HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19437-2001Dec23.html A Peaceful Intervention The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will never be resolved without a U.S. blueprint. By Zbigniew Brzezinski Monday, December 24, 2001; Page A17 As the Bush administration huddles to review its Middle East policy, it needs to confront four stark realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: . Left to themselves, the Israelis and the Palestinians can only make war, not peace. Neither side is able to take the ultimate steps necessary for a grand, but also painful, historic reconciliation. . International support for Israel has never been lower. Israel, which has enjoyed the moral upper hand throughout the half-century conflict, is compromising itself today in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of mankind by its repressive occupation and its indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians -- including numerous children -- thereby obscuring the merited global condemnation of the Palestinian terror tactics directed at the Israeli public. . Paradoxically, by now the broad outlines of the only viable formula for a settlement have been sketched out -- in part through earlier, inconclusive negotiations and in part by U.N. resolutions -- though without a systematic and politically appealing clarity capable of offering both the Israelis and the Palestinians a meaningful alternative to conflict. . The United States, by pleading for peace while avoiding its more precise definition, is unintentionally perpetuating the conflict. In that ambiguous setting, the stronger side can continue to insist on conditions that would make the weaker into a permanent vassal, and the weaker can persist in demands that would ultimately destroy the stronger. In the meantime, the mutual killings risk destroying what little is left of the peace process initiated more than a decade ago -- a process that at one point was even crowned by the joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. Arafat is now vilified by the Israeli side as the local version of Osama bin Laden, while Ariel Sharon is viewed by the Palestinians as the personification of a war criminal. Each side ascribes the worst possible motives to the other. In these violent circumstances, the growing risk is that Arafat may be driven out by Israeli pressure or assassinated by a radical Palestinian (perhaps with some extraneous inspiration), or that the West Bank will degenerate into anarchy. Sharon may calculate that through a re-occupation he then can impose a more pliant Palestinian leadership on the cowed and crushed Palestinians, but more likely is the emergence of an Algeria-type urban guerrilla warfare against Israel. Especially ominous is the prospect that in the absence of peace, the 1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel increasingly will identify with their 3.3 million brethren in the West Bank and Gaza against the 4.8 million Jewish Israelis. Given the ominous prospects for the region, for America's interests in it and ultimately for Israel itself, a proposed peace blueprint from the United States could not be more timely. A U.S. plan would certainly be endorsed by the European Union and also by Russia. It would enjoy the support of the United Nations as well as of prominent religious leaders. It would focus the attention of the Israeli and Palestinian publics on something other than their fears and hatreds. Even if initially rejected both by the respective leaderships and their publics, it would, in time, force the peoples directly concerned to ask whether its eventual acceptance and implementation is not a better alternative to endless strife. There is a remarkable degree of international consensus as to what a truly fair peace would entail. Its various components are contained in the transcripts of the aborted Taba negotiations of January 2001 and the Ehud Barak proposals of September 2000, in the speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell in October of this year and in resolutions 242 and 338 of the U.N. Security Council. These need to be put together for public consumption in a systematized fashion, amplified by specific proposals for the resolution of still contentious issues. There can be only one outcome if there is to be genuine peace: the coexistence of the state of Israel with the state of Palestine, in a setting in which the former is secure and the latter is viable. The former means not only Palestine's unambiguous acceptance of Israel's right to exist but also special security arrangements beyond Israel's final frontiers, which (in keeping with the U.N. resolutions and the Powell speech as well as Barak's proposals) would in the main correspond to the 1967 lines. These arrangements also should involve a prolonged U.S. security role as well as the formal demilitarization of the Palestinian state. The latter means that on the West Bank, the Palestinian state should be a contiguous one, not sliced by Israeli security roads to inland armed settlements. Most of these settlements would have to be terminated, except for those in the immediate proximity of Jerusalem, which would become part of Israel's share of the city. As envisaged in the aborted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Jerusalem would serve as the capital of both states, with sovereignty carefully segmented and delineated for the most holy shrines. Only a very few Palestinian refugees would be symbolically granted the right of return to their homes within Israel, with the rest resettled in Palestine or in adjoining Arab states. A blueprint for accommodation would have to address in much more detail all the above issues as well as many more, such as the sharing of water rights. The key point to bear in mind is that at this stage, and at any foreseeable point in the future, the parties to the conflict cannot and will not settle on their own. The only option is thus to place on the table an architecturally complete vision of peace, in the hope that common sense -- perhaps induced by the painful consequences of its absence -- eventually will prevail. In effect, this would not be an attempt to impose peace but a case of a peace gradually imposing itself. The writer was a participant, as national security adviser to President Carter, in the Camp David agreement of 1979. ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
