I keep thinking about things that the historian Ilan Pappe said in a forum on Israel/Palestine at Oxford last summer. He said that peace could not be achieved in the Middle East until the three A’s occur: Acknowledgement, Accountability, and Acceptance.
The first A is Acknowledgement of the "Naqba," the catastrophe of 1948 for the Palestinian people. Pappe refers to this as "ethnic cleansing" of the land of Palestine. In which upwards of 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes and country. And he says that the peace process will be barren until this essential step is taken. I completely agree. We have countless memorials to the Jewish Holocaust in this country, and by and large that’s a good thing (though yes the Holocaust is used to assert the necessity of a Jewish state, through the insistence that Jews are unsafe in western liberal democracies). There ought to be wide public recognition of the price of the creation of the Jewish state.
The second A means that the right of return is more than lip service, or a symbol. It means that people who lost their country have a right to return. Pappe says that people object that England could not take in hundreds of thousands of immigrants or guest workers–well, these are not immigrants or guest workers, they lived there. (I’m not as fervent on this point because I’m not well-enough informed).
The third A is Acceptance. The peoples of the Middle East must accept that the Jews who arrived over the last century and more are also people of the Middle East, they live there too. Pappe emphasizes "the Middle East." Israelis are not Americans or Europeans. This is something that struck me when I was in Israel, the insistence that Israel was a western country, or virtually a European country, when it’s 500 miles east of Istanbul. It has no idea where it is. Acceptance means the end of the law of return and in turn of American dual loyalty. I know that Pappe is for a one-state solution; and right now I’m for the two-state peace process. I felt that his Three A’s also apply to the peace process. I’m not going to work out all the contradictions right now!
