ATALLAH: Responses to questions about Palestinians and their approach to peace December 26, 2009

We recently asked Amjad Atallah, Co-Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and longtime friend of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace,  for frank responses to some persistent questions about Palestinians and their approach to peace.
- Aliza Becker, Interim Executive Director, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom*
23 December 2009

1. Why do Arabs and Palestinians reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State?

Palestinians and Arabs are prepared to accept a Jewish right of self-determination in Israel. What they can’t accept is that the Jewish right to self-determination abrogates or supersedes the Palestinian right to self-determination. So how do two rights to self-determination co-exist? That has been asked in Bosnia, in South Africa, in Rwanda, and other places.

The easiest answer in Palestine/Israel is partition into two states. However, Palestinians are afraid that “right to exist as a Jewish state” is actually code for disenfranchising the 20% of the Israeli population that is Palestinian Arab.

Palestinians are afraid that many Israeli politicians ultimately want to remove, “transfer,” or further restrict the rights of the Palestinians who live in Israel who already have Israeli citizenship.  The debate in Israel currently taking place as to whether Israel should be a “state for all its citizens” with a Jewish majority or a “Jewish state” impacts Palestinian thinking. One real concern is that Palestinians will be dragged into the discussion of “who is a Jew” that periodically flares up in the Knesset. If Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state, are they accepting the dominance of Talmudic law in Israel? If the Knesset passes a law claiming that Reform and Conservative Jews are not really Jews, should the Palestinians be expected to endorse it?

So the common answer of many Palestinians is that it is up to all the citizens of Israel to determine the nature of their state, just as it is up to all the citizens of Palestine to determine the nature of their state. Best to leave questions of Israel’s nature to Israel’s citizens.

2. Isn’t the ultimate goal of Palestinians to destroy the state of Israel one piece at a time?

There will probably always be people from the generation that remember the expulsions of 1947-49 who won’t be able to ultimately be happy with the reality of Israel.  But the truth is that for the majority, this is not the case. Arabs have lived with Jews since before the time of the Prophet Mohammed. The Caliph Omar was the one who opened Jerusalem to Jews again after conquering the city from the Byzantines. Arabs and Jews flourished in Andalusian Spain. Muslim jurisprudence was heavily influenced by Jewish jurisprudence (as even a cursory look at the two communities’ respective religious laws show). When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, Muslims and Jews fought and died together on the same side. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain, Muslims and Jews faced ethnic cleansing or forced conversion together. Most Andalusian Jews fled to Muslim areas. In World War II, Arabs in Morocco and Algeria fought the French Vichy government and tried to protect the Jewish community from expulsion to concentration camps in Europe. Everything I’ve mentioned here is very well documented.

The current nature of the Israeli-Arab antipathy is actually an aberration from a long history of cooperation, co-existence, and in some cases common struggle against an external enemy. A just resolution of this current conflict and the ensuing peace will allow that aberration to be put aside and for the two communities to return to a more cooperative relationship.

3. Is anti-Semitism intrinsic to Islam and Arab culture?

No, anti-Semitism is a distinctly European-Christian phenomenon. Even much of the anti-Semitism currently found in the Arab world is a derivative of European anti-Semitism, such as reliance on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Bernard Lewis, no friend to the Arabs, but a great historian when not writing about contemporary affairs, notes that before there was a Judeo-Christian civilization there was a Judeo-Islamic civilization. Anti-Semitism may or may not be intrinsic to European culture, but that is where it started.  That colonial legacy still resonates with some Arabs just as anti-Arab racism that also began in Europe with early Zionism’s adoption of European nationalist constructs, still resonates with some Israelis.

Racism and bigotry are inherent to different degrees in the very idea of nationalism as well as in many interpretations of religion.  However, political and economic circumstances often dictate the fertility of the environment for this form of discrimination.  Once the occupation ends and normalcy begins between Israelis and Palestinians, it will be possible (and necessary) to directly address both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice head-on.

