Press Room

AAI in the News

Give Peace a Chance

By Claude Salhani
United Press International
Posted on Saturday December 6, 2003

WASHINGTON- One cannot help but wonder why Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is so opposed to the new peace initiative known as the Geneva Accords. Ironically, so are the extremist Palestinians—Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You would think that given the intensity of the violence that has descended upon Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, any relief would we welcomed with an open mind.

The Geneva Accords, authored by Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister and Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former Palestinian information minister, have taken the two antagonists into previously uncharted waters. The two men have been bold enough to address the thorny issues that for the past 55 years have stumped all negotiators who dared to venture into the murky waters that is the Middle East muddle.

Beilin and Abed Rabbo have even tackled the two most sensitive issues in the long-standing Palestinian-Israeli dispute—that of the status of Jerusalem and the fate of the 3.5 million Palestinians currently living in refugee camps strewn across the Levant.

Jerusalem, they say will be shared as the capital of the two countries—Israel and the future Palestinian state. In fact, Jerusalem, as anyone who has been to that Holy city already knows, is de facto home to both communities and no amount of walls, miradors, ditches, razor wire and armed soldiers are ever likely to alter that reality.

The refugee issue—over which previous talks stalled and fumbled—has also been addressed. Except for a very limited number, the majority of them would not be allowed to return to their previous homes, in what is now Israel. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who previously rejected President Clinton’s Camp David peace initiative because it left the Palestinian refugees hanging in eternal political limbo, has cautiously—and with some reservation—endorsed the new plan.

For Israel, that is a point of paramount importance, seeing that a sudden influx of Arab residents would spell demographic disaster and augur the end of the Jewish state. As it stands, Israel’s current Arab population is likely to reach parity with the Jewish inhabitants within the next generation or two, at the most. Which makes Sharon’s reluctance all the more incomprehensible. Instead of grabbing at the chance of peace, the Israeli prime minister seems instead to rely on walls and fences and a piece of Palestinian land.

President George W. Bush, a staunch supporter of Sharon, and Israel, said the new peace plan was “productive.” Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute called the Geneva Accords “a firestorm in the Middle East.” Speaking to a select group of people gathered in a Washington hotel Friday night at a function promoting the Geneva plan, Zogby said that this initiative shatters the “myth that the conflict was unresolvable. It reinstated a peace discourse,” he said. “The seeds have been planted in Geneva and will grow.”

The reality is that this peace sets a precedent in the Middle East peacemaking process, which has been stagnating and moving backwards, particularly since the eruption of the second intifada, or uprising. Unlike previous attempts at settling the long-standing dispute, the authors of this accord bravely went straight to the target, looked at the end game and addressed each issue.

“This is not the work of dreamers,” said Zogby. “It was the work of fighters.” In the words of Israel’s Gen. Annon Lipkin-Shahak, a supporter of the unofficial initiative, it is the work of “committed people for peace.”

The authors of the Geneva Accords and their supporters say that the accords are not meant to replace the Road Map—the document drawn up by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia and meant to bring about peace and a Palestinian state—but rather, it is meant to complement it.

In truth, the road map hit a dead end long ago. The Geneva Accords is the insert in the road map that will bring it out of the impasse where it now resides. However, those opposed to it—Sharon and the extremists on the Palestinian side – should, in the words of former Beatle John Lennon, first “give peace a chance.”