An Open Letter to the Arab World
Here is an interesting article, by Danny Ayalon – Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs – that was published in Asharq Alawsat yesterday.
Since the reestablishment of our state, Israeli leaders have sought peace with their Arab neighbors. Our Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document that expressed our hopes and dreams reads, “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help.” These words are as true today as when they were first written in 1948. Sadly, sixty one years later, only two nations, Jordan and Egypt, have accepted these principles and made peace with the Jewish State.
Recently the Israeli government has made significant steps to restart negotiations with the Palestinians and reach out to the Arab world. In his Bar-Ilan speech in June, Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly stated his acceptance of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel. My government has removed hundreds of roadblocks to improve access and movement for Palestinians and has assisted the facilitation of economic developments in the West Bank, through close cooperation with international parties to expedite projects and remove bottlenecks.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a right-wing government has, in an unprecedented move, declared it would refrain from building new settlements in the West Bank. All of these moves taken together amply demonstrate Israel’s willingness for peace.
This Israeli government is also committed to extend a hand to all of our Arab neighbors, its leaders and its citizens, to join together to face some of the major challenges facing us all in the coming years.
For the first time in many years, we find ourselves on the same side in seeking to quell and defeat the forces of extremism and destruction in our region. While many see the threat from Iran directed solely at Israel, we in the region know differently. Together, we understand the menace that emanates from the extremist regime in Tehran. A regime that seeks to export its extremist ideology across the region and beyond, while arming terrorist groups that seek to destabilize moderate Sunni regimes and aiming for hegemonic control of the Middle East and far beyond.
The Iranian regime has many tentacles spread out across the region sowing destruction and despair amongst the people. The enemy of the people of Lebanon is not Israel, but Hezbollah. The enemy of the Palestinian people is not Israel, but Hamas. The enemy of the Egyptian people is not Israel, but militant Islamist opposition groups. All of these groups, and many others, receive their commands from Iran, who wish to control and suppress any aspirations the region has towards freedom and advancement.
Iran seeks to hold an entire region, including its own people, to ransom and keep it engaged in conflicts orchestrated and directed from Tehran. Whether it is in Morocco, Iraq or Yemen, Iran is constantly interfering with Arab sovereignty for its own nefarious gain. Israel and its Sunni neighbors alike are in the sights of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their minions.
If Iran is able to attain nuclear weapons, the situation becomes inexplicably and inexorably worse. The Iranian regime has demonstrated that it feels unrestricted in its ability to dominate our region, a nuclear umbrella will only embolden its acolytes to act unrestrained to the detriment of us all. Only together can we face this threat and remove it.
Another issue that entails mutual political will to overcome is the threat of climate change to our region. Many reports and organizations are pinpointing the Middle East as an area that will suffer gravely as rain falls even more infrequently and temperatures rise.
Recently, the leading international scholars on climate change met in Copenhagen and released an important report on this issue. They claimed that climate change will exacerbate conflicts and increase strains and violence among competing groups. We are already witnessing water rights and growing desertification as underlying reasons for the intensification of conflicts in our region.
“Making the desert bloom” has been a core component of the Zionist ethos and successes throughout the decades. Israel has been able to turn desert into arable land and barren landscapes into forests. We constantly share our agricultural miracles with our friends in Africa and Asia and it is for this reason that many countries of the developing world have sought partnership with Israel in addressing their own agricultural challenges.
However, as Israel’s founding fathers wrote in 1948, Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. Our partners in peace, Jordan and Egypt, and especially the Palestinian Authority, bear witness to our endeavors in this direction. Israel has actively cooperated with Egypt on the “Mubarak Project” for the establishment of an irrigation demonstration system in Nubariya and annually trains hundreds of Jordanians in Israel in fields such as sustainable eco-friendly agricultural methods.
For us to be able to face these and many other challenges, we need to break with the paradigms of the past. The Jewish People are here because of our historical, legal, moral and national rights.
Those naysayers who can not countenance a Jewish political presence in the region will doom all of us to many more decades of conflict and instability. It is time for courageous leaders to emanate from the Arab world as did Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1979 and Jordan’s King Hussein in 1994 and recognize that peaceful coexistence is far better for all of our people than enduring conflict and enmity.
We recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative is an important document, and is welcomed in Israel as a crack in the denial of an Arab recognition of Israel. However, like the Palestinian Authority’s dictates to Israel on the peace process, it remains frozen in 1993.
Since the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, Israel has taken major strides both politically and strategically towards the Palestinian position.
Both in 2000 at Camp David and in 2008 during the Annapolis process, Israeli prime ministers offered the Palestinians everything possible for peace and on both occasions the Palestinian leadership rejected these offers. The Palestinian Authority, like the Arab Peace Initiative, is still holding to its maximalist positions and has not moved an inch towards Israel since 1993. These positions are obviously untenable for peace and reflect a worldview that ignores Israel’s significant gestures and seeks to enforce a solution that will mean the end of the Jewish State. Recent Palestinian and Arab League declarations only enforce this view.
It is surely time to look to the future and break with former intransigencies to create a better future for all the people of the region. Israel has gone very far and is prepared to do its part, but we must be met by a willing partner. Without this, the region is doomed to more conflict and will negate the unity of purpose in the Middle East that is necessary to face the mounting challenges from without and within.
Comments
| 17 December 2009, 11:43 am |
“It is surely time to look to the future and break with former intransigencies to create a better future for all the people of the region.”
This is no piety but the simple truth. Peace would bring stability and rewards (and also new problems and challenges, but not of the explosive kind). Yet again and again since 1979 we are forced to ask not what does the average Israeli or Palestinian want but how will Iran react?
| 17 December 2009, 12:37 pm |
What is the provenance of this journal?
| 17 December 2009, 12:56 pm |
Given Ayalon’s explicit criticism of Hamas, I wonder why there was no mention of Sharon’s unilateral decision to evacuate from Gaza.
| 17 December 2009, 1:27 pm |
Given Ayalon’s explicit criticism of Hamas, I wonder why there was no mention of Sharon’s unilateral decision to evacuate from Gaza.
Possibly because he knows that no one in his target audience in the Arab States has ever been told that that happened. News that tell things that actually happened, as opposed to who to hate, doesn’t exist in the middle east.
| 17 December 2009, 1:30 pm |
I have only just spotted Neil D’s response in Monday’s ES to Ken Macdonald’s accusations against Tony Blair.
Just above Neil’s letter is a letter by one Laleh Khalili of SOAS who asks, Why should we worry about unpredictable elements in the ME [like Saddam's Iraq] “when its most predictable element, Israeli belligerence against its Arab neighbours, and more specifically against Palestinians, remains the catalyst for continuing violence.”
| 17 December 2009, 1:43 pm |
What is the provenance of this journal?
My trustworthy source says it’s published by the Saudi Research and Publishing Co of Riyadh
http://www.srpc.com/
which is (or was) headed by a Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abd al-Aziz.
| 17 December 2009, 1:48 pm |
I know HP is hardly going to do investigative journalism when it comers to Israel, but simply publishing bland statements from Israel’s politicians without analysis or critique must be a new nadir.
Danny Ayalon (like his boss, Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman) is a member of Yisrael Beiteinu, a nationalist party inspired by Zev Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism. The party is well known for favouring discrimination against Arabs, supporting settlements, whilst proclaiming support a Palestinian state (triangulation).
Ayalon strongly supported the gaza disengagement plan, which Sharon’s chief advisor at the time, Dov Weisglass, described as “actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” That is, disengagement was about deliberately parking the peace process.
| 17 December 2009, 1:49 pm |
@Josh Scholar
“Given Ayalon’s explicit criticism of Hamas, I wonder why there was no mention of Sharon’s unilateral decision to evacuate from Gaza.
Possibly because he knows that no one in his target audience in the Arab States has ever been told that that happened. News that tell things that actually happened, as opposed to who to hate, doesn’t exist in the middle east.”
WTF? Are you suggesting that there is no fair or open reporting in arab states?…excepting of course this article which must be free, fair, and 100% accurate.
| 17 December 2009, 2:06 pm |
“That is, disengagement was about deliberately parking the peace process.”
And Yassir Arafar repeatedly said a Palestinian state was only the first stage in liberating all of Palestine i.e. no more Israel.
| 17 December 2009, 2:16 pm |
Today’s Haaretz prints a map showing the land exchange Olmert proposed to the PA in Sept. 2008. The proposal called for the PA to cede 6.3 percent of its land area, Haaretz says, and to receive, in exchange, slices of Israeli territory adding up to 5.8 percent of the area of the West Bank, plus a safe-passage route linking Hebron to the Gaza Strip.
