The suggestion that the UN impose a settlement on the Israelis and Palestinians, made this week at the Jeddah Economic Forum by former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, makes a great deal of sense. The peace process is now in virtual permanent gridlock. Compromise is nowhere on the horizon. The two sides are polarized as never before, with the situation getting worse, not just within Israeli/Palestine but across the world: as Primakov said, the stalemate feeds international terrorism. It allows the terrorist to coat his evil doings with a pretense of morality.
On the one side, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is determined that under no circumstance will there ever be a sovereign Palestine, that the most the Palestinians should have is an Uncle Tom statelet kept on a tight military leash. On the other, the Palestinians have been catapulted by Israeli intransigence and repression into the hands of their own extremists, for whom compromise is just as much a dirty word as it is for Sharon and his minions. The divide is unbridgeable if left to the two sides to work things out. Every attempt inevitably fails because neither side is willing or able to take a step back toward sanity. It happened yet again with the latest Egyptian effort, with Palestinian militants contemptuously rejecting Cairo’s appeal for a moratorium on suicide bombings.
The crisis therefore needs to be looked at from another angle. That is what the Russian suggestion does. It says that if there will never be peace while Sharon is in power, because he can block any movement, then the answer is to bypass him — and bypass the Palestinians. In fact, the view that there will never be a peace while Sharon is in power misses the point, because it assumes that Sharon alone is the problem. Sharon is the product of Israeli intransigence, not the cause of it. Remove Sharon and there is still Netanyahu, and even if he were not waiting in the wings, there would be someone else. In any event, barring a miracle, it is Sharon who is set to win next week’s Israeli elections which means that his policies are the ones that will dictate Israel’s position for the next two or three years.
Moscow’s answer to the morass is to sever the Gordian knot.
The big question that many people will ask is whether a UN resolution setting up a Palestinian state would have any effect.
The answer has to be yes, although before it could happen Palestinian political reform would have to be delivered. Israel would obviously try to ignore and sabotage any such state, but its ability to do so would be severely restricted. To continue its occupation and deny existence to a state set up by the UN and recognized by the rest of the international community would put it beyond the political pale in a way it has never been before. In such circumstances, real, hard-hitting sanctions could well result.
Just as important, a UN resolution would give the Palestinians hope, something they have not had for a long time. With hope could well come a willingness to abandon suicide bombings.
Primakov suggestion is not his own. It comes with a “Made in Moscow” tag. There is no reason why the UN or the EU would not endorse an imposed solution. They too are exasperated with the gridlock and, as Primakov said, Israel was itself created by the UN, and imposed on the Arabs. That leaves the US. Will it continue to shield Israel? That is the $64 million question. Washington’s vacillating policies on a Palestinian state leave nothing but confusion and frustration.
