Israel and Palestine Vs. ‘Blood and Magic’ by Hussein Ibish, Saliba Sarsar Sep 17, 2013

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Jerusalem

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/17/israel-and-palestine-vs-blood-and-magic.html

Ian S. Lustick’s commentary, "Two-State Illusion,” in this weekend's New York Times dismisses not only the present round of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but the whole concept of a negotiated two-state Israeli-Palestinian agreement. He describes it as a fantasy that “blinds us and impedes progress,” as if Israelis and Palestinians faced a smorgasbord of interesting and attractive options for resolving the conflict.

However, as the latter part of his article makes clear, his "new ideas" are mainly an incoherent jumble of imaginary scenarios, all of which require an alternative reality to emerge at some point in the future. Nothing he suggests can be built on under present circumstances. None of it holds together as a coherent or even semi-coherent counterproposal.

Worse still, most of what he envisages requires by his own admission decades, if not centuries, to become possibilities, and further Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inevitable.

So not only would we have to wait scores of decades, if not centuries, for any of these "alternatives" to begin to emerge, they could only be the product of further wide-scale bloodshed.

Despite Prof. Lustick's passionate dismissal, the two-state solution remains the only viable option for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His counterfactual musings don't provide any practicable, coherent or implementable alternatives. It's an interesting thought experiment to dismiss the global consensus, stated position of all relevant parties, logical implementation of international law, and only practicable means of achieving the minimum goals of each party in favor of flights of fancy. But it has no political value whatsoever. Indeed undermining the only plausible conflict-ending scenario, while not suggesting any serious, practicable alternatives, is actually harmful.

Although realizing a two-state solution faces serious and growing obstacles, it alone allows both Palestinians and Israelis to avoid an ongoing struggle with no end in sight. Yes, “Time can do things that politicians cannot,” as Prof. Lustick writes, but the goal must be to achieve a solution in our lifetime—not in 120 years as with Irish independence, or 132 years as with Algerian independence, two of the key examples he cites.

The occupation is an emergency, not a macro- or trans-historical problem, particularly for the millions of Palestinians living under its oppressive rule. They, especially—but we too—do not have the luxury of waiting to see what the next hundred years of history will bring us, good or bad. On the contrary, we must have the courage to act now, and with urgency, within the existing realities, however difficult, to try to create a working solution to a situation that is both intolerably unjust and regionally (and to some extent even globally) destabilizing.

Other than a two-state solution, other scenarios may have constituencies but they cannot end the conflict. There are three main extant "alternative" visions.

First is the continuation of the status quo of Israeli occupation and unilateralism. Israel rules millions of Palestinians who, uniquely in the world, are not citizens of Israel or any other state. Israel also controls large amounts of Palestinian territory beyond its internationally recognized boundaries. This situation is completely untenable, and, over time, can only lead to further confrontations. It is a relationship of dominance and subordination that makes further conflict inevitable.

Moreover, it can only defer a resolution of the essential issues between the two peoples and deepen and entrench divisions, thus further raising the stakes and making a conflict-ending agreement more difficult at every stage. Israeli exclusivity in Jerusalem is a recipe for continued conflict with the Palestinians, since a Palestinian state without a sovereign role in occupied East Jerusalem would not be viable. More dangerous still, exclusive Israeli control of Jerusalem creates the circumstances through which the conflict could easily morph from being a difficult but resolvable political struggle between two ethno-national communities over land and power, into a far more intractable, and possibly irreconcilable, religious confrontation between Israel and the Muslim world in general over holy places and the will of God.

Second, among both Israelis and Palestinians, minority discourses are demanding complete Israeli/Jewish (as expressed by the Jewish Israeli settler and annexation movements) or Palestinian/Muslim (as reflected in the positions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad) rule over the whole of historical Palestine. These maximalist visions offer nothing but ongoing and, in all likelihood, catastrophic conflict without apparent resolution, since neither side can seriously hope for any sort of comprehensive military solution. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians, both of whom exist in roughly equivalent numbers between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, are going to vanish from the land. And neither people shows the least interest in either accepting subjugation at the hands of the other or abandoning its own national identity.

