Looking for Mid-East peace in two new right places

Salt shakers
November 2003

Looking for Mid-East peace in two new right places
Can "bottom up" initiatives break the increasingly bloody stalemate between Israel and the Palestinian Authority? Two new efforts offer small signs of hope amid the squalor of Mid-East violence.

A two-and-a-half year negotiation between Israeli and Palestinian non-politicians has achieved an unofficial people's breakthrough in the seeming endless conflict. In a stark contrast to the continued deadly recalcitrance of the Middle East's official leadership, who seem content to engage in a progressively more violent campaign of terrorist strikes and indiscriminate retaliations, negotiators of the Geneva Accord worked through some of the most contentious issues between Israelis and Palestinians. The accord has already drawn the support of United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Even Pope John Paul II has expressed his support for the informal "treaty."

Meanwhile a petition drive in support of a set of principles for a peace deal has collected 100,000 Israeli and 60,000 Palestinian signatures in just three months.

The Geneva Accord initiative was spearheaded on the Israeli side by Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the moribund Oslo Accords, and former minister Yasser Abed Rabbo for the Palestinians. The plan, dubbed the Geneva Accord in tribute to the funding and support supplied by the Swiss Foreign Ministry, offers itself as a decisive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the plan drawn up by former U.S. President Bill Clinton after the breakdown in the July 2000 talks between former prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.

At the heart of the proposal is a Palestinian concession on the right of return to lands within the State of Israel in exchange for sovereignty over the Temple Mount. The plan also calls for an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. The proposal was met with furious disapproval by the Sharon government, which accused Israelis involved in the initiative of trying to act in place of a democratically-elected government, but it has drawn some support from from the Palestinian Authority.

Together the petition and the accord efforts may be invigorating peace-oriented discussions among the two peoples. In early November more than 100,000 people attended a Tel Aviv rally in memory of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who pursued a peace deal with the Palestinians until he was assassinated in 1995. The crowd was the largest peace gathering in Israel in several years.

Average Israelis and Palestinians may have finally become fed up, waiting for their governments to achieve peace or for the Bush administration to meaningfully intervene in the political morass.

"In general the Americans are not thinking in terms of moving forward in any dramatic fashion in this area," Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian university president and a founder of the drive to collect signatures, told the Christian Science Monitor.

"Our leaders," said Nusseibeh's partner-in-peace Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's domestic security service, "[have] lost the courage to say what they believe in, and they are expecting us to tell them."

Like the set of principles drawn up by Ayalon and Nusseibeh, the Geneva Accord envisions a state of Palestine situated in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip (with land swaps to make up for settlement areas that would be annexed to Israel) and a shared administration of Jerusalem. The accord foresees the two sides splitting sovereignty over Jerusalem's holiest sites; the Ayalon/Nusseibeh principles say neither side will have sovereignty. Both rule out Israeli settlement in the Palestinian state. Both specify a demilitarized Palestine.

The two documents treat the issue of Palestinian refugees—those dispossessed from their homes in what is now Israel and their descendants—slightly differently. The Ayalon/Nusseibeh principles say there will be no Palestinian "right of return" to Israel; the Geneva Accord would allow Israel to determine how many Palestinian refugees it will accept and says that living in the state of Palestine "shall be the right of all Palestinian refugees."

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