Last week, the US-sponsored peace process in the Middle East came to a virtual halt. American Secretary of State John Kerry said it was ‘Reality Check Time’. The New York Times reported that Kerry would consult with President Barack Obama on whether to spend more time and effort to try and break the impasse between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Even if Obama were to agree, it would be an uphill battle, requiring unprecedented commitment and promising meagre results. In fact, this is precisely what characterised the Kerry initiative.
It included the unprecedented offer to consider freeing the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard who passed on highly classified military documents to Israel. Pollard is serving a life sentence, and although Israel has made representations to various American administrations to try to secure Pollard’s release, no American president agreed to entertain that request — until Obama.
Initially the Kerry plan seemed unrealistically ambitious in calling for a peace agreement by April 2014. When the gulf separating the parties became painfully clear, Kerry downgraded his ambitious goal from a full agreement to simply a framework for an agreement.
When even this more modest goal became difficult to achieve, Kerry directed his efforts at simply preventing the talks from collapsing. It became the undignified exercise of talking for the sake of talking. Such a meagre result for the extraordinary commitment was clearly unedifying. It was insulting. Even the modest goal of slowing down the pace of construction of illegal Israeli colonies in the Occupied Territories, could not be achieved.
This was not all. The specific event that precipitated the downward spiral was the refusal of Israel to honour its commitment to free a number of Palestinians being held in its jails. The Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas considered himself free from the commitment he had made not to seek Palestinian membership in various UN organisations, and proceeded to do just that.
The Israeli-Palestinian talks had reached an impasse. Kerry said that he must revaluate his priorities. He drew only one conclusion: that the parties were not ready to make peace.
At first sight this appears deceptively compelling. But on careful examination, Kerry’s conclusion is one of the more compelling conclusions. For instance, one possible conclusion is that the parties have different conceptions of peace. Given the gross inequality of the Israelis and the Palestinians, it would be surprising if the Israelis did not seek to exploit their superior power to impose their concept of peace.
Here peace is, more likely than not, defined negatively as: the absence of belligerency, the absence of protests, the absence of resistance. There is little doubt that if the Palestinians ceased all forms of resistance to the occupation, many in Israel would proclaimed that peace with the Palestinians had been achieved.
On the other hand, true peace requires some positive actions; for instance the will to foster reconciliation, to give justice for wrongs suffered and to build a common vision for the future.
The will to build a lasting peace also requires a sensitive appreciation of the human dignity of the defeated party. Ignore these fundamental principles and you achieve humiliation instead of reconciliation, build a sentiment of hatred and revanche instead of forging a common vision for the future. These are the elements of the harsh Versailles settlement after the First World War. This was the environment that made it possible for Hitler to emerge as a “healer” for wounded pride.
Consider the US-sponsored peace process. Did Washington ask itself why were there repeated failures? Consider what the Israeli negotiating positions are designed to achieve: The demand that the Palestinians must recognise Israel as the state for the Jewish people not only robs the Palestinians of their right of return, but it also gives Tel Aviv license to practise all sorts of discriminatory policies designed to maintain the Jewish character of the state.
The demand that Israeli troops be based in the Jordan Valley ostensibly seeks to achieve security. But it is obvious that this security is not the type derived from sharing a common vision for the future, but rather the type of so-called security based on domination and force. It is based on a fear of peace and absence of faith in peace.
The continued Jewish colony construction on Palestinian land is designed to achieve expansionism and separateness. It is also a symbol of the occupation, and its related dispossession, collective punishment and oppression.
Clearly, the parties to the Palestine conflict have vastly different conceptions of the kind of peace they want the American initiative to promote. And this has often condemned the initiative to failure.
Another aspect of the peace process that condemns it to failure has to do with its underlying frame of reference. And here again two conceptions collide: The reality of the balance of power between the parties — and the international consensus anchored in relevant UN resolutions and in the principles of international law. The former advances the Israeli conception of peace; the latter receives lip service from the peace process, but is largely ignored.
Further, the peace process suffers from a fatal flaw: Washington claims to be an honest broker, when in fact, it finances the occupation, and the colony project, provides unprecedented military and economic assistance, and regularly blocks any resolution condemning Israel and further isolating it in the international community.
Genuine peace requires a shared vision of the future founded on reconciliation and based on providing justice for wrongs suffered. The present peace process keeps failing because it uses the wrong frame of reference to advance contradictory conceptions of peace. Only Washington, the principle promoter of the process, can remedy its defects. But this requires exceptional political courage that, so far, has proven elusive.
Adel Safty is distinguished professor. His latest book: Might Over Right: How the Zionists Took Over Palestine is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, and published by Garnet, 2014.
