A Blueprint for Peace in Palestine

A solution whose time has come: No Justice, No peace 

Anisa Abd el Fattah

Executive Summary

          With the failure of the Oslo Peace Accords as well as the Bush peace process to bring peace to the Palestinian people and to end the illegal occupation of Palestine, it has become a matter of great urgency that a new proposal be presented. We need a proposal that addresses the real barriers to peace that have frustrated every attempt at peacemaking made along the negotiated settlement path that led to nowhere.  

          Whether we believe that negotiations failed due to a lack of sincerity by either of the parties involved, or whether we believe they failed simply because the right formula for peace could never be agreed upon, the reality is that a negotiated settlement that is not rooted in an enforceable body of international law and treaties cannot succeed and neither can any plan that does not end the illegal occupation that is the source of the conflict as a first step and a matter of urgency..  

          Most observers would agree that all along the path of the Zionist project in Palestine, the road to peace has been strewn with violence, racism and lawlessness.  The Palestinian people, who by legal definition, are the aggrieved party in this dispute, have been subjected to the worse types of political gamesmanship , ethnic cleansing and genocide as Israel has expanded its colonization project far beyond the parameters of the British mandate. Israel has done this by relying upon the sympathies of the international community and our institutions that regret the Holocaust and so has allowed Israel too much latitude for its efforts to establish a Jewish homeland for the protection of Jewish people.  Israel has been made an exception to the law and has been given a license to kill and to act with impunity for more than 60 years. Now their ambitions have expanded far beyond the British mandate and their objectives are no longer to merely establish a safe haven for Jewish people. Their ambitions have expanded to the establishment of something mythical called Greater Israel that has led to the destabilization of the entire region, wars, and a great loss of innocent life and destruction of property.

          The international community supported the Zionist project as an effort to establish a secular democratic state that would serve as a homeland and safe haven from anti-Semitism. The reality that stands before us, to all of our shame, after more than 60 years, is a racist Eastern European colony of Talmudic extremists, who are racists and who persecute African and other non-white Jews and converts.  The Talmudic Jewish authority has denied religious rights to Jews of varying sects of Judaism, even going to the extent of compelling Jewish people to renounce the Torah and to swear loyalty only to state sanctioned rabbis and the Talmud.  The religious authorities are denying equal rights to women and are resorting to the worse types of persecution of women, including forcing women to ride on separate buses, forcing non-religious women to cover their hair in public and preventing women access to the synagogue and schools of religious learning. Rather than serving as a safe haven for Jewish people, Israel has become a persecutor of Jews and is also intolerant of other faiths and people of other faiths. The growing persecution of Christians in Israel has resulted in a mass exodus of Christians from Bethlehem, the birth place of Jesus Christ.  The Christians, who are indigenous to the land, are leaving to escape physical and verbal assaults and violence carried out by of Jewish settlers who destroy their property, spit upon them verbally and physically assault and threaten them. The Jewish settlers, under Israel military and police protection routinely desecrate the holy sites of peoples of non-Jewish faiths.

          There is nothing that any longer compels the international community, and people of good faith to support the Zionist project in Palestine. By any method of measurement and assessment, it is clear that the project has failed, and cannot be redeemed.  Not only has the project become prohibitively expensive, Israel has never achieved economic independence, or self-sufficiency. The project has also cost the entire world by nearly normalizing Israel’s brutish and bullying attitude towards the rest of the world, its arrogant lawlessness and incessant threatening of other governments and people with its illegal nuclear arsenal.  Only the most ignorant and irresponsible among us will argue that the Zionist project in Palestine has become anything except a burden to the world and a serious threat to world peace. 

          For these reasons, and others, including Israel’s establishment of apartheid, in violation of international law, and it’s persistent attempts at ethnic cleansing and the genocide it is carrying out in Palestine, we have no choice except to withdraw unconditional support for the Zionist project in Palestine and to move with urgency to end the illegal occupation of Palestine and to restore fully, the human rights of the indigenous people of that land, Christians, Muslims and Jews.  With this in mind, we submit for your review and approval, our blueprint for peace in Palestine.  It is a comprehensive plan that moves the people forward from occupation to a bi-national transitional government and finally, after approximately ten years of reconciliation of the people and rehabilitation of the land, to a one state government which will oversee the full exercise of rights by the people and administer their political, economic, and other essential governmental affairs. 

The Blueprint for Peace has four primary points that will be presented in detail in several occasional papers. They are as follows.

1). International Law and the Palestine/Israel conflict: Establishing the Legal Parameters for Peace. 

2). Ending the Illegal Occupation of Palestine: Justice as the natural solution to injustice

3). Overcoming Check points and Apartheid in Palestine: A discussion of the dismantlement of the Zionist apartheid state of Israel and the establishment of an equitable society in modern Palestine.

4). The Transitional Bi National State and the Future of Palestine: 10 year plan for reconciliation and rehabilitation of the people and the land.

These papers will be presented at an upcoming international conference that is still being planned.  We are presenting this brief abstract hoping to stimulate interest in what we believe is a new paradigm in thinking and responses to the situation in Palestine.