The road to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has been littered with a plethora of faulty premises, broken promises and hollow pronouncements. Not by resolution, plan, framework, initiative, declaration, summit, accord, or conference – all catchwords that have been used at various times to emphasize the perceived importance of the respective proposals – has anything substantive emerged that might have brought an enduring peace any closer.
As columnist David Frum reminds us (National Post, Jan. 12), there is the old joke that the Middle East peace process is “all process, no peace.” And the odds that the perpetual stalemate will be broken post-Annapolis and in the wake of U.S. President George W. Bush’s recent visit to the region are slim indeed. There’s hardly a pundit who is predicting anything but more of the same.
Regrettably, what has emerged both before and since Annapolis is an overly forceful reaffirmation by the Palestinians that their “right of return” is inalienable and that without it, no deal with Israel is possible. The implication of this demand is no longer camouflaged, nor can it be ignored.
No less than code for the rejection of Israel as a Jewish state and the denial of Israel’s sovereignty over its own land, it looms large as the major sticking point in any current or future discourse between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
In paraphrasing comments attributed to Bush, a Jerusalem Post editorialist (Jan. 12) stated that Bush “has realized that it is not enough for the U.S. to leave the ‘right of return’ as a final status issue.” Instead, it “must be taken off the table now, because it stands in fundamental contradiction to the entire two-state concept.”
In essence, what we have is an American president who is hopeful that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is possible by year’s end. Yet, this same president has simultaneously declared that a sine qua non of the Palestinian position is a non-starter. So what are the chances this time of peace rather than just more (futile) process?
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In her letter to the editor (“Response to Hart”, CJN, Jan. 10), Rebecca Woods Baum seems to have completely missed the point of my Dec. 20 column, “Time to reclaim our campuses.” There’s no question that promoting the normalcy and many virtues of the State of Israel is laudable and should be encouraged. Nor should there be any doubt that reaching out to uninformed or undecided students is a good thing. However, if Baum truly believes that these strategies – and playing (video) games – are the be-all and end-all of campus advocacy, it’s little wonder that anti-Zionist incidents of the sort that have occurred recently at York and Ryerson universities, as well as the University of Toronto, went unchecked.