THE ARAB SHELL GAME
What they say is not what they want. And its high time the rest of the world WOKE UP!
Unserious summit
At the Arab summit in Riyadh on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reportedly said, "The Arab peace initiative is one of the pillars for the peace process... This initiative sends a signal that the Arabs are serious about achieving peace."
Well, not exactly. Not yet.
The Arab states seem serious about looking like they are serious about achieving peace.
If the Arab states were serious about achieving peace, they would not be putting forward an ultimatum, complete with threats of war if it is not accepted, to which no Israeli government could possibly agree. Indeed, this would seem to be the objective of the summit: an Israeli rejection that would enable the Arab states to once again say that it is Israel that is the obstacle to peace.
Israel should not fall into this trap. The government should say that it is obvious that peace cannot be achieved by ultimatums, but only by negotiation, and that Israel remains committed to negotiating over all the final-status issues - such as refugees, borders and Jerusalem - and is ready to meet at any time in Jerusalem or any Arab capital.
The problem is that the Arab side continues to insist on coming to the table with a demand that clearly negates the objective of the entire exercise: two states living side-by-side in peace.
It is assumed that Israel would not even demand that Israelis living in what would become a Palestinian state be allowed to stay, let alone that Jews or Israelis would have a right to move to Palestine. Yet Palestinians, and the Arab states in their revived plan, not alone assume that a million Arabs who are already full citizens of Israel would stay, but that millions of Palestinians would have a right to move to Israel.
Back before the 1993 Oslo Accords, it was obvious that so long as Israelis widely considered a Palestinian state to be an anathema, a two-state approach to peace would go nowhere. Now the consensus has flipped: it is about as politically unacceptable for an Israeli leader to categorically reject a Palestinian state as it was to accept one just a decade and a half ago.
For a two-state plan to be viable, the parallel evolution that needed to happen on the Palestinian side was to abandon the notion of "return" to Israel, rather than to a Palestinian state. Yet suggesting this remains as near-universally taboo in the Arab world as it did in 1993.
FULL ARTICLE AT JPOST
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