Benny Morris var tidigare känd som en av de nya historikerna som var kritiska mot sionismen. Men efter Camp David började han tvivla, och idag är han pessimist. I Tablet Magazine skriver han om de oöverkomliga hindren för fred i mellanöstern:
I am speaking of a basic, strategic impasse which, unfortunately, is far more cogent and telling than the ongoing “negotiations,” which are unlikely to lead to a peace treaty or even a “framework” agreement for a future peace accord. This unlikelihood stems from a set of obstacles that I see as insurmountable, given current political-ideological mindsets.
The first, the one that American and European officials never express and—if impolitely mentioned in their presence—turn away from in distaste, is that Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called “secular” and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews.
They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs. History, because of demography and the steady empowerment of the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West’s growing alienation from Israel, and because of Allah’s wishes, is, they believe, on their side.
They do not want a permanent two-state solution, with a Palestinian Arab state co-existing alongside a (larger) Jewish state; they will not compromise on this core belief and do not believe, on moral or practical grounds, that they should.
Den som följer t ex Palestinian Media Watch eller det palestinska ledarskapets arabiska uttalanden kan enkelt se att Morris har rätt. Det palestinska ledarskapet är dels religiöst betingat, dels antidemokratiskt. De vägrar att acceptera en judisk stat som granne, och ser hela Israel som deras.
Därav kommer också deras vurmande för “rätten att återvända”:
The Palestinian leadership is unanimous and resolute in insisting that the problem’s solution lies in the “Right of Return”: Israel, and the world, must accept the principle of repatriation and eventually facilitate repatriation. The idea that the refugees must return to their homes has been the ethos, the be-all and end-all of Palestinian politics and policy, since 1948. No Palestinian leader can or will ever abandon this principle, on pain of assassination, and none has. […]
And this represents the second insurmountable obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. The United Nations has on its rolls 4.7 million Palestinian refugees [10]; the PLO claims that there are 7.5 million [11], only a small number of whom belong to the 700,000-odd Palestinians originally displaced from their homes in what became the state of Israel. Some two-thirds of the 700,000 moved or were removed to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip; one-third ended up in Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Abbas himself is a refugee from Safad, the Arab-majority eastern Galilean town that the U.N. General Assembly partition plan of November 1947 (Resolution 181 [12]) earmarked for Jewish sovereignty.
The vast majority of the current 4.7 to 7.5 million “refugees”—say nine-tenths of them—are the children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren of the originally displaced 700,000. And more than half of them live in Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinian demand that Israel accept a mass refugee return means that, if implemented, Israel, with its 6 million Jewish and 1.5 million Arab citizens, would instantly or over a short time, become an Arab-majority state.
Dessa fakta har varken västliga politiker eller västliga journalister tagit hänsyn till. Istället beskriver man mellanösternkonflikten med vad jag kallar “palestinaglasögon“. Med dessa glasögon på är palestinierna svaga offer, och Israel en överlägsen krigslysten kolonialmakt i händerna på en religiös höger.
Så länge ingen bryr sig om att kontrollera sina uppfattningar kan glömma fred i mellanöstern.
Via EoZ.