Why Rice Will Fail in the Middle East

Rice’s approach is based on the theory that if you achieve enough trust between the belligerent parties you will facilitate substantive negotiations for a final resolution of the conflict.

But the Palestine conflict is no ordinary conflict. From the beginning of the Zionist enterprise to take over Palestine from its inhabitants and turn it into a Jewish country,  the Palestine conflict has been an existential one. There was no room in the Zionist project for a Palestinian people in the Jewish state.

In fact, the very existence of the Palestinian people was eliminated from Palestine in the imagination of the Zionist propagandists seeking to sell their colonial enterprise to the imperial powers. Their most potent and telling slogan said that the Jewish people wanted to colonize Palestine, “a land without a people for a people without land.”

A measure of the audacity of the enterprise is evident when you consider that at the time of this slogan the Arab Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) constituted about 93% of the population of Palestine.

How the Zionist Commission managed, with the help of the occupying British forces, the support of the Western imperial powers, to transform Palestine by force from an Arab country into a Jewish state, is one of the most remarkable stories of the 20^th century.

In the process the Palestinian people have been expelled by the hundreds of thousand, dispersed, their homeland lost, their society shattered. Those Palestinians who live under the 40 year Israeli occupation are regularly subjected to violence, collective punishment, continued dispersion and dispossession.

The Palestinians have suffered gross injustice and Israel’s responsibility for this has been admitted by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, in 1956. Various Israeli historians documented it in the past twenty years or so.

And yet it is the Palestinians who are being asked to make concessions. In 1988 they abandoned their plan for a secular state in Palestine for Jews, Muslims and Christians and agreed to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on roughly half of Palestine. Under the Oslo Agreement, in 1993, they agreed to accept the irreversible loss of 78% of their country to the Israelis, and establish a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, about 22% of their former country.

In fact, under various ‘peace’ plans the Palestinians continued to lose land and hope while at the same time being subjected to the violence of occupation and pressured into making concessions to the occupier.

And it is this asymmetry of power that is being used by American mediators including Rice, as the defining context for ‘solving’ the conflict. In effect, the victim is being asked to stop resisting the occupation, to protect the symbols of dispossession-the Jewish settlements- to accept punishment if they democratically elect the wrong government, and to be grateful when the daily restrictions on their lives are somewhat eased.

The step by step strategy employed by Kissinger after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war produced the Sinai I and Sinai II disengagement agreements between Israelis and Egyptians. This was in the interest of both parties. The Egyptians wanted to reopen the Suez Canal as a reward for their honorable military performance in the war. The Israelis did not want to be over-stretched militarily after the sobering lesson they received at the hands of the Egyptians. They also received a commitment from Washington not to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in effect committing Washington to block any peace with the Palestinians.

The dramatic visit by Egyptian President Sadat to Israel in 1977 helped produce the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement known as the Camp David Agreement in 1978. The Egyptians regained their Sinai, the Israelis removed the most powerful Arab country from the Arab-Israeli conflict and prepared to liquidate Palestinian nationalism once and for all.

This became evident when shortly after the Israelis withdrew from the Sinai in 1982, The Menahem Begin-Ariel Sharon team sent their army into Lebanon in what they hoped would be the final coup to settle the Palestine question by force. They miscalculated –with tragic cost for the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

Clearly the balance of power calculations used by Kissinger in the step by step strategy is utterly unsuitable for the Palestine conflict because of the gross asymmetry of power between the parties, one of which is undeniably a victim the other incontrovertibly a wrongdoer.

What is needed is a clear break with the past; a recognition that the Palestinians have suffered gross injustice and are entitled to reparations and a measure of justice, not as an act of charity and generosity from the occupier but as of right.

And this is what is missing from Rice’s small ideas: A vision of peace based on law and justice, not force.

Instead she is focusing on power politics and small steps worthy of her small ideas. Why should the Israelis settle for anything less than what they have achieved by force when Washington is allowing them to flout ‘peace’ plans like the roadmap, build a separation wall, and continue dispossession of the Palestinians?

In his reaction to the renewed Arab League offer of peace on the basis of some justice and some rights for the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert responded confidently that his government rejected the right of return of even one Palestinian.

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia. He is author of From Camp David to the Gulf (Montreal and New York, 1992, 1997)