by Amnon Lord
[Editor's Note: This is the last of a three-part article by Amnon Lord, published in Makor Rishon.]
Read Part I here
Read Part II here
While paying lip service to the traditional Arab partners, the president of China announces that the resolution to the conflict must be reciprocal
The new fad in the Left is the Arab League's peace initiative. All of the old-timers from the Geneva Initiative and the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Accord and the rest of the past initiatives are lately joining forces to boost the peace initiative of the Arab League. But now, more so than in the past, the common Israeli reaction is not even to object, but just to shrug their shoulders. The old-timers ask: why not bring up Habib Bourguiba's peace initiative of 1965 again?
Besides the old-new initiative, which was originally brought by the journalist Thomas Friedman more than ten years ago, making the writers of the Left throw up on the clothes of the Israeli public, it has had no effect at all. There are several reasons why this initiative, which has become the Meretz platform, doesn't catch on. First: the Arab League. The Israeli public doesn't know exactly what it is. They know vaguely that such a thing exists. But the League is not considered one of the parties involved in the conflict. If there is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, logic would dictate that the party in conflict with us should suggest the peace plan. Meanwhile, it's not at all clear that the Palestinians themselves accept the "Arab League Initiative", and, in fact, they don't accept it. Of course, this doesn't prevent the writers who support the initiative from vigorously attacking the government of Israel and especially the Israeli public in general for its apathy.
The main reason for the public's rejection of the initiative is the sense that it doesn't address the essence of the conflict, but is rather a diplomatic exercise. Peace initiatives are a means of international communication. Since the beginning of the 1970s "peace initiatives" have been associated with wars. When Arab countries want to take a central place in relationships with the West, they suggest peace plans. They do this also when they want to win legitimacy for their hostile acts. Offers of peace have cropped up over the years as a way to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States.
From Israel's point of view, it would have been better to reiterate the principles that it has declared in the past, which were forgotten in the fervor of the processes that Ehud Olmert conducted and after him, Shimon Peres. For example, that a Palestinian state will be established only when we can be sure that it will be an agent of peace and democracy. The test of its democracy will be its ability to accept a large number of Jewish residents to live among them.
At the time when Steven Hawking announced that he is joining the wretched academic boycott of Israel, a much more important event occurred: The visit of Prime Minister Netanyahu in China, which channel 10, as usual, tried to discredit. Why does this channel exist, anyway? The president of China, Xi Jinping announced that the conflict must be addressed according to principles of equality, inclusion and mutuality. True, the Chinese pay their lip service to the Palestinians, but after long years of one-sided support for them, they are transferring their affinity to Israel. And they mean it: mutuality, as I understand it, is the Palestinians' recognition of the Jews' right to define themselves as a Jewish state. The Chinese did not say that the "occupation" must end immediately.
What is different this time is that a suitable historical background has been created which changes the Chinese way of thinking about the Arab world, Iran and Israel. At one time, India suddenly understood that the 35 years that it invested in orientation toward the Arab world, mainly the "socialist Arab" countries of Egypt, Syria and Iraq, were a waste of time and resources. The Indians did not benefit at all from simultaneously boycotting Israel while conducting friendly relations with the Arabs. After the fall of the communist bloc, India understood that affinity and close connection with Israel are worth more than the whole Arab world.
The Chinese have also understood this, but for historical reasons they have continued to relate to the Arabs as if they represent some higher principle. The higher principle that the Arabs represent, and this can be seen in the way that the international Left relates to its journalists and academicians, is that they are a tool that can be used to slam the West and capitalism. This is the source of their hostility toward Israel as well. The Chinese apparently don't think that this is a good enough reason. The Muslims do perhaps harm the United States and the West, but they have also become a destabilizing and dangerous agent.
It is ironic when sometimes an Israeli leader explains to a foreign superpower, like the United States or China, what its own interest is. Therefore it should not be done directly, which would be arrogant, but by passing messages that clearly convey to the other side what Israel can offer and what its capabilities are, in contrast to the negative changes that the region is undergoing, beginning with the deterioration of the countries and ending with the flood of internal terrorism in the Muslim world. It seems that the Chinese also understand what Simon Peres tries to explain: that geography is no longer what it was in the past. He means that you can fit Israel on the head of a pin. But the theory is also applicable in the opposite direction - on the Arab world. I assume that Netanyahu knows how to explain these changes to the Chinese better than anyone else. To the overall picture of violent Muslim chaos, he certainly must have added the terrible possibility that all of this will take on added significance in the form of Iranian nuclear weapons.
The Chinese are not cynical, like the Russians, for example. The Russians sell their missiles, mainly the anti-aircraft S-300, as the Qataris sell peace plans. In contrast, the Chinese have no underlying interest in causing regional destabilization and stirring up conflicts between the Arab world (and its various components) and Israel.
Amnon Lord
Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav.
Source: Makor Rishon Newspaper, May 17, 2013, Issue 823, Yoman Section, pg. 4
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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