President, U.S./Middle East Project
Posted: November 5, 2010 11:49 AM
Peace Will Not Be Achieved By Deception
This piece originally published in Arabic translation by Al-Hayat
The sloppiness -- not to say outright misrepresentations -- that characterize the punditry of too many Israeli journalists is striking.
I was reminded of that reading Ari Shavit's claim in his Ha'aretz column of October 7 that in President George W. Bush's letter of April 2004 to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the American president promised that "the settlement blocs [will] remain in Israeli hands and the Palestinian refugees will not return to Israel."
That is a fabrication. In his letter to Sharon, Bush promised only that when Israeli-Palestinian negotiations get under way, these are Israeli demands that the U.S. will support. But he also noted in his letter that these demands must be negotiated with the Palestinians, and cannot be imposed by Israel or the United States.
Indeed, to make sure that Bush's letter would not be misrepresented the way Shavit and most other Israeli columnists -- not to speak of Israeli politicians -- have, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on February 8, 2006, following a meeting with the then Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, "No one should try and unilaterally predetermine the outcome of a final status agreement." She emphasized that Bush's letter to Sharon endorsing the need to take into consideration "new population centers" in the West Bank does not provide a license for anyone to "try and do that in a preemptive or pre-determined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."
It is not only Israeli columnists who have played fast and loose with the history of this conflict. So have Israel's leaders. This past week (October 6), during a visit to the city of Lod, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that "Palestinians waited 9 months and more out of 10 months, and set a precondition right off the bat even though they committed to no preconditions." There is no other way of describing this statement than as a lie. The Palestinian insistence that the negotiations' starting point should be the existing agreements to which both Israel and the Palestinians signed onto is not a "condition." Israel's insistence that these agreements be ignored is a condition. It is therefore Israel that imposed conditions for the negotiations, not the Palestinians.
Netanyahu and his Likud Party have popularized a slogan that Palestinians only "take and take" while Israel's many "concessions" go unacknowledged. It is a myth that has become deeply ingrained in Israel's national narrative. The truth is the precise opposite. Palestinians have made a concession to Israel that is entirely unprecedented. In 1988, the PLO agreed formally to recognize the legitimacy of Israeli sovereignty within the 1967 armistice border, an area that includes fully half the territory that had been recognized as the legitimate patrimony of Palestinian Arabs in the UN Partition Plan. This reduced the Palestinians' territory from 43 to 22 percent of Palestine while enlarging Israel's territory from 56 to 78 percent.... READ MORE
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