Friday, March 29, 2024

EDITORIAL – What shall become of the Palestinians?

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PALESTINIANS are indeed a hapless people, as nobody seems interested enough in their plight to raise a finger in their desire to reclaim their homeland.
The occasional feckless call by the United States and the United Nations rings hollow and is patronizing.
No superpower or bloc of nations with economic or political clout seems willing to commit to help them. Last week, President Barack Obama, in a rare policy shift, made yet another call for a non-militarized Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders “with mutually agreed swaps”.
This call was in keeping with UN resolutions and is regarded as a necessary ingredient to get the stalled peace process going. It was immediately shot down by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said a return to the pre-1967 borders would render Israel “indefensible”.
The United States’ support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state on the lines of the 1967 borders, albeit after a negotiated two-state peace settlement, is significant. It may have been to forestall the Palestinian threat of its declaration of independence at the UN in September.
This daring initiative, which has already obtained support from some Latin American states, to gain international recognition of a Palestinian state is opposed by the United States. This is why Obama has warned the Palestinians not to take that course of action.
Mr Obama’s insistence on a peace deal based on the borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war has naturally created an angry response in Israel. It is being perceived as a major United States policy shift and is likely to be stymied by Congress. 
There has been little progress in over 30 years, so history has not been kind to Palestine. Since the 1978-1979 Camp David Accord, successive American administrations have supported a two-state solution, the prime condition for which is Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it occupied in the 1967 war.
In 1993, President Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a declaration of principles, with United States’ President Bill Clinton among the co-signatories, calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories, with a final settlement to be in place in April 1999.
Former president George Bush floated the 2003 Road Map and the 2007 Annapolis Declaration and, like all previous accords, were consistent with two UN resolutions that had reaffirmed the principle of an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories.
Both were eventually scuttled.In last Thursday’s speech, Mr Obama said the future Palestinian state should have borders with Israel, Egypt and Jordan. This is not acceptable to Israel, as it does not intend to withdraw from the fertile Jordan valley.
In the meantime, Palestinians continue to suffer the indignity of being a stateless people in their own land. All this talk of peace in the Middle East for over 30 years is nothing more than a sham.
 

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