Third, especially in the Palestinian diaspora and in Western universities, a utopian vision of a single, democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians both set aside their national identities in favor of an as-yet-undefined umbrella identity in some sort of joint or bi-national state may be appealing in theory, but does not constitute a practical path to ending the conflict. No political movement of any significance among either Palestinians or Israelis has adopted it as a policy goal, because both sides are still clinging to their national projects and self-determination. Moreover, no version of this has yet explained what could make it attractive to Jewish Israelis who would have to be convinced to abandon their national project. Indeed, this idea remains entirely mired in sloganeering aimed at Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sentiments and, thus far, hasn't even attempted to address the basic interests of Jewish Israelis and their national sentiments or narratives.

All of these "alternatives" represent unworkable fantasies and, in practice, the demand for them abandons the goal of resolving the conflict and ending the occupation in favor of an open-ended struggle in pursuit of impossible goals. In short, these "solutions" represent neither principles nor pragmatism, and instead reflect dangerous phantasms and fanaticism.

Prof. Lustick has provided a very good illustration of how far fantasies about alternative scenarios can be taken when they proliferate on the page in what appears to be an unstructured stream of consciousness.

By contrast, one of the most compelling aspects of the two-state solution is that a solid majority of both Palestinians and Israelis alike have shown, in virtually every poll taken in the past twenty years and more, that they are in favor of peace based on two states. Moreover, the international community, the U.N. Security Council, and the international legal framework are all very clear in their support for a Palestinian state that would live alongside Israel in peace and security.

Nevertheless, radical minorities on both sides and in the U.S. have thus far been allowed to thwart the mutual wishes of the large majority of both Israelis and Palestinians. Moreover, they have been allowed to impede the realization of a crucial American national security interest.

Prof. Lustick looks forward to future transformations beyond a two-state framework based on a combination of "blood and magic," which he argues are the key to avoiding "truly catastrophic change." In our view, it's hard to imagine a political perspective that more certainly invites "truly catastrophic change" than a reliance on "blood and magic." We prefer to rely on the national interests, political common sense, and the basic humanity of all the parties to recognize that, under current circumstances, only a two-state solution offers a conflict-ending scenario.

Moreover, we strongly feel that we do not have the luxury of centuries to let "blood and magic" do their work, assuming that Prof. Lustick is right that these are indeed the factors that avoid catastrophe. Prof. Lustick says that in the early 1980s, when working for the U.S. government, he was asked outright if he was "willing to destroy the only available chance for peace between Israelis and Palestinians?” He says he responded in the affirmative.

We are no less aware of the challenges facing the realization of a two-state solution, and there's nothing in Prof. Lustick's commentary with which either of us was unfamiliar. The big difference is that we are not willing to destroy the only available chance for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, or to dismiss or denigrate it. Instead, we strongly advocate that all people of goodwill join together to find a way to make it work because Prof. Lustick's alternative—centuries of conflict and a reliance on "blood and magic" as a solution—appears to us to be inexcusably reckless.

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Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal. He has a PhD in comparative literature from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Dr. Saliba Sarsar, Professor of Political Science at Monmouth University, is a member of ATFP’s Board of Directors.

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"The lesson, I think, is this: the Holy Land holds histories that, with time, can be taught to coexist. My mother’s is one of them. As she navigates her own, inner peace process, I hope that one day, in her lifetime, it leads home."

On Yom Kippur, Remember My Palestinian Mother

by Samer Badawi Sep 10, 2013 1:00 PM EDT 

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/10/on-yom-kippur-remember-my-palestinian-mother.html

This year, September 13 marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. It is also Yom Kippur. On this holiest day of the Jewish calendar—a day of atonement—I hope my Jewish friends will remember my Palestinian mother.

Her story begins with an injury. In 1948, when she was four, my mother’s forearm was stripped to flesh by a tipped kettle. Cooled and dried, the wound scarred smooth as tanned leather. And in my first memory, I am a toddler kneading that taut skin, easing my colic into sleep.

