Abbas admits Palestinian errors
by: Ralph Seliger on November 7th, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Mahmoud Abbas
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has just made a significant stride toward reaching out for peace with Israel. As reported in thisHa’aretz newspaper column by Carlo Strenger (“Mahmoud Abbas’ crucial message to Israel”), and almost as if he’s directly responding to the columnist’s recent appeal for such an effort, Pres. Abbas has owned up to some important historical truths in an interview aired both on Israeli and Palestinian television. This is the core of Strenger’s new piece:
Mahmoud Abbas
…. Almost two years ago [even before this, I believe--RS] Abbas said that the second intifada was the greatest mistake the Palestinians ever made. … [T]he second intifada has made most Israelis profoundly unwilling to take risks for peace. They wonder why they should, once again, trust Palestinians who blew up hundreds of Israelis when the peace process came to a standstill after the failed Camp David summit.
In his interview … a few days ago on Israel’s Channel 2, Abbas took a second step of possibly even greater importance. He explicitly said that the Arab world and the Palestinians made a crucial error by rejecting the UN partition plan in 1947.
In doing so, Abbas is the first Palestinian leader to change a sacrosanct element of the Palestinian narrative: self-representation as pure victims. …While it would be both inhuman and stupid to deny the Palestinian tragedy, the Palestinians’ refusing to take any responsibility for their fate … has contributed to the conflict’s intractability. The rejection of the 1947 partition plan was one in a series of catastrophic mistakes they made. The … latest was the shelling of Southern Israel after the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005….
Abbas’ admission that the Palestinian people’s fate could have been dramatically different if they had made wiser decisions is crucially important…. Instead of moving toward compromise with Israel, too many Palestinians have waited for too many years for a reversal of history. …
[Moreover] Abbas personally made sure that the full-length forty minute interview was aired on Palestinian prime time TV “for educational purposes.” This is also a very significant step. Israelis have, for years, complained that Palestinians spoke very differently to their own constituency than to the outside world….
As to the refugee question, he [said] that it was clear to him that Israel could not integrate large numbers of Palestinians, and that he had endorsed the position of the Arab League Peace proposal that Israel could veto any Palestinian’s return to Israel.
….
Abbas has now made his position clear to Israel’s public. … It is time for Israel’s public to ask whether it wants a government that refuses to engage with Israel’s best chance to end the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Thanks, Ralph, for helping spread this very important message. Let us hope that this will help restart peace negotiations, because it seems increasingly clear that Israel needs a resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians to reduce the possibilities for renewed violence, to end her increasing isolation, to more effectively address her economic, environmental, and other domestic problems, and to remain both a Jewish and a democratic state.
Now it is time for Israel to own up to its errors from the very beginning before even it was a nation. I wonder if that is possible?
Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak are both on record as understanding what drove Palestinians to violence against Israel. Rabin also admitted having nightmares (or something to that effect) about Palestinians driven from their homes in Ramle and Lydda; this decision was taken to avoid having a potentially hostile population in strategic areas as outside Arab armies attacked (as correctly anticipated) when Israel declared its independence in May ’48. But these two leaders, and many other patriotic Israelis, have long acknowledged Palestinian pain and suffering.
It is important for both sides to see where their actions exacerbated the conflict, but I honestly don’t know what “errors from the very beginning” Martha Larsen is referring to.
Ralph, Israel exists because it ethnically cleansed much of Palestine. ‘Transfer’/Expulsion was inherent in the Zionist project. The ethnic cleansing started in November 1947 when the Palestinians rightly rejected handing over more than half of the country to recent Jewish immigrants who still only comprised 1/3 of the population of Palestine. Just because the Partition Plan, in retrospect, would have left the Palestinians with more than they have now doesn’t mean it was a just plan. The British Mandate was unjust, the Balfour Declaration was unjust, the Western imperial program against the wishes of the indigenous Palestinian population was unjust, Israel’s establishment was unjust. The Arab armies “invaded” after Zionist forces had driven 300,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages, and their purpose was to defend Palestinians’ remaining areas, not to destroy Israel. This is all clearly laid out by the Israeli New Historians. The only long-term solution is a binational state with equal rights for all.
I advise everybody to read Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris (his historical scholarship, not his thuggish political comments), Nur Masalha, Walid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and other honest scholars.
Israeli leaders are the ones who have not yet begun to acknowledge history. The Palestinians ARE pure victims. They were forcibly evicted from their country (Seliger still promoting the fog of war paradigm instead of the ethnic cleansing paradigm) and they have been systematically denied their fundamental human rights ever since.
Painful for many Jews to accept, I understand, but true nonetheless. Peace.
As the title of the fine 1999 book by Benny Morris indicates, both sides too often see themselves as “Righteous Victims.” It’s fascinating that this “Be Honest” person is more “pro-Palestinian” than the head of the Palestinian Authority.
Even if this person’s one-sided reading of history were correct, s/he would condemn Palestinians to an endless state of war and oppression. They deserve better.
Even if all that was true, which it isn’t. What’s the point.
The blame game is unproductive.
The time to make peace, is now.
Netanyahu is not a pease maker.
It is up to the Israeli cityznens to make pease.
So far, the Arabs are not much help either.
It takes both sides.