Haaretz goes on: The implementation of the Olmert plan would require the evacuation of tens of thousands of settlers and the removal of hallmarks of the West Bank settlement enterprise such as Ofra, Beit El, Elon Moreh and Kiryat Arba, as well as the Jewish community in Hebron itself.
What happened to Olmert’s proposal? Abbas did not respond, and negotiations ended.
| 17 December 2009, 2:58 pm |
wow! When will Nick Griffin be sending open letters to black papers i.e The Voice?
White South Africans did not demand white only Bantustans, but gave up their colonial ambitions. I think that is called one state solution, or continue in this endless bestiality.
| 17 December 2009, 4:25 pm |
The publication is interesting. But, as usual, too little, too late.
| 17 December 2009, 4:51 pm |
but gave up their colonial ambitions:
DC see http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/12/16/the-myth-of-jewish-colonialism-2/
| 17 December 2009, 5:18 pm |
amie:
Bataween’s article is wonderful, but obviously completely lost on a numbnuts who buys into Israel being a close analogy to South Africa prior to 1994 and that a one-state solution will end the “endless bestiality”.
| 17 December 2009, 5:54 pm |
And Yassir Arafar repeatedly said a Palestinian state was only the first stage in liberating all of Palestine i.e. no more Israel.
Zkharya 17 December 2009, 2:06 pm
i.e. No more Jordan!
| 17 December 2009, 6:36 pm |
That, Joe, is a very interesting and important point, far too infrequently made. I don’t think anyone, however little they might wish it, now doubts that a state is going to be created in the West Bank. For most practical purposes, it already exists.
Now, as you clearly know, the Jordan was never the eastern boundary of anything, and the populations on the two Banks have always been closely related and otherwise connected. They are one people. The pressure for incorporation into the Palestinian State would be unstoppable, with the Hashemites and their entourage told to pack their bags and go home to the Peninsula.
Jordan as it presently exists (i.e., only since the loss of the West Bank in 1967) is so short of water as to be literally unviable. That, no more than anything else but no less so either, makes a Palestinian State, which would have no desire for a Hashemite monarchy, the death knell of the Hashemite Kingdom. Israel is under no such threat from it.
| 17 December 2009, 7:31 pm |
Lynne sez: Given Ayalon’s explicit criticism of Hamas, I wonder why there was no mention of Sharon’s unilateral decision to evacuate from Gaza.
Josh sez: Possibly because he knows that no one in his target audience in the Arab States has ever been told that that happened. News that tell things that actually happened, as opposed to who to hate, doesn’t exist in the middle east.
Bill sez: What would be the point of bringing it up?
When Sharon left Gaza, Israel was universally demonized as much, if not more, than it was before so as to keep the hate against the Israelis going. Mentioning Gaza is useless because it proves that the adversaries of Israel were never interested in Israel giving up territory, they were only interested in demonizing Israel. If they were to go back to the 67 lines, who actually thinks that that would be an end of the hatred? I suspect it would freak them out more since they would not be behaving according to the Evil-Jew narrative they are locked into and they’d totally have to invent more complaints and demands – and they are already them lined up (e.g., the right of return).
Because of that, there’s no point to discussing such an Orwellian “un-event” as leaving Gaza or any of the deals that the PA rejected. Rather, the option here was to discuss the common existential threat that is Iran, as well as a generalist way forward for the region through cooperation and Israel’s street cred on that matter. The deeper message is that Israel is staying in the neighborhood (whether you like it or not), Israel is willing to be a good neighbor and back it up with collegial neighborly acts (e.g., the Mubarak Project) (whether you like it or not), and that they are not the threat to peace on the block (whether they like it or not).
| 17 December 2009, 8:10 pm |
Another problem: if one tries talking to many “ordinary” Palestinians or proPalestinians on the ‘net, for example, there doesn’t seem to be any acceptance of Israel at all (I’m sure there must be some exceptions…)
Zionism per se is a dirty word, there is very little acceptance in my experience to the fact that Jews even have historical connections to Israel. Many people I’ve “spoken” to don’t even believe in the reality of the Temple and now I’m running into claims that Palestinians are actually descendants of the Canaanites regardless of facts about highly variable Palestinian Arab history and origin including European ancestry via the Crusaders and/or descent from local Judeans in the past let alone relatively recent immigration from the Ottoman Empire and subsequently.
