By Syed Qamar Afzal Rivzi.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has renewed rejection of a French peace initiative, telling the visiting French prime minister that peace cannot be forged through international conferences but only through direct negotiations.
“Peace just does not get achieved through international conferences, UN-style,” Netanyahu said on Monday at a press conference with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians have been at a standstill since a US-led initiative collapsed in April 2014.
Palestinian leaders say years of negotiations with Israel have not ended its occupation and have pursued a strategy of diplomacy at international bodies.
An upsurge in violence since October has killed 204 Palestinians and 28 Israelis, though the unrest has steadily declined in recent weeks.
Many analysts say Palestinian frustration with Israeli occupation and settlement building in the West Bank, the complete lack of progress in peace efforts and their own fractured leadership have fed the recent unrest.
Netanyahu’s Play of Gimmick
In a short statement issued a few hours before the start of the second Passover holiday in Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu’s office insisted formally that it saw no benefit to a proposed French peace conference mooted for later this year. The announcement comes ahead of a summit of foreign ministers at the end of May in Paris where participants had been expected to try and hammer out a “political horizon” to bring the two sides together later in the summer.
“Israel adheres to its position that the best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations,” the statement read. “Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions. Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations.”
Neither Israel nor the Palestinians were to be invited to the summit on 30 May, which is expected to include some 30 countries and international organisations – including the “Quartet” of the UN, the EU, Russia and the US – though they would be expected to attended the peace conference slated for later in the summer.
“I have to be honest: I wrote a letter to Francois Hollande and expressed my shock that France had voted for a decision denying the Jewish people’s link to the Temple Mount, which spans thousands of years,” Netanyahu related. “And the reason that this vote was so troubling for us is that it implies that the Jewish people have no right to be here. And I think that remains the core of the conflict, the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to have a nation-state in their ancestral homeland. “Peace just does not get achieved through international conferences, UN-style,” said Netanyahu. “It doesn’t get to fruition through international diktats or committees from countries around the world who are sitting and seeking to decide our fate and our security when they have no direct stake in it.
“Peace is achieved through direct negotiations between the parties and in direct negotiations, the Palestinian leadership must face a stark choice and this choice is simple: recognize the Jewish state or continue educating your people that one day Israel will be gone.”
France says the goal is to eventually restart negotiations that would lead to a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu in particular has criticized the initiative and called for direct negotiations between the two sides.
While addressing the AIPAC-2016 conference in Washington, Netanyahu said:
“I was glad to hear the presidential candidates from both parties reaffirm this basic principle. Peace won’t come through UN Security Council resolutions, but through direct negotiations between the parties.
The best formula for achieving peace remains two states for two peoples, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state finally recognizes the Jewish state.Now, I know there’s some skepticism about my views on this. So let me state unequivocally, and here’s the acid test: I am ready to begin such negotiations immediately, without preconditions, anytime, anywhere. That’s a fact. But President Abbas is not ready to do so. That’s also a fact. There is political will here in Jerusalem. There’s no political will there in Ramallah”.
Israeli policy: from occupation to annexation
First, one hast to distinguish between annexation and occupation. International law recognizes the legitimacy of an occupation, i.e. a state in which one power occupies a territory where a local population lives. But the assumption of international law is that occupation is a temporary affair; the occupier is considered to be a trustee who maintains what he has conquered until the conflict is over. Furthermore, the occupier is not allowed to make long-term changes in the region. An annexation is a one-sided takeover by a state of a territory by use of force or threats of it, and is impermissible under international law – a part of the lessons of the Second World War on which so much of international law is built on.
In view of some liberal Israeli thinkers, the present situation of occupation is actually good for Israel. It confers partial legal legitimacy to its military presence (not its civilian presence) in the West Bank. If the West Bank is not occupied, then the situation looks suspiciously like annexation. And as we noted earlier, annexation is prohibited.
Secondly, no one in the world would accept the legitimacy of Israeli control that leaves Palestinians devoid of rights. An official adoption of the Levy Report would be a hasbara catastrophe; no one in the world would accept the Israeli claim that nearly 50 years of military control is not an occupation.
But even though the Israeli government never officially adopted the report, it effectively began implementing it. On the legal front, the Israeli Foreign Ministry published a document in late 2015 that adopts the spirit of the Levy Report. According to the document, Israel has a right to build settlements, based on the British Mandate charter. This claim became part of the Foreign Office Cadet Training Program and was distributed to all Israeli delegations in the world, accompanied by a directive saying this is the Israeli position and that it should be translated and published on the website of every delegation.
US–Israel thinking
The U.S. and Israel want to limit Palestinian sovereignty, to demilitarize their state, to prevent a Palestinian return and to implement any agreement in stages. But in order for the two-state solution to have a chance at working, they need to do the exact opposite.
The deadlock in the peace talks has generated another American diplomatic push, one that seems like the first stage in the administration’s proposal for a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (or, more accurately, the Ramallah-based half of the Palestinian Authority). According to reports, the American team led by Secretary of State John Kerry put forward a proposal for security measures that would address some of Israel’s concerns regarding a withdrawal from the West Bank.
The workable paradox?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far refused to discuss the future borders of the Palestinian state in public, and leaks from the talks suggest that Israel will only discuss the territorial aspects of an agreement after the security aspects are resolved. The American proposal is designed to tackle this new hurdle or at least prepare the ground for a full American two-state proposal.
If Israel, for example, maintains an army presence on the Jordan border or anywhere inside the Palestinian state – even on a temporary basis – any Palestinian political force with a grudge will make this presence the object of his campaign. There will be political attacks, and then there will be physical attacks. For the same reason all Palestinian prisoners need to be released; keeping them in Israeli prisons will create a political time bomb and an on-going sense of resentment.
If the Palestinian Authority doesn’t control its borders or airspace, or if it needs to give up valuable land in the north and around Jerusalem for the settlements and get desert hills in return – in the spirit of some of the recent land swaps maps – the whole idea of statehood becomes meaningless to the average Palestinian. A chair at the UN, after all, is not the object of the Palestinian national struggle. Freedom and dignity are.
