The Quest for Peace between Israel and the Palestinians

176 Pages·2000·0.747 MB·English

by  Haig Khatchadourian

The Quest for Peace between
Israel and the Palestinians
CONFLICT AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Studies in War, Peace, and Social Thought
Charles Webel
General Editor
Vol. 8
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Boston • Bern
Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Brussels • Vienna • Oxford
Haig Khatchadourian
The Quest for Peace between
Israel and the Palestinians
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Boston • Bern
Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Brussels • Vienna • Oxford
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Khatchadourian, Haig.
The quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians / Haig Khatchadourian.
p. cm. — (Conflict and consciousness; vol. 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993—Peace. 2. Palestine—International status.
3. Territory, National—Palestine. 4. National state. I. Title. II. Series.
DS119.76.K43 956.05’3—dc21 99-046193
ISBN 0-8204-4877-X
ISSN 0899-9910
DIE DEUTSCHE BIBLIOTHEK-CIP-EINHEITSAUFNAHME
Khatchadourian, Haig:
The quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians / Haig Khatchadourian.
−New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Boston; Bern;
Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Oxford: Lang.
(Conflict and consciousness; Vol. 8)
ISBN 0-8204-4877-X
Cover design by Nona Reuter
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2000 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in the United States of America
To the memory of my parents and
uncles and aunts who are no more

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1. The Palestine Problem and the Arab-Israeli Conflict:
A Historical Sketch 1
2. Territorial Rights of Palestinians and Jews 21
3. Proposals for Peace between Palestinians and Israel,
and the Future of Jerusalem 39
4. From Autonomy to Independence 69
5. Israel and the Arab Countries in the Quest for Peace 95
6. The Peace Dividend 115
7. Liberalization, Democratization, and Stability
in the Arab Middle East 129
8. Conclusion 155
Index 165

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., for permis-
sion to include quotations from Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s article, “Islam-
ists and the Peace Process,” in Political Islam, Revolution, Radicalism,
or Reform? (1997), edited by John L. Esposito.

Introduction
The quest for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in the Middle East
has been a very long, difficult, and painful quest, and although consider-
able progress toward such a peace has been made during the past few
decades, and its realization now appears to lie in sight, it still eludes the
efforts of politicians and everyday people in the region and in the world at
large to bring it about. The present work presents and defends its author’s
vision of the shape of such a peace, and the road that he believes can lead
the region toward that goal. At the center of that vision lie the lineaments
of a free, independent Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with
East Jerusalem as its capital, coexisting in peace alongside Israel; although
the very idea of a Palestinian state, or even a comprehensive peace be-
tween the Palestinians and Israel, is anathema to the radical Israeli right.
Similarly, the idea of an Islamic state is abhorrent to the Palestinian and
other Arab Islamists.
However, as this Introduction was being written, several noteworthy
events took place which encourage one to believe that peace, at least
between the Palestinians and Israel, may not be as far off as, in our more
pessimistic moments, we may be inclined to think. One was Yasser Arafat’s
reaffirmation, during his latest visit to Washington on February 4, 1999,
that despite the slump in the peace process, the “process of reconcilia-
tion with Israel [is] irreversible and the opening of a ‘new chapter’ in the
troubled Middle East,”1 and his “confidence in the Palestinians’ achieving
statehood . . . and that a Palestinian state would live side by side in peace
and reconciliation with Israel.”2 Another encouraging note was President
Clinton’s reminding Arafat that although his administration “does not
object to . . . assertions of Palestinian aspirations,” “unilateral declara-
tions of statehood ‘aren’t helpful.’”3 Fortunately, the February 8 issue of
Time reports that Arafat “has agreed to postpone the declaration of
XII Introduction

