Abbas reaps whirlwind

Editorial

Many people subscribe to the simplistic idea that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the primary barrier to a peaceful two-state solution. In fact, the biggest obstacle is the “right of return” – the demand that Palestinians who, during successive wars, left or were forced out of places that are now part of Israel, are entitled to land and citizenship in Israel, as opposed to perhaps being financially compensated. The “return” to Israel of millions of Palestinians (among them a generation or more who were not born there) would achieve through demographics what the Arab world has been unable to do militarily or through terrorism: the elimination of the Jewish state.

The “right of return” is a poison pill that will prevent any negotiated settlement. So, it was a shocking and potentially hugely positive sign when the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, last week seemed to open the door to abandoning this long-held demand.

In an interview with an Israeli news program, Abbas said that he believed it was his right to visit Safed, the Israeli city in which he was born in 1935, “but not live there.”

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, was quick to seize on the positive sounds of Abbas’ statement, saying that his “courageous words prove that Israel has a real partner for peace.”

Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas partisans were quick with the printing presses, creating posters of Abbas and the word “traitor” (in English) and lighting bonfires to burn the Fatah leader in effigy.

Hours later, speaking to Arabic language media, Abbas seemed to backtrack, claiming that his statement was a personal one and should not be extrapolated to indicate an abandonment of Palestinian claims to Israel. Indeed, he doubled down, calling the refugees “a sacred matter,” invoking a theological whiff that will do nothing to make future discussions easier.

Some commentators have suggested that whatever small softening in the Palestinian position Abbas may have made might be intended to garner sympathy at the United Nations when the Palestinian Authority asks the world body to recognize its statehood.

In all, this recent tempest has the feeling of déjà vu. The Israeli president’s suggestion that Israel now has a genuine partner for peace echoes the same words spoken in the years, months and hours leading up to the Second Intifada, at which point the then partner for peace, Yasser Arafat, destroyed a decade of peacemaking and ushered in 12 years and counting of violence and ruin.

It is tempting, especially in these times, to seek good news where we can find it. This should not, however, preclude a clear understanding of the real dynamics taking place. On the other hand, neither should we allow cynicism – however fairly justified by historical experience – to deny any possible opening in the quest for peace.
Another lesson from the past is instructive.

All through the 1990s, while Arafat was making peaceful noises in the Israeli and Western media, he was continuing to pour gasoline on the inferno of Israel-hatred and antisemitism in the Arab media and the Palestinian body politic.

It remains one of the baffling realities of our time that the world was hoodwinked by a terrorist speaking out of both sides of his mouth in an era when these contradictory public statements were easily available through emerging media. It was clear – in retrospect, as it should have been at the time – that Arafat was not fulfilling the one serious obligation he had throughout the Oslo process, which was to inculcate in his citizenry a willingness to accept Jews and Israelis as neighbors living in peace beside an independent Palestine.

For more than 60 years, the people of the region outside Israel have been fed by their leaders and state-controlled media, their education systems and popular culture a steady diet of Jew-hatred and absolute rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Any hope for peaceful coexistence in our lifetime will require efforts to begin addressing this deeply and deliberately entrenched prejudice among the Palestinian and broader Arab populations.

Is it possible that Abbas was making tentative first steps toward preparing his population to abandon the untenable demand for a right of return? This would be one of the most positive signs we have seen in years from the Palestinian leadership. If so, his tentative words would suggest that Abbas may be, as Peres asserts, a genuine partner for peace, and a courageous one at that. However, courageous leaders who seek peace in this region have a mixed record of success and survival. It will take a great deal of unlearning hatred before a Palestinian leader can lead his people to accept a neighbor that has been deliberately demonized over the course of three generations.

A hopeful person will see Abbas’ words as the first, overdue step on this long road. A sad realist, recognizing that six decades of Palestinian leaders have cynically sown the wind, will fear that Abbas may well reap the whirlwind.

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