Talk peace, talk two-state solution

Those who believe that nothing more needs to be done after the Israel-Gaza ceasefire are dangerously mistaken.

For, if the nine-day horrendous Israeli bombardment of the small and heavily congested Gaza Strip — in return for Hamas’ missiles some of which could reach even Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — has proved anything, it is that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is determined to scupper any solution to the wider problem of Israel’s occupation of the entire Palestine since 1967. He has indeed declared that Israel can “talk peace” only after the United States has “dealt with the threat of Iranian bomb”. In other words, while the international community, or the US, should punish Ayatollah Khamenei for his intransigence, his own intransigence merits applause.
Another ugly dimension of the latest bout of violence between Israel and Gaza is what a writer in the Guardian has called “grotesque inversion of reality”. The Western politicians and media have made out as if Israel had been attacked by a mighty power. US President Barack Obama was the first to fully endorse Mr Netanyahu’s policy, declaring that “no country on earth” would have acted otherwise while “missiles were raining down on its citizens” from outside its borders. There wasn’t a word of sympathy for the Gaza people of whom 133 (half of them civilians, including women and children) were killed as against five in Israel. This disproportion did not seem to register on Mr Obama. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, was quick to dutifully repeat what the US President had said.
Worse, the Western powers have gone out of their way to spread the notion that the latest bout of violence between Israel and Gaza was, “as usual, started by Hamas”. The reality is that the upheaval was triggered by Israel’s killing of Ahmed al-Jabari, the head of Hamas’ military organisations with whom it had been negotiating, through the Egyptians, until a few days earlier.
Come to think of it, there is a certain irony in Mr Obama’s unstinted support to
Mr Netanyahu, accompanied with praise of him, if only because last year the latter had “humiliated the US President on American soil” (not my words but those of former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s). At one time the Israeli Prime Minister had rejected disdainfully
Mr Obama’s request to “freeze only temporarily” the construction of Jewish settlements in then West Bank. Why then is Mr Obama being so supportive of Mr Netanyahu, especially when it remains his long-unfulfilled ambition to “reach out to the Muslim world”?
Sadly, our stand on the slaughter was mealy-mouthed. New Delhi first urged “restraint on both sides”. When Israeli attacks and the resultant deaths and destruction in Gaza escalated hugely, we described the situation as “unacceptable” without saying one word in criticism of Israel. Preservation of good relations with that country and its willingness to transfer high-technology weaponry is entirely understandable, but not at the cost of the high principles and the consistent Indian support to the Palestinian cause.
That apart, whatever
Mr Netanyahu’s motives — the imminence of elections is only one of them — and whatever his expectations, the fact remains that he has primarily underpinned Hamas’ legitimacy across the Arab world, and weakened the more moderate head of the Palestine Authority in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas. Interestingly, the result has been the arrival in Gaza of a delegation of Mr Abbas’ party to discuss reunion of the two Palestinian entities.
If, in spite of all this,
Mr Netanyahu persists in his policy of safeguarding his country’s security only by military force and its reckless use, he should be reminded of the wise words of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert: Israel’s “security and democracy” cannot survive indefinite subjugation of Palestine. For, in that event, given the demography of the region, the Jewish state would soon have Arab majority. What would the likes of
Mr Netanyahu do then? Convert Israel into an apartheid state to preserve its Jewish character?
The tragedy of it all is that the basis for a just and fair settlement exists. Its broad features were contained in the Oslo Agreement — between Israel under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was later assassinated, and Yasser Arafat, the supreme leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation — which was so ostentatiously signed on the southern lawns of the White House on September 13, 1993. Since then the template has been refined: Two states of Palestine and Israel with 1967 borders and agreed land swaps; unbreakable guarantees for Israel’s security and its recognition across the Arab world; and a shared capital in Jerusalem. The US could have pressed Israel towards that end, but it hasn’t. Indeed, some mock that Israel seems to be running America’s policy rather than vice-versa. The Jewish vote in the US being Israel’s leverage there makes no sense. As the recent presidential election has shown, though Mr Obama’s share of the Jewish vote has declined somewhat, an impressive majority of it has gone to the re-elected President.
No wonder influential voices are now being heard in Europe that the continent should say and do openly what it has been advocating privately for a long time, that is to mobilise the international community to promote the two-state solution. It is also an encouraging sign that Tony Blair, the United Nation’s special envoy, reportedly welcomes the idea. One wishes that the powerful Arab governments would be as supportive of the Palestine cause as they pretend to be.
The ball can start rolling within this week because on November 29, Mr Abbas would be at the UN General Assembly to demand the status of a “non-member state”. In reality this means an “observer” status, but his emphasis is on “statehood”. The date for this exercise has not been chosen at random. It was on this day in 1948 that the UN General Assembly decided to partition Palestine into two states, “one Jewish and one Arab”.