Costigan Quist mentions that his plan for peace in the Middle East will be published as soon as he completes it. Well, let me save you the work, ‘Cost’, ‘cause it already exists.
Back in 1947, when much of the world was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War, the newly formed and far more prosaic United Nations devised a plan to deal with the thousands of immigrant Jews arriving in the British ‘mandate’ of Palestine. The idea was for a series of what could be called ‘cantons’ for Jews and Palestinians to live side by side – and hopefully together eventually. They would have had a shared currency and crucially, Jerusalem would have been a united and open ‘international’ city for everyone to live in.
The plan was well thought out but unfortunately it was used by the understandably highly politicised and well armed arriving Jews as a green light to create ‘facts on the ground’ and to develop a contiguous state by force of arms and terror. The devastation that is Palestine, the terrorism of the PLO, Hamas and Hizbullah, the opposition and religious extremism of Iran, the dictatorship and subsequent chaos in Iraq and pretty mcuh every disaster in the region since 1948 is a direct consequence of the declaration of an Israeli state and the failure to recognise the equal right of the people already living there – those inconvenient Palestinians.
The Prime Minister and that wretched, deceitful weasel who claims to represent ‘the West’ (ahem, ‘not in my name’), Tony Blair, can call for a ceasefire and a settlement until they are ‘red’ in the face but until the fundamental right of Palestinians to live in their own country is accepted by Israel – and of course the USA – there will be no peace. That isn’t going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, the plan exists, it is a good one and it remains the only real option. One day, be it next year or in 100 years’ time, it will be implemented. In the meantime, expect more schools to be bombed, more civilians to die, more ‘security raids’ to be carried out by Israel and more Palestinian and wider Arab terrorism aimed at the ‘West’ for its support of land grabs, settlements, apartheid and murder.
Doesn’t that make you feel warm inside?
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Much obliged - I shall move onto solving the AIDS crisis :-).
Right. So it's all the Jews fault, and the thing to do is revert to the 1947 settlement despite the fact that it is entirely unworkable now and has been superseded by countless UN resolutions that recognise Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Oh, and the fact that nobody wants it. Nobody! The international community wants pre-1967 borders. The more extreme Palestinians want no Israel at all. The rest of the Palestinians and the equally moderate Israelis want something vaguely resembling 1967 with some variations (vis-à-vis Jerusalem, for example). The extremist Israelis still harbour irredentist desires for the rest of Palestine.
If the people who drafted the 1947 agreement are still alive I'm confident that even they don't think it is the solution now.
But hey! I’m sure you can iron out those problems. Right?
Well, it would be a starting point which recognised the equal claim of both communities and which also put the status of Jerusalem firmly on the table, recognising that Israel does not have an exclusive claim to this.
I'm sure the problems you raise could be ironed out if both sides accepted the other's right to exist.
Well, the fact that a starting point that "recognised the equal claim of both communities and which also put the status of Jerusalem firmly on the table" is certainly necessary. But that is what was proposed in the Camp David accords and every peace initiative of the past 40 years. It does not require a return to the 1947 mandate.
The problem is that it totally ignores reality and tries to simply wipe out the last 60 years of history. It would be like responding to the emergence of the Troubles by proposing to reunify England and Ireland.
Israel has never existed within the 1947 proposed boarders and it is simply unrealistic to expect it to cede half of its territory (that is the territory that it held in 1948 at the point of its foundation) and which – crucially – were implicitly recognized by the United Nations when, On May 11, Israel was admitted as a full member.
To argue that the 1948-1969 borders should be re-drawn to reduce the size of Israel, or that the country should be wound up and merged into some new, cantonised Palestine, has the air of a diplomat at the Berlin Conference, drawing lines across a map of Africa and saying “We’ll give this bit to the Fuzzy Wuzzies, and the Belgians can have the Congo.”
Finally, there is the question of practicality. In 1948 there were 806,000 people living in Israel, and they could easily have fitted into the space allocated by the 1947 settlement. The current population of 7,282,000 are already pretty crammed in the space they have. Even if one could ignore the horrors of driving millions from their homes and trek them over borders (as we did so disastrously in the Indian sub-continent in 1948 – ironically!) it would be extremely unpleasant when they arrived. I think in the 1990s we used to call this sort of thing “Ethnic cleansing”.
A far more realistic proposal, though one that still seems far off, is the reversion to the 1967 borders with some adjustments. I suspect that sooner or later (lets face it, later) the Israelis are going to have to bite the bullet (no pun intended) and start dismantling settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians in turn are going to have to give up on the utterly-unfeasible “Right of return.” Jerusalem will be a tricky issue, but once the hunger for peace outweighs irredentism and pride it will be solved.
I believe it will happen in my lifetime, but not soon.
The reason for my enthusiasm for the 1947 plan is that it is in principle the 'birth certificate' for Israel and the principles it is based on should perhaps be looked at over again. The plan will surely not be implem,ented as it was originally drafted but it would be a starting point.
A return to pre-1967 borders is the necessary first step but no one on the Arab side is going to accept a 'few minor adjustments' because once you start to do this you re-open the can of worms.
Oh, and we have much to be responsible for over India and Pakistan but responsibility for the slaughter of partition lies with the squabbling Indian politicians - most notably Jinnah - who insisted on a two state solution.
"no one on the Arab side is going to accept a 'few minor adjustments' because once you start to do this you re-open the can of worms."
Actually, as long as Palestine has contiguous (Gaza strip aside), viable and the "minor adjustments" were equitable I think that they would - and will - be accepted (a solution for Jerusalem notwithstanding). My bet is that that is how it finally plays out.
But neither of us have a crystal ball so we'll just have to wait and see.
As for the India/Pakistan partition analogy, the issue of culpability is far less germane than the fact that a similar partition of Israel would lead to a similar human rights catastrophe. It will be hard enough (though ultimately necessary) to remove most of the Jewish settlers from the West Bank.
Tom,
"reunify England and Ireland"
Shurely shome mistake.
ReuniFY or reuniTE Ireland, perhaps, or maybe you mean reintegrate the whole of the British Isles into the UK.
Frankly, regarding Ireland, India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine I'm unconvinced of any solution which depends on segregation as the solution.
Post a Comment