It was a kind of sacrament, I now think. In gentle touches, my mother and I learned: Hurt, eventually, heralds healing. But what becomes of wounds that won’t heal?

That question weighs heavy on my mother’s mind this week, as she and I recall two decades of failed U.S. attempts to help end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—a conflict that has defined all but four years of my mother’s life.

She was still in her 40s when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn. But two decades on, as she approaches her 70s, my mother is beginning to reckon with the possibility that she will live out her life in exile.

She is not alone, of course.

My mother is part of the last generation of Palestinians born before 1948, when the creation of Israel displaced three-fourths of the Holy Land’s indigenous population.

That inescapable tragedy—displacing one people to shelter another—is the unhealed wound that sustains the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like any wound, it must eventually be exposed. And if it is to truly heal, Palestinians and Israelis must make of the scar a source of succor, not fear.

After all, my mother, like others of her generation, is no threat—not to those who know and love her and certainly not to an entire nation. For Christmas, she knits Bethlehem-themed ornaments and sells them at church bazaars. She stands at a plastic table, this woman from the Holy Land, and regales wide-eyed American children with tales of day trips to the Sea of Galilee.

That life of more than six decades ago is too far-gone, though. Like any person with more years lived than left, my mother is too wise to inveigh against the inevitabilities of time. Instead, like millions of her generation who remember a land before loss, what she really wants is something more elemental.

She wants the right to access those memories, on her own terms, as she looks back on a life in waning.

But to revisit them, like any person should have the right to do, my mother needs permission—not from the quixotically named Palestinian Authority, but from Israel. That cruel reality, more than any other in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, adds enduring insult to injury.

Still, my mother and I maintain hope that she can return someday, without the indignities of interrogation. Much of that hope, it must be said, derives from the Jewish experience. After all, what nation knows better the injustice of depriving a people of their history?

Some months ago, I gave a lift to an Israeli author whose grandfather’s signature is affixed to Israel’s declaration of independence. In the trunk of my car, where he had just put his suitcase, there was a box sealed well before my years and, in my mother’s scrawl, labeled: “History.”

My Israeli friend asked about the contents. But I couldn’t answer. Whenever I asked my mother what her History held, she demurred, saying only: “Keep it in a cool, dry place.”

I understood why when I opened it myself. In that box, I found hundreds of faded, yellowing photographs—my mother’s history, hidden all those years in sepia stills.

The author's mother and grandmother in Bethlehem. (Courtesy of Samer Badawi)

There she was—tomboyish and slight—beside her mother, who was stitching. And there were Solomon’s Pools, where my grandfather drowned.

These were the Holy Land’s apocrypha, I thought, subsumed for so long by another’s narrative. They told us: Ours was a land without a people. Ours was a desert, and they made it bloom.

But history, the images showed, had been sullied. They showed my mother, laughing on a terraced hill, land stitched with olive trees. They showed the vine, made famous not by wine, but by my grandmother’s stuffed grape leaves.

The lesson, I think, is this: the Holy Land holds histories that, with time, can be taught to coexist. My mother’s is one of them. As she navigates her own, inner peace process, I hope that one day, in her lifetime, it leads home.

ATFP's Hussein Ibish: Where Settler Terrorism Comes From

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/09/where-settler-terrorism-comes-from.html

 

Following a series of violent incidents involving settler and pro-settler Jewish Israeli extremists, including the attempted lynching of a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, many Israelis expressed concern about the rise in violent hatred within their society and wondered where it was coming from. Several incidents over the weekend demonstrated that this trend is only intensifying and clearly pointed to why.

For the answer, Israelis need look no further than across the Green Line: settler terror is an inevitable consequence of the occupation and the myriad policies of the Israeli state that enable this extremism.

A Palestinian farmer inspects the remains of his olive trees after after they were uprooted overnight in an attack blamed on Jewish settlers. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP / GettyImages)

As they have for numerous years, extremist settlers are again violently disrupting the Palestinian olive-picking season, which is now underway. Settlers have been attacking Palestinians on their way to pick olives and destroying trees and orchards. Palestinians complain that the settlers are operating with impunity under the watchful eyes of Israeli authorities who do little to restrain—and even less to arrest or prosecute—them.

