Another Israel/Palestine ‘peace plan’ has been added to the long
list of diplomatic dances that have come and gone in recent years, and
this time it is a reheated version of the Arab Peace Initiative of
2002. At an Arab League summit in Riyadh in March, the organisation’s
members unanimously offered Israel peaceful, normalised relations,
should the land occupied since 1967 be returned.
Yet
despite all the fanfare, and self-congratulatory talk of an “historic
moment”, this proposal shares the same flaw as those that have come
before – it is being offered on behalf of those at the root of the
conflict, the Palestinians. The Palestinians, who, from the refugees
exiled since 1948 to those living in the Occupied Territories, are
still not ‘permitted’ to speak for themselves.
The will of
the indigenous population of Palestine has been overlooked from the
very beginning of the conflict, when external powers collaborated with
Zionist efforts to create a Jewish-majority state against the desires
of the majority Palestinian Arab inhabitants. Israel often cites the
United Nations resolution that authorised the creation of a Jewish
state, but even this ‘legal’ process was carried out over the heads of
the colonised.
Ever since then, Palestinian resistance to
colonisation and occupation has been deliberately subsumed into the
generic ‘Arab-Israeli’ conflict, reduced to one component of a regional
question. That Arab states are presumed to speak for the Palestinians
appeals on two main levels. Firstly, it chimes with a racialised
Western discourse that sees the conflict through the prism of ‘little
Israel’ against all ‘the Arabs’ (or more commonly since 9/11, the
‘Muslims’), an interpretation that owes much to the influence of the
Israeli narrative.
Zionist propaganda will often seek to erase the Palestinians entirely from the conflict’s history, preferring a battle against shapeless ‘Arabs’, for clear ideological reasons. If there are no ‘Palestinians’, but simply Arabs, then why indeed can’t the ‘Jews’ have this tiny sliver of territory to themselves? So the line goes, the so-called Palestinians can simply move elsewhere and live with their Arab brethren.
Secondly, a peace plan minus the Palestinians also appeals to the arrogance of the Arab dictators and autocratic monarchs who for the sake of their own positions of privilege and power have never permitted the Palestinian voice to speak unfiltered. At best, these leaders have given charitable donations; normally, their empty rhetoric has echoed as a desperate sop to citizenry they know are committed to Palestinian resistance.
There
are other external players with vested interests in this particular
moment in time. The USA, desperately seeking to undo regional setbacks,
senses an (albeit small) boost to their Middle East strategy if the
non-existent ‘peace process’ maintains at least a semblance of life.
The Saudi state, meanwhile, along with other US-funded kleptocrats such
as Mubarak and King Abdullah, are worried about their increasingly
restive domestic opposition, as well as the regional influence of Iran
and recently victorious Hezbollah.
In the majority of
mainstream media coverage of this recent ‘Arab peace plan’, the
sticking point has been taken to be the right of return of the
Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948. Even so, this is often spun as a
further example of apparent 'Arab intransigence' and a stubborn refusal
to relinquish past grievances. The connection is never made between the
expulsions of the past, and the continuing, present day Israeli state,
whose Zionist infrastructure privileges Jews over indigenous
Palestinians.
Just as in 1948, high profile 'peace plans' continue to marginalise the very people whose dispossession was, and crucially still is, the core of the conflict. It was not Egyptians, or Syrians, or Saudis who had their orange groves stolen and villages emptied to make way for a Jewish state. Libyans and Kuwaitis have not lived under Israeli military occupation for 40 years. It is only the Palestinian people who can ‘offer’ peace to Israel, because it is their country that has been colonised and occupied; an offer, moreover, that will be made just as soon as, and not before, justice is forthcoming.