Palestinian statehood he has repeatedly threatened to make on May 4,
the date the interim Oslo peace accords expire. The timing became prob-
lematic once the Israelis scheduled elections for May 17.”4 Perhaps most
surprising was the news that ultra-Orthodox rabbis, in talks with hard-
line settler leaders, proposed that the latter “agree to a Palestinian state in
exchange for more settlements”; that they “accept a radical increase in
settlement in the West Bank—from about 150,000 to 600,000—as a
trade-off for recognizing a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.
. . . But [Yaacov] Shulvitz [a follower of ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Eliezer
Shach] said the proposal was ‘just ideas’ at the talking stage.”5 Although
these are “just ideas,” they are nonetheless significant in showing how the
wind is beginning to blow: that at least some members of the Israeli ultra-
right have begun to think the utterly unthinkable of a little while ago.
To help the reader place the subject of this work in its proper historical
context, the book opens, in chapter 1, with a historical sketch of the
Palestine Problem, the root cause of what eventually expanded into the
general Arab-Israeli conflict. Next, in chapter 2, the territorial rights of
Palestinians and Jews in the land of Palestine are assessed. It is argued
that both Palestinians and Israelis have valid, perhaps roughly equal, moral
and territorial rights based on their centuries-long occupation of the land
in different periods of its checkered history; and consequently that the
Palestinian/Jewish-Israeli conflict over territory is a conflict of right against
right. Chapter 3 discusses and evaluates various proposals advanced by
politicians, intellectuals, and scholars for the peaceful settlement of the
Palestine Problem and defends the two state proposal favored by Yasser
Arafat with the PLO’s abandonment of its original aim of destroying Is-
rael, and its de facto recognition of Israel’s existence; although it also
argues that Arafat’s earlier (1970s) proposal—which called for a single,
secular, democratic Palestinian-Jewish state in lieu of the Jewish state—
although utterly impracticable, is fairer to the Palestinians than the two-
state proposal.
Chapter 4 continues the defense of the two-state proposal begun in
chapter 3 by responding to (a) a series of important Islamist criticisms of
the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian autonomy that followed them, and
(b) the hard-line position of the Israeli rejectionists. It argues that, con-
trary to what the latter believe, a Palestinian state would be the natural
next step to the present limited Palestinian autonomy. It then critically
evaluates some suggested ways of marginalizing the Islamists and the
Israeli rejectionists.
Introduction XIII

Chapter 5 briefly traces Israel’s relations with Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,
and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia’s indirect relations with Israel through its
relations with those Arab states that have been actors in the Arab-Israeli
conflict. The aim of that survey is to ascertain the actual and possible
ways in which some or all of these inter-state relations contribute to the
quest for a comprehensive Middle East peace.
Chapter 6 deals with three related subjects: (a) the economic benefit or
“peace dividend” that has accrued to Israel and, to a much lesser extent,
to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, and some other Arab countries, in the
wake of the peace process; (b) the claim that the economic benefit result-
ing from bilateral and regional agreements and cooperation between Is-
rael and the Arab countries would tend to decrease the regime of violence
between them; and (c) the further “peace dividend”—the economic and
cultural benefits—that the present author believes can and ought to ac-
crue to Arabs and Israelis with the achievement of an overall settlement
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
I mentioned that one of the main claims evaluated in chapter 6 is the
possible conflict-reducing role of bilateral and regional economic agree-
ments and cooperation between the Arab countries and Israel, in light of
the economic benefits to the parties. Chapter 7 pursues the theme of
conflict-reduction by attempting to answer a different question; viz.,
whether, as has been claimed, political liberalization and democratization
in the Arab countries may reduce the regime of war between them and
Israel, and help bring about diplomatic efforts to address the conflict’s
underlying causes. A critical examination of that claim shows that (a) the
connection between democracy and the absence of war in general is based
on solid historical evidence, but that (b) the claim that under specified
conditions that relation is likely to hold in the case of the Arab countries
that are still at war with Israel, is more speculative. However, an impor-
tant corollary of (b), namely that, other things being equal, democratiza-
tion would tend to make the Middle East politically more stable or less
unstable, is independently supported by the evidence that democracy le-
gitimates political power and authority. That evidence, together with the
fact that democracy is the political system most conducive to the individual’s
fullest development and actualization, and to the attainment of the gen-
eral welfare, strongly argues for its desirability in the Arab world as a
whole.
The preceding leads to the question of how democracy can best be
established in the Middle East Arab countries, given the absence of a