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Coming Out as an Arab Advocate of Peace with Israel

(Dispatch) Hussain Abdul-Hussain - As a student in Lebanon in the 1990s, I believed that the Jewish state sought to occupy Arab lands "from the Euphrates to the Nile," and I was hardly alone. I immigrated to Washington in 2004, where I started consuming everything Hebrew. Yet to this day I have not visited Israel. Doing so would risk entanglement with Lebanese authorities during my visits to Beirut. Still, I came to see that Zionism is not a conspiracy, but the basic idea that the long history of antisemitism and Jewish suffering, culminating in the Holocaust, created the need for a sovereign Jewish homeland. For Israel, that sovereignty is non-negotiable. It should not be surprising that some Arab states finally decided that there was no point in waiting for Palestinians to accept a version of the two-state solution that did not embed within it a demographic threat to Jewish sovereignty. Was it their obligation to perpetuate an endless conflict and harm their own interests in the name of solidarity? Saudi Arabia has been inching closer to peace with Israel, with its media leading the way, including Al-Arabiya's unprecedented interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month. Saudi networks have started inviting Israeli pundits on their shows, a practice that remains taboo on most Arab channels. While Riyadh and Jerusalem negotiate, Arab advocates of peace have a crucial role to play. The first step is to defy pervasive shaming by fellow Arabs and come out as proponents of normalization. Their voices can help bring peace talks across the finish line, because fear of a public backlash is precisely what constrains so many Middle Eastern leaders who would prefer to treat Israel as a neighbor, not an enemy. The writer is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
2023-02-09 00:00:00
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