THE Madrid Conference marked the first serious attempt to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Then came the Oslo Accords. The third with the same aim was the “road map”. The names and the main players (at least on the Israeli side) have changed; what has not is Israel’s grip on the Palestinian territories it captured in the 1967 war and the Palestinians’ misery. If anything, this misery was deepened by the West’s ban on aid to the Palestinian Authority to punish the Palestinians for voting Hamas to power.
Though Oslo was launched with much fanfare, Palestinians have lost more land to Jewish settlers since “the peace of the brave” than was the case when there was no “peace process.” Israel is now in effective control of 85 percent of historic Palestine compared to the 55 percent it is entitled to under the UN partition plan. To add to the suffering and frustration of the Palestinians, the remaining 15 percent is not a contiguous area, interspersed as it is with Jewish settlements, roads for “Jews-only” and the notorious Separation Wall.
Of course, there has now been a lull in violence. Can it be converted into a unique opportunity to invigorate the quest for peace? This is the big question for the Arab leaders as they gather for their 19th summit in Riyadh today. The answer is in the affirmative with the main ground for optimism being that the Arabs have, for the first time, taken a historic step in unifying their approach to Arab-Israeli peace making. The result, an Arab peace initiative endorsed by an earlier Arab League summit, will be the focus of the summit. The plan offers Israel diplomatic recognition and peace in return for full withdrawal from the land it captured in the 1967 war, plus the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. It also calls for allowing Palestinian refugees the right to return to homes in Israel.
The chief merit of the plan is that it restores a much-needed clarity to the whole process. The offer is clear, leaving no room for ambiguity about the shape of a final settlement: two independent neighboring states. The offer does not insist on confidence-building measures or stage-by-stage disengagement. The main drawback of previous plans was that they gave the occupying power, Israel, the authority to decide whether the Palestinians were conducting themselves so that they deserved the next stage of withdrawal or, indeed, whether they deserved any other concessions.
From an Israeli point of view, there are two sticking points: The “right of return” to Israel and Hamas’ refusal to recognize the Jewish state. These are not insurmountable. Palestinians will have to think whether they should allow Israel to reject the Arab plan over a right which can only be theoretical in the case of most refugees. Hamas’ recognition of Israel could be made conditional on Israel’s declaring its willingness to withdraw from all occupied Arab lands and to allow the formation of a Palestinian state with well-defined borders. Israel must realize that only if Arabs accept and recognize a Jewish entity in their neighborhood will Israel gain the long-term security it yearns for. This is what the Arab peace initiative, to be renewed by the summit, offers — with neither frills nor circumlocutions.
