and the prospects for peace in the Middle East are slim
Ahmad Samih Khalidi
As Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its establishment,
an inescapable counter-reality lingers over the occasion that
is inextricably twinned with it. It is the nakba or catastrophe,
the 60th anniversary of the destruction of Arab Palestine in
1948.
Despite a public discourse that often claimed the opposite, the
Zionist movement set out to build a Jewish state in Palestine
with a Jewish majority. This could only come about at the
expense of the local inhabitants, the vast majority of whom
were Palestinian Arabs - both Muslim and Christian. From
this perspective, neither the Zionists' intentions nor the
reactions of the Palestinians are at issue: Israel could not
have been built as a Jewish state except on the ruins of
Arab Palestine.
In 1948, about 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly
driven out of their homeland, creating what still stands today
as the world's largest and most longstanding refugee problem.
The nakba created an entirely new politico-demographic reality.
From a longstanding majority on their own soil, the
Palestinians became a small, vulnerable minority and a
tattered, broken nation living in exile or under foreign rule.
Nothing can convince the Palestinians that what happened to
them 60 years ago was right and proper. They cannot be
expected to hail the events that led to their own destruction
and dispossession. They cannot be expected to extend their
benediction to the establishment of Israel, or internalise its
legitimacy. There can be no conceivable circumstances in
which the Palestinians can concede their history in favour
of the Zionist narrative, for to do so would be to deny their own.
But the conflict is not just over narratives. It is also about
fundamental shifts in attitude and political perception.
Almost all the major transformations have come in the
wake of cataclysmic and usually unforeseen events. There
is no need to welcome violence to understand its impact,
neither does it follow that violence on its own necessarily
leads to peace, but the history of the struggle over the
land of Palestine stands in stark contrast to the adage
that violence gets you nowhere.
The sad truth is that violent convulsions have always been
part of the process of change in the political, psychological
and material terms of the conflict. The 1948 war, including
pre-state Jewish terrorism, established the state of Israel.
The June 1967 war led to an Arab realisation that Israel
was an irreversible reality. The 1973 war eventually brought
peace with Egypt, and set the background for the Palestinian
acceptance of a two-state solution. The 1982 Lebanon war
resulted in the first comprehensive Arab peace offer to Israel.
The 1987 Palestinian intifada drove Israel to talk to the PLO,
culminating in the 1993 Oslo agreement.
Furthermore, Israel's decision to withdraw from south
Lebanon in 2000 was the result of a realisation that
staying put was not worth the sacrifice. Israel's
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was a direct consequence
of the second 2000 intifada. The current debate about
the need to engage Hamas is more a reflection of the
Islamic movement's military prowess than any real
conviction that it is a potential partner in peace.
Today, the prospects of a final resolution of the conflict
based on the two-state solution are fading as it comes up
against settlement realties, Palestinian domestic divisions
and the structural weaknesses of Israel's political system.
But even if such an agreement were to be reached, it would
have to be ratified, implemented and sustained, and there
is precious little to suggest that either side can see
this through.
The alternative is unlikely to be yet another stab at a
final status settlement. There is no real safety net that
will allow for the process to proceed after such a failure,
nor any agreed guidelines for doing so. The Palestinain
Authority (PA) and its Israeli partner have no plan B,
neither has the US, the putative sponsor of the process,
with the international community in tow. Yet stasis is
ahistorical and unsustainable. The history of the conflict
suggests other alternatives, most of which point to a slide
towards further and more extensive violence as an
eventual catalyst of change.
As things stand, and in a situation where the vast majority
of Israelis are impervious to the horrors of the occupation
and shielded from its consequences, and where Palestinian
aspirations are being dissipated by the daily changes on the
ground and the PA's own failures, it is hard to avoid the fear
that the next shift in attitude is going to be the product of
yet another cataclysm.
At the one end of the spectrum of possibilities is an open-ended
and continuous spiral of conflict. At the other is a new set of
relations between Arab and Jew, and new forms of association
on the land of Palestine that go beyond the dying paradigm of
a two-state solution towards different formulae for
power-sharing, partition or sovereignty. One century after
the first Zionist incursion into Palestine, and 60 years after
the great determining event of 1948, it would take a brave
soothsayer to predict which course will prevail.
· Ahmad Samih Khalidi is a senior associate member
of St Antony's College, Oxford aswk@yahoo.com
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