Haaretz
Iyar 29, 5765
It could be that there is some substance to the
argument that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is
plotting to eliminate the State of Israel by means of the right of return.
It is true, more or less, like the prediction that Syrian President Bashar
Assad is ripe for a peace agreement in return for the Golan Heights. The
weight of both of these suppositions is no less than the informed
assessments made with regard to the prime minister's plans for the Gaza
Strip, in the not-too-distant past when he was insisting that there is no
difference between Netzarim and Tel Aviv. Had you asked chief of staff
Ehud Barak or head of Military Intelligence Moshe Ya'alon in June, 1993,
whether Yitzhak Rabin would shake Yasser Arafat's hand - they would have
burst out laughing. Had the decision been up to chief of staff Motteh Gur,
we would be preparing to this day for the next war with Egypt.
Ya'alon is complaining that even after four years of fighting we
have not succeeded in convincing even Fatah, the Palestinian ruling party,
to recognize a Jewish state that will exist here for all eternity. This
statement, with slight amendments, can be put into the mouth of someone
from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. From his perspective, the fight by
senior ministers in the Likud against the disengagement and the referendum
among its registered party members are evidence that even after
four-and-a-half years of fighting, the ruling party in Israel does not
even recognize the right of the Palestinians to a mini-state in the Gaza
Strip.
What should the Palestinians understand from Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's confession to an Israeli newspaper to the effect that after
the disengagement, he has no intention of evacuating additional
territories? What would we say if a senior adviser to Abu Mazen were to
tell a Palestinian newspaper that the Palestinian Liberation Organization
will recognize a Jewish state after the Israelis become Finns? What
difference is there between Abu Mazen's vague and sometimes contradictory
statements concerning the solution to the refugee problem, and Sharon's
declarations about the perpetuity of the Israeli occupation of East
Jerusalem? Why should the right of return be less sacred to the
Palestinians than the Temple Mount is to the Jews? Not to mention that
while the Palestinians "are dreaming about the right of return to Israel,"
the Israelis are continuing to exercise unceasingly their "right of
return" to territories in the West Bank.
In the absence of other
means, the Israelis are determining their attitude toward the Palestinians
on the basis of terror attacks and statements by Palestinian personages.
The Palestinians are drawing conclusions from the expansion of the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and from the declarations of Israeli
personages. A serious assessment cannot cut the umbilical cord that links
the occupier to the occupied and discuss the intentions of one without
relating to the declarations of the other, never mind his deeds. In either
case, the positions are to a large extent derived from internal political
constraints. Abu Mazen is forced to pay the Hamas rebels, just as Sharon
is scattering promises to the Likud rebels.
Divestment from a
historical narrative, such as the right to Palestine, or the greater land
of Israel, and to sites that are sacred to Judaism, or to Islam, is an
agonizing concession like no other. Such an act is not done only in order
to find favor in the rival's eyes. Israel has never offered the
Palestinians real recompense for what Sharon calls painful concessions,
such as giving up villages and houses.
Aaron Miller, the deputy of
Dennis Ross, who was the head of U.S. president Bill Clinton's peace team,
has recently joined a group of participants in the 2000 Camp David summit
who are testifying that what happened there is not worthy of the name
"negotiations." According to Miller, Arafat is no more to blame than Barak
and Clinton.
Amos Malka, who headed Military Intelligence at that
time, testified that none of the papers written then by the experts, upon
which the chief of staff's assessments were based, determined that Fatah,
as Ya'alon would have it, sees the right of return as "a demand to be
realized." Intelligence sources on active duty are promising that today
too they have no assessment refuting the assumption that the right of
return is nothing but a Palestinian bargaining chip.
Until we
invite them to the negotiating table and everyone lays down their cards,
we shall not know whether we have missed out on peace, or whether we are
fated to be killed and to kill.