The Warped Mirror: A revealing proposal

Expectations for the meeting in Annapolis were low enough to forestall disappointment: the meeting was only meant to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that had failed so disastrously seven years ago. But now it seems there is an urge to make up for all the cautious commentary in the run-up to Annapolis, and the hope that this conflict could be settled within a year is considered by some as entirely realistic.

The International Herald Tribune recently featured an article that came up with a rather unconventional idea about how to cut through the Gordian knot of the difficult negotiations. The two authors of the piece suggest that President Bush should do away with the "received wisdom" of viewing negotiations as "the art of give-and-take". Instead, he should boldly "delineate new parameters in the relationship: Palestinians as sole recipients, Israelis as sole providers."

The authors justify their proposal by pointing out that when it comes to the crucial issue of security, Israel has long insisted that it can rely only on itself and that it will do whatever it deems necessary to defend itself. Moreover, they note that Israel has always maintained that "the Palestinians not only would not, but simply could not, deliver satisfactorily on security". So why insist that the Palestinians try harder to do better? Instead, the Palestinians should be given a fully sovereign state in which they could do as they please without any restrictions, while Israel in return would receive "nothing, only tacit understanding that it can retain freedom of action to secure its security."

The operative word here is 'retain', because the authors argue that "the validity of Israel's security self-reliance is already accepted. When Israel deems its security jeopardized by actions from areas from which it has withdrawn, it asks permission from no one to act against such violations - either in the case of the legitimate (Israel-Lebanon) border, or of the de-facto (Israel-Gaza) border. When it acts, there's barely a peep of international protest, not even from Arab leaders."

Unfortunately, anybody who asserts that there is "barely a peep of international protest" when Israel exercises its right to self-defense has clearly lost all touch with reality. The Lebanon War in 2006 resulted in a veritable media frenzy of coverage hostile to Israel ? so much so that Marvin Kalb of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, devoted a study to examining how Hizbullah used the international media for its own advantage. Likewise, the rather modest measures Israel takes to protect its citizens from the constant rocket barrage coming from Hamas-ruled Gaza are criticized in the international media on a daily basis, and the security fence build to thwart terrorist attacks is widely denounced as an 'Apartheid wall'.

The proposal that Israel should resign itself to the Palestinian unwillingness and inability to ensure that the territory of a future Palestinian state will not be turned into a launching pad for constant attacks therefore simply amounts to suggesting that Israel should duplicate the experience with the disengagement from Gaza: all of the country's towns and cities would turn into Sderot and Israel would have as much right to defend itself against these attacks as it has now - and whenever Israel exercises its right to self-defense, the reaction would be no different than it is now: an international outcry about Israel's "disproportionate response" which would quickly morph into unabashed claims of "Israeli aggression".

That a proposal like this one would be considered worth the paper to print by an internationally respected newspaper reveals much about the current debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: whatever rights are taken for granted for the rest of the world's states, these rights become suddenly "negotiable" as soon as Israel is concerned.

It was thus hardly a coincidence that the same issue of the International Herald Tribune featured another article on the prospects of the negotiations launched at Annapolis which criticized President Bush's reference to Israel as "the homeland of the Jewish people". Aside from the fact that this reference simply echoes the provisions of UN resolution 181, one might think that if dozens of states encounter no problem when they define themselves as Muslim and/or Arab, there is no reason to object to one state that would choose to define itself as Jewish.

And indeed - what could possibly be the reason when the very same people who are so terribly troubled by Israel's insistence to define itself as a Jewish state have no problem whatsoever with the fact that the Palestinian "Declaration of Independence" proclaims that the "State of Palestine is an Arab state, an integral and indivisible part of the Arab nation" and that Palestinian Basic Law describes Islam as the official religion and the principles of Islamic Shari'a as the main source of legislation?