Guest Blog: Is Israel responsible for Palestinian misery?

At Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat rejected Israel's offer to return to the 1967 pre-war borders with minor land swaps, East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital, the return of refugees to unite Israeli Arab families, and compensation for Arab refugees settling outside of Israel.

Seven years later, Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have turned down a better offer, and for the same reason: the demand that Israel absorb "all refugees and their descendents."

Do the Palestinians want independence and sovereignty? Put differently and more to the point, are their leaders willing to share what was previously Mandatory Palestine with an independent Jewish state?

In 1947, the Palestinian leadership turned down any division of the land leading to Jewish independence. The result was what they now describe as the nakba, the loss not only of the opportunity for their own state, but also the creation of the Palestinian Diaspora and their 60+ year-long refugee problem.

Fifty years later, in 1998, Yasser Arafat turned down Netanyahu and Clinton at the Wye River summit, and two years after that refused Ehud Barak and Clinton at Camp David, turning down concessions many believe to be maximum Israel can offer if it is to survive as an independent state.

Those concessions included a return to pre-1967 borders with minor territorial exchanges allowing Israel to retain the larger communities adjoining the state; Palestinian sovereignty in Arab majority East Jerusalem suburbs and the mosques atop the Temple Mount; the City of Jerusalem to serve as shared capital for Israel and the future Palestine; and acceptance of a some refugees uniting Israeli Arab families, with compensation for the remain refugees as resolution of "the refugee problem."

Arafat's pretext for rejecting Camp David, if one ignores his comment to that Saudi journalist that he would be "assassinated" if he signed, was the time-tested deal-breaker, the demand that Israel accept the return of "all refugees and their descendents." Demographically, that would be the death knell of the Jewish state, which would vanish within decades.

More recently, according to press releases following Ehud Olmert's departure from government, Kadima's prime minister was reported to have sweetened Israel's Camp David offer, only to have the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas follow Arafat in demanding that same deal-killer,  that "all refugees and their descendents" be allowed to return to Israel.

So, do the Palestinians want a state? Maybe, but apparently not one that also provides for a Jewish state.

How has the United States impacted Arab-Israeli peace in recent years? In the run-up to the 2007 Palestinian elections, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli leaders warned President Bush that his insistence that the elections proceed on schedule would result in a Hamas victory.

When Hamas did in fact win, Bush apparently reconsidered his commitment to the Palestinian democratic process and initiated, armed, trained and financed Fatah's security chief in Gaza Dahlan in that second predictable disaster, the rout of Fatah and secession of Hamas's Gaza.

How might the long-simmering conflict between Hamas and Fatah have played out had the elections been delayed or canceled? Would Abbas have eventually found the wisdom and courage to "disarm the terrorists," that critical first step of Bush's road map?

Interesting to speculate on where the contesting secular and Islamist Palestinian parties might be today had Abbas confronted Hamas before the elections.

But Bush pressed for elections and the outcome was two claimants to represent the Palestinians, with neither able to unify or represent the whole.

Unless and until Palestinians are able to make peace among themselves it makes little sense to expect Palestinians and Israelis to enter end-game negotiations over statehood and peace.

Over the decades, American interests and policies regarding the Middle East have tended to be tactical, responses to global and local circumstances (the Cold War, Arab nationalism, Islamic terrorism) rather than strategic (Arab oil, Suez, the primacy of the US regional defense shield).

This has resulted in confusion and mistrust of the American commitment to traditional US allies in the eyes of local governments. An unfolding example is America's shift of attention and preoccupation with Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Obama's wooing of Iranian support in the conflicts to the north has left the Saudis and the Gulf emirates fearful of a US-Iran quid pro quo leaving the Sunni Arabs at the mercy of the Shi'ite Iranians (a fear compounded by the Bush administration decision to replace Sadam's Sunni regime with a Shi'ite government in Iraq, a country sharing a long border with the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates).

Is Israel the cause of Islamic terrorism? The charge is raised often enough by Israel's Arab adversaries, periodically by friends and allies weary of the endless Palestine issue.

But history suggests a more nuanced explanation: Islamist rage and frustration directly inspired by past European imperial exploitation and cultural and religious arrogance.

Israel might or not be hated as a Jewish presence by the Arabs, but she is seen and typically described as an outpost of European Imperialism in the midst of the Arab world.

When our critics call us racists, accuse Israel of "ethnic cleansing," "apartheid," identify the behavior of some "settlers" as that of the entire Israeli people, do they apply the same measure to themselves, to their own country?

Do Americans, for example, accept that the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity or home grown Nazis are representative of the citizen attitude and government policy of the United States?

In point of fact the first twenty years of Israeli occupation were years of relative peace and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinian economy was robust on income from Israeli jobs and commerce. There was free movement in both directions across the Green Line.

Palestinians did not experience the poverty due to lost jobs, the frustration of checkpoints; no wall separated Jew from Arab until the Oslo Accords and the return of Yasser Arafat and the PLO to Palestine.

Palestinian suffering grew much worse with Arafat's first intifada in 1989. And worse still with Arafat's second and more self-punishing intifada, with its return to Black September and television images of that murderous mob bludgeoning to death young Israeli prisoners, tossing their battered bodies from the window, their murderers laughingly flashing blood-soaked hands for the world press to record. 

Israel's response to the Intifadas is telling. Neither impulsive nor "murderous," Israel acted with deliberation, with slow, graduated responses to acts of terror.

Those roadblocks, that wall which so effectively put a halt to cross-border attacks are, compared to other countries responses to what they consider acts of terror, a humane and measured deterrent to terrorism and its perpetrators.

Compare, for example, Israel's behavior to that of the United States and Europe. Germany in the Second World War murdered entire populations of towns and villages, reduced whole communities to rubble in retribution to partizan attacks on German soldiers.

And the US horse soldiers slaughtered entire villages of Native Americans, expelled tribes by the tens of thousands from fertile land, to scrub to make way for their own settlers "moving west," or to rob them of the mineral wealth below.

The difference between the Jewish state and the West is precisely that the State of Israel (as distinguished from vocal but powerless fringe groups) never intended to keep the spoils of war, never considered expulsion of the "natives" to make room for their growing population, or even to control the areas limited water supplies.

Holier-than-thou may "feel" good to Israel's detractors but, as Christian scripture would have them, Let he who is without sin...

Is Israel Responsible for Palestinian Misery? As with every complex and difficult question, the answer lies somewhere between yes and no.

Palestinian in-fighting and social anarchy mean that Israel can put off indefinitely the pain of removing, in some cases forcibly, Israelis who lived, raised families and buried loved ones in the West Bank.

Memories of the pain associated with the withdrawal from Yamit in the Sinai, of communities in Gaza are still fresh. And unlike Sinai and Gaza Yehuda and Shomron are filled with historical and biblical importance to all Jews.

Borders, limits of sovereignty, natural resources, all these are difficult issues easier put off than confronted.

Israel is a partner in Palestinian misery because status quo, even with terror and Intifada, is easier than the difficulties of achieving peace.

But primary responsibility for 60+ years of Palestinian misery lies squarely at the doorstep of the Palestinians themselves. To remain true to their 1947 decision of all-or-nothing to the lands of Mandatory Palestine through the demand that Israel absorb all "refugees" is nothing less than a guarantee of continued statelessness, perpetual reaffirmation of their Nakba.

Until the Palestinians manage to produce a leader of the caliber of a Ben-Gurion, a politician with the intelligence and acumen to appreciate that compromise and accommodation are the path to statehood, they will continue a people of the Diaspora, apparently content in their misery, a self-pitying and dignity-less existence. That is their curse, and their choice.