Israel and the Palestinians: Ending the Stalemate

Then too, the U.S. should announce that it no longer opposes Israeli building in Judea and Samaria. By doing so, Washington will be taking a highly significant symbolic step towards insisting that a Palestinian state must not be founded on bigotry and hatred but rather must be as hospitable a place for Jewish citizens as Israel is for its Arab citizens.

Finally, the U.S. should implement its law requiring the transfer of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and end its refusal to fully recognize Israel’s capital city. Like the removal of U.S.  opposition to Israeli building in Judea and Samaria, the U.S. need not accept Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the entire city by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the parts of the city that have served as its capital since 1949.

Eliminating the infrastructure of the conflict. One of the reasons that the Palestinians are able to reject Israel’s right to exist is because for 60 years, through the UN, the international community has been perpetuating the statelessness of Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel in 1948-49. The UN Relief Works Agency, UNRWA, was set up in 1949 for the specific purpose of preventing those refugees from being resettled. The U.S. must end its financial support for UNRWA and take steps to close the agency and end the systematic discrimination against the Palestinian Arab refugees by placing them under the authority of the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees together with all other global refugee populations.

Beyond working for UNRWA’s dismantlement, the U.S. should move to close down other UN and international agencies whose sole purpose is to isolate Israel and maintain the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many such bodies were set up in the  UN following the approval of the 1975 General Assembly resolution which defined Zionism as a form of racism. These bodies include the UN Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977), and the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (established in 1975). The U.S. should boycott these bodies and call for their abolition in the same manner as it campaigned for reform of UN human rights bodies. Moreover, it can advocate the abandonment of the UN regional system of country blocs until Israel is accepted as a full member of the Western European and Others (WEOG) bloc of member-nations.

Outside of the UN, current U.S. moves to abrogate the Arab economic boycott of Israel should be stepped up. Specifically, Washington should enforce its anti-boycott law on commercial relations with states like Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the Iraqi government should be pressured to end its boycott of Israel and officially terminate the formal state of war that has existed between the countries since 1948. Finally, U.S. pressure on Arab states to end support for terror groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah must be expanded to ending support for terror groups like Hamas and Fatah.

Rewriting the script

The main thrust of all these recommended Israeli and U.S. policies is that they are based upon a renewed American-Israeli acknowledgement that Israeli territorial claims to the lands it took control over in 1967 are not the root cause of the conflict with the Palestinians. Rather, Palestinian and wider Arab rejection of Israel’s right to exist is the cause. The reform and stabilization of Palestinian society depends on such a reorientation. Since the Palestinians themselves have never made the attainment of statehood their primary aim, whether a Palestinian state will emerge from such a reoriented Palestinian society cannot be known. But what is absolutely clear is that there is no chance that any Palestinian state that is not a terror state at war with Israel will ever be established unless such a reform and stabilization of Palestinian society takes place first.

For 15 years, Israel and the U.S. have based their policies towards the Palestinians on the false narrative of Israeli culpability for the endurance of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel.  Consequently, all of their policies aimed at resolving that conflict have been predicated on false assumptions. Not surprisingly, they have not only failed to resolve the conflict, they have exacerbated it by strengthening terror forces while weakening voices of liberalism. The time has come to reassess this state of affairs, and move toward Israeli and U.S. Palestinian policies based on the true nature of the conflict.

CAROLINE B. GLICK is the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post. She is also the senior fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. Her book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, was released in the spring of 2008. Ms. Glick lives in Jerusalem.