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Articles

hatem

Peace and its chances in the Middle East?

by Mosheer Amer

-

26 August 2008

Printable version | Original

This week a joint Israeli-Palestinian team has arrived in Melbourne to participate in a number of sporting events in the International Cup on the AFL’s 150th anniversary. The initiative, which is hosted by the AFL, is sponsored by Israeli Peres Centre for Peace, a non-profit organisation established by Israeli president Shimon Peres in 1996 to promote peace through joint projects between Israelis and Palestinians.

No doubt the event will receive some coverage by the Australian media. After all, this event has all the ingredients of a “good” news story, especially when all that seems to be coming from Palestine/Israel are news of violence, death and terror.

Of course, sport is important in bringing people together and promoting values of understanding and respect, but these Israeli PR events only tantalise the feelings of many conscientious people who desire to see peace a reality for these two war-weary and deeply wounded peoples of the Middle East. These initiatives falsely present the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as nothing more than a dispute between “bad neighbours” unable or unwilling to understand each other.

Those with even basic knowledge about the Middle East conflict know that such a seemingly well-meaning initiative does not further the cause of justice and peace for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. For one thing it does not specifically address the fundamental issue standing at the core of the Middle East conflict: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the ongoing displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians for more than six decades.

To the vast majority of Palestinians these initiatives are not known, and if known, have little effect and relevance to the brutal reality of living in walled-in Bantustans under an Israeli regime of control, colonial settlements, a suffocating siege on Gaza, the Apartheid Wall, assassinations and military attacks and the daily humiliation of innocent civilians at hundreds of Israeli military checkpoints throughout the Occupied West Bank.

Of course the Palestinian people have been so desperately longing for peace and some normalcy in their lives, but it is peace that is grounded in justice, universal human decency and dignity.

During a barely publicised visit to the besieged Gaza Strip last May, UN envoy and Noble Peace Laureate former South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu called Israel’s blockade of the 1.5 million Palestinians in the tiny Gaza Strip an “abomination” and the international community’s “silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shame us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma.”

And this is the tip of the iceberg of Israeli physical and structural violence. In a report for the UN Human Rights Council decrying Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, UN Special Rapporteur, John Dugard, stressed that Palestinian acts of terror against military occupation “must be understood as a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation…This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue.” [A/HRC/7/17- 21-01-2008]

The so-called Oslo peace process has long been pronounced dead because of Israel’s colonial settlements in the West Bank and creating facts on the ground that have aborted any serious possibility for an independent Palestinian state. Evidently the two-state solution is not applicable and not relevant anymore to realities on the ground.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s sorry speech to indigenous Australia, which touched the heart of millions of Australians, gives us not only inspiration but also a way out of this seemingly unresolved conflict to “a future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.” A future where “decency, human decency, universal human decency” demands acknowledging the immense grief, suffering and mistreatment inflicted on past and current generations of the Palestinian people; A future that rights historical and current wrongs and embraces the Palestinians and the Israelis as equal partners in a country that belongs to all those who live in it.

Now back to the “peace” team; the players will play and the pundits will talk, and then everyone will go home. In Palestine it will be business as usual. The more effective course of action to peace and reconciliation comes through a concerted international and public opinion pressure including from the Australian government and people on Israel to relinquish its illegal occupation, put an end to its gratuitous humiliation and mistreatment of the Palestinians and grant them their long-denied human rights, dignity and freedom in their homeland.

Mosheer Amer is a Palestinian doctoral candidate from the Gaza Strip studying at the University of Melbourne.

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