By Isaac Yetiv, PhD
LA JOLLA, California–Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The century-old Arab-Israeli conflict provides a vivid and tragic illustration of this observation. In the last 60 years, a dozen U.S. presidents,Democrats and Republicans, and more than a dozen of Israeli Prime Ministers from the Left and from the Right offered substantive concessions to reach a modus vivendi with their neighbors without success.
The “peace process” saw many “processors” and special envoys, and conferences at Camp David, Taba, Madrid, Annapolis; various programs and methodologies were tried (Quartet, Road Map, Land –for-Peace, Two-state solution etc.), and all came to naught. Constant Arab rejectionism prevented any accord. . We have now a president who heralded “Change we can believe in” and who is not averse to 180 degrees about-faces. He extended a hand of peace to the Muslim world with respect; he even told them that “his family is Muslim,” thus enhancing his credibility.At this juncture, he is the only power in the world that could inaugurate a new policy of ‘tough love” by telling the Arab world the truth they never wanted to hear.
The new approach in the Middle-East requires fresh and original thinking: 1) First and foremost, Resolve the refugee problem: After WWII more than a hundred million refugees in the world have been settled peacefully among their peoples with whom they shared culture, religion, and language (Hindus and Pakistanis, Germans in the Sudeten lands, Jews from Arab countries who were absorbed in the Jewish state, and others.) The only refugees who continue, after 60 years and three generations, to live in squalor and despair in refugee camps are the Palestinians. One of the worst blunders of the UN was to absolve the Arab world of any obligation to care for their brethren. The UN created UNWRA , a well-meaning agency that has practically adopted the refugees ,and their generations of offspring , by seeing to all their needs, thus creating an abject dependency. The UNRWA is funded mainly by the West ( EU: 50% ; US:31%) while the wealthy Muslim countries provide only 7%. . Let us not kid ourselves: There is no solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict before the refugee problem is resolved.
Recent history has shown that the refugee problem was the ubiquitous stumbling block to any agreement: Arafat at Camp David was given everything he wished for and then some, but he could not bring himself to sign a peace treaty with Israel that does not recognize “the return of the refugees” to Israel proper, not to the new state of Palestine (a demand tanatamount to the annihilation of the Jewish state.)
The Saudi peace initiative of 2002, accalaimed by the West as “moderate and a good basis for negotiations” included the same demand, albeit vaguely sweetened. And even the so-called “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah in the West Bank, never ceases to repeat the same non-negotiable demand . What is needed is a huge Marshall-like program of resettlement of the Arab refugees among their own people, culture, language and religion. We need not dismantle the UNRWA,as many experts have suggested, we need only to change the meaning of the letter R in the acronym: from relief to resettlement.
While the resolution of the refugee problem is essential for the achievement of a genuine peace, it must be accompanied with other measures to transform the Palestinian society from one that glorifies death and martyrdom to one that values life, peace and prosperity.
2) President Obama should tell the Saudis, in no uncertain terms, that they need to close the thousands of madrassas which inculcate Wahabi Islamic doctrines to the tender minds of the Arab youth, or to transform their curricula ,adding math, science, world history etc…They must also prohibit the funding of terrorist organizations.
3) Abbas and Fatah should be told categorically that their rhetoric of hatred,death,and martyrdom should cease; their school textbooks need to be re-written and purged of the venomous propaganda against Israel and America ( the only countries that can deliver anything to them) which they have been inculcating to their children, generation after generation. Schoolboys and girls have been officially “taught” that “the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys…” and that the highest achievement is “to die gloriously as a shaheed, a martyr. Today, films are shown at schools, mosques, youth camps…in which six-year-old boys and girls appear with all the accoutrements of a suicide bomber,chanting “poetry” of violence and death .
4) It is imperative that the leaders of the moderate Arab countries , our allies, pressure vigorously their muftis to issue a fatwa on the great sin of suicide which Islam ,as well as Judaism and Christianity, expressly prohibits. The Qur’an equates suicide with the denial of the oneness of God, which is an unforgivable sin (dhum la yughfar lah) , and no other consideration can make it halal , permitted.
As things stand now, without these reforms, any talk of a Palestinian state is premature and even detrimental to that same goal. “More of the same” and “business as usual” will, as in the past, do more harm than good. An artificial state, concocted in haste before the resolution of the refugee problem and before a huge and sincere effort to re-educate the masses, especially the children, is like spraying a coat of paint on rusted iron. The “state” will not suddenly metamorphose into a peace-loving democratic society. Rather, it will become an international beggar state and a seething irredentist agent of instability, and possibly a front of well-organized international jihadist movement, as Afghanistan used to be before nine-eleven.
I think our hands are already full with the intractable problems of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran,and Pakistan. Why volunteer for more?
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Yetiv, a native of Tunisia who served on the city council in Haifa, Israel, is now a lecturer and resident in San Diego