Solving refugee problem a must for Mideast peace

By Isaac Yetiv, PhD

LA JOLLA, California–In the last 65 years, a dozen U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans and  more than a dozen  Israeli Prime Ministers from the Left and from the Right repeatedly offered substantive concessions to the Arabs in order to reach a
modus vivendi for a peaceful coexistence of Arabs and Jews in the Middle-East. All these efforts came to naught. The “peace process” saw many  “processors” and special envoys, and conferences at Camp David, Taba, Madrid, Annapolis; and various programs and methodologies were tried  (Quartet,  Road Map,  Land-for-Peace, Two-state solution etc.), all in vain.

This sociopolitical “experiment” can be studied as a chemistry lab experiment.
If, for example,  you change the temperature, or the pressure, and nothing changes, you can conclude that it is not the temperature or the pressure that are the “cause,”  but something else. By analogy, we may conclude that it is not the politics,  or the policy, of this or that Israeli PM or US president  that “caused” the lack of  peace in the
Middle-East, but something else that must have been there all the time but was dismissed, ignored, or overlooked by the US foreign policy makers.

I submit here that it was and still is the constant Arab rejectionism  that has prevented any accord even when the benefits to the Arabs were tangible, substantial, irrevocable, and undoubtedly conducive  to autonomy, independence and  statehood.

In his book, Time to Tell, David Hacohen, one of the  Zionist Old-Guard,  reports that already in 1921 (90 years
ago) Moshe Sharett  (then Shertok)  met in London  with Palestinian leaders  led by Musa Kasim Pasha and offered them
“peace and cooperation for the  benefit of both peoples,” and they rejected his  advances. This was 27 years before the birth of Israel, 46 years before the six-day war and the so-called “occupation.”   In 1936, Jewish and Arab leaders met in Damascus; it again ended in failure.  In 1937, a meeting  with King Abdallah of Jordan  yielded the same results. The same year, the  Arabs rejected the first  partition offered by the Peel commission.  In 1939,  the Arabs rejected even  the anti-Jewish British White Paper that gave them a  state on 78 % of the   land.  On September 15,1947, Abba Eban and David
Horowitz met secretly with  the Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha,  and told him that   “the Jewish state to be was very interested inbeing integrated into  processes of  regional development and…in joining with the Arab states in a single league”  (Half a century later, this absurd suggestion was echoed by Beilin and Peres in their talks with Shaath and Abu Mazen, and Peres even dreamed it in his book,  The New Middle-East).  Azzam rejected their offer and told them bluntly that “the Arabs resented the Jewish presence as an  alien organism,  which had come without their consent…and that the Arabs  would never accept the Jews, ” adding  ominously:”  For the Arabs, you are not a  fact at all; you are a temporary  phenomenon.  Centuries ago, the Crusaders  established themselves in our midst against our will and in 200
years we ejected them…”  Ten weeks later, the UN Resolution on partition  and the creation of a Jewish and an Arab states was accepted by the Jews –I remember Haim Weizmann declaring he would accept a Jewish state even with
the size of a tablecloth– and rejected by the Arabs who swore to “throw the Jews into the sea” and who then attacked in force to fulfill that oath.

Immediately after their humiliating defeat in 1967, at the Khartoum Conference,  the Arabs formulated their infamous  “3 No’s” : “no negotiations, no recognition, no peace!”  Closer to us , the history,  the same, is well known: Oslo, Clinton-Barak’s offer,  Arafat’s  rejection and launching of the Al-Aqsa intifada and the terror of the suicide bombings.

The late Faisal Husseini, former PA “Minister of Jerusalem affairs,” in an  interview dated June 24, 2001,  said: ” …The Palestinian borders , according   to the higher strategy, are from the river to the sea.   Palestine in its entirety is
an Arab land,  the land of the Arab nation, a land no one can sell or buy, and  it is impossible to remain silent while someone is stealing it, even if this  requires time and even if  it means paying a high price.”

