Written by Henry Hill | 29 September 2011
Posted in Comment - Middle East

Photography: Palestine's seat at the UN, real.tingley

“…how could anyone pretend to support the Arab Spring if they do not stand behind the Palestinian right to statehood?”

Sabine Saade, TSJ, 22 Sept.

With relative ease, really. The right to individual liberty from a tyrannical regime and the collective right to a state are quite distinct, after all. But that isn’t really the point.

Nearly everybody, me included, is pragmatically in favour of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Integrating Palestine would severely jeopardise Israel’s position as a Jewish state, so it won’t happen.

However, I have two objections to Sabine’s above-linked article. The first is to the idea that trying to impose a settlement from outside is a good idea. Israel’s objections, whilst perhaps ‘cunning’, are essentially correct: any sense that the outside world is ganging up on them will throw a great many Israeli’s into siege mode, and make compromise far less likely.

If Israel thinks the world is against it that will strengthen the hand of the hardliners and settlers – and unless the UN is willing to prize Israel out of the West Bank through force (and it isn’t) that will greatly worsen the situation.

Moreover it is worth remembering that it was the Palestinians and anti-Israeli Arab states that have consistently rejected a partitionist solution to the conflict. There’s little to suggest that the recognition of a Palestinian state will lessen the determination of those hardliners in Muslim states – most notably Iran – to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. The fact that peace has not yet been reached is not, put kindly, entirely Israel’s fault.

There’s a reason that peace has to be negotiated. Both the Palestinian and Israeli governments sign up to the fact that the issue of settlers and borders need to be resolved for peaceful coexistence to occur. If a Palestinian state is suddenly recognised, the ante is pointlessly ramped up. The settlers will technically be in a foreign country, and the Israeli troops policing them in violation of Palestinian sovereignty. Instead of a gradual, negotiated settlement where inner settlements are abandoned in exchange for border settlements being ceded to Israel, the settlers will dig in and their sympathisers in the Knesset will be strengthened.

No Israeli government could ever unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank – but would Palestine be content for Israeli troops to stay while negotiations continued, given her new status as a widely recognised sovereign state? Pre-emptive recognition is the key to a further deterioration of relations, not their improvement.

My second objection to the article is the idea that Palestine represents some kind of magic key to the solution of all the West’s major foreign policy problems. Specifically, the rather fundamental assumption that the genesis of Al Qaeda and the entire reactionary Islamist movement can be traced back to decisions made in the Mandate of Palestine, and the equally sweeping and unsubstantiated claim that the solution to the problem lies there too.

There are all kinds of theories about where Islamism came from and what it represents. But one thing seems clear is that Al Qaeda is not just a middle-eastern copy of the anti-colonial movements that occurred in Africa. It represents a rolling cult of religious puritanism that has murdered, mutilated and oppressed many more progressive Arabs than it has imperialist westerners. The Islamist vision of a pan-Muslim Caliphate is the very opposite of anti-imperialist, as Bin Laden’s objections to the Australian intervention to remove Catholic East Timor from largely Muslim Indonesia make clear.

If the ‘West’ did recognise Palestine, why on earth would that satiate what Sabine calls “a threat that has been haunting it for 10 years”? Fundamentalist religion is not a territorial doctrine. Our society would still be liberal and ‘decadent’, our women still sexual and free. All of the things that disgusted the 9/11 bombers – whose diaries make no mention of global capitalism or any of the other fashionable causes so often pinned to them – would still exist.

It is nice to think that a grand gesture can solve so many ills, but this one won’t. I can’t address Sabine’s accusations of hypocrisy because I don’t know what hypocrisy she refers to, but external recognition won’t aid any of the other problems listed.

It will not persuade the settlers and hard-line Zionists to accept a negotiated settlement because it won’t be a settlement. It will not lead to an improvement in Israeli/Palestinian relations or create a climate for more productive negotiations. It will enflame tensions, rather than lessening them.

It will not make those in the Muslim world who object to Israel on an ideological level any less determined to eradicate it. By the same token, those with a murderous hatred of whatever they perceive to be ‘Western Civilisation’ will not be sated by a compromise solution in the Levant.

Instead, Palestine must continue the long and often difficult path to a negotiated peace with Israel. Neither party can reasonably claim to be more sinned against than sinning, and each will have to make compromises. But it is that path, and those compromises, that will be the key to any permanent solution. As United States liberals have found out via their repeated recourse to the Supreme Court, invoking an outside authority without winning people round doesn’t solve any problems.

The solutions to Palestine’s problems cannot be found in the West, any more than the solutions to the West’s problems could all be found in Palestine.

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