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Recognizing Israel's Achievements Does Not Negate Palestinian Suffering, But It Is Time to Move On

[Guardian-UK] Carlo Strenger - The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more than 100 years old. Along with many others in Israel I am committed to ending it. But time and again, Israel's critics raise the question of whether Israel's existence is legitimate. Instead of working towards the realization of the two-state solution, they keep the option in public discourse that Israel will disappear from the map. Most Jewish Israelis are not willing to move ahead as long as they have reason to think that a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is only meant as a step on the way to erasing Israel altogether. Unfortunately, this suspicion is not sheer paranoia: Hamas to this day is committed explicitly to Israel's annihilation, and others continue to think that Israel should be replaced by a binational state west of the Jordan River. The first step is to get history right. Palestinians were not just passive victims in what they call the Nakba, as if it had been something like a natural catastrophe. Far from being only victims, they made decisions like choosing to follow Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who formed close ties with Nazi Germany. Arab rejection of the Jewish presence created a zero-sum-game that made the attempts of Jewish leaders like Magnes and Buber to seek cooperation and coexistence with Palestinian Arabs irrelevant. The Palestinians could have accepted the UN partition plan of 1947. They chose not to. If the Arab armies that attacked the fledgling state of Israel had won, not a single Jew would have been allowed to stay in Palestine, and countless would have been killed. The writer teaches at the psychology department of Tel Aviv University and serves as a member of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists.
2009-10-16 06:00:00
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