4. Why do Palestinians and Arabs incite against Jews? What is the truth about Palestinian textbooks?

Actually, this is a canard. It is simply not true anymore. Palestinians and Arabs do decry Israeli injustices, and this is what is today viewed by the Israeli government as “incitement.”  Palestinians, like Israelis, should not be expected to remain silent to attacks on their civilians or other non-combatants, or in the case of Palestinians, to policies of collective punishment imposed on civilians in the hopes of affecting the political calculations of their leaders.

As for Palestinian textbooks, those in the West Bank used to be Jordanian textbooks and those in Gaza were from Egypt, so any inaccuracies in them were actually in the textbooks of the two Arab countries that have made peace with Israel. In the last ten years, the UN has been helping the Palestinians make their own textbooks one grade year at a time and to ensure that in maintaining the Palestinian narrative, they do not include any racist conclusions. This practice should be adopted at least by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt as well.

5. How can there possibly be two states when the Palestinians insist on the right of return?

There are two possible arguments. The current Palestinian government argues that it wants an acknowledgement that Palestinians once lived in Israel and were driven out or fled. They argue in private that if reparations and compensation are paid to the refugees, the Palestinian state can take them. Others have argued that there also needs to be a real implementation of a return of at least some of the refugees to Israel. One way to ensure Israel’s political nature is to provide those refugees with permanent residency but not citizenship in Israel. They would possess Palestinian citizenship but be allowed to move back to the areas they once lived in. Under such circumstances, Palestinians might reciprocate and invite settlers to continue living in Palestine and maintain their Israeli citizenship. They could develop a relationship like France and Germany where citizens keep their mother nation’s citizenship but live and work in either country.

If neither of the above scenarios are implemented, there is a real risk that the Palestinian refugee population, which forms roughly half the Palestinian population, would continue to agitate for a solution (more unacceptable to Israelis) even after an agreement, thus further promoting instability.

6.  How can you make peace when there is no Palestinian partner?

Again, the question can be asked in reverse.  Israelis argue that their political system is so heavily weighted to vetoes by small fringe parties that it is impossible for Israel to actually make any decisions necessary for peace, such as withdrawing settlers, sharing Jerusalem, or accepting some responsibility for the expulsions of 1947-1949.  The question for Americans is doubly complex:  how do we make peace between two parties with dysfunctional political systems heavily weighted against making the hard decisions necessary for a comprehensive peace agreement?

The answer to this means that the United States has to compensate for the inadequacies in both political systems or else choose to be slave to those inadequacies.

The martyred Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin had to make this choice.  He realized it was in Israel’s interest to end its occupation — and he knew that Israel had just spent thirty years trying to destroy and demonize the Palestinian national movement — in many cases making exactly the same argument that “there was no partner for peace.”  However, by negotiating in good faith with the very same leaders of the movement he had spent much of his political career trying to destroy, he created the partner he needed.

7.  How can there be a Palestinian state when Hamas rules the Gaza Strip and Fatah the West Bank?

The ending of the occupation and the creation of an effective and unified Palestinian government need to both take place but the first is not contingent on the second.  The occupation itself created the dynamics by which Hamas was first created and thrived, and US and Israeli policies helped ensure the subsequent political division of Palestinian Occupied Territory. It thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The answer to this requires, in a variation of Yitzhak Rabin’s axiom, for the parties to work to end the occupation as if Palestinian unity exists, and work to promote Palestinian unity as if the occupation has already ended.

8.  How can Israel be secure if it cedes land to the Palestinians given what happened in Gaza?

Israeli security is a legitimate concern but it is often conflated with illegitimate concerns thus making the problem irresolvable.  Israel has a legitimate right to ensure that Israelis not living on occupied Palestinian territory are secure but that is not why Israel builds kindergartens, schools, movie theaters, and swimming pools on Palestinian territory in the West Bank.  In fact, the action of pushing so many Israelis and their children to live on Palestinian and Syrian territory is evidence of just how secure Israelis really feel.