Increasingly, occupation forces are also coming under settler "price tag" attacks (retribution for government crackdowns on illegal activities), with three undercover Israeli police officers posing as Palestinians violently attacked by extremist settler youths near Hebron. The police say they did nothing to provoke the youths, who have been arrested because they made the mistake of assaulting occupation forces rather than Palestinians.

The recent violence comes in the wake of earlier attacks against Israeli forces by extremist settlers, and a constant barrage of assaults on Palestinians. Some of these attacks have been videotaped in a manner that suggests Israeli forces on the scene stood by impassively.
Attacks have also been spreading to target Christian sites including churches and monasteries.

"Price tag" violence has become part of a deep-seated culture of hatred and impunity on the part of Jewish Israeli extremists. Like the racist Ku Klux Klan in the American deep south during the civil rights era, violent settlers are encouraged by incitement from radical establishment figures and operate under a well-founded belief that the system will not act systematically or forcefully to restrain or punish them in most cases.

This atmosphere of impunity, and even encouragement, was dramatically illustrated by a celebratory sendoff at an Israeli settlement over the weekend for a man convicted of severely abusing a Palestinian teenager. The event honoring this thug was attended by local settler leaders and rabbis, and by a member of the Knesset.

One of these rabbis, the notorious extremist Dov Lior, encouraged the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and is noted for violent and racist statements against Arabs and other Gentiles. He serves as the head of the "Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria" (settler rhetoric for the occupied West Bank), and is employed by the Israeli government as the rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement. Among many other extreme statements, he endorsed a book by another radical settler rabbi that advocated the killing of Gentiles, including infants, “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”

It is true that such extremism doesn't characterize all, or perhaps even most, Israeli settlers. But this mentality is part and parcel of the settlement movement and nothing effective is being done either by that movement or by the Israeli state to seriously counteract the continued growth of such hatred and extremism. The Israeli police on several occasions have announced the establishment of units to focus on such extremism, but this does not appear to have done anything so far to restrain or counteract the flourishing of the culture of violence, hate and impunity.

In his recent U.N. speech, which was basically a litany of familiar and mostly justified complaints, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas led with the issue of settler violence. But it's not clear was what, exactly, Abbas can do about it other than complain. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has also repeatedly stated that these attacks, along with Israeli government incursions into Palestinian ruled areas, constitute some of the most serious threats to the credibility of the Palestinian Authority.

These attacks are intended to send a message to Palestinians that they live under Israeli occupation and that there is little or nothing they can do to protect themselves from settler rampages. Given that the Israeli government typically offers little more than rhetorical condemnations of this violence, that message is being received loud and clear. It therefore constitutes one of the gravest threats to the promotion of a culture of peace, and stability on the ground, between Israel and the Palestinians, as it enacts the relationship of dominance and subordination inherent in the occupation on a daily basis.

Other Israelis need not wonder how or why such attacks take place. They are the inevitable byproducts of the occupation itself, the culture it promotes, and the rhetoric and mentality of the settler movement that is so generously subsidized and protected by the state itself. But because they are such a direct and grave threat to the rule of law, the cultural health of its society, and prospects for peace, settler terrorism is profoundly antithetical to Israel's real interests. And until the Israeli government finally decides to act decisively against the violence and the culture that informs it, rather than coddling and subsidizing them, the problem is only going to get worse.

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Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal. He has a PhD in comparative literature from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Empowering Peace & Palestine

A Hollow Call For "Justice"... Cohen wants Palestinians to drop what both parties agreed would be one of the four major final status issues: the question of the Palestinian refugees.

http://www.americantaskforce.org/daily_news_article/2012/09/17/hollow_call_justice

by Hussein Ibish
in the The Daily Beast (Opinion)
September 17, 2012 - 12:00am
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/17/a-hollow-call-for-justice.html

Ben Cohen's response to my recent piece systematically proves every point I make about Israel's cynical new campaign to raise the issue of Jewish refugees. In particular he demonstrates that this is not about defending the rights of Jewish refugees, since no substantive demands on their behalf are made, but simply about using them to try to obliterate the claims of Palestinians. It's one of the oddest cries for "justice" I've ever encountered, since it seeks merely to deny the claims of others.

