Misjudgments and misconceptions to secure Mideast peace

[Nannette]

Misjudgments and misconceptions in overview of decades of efforts to secure Mideast peace

By Zalman Shoval

Sir, It is quite amazing how many misconceptions can be packed into one editorial ("The real price of Middle East peace", November 17). Here is a short list of the more glaring, hopefully, inadvertent mistakes.

First, "land for peace" never intended that Israel, after being the victim of aggression in 1967, should return to the vulnerable former armistice lines; on the contrary, Security Council Resolution 242 expressly stated that Israel would not be required to withdraw from all "the territories occupied in the recent conflict" and that any withdrawals would be to "secure boundaries". As Lord Caradon stated at the time: "It was not for us to lay down exactly where the border should be. I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border." Israel being anywhere in the territories, at least until a permanent agreement will be negotiated, is certainly not "illegal".

Second, there is no such formula as "democracy for peace", and George W. Bush and Tony Blair did not say there was. What they did imply, and what should, after all, be a basic truism, is that as long as the Palestinians will not rid themselves of the vestiges of "Arafatism", stop terror, violence and incitement, create a democratic environment, they should not expect the US, Britain and the rest of the free world, including Israel, to help them in attaining statehood.

Third, how could the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000 not be assigned to Yassir Arafat when it was he who rejected the Israeli-American offer of 97 per cent of the territories with most of east Jerusalem into the bargain, refusing to commit himself to an "end of conflict" - instead unleashing a long-planned terror offensive which, now in its fifth year, has felled thousands of victims on both sides?

Lastly, historians on all sides will probably debate until the end of time what a "fair sharing of the Holy Land" means; by virtue of history, morality and legality, the Jewish people would have had every right to claim all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. The late Moshe Dayan once said that "for Israel not to be the sovereign in Jerusalem one would have to rewrite the Bible". On the other hand, those who support the Palestinian case - especially the more extreme among them, certainly Islamic fundamentalists - would deny the Jewish people any right to its historic homeland. (A Hizbollah spokesman recently referred to the town of Nahariya in northern Israel as "the settlement of Nahariya in occupied Palestine".) But while all Israeli prime ministers, right and left, and the mainstream Zionist movement before the establishment of the state, always supported compromise of some sort, either functional or territorial, for the sake of peace and reaching an understanding, the Arabs did not. Still, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has now decided to break this more than 60-year-old impasse (since the Arab leadership rejected the first partition proposal) by going ahead unilaterally with a de facto sharing of the land, in spite of the ongoing terror. This was not an easy decision to make, and he should be praised for that, not censured.

Zalman Shoval, Tel Aviv 62504, Israel (Former Israeli Ambassador to the US)

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/205828a0-3cf7-11d9-bb7b-00000e2511c8.html
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He who is merciful with the cruel, will end-up being cruel to the merciful
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