Open Letter to President Bush
Palestinian rejection of the “new deal”, by the masses if not their leaders, would give Zionism the pretext to go for a final round of ethnic cleansing – to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, will be Zionism’s final solution to the Palestineproblem.If that happens, the West Bank will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust….. And that, if it happened, would bring forward
the day when the impotent Arab regimes on whom the West has relied for so long will be toppled. And the forces of violent Islamic fundamentalism everywhere would be energised like never before. A Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, would then be unstoppable.
Mr. President, that does not have to be the future. As I have written, and almost always say on public platforms, the Jews, generally speaking are the intellectual elite of the Western civilisation, and the Palestinians, generally speaking, are the intellectual elite of the Arab world. What those two peoples could do together in peace and partnership is thestuff that real dreams are made of.They could change and develop the region for the better and, by so doing, give much needed hope and inspiration to the whole world.
That dream could still be made to come true but only if the White House uses all the leverage it has to require Israel to withdraw from all the Arab territory it grabbed in the 1967 war. (Western public opinion was conned into believing that the Arabs attacked first and/or were intending to attack, and that Israel went to war in self-defense, to prevent its Jews being “driven into the sea”. As you must know, Mr. President, that, too, was a Zionist propaganda lie. The Six Days war of 1967 was a war of Israeli aggression, long planned, and, for Israel’s hawks, the unfinished business of 1948/49).
Were you to even think of using the leverage you have to require Israel to be serious about peace on terms acceptable to the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere, you would need to be able to expose for the nonsense it is Zionism’s assertion that a Palestinian mini-state on all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would pose a threat to Israel’s security and even its existence.
The best explanation of why this Zionist assertion isnonsense was given to me by Arafat. He put it this way. Suppose that Israel did end its occupation of all the land it grabbed in 1967 and that a sovereign Palestinian state came into being on all the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Then suppose that Palestinian opponents of compromise launched a terrorist attack or attacks on Israel from within the Palestinian state. How would Israel react? If the attacks continued, Israelat a point would roll over the borders of the Palestinian state and crush it out of existence. That done Israel would say to the world, “We are here to stay for ever.” And the world would say, “We understand.” That, said Arafat, would be the end of Palestine. “We would have lost everything.” Arafat concluded his explanation to me with this question: “Does anybody seriously think that we Palestinians, having struggled for so long against impossible odds, and having suffered and sacrificed so much in order to achieve an acceptable minimum of justice, would be stupid enough to invite Zionism to come and take away what we had gained?”
A sovereign Palestinian mini-state on all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip neither would nor could pose an unmanageablethreat to Israel’s security, let alone its very existence. (I emphasise “unmanageable” because it’s not impossible that in the early days or weeks of the new state’s existence, Palestinian rejectionists would seek to provoke Israel with a terrorist attack or attacks. But there can be no doubt that the government and security services of a sovereign Palestinian state inside defined borders and at peace with Israel would stop at nothing to isolate and destroy
Palestinian rejectionism; and it would do so with the full support of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people).
What about Hamas? There is no mystery about its real position.. If Israel said and meant that it was ready to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine and viable two-state solution – one that would see Israel back behind its pre-1967 borders – Hamas’s leaders would say, “Let’s do the business”. And they would say that and mean it because they would have no choice- because, as they know, a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians are prepared to settle for.
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