T HE P OIN T- C OUN T ERP OIN T P UBL IC AT ION FOR NO V EMBER 2, 2 011
ISR A EL A ND PA L E S T INE AT T HE UN:
I S UNIL ATER A L AC TION THE A N S W ER?
PEACE NEGOTIATIONS ARE THE SOLUTION The views expressed in this piece represent no one but myself. Please resist the urge to categorize my arNAOMI SCHEINERMAN ticle as an ideological manifesto that is “Pro-This” or “Anti-That.” My perspective is informed by my experiences living in both Israel and the West Bank; by years of studying, reading, listening, and observing; by sharing stories and ideas with family and friends intimately involved in the conflict; and by a passionate connection to Israel as the Jewish Homeland. I do not pretend this perspective is not personal, but neither is it un-nuanced. The recent Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations is inappropriate for two reasons: (1) The UN is incapable of serving as an appropriate or objective arbitrator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and (2) this conflict will not be resolved by unilateral action from either party. First, the United Nations’ record on matters relating to Israel and the Palestinian and Arab conflict has consistently been biased against Israel. The UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than all other states combined which evidences a blatant double standard. It is one thing to pass warranted and accurate resolutions about Israel’s human rights record and quite another to focus primarily on Israel when more egregious human rights violations take place in Sudan, India, China, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico on a regular basis. This clear bias renders the UN an entirely inappropriate arbitrator of the question of Palestinian statehood. Second, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to acquire statehood status at the UN constitutes a unilateral demand for territory without a corresponding peace offer. Since the 1978 Camp David Accords, the basis of the Middle East peace process has been Israeli offers of land in exchange for Arab promises of peace. Abbas’s UN bid entails no such promise. Today, unilateral action can have devastating effects. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and ceded governance to the Palestinians, Hamas (the Palestinian terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of Israel) violently took over. Hamas proceeded to launch thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian populations around the Gaza Strip (terrorism that continues today). When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah (a Lebanese terrorist organization) seized control, fired hundreds of rockets into Northern Israel, and has amassed thousands of long-range missiles. It is misleading to boil the great complexity of the Middle East conflict down to the singular issue of Palestinian sovereignty. In 1947, the UN partitioned the land into a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel, but the Arab states, rejecting partition, waged war against Israel, resulting in the Jordanian seizure
POINT
Unilateral action by Palestinians or Israelis will never yield peace; achieving peace in this complex situation requires negotiations in which both sides are willing to make concessions.
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of the West Bank and Egyptian control of Gaza (both of which Israel took in the defensive Six Day War in 1967). Furthermore, Palestinians have been given sovereignty both in Gaza (2005) and, since the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993), increasingly in the West Bank as well. However, failure by both Israel and the Palestinians to adequately comply with the provisions of the accords led to a Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada (2000-2004), which saw hundreds of tragic Israeli and Palestinian deaths. The peace process exists in order to rectify the mistakes of the past and help both sides strive to achieve Palestinian sovereignty and peace. This is why the situation is far more complex than a simple power dynamic of occupier vs. occupied or oppressor vs. oppressed. As a result of security threats, Israel constructed a security fence around the West Bank. Though often criticized as an Israeli land grab by means of an instrument that serves largely to divide and degrade Palestinians, the presence of the barrier has resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of suicide bombers and terror threats on Israeli soil. The barrier has saved countless lives, a goal that unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood could jeopardize. In addition, there are many issues on the table that need to be sorted out, including the location of Palestine (which neighborhoods and Jewish settlements it would include), the question of how to connect the West Bank and Gaza, and the location of Palestine’s capital (East Jerusalem includes one of the sites holiest to Judaism, the Western Wall), and also Jewish access to holy sites in the West Bank. Negotiation is the only way to sort out these thorny issues. Peace negotiations are dynamic and change with the political circumstances (such as the return of Gilad Shalit to his home after over five years in captivity) and with those in power. In the tumultuous world of global politics and diplomacy, it is illogical to conclude that because negotiation has stumbled in the past, it will not triumph in the future. I dream of a day when there is no security fence, no checkpoints, and no rocket fire. I yearn for a day when the sovereign state of Palestine and the secure and Jewish state of Israel can share a peaceful border, collaborate on environmental problems, and discuss education initiatives. That dream can only be attained through patience and difficult negotiations over the details, painful concessions on both sides, and, above all, an unambiguous dedication to peace. The author is an LSA senior majoring in Political Science and Philosophy and is Israel Chair at Hillel and a former board member and treasurer of the American movement for Israel. She blogs for Consider and is an associate editor for the Journal of Political Science.
