An earlier Op-Ed, on what President Barack Obama can yet do to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians argued that international law should be the touchstone to a reconciliation of the interests of these two peoples. It appeared here in Arab News on the very day that President Mahmoud Abbas announced that he would not run for re-election. That really put the cat among the pigeons, as the reason was so clearly disillusionment with American efforts to achieve such peace.

A clear body of international law exists, which defines the obligations and responsibilities of the parties - Israeli, Palestinian and American - in this conflict. Its major points have been incorporated in the acts of the United Nations, but many of them exist already prior to any action of the UN as fundamental matters of international law and justice. The principal elements are:

1. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, by which every signatory to the Charter renounces any acquisition of territory by force. That is the basic means by which the organization is expected to prevent wars, and of course it is also the fundamental prohibition of aggression that exists prior to the Charter of the United Nations itself. Reference to this is made three distinct times in the "Land for Peace" resolution of 1967. That is why Menachem Begin first refused to accept Resolution 242, and later assented only when he had invented a seeming escape clause that made him believe he could return some of the land (to Egypt) and not all of it. But this is bedrock international law.

2. General Assembly Resolutions 181 (November, 1947, the partition resolution, authorizing the establishment of two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab and 194 (December, 1948, voted even before the end of the initial war, and containing, along with much else, the neuralgic point of Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.) It should always be noted that Resolution 194 specifies that the return of refugees should be "to live in peace." When we look at the practicalities of the situation, which means necessarily that there should be negotiated agreement on numbers. There is no way it can be done in peace if the project becomes the displacement of the Israeli Jewish population, as was done to half the Palestinian population in the 1948 war. In other instances, only the resolutions of the Security Council entail full legal obligation for the parties, but when Israel was admitted to UN membership in 1949 it was required to accept the condition that these two General Assembly resolutions carried the full obligation of law for itself.

3. The major Security Council resolutions, 242 of November 1967, and 338 of October 1973. Resolution 242 carries the greatest weight, often invoked and as often neglected. Written only after months of deliberation following the June war of that year, it is the only instance in which a Security Council compromised with Article 2 of the Charter. In all other cases of the seizure of territory by force (Iraq in Kuwait, Israel in Lebanon 1978) the Security Council has demanded immediate return to the initial border. Only this time did it make the return of territory dependent on first achieving peace, i.e., treaties.

4. The Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), dealing with the responsibilities of occupiers in occupied territories. The convention affects Israeli policies in three ways:

a. It prohibits the expulsion of residents from the land other than in strictly limited circumstances.

b. It requires of the occupiers that they provide for the safety and the adequate supply of necessities to the occupied population. This is seldom mentioned but is a major obligation, one that has been conspicuously neglected. How the safety of the occupied population has been treated was seen in Gaza in last December and January, and the supply of necessities has always been left to UNHWA, the Europeans and Arab states.

c. It prohibits entirely the transfer of the occupier's own population into the occupied territory. This aspect of the Fourth Geneva Convention that we all know best, affects all the settlements. They are all illegal acts of colonization, as American policy recognized until, in Lyndon Johnson's time, they became simply "obstacles to peace" in US administration eyes. Later they were demoted to merely "unhelpful," but they are illegal still.

d. Does this mean, as we hear from the more paranoid Israeli propagandists, that all Jews would be expelled from the Palestinian territories? Not at all. Palestinians have long since recognized how important it is to Jews that some of them should live in the territories of the ancient kingdoms, their holy places, and have stated their readiness to welcome them. The problem is not Jews, but occupation. These territories do not belong to Israel, but to the Palestinians. Jews who live there should be able to keep their Israeli citizenship but live under Palestinian jurisdiction. That would require them to live there in peace, the same requirement that is made in General Assembly Resolution 194 for Palestinians who would return to their homes.

This, in fact, was the Palestinian proposition at Camp David and has remained settled policy. In quite recent months it has been emphatically reasserted by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, by negotiator Abu Ala and others in an authoritative way.

Hebron is the test case, the holiest spot for Jews after Jerusalem itself. But the wrong Jews live there, people not willing to live in peace, but who have come to drive Palestinians out. The West Bank is increasingly dominated by settler terrorists who violently attack Palestinians in their homes and their fields burn their olive groves or steal the harvest from them, set their own children to molest Palestinian children on their way to school. Israeli Army and police stand by, not interfering, sometimes themselves joining in the mayhem, and if there are arrests it is normally of Palestinians who resist these predators. It is as much the responsibility of Israeli government to stop that, to discipline its army and remove the terrorist elements from the territories, as it is for Palestinians to deal with their own terrorists. No society that respects the rule of law could tolerate, from its own citizens, what these settlers do constantly and with impunity. These, of course, are atrocities.

In the United States, people are very timid of naming atrocities as such if they are committed by Israelis, but there is no true friendship for Israel if we will not tell truth. When Palestinians do things that call for censure, they get it immediately, even if they are only making legitimate protest against violations of their rights. Our commitment to Israel calls for no distinctions in such matters.

