“What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately, I’ve done so because we can’t afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades to achieve peace.”
I must admit I was incredibly surprised by Obama's speech on Middle East Policy last week. Obviously not the part about the Arab Spring being a good thing, or Osama bin Laden being a bad man. But the part about the 1967 borders of Israel-Palestine.
But I'm surprised for a number of reasons. For a start, it was about time he did something impactful about the Palestine question with another election coming up. With his envoy, George Mitchell exiting stage left recently having achieved nothing, he was going to have a tough time at the polls on this issue. However, he has chosen an interesting week for it. Just as the Republican candidacy collapses, he decides to throw away millions of dollars of Jewish lobby funding. For it's about as politically risky as it gets, canvassing a policy that Israel should revert to the 1967 borders (not to mention asking Hamas to recognise Israel!). It's about as radical as anything anyone has said on the middle east for more than a decade. It certainly has put the cat amongst the pigeons.
I'll never forget my visit to the Golan heights in 1996. It's a beautiful place, high up above the sea of Gallilee on the Syrian border. It was Syria before The Six-day war in 1967. Now it's full of very serious and mostly militant Jewish migrants. We stopped to help a couple whose car had broken down, and they invited us back to their's for tea to say thanks. They talked almost exclusively about how they will never leave, how they will fight and die before they let the Syrians have it back. I don't believe, if they were a good indication, that many of the Jewish settlers in The Golan are going anywhere.
I visited East Jerusalem in 1999. I visited the highly tense Temple Mount, where the third most important Islamic shrine sits atop the most important Jewish shrine, both only a stone's throw from the most important Christian Shrine. Security of The Wailing Wall is the raisin d'être of the Jewish State. They're not going to give up Temple Mount without a fight as intense as the one that won it in 1967. I don't believe they're going anywhere either.I walked around the Jewish Quarter. It's a wonderfully calm place compared to the mayhem and frenetic excitement of the Arab Quarter bazaar. It's been beautifully renovated since its near destruction in the wars of 1947-8 and 1967. It's a bastion of Jewish strength. It's streets are peppered with Orthodox Torah study groups and synagogues. Its streets are armed ot the teeth with Jewish check points. I don't see Israel giving that up in a hurry either. I did visit the West Bank too. It's fortified by the seemingly endless compounds of Jewish settlements, many of them built quite illegally. Then of course there's The Wall. I don't see those people going anywhere either. They are as nailed to the spot as those in The Golan.I think something needed to change to give new life to the peace process. It took a bold leader to say something controversial and risqué to kick start a negotiation everyone had grown tired of and that had entirely run out of steam. But I wonder how wise it was to suggest that Israel should revert to the 1967 borders so publicly and so bluntly. To give up The Golan Heights, which they secured to stop missile attacks on The Galilee and secure its northern border; The West Bank to the Jordan River, which Israel used to secure it's western border and East Jerusalem, which Israel secured in order to claim ownership of it's perceived Biblical inheritance. I don't see any of these things happening. I think Israel has given up everything it is prepared to, The Sinai, Gazza, South Lebanon. There is no more to negotiate.On that visit in 1999 I had the privilege of meeting with Jewish writer Amos Oz at his home in Arad (Read the interview here on page 92). It was during the Presidential Election that saw Ehud Barak take power on a wave of peace and optimism, shortly before the withdrawl from South Lebanon. Arad is a thriving community in the middle of the Negev desert. His feeling was that unless ways were found for more people to be able to live in the desert, and better ways of distributing water equally among Israelis and Palestinians, the State of Israel would not be sustainable. Perhaps he is right and until the Jewish occupants of The West Bank and The Golan can be found new homes in the Negev Desert, there is no hope. (How the problem of Jerusalem is solved though is quite another matter!)
I wish Mr Obama luck, I really do, but the only surrender I can see from this is his surrender of millions of dollars of Jewish lobby funding for his re-election campaign.