Financial Times Editorial Comment: A fight that must go back to the land

Financial Times Editorial Comment: A fight that must go back to the land
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 3 2007 20:37 | Last updated: June 3 2007 20:37



Forty years ago tomorrow, a war erupted that changed the course of the Middle East. Israel crushed an alliance of Arab armies, seizing in six days the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and Arab east Jerusalem.

It was a stunning and widely acclaimed victory for Israel and a devastating blow to Arab self-esteem. Forty years of missed opportunities to exchange land-for-peace later, however, the consequences have been calamitous for both sides.

From being an admired and even romanticised nation of pioneers and kibbutzniks, Israel is divided and well down the road to pariahdom because of the way it treats the Palestinians under occupation. For the Arabs, 1967 blew away the bluster and ambition of pan-Arab nationalism, leaving despots at the head of garrison states and an ideological vacuum increasingly inhabited by radically competing Islamists.

For the US, the war marked its move towards unconditional support for Israeli policy – irrespective of its own, or Israel’s, national interest – and the growth of a powerful lobby within the US political system that, despite the liberal instincts of many American Jews, is a bastion of Israel’s nationalist right – more Likudnik than the Likud.

Israel’s enlargement has left a trail of unresolved conflict with, at its core, the battle between Arab and Jew over how (or whether) to share the cramped and combustible Holy Land. Like a volatile chemical, this land keeps catching fire, blowing flames through the region and spraying sparks across the world.

Israel has reached formal peace with Egypt and Jordan and given back the Sinai and some Jordanian border enclaves. It could even conceivably do a deal with Syria to return the Golan. But Israel has never asserted any ideological claim to these places, or to Gaza, from where the government of Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew two years ago. The West Bank is different.

In the biblically resonant hills of Judea and Samaria, and in and around east Jerusalem, through war and in peace, Israeli colonisation of the occupied territories has never ceased. The settlements, the roads connecting them and now the “security barrier” deep inside the West Bank have left the Palestinians unviable reservations of land amounting to 44 per cent of the West Bank, or barely 10 per cent of colonial Palestine. That is not the basis for a historic compromise but a contract for permanent conflict.

There is no mystery about the solution to that conflict. The outlines are in the parameters set by President Bill Clinton and in talks between Israelis and Palestinians at Taba in Egypt, after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and adopted in their essentials by the Arab League, in Beirut in 2002 and again at Riyadh this April.

The offer is simple: full Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for the land it seized in 1967. That means a Palestinian state on almost all the West Bank and Gaza with east Jerusalem as its capital, and what the Arab plan calls a “just solution” that inevitably means compensation rather than repatriation for most Palestinian refugees.

This formula has not really been tried. Even under the 1992-96 Labour government led by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – the high watermark of the Oslo peace process – the number of settlers in the West Bank grew by 50 per cent. East Jerusalem has been enclosed by four big blocs of settlements, with every government since Oslo able to claim a rampart in the wall.

Yassir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, more anxious to assume the trappings of statehood than learn statecraft, was powerless to stop it and kept the option of “armed resistance” dangerously in play. His failure to end the occupation led to the rise of Hamas and the dream of Palestine dissolving into rival militias fighting for control of Gaza.

Yet Israel’s excuse that it has no interlocutor is unconvincing. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, was undermined from the first by Israeli assassinations and land annexations. Those who believe this is merely a response to terrorism need to explain why the land being annexed is identical to a map first drawn up by Mr Sharon in 1982.

The Bush administration, instead of backing Mr Abbas’s push for negotiations, in 2004 gave Israel a green light eventually to annex the settlements around Jerusalem. That is an abdication of responsibility and betrayal of clear majorities of Israelis and Palestinians who want a negotiated peace. Weakened leaders on both sides will never deliver that without US-led international pressure. This is not some regional dispute that can be left to fester: not without alienating Arabs and Muslims, and not without compromising the security of the US and its allies, foremost among them the Israelis.