by Yigal Carmon
It took 25 years for the truth to emerge, crystal clear: The Palestinians are not ready to give up the "right of return."
The Palestinian ship of state sinks beneath the sea (Source: Alghad.com, May 2, 2018)
These days, the Palestinian national
movement is descending, before our very eyes, into an internecine
struggle over the right to represent the Palestinians – a struggle that
is bereft of any political meaning in terms of resolving the conflict
with Israel. The octogenarian leader of this movement is completely
losing his touch, spewing gutter anti-Semitism blaming the Jews for the
Holocaust (see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 7452, Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: Holocaust, Massacres Of European
Jews Due To Their Function In Society As Usurers; Hitler Struck A Deal
With The Jews, May 2, 2018) and bringing international condemnation upon himself.
How did we get to this point?
In 1993 in Oslo, after nearly a century of
armed struggle, the PLO, then the representative of the Palestinian
national movement, endorsed the political process. But the change was
only tactical, for it was unaccompanied by an ideological
transformation, without which the political process is a framework void
of content. What ideological change would have made the political
process a genuine road towards peaceful solution? The answer is simple:
the renunciation of the "right of return."
It took 25 years for the truth to emerge, crystal clear: The Palestinians are not ready to give up the "right of return."
MEMRI's research showed, from the day of
its establishment on February 7, 1998, that the Palestinians are
unwilling to forgo the "right of return."[1]
In fact, it showed much more: the Palestinian duplicity and doublespeak
(inciting jihad in Arabic while negotiating with Israel), the PLO's
involvement in terror attacks, and Arafat's unwillingness to move from
the role of revolutionary to the role of a peace maker and statesman.
But the one most important revelation, more important than anything
else, was the PLO's insistence on the right of return, which doomed the
whole process.
In all these years, only one figure in the
Palestinian elite agreed to the trade-off: foregoing the right of
return in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. That
figure was Professor Sari Nusseibeh, who formed a joint movement
together with an Israeli counterpart. The movement numbered a few
thousand Israelis and a handful of Palestinians. Nusseibeh was
ostracized in his own camp and eventually left politics.
The Saudi Peace Plan of 2002 could have
furnished a basis for a partition-based solution, because in its
original version, it did not include the "right of return." However,
after the Arab League amended it and grafted the "right of return" onto
it, it became a non-starter (see MEMRI TV Clip No. 6031, Former
Lebanese President Émile Lahoud Reveals How The Right Of Return Was
Forced Into The Saudi Peace Plan In The 2002 Arab Summit (Archival), December 11, 2014 to May 22, 2017; see also Professor Itamar Rabinovich's analysis of that summit, The Warped Saudi Initiative, Haaretz.com, April 7, 2002).
During the 25 years since Oslo, the
conflict deteriorated further as Israelis of goodwill bought into the
Palestinian political process tactic – void of the concrete political
requisites for peace. Israel even deluded itself that postponing
discussion of the "right of return" would cause the problem to fade
away. But the very opposite occurred: the Palestinians interpreted this
as tacit acceptance that the "right of return" would eventually be
granted, an idea that no Israeli leadership ever entertained.
In recent years, by rejecting the
proposals by Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert for an Israeli
withdrawal from nearly all the occupied territories, and by failing, in
the past year and a half, to even return to the negotiating table, the
Palestinians have brought themselves back to square one: to their
situation in 1947.
For the Zionist leadership, the test has
always been the readiness to accept partition – and it has repeatedly
passed this test. For the Palestinian leadership, the test was foregoing
the "right of return" – and it has repeatedly failed the test.
True, a large portion of the Israeli
public was antagonistic to partition, but those representing the
majority of Israel's population were prepared to accept it. By clinging
to the "right of return," the Palestinians spared Israel the need to go
through with this choice, with all its potentially destructive internal
repercussions.
The Palestinian insistence on the "right
of return," and Israel's rejection of it – a rejection shared by nearly
all parts of the Israeli political spectrum, from right to left –
constitutes the real tragedy of the conflict. The overwhelming majority
of Western countries do not expect Israel to agree to the "right of
return." The problem of the settlements, which many place in the
spotlight, is a problem that could be resolved in a variety of ways, but
the insistence on the "right of return" dooms the two-state solution
from the outset.
The Zionist path to statehood was
characterized by readiness for compromise and pragmatism. This was not
always the case in Jewish history. In the years 67-135 AD, the Jews
believed they could make mincemeat of the Roman legionnaires and send
them back to Rome – like Hamas today believes it can send the Jews back
from whence they came. But instead, it was the Jews who were packed off
to face two millennia of exile and annihilation. This catastrophic
outcome was etched deeply into the psyche of most Jews, and induced most
of the Zionist leadership to accept nearly any partition out of a
"refusal to refuse" mentality. At the time when the British Royal Navy
was turning away Jewish refugees and sending them back to die in Europe,
Ben Gurion exhorted the Hebrew youth to enlist in the British army that
was perpetrating this atrocity.
Lacking the components vital for a
political solution, and unable to persevere even in a sham political
process, this movement may revert to armed struggle. For the moment, it
has not done so. Even Hamas is endorsing – for now – a strategy of
"popular struggle" rather than launching missile attacks on Israel.
An alternate scenario is for the
Palestinian national movement to seek its future in Jordan. Admittedly,
such a solution is not on the horizon. But given Jordan's Palestinian
majority, for the long run this demographic imperative cannot be totally
dismissed.
A third scenario would see the
Palestinian public integrate, albeit reluctantly and out of lack of
choice, into Israel (the so-called one-state solution) while constantly
fighting for all the rights it can get, both civil and national. This
scenario is not materializing either.
Therefore, the only current development is further descent into decay and political extinction.
Given the Palestinian inability to
renounce the "right of return," some would ask: Were there ever
potential exit points from the conflict?
Had King Hussein accepted a peace treaty
in return for an Israeli withdrawal immediately after the 1967 war, the
"right of return" issue might have faded, gradually but significantly.
Had Israel persisted in its principled
refusal to recognize the PLO, the standard-bearer of the "right of
return," and attempted to reach a gradual solution with a local
Palestinian leadership, a more realistic, albeit bloody, process, could
have commenced. This could have received significant political backing
from Egypt, had Sadat survived.
As long as the Palestinians fail to make
an historical ideological change and forego the "right of return"
component of their national identity and struggle, they have no prospect
of actualizing any real national goal.
One hopes, for the Palestinians' sake,
that it will not take them two millennia – as it took the Jews – to
accept the need for moderation and pragmatism. 'Abbas's and the PLO's
conviction that Israel is a colonialist project that is inexorably
doomed will only prolong their suffering.
*Yigal Carmon is Founder and President of MEMRI.
[1]
See:
Washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/02/07/on-fire-with-hate/ccaf6175-e047-40fb-a8ad-d9e450b7309d/?utm_term=.79fcd5f44afa,
February 7, 1998;
Washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/01/23/where-the-talk-is-of-hate/1ec1bc8b-2c23-4368-9384-b420c761ecaa/,
January 23, 1998.
Yigal Carmon is Founder and President of MEMRI.
Source: https://www.memri.org/reports/towards-political-extinction
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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