A peace plan minus the Palestinians appeals to the arrogance of the Arab dictators and autocratic monarchs who for the sake of their own positions of privilege and power have never permitted the Palestinian voice to speak unfiltered.
A Very Good Article
By Ben White
PalestineChronicle.com
".....Yet despite all the fanfare, and self-congratulatory talk of an “historic moment”, this proposal shares the same flaw as those that have come before – it is being offered on behalf of those at the root of the conflict, the Palestinians. The Palestinians, who, from the refugees exiled since 1948 to those living in the Occupied Territories, are still not ‘permitted’ to speak for themselves......
Ever since then, Palestinian resistance to colonisation and occupation has been deliberately subsumed into the generic ‘Arab-Israeli’ conflict, reduced to one component of a regional question. That Arab states are presumed to speak for the Palestinians appeals on two main levels. Firstly, it chimes with a racialised Western discourse that sees the conflict through the prism of ‘little Israel’ against all ‘the Arabs’ (or more commonly since 9/11, the ‘Muslims’), an interpretation that owes much to the influence of the Israeli narrative.....
Just as in 1948, high profile 'peace plans' continue to marginalise the very people whose dispossession was, and crucially still is, the core of the conflict. It was not Egyptians, or Syrians, or Saudis who had their orange groves stolen and villages emptied to make way for a Jewish state. Libyans and Kuwaitis have not lived under Israeli military occupation for 40 years. It is only the Palestinian people who can ‘offer’ peace to Israel, because it is their country that has been colonised and occupied; an offer, moreover, that will be made just as soon as, and not before, justice is forthcoming."
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