Initiative versus principle

If Israel rejects the best Arab position, perhaps the Arabs should revert to maximal demands and ask Israel to propose a plan

Azmi Bishara at His Best
Al-Ahram Weekly

".....Maybe what was required was a new Arab initiative announced during the incumbencies of these two administrations. Then they might have called it an initiative. Better yet, perhaps the Arabs should come up with a new proposal, every three or four years, modifying the "positions" that had once constituted the cardinal points of the previous peace initiative, so as to placate every new set of American envoys. Then, in 20 years or so, after four or five Israeli governments and American administrations have come and gone, the Arabs will approve of Israel's annexation of a large chunk of the occupied West Bank and they'll feel grateful that Israel not only asked them to recognise just plain Israel but also Article 7a of its organic law in which it describes itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Anything is possible as long as Israel finds Arabs who argue, "it's better to accept what's on offer now, before we're forced to accept something worse."

Such is the fate of a peace initiative that emanates from the dynamics of weakness. Without a victory to make the tenets of a peace initiative more compelling or the ability to alter the balance of power in favour of the authors of the initiative, the initiative remains no more than a proposal in need of more alterations. This is why an initiative maker is either a neutral party who wishes to mediate between antagonistic parties that cannot reach a middle ground on their own, or a victorious party who seeks to translate a military victory into a political one, or an otherwise powerful party that has the power to impose the initiative. As for an initiative that is forwarded hypothetically, it can only be interpreted as a form of backing down and is certain to whet the adversary's appetite for more concessions. Real life is not made up of the simulation games played in the strategic study centres that live off Arab-Israeli dialogues......

Even Benyamin Netanyahu would have been embarrassed to tell the Arabs what that mild and moderate foreign minister did via her speech to the powerful pro- Israeli lobby. What the Arab governments have to do, she said, is to normalise their relations with Israel so as to allay Israel's fears, after which they should wait until Israel gradually changes. Perhaps, eventually, Israel would recognise the Palestinian national unity government and maybe even the Arabs.....

Normally, of course, this is a very positive trait, one that is highly valued in capitalist societies since it is the antonym of the laziness, indifference and lack of initiative with which we Orientals are so often characterised. But in this instance, at least, there was no shortage of the spirit of initiative, especially when it came to pleasing the Americans by agreeing, for example, to lower the threshold of the Arab proposal to the level of the roadmap.....

Unless the occupying power recognises the right of the occupied people to self-determination and declares its intent to withdraw, what you have is not negotiations but another form of bullying, and calling the people sitting around the negotiating table "the two sides" doesn't alter that fact. This is why liberation movements resolve to sustain the resistance and not to negotiate with the occupying power and somehow manage to reconcile the demands of resistance with the demands of day-to-day life until the occupying power declares its readiness to lift the occupation. Only then is there really something to negotiate over.

In Palestine, the liberation movement switched track and began to dream that the occupying power would recognise it. Once that dream was realised, the Palestine Liberation Organisation became one of "two sides", and was then fragmented and reduced to a hypothetical political entity that consisted of remnants of the liberation movement and that enjoyed none of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Eventually, however, the people under occupation were given the opportunity to hold legislative elections and they returned a parliament that produced a government that rejected the post-Oslo game. This government was willing to rule for the very reason it was elected: it stood as a liberation movement determined to fight the occupation. At the same time, however, this government opposed negotiations with Israel, but in order to stay in power it delegated members of its political opponents -- the very people who disintegrated the liberation movement and led the hypothetical political entity -- to enter into negotiations, yet without devising a mechanism to keep negotiators in line. In other words, the government may not have negotiated, but it did not turn its rejection of negotiations into a binding position and it had no way of ensuring that negotiations would not jeopardise the national movement's fixed priorities. Perhaps, one day, it will wake up to the fact that to Israel and the US a Palestinian government consists of no more than a Palestinian Authority president and his advisors who agree to negotiate on Israel's terms. But this subject is better left to another day."