Toward a new dawn in Palestine

Yes, now we have a state, asserted an ebullient Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority President in his first communication with the people in West Bank after achieving an upgraded status in the United Nations. But then given Israel’s provocative authorization of restarting the stalled E1 settlement projects east of Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership needs to be reminded of the famous proverb — well planned is just half done.
President Abbas hopefully has an ace up his sleeves because the UN victory is only one part of the whole strategy of acquiring a sovereign and contiguous State of Palestine — a territory the Zionists loves to call “a land without people for a people without land.” The task will be all the more difficult considering the efficacious penetration of the top Palestinian leadership by Israeli agencies. The slain Hamas military commander Ahmed Al-Jaabari for instance was widely believed to be a valuable Israeli asset assigned to maintaining a fragile peace along the Gaza-Israeli border and more importantly preventing the radical elements within Hamas and other fundamentalist groups from launching rocket attack aimed at the Jewish State.
Interestingly, the hard-line Hamas top brass is almost reconciled to the futility of carrying out unprovoked offensive on Israel from a politico strategic angle and has been fairly successful in reigning in their heavily armed cadres in the recent past. This leads us to a more pointed question. Was the missile attack from Hamas controlled region into Israeli territory and the retaliatory aggression on the part of Tel Aviv therefore a carefully orchestrated pre-election manoeuvring intended for domestic consumption?
With the Obama administration having decided to elevate significantly the status and importance of Israel as Washington’s principal gendarme in the Middle East in the days and months ahead given America’s shifting pivot to East Asia and Asia Pacific, it was extremely irrational on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right wing reactionary Likud Party to plunge the already volatile region into a fresh quagmire.
As rightly pointed out by Matthew Steven Gould, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, the threshold for international tolerance towards Israel’s penchant for inflicting ineffable horror on the lives of Palestinians might be precipitated to an extent that the Israeli leadership — more inclined to the jingoistic philosophy of war over land — will find themselves isolated within and without. Authentic information coming out of the Jewish State suggests that the citizens are already growing tired of this never ending animosity and even a large majority of right wing nationalists too have discovered virtues in moderation, virtually acknowledging the limits of any iron fist strategy in a compact zone packed with more than 11 million people. After all, incurring evitable political and economic cost for sustaining a battle to soothe the inflated ego of soldier turned politicians who share common memories of holocaust and nurture a somewhat disoriented view of international politics is completely self-defeating.
While denouncing the savagery perpetrated by Hamas and other groups in the form of hurling projectiles at civilian target inside Israeli territory, one cannot but criticize the ruling elites in Israel simultaneously for digressing from the true Judaist ethos that cannot be correlated with trumpeting militarism in any way. Regrettably, successive administrations in Washington and the European Union in particular have shown leniency toward the Israeli State in spite of continued brutalization of Arab populace. To Tel Aviv’s delight, the big powers have successfully tabooed the very word occupation — the root cause of this age-old crisis — in diplomatic deliberations.
Coming to the issue of rapprochement between the warring parties, one needs to be cautious in arriving at any definitive conclusion on the magic theories circulating within the premises of various world bodies. The United States and the whole of Europe being the primary patrons of Israel both militarily and economically, should cross check their calculations before gunning for an acceptable formula of restoring sanity in this stretch of torrid land along the eastern edge of Mediterranean where the Abrahamic faiths have co-existed. It is incumbent on the international community to eliminate those extant impediments in pursuit of permanent tranquillity in the Arab world. With the peace process in shambles if not dead despite a truce and very little land being left for one of the two quarrelling stakeholders thanks to forceful seizure, the feasibility of a widely accepted two state solution diminishes as days go by.
Random construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied land makes the emergence of a contiguous Palestinian State practically impossible. Furthermore, a two state formula entails exchange of large chunk of population that the Indian subcontinent witnessed in the post 1947 partition days. Anybody who has endured such trauma would hate the repetition of such agony anywhere in the globe. But then, given the high degree of misgiving prevailing in Palestinian and Israeli societies against each other, hoping to accommodate both the people within a unified entity might be a bit over optimistic.
Integrating the two nationalities could have promoted pacifism in a region marred by separation and mistrust for too long and above all erased the bitter memory of Nakba. Carving out an independent Palestine State being the avowed consensual objective of humanity, Israel must be persuaded to shed its meaningless intransigence. Elimination of apartheid against the Palestinian people, restoring their rights and lifting all sanctions coupled with a freeze on constructions in the disputed region will go a long way in brokering a final settlement. Any future intra-Palestinian discord over government formation can be settled by adopting an interim arrangement of appointing the president and prime minister from Fatah and Hamas on a rotational basis, dividing the term into two equal parts so that both the groups can have a share of executive responsibility till institutions necessary for maintaining a deliberative democracy take shape.
Lastly, the United Nations must stand guarantor to secure enduring sovereignty of an independent Palestine State divided into two enclaves.