What Netanyahu Should Say About Peace To The Arab World

It should be obvious to anyone who looks at the matter with a shred of honesty that the Middle East peace process as it now stands is a dead issue.

To show how futile it really is, let's take a look at the facts as they stand.

We now have a situation where the West's only course of action seems to be to have its 'preferred' Palestinian capo del tutti Mahmoud Abbas cobble together a unity government with Hamas, an admission in itself that all the billions in aid shovelled at Fatah to 'bolster Abbas' were simply wasted. Abbas now sits propped up by the West and the IDF in Ramallah without a shred of legitimacy, power or credibility, and any unity government would quickly become a Hamas government in both the Palestinian occupied areas of the West Bank and in Gaza.

And after that happens, the same people pushing for a Palestinian 'unity' government will demand that the Israelis somehow negotiate a peace settlement with a genocidal Hamas regime!

It will never happen.

But there is a way to achieve peace in the Arab Israeli conflict..or at least reveal what the real obstacles are, as opposed to the PR. Believe it or not, the solution is in the so-call Saudi Peace Plan of 2002, which has been endorsed by every member of the Arab League.

Now, I could be cynical (and I have been) over the real motivations of the Saudi plan..but I think the time has come for Israel to take this seriously, as an opening gambit to resolve the Arab Israeli conflict and respond in kind.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has been used as a rationale for Muslim attacks on the West for 60 years. Are the Arab nations serious about resolving it - or is it just an excuse for their own failed societies and a means of hoodwinking their own people and gullible westerners?

It's time we found out.

Now that Bibi Netanyahu will be Israel's next prime minister he has a golden opportunity to do exactly that. If I were Israel's Prime Minister, here's the proposal I'd make, broadcast simultaneously to the Arab world in Arabic, to his countrymen in Hebrew and to the rest of the world in English...and it would either be a major breakthrough or reveal whether the Arab nations, once and for all, were serious about peace in the Middle East with Israel:

"Salaam Aliekem, to our Arab brothers. I, the Prime Minister of Israel owe you an apology. You proposed a peace plan through the Arab League that you all have endorsed, and our country has been discourteous enough not to respond directly. I will do so now, in the hope and belief that you seriously want to end the differences between us.

This plan, endorsed by the entire Arab League in Beirut says, essentially, that if Israel retreats back to the pre-1967 borders including Jerusalem and allows all of the Palestinians who claim to be refugees and their descendants to return to Israel, you will respond with what you define as `normal relations.'

I think your proposal addresses all of the main issues between us that need to be dealt with; Jerusalem, the issue of borders, and justice for the refugees. I recommend that we address each one of them in a fair manner, with compassion and with a sense of justice.

I fully support a settlement for the refugees of the Arab Israeli conflict. We must, finally, have justice for the refugees who have been created because of the strife between us. There can be no peace without it.

We Jews know only too well the plight of being a refugee and the bitter pain of losing one's home. It has happened to us too many times in our history. It happened to some 400,000 of the Arabs living in what is now Israel, and it happened to 800,000Jews living in the Arab world in the years between 1948-1967.

There is no possibility now, after all that has happened of those Jews returning to their homes in the Arab world, just as there is no possibility of Arabs returning to their homes in what is now Israel. For either side to insist on this is not only to perpetuate this conflict between us, but to condemn us to interminable war in the future.

I propose the following solution to the problem of refugees: that Israel and the Arab nations cooperate together in setting up a joint committee to arbitrate, process and compensate financially the claims of all of the actual refugees from the conflict, Jewish and Arab, who lived either in what is now Israel or who were expelled from the Arab world as a result of the Arab Israeli conflict and who can also provide legal evidence to substantiate a claim from whichever nation expelled them.

There are numerous precedents for this kind of settlement of refugee issues in history, and they provide a model for us to use to move forward and finally address this. We must provide justice to all the refugees, and we must do it within the framework of the law.

Next, let us turn to the issue of borders, and the desire of the Arab nations to see Israel return to those borders that prevailed before the 1967 war, including half of our capitol, Jerusalem. Since Israel has settled its borders with Egypt and Jordan and has already returned over 80% of the land captured in that conflict, it is obvious that any further land demanded from Israel is intended for a 2nd Arab Palestinian State on our borders.

After much careful thought, I must respectfully say that a second Arab Palestinian state on our borders is an unacceptable risk to peace for us at this time. We wish it were not so, but we must deal with the reality of the last 60 years, and with the reality of Hamas. So much blood has been shed, and so much hatred voiced that we do not feel that a second Palestinian state living in peace next to Israel is possible.

