The Bridge on the River Wye

Emmanuel Navon

If today’s Middle East was the plot of a novel, the manuscript would be rejected by any serious publisher as corny. Which reader, in his right mind, would want to read a book where same story keeps being repeated chapter after chapter, where the protagonists never learn their lessons, and where you’re never sure if you are supposed to laugh or cry? Twelve years ago, Prime Minister Netanyahu flew to the United States in order to sign an interim agreement with Arafat under President Clinton’s aegis. The result was the Wye River Memorandum, which was supposed to generate a permanent status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by May 1999.

Twelve years later, the permanent status agreement is still on hold. The only tangible progress is that Arafat is dead and that the Clintons married their daughter.

In truth, certain things have changed during those twelve years. But chances of achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians are as null today as they were then.

On the Israeli side, Netanyahu has publicly endorsed the two-state solution, has agreed to a ten-month settlement freeze, and has removed many checkpoints. All these decisions would have been anathema twelve years ago for the Chairman of Likud. The leaders of Israel’s largest parties (Kadima, Likud, Israel Beitenu, and Labor) are more or less of the same opinion when it comes to the "permanent status agreement" with the Palestinians: some 90% of the West Bank would go to a demilitarized Palestinian state; Jerusalem’s eastern Arab neighborhoods would be included in the Palestinian state and sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be shared; the Palestinians, by abandoning their claim to resettle the 1948 refugees within Israel, would implicitly recognize Israel as the legitimate nation state of the Jews.

This Israeli consensus is as wide as it is irrelevant. The Palestinians reject it and they show no sign of maturation.

Like Arafat in July 2000, Mahmoud Abbas turned down, in September 2008, a peace offer based on the "Israeli consensus." Ehud Olmert’s offer actually went beyond that consensus: it consisted of a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank (with land swaps), on the entire Gaza Strip, of a safe passage between two entities, of a shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, and of the acceptation by Israel of a symbolical number of Palestinian refugees. Abbas insisted he would never give up on the "right of return."

The so-called "right of return" is a euphemism to turn Israel into a bi-national state. While the Palestinians keep saying that they will never abandon that claim, many Israeli leaders pooh-pooh them by saying that they don’t mean it. But the fact is that the Palestinian insistence on the "right of return" is what made them turn down Barack and Olmert’s offers in July 2000 and in September 2008 respectively. Why else do they refuse to recognize Israel’s Jewishness? (Saib Erekat said Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him" on that issue).

While Netanyahu’s Likud party has tacitly acquiesced to his endorsement of the two-state solution and to his government’s decision to stop all Jewish construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines for ten months, Abbas’ Fatah has made no similar ideological (or even tactical) moves. At its sixth general congress, held in Bethlehem in August 2009, Fatah reaffirmed its commitment to "armed struggle," and confirmed that "this struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated."

Abbas shows no sign of distancing himself from this rhetoric. He made a point, before flying to the US for the upcoming "peace talks," of attending the funerals of Amin Al-Hindi, one of the senior planners of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. This is a few months after Abbas attended a ceremony that named a square in the memory of Dalal Mughrabi, who massacred thirty-seven Israelis and one American in 1978. Then there is Abbas’ state controlled TV that keeps "teaching" Palestinian children that all of Palestine is occupied. "The Best Home," a children’s show currently broadcast three times a week during the month of Ramadan, describes Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, and Acre as "occupied cities."

Publicly honoring terrorists and toeing to the line that Haifa is occupied not only say a lot about Abbas. This is also the only way for him to keep his job. Legally, his tenure as PA Chairman ended in July 2009. It is because there is no rule of law in the PA that Abbas has been able to "extend" his office, but he hardly represents his Hamas-dominated constituency. Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections (including in the West Bank) and has been ruling Gaza since 2007. For Abbas, being even perceived as a peacemaker with Israel would be politically suicidal.

Is this a Greek tragedy or just a bad novel? If it’s the former, I’ll play Cassandra. If it’s the latter, I’ll volunteer to rewrite the script. In it, Israel will continue to play the "peace process" game only to give itself enough time to bomb Iran and complete the separation fence with the Palestinians. There will even be a happy end: People will stop fooling themselves ever after.