6^th August 2013
by Peter Wertheim,
Executive Director, ECAJ.
Amin Saikal Peace Still a Distant Dream (Canberra Times, 1 August 2013) is wrong on the facts and wrong in his analysis.
His assertion that The Israelis have given no indic­a­tion that they are willing to negotiate in good faith on the basis of the principle of land for peace flies in the face of offers to the Palestini­ans of more than 90% of the West Bank made at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and at Annapolis in 2008 by former Israeli Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert respect­ively, not to mention Israel’s complete with­draw­al from the Sinai Peninsula to achieve peace with Egypt in 1979 and from Jordanian territory when it signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994.
Similarly his statement that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always opposed this principle fails to account for the fact that it was Netanyahu, as Israeli Prime Minister, who nego­ti­ated the Hebron and Wye River agree­ments with the Palestini­ans in 1997 and 1998, pursuant to which Israel handed over control of parts of the West Bank to the Palestini­ans. Nor does he mention Netanyahu’s recent agonising decision to release 104 convicted ter­ror­ists, most of them with multiple civilian deaths on their hands, in order to get the talks restarted.
Saikal cri­ti­cises Israel’s blockade of Gaza, but fails to mention the findings of the inter­na­tion­al Panel of Inquiry estab­lished by the Secretary-General of the UN under the chair­man­ship of Sir Geoffrey Palmer of New Zealand, an expert in inter­na­tion­al maritime law, together with legal experts from Colombia, Israel and Turkey. One of the con­clu­sions to be found in its 105-page report is that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is legal, a measure it has legit­im­ately taken in self-defence.
Set­tle­ments and borders are undoubtedly difficult issues, but they should not be exag­ger­ated. It is simply false for Saikal to say that Jewish set­tle­ments occupy more than half of the West Bank when the correct figure is about 2%. More rel­ev­antly, according to the UN Office for the Coordin­a­tion of Human­it­ari­an Affairs (August 2009), the territory lying between Israel’s security barrier and the pre-1967 Green Line accounts for 8.5% of the total area of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Approx­im­ately 85% of Israeli settlers live within that area.
Further, the Palestini­ans are seeking some form of access between the West Bank and Gaza through sovereign Israeli territory. Some allowance would need to be made for this in any land swap arrange­ment. The size of the ter­rit­or­ies involved in any land swap would be quite small.
No-one pretends that there are any ready-made solutions to resolve the status of Jerusalem. However, an agreed basis for dividing sov­er­eignty over Jerusalem would not neces­sar­ily mean a physical re-division of the city.
The issues con­cern­ing refugees, including the 800,000 Jewish refugees evicted from Arab countries after 1948, are also difficult. But creative ideas have been seriously discussed during previous nego­ti­ations, and con­tra­dict Saikal’s assertion that the parties have not been prepared to demon­strate flex­ib­il­ity on these issues. The question of Palestini­an refugees from 1948 takes on a less daunting per­spect­ive when one realises the small numbers of them who are still living. Few would begrudge them or their des­cend­ants the oppor­tun­ity to become Palestini­an citizens within a State of Palestine. But the des­cend­ants of refugees cannot truth­fully claim to be refugees them­selves. There can be no right of “return” to the territory of Israel for those who were never there.
This would not prevent the parties from agreeing upon a mechanism for refugees or their des­cend­ants, whether Palestini­ans or Jews, to pursue private rights to com­pens­a­tion for lost family property.
Saikal says nothing about the renewed violence in Egypt and the grinding civil war in Syria, which may actually be a reason that talks are going forward. The main forces of extremism in the region, Sunni Salafist groups and the Iranian-backed Shia terror organ­isa­tion, Hezbollah, are currently having much of their energy sapped in either or both of these quagmires. They now have less time and capacity than they have had in the past to exert influence on the Palestini­an side to confront Israel and to refuse any and all com­prom­ise with it.
Nowhere is this decline in extremist pressure on the Palestini­ans more evident than in the current disarray of Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Broth­er­hood, which remains openly dedicated to the destruc­tion of Israel as a State and to the exterm­in­a­tion or eviction of most of the Jewish pop­u­la­tion. Hamas has been brought to the brink of financial collapse, not by Israel, but by the actions of the former Morsi gov­ern­ment of Egypt and its successor in closing down many of the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. Hamas has hitherto derived most of its income from taxes levied on goods and weapons coming through the tunnels and from the direct smuggling in of cash, sources which are now much dimin­ished.
Saikal advocates western engage­ment with Hamas, which would re-empower it when it is at its weakest, and undercut any move on the Palestini­an side towards an historic set­tle­ment with Israel, an outcome fraught with dif­fi­culty but which Israel and all western gov­ern­ments desire, even if Saikal does not.

 
Peter Wertheim is the Executive Director of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.