Daily Times

Leftwing Zionists wanted to convince the Arabs that Jews and Arabs could live in peace in Palestine. However, rightwing Zionists overruled peace overtures towards the Palestinians. Thus, for example, on the orders of Yitzhak Shamir, later the prime minister of Israel, the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish royal family, was assassinated on September 17, 1948. Bernadotte wanted to create a viable Palestinian state and make Jerusalem an international, open city. All this is deliberately kept out of any discussion on the origins of the conflict in the late 1940s.
The US will always provide Israel the arms and technology needed to withstand any existential threat. One can understand that as an obligation to a close ally but the US is complicit in Israel’s comprehensive oppression of Palestinians through occupation and the blockade and perpetual seige of Gaza. Most Arab states ruined themselves fighting wars with Israel for the sake of the Palestinians. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (formed as an inclusive umbrella for all Palestinian resistance organisations) also realised the futility of armed confrontation with Israel. Hamas’s firing of rockets into Israel has hardly endeared the Palestinian cause to world opinion. Since 2001, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have been ready to recognise Israel if the latter would give the Palestinians their legitimate rights. It is Iran that backs Hamas and arms it. Even if Iran were to make a nuclear bomb it would need it to defend itself against the Israeli and US arsenals. Pakistan does have nuclear bombs but those too are needed for its own defence.
With regard to other powers, the Soviet Union has disintegrated, China does roaring business with Israel and so does India. Militant Islamism and concomitant terrorism make the rest of the world look for all means to contain such a scourge (notwithstanding the new surge of this tendency thanks to ill-considered western backing). Israel is today one of the most attractive places for buying arms. In a documentary shown some weeks earlier on Swedish television, one could see delegations from all corners of the world visit its special sites where mock attacks on Palestinian villages are carried out for the obscene entertainment of prospective buyers. Israel earned $ seven billion last year and nearly the whole world is its customer.
The American Jewish lobby, with its vast economic resources and immense influence over the mass media, coupled with the 40 million Christian Zionist votebank, combine to render US elections and governments hostage to Israeli occupationist policies. It is, however, important to bear in mind that mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches maintain an even-handed policy on the Palestine conflict and support the creation of an independent Palestinian state to exist peacefully side by side with Israel. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), who was intimately involved in the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, has recently argued that Israeli occupation is the real obstacle to lasting and fair peace. His interview on YouTube is worth listening to.
Gandhi wrote in 1938: “I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.” Gandhi thus did acknowledge the right of armed resistance but only if other means proved futile. The Palestinian leadership never applied a Gandhian non-violent strategy to resist oppression. It is now time to try it wholeheartedly. The world is too well-informed now about the agony of the Palestinians, and the current overkill bombing by Israel has exposed the violent strand within Zionist ideology. An Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom, regularly protests the preservation of the status quo by Israeli hawks, but as long as rockets are fired into Israel or settlers are attacked, the Palestinians will never occupy the high moral ground to protest their continuing humiliation and subjugation.
As the situation now stands, Israel illegally occupies 22 percent of original Palestine: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. A viable, independent state connecting the West Bank and Gaza in a two-state formula would require Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 war borders. All illegal Jewish settlements have to be dismantled in order to accommodate the refugees languishing in Beirut and elsewhere. In fact, it would be correct to demand that Israel and Jordan make small adjustments so that independent Arab Palestine can absorb the refugees. Alternatively, as Mr Miko Peled suggests, Israel and the occupied territories should be reintegrated into one plural, democratic state. The Palestinians should be willing to accept either of these options. “The world stands disgraced,” said a UN spokesperson to condemn the bombing of a school in Gaza on July 30, 2014 in which many innocent people were killed. The UN is also considering charging Israel with war crimes.
It is time to probe if a majority in the UN General Assembly can be convinced to pass another resolution clearly and explicitly demarcating the international boundaries of the Palestinian state or, alternatively, of one pluralist, secular-democratic state for both Israelis and Palestinians. Just as the 1947 partition plan, which was only a recommendation and not a binding legal instrument, created the basis for Israel, another resolution now by the General Assembly giving the Palestinians their due would be the crucial step needed to break the deadlock.
Present day Syria, Iraq and Jordan too were created arbitrarily out of Ottoman Turkey’s provinces. Israel is a tiny state and most of the Middle East remains with the Arabs, including the oil fields. It is time to make necessary accommodations. Hamas and other Palestinian groups must accept the reality of Israel while the Israeli hawks must concede real and genuine independence and sovereignty to the Palestinians. The UN can, through the Security Council, take upon itself the role of guarantor of the peace agreement between the two conflicted peoples. Many Palestinians are, in all probability, progeny of the Canaanites who lived in Palestine when Jewish tribes arrived and populated it more than three millenia ago. Some Canaanites converted to Christianity and others to Islam, while Arabic became the language of that region during Muslim rule. Instead of dogmatic certainty about one people alone having exclusive rights to that region, scepticism and human compassion should inform the process of mutual accommodation. Such an approach would truly epitomise Gandhian realism, fairness and justice.

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The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com