Cohen thinks the source of my "umbrage" is a conference. It's not. It's a much broader campaign, organized by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to raise the issue globally as part of Israel's political strategy. Israeli diplomats around the world, for example, have been instructed to raise the issue at every possible opportunity. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who makes no secret of his hostility to a peace agreement and support for the occupation, is leading the campaign.

Bona fide efforts by Jews from the Arab world to recuperate their history are legitimate and desirable. There is nothing to be gained by covering over aspects history that I described as "a stain on Arab honor." Cohen suggests I repeat an "oft-heard claim of Arab propagandists that Jews lived in harmony and equality with their Arab and Muslim neighbors until the Zionist movement started meddling." In fact I argued the contrary: that while Israel's government was enthusiastic about the mass migration, growing hostility to Jewish communities in the Arab world after and before the creation of Israel made normal life impossible.

If the issue of Palestinian refugees did not persist and was not a final status issue, the Israeli government would not be launching this campaign. Cohen claims I am "fixated… with the notion of an Israeli plot." It's not a plot. It's a well-publicized, announced campaign, with obvious political and diplomatic intentions.

Cohen's repetition of crude hasbara talking points is demonstrated by his dismissal of "the hoary myth of the 'Nakba,'" in contrast to "the horror of the ethnic cleansing" of Jews from the Arab world. This is the essence of the campaign: to downplay and dismiss the sudden and crushing destruction of Palestinian national society and the displacement of most of its residents in 1948, while describing the far more complex and protracted migration of Jews from Arab states to Israel, under multiple circumstances with many different experiences, in the most reductive and emotionally charged language possible.

Cohen's main point is that, "We'll give up our refugee status… if you give up yours." Or rather that's what he wants Palestinians to say to Jewish Israelis of Arab origin. Like the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Cohen wants Palestinians to drop what both parties agreed would be one of the four major final status issues: the question of the Palestinian refugees. That's the purpose behind the campaign, dovetailing with many other efforts to achieve the same effect.

It's telling that this is the only indication of what "justice" for Jewish refugees, to which Cohen refers many times, might look like. He doesn't ask for their right of return to their countries of origin, because they don't want that. He doesn't raise the issue of their property rights, because that would also beg the question of who owned what in Palestine on the eve of the creation of the Israeli state. It would imply the right of Palestinian owners to all the property seized by Israel's "Absentee Property Law" of 1950 and other actions that expropriated the lands and other possessions belonging to what had been the country's majority inhabitants in 1948: the Palestinians.

So, "justice" for Jewish refugees doesn't mean restoring any of their own rights to property, return and so forth. Instead this is just cynically using their narrative to deny Palestinians the ability negotiate over their own refugee issue. The message is in effect: Drop this issue, even though we agreed to negotiate over it in 1993.

As a question of history, memory and narrative, raising these issues is a perfectly reasonable project, although it doesn't sit very well with the broader Zionist narrative. But as an effort to eliminate a core, long agreed upon, final status issue (the Palestinian refugees) or suddenly introduce a new one (Jewish refugees), the campaign perfectly reflects the politics of its leader, Ayalon. His argument is, in essence, that Jews must have their state—Israel—as a refuge, but Palestinians shouldn't have one of their own. That's the idea of "justice" that informs this campaign.

Ayalon's hostility to Palestinian statehood, and insistence that there is no occupation and that Israel has full national rights in all of the territories under its control, are the obvious subtext. Cohen's response to me confirms, not dispels, that undisguised reality.

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Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal. He has a PhD in comparative literature from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Safer Side by Side: Why Israel Needs Palestine by Hussein Ibish

The “threat” posed by a potential Palestinian state is the most common Israeli objection to a two-state solution. But the occupation itself is the main source of insecurity and lack of peace. The only guarantor of peace for Israel is the establishment of Palestine.

