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Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a German/Israel citizen with a Ph.D. in contemporary history with a focus on European public opinion relating to the Middle East, Islamic Terrorism, the US and Israel.
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By Petra Marquardt-Bigman
January 26, 2007
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Jimmy Carter's recent book on "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" has met with much criticism, not only because of its blatant bias against Israel, but also because of a number of factual errors and misrepresentations. Among the critics who have challenged Carter's presentation of specific issues was veteran Middle East expert Dennis Ross, who objected in an article in the International Herald Tribune to Carter's misleading labeling of maps that summarized the proposals for the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in 2000.
Ross noted that in Carter's book, "the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them." Ross, who was involved in the negotiations, maintains that this "is simply untrue". According to him, the proposals presented by President Clinton in December 2000 "would have produced an independent Palestinian state with 100 percent of Gaza, roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and an elevated train or highway to connect them. Jerusalem's status would have been guided by the principle that what is currently Jewish will be Israeli and what is currently Arab will be Palestinian, meaning that Jewish Jerusalem -- East and West -- would be united, while Arab East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state."
Ross argues that after the talks failed, a "mythology" emerged "that seeks to defend Arafat's rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren't real or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised. Arafat himself later claimed he was not offered even 90 percent of the West Bank or any of East Jerusalem. But that was myth, not reality." In Ross's view, the conflict has been perpetuated by "mythologies on each side [?] Peace can never be built on these myths. It can come only once the two sides accept and adjust to reality."
Six years have passed since President Clinton presented these proposals at the end of 2000, and it would thus seem legitimate to ask whether the "reality" that has to be acknowledged and accepted is still the same. Arafat's rejection of the Clinton proposals certainly changed the reality for many Israelis who had been willing to give peace a chance: for them, this rejection indicated that the pursuit of peace was futile -- Israel could not possibly come up with a better offer, and if Israel's best offer was not good enough for the Palestinians, it was not peace that they were after.
While Sharon's disengagement from Gaza and Olmert's subsequent "convergence" plan were much criticized in diplomatic circles because of their "unilateralism", these policies arguably reflected how serious Israel actually was about ending the occupation. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, from Gaza in 2005, and after Israelis elected in spring 2006 a prime minister heading a party whose main raison d'être was continued "convergence", there can be little doubt that a majority of Israelis did not dream of a "Greater Israel", but viewed the Westbank and Gaza as land that was to be traded for peace -- and if there was nobody who wanted to trade it for peace, most Israelis were willing to give up that land anyway, because to them, the land was not worth the price of having to rule over another people. But it seems that, for Israel, it's "damn if you do, damn if you don't".
When Jimmy Carter decided to write a book propagating the myth that Israel is the greatest obstacle to peace in the Middle East, he could be confident that the book would sell well, because this is quite simply the most popular Middle East myth. The popularity of this myth is in no small measure due to the fact that it offers a simplistic view of the complex problems that make the Middle East a hotbed of extremism; even more conveniently, this simplistic view also allows for a simple solution to the problems of the Middle East: just get Israel to make all the territorial concessions that will finally move the Muslim world to accept the Jewish state's right to exist, and Islamic extremism will wither away, deprived of its rallying call.
But it is not maps that make the Middle East conflict so intractable, it is minds -- "wars begin in the minds of men", as the Preamble of the UNESCO Constitution states; and in 1945, when this document was signed, they knew what they were talking about. They knew what it does to peoples' minds when, day after day, the media are full of venom and hatred towards a purported enemy that gets blamed for everything that is wrong with the world. It is a much publicized fact that only very few foreign books are popular in the Arab world, but it is less well known that there is one exception: the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are a perennial favorite, frequently updated to include explanations how current events like September 11 or the Iraq war fit into the "bigger picture", and popularized even more by TV-series and soap operas.
Yet, there are no peace plans that propose how to change minds; they all are about how to change maps. But as long as minds will not be changed, the most popular change of maps in the Middle East will be the one advocated by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, in which Israel is erased. The Hamas Charter, written in the same frame of mind, advocates the same change of maps. [As does the Fatah/PLO Charter, which has never been amended to eliminate the many calls for Israel's elimination, despite public charades and claims to the contrary - Israel Insider]
All the peace plans for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rely on the notion -- which may turn out to be a myth -- that minds in the Middle East will be pacified by a less dramatic change of maps. But in a grim forecast for the "New Middle East", Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass recently noted that "[if] Palestine existed, it would be a failed state." He still advocates the establishment of a Palestinian state, and even argues that "[the] more detailed and generous the vision, the harder it becomes for Hamas to justify choosing confrontation."
Depressingly, what Haass is ultimately saying is that it may be a myth to expect that peace will follow the redrawing of the Middle East's map to include a Palestinian state -- no matter how "generous the vision", it may not be enough to bring about a change of the Middle East's prevailing mindset, and it seems that all Israel should expect from an agreement with the Palestinians is that it will become "harder [?] for Hamas to justify choosing confrontation."
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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