Open Letter to President Obama – Yes, You Could.
You’ve made a good start by authorizing a dialogue with Syria. I say that assuming you’re not running an agenda which is premised on the expectation that in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, Syria can be prevailed upon to become, like Egypt and Jordan, an American-and-Israeli stooge. I can tell you that a separate Israel-Syria peace was Arafat’s “nightmare”. In my last conversation with him before he was murdered (do you know that he was most probably the first victim of Israeli biological warfare?), he said that a separate Israel-Syria peace could result in Syria, to please America and Israel, working with Jordan and Eygpt to oblige the Palestinians to accept whatever crumbs the Zionist state was prepared to offer them. And worse still in that scenario, Arafat added, was the probability that if the Palestinians refused to accept the crumbs on offer, Syria would be complicit with Jordan, Egypt and Israel in eliminating any further possibility of Palestinian resistance to Zionism’s iron fist and will.
That said, I am assuming that you, Mr. President, are wise enough to know that peace, if it is to be real and enduring, must be a comprehensive one. (And therefore that a separate Israel-Syria peace could well create more problems than it solved).
In that context bringing Syria in from the cold is a good start but it’s not enough. You must also bring Iran into the peace making process.
The fact that Damascus has influence with Hamas and Tehran has influence with Hizbollah and Hamas is not really the point. Neither Hamas nor Hizbollah need their arms twisted by their friends to make peace with Israel on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.
As I’m sure Ambassador Freeman will confirm if you don’t already know, Hamas’s real position has been a matter of record for some time. I often put it this way. If tomorrow Israel said and meant that it was ready for final negotiations on the basis of its withdrawal to the borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war (give or take some mutually agreed and minor border modifications), and with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two states, Hamas’s leaders would say, “Let’s do the business”. And they would mean it because they are not stupid. They know that a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians are prepared to settle for. (Though for how much longer that will remain the case is a good question).
Also true (I’m sure Ambassador Freeman could confirm this, too) is that Hizbollah’s real position is known. It is prepared to accept whatever the Palestinians accept.
And that is also what could be described as Iran’s fallback position, fallback because Iran’s preferred solution is the complete de-Zionisation of Palestine, otherwise known as the One State Solution – one secular, democratic state in which Arabs and Jews enjoyed equal political, other civil and human rights. (As you may or may not know, Mr. President, Iran’s Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be “wiped off the face of the earth”. Those words, which were not the words he used, obviously implied that he did want Israel’s Jews to be driven into the sea. What he actually said was that he wished to see the Zionist colonial entity “vanish from the pages of history” in the same way as the Soviet Union vanished. The notion that he called for Jews now living in Israel-Palestine to be liquidated was and is nothing but Zionist propaganda nonsense which, unfortunately, the mainstream Israeli-occupied American media was happy to promote as truth).
So here, Mr. President, is what I think you should do. Give your diplomats the authority to talk honestly and openly with all parties to the conflict including Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran. By so doing you could establish that what I’ve summarised above is true – that the whole Arab world and Iran is ready, willing and able to make peace with Israel on terms which, to repeat, any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.
Once you had established that fact, you could go to Israel and tell its Jewish citizens the truth and that they have a real choice to make.
If I was writing your speech for that occasion, I would have you tell Israel’s Jews that they need to make the right decision not only for their own self-interest but also for the continued wellbeing of the Jews of the world. And I’d have you reinforcing that point by quoting Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s longest-serving and universally respected Director of Military Intelligence. In his seminal book, Israel’s Fateful Hour, published in 1986, he wrote these warning words:
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