NEGOTIATING WITH YOUR OPPRESSOR If it didn’t have such tragic implications for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper, the so-called “Peace Process” would be one of the great jokes of modern history. The question of the appropriateness of unilateral action, therefore, must begin with an assessment of this tired alternative, a process by which the U.S., the world’s leading imperial power, rejectionist state, and underwriter of Israeli crimes, attempts to mediate a settlement between an occupying power, Israel, and those who are occupied, the Palestinians. Despite all the events, changes in leadership and ideological shifts within these three parties over the last 44 years, this basic blueprint hasn’t changed, and unsurprisingly, it has produced a lot of process and no peace. Consider this carefully: ever since Israelis and Palestinians began negotiations for a two-state settlement, the Israel has offered precisely and exactly zero concessions. All concessions have come from the Palestinians, who’ve seen their territory shrink rapidly since 1948. Many Israeli apologists, however, unable to recognize the deep sense of lawlessness and exceptionalism that has so rampantly infected Israeli political culture, often point to a long list of “painful concessions” made by Israel: the 2005 “withdrawal” from Gaza is a popular one, so too is Netanyahu’s 10-month “freeze” on illegal settlement building. In both cases, Israel did not offer a concession, but rather decided to temporarily obey the law (though the Gaza example is a bad one, since there was no complete withdrawal, but instead a redeployment of the Israeli Occupation Forces on the periphery of Gaza). Indeed, issuing a temporary freeze on illegal settlement building is much like telling the highway patrolman: “I’ll stop speeding for 90 days, but after that, I’m going drag racing in a school zone.” Furthermore, Israel-Palestine is perhaps the least controversial and easiest “conflict” to solve; there already exists an overwhelming consensus on how to reach a two-settlement. This year, the U.N. resolution calling for “peaceful Settlement of the question of Palestine,” which essentially reiterates the universally accepted realities of this issue– that the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, in their entirety, are “occupied Palestinian territory,” that the settlements are illegal, that the wall is illegal, that the blockade on Gaza has caused a monumental humanitarian crisis, etc. – received 165 “Yes” votes and 7 “no” votes. That is, over 95 percent of voting states agree that Palestinians should have a state; the dissenters are the usual rejectionists – Israel, the U.S., Australia, and a few Pacific Island nations. That a solution hasn’t been reached with such incredible unanimity is proof enough of the crippling effects of U.S.-Israeli intransigence. Meanwhile, proponents of the Peace Process insist that unilateral action in Israel-Palestine
affairs can only hinder the prospects for peace. The truth is that the Israeli camp has only practiced unilateralism. After all, did the Palestinians bilaterally agree to have their homes demolished, their land illegally colonized, their resources stolen, and their families beaten and harassed on a daily basis? Certainly they didn’t have a say in Israel’s construction of an illegal annexation wall that separates farmers from their fields, students from their classrooms, and the sick from medical care. Indeed, there is only one type of bilateralism that the Israeli government has communicated: agree to let us do whatever we want. I support the most recent unilateral statehood bid by the Palestinian Authority in principle, because it represents a break from the farcical American Peace Process. The bid gives the nations of the world a chance to stand against Israeli occupation, which hopefully can pressure and isolate Israel in the same way that Apartheid South Africa was in the late 80’s and early 90’s. In the end, however, this bid can’t have a real impact on the situation in Palestine, and I have plenty of reservations about it. Most notably, I believe there’s a dangerous precedent in Mahmoud Abbas – who hasn’t been elected and represents no one – speaking on behalf of the Palestinians. A democratically elected leader must represent Palestine. It must be stated, though, that the last time there were elections in Palestine, the U.S. and Israel punished the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election. Thus U.S.-Israeli suppression of democracy must end as well, which includes unwavering support for Arab dictatorships like the Saudi and Jordanian kingdoms. Seeing that such change isn’t likely to emerge out of Israel’s own accord, it’s important for supporters of peace to practice targeted boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel, until it complies with international law and abandons its expansionist ambitions. If Israel truly wants peace and is serious about protecting its security, it should do one thing: end the occupation now. But as history has shown us, the Israeli government will ultimately choose expansion over peace, and then tell the world it wants to dialogue over whatever land it hasn’t yet usurped. The Israel-Palestine issue is not a conflict between two peoples who just don’t know how to share and get along. It is a struggle between poor and privileged, colonized and colonizer, occupied and occupier, victim and aggressor. Until this power structure changes, or a genuinely neutral party mediates the talks, the struggle will continue.
COUNTERPOINT BIL A L BAY DOUN
The peace process is a farce biased heavily in Israel’s favor. Only unilateral action from a democratic Palestine will allow Palestinians to counter Israeli imperialism and achieve statehood and peace.
The author is a senior at the University of Michigan, the cochair of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), and a lifelong advocate of freedom and equality for all disenfranchised people of the world. November 2, 2011
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CONSIDERONLINE.ORG MAJOR EVENTS of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process 1978
The Camp David Accords, signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, mark one of the earliest events in the peace process.
1992
On September 13, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat met in Washington to sign the Oslo Peace Accords. Rabin was assassinated three years later, after which this stage of the process ground to a halt.
1996-1999
In an effort to revive the Oslo process, which had lost momentum by the late 1990s, Israel and the PLO signed the Hebron Accord and the Wye River Memorandum.
2000-2004
The Second Intifada, a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian violence, takes place.
2002
The “Quartet”—the US, EU, UN, and Russia— introduced the “Road Map” for peace after Mahmoud Abbas was appointed as the first prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
2010
Since this year, official US policy has been to organize direct talks between the parties for the first time since 2008, a strategy that thus far has failed to appreciably change the status quo.
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VOLUME 25 ISSUE 6
Managing Editor for the issue: Aaron Bekemeyer Associate Editor for the issue: Rachel Blumenstein Cover by Rebekah Malover © Consider Magazine 2011
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