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In the conflict between Israel and
the Arab states there is one bag of issues, one could say.
That is the bag of issues relating to the war of 1967 and its consequences.
In the negotiations between Israel and Egypt, or Syria,
or Jordan, the issues that Israel, has to deal with
are the territorial matters arising from its conquests in 1967.
Peace with Egypt is possible if you give the territory
conquered from Egypt in 1967 back to the Egyptian people.
But between Israel and Palestine, there are two sets of issues, not just 1967.
There is the 1948 set of issues, which is even more complicated, more demanding,
and far more difficult for the Israelis to address than those of 1967.
The 1967 issues are those that relate,
,as we have seen in the Oslo Accords, to territory and to Jerusalem.
These are matters that Israel can concede on in principle without eroding
the nature of the Israeli state as the nation state of the Jewish people.
But Israel cannot address the 1948 questions
.without touching upon its very essence :and the 1948 questions are two
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One is the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper, and
the other is the question of the political, collective rights
of the Palestinian people who are citizens of the State of Israel itself.
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That Israel cannot address without opening the questions
of Israel's very being as the nation state of the Jewish people.
Therefore the 1967 issues, as difficult as they may be,
are far easier to address than those of 1948.
And the 1948 issues don't exist in the set of issues that Israel has to deal with,
with the Arab states: Syria, and Egypt, and Lebanon, and Jordan too.
as states do not have 1948 questions with Israel, but the Palestinians do, and
that makes the creation of a long-standing agreement that would end the conflict for
all time, much more difficult to attain.
,On the Israeli-Palestinian domain there is also an unbridgeable
clash of the narratives.
If, for Israel, the creation of the state of Israel was an act of
Jewish self-defense against ,their pitiful history
from the Palestinian point of view, this was never an act of self-defense,
but an act of aggression from the very beginning
of Jewish settlement in Palestine.
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From the Palestinian point of view, the creation of Israel was
the epitome of injustice, quite the opposite.
These are not narratives that are close to each other.
These are narratives that the distance between them is so
great that they are virtually impossible to bridge.
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The very being of the Palestinian people, Palestinian-ness,
the identity of the Palestinians, is as Beshara Doumani,
an American-Palestinian academic has described,
being Palestinian is based on the "shared memories of the traumatic uprooting of
their society and the experiences of being dispossessed, displaced, and stateless."
It is these factors that were to come to define Palestinian-ness.
Palestinian so defined is very difficult for
Israelis to come to term with.
It is very difficult for Palestinian-ness so defined to come to terms with Israel.
The failure of the talks at Camp David, and the failure of the Oslo
process gave way to what became known as the Second Intifada.
The Second Intifada, the second uprising the Palestinians against
the continued Israeli occupation was very different from the first one.
The Second Intifada was not a civilian, unarmed uprising of demonstrations by men,
and women, and, and young boys and girls against the Israelis.
The Second Intifada was the Intifada of the suicide bombers.
Perhaps the most violent confrontation between the Israelis and
the Palestinians ever since 1948.
This campaign of suicide bombings in Israel that took over
a thousand of Israeli lives over the ,the next few years
if intended to soften Israeli positions ,they did not. Quite the opposite
Israeli positions were hardened very significantly
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And if the bombings were taking place in Jerusalem,
Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, ,and the other towns of Israel
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By using this kind of armed struggle,
the Palestinians again delegitimized their own movement themselves by
carrying out acts which were deliberately ,designed to take civilian lives
and therefore exposed them to the condemnation, again, as terrorists.
Professor Asher SusserSenior Research Fellow