Return of refugees, as indicated above, is the great neuralgic issue for Israelis, who have nightmares of the arrival of six million people other than themselves to live in their land. Palestinian land beyond the Green Line is limited too, but the Palestinians make it clear that they will welcome Jews to live there, not as conquerors/exploiters but as guests in the Palestinian state. Of the settlers now living there, how many would choose to remain, under Palestinian jurisdiction? One may reckon, far less than the half million now there, many of whom are striving to take the territory away from Palestinians and unready to acknowledge any authority (even, be it noted, that of Israeli government itself). A good guess might be 100,000. That would need to be reciprocal, as an agreement between equals: Comparable numbers of Palestinians able to return to Green-Line Israel. Such numbers would be no threat to the demography of either state.

Something more is needed: An open border. It would take some time to establish the trust between peoples that this would require; attainable once both have seen that justice is done for them, but the objective should be a border as open as that between Massachusetts and Connecticut. In that way, both peoples would be recognized as nations. Each would have a secure, internationally recognized border. Each would have all the institutions of state and society. And each would have access to the whole territory. This is truly the process of nation-building; otherwise these entities would remain in reality only feuding political enclaves though identified as states.

Are these truly attainable things, or are they pipe dreams? Are they within the actual reach of President Obama, things he can really do, or are they impossible things that he will be prevented from doing if he attempts them?

Judging from the response to the UN fact-finding mission's report on the Gaza conflict by not only the Israeli government but the US Congress, we could certainly expect loud protests from the current Israeli government if they were held to the law. However, the Israeli people would soon realize that it was to their real advantage. It could well mean the end of right-wing dominance, as the Israeli public would well understand that they needed something different if they truly wanted to live in peace.

Last week's Op-Ed spoke of Obama's showing genuine respect to Palestinians, such respect that they have never experienced from an American government, and especially to the indispensable Hamas. It would cause hyperventilation in the current Israel government, but Obama could bear that.

Remember what happened when President Clinton, in February 1994, made his first step toward the promotion of peace in Northern Ireland. He granted Gerry Adams, president of the Sinn Fein Party, which had always been denounced as terrorists with whom no one should speak, a 48-hour visa to address a conference in New York. Out of that came the empowerment of the peace faction among Irish Republicans, the eventual cease-fires of later that year, and the whole process of negotiation that has now brought relative peace to Northern Ireland. The relations between Britain and the US remained strained for sometime after that.

What remains of that consternation now? All of Britain is vastly grateful to Bill Clinton and the United States for doing the indispensable thing that made the peace possible in Northern Ireland, lifting an insupportable incubus from Britain. Clinton, once this became clear, as it did very quickly, took his place as the trusted colleague of Tony Blair's Britain, working tirelessly, always on the phone to all the parties, urging the consummation of the peace. That is what President Obama can expect if he does these things that are well within his reach: Make the law the basic assumption for all these dealings and treats the parties, including those we have unlawfully tried to exclude, with the respect they have earned by meeting the democratic demands of their people.

Americans - the Bush crowd - have treated Mahmoud Abbas as if he were the willing collaborator for whatever the most right-wing Israelis might want. It has not in fact been true, and Abbas has demonstrated his resistance to occupation by announcing his resignation. Hillary Clinton had asked him to return to negotiation as if nothing were wrong while the Israeli government carried on with its colonization program on his people's land. He has in fact been tarnished, unjustly, by every word of praise he has received from the US or Israel on such grounds. A January election, constitutionally required, cannot take place in any legal form unless there is reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, a heavy responsibility incumbent on both, for which any friend of Israel or the Palestinians should help. If it is achieved, a worthy candidate for Palestinian president sits in an Israeli jail, a man incomparably respected by both Hamas and Fatah and an eminently practical advocate for a just peace: Marwan Barghouti. It was he who brought about agreement on the Arab Peace Plan of 2002. Though he is of the Fatah Party, Hamas candidates for the election of 2006, when they had to field troublesome political questions, waited until they could consult Barghouti in prison. In him the Palestinians may well find their Mandela.

King Abdullah as the crown prince had put together the Peace Plan. Its basic elements were: Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders; two states, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both with safe and secure borders; shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, which would be the capital of two states; normalization of relationship between Israel and Arab states and lastly the issue of the right of return for the Palestinians. This plan was accepted by the Arab League but was never fully discussed in the international forum, especially since it included the right of return that Israel refused to accept. One can see that, barring the right of return part, it has definite merit because it addresses the concerns of both sides. It elevates the relationship between Israel and the Arabs to a higher level from mere recognition to normalization. And given what has been said above about GA Resolution 194, even the right of return should not be a deal-breaker. One may hope that the Obama administration will refocus on this invaluable offer from the whole Arab world. (Concluded)

- Fr. Raymond G. Helmick, S.J. is instructor in conflict resolution, Department of Theology, Boston College and author of Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed (London, Pluto Press 2004). Dr. Nazir Khaja is chairman of Islamic Information Service, Los Angeles.