Alexactus T Kaure
3 July 2009
column
IS the Israeli-Palestinian conflict permanently stuck on the peace-making highway or is the final destination finally in sight? Is there a glimmer of hope to ending this ongoing conflict and the human tragedy it engenders?
I'm posing these questions in the light of President Barack Obama's high profile visit to the Middle East and wanting to reach out to Muslims across the world. Obama's speech in Cairo has rekindled hope of and revived interest in resolving this long-running crisis. He reiterated American support for "the two-state solution" and also called on Israel to freeze all settlement activities in the occupied territories.
The current framework for peace dates back to the 1993 Oslo Accord between Palestinians and Israelis. It sets out the so-called "two-state solution" - Israel and an independent Palestine living peacefully side by side.
This arrangement has been criticised by some. Early this year, for example, Herbert Jauch wrote in The Namibian that: "The PLO leadership capitulated in 1993 by signing the Oslo Agreement as it essentially gave up the demand for national self-determination and dropped its resistance to Israel's illegal occupation."
Bu what are the alternatives? How about some limited victory as opposed to a total one? One understands the sentiments, not to say the mentality, of those involved in conflicts of this nature. Because any gain for one side is immediately conceived as a potentially fatal loss for the other side. So maybe some compromises might have to be made in the meantime in order to achieve long-term objectives. Namibia did precisely that in the case of Walvis Bay. We didn't say: 'no Walvis Bay, no independence'. We negotiated this later on. But the conditions and the issues involved are different, of course, and call for different negotiating strategies.
But in any case the international community is hoping for a positive outcome during the Obama's Administration. This is only human to expect.
But don't expect a smooth sailing on this front. The obstacle, in my view, would be the current hawkish Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Because it was him who stalled what many regarded as a 'sell-out solution' (the Oslo Accord), on the part of Palestinian, during his first term as PM from 1996 to 1999. And he is back again as a Prime Minister and doesn't seem to have changed much of his ways.
He is still insisting on maintaining Israeli control of Palestinian air and sea lanes, ruling out the return of Palestinian refugees and rejecting US calls to freeze Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. These are not conducive conditions towards progress for 'the two-state solution'. That's why, for a lack of a better phrase, I'm calling for the application of the 'Southern African peace-making formula' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This entails a two-pronged approach. First resumption of serious negotiations between the two parties with mediation by the international community (or the so-called Quartet on the Middle East represented by a special envoy that consists of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations to iron some of the contested issues - status of Jerusalem, water, Israeli settlements, final borders, security issues and Palestinian refugees. The Quartet is almost like the Gang of Five (the five Western Contact Group) in the case of Namibia and South Africa.
But we have to be realistic on this lest it turn out to be one of those non-ending talks that end up producing nothing. In fact we have lost count of the many peace accords and agreements that have been signed over the years in the course of this conflict and never implemented.
The other approach is to treat Israel the way the international community treated the apartheid regime in SA. Israel is both an occupying and an apartheid state. Therefore if Israel continues to with its ways, then the international community must start to put real political and economic pressure on the Israeli government - economic and military sanctions as well as disinvestment by foreign companies doing business there.
This was applied in the case of SA and it worked. The Israeli allies in the West, and especially the USA, have to take the lead on this issue. It's the US that provides money and supply weapons to Israel to terrorise its neighbours and kill Palestinians en masse. It's therefore imperative that Obama take the lead on this if his Cairo's speech is anything to go by. One reason why a country like Iran is trying to develop its own nuclear weapons is because it is living in the shadow of a nuclear state - Israel. Countries like SA and Namibia should also help to drive the process because they benefited greatly from international solidarity. They should thus cut diplomatic ties with Israel and stop its companies from exploiting our resources - e.g. Lev Leviev Diamonds in Namibia - part of our diamonds is conflict diamonds. We are thus letting Palestinians down when they need our unwavering support and solidarity.
But in the end, Israelis and Palestinians must accept that the highest price of peace is to give up hopes of total victory by realising the limits of power.
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