At Oslo, Israel took a major risk for peace and provided the Palestinians with land for a state...perhaps not all that they wanted, but land, nevertheless. We then took another risk and evacuated Jews from their home in Gaza, with the idea that the Palestinians could start to achieve their own destiny there. After seeing how the Palestinians reacted to this, after looking at the results, we have come to the conclusion that these were mistakes. There is simply not room for two antagonistic countries to live next to each other in the small area available, and it is simply a recipe for failure. No country could be expected to live with rockets and mortars being fired at its civilians.

In the interests of peace between us, we would prefer that the areas of Gaza and the West Bank now occupied by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas be the subject of final settlement talks between Israel, Egypt and Jordan, with the idea of providing secure and final borders between our nations, establising homogeneous areas and integrating the Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively, as part of Egypt and Jordan. We enjoy peaceful relations with both nations, and according to Jordanian law all Arabs residing in the West Bank were Jordanian citizens until 1988 when the law was changed, so this is by no means impossible.

This is particularly fair in our eyes since a substantial part of the land where Jews now live in what we call Judea and Samaria and you call the West Bank - among them the Ariel and the Gush Etzion areas - was legally purchased through the Jewish National Fund from its Arab owners prior to 1948, and seized after that time with no compensation to the owners. We think it would be unfair to dispossess them of their homes a second time. I am certain that you also would recognize the unfairness and injustice of doing so.

Should Egypt and Jordan agree with this proposal, Israel is prepared to do its share to help with the logistic and financial issues involved. Others, such as the US, the UN and the EU who have expressed a desire to assist in promoting peace in our region would undoubtedly be prepared to help with these matters as well.

Should this be unacceptable, a second alternative we would be willing to discuss would be for the Arab nations to provide at least as much land for a future Palestinian State as Israel has provided for a Palestinian state, preferably away from our borders to eliminate any future conflict. Such generosity from the Arab world towards the Palestinians would be a major contribution towards peace in our region and a better life for the Palestinian people.

Jerusalem is the ancient capitol of Israel. It is the single most holy site of our religion, and the spiritual center of our nation and our people. Dividing it would be the equivalent of asking you to divide Mecca with non-Muslims. Yet, for the first 20 years of Israel's rebirth, we were faced with exactly that situation. After 1948, Jews were ethnically cleansed from East Jerusalem, old and historic synagogues were desecrated and destroyed and Jews were forbidden to access their holiest sites.

It is exactly that history, and the modern desecration of holy sites like the tomb of the ancient prophet Joseph and synagogues in Gaza that make us adamant that Jerusalem shall never be divided again.

We recognize that Jerusalem is holy to other faiths besides ours, and we have tried to honor that. I remind you that after 1967, not a single mosque in Jerusalem was destroyed or desecrated in retaliation for what happened 20 years before, and that the waqf in charge of the al Aksa mosque was allowed to remain in control of that area.

Unfortunately, the al Aksa mosque, which is the chief Muslim religious site in Jerusalem has become a symbol of the conflict between us. Erected as a symbol of conquest in the 7th century on the site of our destroyed Holy Temple, as long as it stands where it is Jerusalem will never be accepted by you as the capitol of Israel.

I propose that as part of a peace settlement between us, the al Aksa mosque be moved intact to a place of your choosing, and that Israel pay the cost and provide the labor to do so. As part of this settlement, Israel will also waive compensation and claims for the many synagogues that have been destroyed in the Arab world. Let the new location of the al Aksa mosque become a shrine to peace between our peoples...a settling of accounts and the start of a new beginning.

Not only will this sacrifice for peace on your part be a major symbol of good will between us, but it will allow us to rebuild the Beit Hamikdosh, the Third Holy Temple and thus fulfill the words of a prophet that Muslims also revere, Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall they learn war any more".

Let us make this come true now, and in our time. Let us sit down together like brothers and end this conflict, pursue justice and make a better future for our two peoples. Let us,the children of Abraham, provide an example to the world.

My heart is open, and I await your answer."

Would the Arabs react positively to this? Probably not.

But the way I see it, it's a win either way. For the Arabs to reject it out of hand would reveal that their peace plan is the ultimatum it actually is and that their real aim is not peace, but the conquest and ethnic cleansing of every Jew in Israel. That would provide a valuable clarity to the situation...particularly for the EU and for the current occupant of the White House.

On the other hand, if the Arabs did accept this overture and began negotiations on that basis (and there are certainly reasons why it would be to their advantage ) it would be the start of an actual and workable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict at long last.

At the very least, it's worth trying.