This book comprises dual components–the one, an appraisal of the two-state principle as propagated by the EU as a feasible formula for the resolution of the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the other, a proposal for an alternative formula for such a resolution.
Unfortunately, while the first provides a commendably sober analysis of the flaws and faults of the EU’s two-states-for-two-peoples approach, the second produces a prescription considerably less laudable for overcoming/circumventing them. Thus, while the book mounts an impressive challenge to the EU perspective, asserting that “it is counter-productive to peace... discourages compromise, and encourages intransigence and feeds hostilities” (p. 54); it ends up offering an alternative approach that is no less flawed.
The authors take a distinctly disparaging view of the EU attitude, asserting: “A significant driver of the EU’s approach seems to be its perceived obligation to export its own concept of ‘peace and security’ into the Mediterranean region. Peace was now to be achieved through ‘justice’ and justice meant upgrading Palestinian statehood demands, while consequently downplaying Israeli security concerns.”
The authors provide a commendably candid characterization of the essence of the conflict. They diagnose the clash of interests as being not territorial but “existential.” “It is existential, in the sense that the Palestinian political leadership rejects—politically, legally, and by force of arms—the right of the Jewish State of Israel to exist.”
Thus, they censure the EU support for Palestinian statehood for disregarding the fact that all relevant Palestinian political organizations explicitly challenge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. “Their goal is not to establish an independent and viable state side-by-side with Israel—but to destroy the Jewish state.”
The book, thus, disputes the basic validity of the EU approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict—on all three pillars on which it is based: the historical, the legal, and the political.
Significantly, it deems Israel a more than a legitimate occupant than its Arab adversaries with its territorial entitlements (based on the Mandate) remaining intact. According to the writers, the EU’s rigid attitudes have caused it to ignore the underlying realities, and to be unresponsive to changed Middle East political and economic conditions rather than achieving peace with justice. It is this approach, they warn, that continues to fuel ongoing hostilities.
Oddly enough, it is the very insightfulness of the book’s analysis that precludes the feasibility of its preferred alternative to the EU’s policy perspective. In essence, it calls for the complete re-engineering/re-programming of Palestinian society—without offering any hint how this should be realistically achieved—a little akin to proposing that a Bengal tiger should stop preying on antelopes by becoming a herbivore, blithely skipping over the biological process of how this is to come about.
Thus, it prescribes making EU support for Palestinian self-determination conditional on the “genuine Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish people as a nation, the right of the Jewish state to exist permanently, the Palestinian leadership jettisoning ties to extremist, destabilizing forces of the radical Islamist camp, and concrete actions to “eradicate the corrupt political culture of the Palestinian Authority, PLO, and Hamas.”
But if all these could be achieved, there would be no conflict. So in essence, the authors’ learned proposal is to solve the conflict by solving the conflict.
Accordingly, this book should be commended for what it opposes, but condemned for what it endorses. Overall, however, it appears a step in the right direction on the long road to remedying the academic milieu’s depressingly dysfunctional debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
