return. But he was not renouncing the principle of the right of return for others. His hope was that one or two generations of a two-state peace would lead by mutual consent to One State with equal rights for all and therefore the space and trust needed to allow many more Palestinians to return. His priority in 1979 was to get “something concrete” for the Palestinians instead of nothing).
6. Since 27 March 2002 there has been on the table on Arab Peace Initiative (API) which was presented at the Beirut Summit of the Arab League by then Crown Prince and today King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. In return for an end to Israel’s occupation of all Arab land grabbed in the 1967 war (actually a war of Israeli aggression not self-defence) and Israel’s acceptance of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the API offers an end to the conflict AND WITH THE SIGNING OF A COMPREHENSIVE PEACE AGREEMENT THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NORMAL RELATIONS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE ENTIRE ARAB WORLD. (If Israel’s leaders had been willing to explore what was on offer in the API, they would have discovered two things. One was that a comprehensive peace agreement could contain a clause limiting the Palestinian right of return to territory of the Palestinian state with compensation for the rest. The other was Arab flexibility on Jerusalem. The API has East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state, but in negotiations for a full and final comprehensive peace the Arabs would accept that the whole of Jerusalem should be an undivided, open city and the capital of two states).
7. For some years Hamas’s top leaders have been on the public record with the statement that while they will never recognise Israel’s “right” to exist, they are prepared to accept the actual existence of an Israel inside its borders as they were on 4 June 1967, and live in peace with it, if that is the wish of a majority of Palestinians as expressed in a referendum.
Two related conclusions are demanded by the truth of history.
One is that it’s not Israel that has lacked and lacks a Palestinian partner for peace. It is the Palestinians who have lacked and lack an Israeli partner for peace. (There’s a case for saying that Israeli Prime Minister Rabin might have been one but he was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic who knew exactly what he was doing – killing the peace process Arafat’s pragmatism in motion).
The other conclusion is that Israel’s leaders are not remotely interested in peace on terms that would provide the Palestinians with an acceptable amount of justice.
As I think you know, Mr. President, but dare not say, the game plan of Israel’s leaders is to make life hell for the occupied and oppressed Palestinians in the hope that they will either abandon their struggle and surrender to Zionism’s will by accepting crumbs from its table – a few Bantustans here and there which they could call a state if they wished, or, preferably, pack up and leave their homeland to make a new life elsewhere.
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