Jonas “Palestine 194”

George Jonas
National Post
13 August '11

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/08/13/george-jonas-palestinians-want-peace-just-not-with-israel/

The Palestinian Authority proposes to become the 194th member of the United Nations by a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state in September. Those who complain that such a declaration undermines the peace process with Israel don’t understand that that’s the declaration’s purpose.

If “Palestine 194” were designed to coexist with the Jewish state, it wouldn’t have to be declared unilaterally. Since it’s designed to replace it, it has no other choice. If the Palestinian state comes about as a result of negotiations, it legitimizes the Jewish state.

It isn’t that Palestinians don’t want peace. They want peace, all right; it’s only that they don’t want peace with Israel.

The Middle East conflict started in Europe over a hundred years ago when a Budapest-born playwright was covering the Paris trial of a French officer for a Viennese newspaper. Like the defendant, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Theodor Herzl was an assimilated Jew. After Dreyfus was innocently convicted of treason, it occurred to Herzl that assimilation wasn’t enough. To escape anti-Semitism, Jews needed to have a home of their own. Political Zionism debuted with Herzl’s pamphlet “The Jewish State” in 1895.

Many Arabs say that the Jews stole “the land.” They didn’t, but some Jews did have the idea of buying “the land” — not from the Arabs, who didn’t own it, but from the Turks, who did.

In those days most nations and territories belonged to the dynasties that ruled them. Palestine, the biblical homeland of the Jews, was a possession of the Ottoman dynasty, ruled by the sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II. In law and in fact, Palestine was Abdul Hamid’s land, along with a good chunk of the rest of the Middle East. Arabs and Jews living in Palestine were his subjects.

Herzl, a subject of the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, hoped to persuade the Hohenzollern emperor, Wilhelm II of Germany, to support an approach to the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, to let a consortium put together by the House of Rothschild make him an offer for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. Buying a country sounds impossible today, even somehow wrong, but it didn’t then, and Herzl lived then, not today. The German emperor saw Herzl during a visit to the Holy Land, and although he never dismounted from his horse while listening to the Jewish journalist’s petition before the gate of Jerusalem, he seemed sympathetic. The Sultan had financial woes. It was conceivable he might consider an offer for his arid possession.

Early Zionists took it for granted that Palestinian Arabs would welcome their plan. The Arabs were tenants, not owners of the land; surely they would prefer a progressive Jewish democracy to an inefficient and corrupt Ottoman overlord. In fact, by then Arabs were looking for mastery in what they viewed as their own homes, not a new and better landlord, but most early Zionist leaders never saw this. In Herzl’s 1902 novel about an Israeli utopia, Old New Land, the Zionists’ chief ally in realizing the Jewish dream is an Arab engineer, Reshid Bey.

As it turned out, the Sultan wouldn’t sell, which was just as well because no funds were raised sufficient for the purchase of a country by the Rothschilds or anyone else. Herzl soon died, and before long the Ottoman empire — the sick man of Europe, as it was called ­— also collapsed.

The victorious European powers, essentially the French and the British, split up the Sultan’s possessions, meaning to manage them for their own benefit as well as the benefit of their inhabitants, Arab and Jewish. For a mixture of reasons, not all selfish, but unwise all the same, the British turned their Palestinian mandate into the powder keg of the Twice Promised Land. When the dust settled, about 80% of the Balfour Declaration’s Jewish homeland had become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with the 1937 Peel Commission inviting the Palestinians and the Zionists to split the remaining 20% between them.

The Jews, though unhappy, said yes to Lord Peel. The Arabs said no. They said no again 10 years later when the United Nations voted for partition in 1947. Israel declared itself a state on May 15, 1948, and within about five hours the “rejectionist” Arab states attacked it. That is the war that continues to this day. It’s a conflict the Arab world can afford to lose over and over again. Israel’s first loss would be its last.

It follows that peace is the only way Israel can win, and peace is the only way the Arab side can lose. Under such circumstances, Israelis would be fools not to give land for peace, while Arabs would be fools to give peace for land. Neither side are fools.

Last year, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, named a promenade along the River Seine after David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, at 88 probably the only Israeli politician still active from Ben-Gurion’s generation, was among the dignitaries attending.

“For Ben-Gurion, the most realistic thing was the vision,” Peres said. “He used to say that a realistic person must believe in miracles.”

From an 1895 pamphlet to a 1948 statehood in 53 years was indeed miraculous for Israel. Creating a Palestinian state following a unilateral declaration wouldn’t require a miracle in the current ambiance of the UN, so by the logic of the Middle East, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t have to be a realistic person to believe in it.

It’s hard to say whether Abbas believes in the unilateral Palestinian state or not. Perhaps he just believes in retiring with a bang rather than a whimper. This would be quite realistic and I’d give it a 50-50 chance. The only thing that has no chance in the Middle East is peace.

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