The Geneva Accord: Two Views

[La_Serpiente]

The Real Road to Peace
By John V. Whitbeck

The Geneva Accord, signed Dec. 1 at an impressive ceremony in which President Jimmy Carter and other Nobel Peace Prize laureates participated, deserves the active and whole-hearted support of everyone who genuinely cares about Israelis, Palestinians or peace.

This “virtual” permanent-status peace agreement, a prodigious, detailed document, contains all the fundamental substantive compromises and trade-offs which have long been recognized to be necessary in any negotiated peace agreement conceivably acceptable both to most Israelis and to most Palestinians, as well as carefully considered procedures and timelines for implementation. If both peoples simultaneously had governments sincerely determined to achieve peace, this is precisely the sort of document one would expect to emerge from their negotiations.

Giving Peace Talks a Chance
By Ali Abunimah

The medium-term future for Israelis and Palestinians remains bleak, but in the long run peace will be created.

It has been almost two months since the last deadly attack on Israeli civilians by a Palestinian suicide bomber and there are currently intense diplomatic efforts, principally by Egypt, to turn this hiatus into a new global cease-fire by Palestinian factions.

Such efforts are in jeopardy, however, because while Israelis have seen a dramatic drop in attacks, Palestinians continue to suffer daily.

Since the last suicide attack, the Israeli army has killed more than 70 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians, among them 17 children.

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The Geneva Accord: Two Views

[papau]

1. The PA's lawyer wants a single state solution because"fails to resolve"?

"The initiative proposes that Israel annex the vast majority of its settlements on Palestinian land, and almost all of Jerusalem. At the same time, Palestinian refugees, forced from their homes since 1947, are expected to give up their right to return. Israel’s government and its hard-line supporters reject the deal because they see it as being too generous to Palestinians. In short, this accord looks superficially promising, but close-up it fails to resolve any of the key issues that have torpedoed every earlier peace plan.

Given these fundamentals, the prospects of a negotiated settlement to the conflict remain close to nil. Yet the terrible situation cannot continue forever. Senior Israeli security officials increasingly acknowledge that Israel’s policies intensify the conflict. But by the time enough Israelis wake up to this and demand change, the basis for the two-state solution that Palestinians and the international community embraced will have been irretrievably lost. Israeli settlements will cover too much land, while Palestinians will in a few years be the majority population.

Some Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge a need to seek a radically different solution: If dividing the land between two peoples is impossible, then why not give 100 percent of the land to both peoples? In practice this means a single democratic state with a constitution that guarantees the political, cultural and religious rights of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims. A common homeland where Jews and Palestinians can flourish instead of fight."