Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally related to the land? Certainly, the land is part of it, but when we hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the question of who has any part of the land does not necessarily represent the reality clearly. She participated in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel and the West Bank organized recently. A Palestinian official told us, "We will not give up our dignity."
What we know about President Donald Trump's "peace plan" is that it asks the Palestinians to do exactly that - to give up dignity. The entire Trump approach seems to be based on the call for unilateral surrender. It is based on the destruction of the will of the people, and in the hope that despair will one day become complacent. This is the only way to explain the insistence of Trump's chief adviser and son-in-law Garrid Kouchner to give priority to economic incentives for political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about humanitarian motives.
I do not like to think that people are motivated primarily by measurable or quantifiable things, to the extent that they become an insurmountable obstacle. They are important, but they are important as an alternative to other deeper issues, said a colleague at the Brookings Institution, Shibley Telhami "The assumption that the promise of economic improvement would outweigh the normal humanitarian aspirations of a people who have struggled for decades, takes us far from the nature of the humanitarian situation."
The refusal of the Palestinians to renounce dignity was not a review; it was an expression of despair. There have been conflicts in which leaders have made concessions that may have seemed treachery, only for history to be seen as bold, but those conflicts are not such a conflict.
According to this perspective, the Arabs, from 1948 onwards, either yearn for the disappearance of the Jewish state or take action to make it virtually disappear.
In their long history together, Muslims have defined Jews as an ethnic group rather than followers of another religion, different from Islam, but also have common denominators. In the Book of the Jews of Islam, Bernard Lewis pointed out that when Muslims express negative attitudes towards Jews, they "express themselves in religious and social terms, and very rarely ethnically." Many Palestinians express dissatisfaction with the notion that Jews are a people and a religion, and Israeli Jews tend to view this non-recognition as negative and evidence of disunity with the Arabs.
Many of the early Zionists were secular, so their vision of the State of Israel was not based on common religious faith. He relied, instead, on there being people. This epitomizes the "Jewish state" itself, because the Jewish state can be a secular homeland for the Jews, while the "state of Islam" refers to a religious mission and ideological reasons.
The disparate stories and narratives are an explanation of the real questions about what actually happened or did not happen at important moments. For example, Israeli politicians attack the Palestinians to dispel the "generous offer" presented by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, so the story of Arab and Palestinian retaliation continues unabated, with every new rejection confirming the previous offer: First, the Arabs' rejection of the 1947 UN partition Arab countries fought against the new "Israeli state". After decades, when they finally had the chance, the Palestinians rejected Barak's offer, then rejected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's offer, and so on.
To put it mildly, the Palestinians do not share this explanation of what went wrong. They think the offer was not generous. Six years after "more settlements, less freedom of movement and worse economic conditions," argues Robbie Malley, senior adviser to the administration of former President Bill Clinton, in one of the writings on the Camp David negotiations 2000. In practice, Barak was not a dove of peace. As Mali wrote, "behind almost all of Barak's actions, the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat believed that he could distinguish between being forced to swallow an unreasonable deal or mobilize the world to isolate and weaken the Palestinians if they refused to submit."
Palestinian activists tend to speak out of justice. An injustice has occurred, so it must be reversed. Christopher Hitchens, in his farewell to the American-Palestinian thinker Edward Said, wrote that his friend's sense of "injustice to Palestine was instinctive." He simply did not accept the total deprivation of rights or lies and evasion that was used to cover up this crime.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators often chant "No justice, no peace". One of the former Israeli officials we spoke to in Jerusalem had a different view. "If it is, there will be no peace," he said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believes many Palestinians present themselves as victims - fueling a deep sense of injustice instead of overcoming it.
But then we return to the issue of dignity. No one should be required to overcome the victim of occupation and injustice by renouncing his dignity, the only thing the occupier should not rob. This may seem naïve and impractical, especially for those who would prefer the Palestinians to continue to do so, but this does not make it less realistic.
If I would advise the Palestinians, I would tell them to reject Kouchner's offer, but they do not need anyone to tell them what is already clear. If someone does not understand anything about Palestinian history, grievances and stories, what is the point? The outgoing French ambassador, Gerard Arud, described Kouchner in this way: "He is pro-Israel, too. He may even neglect the point that if the Palestinians are offered the choice between surrender and suicide, they may choose the second option. Someone like Kouchner does not understand that. "
Because the two sides are very far apart and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, if the United States is unwilling to exert serious pressure on Israel or seriously deal with Palestinian objections, it would be better off from an imaginary peace process rather than legitimizing Israel's behavior Or give illusion to progress without content.
Shadi Hamid - Senior Researcher at Brookings