Along the latest fork prong in the “roadmap to peace,” the Palestinian side has declared that, while it is true Yasser Arafat “recognized” the “state of Israel” as part of the “Oslo accords” in September 1993, neither he then, nor they today, recognize it as a “Jewish state.”
The reader will recall that Arafat’s recognition of Israel was the precondition for the PLO leadership to enter the West Bank and Gaza, and begin negotiating for a Palestinian state. No Oslo, and Arafat would never have been in a position to blacken Israel’s eye with repeated Intifadas.
According to Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator to the impending round of “roadmap” discussions in Annapolis, Maryland: “No state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity.”
This statement is untrue of the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Mauretania, and so forth. It is untrue of the Palestinian Authority, whose constitution recognizes Islam as present religion, and future state religion, with the Shariah as the ultimate basis of that state’s laws. It is also untrue of several countries in Europe with established churches.
The statement further contradicts mandates of the United Nations, and the League of Nations before it, for the establishment of an explicitly “Jewish state” in Israel’s present location.
I have yet to hear any outcry against Mr Erekat’s vicious, bare-faced lie, which carries with it a disavowal of the conditions upon which the Palestinian Authority he represents exists in international law, and thus any commitment whatever to the current “peace process.”
On the other hand, that Oslo agreement of 1993 must have some authority, for Condoleezza Rice—the American secretary of state for whom my patience continues to diminish—told the Israelis this week that they must not only freeze settlement activity in Judaea and Samaria, but begin actively preparing to withdraw all Israeli presence from the West Bank.
Let me parse that out. There are to be no Jews on the West Bank, just as there are now no Jews in Gaza (except on the days when the IDF is responding to one of innumerable Hamas missile attacks on Jewish civilian settlements in Israel proper). Jews are to remain entirely within the “green line.” But the Palestinian Fatah leadership, which is to inherit control over the entire West Bank (after losing it to Hamas in Gaza), do not recognize Israel as the world’s only Jewish state. Instead they recognize it as the 22nd Arab state, presently under illegal Jewish occupation.
That is the moderate position. For the more radical position, we refer to Hamas, whose constitution calls for the annihilation of the Jews.
I am not a Jew, incidentally, but a “Jew lover,” in the words of various strangers who have taken the liberty of telephoning me from time to time, from Canadian area codes. I would probably have opposed the foundation of Israel in 1948, had I been around to columniate in that era before I was born—and on the grounds that, given its prospective neighbours, a State of Israel would be hard to sustain.
Notwithstanding, Israel is there, by the fact of history. And it is also there, as the only reliably free, democratic, pro-Western state in a dark region where the most open societies (Jordan, Egypt) are arbitrarily ruled by moderate tyrants, and the worst are unspeakable. Where the best hope for the future, after Israel, is, quite frankly, presented by Iraq.
There are today more than five million Jews living in Israel, who have no citizenship anywhere else. The overwhelming majority were born there. This is what I mean by an historical fact.
There may well be as many Palestinians, in the West Bank and Gaza, and scattered through the region under subsidy from the United Nations, who claim the “right of return” to what is now Israeli territory, but who were not born there.
It should be remembered, constantly, that they descend from Palestinian ancestors who were only one half of a population exchange that happened in the 1940s. And that, an approximately equal number of Jews were uprooted from their homes throughout the Arab world—under pressure of both the state and the mob—many of whom found refuge in Israel.
The Palestinians are ill served, by the failure of Miss Rice and all other diplomatic authorities in the West, to remind them of the facts, plainly.
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