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http://www.americantaskforce.org/daily_news_article/2012/04/02/1333339200_22

Benny Begin, a member of Prime Minister Netanuyahu's inner cabinet, recently dismissed the idea of the creation of a viable Palestinian state, claiming it would be an unbearable security threat to Israel.

He added that Netanuyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, which seemingly endorsed the two-state goal, was aimed exclusively at foreign audiences but that Palestinian statehood "was not brought up for discussion in the government, nor will it be discussed." "This is not the government's position," he stated bluntly. All the evidence suggests he's correct.

The "threat" posed by a potential Palestinian state is the most common Israeli objection to a two-state solution. But the occupation itself is the main source of insecurity and lack of peace.
The mainstream Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has staked its future on a two-state agreement and an end to the occupation. Through the Arab Peace Initiative, the rest of the Arab world signaled unanimously that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement would also mean normalization between Israel and the Arab states. Plainly, most Palestinians, other Arabs and their governments would welcome an end to this destabilizing conflict.

It is frequently alleged that a core barrier to peace is the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel. But the Palestine Liberation Organization—the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—did, in fact, formally recognize Israel in 1993. Israel, in return, only recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Israel has never recognized a Palestinian state, or, in any formal manner, the Palestinian right to statehood.

Moreover, the Palestinian Authority has engaged in unprecedented security cooperation with occupation forces in recent years. Joint efforts to thwart attacks against Israelis, intelligence sharing and coordination in confronting militants have all persisted despite the breakdown of negotiations and at tremendous political cost to the PA.

Israeli security officials acknowledge that the Palestinian security cooperation and performance have been excellent. Attacks against Israelis in Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank have fallen to virtually zero.

But this security cooperation is frequently ignored and emphasis instead placed on the actions of militants in Gaza. The PA has not been able to contain the Gazan violence because Hamas runs Gaza. The PA lost control of Gaza for several reasons: its own miscalculations; Israel's refusal to allow the PA to develop elite counterterrorism forces; and insufficient support from half-hearted patrons like the United States (Hamas's patrons lavished enormous support on it). But most importantly, groups like Hamas need the absence of peace to thrive, even in Gaza.

The PA won't be able to achieve complete security control—a key responsibility of a sovereign government—without possessing the rights and prerogatives of sovereignty. Israelis point to the Altalena incident in which the fledgling Israeli state confronted the extremist Irgun group, forcing it to disarm. This confrontation took place after Israeli independence, not before the establishment of the state, when there was ample cooperation between mainstream Jewish organizations and terrorist groups like Irgun.

In the event of real Palestinian independence, Palestinian public opinion, the Palestinian security forces, and Arab governments would not allow any campaign of violence against Israelis to undermine or threaten the new state. Palestinian militants justify violence as resistance to the occupation, and ending it would remove such rationalizations. Islamist groups, just like far right-wing Israeli political parties, would be disarmed and pursue their aims through peaceful and democratic means.

In the limited areas under its control in the West Bank and without real sovereign authority, the PA has already proven its ability to do what Israel did after independence: reign in militants and enforce the rule of a single, disciplined security force. In the event of independence, this could and would be replicated in Gaza.

It should be added that “security” arguments typically focus on the predictably negative consequences of unilateral actions, but clearly unilateralism is a recipe for disaster. Building Palestinian independence does not require immediate Israeli withdrawal, and any agreement with the PA would not be unilateral but mutual. The correct security analogy is not Lebanon or Gaza, but the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, which have been maintained by all three countries. The Palestinian state would have an even greater incentive than the Egyptians and Jordanians to uphold such an agreement because not doing so would undermine or even threaten its own continued existence.

A mutual peace agreement will offset Israel's need to live on the permanent knife-edge of potential war and uprising as well as in the morally, socially and culturally corrupting position of occupier. It will allow the Palestinians to live in freedom and dignity, and remove any excuse for others to claim to be confronting Israel on behalf of the Palestinian cause. Peace may be a gamble, but endless wars are a sure loser.