Thursday, October 22, 2009

No peace without justice

No peace without justice

Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is urging Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to come and make peace.

Netanyahu wants to negotiate with Abbas while Israel continues to consolidate the very occupation it is supposed to negotiate an end to.

Apart from the obvious damage this would do to Abbas in terms of public opinion, it shows nerve to think that any Palestinian leader, in view of the past 15 years of ever-spreading Israeli colonies in the occupied territories, would even consider such a proposal for a second.

Netanyahu doesn’t really care to make peace. Or, rather, he would love to make peace but not in such a way that a minimum of justice is served.

What Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians seem to be forgetting is that there can be no peace unless a majority believes that peace also serves a sense of fairness. Offering maybe 45 per cent of the West Bank for a future Palestinian state does not qualify as fair.

Of course Israel is enamoured with its power. And why wouldn’t it be? It has nuclear weapons and the most modern army in the region. This, it got by and large free from its generous sponsors within whose domestic circles pro-Israel groups have played a clever game. These same groups have also shielded Israel from the laws of nations that others are asked to abide by.

Moreover, the idea that Palestinians, not Jews, could possibly have a just cause is so alien to the Israeli psyche that a school book that dared mention the fact that the Palestinians have a very different narrative from the Israelis on how the state was founded had to be recalled.

Might, of course, is not right, and Israel will learn to its detriment that the best possible time to make peace with the Palestinians - on a basis that preserves the Zionist idea of a Jewish state, however wrong that may be in a country where 20 per cent, the original inhabitants, are not Jewish - passed with Yasser Arafat.

There is still a small chance with Abbas, but it is slipping away.

This is not a marketplace; it is not a bargaining process. This is about freedom, national preservation and history. People will go a long way for those things.

Palestinians will not accept anything less than what is rightly theirs, and international legality is the minimum of that.


22 October 2009

No comments:

Post a Comment