The Arab Peace Plan: Say No to Rights, Recognition

The Arab League’s plan for Middle East peace is back on the table and, as has been the case since the initiative was first unveiled, any real progress requires movement on the Israeli-Palestinian track. In order to give this round a chance, those wishing to see a breakthrough ought to take a page from an earlier Arab League declaration and insist on three “nos” as a basis for negotiation: no rights, no recognition and no reconciliation.

Notwithstanding their differences, most Israelis and Palestinians adhere to a moral framework that places rights, recognition and reconciliation at center stage. Whether they believe that their side alone holds the moral high ground, or that both sides have been wronged and deserve mutual legitimization, they maintain that rights and recognition play a key role in bringing parties to the table and moving toward reconciliation. Thus, their positions are based on the peculiar premise that out of the ashes of irreconcilable difference and decades of pain and violence, mutual recognition can emerge.

In the marketplace of negotiation, however, rights, recognition and reconciliation have become tools of intransigence and symbols of the very issues that bring the peace process to its knees.

From the Israeli perspective, recognition and rights have always been linked: As an indication that they could live safely among their neighbors, Israelis have sought Palestinian and Arab recognition of Jews’ historical ties to the Land of Israel and of the state’s right to exist. The result is that Israelis have effectively been asking Palestinians to be partners by way of asking them to be Zionists: In order to earn an invitation to the negotiating table, Palestinians must accept the historical and moral legitimacy of the State of Israel.

This is an understandable wish, but a logical impossibility. Israelis do not have to believe that their parents and grandparents were thieves or interlopers to realize that people who lost their land and homes will fight and deny, not recognize or legitimize. For Palestinians, withholding full recognition is not only a useful bargaining chip and expression of rage but also an act of dignity and assertion of existence in the face of an intolerable present and an uncertain future.