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From the Editor
Choosing Windows over Walls
The security wall Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is building between his country and the Palestinian territories is a monument to failure. It memorializes the inability of two governments to envision anything but endless strife between their peoples.
Sharon supporters and loyalists of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat trade recriminations over the barrier: Israelis label it “Arafat’s wall,” meaning that his incitement of violent resistance against the Israeli occupation made the wall necessary; Palestinians decry Sharon’s “wall of shame.” Meanwhile, other Palestinians and Israelis collectively strive to create openings for a resolution of their entwined grievances.
Explaining his support for the Geneva Accord, an unofficial plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unveiled in Switzerland on Dec. 1, Israeli writer David Grossman told the French magazine Jeune Afrique L’intelligent, “We have tried all imaginable wars. The moment has come to undertake all the peace that is possible.”
Joining Grossman, let us now praise the initiative’s architects, Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, along with Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh, authors of a grass-roots peace petition known as the People’s Voice, and all those who push past cynicism and its sibling, despair, to forge a new definition of the possible in the Middle East.
For their efforts, Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister and member of Knesset, and Rabbo, a former Palestinian information minister, have been branded as traitors, dismissed as dreamers, and derided as meddling nuisances by officials and extremist elements of their respective societies.
Despite attempts to discredit them, Beilin and Rabbo’s proposed answers to the so-called “final-status” questions that derailed the Oslo peace process—what Israeli writer and Geneva Accord supporter Amoz Oz calls the conflict’s “radioactive core”—have started something important. Their audacious assumption that there is a constructive alternative to the prevailing dynamic of violence and domination has captured the attention of the international press and revived debate about how to get onto a track toward coexistence.
Fifty-eight former presidents, prime ministers, foreign secretaries, and other leaders have endorsed the plan. Interest from Washington and other capitals has renewed pressure on Arafat and Sharon to budge from the status quo. Their proxies now feel compelled to become interlocutors in the rekindled conversations about peace. In mid-December, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia lent his support to Egyptian-sponsored talks with Palestinian militant groups aimed at a cease-fire with the Israelis. When Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert broke a Likud taboo in a Dec. 5 Yediot Aharonot interview by suggesting a unilateral withdrawal from most of the occupied territory to preserve Israel’s Jewish character, he described his stunning shift as a “right-wing line” to counter “the line that Beilin is offering.”
Geneva tackles head-on what Oslo left to the end of the road: creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state in exchange for unequivocal Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s right to exist; dismantling of illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory; division of Jerusalem into two capitals; granting Palestine control of the holy Jerusalem site Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews call the Temple Mount; forfeiting most Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their pre-1948 homes inside Israel.
Building from such a blueprint is neither painless nor without cost: Each side must forfeit precious preconceptions. Still, it’s a small price to pay for replacing deadlock with live options.