Wierdly a lot of the “information” I’m given as “evidence” for these assertions comes from PressTV.
Propagandawise and in terms of historical ignorance let alone compassion for “the other” or the desire to effect reconciliation I think the problem on the ground may be getting worse, not better.
Also, the more reasonable the (Zionist/proIsrael) person or idea the angrier the conversation becomes. A straight-up anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bigot fufills the preconceived idea of a Zionist as evil and this can be dealt with easily – “well you are just a typical Zionist after all!” – whereas a person who wants to communicate let alone a real world, high-level offer like Olmert’s or the Clinton-era proffers elicit real confusion which in the past have resulted in violence.
It’s extremely difficult to undo decades of propaganda especially if there’s a religious component. There’s also constant incitement and the stream of lies and distortions is endless and unceasing.
Also, I’m gathering an impression of religious denial of Judaism’s validity – both Christians and Muslims I’ve encountered seem to feel that Jews/Judaism are per se inferior and flawed which is why Christianity/Islam were created/revealed, ie the existence of Islam “proves” the inferiority of Judaism. I have actually read comments to the effect that the mosque in Jerusalem dates back to the time of Abraham who is also claimed as a Muslim.
Thus a large part of Israel’s premise is undone – Jews either have no history in Israel and/or they don’t deserve one (past, present or future).
This is in addition to the usual slanders comparing Israel to South Africa, etc. and includes, from Europeans, morose tears for the exterminated Jews of WWII combined with rage against the state of Israel, complete with Gandhi quotes.
Ideas?
| 17 December 2009, 10:08 pm |
Wierdly a lot of the “information” I’m given as “evidence” for these assertions comes from PressTV.
Yep, propaganda appealing to hatred works very well as every despot knows.
It is horrible that Britain is allowing a foreign to put his yellow press on its shores in order to foment hatred here, just like in a real tyranny.
PressTV has to be shut down.
| 18 December 2009, 12:33 am |
Are you not in favour of freedom of speech Josh?
| 18 December 2009, 2:42 am |
I’m not in favor of allowing hate speech and lies to pose as news.
The yellow press of a despot should be allowed no airtime anywhere.
Shame on Britain for allowing this trash on the air.
| 18 December 2009, 3:23 am |
Breaking News from Iran: The Holocaust Happened!
[Michael Rubin]
Hamid Baghaei, one of Iran’s vice presidents, according to the Iranian website Parsine.com, has said that the Holocaust happened. The catch, however, is that he says that it occurred in Iran and the victims were the Iranian people, who suffered as a result of allied violation of Iranian neutrality during World War II (when British and American forces helped secure a supply route through Iran to supply the Soviets). He is demanding that the Allies pay Iran reparations. No word on whether an apology from President Obama will be forthcoming.
Shhh. Don’t tell Norman “Israel exploits the Shoah in order to oppress Palestinians” Finkelst@#$%ein.
| 18 December 2009, 7:00 am |
Gene – most recently there’s been a really discouraging thread on Solomonia – I’ll put a link up tomorrow.
I’ve also encountered views like this on certain leftist or “progressive” websites. On Democratic Underground for example outright calls for Israel’s extinction were deleted but they were not uncommon.
| 19 December 2009, 11:43 am |
Thomas Smith
Ayalon strongly supported the gaza disengagement plan, which Sharon’s chief advisor at the time, Dov Weisglass, described as “actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” That is, disengagement was about deliberately parking the peace process.
Weisglas’s cynical attitude took into account the knowledge of how the Palestinians would react and actually said that had we been dealing with Norwegians things would have been very different. There was no international or Israel pressure to make the Palestinians behave as they did and to criminally waste an opportunity
1. to establish a mini-state with all governmental roles in place in preparation for the eventual state of Palestine
2. to force Israel to continue with the disengagement in the West Bank as it had promised if the Gaza experiment was successful
3. to give us peace in the Middle East.
Was it published in the Arabic version?
That actually has a very high circulation, particularly in Saudi. If so, that’s interesting.