Friday, December 6, 1996
by ABBA EBAN
(a former foreign minister of Israel)

There is nothing new in Henry Kissinger's conviction that Palestinian statehood became inevitable from the moment that Menachem Begin accepted the Camp David accords.

Before writing the above article Kissinger said in an interview to The Economist way back in 1985 that, "paradoxically, the Begin government, against its preferences and ideology, was really proposing what all other nations were certain to treat as an embryo state."

Many young Israelis have been brought up to believe that a Palestinian state side by side with Israel is an audacious leap into an uncharted future.

It is nothing of the kind.

It is quintessential Zionism with deep roots in the soil from which Israel sprang into life nearly 50 years ago. It takes us back in recollection to the most revolutionary transition that has ever been celebrated by any nation.

At the beginning of 1947 our nation was at the lowest ebb of its fortune. The horror of the Holocaust had become visually revealed. There was no readiness of the victors in World War II to regard the Palestinian Jews as a political entity with an inherent right to independence.

The promised homeland was assailed by Arab violence and international alienation. The gates were shut against Jewish entry. There was danger and solitude wherever we looked.

Two years later our flag was aloft in its own name and pride, the Jewish state was established with international recognition, the gates were open, hundreds of thousands of our kinsmen were rushing in, Israel was an acknowledged member of the emerging world community and the war of survival had been won.

No national society had ever passed from such anguish to such salvation in so brief a time.

The driving force for this transition came from the cooperation of the US and the Soviet Union in the UN judgment for the partition of Mandatory Palestine between an Arab state and a Jewish state side by side with economic union.

It is fantastic to recall that in that startling transition an integrative relationship between Israelis and Palestinians was already envisioned as part of a new regional order.

IN AN effort to avoid the inevitable Israel's prime minister has suggested that the Palestinian entity be equivalent in status to Puerto Rico and Andorra.

Someone in the Prime Minister's Office is not doing his homework; Andorra is a sovereign member of the UN, and the inhabitants of Puerto Rico are US citizens.

If Binyamin Netanyahu is prepared to grant Israeli citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza and to have their community become a UN member it is hard to understand why he should object to granting them full statehood.

In any case, we should not exaggerate the capacity of Israel to determine the structure, identity and status of the neighboring community.

Israelis did not consult the previous colonial rulers on the question of its own statehood, nor did the American colonists ask George III for permission.

Kissinger has estimated that international acceptance, which is the customary criterion for the recognition of states, would be unanimously supportive of the admission of a Palestine state to the major international agencies.

When I presented my ambassadorial letters of credence to President Truman in September 1950 he said: "Your people gained its state because your leaders suggested what was practicable and your opponents did not."

By "your leaders" he meant Chaim Weizmann (he had never met anyone else) and by "practical proposals" he meant Jewish and Arab states side by side.

In successfully advocating Israel's membership in all the international agencies, I said that "at every stage of Israel's relations with the Arab world we have felt equality of status to be the essential condition of partnership."

Chickens have an irritating habit of coming home to roost.

If Israel's founders had wasted their own time and their audience's patience in bizarre allusions to Puerto Rico and Andorra no one would have taken them even half-seriously.

It is right that the Palestinians should have to pay a painful territorial price for their protracted reliance on radicalism and violence, but the structural logic of two sovereignties side by side with one of them - Israel - vastly preponderant in size and power has a viability that clearly dominates world opinion and is making progress with Israeli opinion as well.

Perhaps Kissinger is right again when he declares: "The longer this reality is evaded the less it can be used to enhance Israel's security. It is a card which needs to be played sooner rather than later."

The most intelligent thing to do with inevitability is to stop avoiding it.