This was a brief history of the Arab rejectionism, constant, permanent, and contemporary, that should be taken
very seriously. We have now a president who heralded  “Change we can believe in”  and who is not averse to 180 degrees
about-faces.  He extended a hand of peace to the Muslim world with respect; he even told them that  “his family is Muslim,”  thus enhancing his credibility.  At this juncture, he is the only power in the world that could inaugurate a new policy of  “tough love” by telling the Arab world the truth they never wanted to hear.

The new approach in the Middle-East  requires fresh and original thinking:

1)  First and foremost,  Resolve the Refugee Problem: After WWII more than a  hundred million refugees in the world have been settled peacefully among  their peoples with whom they shared culture, religion, and language (Hindus
and Pakistanis, Germans in the Sudeten lands, Jews from Arab countries who were absorbed in the Jewish state, and others.) The only refugees who continue,  after 60 years and three generations,  to live in squalor and despair in refugee camps are the Palestinians.  One of the worst blunders of the UN was to absolve the Arab world of any obligation  to care for their  brethren.  The UN  created UNWRA,  a well-meaning agency that has practically adopted  the refugees,  and their generations of offspring,  by seeing  to all their needs,  thus creating an abject dependency.   The UNRWA is funded
mainly by the West (EU: 50% ; US:31%) while the wealthy Muslim  countries  provide only 7%.   Let us not kid ourselves:  There is no solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict before the refugee problem is resolved.

Recent history has shown that the refugee problem was the ubiquitous stumbling block to any agreement.   Arafat at Camp David was given  everything he wished for and then some, but he could not bring himself to sign a peace treaty with Israel that does not recognize  “the return of the refugees” to Israel proper, not to the new state of Palestine  (a demand tanatamount to the annihilation of the Jewish state.)  The Saudi peace initiative of 2002, acclaimed by the West as “moderate and  a good basis for negotiations” included the same demand, albeit vaguely  sweetened. And even
the so-called “moderate”  Mahmoud Abbas,  the leader of  Fatah in the West Bank, never ceases to repeat the same non-negotiable demand.

What is needed is a huge Marshall-like program of resettlement of the Arab refugees among their own people, culture, language and religion.  We need not dismantle the UNRWA,  as many experts have suggested,  we need only to
change the meaning of the letter R  in the acronym: from relief to resettlement.

While the resolution of the refugee problem is essential for the achievement of a genuine peace,  it must be accompanied with other measures to transform the Palestinian society from one that glorifies death and martyrdom to one that values life, peace and prosperity.

2) President Obama should tell the Saudis,  in no uncertain terms, that they need to close the thousands of madrassas  which inculcate Wahabi Islamic doctrines to the tender minds of the Arab youth, or to transform their curricula, adding math, science, world history etc…They must also prohibit the funding of terrorist organizations.

3) Abbas and Fatah  should be told categorically that their rhetoric of  hatred, death, and martyrdom should
cease;  their school textbooks need to be re-written and purged of the venomous propaganda against Israel and
America (the only countries that can deliver anything to them) which they have been inculcating  to their children, generation after generation. Schoolboys and girls have been officially “taught” that “the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys…”  and  that the highest achievement is “to die gloriously as a shadeed,” a  martyr.   Today, films are shown at schools, mosques, youth camps…in which six-year-old boys and girls appear with all the accoutrements of a suicide
bomber,  chanting  “poetry” of  violence and death.

4) It is imperative that  the leaders of the moderate Arab countries , our allies, pressure vigorously their muftis to issue a fatwa on the great sin of suicide which Islam, as well as Judaism and Christianity,  expressly prohibits. The Qur’an
equates suicide with the denial of the oneness of God,  which is an unforgivable sin ( dhumb la yughfar lah),  and no other
consideration can make it halal,  permitted.

As things stand now,  without these reforms, any talk of a Palestinian state is premature and even detrimental to that same goal. “More of the same” and “business as usual”  will,  as in the past,  do more harm than good.  An artificial
state,  concocted in haste before the resolution of the refugee problem and before a huge and sincere effort to re-educate the masses,  especially the children,  is like spraying a coat of paint on rusted iron.  The “state” will not suddenly
metamorphose into a peace-loving democratic society.  Rather, it will become an international beggar state and a seething irredentist agent of instability,  and possibly a front of well-organized international jihadist movement,  as Afghanistan
used to be before nine-eleven.