Walter Russell Mead has written an interesting article about the Middle East conflict for the American Interest that attempts to rise above Arab-Israeli partisanship. But rather than, as is usual with such pieces, blaming both sides, Mead rightly seeks to distribute some of the responsibility for the continuance of the conflict to other sources.
While dismissing both the Israeli and Arab narratives as too narrow in perspective, he rightly blames Britain for setting the conflict in motion early in the 20th century and the failure of the international community to separate or protect Jews and Arabs from each other in the months and years prior to Israel’s War of Independence. He thinks it’s time for the world to make amends for that and to take the steps necessary to end the conflict now.
To that end, he proposes that well-meaning foreign observers who are not shy about giving opinions about Israel or the Palestinians pitch in with the wherewithal to actually help things rather than merely make them worse. What does he want them to do? To stop sending advice to the Palestinians and to replace it with “visas, jobs and money.” Since there is, according to him, no room in the West Bank and Gaza for the millions of descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees who oppose any two-state solution that will not give them the right to “return” to what is now Israel, what must happen is that “self-righteous Europeans will have to interrupt their Israel-bashing to make room for some new Palestinian immigrants who will have the full right to become citizens.”
These refugees and their descendants should be compensated for their losses and allowed to emigrate to the West from an Arab world that has kept them in squalid camps to be used as props in the ongoing war against Israel. To his credit, he adds that the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who came to Israel and the West in the 1940s and 1950s (and whose fate has never interested Israel’s critics) should be similarly compensated, both for the sake of justice and to ensure Israel’s support for the project.
This all makes a lot of sense. Which is why it will never happen.
Mead writes, “Palestinians will reject any peace agreement that ignores their rights and needs.” That’s true. But the problem here is that the Palestinians don’t have the same view of “their rights and needs” as Mead or any other objective observer. Palestinian nationalism didn’t come into being as a movement to better the lives of ordinary Palestinians or to secure reasonable redress for their wrongs. It came into existence to oppose Zionism. The dynamic of Palestinian political culture is such that any agreement — whether for two states or three, or for refugee compensation — that legitimizes the existence of a Jewish state within any borders, be they of 1967, 1949 or any other date, is a betrayal.
As Mead says, if peace were “just a question of the West Bank, we could probably fudge a solution.” But giving the refugees a degree of justice isn’t what the Palestinians want. They want there to be no Israel, and that is why, contrary to common sense and to the frustration of the rest of the world, they have “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to make peace. If it were just a matter of the West coming up with the cash and the visas to resettle the refugees, there would have been peace 60 years ago. The Arab refugees won’t be resettled (as the Jews have been without international assistance), because doing so means that Israel is here to stay. While Mead comes closer than most observers to understanding what is at the core of the conflict, he ignores the basic fact that his elegant solution, even if it were taken up by the Obama administration as he hopes, would never satisfy the Palestinians.
