The Arab-Israeli conflict is, above all, a confrontation of perceptions. The governing party in Israel has historically seen its country as the fulfillment of a biblical dispensation, which would be denied by any dividing lines on Palestinian soil. For Palestinians, expulsion from a territory for centuries considered Arab is an open wound; accepting the Israeli intrusion has thus far been beyond Palestinian emotional and psychological capacities. The internal Palestinian debate is essentially over how to overcome the Jewish state: one group arguing for permanent confrontation, while moderates are willing to move toward the same objective in stages. Only a tiny minority considers coexistence desirable in itself.
The most active diplomatic initiative comes from the so-called quartet composed of Russia, Europe, the United Nations and the United States. They have come forward with a ``road map,'' a series of procedural proposals by which a final agreement is to be reached by 2005. They share this hopeful prospect because at least the non-U.S. members seem to believe that the most important instruments for forging a peace agreement are a sharp pencil and a map, with the result to be imposed by the United States. The United States has insisted on a verified end of terrorism and a dismantling of the terrorist apparatus on Palestinian soil as a precondition of negotiations on specifics.
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In half a century of Israel's existence, the Palestinians have been the central element in the region's refusal to accept Israel. No Palestinian leader has fully recognized Israel or renounced the right of refugees to return there. Government-sponsored public assaults on the very concept of a Jewish state are unremitting. Even the Palestinian signatories of the much-ballyhooed Geneva Accord went no further than to relate the return of refugees to a proportion of refugees accepted by third-party countries and left Israel discretion in determining the final number. The ``concession'' is empty; coupling some right of return with Israeli discretion would make Israel vulnerable to international pressures to adjust the number for the sake of regional stability. The breakthrough in Egyptian-Israeli negotiations took place in 1977 when President Anwar Sadat made his historic trip to Jerusalem and, among other gestures, laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There has never occurred a similar act of grace on the part of Palestinian leaders. Palestinian leaders must find a way to convey that they have accepted the permanence of Israel's existence. Dismantling the terror apparatus may be difficult to do quickly, but ending the systematic rejection of Israeli legitimacy and incitement to terror in the media are within the scope of immediate Palestinian decision.
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The real challenge is terrorism, against which international guarantees are likely to prove empty. If Israel's armed forces with a huge stake in the outcome could not prevent infiltrations, how is an international or even an American force going to do it? It is much more likely to prove a barrier against Israeli retaliation than against Palestinian terrorism. The probable outcome is that an international force would become hostages who will either purchase their safety by turning their backs on violations or risk their lives by serious efforts, at which point the governments supplying the forces will be under pressure to withdraw them.
Security should be pursued by other strategies that take account of the special features of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:
(a) The demarcation line between the two societies is not an international border but a cease-fire line that ended the first Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 1948. It was never accepted by the Palestinians until nearly half a century later and, even then, not as the border of a legitimate Israeli state.
(b) The two societies live in the closest proximity to one another; indeed, the central challenge is how to achieve coexistence when the distance between the Jordan River and the sea is 50 miles or less. There is no cushioning strategic space as in the Sinai between Egypt and Israel.
(c) In these circumstances, security cannot be based on battle lines in a war that ended more than half a century ago and must instead be adjusted to the experience of actual security threats.
(d) In any foreseeable agreement, the Israeli concessions will be territorial and concrete, while the Palestinian concessions are largely psychological, hence revocable. The pledge of abandoning violence was already part of the Oslo agreement with derisory results. The argument that, under an agreement, confidence may be restored ultimately does not answer the challenge of the short run
American opposition to the concept of a security fence, therefore, should be reconsidered. A physical barrier difficult to penetrate would facilitate Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian cities and the abandonment of checkpoints that deprive so much of Palestinian life of dignity. It provides a line on the other side of which settlements have to live under Palestinian rule or be abandoned. Is the Palestinian objection less the result of the principle of the fence but the ratification of the permanence of Israel it represents? By the same token, Israel must be serious about vacating the territories beyond the security fence. Some object to the security fence as being reminiscent of the walls created by communism, especially in Berlin and along the east-west German borders. But the Communist walls were designed to keep their peoples in; complex than a device for using the United States to extract concessions from Israel for little more than the word ``peace.'' The Palestinians must make a choice between the requirements of genuine acceptance of the Jewish state and an interim solution that creates a Palestinian state immediately and marks a major step toward dealing with the settlement, even if it falls short of the entire gamut of their aspirations. Israel must abandon a diplomacy designed to exhaust its counterparts and concentrate, in close coordination with the United States, on the essentials of its requirements.
For both sides, a resolution will be traumatic. For many in Israel, the abandonment of settlements and the partition of Jerusalem will be perceived as a repudiation of much of the history of the Jewish state. For the Palestinians, it will be a final end of the myth by which their society has lived. America's role is central: It needs to explore whether there is a Syrian negotiating option, to abandon the illusion that America can impose some paper plan and, at the same time, to move the parties with determination toward a goal that seems, at last, conceptually within reach
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200312/kt2003122214543311550.htm
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