Conventional wisdom on Israel-Palestinian peace talks is fallacious
We do not know how expectations might color the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Not at all, we hope, given the fallacious conventional wisdom about these talks. No better representative of the genre is an AssociatedPress analysis by Dan Perry, which appeared the day after the talks began.
Perry opens:
“The contours of Israeli-Palestinian peace are clear, experts say: If only the sides summon up the will, the inevitable outcome of two states roughly along the pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem as a shared capital and a finessing of the Palestinian refugee issue.”
There are three fallacies in this long sentence.
One, the failure to make peace up to now has not been a failure of will on Israel’s part. The Israeli will has always been there, as evidenced by its peace treaty with Egypt (1979) and with Jordan (1994). The very same Israel will that led to these treaties has been in evidence with regard to the Palestinians since they began to regard their identity as separate from Jordan or from a pan-Arab nation. It is only one side that has not summoned the will, and even that formulation is skewed. It takes more than will for the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel as legitimate and as Jewish. The failure to do so is not just a failure of will, but, more deeply, a failure of tolerance and political pluralism.
Two, “the outcome of two states roughly along the pre-1967 borders” actually contains two fallacies. First, the 1967 “borders” are not borders; they are armistice lines drawn in 1949. If they were borders, there would be no need for negotiations now. There would be peace. Second, call these lines what you like, it is clear that no Israeli government, on the left, center or right, will cede the large settlement blocs on the other side of the 1967 lines — Gush Etzion, Ariel or Maale Adumim, for example. Much more realistic than an outcome along pre-1967 armistice lines are land swaps: for example, parts of the Negev to the Palestinians in exchange for these blocs to Israel.
Three, “Jerusalem as a shared capital” might mean West Jerusalem to Israel and parts of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians; but Jerusalem, at its heart, is the Old City. The chances of Israel ceding sovereignty over the Old City, which includes the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter, are nil. From 1949-1967, Jordan prevented Jews (not just Israelis) from entering the Old City and praying at the Western Wall. Israel is not going to outsource its holiest site to a foreign power. (Islam’s holiest site? Not in Jerusalem, but in Mecca.)
Perry continues:
“The previous rounds [of talks] have led many to conclude that when it comes to details, the Palestinians’ minimal demands simply exceed what Israel is willing to deliver.”
Which previous rounds of talks? The Oslo agreements of 1993 and 1995? Then Israel delivered more than the Palestinians imagined in their wildest dreams: the recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization; the admittance of the PLO to the West Bank; the establishment of a Palestinian Authority and of a Palestinian police force. Ask any Palestinian leader as recently as three years before that — at the Madrid peace talks in 1991 — whether any of these developments seemed even remotely possible to the Palestinians. They did not. AP analyst Dan Perry has it exactly backwards. Israel, for the sake of even the promise of peace, has been willing to deliver on a level that exceeded the Palestinians’ maximal demands.
Israel is drunk for peace. Israel goes overboard for peace. Witness Israel’s withdrawal from the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 for the sake of peace with Egypt. Witness Israel’s withdrawal from the entirety of Gaza for the sake of peace with the Palestinians — who did not reciprocate. Witness Israel’s agreement last week to release Palestinian prisoners, not for the sake of peace, but merely for the sake of peace talks. It is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have failed to deliver.
Perry continues:
“Some say the Palestinians are driving what Israelis view as a hard bargain because they already have lost some three-quarters of historical Palestine under the pre-1967 borders.”
The fallacy here is Perry’s convenient neglect to define “historical Palestine.” Should we define it as the land that the British allotted for the “Jewish National Home” in the Balfour Declaration of 1917? If so, no Arab called himself either a Palestinian or a Jordanian at that time. However, the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, plus substantial territory east of the Jordan River, were allotted for the Jewish National Home. Under that definition of “historical Palestine,” it is Israel that has lost three-quarters of historical Palestine to Jordan and to the Palestinian Authority.
Should we define “historical Palestine” under the terms of the UN partition plan of 1947? If so, the loss of land that the Palestinians now deem their own is strictly the result of the Palestinian rejection of the UN plan, which gave the Palestinians the lion’s share of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Look at the maps. The Palestinians threw away what they were due to receive on a silver platter. They did not “lose” their opportunity due to forces beyond their control; it was their choice.
“ . . . contrary to the standard discourse, the Palestinians may not be the weaker party at all. While they suffer in various ways from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, it is the Israelis who may actually need a partition of the Holy Land more.”
Perry goes on to say that Israel is losing the demographic battle, what with almost two million Arab citizens and some four million Palestinians on the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. “An Arab majority may follow that cannot forever be denied full democratic rights,” says Perry.
The fallacies here are multiple.
First, the lack of democracy for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew in 2005, is due entirely to the Palestinian failure to throw out its authoritarian, Hamas rulers. There is no “Arab Spring” in Gaza. No Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement will solve that.
Second, the head of thePalestinian Authority is in the ninth year of his four-year term. The failure of democracy in the West Bank is strictly a Palestinian matter. No Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement will solve that.
Third, those who restate the demographic argument ignore the data of the last decade, which show a much slowed Palestinian birth rate and a much increased Palestinian emigration rate. Perry’s demographic argument is old, outdated.
Perry continues: “For decades Israelis were told that they may have to make ‘painful sacrifices’ in exchange for peace. Now the narrative shifts: They might have to do it regardless, for demographics alone.”
Here, the fallacy that the Palestinian population is overcoming the Israeli Jewish population is carried to an extreme in the form of a “new narrative” that exists only in the mind of Dan Perry. A narrative that, in fact, serves as an advance apologia for a Palestinian refusal to make a deal with Israel. “This [demographic] understanding may be dampening Palestinian urgency to strike a deal,” writes Perry.
There you have it: Fallacy piled upon fallacy to justify the “same old same old”: A Palestinian refusal to acknowledge, as Egypt and as Jordan have acknowledged, the permanence and the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
And to think, this is what passes for analysis on the Middle East by the Associated Press. We only hope that fallacious expectations do not color the outcome of the peace talks — that Israel acts in its own best interests, not in what others say are its best interests.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
