Can It Ever Really End?

By Sam Bahour

The world has finally come to its collective senses by explicitly acknowledging that Israel's 37-year military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem must come to an abrupt end in order for peace in the Middle East to have even a remote chance of success. With this belated awakening, a fair and frank question has come to the forefront.

Will the Palestinians accept the end of the Israeli occupation as their cue to cease, once and for all, their five-decade struggle to correct the historic injustices done to them? The easy answer is no.

Fifty-five years of historical injustice does not subside with the signing of a peace treaty, official or unofficial, whatever the extent of public relations invested in the effort. Prospects for peace must start to be measured by how well justice is served, and not by how much fanfare is generated.

The fact of the matter is that many Israelis, some say the silent majority, are now finally convinced that their country's illegal occupation of Palestinians must end, but they are holding themselves back, some say holding the Palestinians hostage, by wanting clear guarantees that what will follow Israel's return to the 1967 armistice border is absolute security for every Israeli citizen.

Absolute security is a myth. It is a political myth so perfected by the Israeli propaganda machine that when Palestinians attempt to call attention to its mythical nature they are accused of propagating the cycle of violence. No one can meet this security threshold. Israel, especially Israel's Prime Minister Sharon, has used the myth of absolute security as a strategy to avoid assuming historic responsibility. Not the US, not Yasir Arafat, not a well-groomed Palestinian Prime Minister - nobody, not even a demilitarized future State of Palestine - can guarantee Israelis, or any people on the planet for that matter, absolute security. The sooner that Israel concludes that its security cannot co-exist with an illegal occupation of another people, the closer the Palestinians and the Israelis will be to embracing each other's fears and working jointly toward alleviating them.

On the other hand, there are no easy answers in the Middle East.

The reality of the region, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is the region's cornerstone conflict, is that Israel's illegal occupation is only one of a multitude of wrongs that Israel must address. In today's global, short-term memory approach to conflict resolution the UN, US, EU and Russia are aiming to resolve only the most recent Israeli historic wrong - the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. However, the initial wrong that culminated in the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from today's Israel is purposely being neglected in the hope that the embattled Palestinian society will somehow forget that their inalienable rights were violated.

Palestinians call this right the Right of Return. It is a right embedded in international law, a right afforded to individuals; a right that no government, not even a recognized Palestinian government, can invalidate. Although the most recent peace initiatives, namely the Geneva Accord and the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Statement, prefer to dismiss this right, one must be politically and morally na