Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday outlining his views on Arab-Israeli peace-making offered nothing new, which is why it represents an important challenge for the Arab world that deserves more than perfunctory rejection. Netanyahu reiterated core, hard-line Zionist positions that most of the world finds unreasonable, and most of the Arab world finds racist, in giving Israeli Jews greater primacy or rights over Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims.
In demanding that the Arabs declare, a priori, that the state of Israel must be Jewish, secure and militarily more powerful than its neighbors, Netanyahu has given a speech couched in biblical dimensions. He wants Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa to guarantee Israeli Jews today what God promised the ancient Hebrews in the biblical books of Deuteronomy, Exodus and Numbers: eternal, exclusive, pure, powerful, secure statehood in a land owned by others that will be miraculously ethnically cleansed with Divine mandate and legitimacy to make room for a Jewish state.
Netanyahu's speech was aimed at two primary and two secondary audiences: primarily, US President Barack Obama and Netanyahu's own right-wing coalition government partners; and, secondarily, public opinion in the Arab world and Israel. The two important battles the Israeli prime minister faces are to hold together his right-wing coalition and to maintain the close US-Israeli strategic relationship. He outlined positions that he thought would achieve these goals, and probably correctly read the pressures on him in both cases. He also totally ignored the rest of Arab and Israeli public opinion, in the best manner practiced by professional politicians who care only for their incumbency and by nationalist-supremacists who view their people's rights as superior to that of others.
Netanyahu did not offer plausible peace conditions; he merely offered to enter into a protracted negotiating process that he knows will go nowhere due to his very harsh opening position. The idea that his "acceptance" of a Palestinian state is a breakthrough or a major step forward, as many in the West have described it, combines insult and ignominy. The imbalance between national and individual rights that Netanyahu ascribes to Israel and to the hypothetical Palestinian "state" is so severely in Israel's favor that talk of a "two-state" solution becomes comical, and should be more accurately described as "slave statehood."
Netanyahu would like us to spend years discussing what Israel means when it says it will live with a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, accepts continued growth of settlements, and does not insist that the right of return for Palestinian refugees from 1948 be recognized. These are not new positions. Previous Israeli governments have negotiated on the basis of two states, an Israeli and a Palestinian one, being the outcome of negotiations.
Netanyahu now wants the Arabs and the world to accept Israeli preconditions as the starting point for talks, and he will use the American insistence on freezing all settlement activity as a key negotiating card to win concessions on other issues, especially refugees. He will also try to get Palestinians and Arabs to engage in an endless round of talks that will either repeat the fruitless cycle we experienced from the Madrid talks in 1992 until today, or wear down the Arab side until it surrenders.
Neither of these alternatives will happen, which is why the Netanyahu speech is important. It clarifies the official Israeli position, which is at great odds with the Palestinian and Arab position, and at some odds with the American position as articulated by Obama. Much faster than was expected, within just five months of Obama's inauguration, we are witnessing important potential turning points in the Middle East. US-Israeli positions are diverging on some issues, such as settlements, as Washington seems serious about renewing its role as a mediator in order to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, permanently and comprehensively.
If the US and Israeli positions are clearer, the Arab position is not. As long as the Arab world merely rejects Israeli positions, calls on the United States to do more, and sits around waiting for others to rescue it from its diplomatic incompetence, we should not be surprised to hear the kinds of things that Netanyahu said. The Americans have declared an intention to re-engage. The Israelis have declared an intention to dig in and cement their supremacist, colonial ways. The Arabs have done nothing more than repeat old positions that have impressed and moved nobody.
The combination of the new American posture in the Middle East and the reaffirmation of hard-line Israeli positions should be an opportunity for the Arab world to work more seriously than before in generating momentum for progress towards a negotiated peace, in a manner more eloquent and effective than merely rejecting Zionism's colonial ways.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.
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