No agenda, no hope, not so difficult to change

Gershon Baskin

November 10, 2006

Prime Minister Olmert is about to leave for Washington. If by some small chance President Bush should ask him what he is doing to advance peace, Olmert will not be able to answer.  He could challenge Bush by asking him the same question. He could look Bush in the eye and say “George, you know very well that neither of us is really interested in talking to them Arabs. So why don’t we go out to the press and make some nice speeches about the grand new middle east, bringing democracy to the natives, fighting global terrorism.  You know the routine; in fact you have a patent on it.”  George would probably say, “Ehud you are 100% correct, but listen bud, when you kill the Arabs, you’ve got to keep it out of the television.  Can’t you learn from us?”

Ehud will come back from Washington all smiles and hand shakes.  He will have met with some of the new Members of Congress and some of his old buddies there and have had a great time.  After all, the government of Israel has more support in Congress than it does in the Knesset.

But eventually Ehud will have to face reality.  He has put together a government that is equally incapable of implementing the Road Map as is the Palestinian government.  His government has no political agenda to advance peace.  He has become no less of a refusenik than Yitzhak Shamir. The latest evidence of this is the appointment of  Avigdor Lieberman to the “outpost committee”. This is no different than Mahmoud al Zahar as the Palestinian Foreign Minister.

While the Government of Israel is busying itself with political survival, the Palestinians may be moving forward towards a new national unity government. If the new PA government will be based on the “prisoners document” and the Arab League Peace Initiative, many will claim that the PA has given conditional recognition to Israel, e.g. if Israel agrees to withdrawal from all occupied territories the Palestinians will not only recognize Israel, they will make full peace with Israel, as will the rest of the Arab world. European governments will then begin to re-engage the Palestinian government and to transfer funds to it.  Instead of the PA being isolated, Israel will be come isolated as most of the world will agree that the Palestinians have moved far enough to be brought back into the fold. Israel will then be perceived as being the no-sayer, the refusenik, and the aggressive trouble maker of the region.

The world is very tired of this conflict.  Almost no one in the world has any doubts regarding the nature of the settlement that needs to be laid down by Israel and the Palestinians.  There are no serious questions in the minds of statesmen around the world regarding what the two-state solution looks like.  Even in Jerusalem and Ramallah and even in Gaza everyone knows what the solution looks like. The space for negotiations on the issues are actually quite small and don’t even require a lot of time.  What prevents us from getting there is primarily Israeli rejectionism which continues to create an impossible situation on the Palestinian side. Without a radical change in Israeli policies, no Palestinian leader, even the most moderate one in history, Abu Mazen, can have an impact on bringing about the change that he wants to happen.

Instead of twiddling his thumbs when speaking to George, this is what Ehud should tell Bush next week:

George, I have instructed my government and the army to do the following, and they are doing it now, as we speak:

• Open up the Karni transport terminal which thanks to the help of the US Government and General Dayton now has the capacity to take 400 trucks a day, did you know that in the entire month of September only 76 trucks passed through, and October wasn’t any better.

• Open up the Rafah crossing which has worked quite well, when we allowed it to be open, with Abu Mazen’s security force there and the European Observers.

• Open up the Erez crossing to allow a normal flow of business people, international aid workers, journalists and diplomats to pass through.

• Re-issue the BMC - the Businessman Card to thousands of Palestinian businessmen who are peaceful people working to build the Palestinian economy.

• Remove the internal checkpoints through the West Bank.  We would like to work with General Dayton and with Abu Mazen in the creation of a system of checkpoints that would be run by the Palestinian security force under Abu Mazen because we know that he too is against terrorism and is willing to work with us on preventing it.

• I will release thousands of Palestinian prisoners, especially the old, the sick and the veteran prisoners.  We will also release women and children.  We know that the Palestinians will then immediately release Gilead Shalit and I will ask them to influence the Hizbollah to release our abducted soldiers in Lebanon.

• As soon as I get back to Jerusalem, Abu Mazen and I will meet.  I have also instructed my government ministers to meet with their counterparts in the PA and to begin to rebuild the Israeli-Palestinian partnership in as many fields as possible.  We would like to resume negotiations on permanent status when I get back.  My proposal is that once we reach agreement on the principles of permanent status and the situation on the ground really changes for the better, we will then go back to the implementation of Phase I of the Road Map.  We will fully implement our part including the removal of all of the unauthorized outposts, even if it means that Avigdor Lieberman will leave the government!

• I’ve instructed our Ministry of Communication to release the radio transmitter of All for Peace Radio (107.2 FM) that has been locked in a warehouse in the port now for more than three years. We want this radio station that Washington has supported to succeed.  It will be our new voice of peace throughout the region.

• I would like you to ask Congress to allocate an additional $10 million a year which my government will match and we will ask other governments to do the same so that we can have a multi-million dollar fund to support peace-building activities between the Israeli and Palestinian civil societies.

• The Japanese government allocated funds for repairing the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah which is used by so many thousands of people everyday.  We have until now prevented the road from being repaired.  Well George, the work has begun and soon Palestinians will be able to travel there without destroying their cars.

• We want to move forward with a quick study on the best way to link Gaza and the West Bank.  We know that the US Army Corp of Engineers could help with this; maybe you could move some of them from Iraq to Jerusalem?

George, there’s a lot more that we can too. I believe that the people of Israel gave me a mandate to make peace.  We got a bit side-tracked during the summer, it must have been the heat, but we’re back on course now. This world needs leadership (thinking to himself: and you George are now a lame duck) and I can lead the Middle East towards peace, are you with me or against me?

What choice will George have?  Maybe even he can be inspired by Ehud.

Gershon Baskin is the Co-CEO of IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information  www.ipcri.org