Why resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict requires more than grandstanding
By Tiko Okoye
“There could be real peace,” averred French critic and poet Paul Valery, “only if everyone were satisfied. That means there’s not often a real peace. There are only actual states of peace which, like wars, are mere expedients.” Those who tend to vigorously shake their heads in indignation to signal their visceral disagreement with the dictum that the worst peace is preferable to the most just war consequently cannot deny the wisdom embedded in the old Danish proverb that holds that “Bad is never good until worse happens.”
It ought to be immensely clear to both Hamas and Israel by now that bad has since become worse. If indeed Israel has been using other stratagems to intimidate and subdue Palestinians in an area that’s one-quarter the size of the Federal Capital Territory, and with a population of only 2.2 million, and fallen short, what then gives it the mind-blowing confidence that an outright invasion will do the trick, especially against the background of what’s clearly happening in Ukraine?
Apart from the massive degradation of infrastructures, 22,000 Palestinians – mostly women and children and relatively small number of Hamas militants – are said to have been killed as at yesterday, constituting 1% of the population of Gaza. Did you dismissively say “just 1%?” Let’s then put things in a starker perspective by considering ‘just’ the USA and Nigeria with their estimated populations of 336 million and 226 million respectively. 1% of America’s population implies 3.36 million fatalities, while Nigeria’s case will be 2.26 million!
Now this: in the case of Nigeria, it would amount to the population of several states on a standalone basis, and in the case of the US it would be almost equivalent to the total number of Americans – both combat and non-combat personnel – killed in ALL major wars combined since its declaration of independence about 300 years ago! Actual figures in thousands are: War of Independence – 23.8; Civil War – 520.0; WWI – 116.6; WWII – 405.4; Korea – 36.6; Vietnam – 58.2; Persian Gulf – 0.4; Afghanistan – 2.5; Iraq – 7.0; and COVID-19 – 1,165.2. Is this conscionable, regardless of the crime committed?
Netanyahu is obviously an unapologetic believer of English cleric and writer Charles Caleb Colton’s contention that “He that has gone so far as to cut the claws of the lion, will not feel himself quite secure until he has also drawn his teeth.” It’s crystal-clear that just like legendary Greek doctor and globally-acclaimed father of medicine Hippocrates did under a different set of circumstances, he’s fully persuaded that “Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.”
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Little wonder then that his hawkish cabinet is moving full steam to push Palestinians out of Gaza to the Sinai Desert or even the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is being strongly rumoured without any official rebuttals, and resettle Jews on the ‘captured’ land. What ultimately becomes of the West Bank is anybody’s guess!
Those in the know assert that Netanyahu is on the verge of re-enacting the 1982 Gen. Ariel Sharon invasion of Lebanon with the aim of stamping out the Hezbollah menace once and for all as a way of opportunistically killing two birds with one stone and salvaging his tottering political career. Added to all of this is the shuttle diplomacy to Arab nations embarked on by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, ostensibly aimed at scuttling the expansion of the scope of the Hamas-Israel conflict. But whether these measures are enough to deter a beleaguered Netanyahu remains an open question. The one thing that’s a settled question is that regardless of whether one supports Israeli Jews or Arab Palestinians or is simply sitting on the fence, peace is very much needed in that region.
But in order to have any real chance of succeeding, the White House must dispense with the James Bond-like ‘007 licence’ it has granted Israel and crystallize a very creative way to forge a balance that would staunch snowballing internal party differences over the war in Gaza and abate the worrisome gathering storm posed by a potential massive loss of the youth vote.
But the foregoing is particularly easier said than done in an election year, considering the chokehold the Jewish lobby has on American politics by way of corralling a controlling stake in the media, Hollywood and banking and finance. Still, something quite unexpected seems to be happening that might impact the political calculus. 32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt once declared that “There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”
The ever-increasing worldwide spectacles of restive populations of university students and other youths protesting the horrifying scenes in the Gaza are reminiscent of era of the anti-Vietnam war protests and the hippie generation, epitomised by flagrant revolt against constituted authority and repudiation of established norms of societal behaviour.
A frustrated and flustered incumbent President Lyndon Johnson was forced by the poor handling of the youth revolt to abruptly renounce his re-election bid. But it didn’t end there. His deputy, Hubert H. Humphrey, aka “the happy warrior” – a very popular senator from Minnesota – who emerged as the flagbearer, was shellacked by Richard Nixon, the same candidate defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960, in the 1968 return match.
The only credible way this can be done is by being just as forceful in calling for the cessation of the indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip and the creation of a self-sustaining independent State of Palestine just as forcefully as it is guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist. Failure to do so would see Biden and Democrats suffer the same fate their candidate and party suffered in 1968!
Truth be told, the world lost the best chance to foster an enduring peace in Palestine when the UN inexplicably failed to implement Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 calling for the partition of the Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, with an international, UN-run body specifically established to administer Jerusalem.
The path to peace in the Middle East is now strewn with a multiplicity of bobby traps with no room for grandstanding. There’s already talk of a massive redeployment of IDF troops and equipment from northern Gaza to the border with Lebanon from where rocket attacks by Hezbollah has necessitated the evacuation of several northern Israeli towns. And the target assassination of a Hezbollah top commander is likely to heat up the already tense atmosphere.
Israel mustn’t be allowed to get away with creating the same kind of non sequitur “independent” homelands the White apartheid regime in South Africa gratuitously granted to Black South Africans. Just as the scheme miserably failed in South Africa, it will also fail to fly with Palestinians. A sovereign Palestine state must provide for contiguity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to foster an effective administration.
Given the enormous bad blood mutually generated over decades, such a country must not be completely enclosed inside Israel as Lesotho is in South Africa to preclude occasional ‘Big Brother’ hanky-panky. It would be preferable if the new state has a seaport of its own but to achieve this, Palestinians might have to give up part of northern West Bank.
The custodianship of the area within which the holiest sites of three religious denominations are sited – the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and King Solomon’s Temple Mount – should be withdrawn from the Jordanian royal family – the Hashemites – and handed over to a UN agency.
Millions of Palestinian refugees who live in the Diaspora as a consequence of the birthing of Israel must be resettled and appropriately compensated. Numerous UN General Assembly and Security Council Resolutions affirming “the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes” and “an overriding necessity for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem” have been passed but a contemptuous non-compliance has been the norm on the part of Israeli authorities.
The non-compliance is attributable to the propensity of the US to use its veto power in a one-sided manner that provides Israel the elbow room it needs to ‘do and undo.’ There may consequently be the need to reform the manner in which Security Council members use their veto power, but this is a topic for another day.
It is a great irony that the Jews who suffered so much persecution in Europe and were massacred in their millions by the evil Hitler Nazi government on the bases of race and creed feel neither empathy nor sympathy for what they are forcing Palestinians to experience.
“You may call for peace as loudly as you wish,” bellowed Russian-born American newspaper editor Max Lerner, “but where there’s no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.” The deep gulf of mutual distrust and reciprocal scepticism about the other party’s commitment to upholding obligations in an eventual bilateral agreement cannot be easily bridged, meaning that there must first be a buy-in by the Arab League. International ‘Peace Sheriffs’ – comprising the triad of China, Russia and the US – would have to stand as guarantors and enforcers of any peace agreement for a period not less than 50 years.
- Concluded