Gaza is actually a case in point on the necessity of a peace agreement for real security.  When Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, then Israeli leader Ariel Sharon made a point of telling Palestinians and Israelis that he was breaking once and for all Palestinian aspirations for a state.  He made it clear that by leaving the Gaza Strip, which constitutes less than 5% of Palestinian territory, he was making sure that Israel would never have to leave “Judea and Samaria.”  To drive the point home, he rejected desperate pleas by President Abbas to negotiate the withdrawal as part of a peace plan.

Gazans are as much Palestinian nationalists as any other Palestinian — so the idea that they should stop caring for Palestinians living in the other 95% was as unrealistic as expecting Israelis in Tel Aviv to stop caring about Israelis in Sderot, or Ashdod.

Furthermore, Israel did not “end the occupation” even though it withdrew settlers and the soldiers who were protecting them.  Israel maintains control over all the border crossings, the sea, and airspace.  Once Hamas won the democratic elections in 2006, Israel also ensured that it and Egypt enforced a strict blockade on Gaza, plunging an already poor population to the edge of starvation.  The results were predictable.

The one axiom to remember is that as long as only one side in a conflict has security, that security will always be temporary.  This is true across the world, and Israel/Palestine is no exception.

9.  Why are Palestinians against having Jews live in a Palestinian state?

They are not.  Palestinian negotiators in the past, as well as current leaders in the PLO, Fatah, and other third secular parties have all gone on record as saying they would support Jews living in the Palestinian state, either as citizens of Palestine or potentially as permanent residents.  However, Palestinians do not accept exclusivist ethnic townships in their state, especially armed enclaves.  The Palestinian negotiating position does not demand an exclusivist Arab population for the state of Palestine.  Incidentally, Palestinians consider Kurdish, Armenian, Balkan and other non-Arab Palestinians to be fully Palestinian despite their diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.  In fact, the removal of Jews from Palestinian territory has always been an Israeli negotiating position — the Israeli government wants to remove all settlers from any area that would be under Palestinian sovereignty.

10.  Do the Palestinian people support two states or one bi-national state?

Both.  The majority of Palestinians polled in the Occupied Territory consistently show support for a two-state solution, and this is probably a result of it being considered the most pragmatic and achievable solution as it overlaps so much with Israeli national security interests.  However, there are few Palestinians ideologically opposed to living in a bi-national state and a distinct minority actually prefers it.  What matters most to Palestinians is freedom and a normal life through realizing their national aspirations. Either a dignified two-state option or a dignified bi-national option could theoretically achieve that outcome.  So at least one question that friends of Israel might ask themselves with greater urgency is what they expect Palestinians to endorse if they ever come to the conclusion that the United States will not or cannot induce Israel to end the occupation (having already assumed that Israel will not end the occupation on its own).

Mr. Atallah is also a Senior Affiliated Expert with the Public International Law and Policy Group. Prior to working at the New America Foundation, Mr. Atallah headed Strategic Assessments Initiative, a not-for-profit organization committed to providing legal and policy assistance to parties involved in negotiations in conflict and post-conflict situations. Mr. Atallah’s efforts included running the international policy and advocacy efforts of the Save Darfur Coalition, advising the Kosovar constitutional process, and preparing scenario planning exercises for the Palestinians and Israelis. Prior to that, Mr. Atallah advised the Palestinian negotiating team in peace negotiations with Israel on the issues of international borders, security, and constitutional issues. He was also responsible for liaising with U.S. government officials in Washington, D.C. on these issues. Mr. Atallah received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and received his J.D. from American University’s Washington College of Law.

*Disclaimer: Amjad Atallah’s views expressed below are entirely his own and don’t necessarily reflect Brit Tzedek v’Shalom’s views.